Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  Leo decided right then that he was deeply in James’s corner on this; Dickbag was definitely a bad guy, and pretty much Leo’s enemy also. In the dark, from his pillow, unseeable, Leo made a face that meant all this.

  “So I’m having some trouble taking on board the forgiveness stuff that they’re saying is in some totally undemonstrable way necessary to stay sober. Right now I see two reasons to stay alive, sober or not: to help my boy out of this patch and to take a gun down to Aces and shoot Dickbag in the face.”

  “Ah. Don’t do that, now,” said Leo, his voice raspy from underuse. “Seems self-endangering to the point of suicide. And if not death, then prison, right? Or would you escape after shooting Dickbag? No. You can’t leave your son alone in the world. I mean, you will one day, I guess. But not yet you shouldn’t.” He thought that sounded bossy though, and he wanted to let James know that he was speaking from experience. “I know,” he said. “I am an orphan.”

  Leo wondered whether the word was justified. He had never dropped it like that before. He was twenty-two when it happened: the fire, his escape, his parents’ non-escape.

  An extra beat of silence in the blue room while James absorbed that. “Yeah, I know. I can’t leave Caleb,” he said, and sighed, and said fuck while he sighed, and the sadness in the sigh gave the dull cuss real weight. “My boy may have a worse brain than I do, but he has a better heart. I should forget about Dickbag; let him rob me of that whole toxic joint. Bankruptcy’s low down on my list of problems right now. I know what I’m supposed to do. But I just can’t seem to quit devising ways of making that man suffer. I tried to say could I use that as my Higher Power—my obsessive sense of vengeance against this one guy.”

  “They said no, right?”

  “They said no,” said James. “I think I want to use Zeno of Citium. ‘The passionate emotions are the result of errors in judgment.’ That’s Zeno. Yep, once I get rid of those passionate emotions, the errors in judgment will just fall away.”

  Was that wry? Leo had always wondered about wry. Whatever it was, it was comforting to hear about this man’s bus accident of a midlife. Compared to James’s, Leo’s situation didn’t seem all that bad. Okay, he was a fragile-minded, careerless, privileged loser. Okay, he was alcoholically inclined and overfond of pot. And okay, so he’d let his imagination run too wild; he’d seen patterns and meaning where really there was only the ordinary world, drab and difficult for every poor sinner. He was embarrassed, deeply embarrassed. But embarrassed was related to humbled, wasn’t it? And humbled was said to be a good thing.

  So he was actually a little cheered as he lay in the dark. Crack cocaine? Girlfriend-stalking? Bankruptcy? He saw that he had stopped well shy of the true cliff edges.

  In the morning, before breakfast, Leo followed James to the lounge-like area in the middle of the men’s wing. James explained that every morning a new man led his co-recoverers on a guided meditation. It was on the chore wheel in the lounge: Snack, Library, Kitchen, Meditation, Sweep Patio. Men’s names beside these duties. Leo’s wasn’t up there yet.

  Men sat in chairs and on the floor. “You’re just not allowed to lie down,” said James. A few men were pushing the edge of that rule, slumped in near-sleep in the corners of couches. Most men kept their eyes closed. One show-off sat in full lotus. The meditation was led by a man in loafers and feathered hair. He took his job seriously, making his voice all Garrison Keillor-y as he drew with words a sylvan path along a quiet shore. “The water laps at the mucky shore, the pine boughs wave gently in the morning breeze,” he said. But after a few minutes of that, he depleted his stock of relaxing imagery, so he brought the men out of a stand of pine to a clearing of shore, where they found a bass boat, “an Allison XB-Twenty-One Bassport Pro Two and Two,” said the man. “With a hydraulic jackplate, Garmin GPS in the dash, two chargers, a Livewell pump-out, tip-up consoles, a swing trailer tongue, LED lights, disc brakes, oil-bath hubs, a Minn Kota Pro-Eighty trolling motor, and dual-rod storage racks.” Gamely, Leo tried to imagine this craft.

