by David Shafer
“Think you could help me inside?” Al said.
“Shit. Yeah. Of course,” Leo said.
“Here, gimme that chair.”
Leo manipulated a white plastic patio chair in front of Al.
“Now, take my cane.”
Leo took the cane, one of those orthopedic-store jobs, with the clicktety-sprung-ball-through-the-line-of-holes system for adjusting height. Al steered the chair across the patio and Leo walked beside him, bearing Al’s cane and offering him a shoulder. When they reached the patio door, they saw that there was a minor hubbub within. The credits were rolling on the movie, and the men were hopping off the couches like locusts. A man called Phil patted frantically at the pockets of his sweatpants, then began digging in various wedges of upholstery, looking for his lost cigarettes. Men who could claim not to have come down to the pit at all during the movie squared the pages of their reading and sucked from the straws of their juice boxes.
“Dang. Looks like I don’t get to know what Harry done to Sally,” Al said. Leo opened the sliding door for the older man. Al put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and tried to step up the high threshold. But the top of his sneakered foot scraped against the metal drip edge on the door sill, and he fell back in pain. For a moment, Leo had the man’s whole weight on him; he felt like a stack of plates. Leo put his hand on the small of Al’s back to steady him. Through cardigan and checked shirt, he felt some of the armature of the plastic brace.
“Shit,” said Al in a pained exhalation. Leo put his hand on the underside of Al’s thigh and helped him to raise up his foot. Their entanglement barred the exit of the smokers, who had to give way before Leo and Al. Al told someone inside to fetch his walker, and Leo, beneath and behind him now, handled a man twice his age into another piece of scaffolding.
“I thank you, Leo,” said Al. “You think on what I told you,” he said as he walkered away.
Leo was thinking on what Al had told him an hour later as he lay in bed. James was flossing his teeth, wearing boxer shorts and a law-school T-shirt, as attorneys will do.
“What did you and that geezer talk about?” asked James while examining some bit of floss dross.
“His name’s Al. He scared the shit outta me.”
“Yeah. Man looks like he’s mostly parts.”
“No, it wasn’t that. He just made a very concise and compelling case against ever drinking again.”
“Yeah, but that was probably in the abstract.” James worried up his spent floss and dropped it in the wastebasket.
“Not really,” said Leo.
James flicked the light switch and got in bed. It wasn’t that dark. A pale spreading light from the parking lot seeped into their room.
Leo considered again that he should stay here awhile. The tomato juice was cold. There was a little weight room beneath the cafeteria, beside the laundry room; a rough jogging track scored into the hill before the railroad tracks. (Some high-quality chain-link fence between Quivering Pines and the railroad track. “They never said it wasn’t a fenced facility,” James had pointed out.) He could eat the hell out of those mini-yogurts, run-run-run around that track. Just get his wits back about him. He should hear what they had to say here; give it a chance. James was here. Al was here. This might be just the place.
On Monday morning Leo was sitting in the large round room with all the men trying to pay attention to a sort of science class—the onion-looking counselor was drawing pictures of confused neurons on a whiteboard—when Keith, Leo’s Small Group counselor, interrupted the class.
“Sorry, Gene,” he said to the Onion. “Can I see Leo out here?”
Leo did not want to go. He was afraid, as he left the circle, that he was Leaving the Circle.
Outside, Keith told Leo that the doctor wanted to see him again, and it couldn’t wait until the afternoon. Keith said that was weird.
“Listen, Leo,” he said, “I really think you should try to stay here. You have to dry out, man. You’re not going to be okay unless you do. There may be some, you know, comorbidity here. Like, you have mood issues. But sobriety will help you.”
“I know, I know,” said Leo. He truly wanted Keith to believe him. “I’m actually totally down with that.” He had really lathered on the fruity soap that morning, and brushed his teeth until his mouth gleamed like a bank lobby. “I think that maybe I might stay.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” said Keith. They were outside what was called the medical building, which phrase Leo could have told them was needlessly creepy. “Why’d you put down such crazy stuff on your MMPI?”
