Well

by Matthew McIntosh

  ACHE:

  It began when

  It began when he dove into the shallow end of a pool and hit his head on the bottom. It was before his senior year in high school and the world had been turning for a long time and he hadn’t been happy in a long time, and when he came to the surface, he felt an ache. He climbed out of the pool and when he could stand, he dried off, went into the changing room, put on his clothes, and drove himself to the hospital where they X-rayed him and said that everything was all right. He had been lucky. He could have broken his spine, been paralyzed, gone brain dead. He could have died. They told him he had a concussion, but the effects of the concussion would pass. His neck would be sore for awhile and he would be confused and his head would hurt, but these things would pass.

  The headache didn’t go away. He had trouble remembering things and often became lost in conversation. He would know what to say, but not how to say it. He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t keep his head up. He could not look you in the eye. He found himself afraid of noise.

  At school he had a hard time sitting in one place and sometimes he’d find himself rocking back and forth, sweating, and he would have to leave. He tried to ignore the pain as well as he could, but it was useless. Sometimes, he could function. Sometimes, he couldn’t. When he couldn’t, he’d get in his car, drive through the trees, down the winding roads by

  There were more doctors than anyone could keep track of; there was the family doctor and then there were physical therapists, chiropractors, neurologists, an osteopath, acupuncturists; all of whom had different ideas as to the cause of the problem—they all agreed that it had all begun when he dove into the pool, but MRIs and C/T scans showed nothing, and they all had different ideas as to why the problem had stayed so long. They also had different ideas as to the solution to the problem, and according to their specialties, they gave him drugs, and herbs, and exercise regimens. They stuck him with needles and cracked his joints and attached electric probes to his head and neck and shocked his nerves. They made him drink tea made of bark and roots. His family doctor, the doctor who cared the most, gave him pills and made him keep track of his progress in a journal. The doctor made him rate his pain each day on a scale of one to ten and it drove him fucking crazy. He hated to pay attention. And the headache never stopped for a moment.

  Once every couple months or so, he would become aware that he was breaking down under the pain. For a week the pain would

  For a week the pain would become increasingly intolerable and then finally, it would show itself in all its glory. When his body broke down, when the pain became glorious, his mind would break down and complete things. His mind would give in to the pain and the pain would take control. He would hyperventilate. He would cry. He would have no idea who or where he was.

  The first time was six months after the accident. He was lying on the couch watching TV and he noticed that he was breathing in short seething breaths and that he’d been breathing this way for a long time. He could understand what they were saying on the TV but he didn’t know why it was such a big deal. He didn’t know why they were all wearing blue T-shirts and standing in such a large kitchen. He didn’t know why they were all wearing blue T-shirts and standing in such a large kitchen and he slid off the couch and began crawling on all fours. He crawled around the basement like this, crying and shrieking and attempting to hide beneath a desk, then coming out and trying to hide beneath the couch. His mother found him and panicked and cried herself and touched him, pleading with him to tell her what was wrong. What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong! He didn’t know but he was sure that he was going to die. He tried to hide beneath her skirt.

  When this happened, and when it would happen in the future, his mother or father, and often both, would drive him to the emergency room where they would explain to the people there his situation, and the nurse would come in and give him a very large dose of Demerol. His parents would make sure the dose was a large one. His mother would cry. The Demerol could not release him from the pain completely, and this always depressed him later. But it took the pain and put it somewhere else, pushed the pain outside of his body, gave him what he needed to breathe right again. The Demerol would give his mind and body a few hours to collect themselves, to restore themselves,

  to restore themselves, get themselves into a position where they could once again ease and ignore a small but important portion of the pain, enable him to live with it, as tentatively as he did, which was the best that he could hope for. And it fucked him up and he loved being fucked up.

