Even the Pax Kyrie protesters who were coming up in cars and church buses from the valley had to turn around and postpone a planned action. They got stuck behind the delivery truck.
And nothing happened.
No explosion. No earthquake. Not the slightest tremor on the Richter scale.
SAP, the DOE, and Homeland Security call me a national security risk. The agents’ arrest report describes me as filthy and having a foul odor; it says I was raving and had to be restrained. I remain in custody, under medical observation, and on administrative leave from the Lab.
The Los Alamos Monitor calls me The Surge Tweet-ker and the Journal and New Mexican blow the dust off journalistic chestnuts like Chicken Little and Benedict Arnold. I ask the SAP investigators how they found the house.
“Unidentified caller. Can you tell us why the pages of the Los Alamos telephone directory were stuck to the wall with human excrement?”
“My excement?”
They glare.
“Can I ask to speak to McCaffery?”
“Well, you can ask …” Interrogation dissimulation: they say there is no McCaffery.
I tell the SAPers to talk to the bartender at Central Avenue Grille. He tells them he remembers me, “the ashes guy”—he had to wipe down the barstool after I left—but he testifies that nobody else was drinking at the bar so early that morning and that I had been muttering to myself “like some kind of meth head.”
I tell them check my cell phone. They analyze the SIM card and determine that I did get a call on July 12, the day after I was placed on administrative leave, with no caller ID, but they trace it back to a banking advisor in Los Alamos. She had been trying to update me on the fraud investigation when, according to her testimony, “He babbled something about his hand, how it didn’t work in the scanner,” and then I hung up.
Golz announces her resignation. My life savings has been pillaged and I get no paycheck. I have no money for a lawyer, but on Thursday the eighteenth I learn that the ACLU has made me a cause and retained a defense attorney. The Jewish-sounding “Katz” inspires confidence.
We meet in the same interview room as the men from SAP. “Don’t ever talk to those assholes without me in the room.” I want to tell him how good I have been. I did not tell them about Mel Woburn. I did not tell them about the blood tech. He hands me a business card: Cahats.
Things are always not what they seem.
I tell him the truth: I was drinking, I was despondent, I have no memory of posting that message on Surge, but whoever did made it impossible to prove it wasn’t me. You never know how people can manipulate you … I do not tell Cahats either about Mel Woburn or the blood tech.
For the moment I am suspect, soon I will be defendant, and then I will be convict.
I have no money for the bond. At the arraignment on Friday the nineteenth Cahats makes a case to get me out until the trial on the basis of a few technicalities: I am a U.S. citizen, I did not hurt anyone, and the toxicology tests conducted at my arrest determine that I cultivated a brief but serious addiction to painkillers. Cahats cites expert pharmacological testimony that oxycodone, with the right megadosing (ten or twelve pills in a twenty-four-hour period), especially when mixed with alcohol, can create dependency literally overnight.
Sunday, July 21
I am released and placed on nightly house arrest and daily, court-mandated detox rehabilitation. Cahats loans me some money for groceries and counsels me to take however long I need to recover from “that bump on the head.” The bump. In front of the judge he called it “schizophrenia resultant from accidental poisoning.”
My first night out I watch a lot of cable. I flip through the infomercials, workouts, and reruns: everything looks the same. I forget how long I’ve been flipping the way you forget the last stretch of drive late at night on the highway. The only things that can make me forget the shit my life has become for a few seconds at a time are comedies from the ’50s and ’60s turned up as loud as the TV will blare: I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons. I don’t hear what they’re saying, but the black-and-white relieves my eyes and the laugh tracks are a kind of white noise for my consciousness.
My cell phone has been confiscated as part of the investigation, and for me there will be no more computers for a while. The laptop was fried. The PC has been seized for a complete hard-drive search, the kind where they can recover even deleted data. They impound the Spider. Evidence. I am left alone on Pajarito Road to knock around the house in the night, and I know how bereft I am.
All the little things she did to keep me presentable.
What did Kitty used to do? Iron, button, fold? All I can do each morning is make it to the dryer to get the day’s clothes.
I lie awake cycling through all that went wrong. This was your fault. This wasn’t your fault. It makes no difference. This is all your fault.
I sit in the living room and turn on the TV, find an infomercial. My eyes stray to the dining room. The slider. The curtain covers all but a sliver of glass. I get up and pull it all the way to the edge. Is the latch closed? The latch is closed.
I lie down on the king-size, springless, formaldehydefree bed. There are no more nightmares. Now what is worse is when I awaken.
I could have a drink. A drink would make me feel better. It might not be as easy as just going to the cabinet in my study—they took away the bottles when they took the computers and the phone—but I could still walk down to Smith’s, pick empty bottles and cans out of trash barrels on the way, redeem them for a nickel apiece. How many would it take for the price of a twenty-four-ounce PBR? How many would it take for a forty-ounce malt liquor?
I could stand in front of Smith’s and spot one of my old coworkers or a former subject and ask for a buck. Make up some excuse: locked my wallet in the car, lost my keys, left the cell at the house, need to make a call on a pay phone. Are there any more pay phones?