“My what?”
“The true-false questionnaire you took when you got here, the personality profile.”
“Oh, the are-you-afraid-of-doorknobs thing? I thought that was a joke.”
“Just tell him you didn’t mean it. The doctor. Make him believe you want to be clean and sober.”
“Clean and sober. Got it.” Man, did Leo want to be clean and sober.
“So, Leo,” said the doctor. He was in a grand mood, and wearing a lab coat today. That must be an affectation; there was no laboratory at Quivering Pines. The folder on Leo had thickened. “Do you know what it is we do here?”
Leo’s heart began to race. “You treat addiction. I got that.”
“Yes, we treat addiction. And you, Leo Crane, are an addict.”
Leo didn’t like the tone at all.
“Thing is, we don’t want to waste your time”—the doctor might have smirked there—“so if you aren’t receptive to certain basic assumptions, I’m afraid you’ll find that we don’t have that much for you here.”
“No. No. I am receptive to those assumptions,” said Leo, sipping at the stale air of the office to keep a lid on the part of him that wanted to object to this doctor, to push back, because you got the best stuff when you pushed back. “More than receptive,” he said. “I am powerless over…in this case, I guess, alcohol and marijuana.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that,” said the doctor. He opened and closed the folder on his desk, swiveled around in his seat a bit, made Leo wait. “The thing is, Leo, you have, oh, a sort of preexisting condition.”
“You mean depression, right? I know, but I think that’s related. To the drugs and alcohol. I mean it’s gotta be, right?”
“Well, it may be,” said the doctor. “It probably is. But I think there may be a problem with your personality.”
Well, I guess there’s nothing to be done about that, then, thought Leo. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean that I think you suffer from a personality disorder.”
“You think I’m mentally ill?”
“A personality disorder is not the same as mental illness,” the doctor said. He flicked some fuzz from the cursively embroidered and overpenned breast pocket of his lab coat. “You exhibit certain clusters of symptoms,” said the doctor. “The brief, intense bouts of anger, depression, anxiety; the engagement and then rapid disengagement with jobs, with women; the feelings of worthlessness. It’s true that your capacity for delusional elaboration and self-centering is not usually part of the presentation. A mild form of BPD is not something that would ordinarily stand in the way of your being treated here—”
“BPD?” asked Leo.
“Borderline personality disorder.” The doctor swiveled around in his chair twenty degrees. “It even occurs to me that you might be somewhat Aspergian.”
Yeah, and I think you’re somewhat assholian. He really shouldn’t have had such fun with those tests. Why did he have no good instincts about what to take seriously and what to blow off? It had always been that way.
“Do you know what is meant by the saying ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’?”
“Are you serious?” You mean, when it’s actually used by people who live in glass houses and throw stones for a living?
“Yes. What do you think it means?”
“It is a maxim encouraging
introspection and warning that hypocrites are liable to criticize in others faults that they themselves display.”
The doctor only nodded.
“But it’s really quite meaningless,” continued Leo. “I mean bland. I mean, presumably it’s the throwing stones at houses that should be avoided. Or maybe living in a glass house. It would be so hard to keep clean.”
The doctor had already started speaking. “…mania and the paranoia that you exhibit is, I think, of such a degree—this conspiracy you saw involving the computer company and the Scientologists and the contact lenses from the drug company—that you would probably do better at a facility with a more psychiatric orientation.”
Facilities have orientations? “No. I should stay here. I want to try this thing, this sobriety.”
“Certainly, getting those drugs out of your system is the first step, and I imagine that that will be, ah, achieved at whatever facility we, as your care team, decide is best for you.”
The first step is admitting you are powerless—even Leo knew that. And who’s we? You and that desk blotter? “You mean my sisters?”
He ignored the question. “So here’s what we’re going to do.” He had kept swiveling and was now actually looking out the window behind his desk, like Mr. Burns. “Tomorrow morning your sister will be here—”
“Which one?” interrupted Leo. “I got three.” He was trying to sound like Al. He held up three fingers.
