CHAPTER 31
WHEN HE WOKE UP, his body was lit with pain. A pulsing, seething, freezing, ungodly pain. He had no idea where he was. He was on his back but where was he?
“I don’t know why you fools snort this shit,” someone said.
He writhed on the hospital bed, squeezing his eyes open and shut, clenching his teeth. He saw Uffa in the corner of the room. He was looking on in horror, face wet with tears, his purple bandanna sagging around his neck. Berg began to sneeze and, after one of these sneezes, he told them he was freezing cold. Uffa asked the nurse to bring him another blanket. The nurse draped the blanket over Berg and then Berg began to cry, to wail.
“The naloxone triggers immediate withdrawal,” the doctor explained.
“It’s so bad,” Berg cried. “It’s so bad.”
Alejandro was there, too.
“You’ll be all right,” he kept saying. “You’ll be all right.”
Berg gasped for air. He tried to sit up but couldn’t. His center of gravity was off. His vision was blurry. There was a faint taste of blood in his mouth, a metallic taste, like he’d been sucking on a penny. The pain was so bad he wanted to smash his head on a rock.
“Remember this,” the doctor said. “Remember this feeling the next time you reach for that garbage.”
“You assholes gave it to me,” Berg growled.
“I didn’t give you anything,” the doctor said. “And I sure as hell didn’t make you snort it.”
“Fuck you,” Berg said.
“Give him more lorazepam,” the doctor said.
The nurse came over and did something to his IV.
“I know this is painful,” she said. “You’re experiencing full withdrawal right now.”
“I’m going to vomit,” Berg said.
She handed him a plastic basin. He heaved into it and then passed it back to her. He was sweating now, but he was also shivering. It made no sense. Alejandro walked over and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” Berg said. “What did you do to me?”
“You did this,” the doctor said. “No one did this to you.”
“Is this normal?” Alejandro asked the doctor.
“Patients are always combative after the naloxone,” the nurse said.
“I think I’m dying,” Berg said. “I’m dying.”
“You’re not dying,” the doctor said. “We just saved your life.”
“Fuck you,” Berg said. “Fuck this guy.”
The pain was an ascending arpeggio, a madness. Berg had broken many bones in his life, had snapped his tibia all the way through, and nothing compared to this. As the pain reached its most unbearable peak, he felt himself going into shock. The agony ceased. The pain was still there, but it was as if his body would not allow him to feel it. He stared wide-eyed at Alejandro and in a calm, collected voice, he asked,
“Is this real?”
Then he passed out.
CHAPTER 32
HE DID NOT KNOW how long he slept, but when he woke, the acute pain had subsided. He turned to his right and saw Alejandro. He was sitting in a plastic chair, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and watching TV. It was local news. Channel four.
“Good morning,” he said, turning to Berg.
“Morning,” Berg said. He looked at Alejandro for a moment, and then trained his gaze on the television. He stared, blinking, as the news anchor ran through the day’s headlines. Someone had won millions of dollars in the mega-jackpot lottery. A thawed reindeer carcass was being blamed for an anthrax outbreak. Stock prices had risen and fallen and then risen again.
“Would you like a coffee?” Alejandro asked, watching him.
Berg shook his head.
“Some food?”
“No.”
There was a whirring noise coming from some unidentifiable location. Outside he could hear the hiss and squirt of a sprinkler. Berg felt sore and weak and the more conscious he became, the more ashamed he felt. Fragments of memory returned to him, the foul things he’d said. He needed to apologize to the nurse and the doctor. He needed to apologize and then flee this place. He never wanted any of these people to see his face again.
“You’re going to be okay,” Alejandro said.
“I don’t know,” Berg said.
“Just deal with today,” Alejandro said. “All you can do is deal with today.”
“Why are you here?” Berg asked.
Alejandro took a sip of his coffee.
“I’m here because I care about you,” he said.
