The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  A few days later, in our morning meeting by the campfire, Medeina abruptly announced: “Sam, this is your good-bye group.” I looked up at her, startled. “They’ll be coming to take you to grad week in about an hour.”

  Slowly, methodically, each member of the group said a few words; the mood was elegiac. It was as though I were attending my own funeral.

  “Dude,” Eric said, “it’s been you and me from the beginning.” His voice cracked. “I hope you can get out of all of these rehabs.”

  I didn’t cry until Medeina began to speak. “You and I both know what my greatest concern for you is,” she said. “Be mindful of the signs.”

  She gripped my hand and I wept openly. I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to face my parents, didn’t want to know where I would ultimately land, and I was puzzled by that feeling, so counterintuitive. On some level, I must have known that the person I had become at Aspen—serious and independent and unguarded—couldn’t possibly translate into the real world. The quiet rhythms of my daily routine, the certainty of the sun rising and setting—it was so soothing in the narrowness of its scope. Real life was complicated, messy, unpredictable. Paradoxically, it was the natural world that felt artificial. I wanted to take a hot shower, wear real clothes, smoke a cigarette, call my friends, but more than any of that, I wanted to stay in a place where the variables were all known.

  But I couldn’t. I cried again as I left the campsite, fiercely hugging the other boys good-bye, though I couldn’t even remember their names today. And I sat silently in the passenger seat as a man with a beard drove me away from camp in a pickup truck, through the white aspen trees and the hot red-rock desert, not knowing where I was going.

  As it turned out, grad week wasn’t so different from the weeks that had preceded it—the main difference being that this was a new crop of kids, the graduates from all of the other groups. There were girls, too, a development that the other boys found exciting.

  On a dusty new terrain several miles from where I’d spent the past seven weeks at Aspen, we hiked for a few days, the focus of therapy now shifting onto our families. I felt detached from this upcoming rite of passage; there was a low-level, distant concern for where I would go and what I would do, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. Other kids had already been told that they were being placed into therapeutic boarding schools, but that wasn’t an option for me: I had already completed high school, and I was nearly eighteen—too old for an adolescent program. But I also knew that it was likely that I needed more treatment, both because Kathianne had told me so and because I felt it—like a broken bone that had yet to completely heal.

  I knew this would disappoint my father, even as I still bubbled with hot rage for how he’d sent me away in the first place. There could be no way to explain to him the holy moment I’d had with a deer at sunrise in the middle of the woods, the triumph of building a fire with my own two hands—and yet I couldn’t take any of that with me, not really. All those accomplishments, but his disapproval could override any sense of having made progress.

  I immediately picked out a girl named Laurel as the other most interesting person in our group. She rattled off her addictive behaviors in a long list, her affect flat and humorless—“Alcohol, cocaine, crystal meth, bulimia, truancy, prostitution,” she said. She was from Staten Island, and although that was a world apart from the city I knew, there was a toughness to her that I associated with New Yorkers. Her stringy brown hair was pulled back, so matted with sweat and dirt it looked marbled; the girls, too, wore sack-like tan khakis; her skin was caramel-hued and crusted with the same permadirt.

  Laurel had almond eyes and freckles and a guileless smile (albeit with yellowing teeth), and even at seventeen, she bore the physical trappings of having endured some profound trauma. (I could almost imagine my mother sizing her up and saying, “She looks like she’s had a hard life,” in that theatrical way that I loved.) Somehow, Laurel seemed fundamentally broken: even the way she walked was like a marionette with twisted strings, every step a shudder.

  Perhaps I liked her because I could see that she was even more damaged than I was, or perhaps we had more in common than I could even see at the time. We were pushing up a hill together on the third day, the sweat unremitting on our faces, and I could see that she was close to breaking. I touched her arm. Her eyes were dark and empty.

  “We’re not doing it for them,” I said. “We’re doing it for all the men who have hurt us.”

  She looked at me with awe. “How did you know?” she whispered. I wondered if it was the first time anyone had seen her as a victim rather than as the instigator of chaos and conflict.

  Over the fire, we talked quietly about her past. She told me that she had been a crack whore—literally, she said, she had rented her body for crack cocaine. I’d hustled older guys for drugs or money, too, but something about the starkness of her admission made me want to rescue her. Because of its colloquial popularity, the term “crack whore” had assumed a larger-than-life lexicographical mythology, and so it was almost hard for me to swallow the reality that there were real crack whores, let alone seventeen-year-old ones who might cross my path. Before she had come to Aspen, she said, her pimp had kicked her in the face with a steel-toed boot and shattered her jaw. Desperate, Laurel’s parents sent her to Utah.

  “Just stay close to me,” I said. “We’ll get through it together.”

  A therapist led us through a psychodrama workshop where we re-created our family dynamics, acting out the parts of our parents; I rolled my eyes through it. A conversation about relapse prevention focused on peer pressure felt impressively far removed from anything I knew would be my reality.

  “I’m not worried about my friends pressuring me to get high,” I said under my breath to Laurel. “What am I supposed to do when I’m bored and alone and empty and some guy I used to bang texts me that he just bought an eight ball?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t know any better than I did. It was so clear: our triumphs in the wilderness existed only for the wilderness.

