Recovery

by John Berryman

  ‘Anyway it hasn’t got far. At least you have no weight problem.’

  ‘That’s just what I do have!’ she cried furiously.

  He was taken aback. ‘But you’re very thin, Luriel.’ He did not want to hurt her feelings: she was skin-and-bones plus excited.

  She pointed her left forefinger with terrible emphasis to her belly and said ominously, ‘Just wait till I weigh four hundred pounds.’

  Severance actually seemed to see a frightening rounding under the green robe. He knew what could happen with drinking, and he and his wife had a witchy-pretty young hausfrau friend who had mountained under his eyes over the last two years. It was no laughing matter.

  ‘Look. Get another psychiatrist. This is out of my province.’

  ‘I like Dr Walters.’

  ‘But you say he laughs at you.’

  ‘Only about my weight problem.’ She sounded both stubborn and strangely happy.

  Severance was lost. ‘Take it up in Group tomorrow,’ he said as a last resort. ‘Maybe the counsellors can help, or somebody.’

  ‘But what about tonight?’

  “You can’t eat yourself to death in one night. Just don’t fight it and sweat about it. Relax. Eat your goddamned head off if you feel you must. I don’t know what to say. It sounds awful.’

  ‘Oh, it’s awful,’ she stared at him solemnly. At the same time she seemed perfectly content, and as he said goodnight and shook hands he felt entirely out of his depth, not for the first time today.

  Stiffly he shed his clothes, drew on soiled pajamas, and knelt down reluctantly against the side of the bed, having switched off the light. His bony knees resented the floor, his scrotum flamed, his head ached, even his toes were not comfortable against the inhuman cold parquet. He was ready, and he was not alone (Alas). The damned room was uneasy with pervading, incomprehensible but all-comprehending all-remembering all-penetrating all-foreseeing Presence. Alas!

  He did not feel like a fool. He felt pinned: on his mark, get set.

  Severance did not know much about prayer, and he knew it (he thought). Anyway he was no good at it. Off and on, fifteen years before, studying a translated selection from the Philokalia ordered from Blackwell’s in Oxford, he had used the Jesus Prayer, so he had inklings of the heights above him and the depths below him. But now that he was praying every night—five now, six?—he confined himself to the Lord’s Prayer, as recommended by Christ (‘After this fashion pray ye’), for fear of making mistakes, and frankly it wore him out. Six weeks ago in Mexico City, passing an old sunken church on Madero, his mind brimmed with wishes, and he went in and said or prayed the Lord’s Prayer. By the time he had finished, half or three-quarters of an hour later, he found that all the topics were taken care of. Encouraged by this luck or providence, he did sometimes allow extraneous prayer-wishes to flash through the main business, but on the whole he concentrated with his whole power, and Severance when he wanted to had a mind as simple as a hydraulic press.

  ‘In the name,’ he said mentally, ‘of God the Father’ (no doubt about Him) ‘and of the Son’ (amazing, God-inspired, unique, whether a special Son who knew?) ‘and of the Holy Ghost’ (not clear, far from clear, Pentecost scene misunderstood by Luke unrecoverable) ‘Amen’ (Let it—this prayer—be established) joining his palms and fingers flat as he had done every bedtime until he was twelve years old.