“I’m an asshole. I’m a fucking drug addict asshole who screams at doctors.”
“That was the naloxone. That wasn’t you.”
“You don’t even know me,” Berg said. “You don’t. I’m not who you think I am.”
“Well tell me who you are then.”
Berg said nothing.
“Berg, you are very lucky,” Alejandro continued. “That’s what I’m thinking right—”
“I stole things,” Berg said, interrupting him. “I stole things from people’s homes. From your home. I lied to you, I lied to Nell.”
“Okay.”
“So now you know.”
“Now I know,” Alejandro said.
“Do you know what I stole?”
“I could make an educated guess.”
Berg stared at him.
“Oh stop,” Alejandro said. “You think your pain makes you so special and complicated? That there’s something so crazy about you? There isn’t.”
“I lied…”
“And?”
Berg said nothing.
“You just need to come back to this world, to the truth of things,” Alejandro said. His voice was fierce. “Right now. Do it now.”
Berg looked out the window at a brown rooftop. They were on the second floor. Next door he could hear the nurses helping treat a new patient. She’d sprained her ankle while hiking that morning, it seemed. The smell of hospital was everywhere: plastic and disinfectant and urine. He wanted to go home.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking back toward Alejandro. “I’m sorry.” He was crying, shaking slightly. Alejandro walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. Berg could feel a growing tightness in his forehead and his jaw. A headache was brewing, gathering force by the moment, its clouds condensing. It would be upon him in no time.
CHAPTER 33
HE DIDN’T WANT TO go to an inpatient rehab center. And he didn’t want to mess with Suboxone or carpet-bomb his brain with antidepressants. He would go to the meetings in Pine Gulch and work with Alejandro. He’d delete Eugene’s number from his phone again, and he’d stay away from Dennis Lapley.
“Pine Gulch is a forty-five-minute drive from here,” Nell said. They were sitting in the bakery in town.
“I know, but I’ll make it work,” Berg said.
“Don’t you think it might make sense to live somewhere closer to treatment centers?” she asked. “Somewhere closer to a hospital?”
“I want to keep working with Alejandro,” Berg said.
“What does he think about that?”
“He’s okay with it.”
“I don’t know,” Nell said, unconvinced.
“I have the Narcan spray now. So does Alejandro. And I’m not going to relapse, anyway,” he said.
“I can’t believe we’re still dealing with this.”
“I understand that you’re mad at me,” he said. “You have every right.”
“I’m just really sad, Berg,” she said. “It’s just… it’s sad. And it’s scary. I’m scared for you.”
The first day back in the shop he could barely look at Alejandro and Uffa. He kept his head down, cut blocks for the rigging and then soaked them in warm linseed oil in Alejandro’s old white Crock-Pot. Uffa asked him if he wanted to go out on the Contos after work but he said no. He went straight to his bed in the cubby and read a novel.
The following day he did the same thing: cut blocks and soaked them in l
inseed oil. He ate lunch alone, down by the water, and thought about the hospital, about the way he had screamed at the doctor. He had no appetite but he forced himself to finish his lunch. Leftover chicken from last night’s dinner and a small salad. It tasted like nothing.
When the day was over, Alejandro told Berg to follow him outside.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going for a walk.”
“I don’t want to meditate,” Berg said.
“We’re not going to meditate. We’re just going for a walk.”
Berg set down his chisel and followed him out of the shop. They walked along the path, down toward Mimi’s. Miner’s lettuce along the trail and wrens in the branches. Alejandro turned right and headed into the forest. The sun was setting, the cool evening coming, with its mosquitoes and hysterical coyotes. They walked in silence, rustling through the forest. At one point Berg almost stepped on a banana slug. It was the size of a highlighter, oozing with yellow-green slug slime. Then Alejandro spoke.