  On the fourth day, we were led into the field and blindfolded. After several minutes, where I could make out rustling and some quiet conversation, I heard the blast of a bullhorn. We removed our blindfolds and turned around.

  Our parents were waiting there, a few hundred yards away.

  “Run!” someone yelped.

  The other kids began sprinting toward the crowd—they were doing it to embarrass me, surely. I resented their eagerness, their willingness to forgive, and envied them, too—all I felt toward my parents was a dull apathy.

  I walked slowly and deliberately. I could see my mother and father standing together, scanning the crowd of runners for me—then they spotted me, the lone straggler. I twisted my face into a grim smile.

  I hugged my mother first, then my father.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” my mother said.

  “Why weren’t you running?” my father asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked around at the other families—they were crying, jubilant, so happy to be reunited.

  What is wrong with us? I wondered. What is still wrong with me?

  We met with Kathianne, who, it seemed, had been expecting a level of catharsis that wasn’t in play. The main question on my mind was still where I would go from Aspen—what the aftercare program was. A week earlier, Kathianne had said that another thirty days in a program specifically designed to treat drug addiction, as opposed to behavioral issues, would be appropriate, and while that didn’t sound attractive to me, I didn’t have any better ideas. She had promised that the plan would be revealed when my parents came, and I was ready.

  “So have you figured out where I’m going?” I asked.

  “Well,” my mother said carefully, eyeing Kathianne, “we’re not exactly sure yet.”

  “What?” I was flabbergasted. “I’ve been out here for two months. You haven’t come up with anything?”

  “Honey,” my mother
said. She had her mental health professional voice on, calm and clear. “It doesn’t look like any of the adolescent treatment programs are what you need right now. Your issues are too . . . too advanced, too specific. We can send you to a boarding school to do a postgrad year—”

  “I’m not doing that,” I said. “I’m supposed to go to college.”

  “I’ve called every adult rehab in the country,” my mother said. “None of them will take you. You’re underage. It’s a liability for them. Basically, you’re too old for the programs for teenagers and not old enough for the programs for adults.”

  “That wasn’t my responsibility,” I said. I could hear the old anger creeping back in. For the first time in weeks, I sounded like myself again. Bitter, spiteful, bratty. I heard those notes in my voice, but I didn’t know how to control it. “My responsibility was to come out here, hike ten miles a day, talk about my feelings, and shit in the woods. Your responsibility was to fulfill the relatively minor task of finding somewhere to go from here that might actually help me get better.”

  “We really tried, sweetheart,” my mother said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Give me a working phone and I’ll do it.”

  I kept waiting for Kathianne to interject, but she just sat back, watching the spectacle.

  “And you,” I said, turning to my father. “Have you made any progress on this front?”

  He shook his head.

  “Busy with Jennifer? Having a nice summer?”

  He looked pained. “I have thought of you every day since you’ve been gone,” he said.

  “Too little, too late,” I said. “Maybe if you had paid an iota of attention to me while I was actually living with you, I wouldn’t have ended up here.”

  I had been wanting to say this for months, dying to say it, and it felt so gratifying to purge it from my body. I could see that I was hurting him, and I didn’t care. Never mind that he had been trying to reach me in his own way—that I had been the one deliberately diverting his attention away from my downward spiral. I couldn’t feel anything bigger than this flashing, irrational rage. In it, I felt powerful once more.

  “I don’t know if there’s any parent who could have given you what you needed,” my father said.

  “You’re probably right, Dad,” I said. “But would it have killed you to try?”

  His face fell. Horror filled me, at how ugly all this was, at how little I’d actually changed, and how good it felt.

  The program hadn’t worked.

  Late that night, I was awakened by one of the counselors shaking me. “Get up,” he whispered.

  I crawled out of my shelter and pulled on my pants, quickly tying my laces and rising to my feet. Through the campground, past makeshift tents and spindly trees, I followed his flashlight.

  This gimmick worked better the first time, I thought.

  In a wide clearing, there were two clusters of people: in the first were my parents, with two other sets of adults; then Laurel and another boy stood perhaps a dozen yards away. I joined them, raising a hand in greeting to my parents.

  “This is your Eagle ceremony,” a counselor said. His voice boomed. “You are being inducted into the next level of achievement because of your hard work and dedication to the principles of this program.”

  I reached for Laurel’s hand.

  Then, as if by magic, a circle of flames ignited around us, roaring and crackling. I could smell gasoline. It lit up the clearing, casting shadows across my parents’ faces; I could see them through the fire.

  “Congratulations on your accomplishments,” the counselor said. Laurel gripped my hand tightly. I looked across at my mother and father. I didn’t want them here, observing this ritual; I wanted it to feel as sacred as it had felt when I was alone in the woods. Their presence cheapened it, reminding me of the world outside—the world that had hardly existed for months, the world to which I would soon return. And the person I would become once I had to go back to it.

  I wanted to cry, but I blinked back the tears. I held my face up to the sky, letting the heat of the flame warm me. I tried to look strong and proud. I stared at the fire until my vision went blurry.

