Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “And also that it’s not your fault,” Christian broke in.

  “That’s right,” Kyla said. “If there was damage there that led to this, it happened before you adopted him. All you and Jared ever gave him was love and safety. And frankly,” Kyla added, her voice rising a bit, “at a certain point, with addiction, you have to stop mulling over what caused it and just decide what you’re going to do going forward.”

  “That’s right,” Christian said firmly.

  Milly nodded obligatorily. She felt a bit cowed into silence, hearing this from the source, as it were. Then they all just sat there for several seconds, saying nothing, picking at their food.

  “Milly?” Kyla finally said gently. “Can I ask you something?”

  Milly nodded.

  “Have you been able to paint the past year or two with all this?”

  “Oh, yes,” Milly said. “I mean, I go to my studio. I have a few things cooking.”

  On the surface, this was true. There were two or three half-finished canvases in her studio right now. But she didn’t particularly like them. They were sort of ugly and dark and gunkily painted and she didn’t really know where they were coming from. But in the hours here or there, usually on weekends, when she went into her quiet Chinatown studio and listened to Beck or Radiohead or Moby through speakers hooked up to her iPod while she worked, she would feel like she was attaching to something that felt blank and wide and open.

  Then, after she’d painted for a few hours, after a mild sense of panic and doom started to overtake her as the night deepened, she would sneak a cigarette out of the pack that she kept in a file cabinet and swing open the industrial window that faced the Manhattan Bridge. She would sit in the window and smoke, flicking the ashes down five stories, getting dizzy in a half-awful, half-pleasant way because she so seldom smoked, looking out at the city and thinking about flying, as she’d once done often in her dreams. This was a longtime favorite thought of hers; the ease and lightness with which she could get around the city if she could fly absolutely exhilarated her. What if she could walk out the door of the Christodora every morning, turn on her jet pack, waft upward until she was hovering just over the rooftops of the East Village, and then fly—arms outstretched, feet sailing behind her, a bit like swimming—at a northwest diagonal across Manhattan, gracefully slaloming through the skyscrapers of midtown, to Columbus Circle, where her school was? And better: What if, at night, unable to sleep and oppressed by Jared’s snoring, his smell, his spasms where he would kick her, she could put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt against the wind, take off from her own window, and tour the city at night? Just for a half hour or so, when she couldn’t sleep? The thought thrilled her.

  “—call Mateo later?”

  Milly came to from her reverie. “Hmm?”

  Kyla was speaking. “We’ll call Mateo later and see about a visit on Sunday?”

  Milly nodded and went back to her salad.

  The next day, after she and Kyla had passed the morning in a vigorous walk around the reservoir, which made Milly feel about as good as she’d felt in a long time, Kyla came into the sunroom, where Milly was reading Kyla’s copy of Tina Fey’s book Bossypants, and sat down beside her. She sighed and put a hand on Milly’s knee.

  “What is it?” Milly asked warily.

  “I talked to Mateo. I don’t know if he’s ready for a visit this Sunday.”

  “But you said you’ve already visited him twice,” Milly said, then, “Oh.” She winced. “You mean he’s not ready to see me.”

  Kyla sighed again. “He seemed fine with it when I mentioned you were coming two weeks ago.”

  Milly put down the book and crossed her arms. She could feel the Melancholy Demon bearing down.

  “Listen,” said Kyla. “I told him you were here and I asked him to think about it and talk to me again tomorrow. He probably just needs a night to adjust to the idea.” Kyla paused. “He’s humiliated, Millipede. You put him on a plane, sent him out here to an expensive rehab, and he blew it, and now he’s in a halfway house with a bunch of ex-cons.”

  “Wait,” Milly interrupted, startled. “There’s a bunch of ex-cons in this house?”

  “It’s a very good program,” Kyla said. “It’s a nonprofit. I know many people who’ve done it. It was also the only place for him to go because nobody was paying for him to go somewhere fancy a third time around.”

  This much was true; when Jared had heard Mateo was in jail, he’d instantly said that Mateo would never receive a dollar of support from them again.

  Kyla stood up. “Just give it a little time, okay, Mills?”