I could, but I don’t. Something inside me knows the liquor would just magnify my misery. The only reprieve I get is in the second or two after waking. When I was doing okay, I had awful nightmares. Now there is no more nightmare. When I awaken, it takes a second or two to recover the misery. Then I feel the welt on my chest or the sore hand, and I realize that Kitty is not beside me. There is another reason I don’t have a drink: because maybe if I don’t, Kitty will come back.
Remember when this house was new, sitting with Kitty on the living room couch, watching Lost on Tuesday nights and cuddling over a big bowl of popcorn? Remember how she used to sprinkle on nutritional yeast, how our fingers would mingle in the middle of the bowl? Remember how her touch would make me tingle, how the hairs on my knuckles would stand on end? Remember how she used to stroke my arm? Remember how I used to feel it, really feel it?
Remember?
Maybe she will see how hard I’m trying. Maybe, however bereft I look, she will smell that I am clean. Maybe she will decide to stay. I should have coffee. Have candy. Have a smoke. Don’t have a drink. Pills? Hell yes, I would take pills. I search behind the bedstead. I pick through the plush of the bathroom floor mat for any crumb of Kitty’s forgotten prescription. What I wouldn’t do to find even one tablet with the little chisel: Watson 932. It passes the time. If I had a bottleful I would OD. Not in a deliberate attempt to die—I can’t plan that far ahead—just to feel the sedation, the deep tide submerge me, because in that instant when I am knocked out there will be real relief. Let whatever happens happen.
There is no chance of getting my job back, but until things can be worked out for them to terminate me free and clear, the Lab does not cancel my health insurance.
* * *
Monday morning, July 22, I begin my days of treatment.
Every morning the sound echoes hollowly off the tiles when I put my coffee cup on the countertop beside the sink. The cup will be there, unwashed, when I get home.
Gradually the cabinets empty of clean cups; gradually a procession of unwashed cups forms beside the sink.
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Every weekday a van honks out front and takes me to a rehab program in Española, a double-fenced yard on hardpan, free of tree or sagebrush. Burly orderlies ready to wrestle you to the ground if you get out of hand, a minimum-security prison crossed with a psych ward.
I have a one-on-one intake meeting with a counselor, but the rest of the day it’s two-hour sessions where my fellow “clients” go around in a circle, say their first names, and talk about using. Most are Hispanic heroin addicts, many of them on methadone treatment. They talk about chiva like a lover, their rhapsodies pure poetry. It’s a kind of pornography, hearing them describe how it feels to shoot up behind the McDonald’s on Riverside Drive. There are glimpses of redemption, some of them obvious connivances to inflame the enthusiasm of the counselors, who report to the parole officers, who report to the judges.
My turn comes and I say, “Hello, my name is James.” They stare at me a long time and wait for me to say more. I stare back. The court order only requires me to show up, sit in the circle, and say my name. They cannot make me say more. I wait.
Every afternoon the van drops one of the other clients in Rinconada. I watch out the window and see the health clinic. I keep an eye out for the blood tech.
At the end of the day I return to the house on Pajarito Road. I no longer call it my house. A letter arrives telling me that I have thirty days to make a payment or the mortgage company will initiate foreclosure proceedings. I have missed just one installment.
Soon this place will belong to the bank and I will have to find somewhere else to sleep—or not sleep, to lie awake at night. I go downstairs to the dining room and check the latch on the slider. When I flip on the outside flood lamps there is nothing there.
Thursday, August 1
I am looking at the procession of empty cups before the van comes to pick me up. The doorbell rings, and a pimpled paralegal from Kitty’s lawyer’s office serves me divorce papers. I put the papers on the kitchen table and let them sit there. I have thirty days to reply, just like with the mortgage company.
I go to rehab and wait while the time runs out. I don’t know how much longer I can take it. I flip on the TV when I get home and there is no more TV. I have not paid the cable bill.
I get permission to leave the house to go to the Mesa Public Library that evening. It’s the only card in my wallet that is any good anymore. I check out the memoir My Country Versus Me. The thing that bugs me about Wen Ho Lee protesting his mistreatment is how guilty he sounds. But somehow he kept it all together. He kept his wife. He kept his house. He kept his money. How?
On August 2, Cahats begins preparing me for the pretrial hearing. “The government is going to look closely at your whole history, even back at your family, when they make their case.” I know what’s coming. The same shit that’s followed me ever since I saw that shrink in college. “Your father spent four years at Fair Oaks in the 1970s.”
“Actually, he was in and out intermittently for those four years.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this? We can use this in your defense.”
“Leave Dad out of it.”
“Insanity. It’s hereditary, even if it’s only temporary.
It’s the best chance you’ve got. Beats national-security threat. Trumps attempted terrorism.”
If you were the only person in your family who hadn’t gone crazy …
I catch myself. What if crazy, instead of a 180, is just two clicks away from sane? What if sometimes crazy is right? Like seeing something nobody else sees, and it might be enough? Like Ritchie saying, Save Church Rock. Like saying, Burning lungs … burning eyes … radiation … life expectancy: 12 hours. But that’s crazy. Nothing happened.
No more nightmare, but the memory of the dreams gives rise to another sickness. I brood over the vision: my neighbors in the street, clawing out their own eyes. Nothing is like the living hell of those memories.