The doctor swiveled back around and looked in his folder. “Daisy,” he said.
That made sense. Leo was somewhat less mortified that it was Daisy missing work for this shit rather than Heather or Rosemary.
“She will accompany you to a place that better suits your needs.”
Where’s that? A locked ward, or Amsterdam?
He thought he would attempt a straight-up approach. “So you’re really convinced I shouldn’t stay here?” He was going to try not to plead. This doctor seemed like someone who would take a certain pleasure in a patient’s pleading. “Look, I want what you’re selling.”
“We’re not selling anything.”
“Offering, whatever. Surely you’re supposed to treat people who want to be treated. I do like this sober and clearheaded thing, by the way,” he said to the doctor. “And I take that all on board. I think I will stop smoking and drinking. I think that’s just what’s needed.” Leo realized too late that he sounded like he was sucking up.
“But you said you were embarrassed to be here,” said the doctor.
“Well, of course I am. Isn’t that reasonable?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the doctor. “Many of the people who get here are relieved to get here.”
“Okay, well, then I’m embarrassed and relieved. Those are both feeling words.”
But it was pointless now. Leo saw that he was being booted from rehab. It was like that morning in Sharon’s office. Too late, he saw that he wished to stay among these fallen men.
A kind of lightness was floating into his limbs. “Right, well, look, Doctor, you say I’m out of here tomorrow, right?”
“We’re currently arranging a space for you in a more appropriate facility.”
“Which might be called …?”
“When your sister gets here tomorrow, we can discuss all that.”
“Yes, we can.” Leo stood up. “Well. I’ve got some journaling to do.”
“You’re excused from all the afternoon treatment activities, Leo. Actually, you’ll be staying up here in the medical building tonight.”
Really? That is unlikely to happen. “You think my borderline thing might be contagious, huh?”
Leo made his way across the quad and back to the men’s wing. It was another grand morning; the firs and aspens were shaking their green fists at the sky. He decided that he would just leave Quivering Pines. It was not a locked facility.
But it had a very long driveway, which led to the fuzzy edge of a lush outer suburb that Leo did not know at all. He would have to walk two miles to the Fred Meyer and call a taxi to get home. It would be an undignified escape. But it was weird, the way the doctor had said, You’ll be staying up here in the medical building tonight. Was there even a bed up there?
And there was the other weird thing, Leo realized. How had the doc known about the conspiracy, the Scientologists, and the contact lenses? All that had been only in the broadside. Would Jake have given that up to his sisters?
The drummer from Skinflute thought these rooms were bugged.
No, that was the paranoia, he reminded himself. But just to be safe, Leo should get out of here today. He could meet Daisy at his house tomorrow, deal with the fallout from there. Maybe she’d let him come live with her for a few months. Go to meetings, mind his nieces. He’d impress upon her that whatever he was supposed to have taken on board here—James Dean or Al or the doctor or the cautionary sight of broken lives or the glimpses of grace and mending—he’d absorbed it already.
The men’s wing was deserted; the others were still down there learning about neurons. Leo stopped in the kitchen and knocked back a couple of mini-yogurts. He went to the front desk, asked the nurse behind it to unlock the phone cabinet for him. It was a plain old desk phone inside an authentic wooden phone booth.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. That phone is for evening use,” she said in a honeyed, unkind voice. They seemed to think people here needed such explicit retraining. He got the point, but please.
“Yeah, but I think I’ve been eighty-sixed. So I’m really not a patient here anymore. I’m more like a guest. I just want to call my sister. She’s coming to get me.”
The nurse puckered her mouth a bit and scrunched up her key bracelet protectively. “Okay, well, I’m just going to have to call the doctor to see if that’s okay.”