  Eventually, we decided—or, rather, my father decided—that I should travel to Portland with my mother for a few days while they figured out where I would go next. I was booked on the same departing flight as she was. On the final day, we were shuttled back to base camp, where there was a celebratory barbecue with both patients and parents.

  I asked my mother whether she could take me back to the hotel in Loa where she was staying instead, and she agreed. It was strange to see buildings, a town—even such a small one, which suddenly felt like the apex of all civilization. Paved roads. People in real clothes. Automobiles.

  In the hotel room, I opened my duffel bag, the contents of which I hadn’t seen for two months. There was the cashmere sweater I had packed foolishly, the David Yurman chain I had received as a graduation gift from Jennifer. I had no sensible clothes, nothing to wear except the filthy uniform I had been living in.

  I stripped naked and studied myself in the mirror. My facial hair had grown in patchy and irregular. I was sunburned and lean. My skin was a strange color from the dirt that I hadn’t been able to wash off. Burnt sienna.

  Who was I?

  I ran the shower and stood in it for the better part of an hour. The water that spiraled down the drain was black as ink. I waited until it ran clear, turning the heat up, scrubbing until my skin was raw.

  “There is only clean,” I whispered. “There is no in between.”

  Eight

  Everything was heightened: the smell of exhaust fumes at a gas station were noxious, going straight to my head; the yogurt pretzels I grabbed from a convenience store were so sweet they made my mouth fill up with spit; a first cup of coffee had me feeling warm and bright in a way caffeine hadn’t in ages.

  Stopped for a bathroom break somewhere outside Provo, I booted up my laptop, combing through two months of emails. Here was a message from Dean, asking how I had been: “Igby. I dreamed of you last night.”

  A note from Evan, whom my father had called to explain where I’d gone: “When the big house lets you run free and clear,” he wrote, “give me a call—because memory, it can only thrive for so long before I start craving the real deal.”

  And a message from Kat: “I’m just going to keep emailing you in hopes that one day when you’re home I’ll see your name in my inbox.”

  I closed my computer. It was too overwhelming. I felt seasick. In my pocket was my top rock. I ran my fingers over its indentations, the round dark hole in its center that my spindle had worn into it.

  It left my fingers covered with a fine soot, powdery as cocaine.

  Back in Portland, my mother continued her efforts to find a program that would take me. I heard her in her office as I walked past, pleading on the phone to intake officers, explaining that I would be eighteen in just a few short months, I was a high school graduate, I wasn’t a good fit for adolescent programs. “Please,” I heard her in snippets, “please. My son . . . nowhere to go . . . poly-drug and sexual acting out.” She didn’t sound desperate, just resigned.

  I found a pack of cigarettes I had stashed in my bedroom and sat on the steps that led down from my brother’s room to the garden and smoked. It didn’t occur to me that I should stay quit—from that, at least.

  Kat picked me up the afternoon after I got back, hugging me warmly. “You look so weird,” she said.

  “How?”

  “I dunno,” she said. “Like, normal.”

  Being on drugs all the time had given me a sickly pallor—now, lean and toned from months out in the woods and sunshine, I looked healthy for the first time in years. I hardly recognized myself.

  Downtown, we parked at a coffee shop. It was July now, and all my friends would be celebrating their last weeks before heading off to college, while I was on a brief hiatus between stints in rehab. I envied them their freedom. Tha
t jealousy burned bitter in my throat.

  What did sober people do? I wondered. It seemed peculiar, the idea that I would go about each day with total clarity—and, the more I thought about it, unattractive. I was still so young. Too young to be quitting everything. And back in Portland, where it all had begun, there were so many trigger points. As I walked up the busy street toward a department store, there was the bench where I had sat with Jim for the first time. I had been so young, so stupid. The memory made my palms sweat.

  But moreover, I reasoned, there was no point in staying sober now if I was just going back to rehab in a few days. If I were back in Utah, sure, I could stay sober, but that environment had been artificial. The real world was fraught with temptation, and I had no defense—but I knew I would find one.

  Just not quite yet.

  “Do you have any Adderall?” I asked Kat. She looked startled.

  “At home,” she said. “But aren’t you— Wasn’t the whole point of this to stop, like, doing that?”

  “I have to go somewhere else, like, tomorrow,” I said. “I might as well enjoy myself while I’m out.”

  “But haven’t you been clean for two months? Do you really want to give that up?”

  “The success rate for wilderness programs is abysmal,” I said. (I had looked it up after I’d gotten home, to use in situations just like this.)

  “Why?”

  “Because it doesn’t fucking work, Kat,” I said, surprised at my own sudden anger at her. “Okay? It doesn’t fucking work.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  We chopped up lines of Adderall in her bedroom and snorted it. As that familiar euphoria flooded my body, I felt no twinge of guilt.

  “I deserve this,” I said to Kat, feeling powerful again. “I deserve to be happy.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Yet another person I had let down.

  Finally, after several days of placing phone calls, my mother got a hit on an adult rehab in Tennessee. It was called, clumsily, the Bridge to Progress.