I watch my neighbors from the house on Pajarito Road, this house that is not my house: my neighbors in bright shirts driving shiny SUVs to church on Sunday, smiling their constipated smiles. Purge them by fire … Make it stop. Why doesn’t it stop? I delivered the message. Abandon the community that has forsaken you …
I do not believe in clairvoyance. I know that the drugs, the drink, and sleep deprivation all contributed to the nightmare.
What I do believe in is the house. Meth or no meth, there’s something fucked up about that wall. Why was my name up there in the first place? Either someone is playing me like a game or the house itself still has a hold over me. I don’t like it either way, but when I last went out there I figured the house would be easier to beat than a personal enemy. I figured wrong.
On Sunday, Kitty comes by to get a few of Oppie’s old things. The papers just got filed, but already I cannot look at her like a wife anymore.
“How is your treatment working out?”
“It’s not treatment.”
“Call it whatever you want.”
Sadly, I realize that she is not swearing at me. Kitty has given up that intimacy.
I want to reach out to her, but this would make her hate me even more. I should have kept to my almond cheese and my exercise regimen, but now there is no getting her back.
I love Kitty. I need her. It is futile to suggest otherwise. We could have been nicer to each other. We could have raised a family, even if it meant adoption. We didn’t have to be so cruel to each other. I know that she loves me, but she hates me too. And now for her the hate is drowning out the love.
“I miss Oppie,” I say. “Do you miss Oppie?”
“Of course I miss Oppie.” She already wasn’t looking me in the eye, and now she turns away. She won’t let me go there. I don’t deserve to mourn with her, to mourn like she is mourning. “James, the movers are coming on Tuesday.”
“Movers?”
“They said they’d get here early, before you have to leave for your treatment, anyway. All you have to do is let them in. They’ll have a list of my stuff and leave you a copy of the manifest … What made you start acting so crazy, Jimmy?”
I’m trying to find an answer when she walks away.
Monday after rehab I go by Hank Farmer’s and ask to borrow his car.
“I’m not sure I should be letting you do this.”
“It’s just to get groceries. I’ll be back in an hour.”
I see her pulling out of the clinic parking lot in a PT Cruiser—cheap, flashy, a car for people who know nothing about cars. I follow her through Chimayó to a trailer on blocks and park across the highway. A ruin of an old adobe sits boarded up beside the trailer. She parks in the shade of an elm that grows out of its crumbling foundation and goes into the trailer.
She emerges half an hour later, alone, having changed out of her scrubs, now transformed into full goth: black blouse and short black skirt, black hair teased into a tufted rat’s nest, and torn black stockings.
I follow her into Española. She pulls into the Christian coffee shop.
She orders coffee, sits alone at a booth, and gets on her phone, ghoulish makeup smudged deliberately on her pale skin, a big beauty mark dotting her left cheek.
I sit two booths away with my back to her, listening to snippets of her conversation. “Why don’t you go out today, see about that job?” Suddenly I hear her phone snap shut and before I know what’s happening the blood tech is standing at my booth, tapping my table with her outrageous nails. “How’s your levels?”
My heart leaps into my throat. “Huh?”
“Your cholesterol.”
“Not so good.”
“James, right? You think you’re the only person who can follow people?”
I decide to spit it out. “Been up to Morphy Lake lately?”
“Oh, you know, I’ve never been to Mora in my life.” The way she says it, I know it’s true.
“Your friend must have given you some surprise.”
“My friend?”
She sees the look in my eyes and
settles down opposite me in the booth. Her black stockings are ripped artfully up to her garters. Is this what I gave up Kitty for? Gave up everything?
“Last time you came in for a draw, he was there a few hours before, and he was like, My friend’s turning forty and a bunch of us want to throw him a surprise party. I said the thing about patient confidentiality and everything and he said, James O., born on the fourth of July, and then you came in and it was right there on your chart: DOB, 7/4/73. ”
“What did this guy look like?”
“He was really clean.”
“Clean?”
“You know: white, rich, from Los Alamos, like you.” The blood tech blushes. “He gave me fifty bucks. I said I didn’t want any money. He made me take it anyway.”
“Did he say his name?”
“McDonald? McSomething …”
The many ways people can manipulate you unless you’re aware of the possibilities. I wrote that line.
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” she asks.
“No, you’re not in any trouble.”
I drive back to Los Alamos and leave Hank’s car in his driveway. It’s a long walk home down Pajarito Road.
Tuesday, August 6
The slider is locked. The crickets are singing. The king-size, springless, formaldehyde-free mattress—I lie on it for the last time. The moving truck is getting here early. I will go out to meet it.
I go down to the dining room in the middle of the night and flip on the light, plink. In the glass of the slider I see a man: unshaven, forsaken, tattered, haggard. I cannot look him in the eye, but if he were the subject of one of my profiles I might write: He has ceased to be troubled by even the most horrifying visions. Disaster, devastation, suffering: he is indifferent before them—unmoved by the misery of man or animal, like nature, but as a man, unnatural. His acquaintances would say they barely recognize him.
Curse the Names Page 13