  She went back to her office down the hall, but when Milly picked up her book again, she couldn’t concentrate. After a few minutes, she padded down the hall and tapped on Kyla’s office door. Kyla turned around in her chair.

  “Can I ask you something?” Milly began.

  “Ask.”

  “Do you even remember this drug time in your life anymore? When you first tried to stop, from that night you came to my place and then, I guess, the following year in rehab and all that?”

  Kyla smiled. “I remember it vividly.”

  “What do you remember about it?”

  “It was like—” Kyla searched for the words. “It was like being born again.”

  A memory flashed through Milly’s mind: Kyla wearing that ankh pendant! Which, as it turned out, she had abandoned a year or two down the line, much to Milly’s private relief.

  “I don’t mean that in a Jesus-y evangelical way,” Kyla said. “But it was like—every day those first few months were so hard. But everything was so vivid. Colors, interactions I had with people, emotions, thoughts, things I noticed on the street. Daily epiphanies. Everything was so raw. I wouldn’t want to go through it again. But I think that was the best year of my life.”

  Milly mulled over this a long time. “Do you think maybe Mateo’s finally having that now?” she finally asked.

  “I hope so. But maybe you should try to have a year like that, too.”

  SIXTEEN

  West Adams

  (2012)

  Mateo is on his hands and knees, cleaning the second-floor bathroom. This is his job every morning after breakfast, at least for this week’s work cycle in the house. By far, it’s the gnarliest job here. With cooking duties, there’s the social element, goofing with the other guys in the house, putting a bit of creativity into the chopping of vegetables, listening to cheesy Top 40-hip-hop on Power 106 on the old boom box in the kitchen. Vacuuming and dusting, there’s still an element of remove from the gnarly factor; at least you’re standing up, Mateo figures. But when you’re on your knees because you’ve got to spray and wipe down the floor where two dozen guys have planted their feet while they took a dump over the past twenty-four hours, then have to wipe down the shower where they’ve probably jerked off, savoring that brief moment of privacy in a house where privacy is hard to come by, there’s no getting around the fact that all your choices have led you here, to where you’re living under court mandate in a house with a bunch of other court-mandated dudes, who were actually lucky that alcohol or drugs were part of their records, because it gave them this option of choosing a halfway house over more jail time.

  And the funny thing is Mateo doesn’t even really mind. While he’s working, guys in the house are singing that schmaltzy half-rap, half-ballad “Lotus Flower Bomb,” by that guy Wale, and he finds himself lifting up his head and joining in, cracking himself up as he cleans. And when he’s done, he stands up in the doorway of the bathroom and takes a moment to admire his work before he puts away the spray cleaner and the paper-towel roll in the cleaning closet before he heads back to his room, which he shares with three other guys, to grab a towel and hit the shower himself. He has seven minutes to report downstairs. On today’s morning docket: acupuncture, a bunch of tiny needles in his ear to r
educe anxiety and cravings, at some nonprofit clinic nearby.

  Every morning he wakes up in that room, where three other guys are snoring and mumbling in their sleep, and he looks around and his first thought is How the fuck did I get here? Then, every morning, whether he likes it or not, it all comes rushing back to him: that moment when five EMTs came rushing at him down the hall as he stared dumbly at them, naked, paralyzed from what turned out to be the combined effects of heroin, crystal meth, ketamine, and MDMA. There he was, looking up at the squad in a narcotic haze. Instantly, two of them threw one of those silvery thermal blankets around him, pulled him onto a stretcher, and started taking his vitals. A cacophony all around. The other EMTs blew open the door to the apartment, where he could vaguely remember hearing the music and assorted moans and exclamations of the porn video.

  The EMTs coalescing in the apartment around her. Carrie. (A woman at the nonprofit yoga-like clinic they go to taught him how to do a breathing exercise, after he confided to the woman that every time he thought of Carrie—and it was usually several times a day, starting with shortly after he woke—he wanted to hurt, or kill, himself. He clings to that breathing exercise now like a madman.)