  After the bass-boat meditation, Leo tagged along with James to the smoking station, a pedestal ashtray set the state-mandated thirty feet away from the main facility. Next to the ashtray was a concrete pillar, six feet high with a dirty metal circle near its top, its function a complete mystery to Leo. Security camera? Cyclopean statue?

  James put an effeminately slim menthol cigarette in his mouth, then reached a hand around the rear of the pillar and pushed a button. In seconds, the dirty metal circle glowed bright orange. James leaned his cigarette into the glowing hole.

  It was an electric cigarette lighter, like the kind in a car’s dashboard. Of course, butane lighters were contraband around here. And it was definitely a tobacco disincentivizer, making smokers embrace a concrete pole and stick their cigarettes in its fiery, head-high anus. It didn’t seem to faze James, though, and Leo liked him even more for that.

  “Sorry. You want one?” He proffered the open pack to Leo.

  “No. Thank you,” said Leo. The smoke coming off James’s cigarette looked greasy.

  “See, the Stoics, they probably wouldn’t let us smoke. Maybe there’s a Stoic treatment facility. If I say the Stoics are my Higher Power, they have to send me there, right?”

  “Speaking of, what are their powers of sending?” Leo asked James. “And do people ever just walk out of here?” Leo was beginning to put together a plan for getting out of Quivering Pines. Clearly, the sisters would have to be appeased, as would Dr. Smugpens. He didn’t want to push too hard; he was still worried about landing in a worse place, an electrodes place.

  “Well, you know, it’s not a locked facility.”

  “Yeah, why do they keep saying that?”

  “I think it helps if they get a runner every now and then. It keeps things taut. We had a genuine B-list rock star here last week.” James mentioned a name. Leo shrugged to indicate he had never heard of him. “The drummer for Skinflute?” said James. Leo nodded as if that meant something. “Wore leather pants. A girl came and got him in a Jaguar after dinner. Can you imagine? How we workshopped about that one.”

  Another man shouted to Leo from the patio. “Hey, new guy. You smokin’?”

  “Only two men at a time allowed at the smoking station,” James said to Leo, and then he called back to the shouter: “Leo and I are talking, Bob.”

  “Smoking station’s for smoking, is all I’m saying,” called Bob.

  “Sounds like you’re harboring a resentment, Bob. Go journal about it,” James called back, and he gave Leo a wicked smile, as if they were prank-calling the supermarket. “Some of these guys aren’t so bad, actually. It’s kinda fun, you know?”

  Leo did know. Even thirty-six hours into his stay, the interesting absurdities of the place were offering relief from the self-hatred and the incessant buzz of dread that had filled the last weeks.

  “It’s a phantasia,” said James.

  Leo didn’t understand the word.

  “The impression left behind by sensations,” said James. He did a lot of bodywork while smoking and talking: he cupped his elbow in his palm; he scratched at his goatee; he rolled the ashen tip of his cigarette carefully on the rim of the ashtray until it was a clean and rounded ember. “Even that guy Phillip, the guy with the bass boat. He’s an egomaniac, but he’s okay. I mean, when it comes down to it.” James straightened; the light breeze dropped and the sun warmed the earth. He quoted some Stoic into the morning air: “‘I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.’” He scraped his cigarette out on the little metal grate, rubbed his hands together, and then said to Leo, “Come on. Let’s go make some memories.”

  In the cafeteria line, waiting for breakfast, Leo met a one-eyed man named Kenny; he was in his twenties, small, wearing a tracksuit, and clearly rougher than most of the other men here. Kenny said that on the outside he collected s
crap metal from “unsecured” job sites; he exuded a street knowledge that made him stand out at Quivering Pines, with its pretty paths across clipped lawns and its selection of juices at breakfast. Still, Kenny must have had rich parents, thought Leo, to have ended up here.

  “What’s your drug of choice?” Kenny asked him. “Or are you just an alcoholic?” Leo felt cornered by the questions. The phrasing presupposed a certain on-boardness with Twelve Step precepts, and he was trying to stay noncommittal on the point. He could answer, Dunno. I haven’t tried them all, or Drugs aren’t really my problem. But in the context, either answer would seem snooty. Kenny was just being kind, chatting to the new guy in the cafeteria line. So he said, “Pot, I guess.”