  Among the drugs his family doctor prescribed were a number of antidepressants. His doctor thought that since nothing showed up on any scans, and since he (the doctor) had never seen a case like this in twenty years, quite possibly a large part of the problem, maybe the problem, itself, lay in the psyche. The doctor thought his patient might be depressed and because of his depression, was remembering a pain that had actually long since disappeared, that the symptoms, while they felt real and true, that the symptoms, while they felt real and true, were nothing more than memories. The doctor sent him to see a psychiatrist, a woman with a small office and long, wavy hair. She was attractive, which didn’t mean anything, and when he sat down across from her, he felt like throwing up. He hadn’t wanted to come. He didn’t need a psychiatrist. He wasn’t going to tell her any

  There was the possibility that he was being punished for something he had done a long time ago. Sometimes, when no one was home, he would lie on the floor, seeking God, first repenting, then asking Him where He was—why wasn’t He here?—telling Him there was no way he could go on—Where the fuck are you!—and screaming at Him—What the fuck are you doing to me you sick fuck? Aren’t you my father? He broke a window in his parents’ bathroom and cut his arms with it. He would take his pocketknife and cut deep gashes in his arms. He would drive the winding roads by the Sound and want desperately to swerve into a tree. He would aim and when he felt the dirt under his tires, he would swerve back onto the asphalt. Aren’t I your son? Headache.

  He didn’t tell the psychiatrist about these things, or anyone else. There was something wrong with him, he knew that, but it wasn’t depression. It wasn’t depression and it wasn’t guilt—it wasn’t memory and it wasn’t simple but it was simple, it was pain and pain was simple and real and true and beautiful and unrelenting and vital as a sixth sense. He loved it. The psychiatrist told him to:

  Go down the pathway … through the tall grass … visualize a blue sky … feel at peace … go into the control room … look around… look for the switch … the switch says PAIN … I want you to turn the switch off … turn your pain off … turn it off … walk outside again …

  He never went back to the psychiatrist. The acupuncturists and osteopath thought they could help him and wanted to see him more regularly, but his insurance didn’t cover them, and he felt guilty about having his parents foot the bill for something that wasn’t working. The pain didn’t leave him, he still had trouble sitting still, he still became lost in conversation—he would know what to say, but not how to say it. After high school he moved out and got a job and took classes at the University, and quit. He dated girls here and there and sometimes got them in bed. He loved lying with them, touching them, smelling them. He tried to live a normal life, was sure that he was never going to be well again. He drank a lot and when he’d drink, he would feel somewhat better. The alcohol would numb the pain to a certain extent, make him forget for awhile, but afterward

  His family doctor kept prescribing drugs and the doctor would consult the latest health and pharmaceutical magazines and prescribe the latest drugs and he would feel so tired, his mouth was dry all the time, he couldn’t shit right. Every two months or so, he’d have a breakdown and end up in the emergency room. Afterward, he would sit on the steps outside his apartment smoking a cigarette, enjoying the recuperative process, and lean over, slowly, gradually, until his cheek was against the cement,
watch the cars slide in the warm rain, he would breathe slowly.

  This is how the next few years passed for him—and there were many other things I could mention, things that would take me too long—and he was very hopeless, because he had learned over these few years he had learned that when you’re lost in the well, when you’re lost in the well and you continue to hope, with each disappointment the bottom drops lower until the world outside the well is only a speck you have to squint your eyes to see. But still

  he lived. He moved around and had different shitty jobs here and there. He went out and got drunk and smoked weed—he laughed with his friends, told jokes. Every few months it would happen again and if someone was around they’d take him down to the emergency room and for a short while he wouldn’t have to squint to see you.

  It occurred to him to get away. So he saved and sold his car and went to London. He got a job and did too many drugs and drank too much, and never slept and worked too many hours, all with the vigor of a man attempting to kill himself. He was in much pain and he met a girl there who wanted to marry him and he overdosed one night and she kept him awake and he clawed at her face one night and hit her and she took him to the emergency room and in the taxi on the way he laughed hysterically and screamed and moaned and couldn’t stop laughing and the English doctor gave him a shot of morphine and some Valiums and Vicodins to last the next few days and when they arrived at the flat it was morning, his girlfriend went to work, he took all the pills he had, he smoked some hash, he walked to the Off-License, came back, drank until she came back and screamed at him.

  He decided to go back home to Federal Way because he was thirty pounds underweight and dying, and he said goodbye to the girl at the train station and she cried and gave him her guitar and told him to learn to play it, she said she would join him later when her visa came through and they would live together and he would play songs for her. He didn’t want her to come and he never saw her again. He was seated over the engine of the plane and for eleven hours he held his head in his hands. He looked down and saw the Atlantic Ocean. He saw icebergs melting on the Hudson Bay. He looked down and saw Canadian tundra. He saw Seattle and he saw Federal Way. He looked for the street he grew up on but couldn’t find it and this was a disappointment and after he landed, his father took him to see the family doctor and he cried and held his head and the doctor gave him an unlimited prescription of a strong narcotic—a real ass-kicker—unlimited either by accident or because there was nothing more the doctor could do and he was tired and sad, himself, about the way things had turned out.