  ‘Our Father’ (fact, and Christ’s father, ‘my father and your father’) ‘who art in Heaven’ (wherever that may be) ‘hallowed be thy name’ (no associations except Shaddai, Yahweh, Adonai etc., the clause meant nothing to him, only: Aweful). ‘Thy kingdom come.’ He came as usual to a full stop, having noticed it once in the AV. When was the point. Be it soon. Image of the drummer’s flushed face, yellow shoes, in the club-car of his first midwest express streaming through the prairies: they had bought each other drinks and were discussing religion: drummer a member of the Open Bible Church, headquarters in Des Moines and London, hadn’t tried to convert him, talk of Second Coming, sense of adventism in the drummer, finally asked without malice just when he thought, heard, ‘Well, we think any day now,’ say Tuesday next at one twenty-seven. The sense fades out from the later Epistles. We can hope, though. I hope. Let all this horror here and in Asia, and our causing it, cease, let me in particular not suffer any more pride lust greed rage self-loathing despair, Your Honour. ‘Kingdom’: not the hid treasure or the pearl of great price but the lucky find! the risking all! to have one thing—Christ to Martha, his gentle and inexorable reproof defending Mary. Wise Mary, the better part. It: sobriety, and a decent end. Maybe years of work first, they didn’t bulk for him at the moment. ‘come.’ ‘Thy will be done’ by me (the only words in Shakespeare’s hand, closing the will—except the British Museum Ms.) this afternoon, at last. Contract. ‘on earth’ (that’s here in my cortex, as in Bahrein) ‘as it is in heaven’ (wherever that may be —in the Local Group or behind some quasar, if quasars had backs). ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (I’m ashamed, as You know, of this money, when others are starving, half my engineer friends out of work, help Dale, help Harmon, Andy, help my brother, forgive me, I didn’t ask for it, it just came, I was poor until lately, I turned down wealth at twenty-one as You know, I do support Mother besides David, I lend money or rather give it, forgive me) ‘and forgive us our trespasses’ (he was too tired to go over them, maybe a dozen vanities and attacking Edith were worst, He was irremediably familiar with them anyway) ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’ (off the hook! by great rare luck he had no enemies, unless the old Dean, who had first lost all power over him and then been forced to resign—long forgiven, though admittedly long hated, Severance had even been sorry for his humiliation). ‘And lead us not into temptation’ (The Masters, the Brass Rail, the Bedford, only threats really in the city, and all airports, insolende, pretty tits and eyes and asses, outrageous demands by mail and telephone, getting better about these) ‘but deliver us from evil’ (all these, everything characteristic and inappropriate—Change my life). He paused, worn, aching. Trouble with final rubric. As a cradle Catholic (a truly disgusting expression, like ‘let it all hang out’ —image of testicles dangling through zippers) he could not get used to it. Also, what the hell was the point of reminding the Lord of the Lord’s power (obvious in every kinked corner of the finite but unbounded Universe) and glory (whatever that was—with all his Francophile passion he spat on gloire)—still the streaked clouds showed forth His glory and the great seas His power—okay: ‘For thine is the kingdom’ (no sweat there) ‘the power and the glory, for ever and ever’ (that is to say, not sempiternally, as per Augustine, but in an infinite series of uninterrupted microseconds, Thomistic instants, no doubt about it). ‘Amen.’ (Forgive me this lousy prayer, as usual; tired, Lord, for no reason and with no excuse. If there was anything good in the day—surely there was!—his spirits pricked up—thank You).

  With rapid supplications for Ruth and The Baby and the coming real baby and one of his ex-wives and the mother of his bastard and their daughter who was nothing but a name and an infant-shitting-all-over-him nineteen years ago and the soul of his father, Addressat Unbekannt, he rose creaking and climbed up on the bed and under the covers.

  He relaxed his shoulders, wrists, fingers one by one, breathed two-one two-one, attended to his stomach, paid no attention to his sphincters, worked mentally on his thighs, the backs of his knees, ankles, toes, as his fiancee’s father had taught him in London so long ago. Three or four times, some years, he did this. What were his chances? At one point he had decided he was just doomed to slips —he could go a week, ten days, even two weeks, then he drank. One Wednesday evening in August Dr Rome had mentioned for contempt and laughter (will hiss me to my knell) the man who had ‘only had nine slips in two years! —I love the Programme.’ Everybody laughed. Severance did not laugh. With six or seven slips in two months, he felt a young-brotherly and horrid admiration. The guy was trying. He wasn’t drinking himself to death. ‘
Until next time.’ But with its ten billion nerve cells and incredible pathways, what stability could be expected of the cortex, in its endless destruction and replacement, not to speak of alcohol affecting oxygen-glucose processes—‘quicksilver’ Luther called the heart of man—an ignorant agreement of biology and theology: give him a prohibition and he’ll disobey it, blaming not only somebody else but God Himself (‘the woman thou gavest me’) … his tired thought reeled and his scrotum hurt. The irresistible descent, for the person incomprehensibly (and how many working on it? one of the three worst problems) determined. Relief drinking occasional then constant, increase in alcohol tolerance, first blackouts, surreptitious drinking, growing dependence, urgency of first drinks, guilt spreading, unable to bear discussion of the problem, blackout crescendo, failure of ability to stop along with others (the evening really begins after you leave the party, ‘my soul ran in the night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted’), support-excuses, grandiose and aggressive behaviour, remorse without respite, controls fail, resolutions fail, decline of other interests, avoidance of wife and friends and colleagues, work troubles, irrational resentments, inability to eat, erosion of the ordinary will, tremor and sweating, out-of-bed-in-the-morning drinks, decrease in alcohol tolerance, physical deterioration, long drunks, injuries, moral deterioration, impaired and deluded thinking, low bars and witless cronies, indefinable fears (terror of the telephone, for me—never mind who, menace, out of the house!), formless plans along with incapacity to initiate action, obsession with drinking, conformance to it of the entire life-style, beyond the alibi-system, despair, hallucinations—ah! he knew every abyss of it, as he drifted off. Something white jerked in some dream, a red figure receded (a woman?), a Vivaldi rallentando was audible off right, just audible. Turn the goddamn volume up will you. He slept.