  Kenny nodded, unimpressed, and said his was crystal meth. Then he said he lost his eye when he leaped from a train car while being chased by cops. Leo, who hadn’t asked about the eye and had been considering eggs, opted instead for cereal, which he dispensed by turning an auger beneath a clear plastic bin.

  It seemed that the men here wanted to get a read on Leo and tell him their stories. At the table, a youngish anesthesiologist volunteered that he was at Quivering Pines to keep his medical license. He said he’d been found by his hospital to have installed a hep-lock in his own ankle so he could mainline synthetic opiates between procedures. He clearly considered his drug habit to be of a higher order than the drug habits of his fellow patients, with their hidden jugs of vodka and nasty little vials of specious, tub-produced amphetamines and attention meds swiped from their children.

  After breakfast, the men returned to their wing, some to pull ferociously on cigarettes at the smoking station, others to finish their homework or do crunches in their rooms before Morning Small Group.

  Leo showered. In the previous weeks, his personal hygiene had slipped noticeably. Correcting this was a low-hanging fruit in the show-them-you’re-better orchard. And he liked the shower in his room. It was one of those one-piece plastic-stall kinds, and it had a big soap dispenser that released a zippy, viscous, dish-detergent-type soap that Leo just slathered on. Brushed the hell out of his teeth. Combed his hair. Shaved like an ad man, leaning close to the mirror. There were men here who shook just bringing Cheerios to their moist mouths. Leo’s hand was steady. I am going to be okay, he thought.

  But James was not in Leo’s Morning Small Group, and Morning Small Group was really in a very small room; Leo felt his anxiety ratchet up. His Small Group counselor was called Keith. Keith was a sharp-looking dude in jet-black jeans. He kept his lanyarded ID tucked into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved button-down shirt.

  If you had to wear a lanyarded ID, that seemed to Leo to be the classy way to do it. They began with a check-in: You were supposed to say your name and ascribe to yourself a feeling word. Keith was clearly having an ongoing disagreement with Kenny, the tracksuited scrap-metal collector, who sat hunched and fidgeting in his chair. Kenny tried to use pissed off as his feeling word.

  “Pissed off is not a feeling word, Kenny,” said the counselor.

  It’s a feeling phrase, thought Leo.

  Fidget-fidget hunch. “But that’s how I feel.”

  “Can you find a less aggressive way to put it?” asked Keith. Kenny scanned the list of feeling words on the sheet taped to the back of his notebook. He chose angry, though it seemed to make him more pissed off to do so.

  Leo chose bewildered. He liked the wildness in the word.

  Leo was hoping that in Small Group he could start talking his way through and then right out of rehab; that he could, politely, make clear the differences between himself and the men around him. His binges were symptom, not syndrome, he reasoned. Sure, it might help to sit in circles and talk about distant fathers, about daily disappointments, about the strange tide of anger that sucked at the sands of a day. But who was going to give a shit, really? The mean world waited outside for them all, and it seemed to him that what was going on here was a willful oversimplification of the problem. He was embarrassed for these men, who were quickly able to see thirty years of estrangement from their families as evidence of their common disease. Who laid every problem at the feet of addiction. Well, it’s probably not that simple, he wanted to say. They were shifty here on what the word addiction even meant. Usually, they said it was a medical disease, like diabetes, but then suddenly they’d get more abstract about it, as if it were a sinister and scheming nemesis, like a wraith from a Blake woodcut.

  But he could find no opening to say any of this.

  “You’re awfully quiet, Leo,” said Keith. “What Bob just said about how difficult it is to stay sober when there’s all this alcohol being pushed at us all the time, what do you think about that?”

  Bob was the one who had been annoyed by Leo’s not smoking at the smoking station. He was a pilot for a major airline.

  “It sounds like Bob needs to move to Mecca if he wants to stop drinking.”

  “Well, how about you?” said Keith. “Do you want to stop drinking, stop using drugs? Don’t you see that that’s what got you here?”