  He got an apartment and a job. He met girls here and there who wanted to relieve him of his pain and he lived with some of them and they’d pick up his drugs from the pharmacy and stop by the liquor store before coming home and they’d rub his neck and they wished they could relieve him of his pain but they couldn’t and eventually he’d meet a woman he would love more than anything in the world and he’d leave for a short time and come back again and marry her.

  But for now, he bought furniture and a car and stayed high and drunk for a long time. He lost more weight and popped pills all day, lost jobs and found new ones, tried to live his life in this manner until it became necessary that he quit.

  He held his pain and kissed it and stroked it, he told it he loved it more than anything, he loved its vitality, and begged it to leave.

  And many years later, when it went away, many years later

  he would find

  he would find that he missed it.

  EVERYONE IN THE WORLD:

  The trick, he said, is to refuse to believe that any of this makes sense. Because when it does—when the world and life and the way things are make sense—then you know there’s really something wrong with you.

  You get me? he said.

  This world should be incomprehensible to us.

  Rape shouldn’t make sense and murder shouldn’t make sense and neither should car wrecks and bombings and loneliness and cancer and diabetes and television.

  But usually they don’t bother me that much, he said. I usually don’t think about them. All I usually think about is: I feel good. Or: I feel bad.

  But when I’m feeling really bad and I can’t score and I start to get the pain, it generally turns into something more like: the world is sick and everyone in the world is sick, and I’ll see some random person and I’ll know that he’s a child molester, or that she’s some diseased fuckbag, except it’s much worse than that—the way it feels and the things I think about them are much more awful than what I just said.

  And the scary thing is, when you’re in that condition, when you get the pain, it all makes complete sense. Of course everyone is sick! Of course everyone is deranged! Because you’re sick and you’re convinced you’re seeing them for what they really are.

  But really, he said, you don’t know them from Adam and they don’t know you and I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Jesus, I don’t know myself half the time.

  And you shake and sweat and can’t sleep and your body aches and you can’t breathe and you want to die.

  And you know this isn’t the way you’re supposed to feel and you know you’re not feeling things the way they really are, but this time you’re wrong.

  The pain of living, he said.

  Because we hurt all the time, without knowing it. Our bodies ache all the time and we don’t know it, because we got endorphins constantly shooting off inside us, blocking all that out.

  Without endorphins, we’d all be junkies.

  A girl told me this once, he said.

  And when you’re on opiates for a long time, your body stops making endorphins and when you try to kick or when you can’t score and you get the pain, what you’re feeling is the way it really feels to be alive.

  And it’s a terrible thing, he said.

  That doesn’t make sense, I know, I know. None of this makes any sense.

  But if I scored, he said, and I’m feeling good, then it’s: It is well, It is well. Everything’s good. I’m good. I don’t have to think or worry about anything. There’s no pain anymore for anyone anywhere.

  It’s: I’ll just float around in here, nice and toasty, for awhile.

  MODERN COLOR NO. 20:

  Sammie found a baggy of pills in the couch. Probably thirty or so. They had W-E-L pressed into them. What the hell was W-E-L? She didn’t know. These weren’t hers and she’d never seen Nate with them. They could have been there for years. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cleaned the couch. She was excited. She hoped they were painkillers (she had an ulcer and when she’d burped that morning, about a teaspoon of brown liquid had come up and she’d spit and washed her mouth with mouthwash and had felt so tired but now) she hoped they were painkillers, but they could always be something worthless.

  So she looked in the phone book and called Poison Control. A woman answered.

  I need help, Sammie said. I found a bag of little red pills in my son’s bedroom. And I don’t know what they are.

  He’s not on any medication?

  No, he’s not on anything. They say W-E-L on them. They’re very small.

  It’s best not to jump to any conclusions, the woman said.

  Oh, I know.

  They could be anything. Or nothing. He could have just found them somewhere, himself.

  Yes, I know. He’s a good kid.

  They’re all good kids. Be careful not to rush to judgement, the woman said. I have a son, myself.

  Do you? Sammie said.

  He’s seventeen. There’s a lot of pressure these days.