  Anyway, Mateo remembers that much. He doesn’t remember much more. Well, he vaguely remembers lying on a bed that was only half concealed by a curtain on a ceiling runner, shouting things, and people holding him down. And that’s about the last thing he remembers until he came to in a hospital room. Then there was a period in a detox unit he can vaguely recall, shuffling awake a few times a day to go eat some bad food with a bunch of freaks, sitting there in a half-coma with a social worker talking to him about his options, then, at night, a makeshift AA meeting with some outside people brought in, mumbling out his dank thoughts.

  It had all led to an inpatient rehab center for a month, some place that accepted Medi-Cal, which apparently they had put him on. He barely remembered anything from that month. He didn’t remember much until he was discharged and a minivan drove him here, to this not-so-pristinely maintained fourteen-room Craftsman home, called Triumph House, in a run-down, poverty-stricken neighborhood full of beautiful old houses called West Adams.

  At this point, he finally started coming to, distinguishing one day from another, becoming aware of the guys around him—mostly black and Mexican guys coming out of prison for some addiction-related crime, usually dealing, sometimes assault or burglary. There is one guy he really loves, a funny, crusty old white geezer named Bobby G. who just got out of prison after serving twenty-two years for a crack-fueled murder. He and Bobby play poker every night after dinner, for pennies, along with a hugely fat Mexican dude named Santi, a former dealer a few years older than Mateo, who calls his mother “sweetheart” over the phone, which everyone in the house gives him a hard time for.

  The funny thing is, in many ways, Mateo is the happiest he’s ever been. He feels like he’s with the right people for the first time in his life. Cleaning up the kitchen one night with Bobby G., he asked, “So what were all those years locked up like?”

  And Bobby G. just turned and looked at him—a pissed-off look, Mateo thought. “How old are you?” Bobby G. asked him.

  “Nineteen.”

  “You have no fucking idea how lucky you are not to be in prison,” Bobby G. said.

  Mateo laughed. “This is fucking prison!”

  “This is fucking nothing,” said Bobby G. “This is a fucking picnic. Look at me. I can barely walk, my joints are so fucked up. I’ll never get those twenty-two years back. Go in at forty, come out at sixty-two.”

  Bobby G. dragged out the trash, leaving Mateo standing there in the kitchen with Wiz Khalifa on the radio.

  Today, when Mateo and the other guys are in the minivan on the way to the acupuncture clinic, Mateo sees him again: the tagger working on his wall, the sidewall of a building fronting an abandoned lot. The tagger’s been working on this wall the past week, and Mateo’s never seen anything like it. His work is so beautiful, abstract, all pale greens and blues, none of the fat black outer lines of traditional Pop graffiti, and it almost looks like he’s rubbing it out, or wiping it away, as he paints, like he’s leaving behind ghost colors. Every few days, Mateo’s noticed, in various trips here and there in the group minivan, the tagger makes progress on it, just this short figure with a baseball cap and his back to the street, working away. Mateo’s started becoming obsessed with the wall, wondering at random hours of the day if the tagger is there, dying for when he’s no longer on restriction and can come and go freely from the house.

  As the van drives away from the corner, Mateo suddenly feels the saddest pang he’s felt in a long time—and, remarkably, he can identify it. It’s that he hasn’t painted. With the exception of some doodling he’s done here and there in rehab and in the house to pass the time, he hasn’t made a thing in over a year now, since well before coming to L.A. Can he even remember the last canvas? Oh God, that’s right. It was that black impasto—the leaves, the sad, foreboding tumble of dead leaves in the corner of the canvas, exactly what that last fall in New York had felt like, chilly death creeping in.

  When he gets back to the house, feeling light as air from the acupuncture session, there’s a message on the chalkboard for him to call Kyla. He feels the usual mix of shame and heaviness that comes over him when he thinks about her or talks to her. And, of course, Kyla is the link back to her—Millimom. He says the Serenity Prayer to himself—he can’t believe he actually does this now, but actually he finds himself doing it a lot, whenever he feels the least bit stressed over something—and he calls Kyla.

  “Are you doing okay, hon?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” He still can’t believe Kyla is so kind to him after what he did to her and Christian. “How are you?”