  It was a good night, he only woke twice. The second time, he was sitting bleary with Bill S over coffee in the Snack Room, four o’clock in the morning, when the frightful craggy face of the retired fire-chief came close to his face and said: ‘Alan, I have more anger to control than most people.’ The nurse and deeply graph-absorbed orderly were too far away down the hall, twenty feet. Severance shuddered and did not confront him. ‘I know, Bill. I believe you.’

  13

  NEXT MORNING he got shot to pieces—in, of all calm safe places, Animal-Vegetable-Mineral. Confrontation was rare on Saturdays, and leaders who went in for it (like Julitta) were hated as well as feared, but it wasn’t the leader who happened to confront Severance. It was everybody.

  Saturday morning was not designed as a rest-cure quite, but at least there was no Group, and the patients were comparatively relaxed. First came a talk by a recovering alcoholic (‘I have never known,’ said Larry T one day, ‘a recovered alcoholic’—out of his boundless experience of eleven years’ five-state-wide AA sobriety) on some aspect of the treatment Programme; then came exercises, one short, one long, plus a second short if there was time before lunch. Everyone stood in a circle, closed their eyes, walked forward with arms down at their sides, and milled. At a word, they opened their eyes to see where they were, then they resumed their seats and reported, one after another around the rough circle, their feelings. Both last Saturday and now, Severance was bored blind and expected to have nothing to report (though this was regarded as very suspicious and in fact rarely happened). But to his surprise his feelings were strong and different from those last Spring. Then he had detested contact; when he felt people bumping against him, he tried to avoid and generally wound up in the open. This second time in treatment at Northeast, he felt a little lonely on his own and moved eagerly about seeking contact—amazing. Odder still, when he found himself, secure in a tossing bundle of bodies (a Group, eh?), being by accident shoved out, he threshed to get back in, and got back in, both times. In short, he enjoyed the exercise. It was pleasant, too, always to find two or three pals hard by when he opened his near-sighted eyes. He decided he was less of a loner than he had always supposed—intensely territorial in his aggressions maybe, but also, somewhat, in his self- and Group-protectiveness.

  Eye-stare was the second exercise. All sitting quietly, at a signal each tried to find another pair of eyes and secure their attention, holding it then for what seemed a very long time indeed until at a signal they broke contact. Each then reported (1) what he felt, and (2) what he saw the other person feeling. Severance did not love this exercise either. The first time, however—they did it twice—he had a hair-raising experience. Looking about with increasing eagerness (nobody liked to be left out, as one or two or even three always were), just as he was giving up hope of finding anybody free he found George S looking at him from halfway down the lounge, to his left, with the maniacal velocity of a Japanese train. He thought, ‘Fuck him. I am just as serious as he is,’ and glared across no space at all like his eight-inch reflector, they locked wills, and supported each other’s Programmes with tooth and nail so hard that it seemed only a second when Jerry said, ‘Okay,’ and he sat back as exhausted however as if he had run a 220. He felt terrific. He had misjudged George—as he was beginning to wonder if he always misjudged everybody, him, with all his experience with men and women and colleagues and students and artists and you name it. He thought George, the short young bullet-headed businessman of his first morning, a smart-aleck, here to dry out, crack a few jokes, and go out to the nearest bar. Couldn’t be more wrong—and he delivered an eloquent speech on the subject when his turn came.

  Altogether he was way above himself, the doctor, inspired by his triumphs yesterday over the Third and especially the First Step, and he should have seen trouble coming. Maybe he did—yes, he actually in some corner of his self-exposure did—but not vividly enough to avoid it. Indeed he invited it, he set himself up.