“Knock yourself out.” Leo loudly ho-hummed while she rang interofficially; he fingered figure eights into the Plexi top of the desk, which was really a chest-high wall of the reception enclosure, where sweatered nurses rolled in chairs and consulted lateral files. The woman sat down at her station, which featured multiple Ziggy cartoons. “Hi, Doctor. Yes, it’s Brenda. Okay. Yes? I have Leo here. He says his sister’s coming to get him, and he’d like to make a call to her. Yes? Okay. Thank you, Doctor.
“Leo, go ahead and call your sister,” said the nurse. She handed him the key to the booth, which had as its outsize fob a child’s toy plastic telephone.
He used one of his mnemonics to recall Daisy’s mobile number. Seven seven four one nine one nine. Two giant green squids dining together in a pagoda; that was the seven seven four. Nineteen was a hot-air balloon over a lake; so two of those.
Her voice on the outgoing message comforted him. “Sis, it’s Leo,” he said. He couldn’t say, Don’t bother coming to rehab, in case Mata Hari out there was paying attention. He decided he would speak to Daisy’s voice mail as if he were speaking to Daisy, to stall for time. “Yeah. Good, good,” he said into the phone. The fake phone call was a pretty basic maneuver in the daily spycraft that Leo had had to use for a while there, back when he was trying to figure out what was real and what was random. He used it also to avoid Greenpeace canvassers on the street. He would have made a good stage actor.
“No, no, anyway, listen…what? Oh, probably a waffle iron. Yeah.” He laughed as if at a joke.
When they were little, his sisters had a game where a certain word or phrase would negate the following word or phrase, or make it into its opposite. It was one of many coded languages they used. Leo only barely got the rules to most of the secret languages that his sisters employed. This one was simple enough, though, and when he’d played it, he’d chosen waffle iron as his code switch because he loved the machine, was allowed to operate it from a young age, had never burned himself on it. His sisters thought that was hilarious, since waffle iron was such a difficult phrase to slip into conversation. Thereby, waffle iron became the standard code switch between the siblings—it meant The following is an insincere statement; it
means the opposite of what it seems to mean.
“I’m glad you’re coming to get me,” Leo said down the phone. “I’ll be here when you arrive. I’d rather just meet at my house, but of course I’m not going to do that.” He uhm-hmmed a few times, said loveya, and hung up. He returned the phone-booth key to Nurses’ Island.
Back in his room, he saw that his clothes had been packed up for him. His trifolded trousers, neat rows of T-shirts, and rock garden of balled socks had been transferred from the veneered pressboard wardrobe into the blue duffel bag that he’d come with, which lay at the foot of his bed. Unknown hands had scooped his toothbrush and comb and organic deodorant into his Dopp kit. Creepy. Who does that? He put everything carefully on the floor beside his bed. He lay down. A breeze with jasmine on it came through his open window. Leo was tired. He decided he would rest before his escape; he wanted to say good-bye to James.
Chapter 13
Heathrow Airport
Leila had four hours before she was to meet the Ding-Dong guy and then another four hours before her flight left for LA. She was bored and ragged and underslept. She wished she hadn’t agreed to the Heathrow meeting. Over the last thirty-six hours of travel, the implausibility of Ned’s story had really become apparent to her. Part of what he told her was probably true; something shady had been perpetrated on her. But that’s pretty much all the Burmese government did—perpetrate shit.
And yet. She couldn’t throw out the little owl icon that the original Ding-Dong e-mail had deposited on her desktop. The other programs on her laptop chugged as if on thin fuel, while this one just blinked away, and twice opened itself up to reveal a message from a guy called Seymour, one saying How about coffee? and then another saying Java-Jiva? Terminal 3, 2 p.m.? They were written as if she could respond, but there was no Reply button or anything.
Maybe if her father weren’t on bail and bed rest, if her brother hadn’t been begging her to come home and deal with their mom—maybe then she would have had more time for the Mystery of the Security Men in the Forest. As it was, she was ready to forget the whole thing. She let Heathrow distract her. She killed a few hours in its chutes and atria. She strolled through handbag stores and wandered through a cigar outlet, passed a waxing joint and a place called Pretzel Junction.