  “We’re good. So—” She pauses. “You know, your mom’s just here till Monday. You think we could come see you Sunday? I don’t want to push, but I know you said you’d think about it a few days ago when you didn’t feel ready.”

  Mateo knew this follow-up call was coming. And he isn’t sure how he can put Millimom off again, her having come all this way just for him to rebuff her.

  “Sure,” he says. “You guys can come on Sunday.”

  Oh, shit, he immediately thinks. He can already see it—Millimom’s stricken mask of pain. That’s all he basically can remember about her during his fucked-up last year in New York. He’d practically stopped coming home; she never knew where he was. And he was barely at Pratt anymore. He was going anywhere he could to cop and use, sometimes to freaky Hector’s, only a few blocks away from the Christodora; sometimes to the filthy holes of various “friends” in Williamsburg or Bushwick or Bed-Stuy; sometimes to shit-traps that passed as after-hours clubs. He avoided having to be face to face with Jared-dad and Millimom as much as he could. But once a week or so, he had to come home, for clothes or a shower or because he was so dopesick he just didn’t care, and always—always—it was her stricken face, the sadness and fear etched into her face until she looked like a hollow-eyed Munch phantom.

  That was the period, he remembers, when he and Millimom had nothing to say to each other. There would just be his mumbles, her mutters, a flash of her face, crestfallen anew when she realized that, yes, he’d been out there yet again, then her retreating into her room. Behind the door, he could hear the murmurs between her and Jared-dad, trying to figure out what was to be done with him. Then came the sculpture-throwing finale and his last look at Millimom’s drained face before he got on the plane.

  Mateo didn’t give a shit what Jared-dad thought of him. Mateo wasn’t a fool; he could always sense Jared’s fundamental equanimity about him, that Mateo would someday be eighteen and no longer Jared’s problem. Mateo knew that it was psychotic of him to have thrown the sculpture, that he’d done it in a jittery panic as he faced a new wave of dopesickness, but he also couldn’t help quietly reveling in the fact that he’
d let Jared know exactly what he thought of his stupid, macho metal art. He knew that spite and revenge weren’t good for his sobriety, but he couldn’t let that go.

  Yet Millimom—she wasn’t so easy to write off. The sick shame he felt when he knew that she’d heard about the whole EMT incident and jail and Carrie—

  And then, oh God, Carrie! He’d sought her out that day, lured her in—he was so hungry to use and to take someone there with him. His AA sponsor told him he had to pray for her spirit but otherwise “put the Carrie self-hatred on the shelf”; he’d figure out down the line how to make amends to Carrie’s survivors and, in some spiritual way, to her, but it was too soon to deal with.

  That’s about the only thought that keeps Mateo from blowing his brains out over the thought of Carrie, because basically he feels like he killed her.

  It’s always hard for him to get his bearings when Carrie thoughts come up. And from Carrie back to Millimom—Jesus Christ. And now Millimom will be here on Sunday.

  Two days later, his initial thirty-day probation period is up; he’s no longer housebound except for supervised group outings. He can come and go as he pleases when he doesn’t need to be in the house for chores or groups, and moreover he needs to leave the house to find a job; it’s mandated. So he’s leaving the house after his cereal at nine A.M., thinking he’ll catch the bus to Silver Lake, catch an NA meeting, then skulk back into Intelligentsia, the coffee shop, and see if they’ll take his skanky ass back. It’s just then that he passes the tagger, his back to Mateo across the empty lot, working on his exquisite, intricate, dreamlike flurry of pale blue and green tattered flags.

  Mateo stops and watches him work, up on an eight-foot ladder, spray-painting through a handful of different stencils. Obviously the tagger’s got to be working legally; no way he could undertake such a long, complex project otherwise. How old is this compact little dude? Mateo can’t tell. He’s never seen his face.

  Mateo knows he should walk on, but he keeps watching the tagger work—so methodically, so unself-consciously. This has to be his seventh or eighth morning out here by now. An ache opens up inside Mateo and grows, overwhelming him, filling his glands and then his eyes with tears. What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? he frantically asks himself. Then, just as frantically, he collects himself, blinks and brushes away the tears, and walks forward. On one hand, he doesn’t want to disturb the tagger, but—