  The don’t you see part pissed him off. “Look,” he said, addressing Keith, not all the men in the room. “Clearly I like to smoke more pot than some people do. More than most people. And all that drinking was gross, I guess. Yeah, it was gross. It could have been Windex, for all the relief it brought me. I got in way over my head. So I should probably stop all that. But that’s not exactly how I ended up here.”

  “How’d you end up here, then?”

  “My sisters were worried.”

  “Well, wasn’t it the drinking and using that had them worried?”

  “I think it was more the unreasonable elation, the no sleep, the delusions of reference and grandeur.”

  Keith squinted at Leo. Great, a vocabulary guy, Leo could pretty much see him thinking.

  “But let’s talk about what came after that—the alcohol and the marijuana? The not getting out of bed?”

  Fine, but that seemed to Leo beside the point. Or at least, not as important as what had come before. No one had tried to intervene on him when his head was full of light and links. They told him to quit talking so fast, not to take himself so seriously. But they could find no way to arrest his ascent. Each mean tether snapped at the pull of his racing self-regard. They’d waited until he was brought low. And he thought he knew why this was: they were jealous.

  Now that he was past that, he could see that he’d been, at times, obnoxious about his insights, and that he’d generally overshared. And he was willing to concede that some of his thoughts, at the end there, were straight-up paranoid. But there had been something; he had been onto something real. How it looked to others shouldn’t really matter. And what they wanted him to do here was give all that up and aim for what they called serenity. And that would be great—water lapping at a shore, all of that—but he knew it would never be his. He tried again, addressing the whole room. “I do see that I am unwell somehow. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got my hands around the truth, you know? And when that feeling goes away, when it’s replaced by its opposite…well, I feel just terrible then. The gloom gets so deep it’s like I can’t see. I feel like a teacup that’s certain to shatter; my mind goes over and over the same terrible data. And then, so, yes, maybe I use the pot and the drinking to treat that, to escape from it. Maybe that’s a bad system. But the pot and the drinking—they’re not the root complaint or final cause or underlying issue or whatever.”

  Keith seemed to be waiting for someone to respond. No one did.

  “Wallace.” Keith prompted one of the men. “I know you said depression is something you’ve battled. Can you speak to what Leo just said?” Wallace was a heavyset black veterinarian from Tacoma with kind eyes and large hands.

  “Not really,” said Wallace. “That teacup-about-to-shatter thing, that sounds a little different than what I got.”

  “I heard you caused trouble in Small Group today,” said James as they lay in their separate beds in the blue of the
room.

  “Yeah. That didn’t go the way I was hoping.”

  “You have to be careful around here, you know? Tell them what they want to hear, but don’t go overboard.”

  “I couldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here, James.”

  “Couldn’t that be, you know, denial?”

  Coming from James, the question didn’t make Leo defensive. “Could be, I suppose. But I think there’s something worse going on.”

  “Worse?”

  “Worse than the getting fucked up, you know?”

  “Like you’re crazy?”

  “Yeah. Well, like I was crazy. Now I kind of want the crazy back, because it felt better than what it left behind. But I can’t ever have it back, because now I know it was…well, I was the only one in that world. I was all alone. Being alone is like being dead.”

  “How crazy? Gimme an example.”

  And because Leo was certain that James was exactly who he appeared to be, he started talking, telling James all the things he couldn’t tell the doctor (because there was something fishy about that doctor) and that he couldn’t tell his sisters (because they loved him and couldn’t help and would only worry that their little brother was a late-onset schizophrenic).

  He started with the truth holes. It was the first time he had tried to explain the phenomenon to anyone. He saw that that phrase, truth holes, was kinda batshit. But what else would you call them? And what about for the first eight, ten years of his life, when loving parents encouraged his obsession with dragons and secret worlds and animals in vests who poured tea and drove motorcars and who gave him to read Tolkien and Susan Cooper and the Brothers Grimm and Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis? Is a boy supposed to leave his imagination on the side of the road when he boards the bus to manhood?