“When Szerbiak died it devastated me,” he said. “He was my brother. I hated him for dying. I hated him. For a long time I couldn’t look at his death at all. I threw myself into my work, you see? The farm, the boats.” He sighed. “I looked away. But I know I need to sit with it. Just like I’ve had to sit with all the hardest things in my life. You see, no one taught me about that. No one taught me to look at the darkness, to sit with it. But you’ve got to go into it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you’ve got to go into it. That doesn’t mean you sanction it. That doesn’t mean you say you like it. It just means that you look at it, that you acknowledge that it’s there—because it already is.”
He stopped walking and turned around to face Berg.
“Soon you’re going to be old like me—”
“Ale…”
“No, no, let me wax poetical for a second. Have I ever waxed poetical at you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well let me do it again. Soon you’re going to be old like me and I guarantee you, the one thing I don’t ever wish is that I’d worried more. Not one day do I wake up and say, ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time being afraid.’ No, I just wish I’d looked at things head-on. Because anxiety needs the future. If you’re looking at the thing itself it’s very unlikely you’ll be anxious.”
“But what if the thing itself is ugly?”
“Well, then it’s ugly. But the suffering happens when you try to make it not ugly when it’s ugly. I’m not saying it’s easy. I fail at it all the time. But it’s the only way.”
They walked past several tan oaks and pepperwoods, into the shade of a few Douglas firs. The fir needles were soft under their feet, the light fading now.
“Should we turn around?” Berg asked.
“Sure, let’s turn around.”
They said nothing on the walk home, just watched the forest, listened to its evening murmurings. When they got back to the house Alejandro embraced Berg in front of the shop.
“There’s more right with you than wrong with you,” he said. “Remember that.” And then he turned and hobbled off toward his house.
Berg climbed the ladder to the lofting floor and crawled into the cubby. Through the small square window he watched the stars come out over the bay. He leaned back in his bed. He hadn’t eaten dinner, he realized. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t hungry.
CHAPTER 34
PAT WAS CONVICTED THAT winter. Eighty-two months in custody for smuggling eleven thousand pounds of pot into California. “We aren’t going to let our oceans become a freeway for drug traffickers,” the prosecuting attorney said in the news. “Smugglers might think the vast Pacific is a good place to be invisible, but these defendants know otherwise.”
“It’s an outrage,” Alejandro said to Berg, after reading the article. “You’ve got corporations polluting our rivers and mountains and air with impunity. You’ve got hedge fund managers manipulating the global economy. The stock market is just pure thought—you know that, right? When we run out of thoughts it will cease to exist. Those guys are scamming everyone and Pat, who’s doing something that harms no one, who’s delivering medicine—and delivering it without using any fossil fuels, I might add—he’s the guy who goes to prison.”
That same winter, Nell went on tour with Carlos Carlos de Carlos again. Berg wrote her letters almost every week, simple notes about his day-to-day, about life in the shop. He’d aim the letter toward whatever city they were visiting next, but he was never sure if they’d make it.
Sometimes, the shame of his lies, of his exposure, of his OD, would be so strong that his chest would hurt. He’d write Nell a long letter about how worthless he was and how much he’d fucked up, and then he’d crumple that letter up and throw it out. She didn’t need his self-pity. She needed him to show up, to maintain some kind of consistent, base-level integrity.
The headaches were still there. He knew they would be. They came on an almost daily basis, and when they did, if he could summon the courage to do so, he welcomed them. He tried to watch them, moment by moment, to observe their texture and sensation, to avoid pushing them away.
Berg was not the only one having a difficult time that winter. Uffa was experiencing his own tailspin. Demeter had purchased a ticket to New York and, in less than a month, she would be moving across the country. When Uffa first heard the news, he spent a week alone in his room, recording an elegiac freestyle rap album. Later, he adopted a gray stray cat and named him Grayman.
“I think he dips his giant mouth scoop into multiple food bowls around town,” Uffa said. “But he likes to sleep on the bus now.”