  His account of his feelings while milling was remarkable. It would have reminded a Jamesian, had any been present (but Jasper was in one of the two other lounges), of what some insolent bitch accused the master of in The Sacred Fount: an expenditure of mental force equivalent to what produced for Kant the two Critiques on the problem of whether or not there indeed existed between two English upper-class house-guests a relation no more important in their case than it would have been between baboons. But in Eye-stare he went further. He interrupted at will, he corrected, he interpreted, he extrapolated, he reminded, he put words in people’s mouths, he read their minds, he gave advice (the sin against the Holy Ghost—you were only supposed to say what you felt or what you saw the other person feeling). As the session wore on, he realized gradually that he was out of line; but he could not help it, he felt too good. His motives moreover were of the best: to share his insights. Tension mounted around the room as driving across Long Island into an electrical summer-storm, and broke in Animal-Vegetable-Mineral.

  This third exercise consisted in everybody studying everybody else in silence and then, ad lib, uncalled on, saying what animal (or vegetable, or even mineral) someone reminded him of, and why. Severance had three impressions ready at once, and composed out at hilarious or penetrating length in twenty seconds. But he was wary enough to wait until someone else had spoken before he compared Maggie to the Taj Mahal, with data (the illusory white produced though by a spectrum of semi-precious stones, the massiveness with delicacy, its creation by a Venetian Catholic jeweller, the reflecting pool vertical in front, the broad Jumna unseen behind—leaving out an excursion into Islamic un-iconographic metaphysics). Nobody cheered. Presently Mike M said: ‘I see Alan as a sick old lion …’

  Severance didn’t hear the rest, composing his admiring impressions of Mike.

  When he heard Mike’s voice stop he said, ‘I see you as—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Jerry, ‘how do you feel about what Mike said?’

  ‘Well, nothing particular.’ Severance, an inveterate interrupter himself, was annoyed at being cut off. ‘It’s nice, of course, to be compared to a lion—’

  ‘What about what he said?’ somebody broke in
. ‘He spoke of “roaring all the time without meaning it”; it wasn’t too pretty a picture.’

  ‘I didn’t hear it all. “Sick” and “old” are true and besides I’m case-hardened to epithets. I’m a sort of public figure for God’s sake. Every time I put a book out some stranger tears me to shreds. I get quoted in the papers, in Life magazine—half the time, wrong. Who cares? You get used to it.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said somebody.

  ‘You must be kidding.’

  ‘May I kiss your foot?’

  ‘You disgust me.’ This was a pretty little blonde nurse new on the Ward. She was glaring at him like a reptile.

  ‘You’re not the only person I disgust,’ Severance threw at her from a hot broth of rage contempt resignation self-loathing self-pity, meaning him. ‘No doubt about it, Miss.’

  ‘You don’t even know my name!’ she cried exasperated.

  ‘How could I? I never saw you before this morning.’

  ‘We all said our names around in the beginning. You’re so superior you make me sick. You think we’re all just zeroes.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘That’s what I see.’

  ‘He’s not even one of us.’

  ‘—sky-high-’

  ‘—superior—’

  ‘—’

  ‘rude to Mike.’

  ‘—’

  Making every allowance for a novice nurse with an MD miraculously under her thumb, and with the mob behind her, he felt crushed by a monotony of injustice and hatred. He was guilty all right, but, even more, he was innocent. Severance decided he had had enough.

  ‘What are you feeling right now?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘Tumultuous.’

  He rose quietly from the end of the couch, seething, threaded between chairs and went bow-legged out down the hall to his room. Screw them. Hyperdemocracy. He hacked. His scrotum was worse than ever. He lit a cigarette, to find one already burning in his ashtray. Linda was her name he had heard it after all and forever fuck her. Snip with a uniform, Judge Lynch, hounds baying the bayou, caught redhanded, ‘I DID IT’ He was prepared to lay claim to a certain superiority in this and that. Linc far beyond him in the other, Dr Rome elsewhere. Everybody should know their place. He knew his. Nobody better than nobody in all respects. Compare not. He felt suffocated, airless, in this room lounge Ward hospital city—gashed. Truth in it, too, though, he was an arrogant man or bastard. He hated his admission to Linda. Linda eh? White-wrapt, lustrous, frigid, crap. Locating himself on the black sand beach at Saint-Tropez in May, mid-afternoon, seventeen years ago, he reved.