With Celia’s boat almost finished, Alejandro had turned once again to his three-pronged plan to generate extra revenue. He spent all day at the docks, puttering around and experimenting with his first 3-D ocean-farming structures. He had built several different kinds and he wanted to test their efficacy over time.
Meanwhile, in the shop, Berg was attempting to build his first twenty-four-hour canoe. It was taking him a lot longer than twenty-four hours, but this morning, after a week of work, he was finally ready to fasten the first plank. He looked around the shop for the specialized jig Alejandro had made to rivet the canoes, but he couldn’t find it.
As he walked down to the docks he could hear the creaking of pilings, the jabber of gulls. When he got to the water, he found Alejandro on the ground, examining kelp.
“It probably makes most sense to dry out this kelp,” Alejandro said, looking up at Berg. “That way we can sprinkle it over our crops as a fertilizer. It would close the nitrogen loop, you know? The kelp would sop up the nitrogen and then we’d use it to grow our vegetables and then it would make its way back into the bay. The issue is the smell. It has an unfortunate odor. Rebecca hates it. Maybe I could mix it in a solution with something else to minimize the odor? Or maybe I should just scrap the whole fertilizer idea and sell the seaweed to high-end restaurants? That would probably make us the most money anyway.”
Alejandro went on in this manner, discussing the different contingencies of his kelp situation. His mind seemed scattered, burnt out, overheated like a computer that was running too many programs. When he finished, Berg asked him if he knew where the jig was.
“I don’t know where I put it,” Alejandro said.
“But you were the last one to use it.”
“Look, I just said I don’t know,” he snapped. “Make a new one. It’s not difficult to make one.”
“I don’t know how to make one,” Berg said.
“Just think about it for one second,” Alejandro said. “It’s not hard. I don’t have time to explain it.”
Berg walked back up to the shop, hurt and irritated. He thought about their conversations in the forest. Alejandro was such a hypocrite. He preached equanimity and awareness and then he behaved like this, with a total lack of respect. It wasn’t Berg’s fault that Alejandro had lost the jig. Here he was, listening to Alejandro talk about his kelp problems for twen
ty minutes and then the guy wouldn’t give him one moment of assistance.
Back in the shop, Berg began designing a new jig. It turned out, to his dismay, that Alejandro was right. It was an easy tool to construct and he finished making it in less than an hour. He used the jig to rivet the plank he’d finished and then he took his lunch beneath the buckeye tree.
As he was eating, Alejandro walked past him.
“Hey, did you get that jig figured out?”
“Yes,” Berg said.
“Oh, good,” Alejandro said. “Well done. Do you need anything from the house?”
“No.”
“I’ll be up there for a little bit. Feel free to come find me if you need anything.”
Berg could tell he was trying to apologize. He’d probably figured out the kelp issue and, liberated from his frustration, become aware of how brusquely he’d spoken to Berg. That didn’t make it okay, Berg thought.
After lunch, Berg began to work on his next plank. At a certain point he paused and looked around the shop. His gaze settled on the photo of Alejandro and Uffa from many years ago, the one where both of them were wearing overalls. He was struck, again, by how young Uffa looked in the photo. His hair was long and fine, like some kind of Arthurian knight’s. As Berg looked at the photo, he imagined Uffa showing up at Alejandro’s doorstep, a lost teenage wastrel who had read some book and thought he knew who Alejandro was. He imagined Alejandro taking Uffa in, those first few days he spent teaching him how to sharpen chisels and how to sail. As he thought about this, something in his heart softened. He realized that he was giving Alejandro no leeway, no room for error. He had made him into an idol, long ago, and if he seemed for a moment imperfect, Berg felt betrayed.
He took the jig from the workbench, pocketed it, and walked over to the farmhouse. Alejandro was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and rolling a cigarette. Berg took the jig out of his pocket and showed it to him.
“This is the new one,” he said brightly. Alejandro took the jig in his hands. Berg poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down next to him.
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