He shook out a handful of pills, shoveled them into his mouth, then guzzled another glass of vodka and laid his head back on the chair. His stomach cramped. A sudden and violent chill engulfed him, even after he swaddled himself in two blankets, even as sweat saturated his skin. His head ached. The room spun. He leaned over and vomited on the floor.
Alex groped for his phone and found it wedged in the chair cushion. He forced his heavy eyelids open long enough to scroll through his contacts, though the numbers were swirling, colluding against him. He’d wanted this, after all. How dare he try to take it back?
“Hello?”
“Jacob,” he slurred.
“Who—Sasha?”
“I think…I did something bad.”
“Dude, you sound completely fucked up. What’s wrong?”
“I think…I think…I need help.”
“Sit tight, okay? I’ll be there in five.”
The phone slipped from his hand and thunked onto the floor. The empty tumbler followed, the glass smashing on the hardwood. He dozed off. Then the door was banging open, and Jacob and the security guard were standing over him.
“Hey, Frank.” He furrowed his brow. “Why are you in my condo?”
“He had to let me in,” Jacob said. “Jesus, when was the last time you took a shower? Ugh, God.” He dodged the puddle of congealing vomit and shards of broken glass. “What did you do to your arm? Oh shit.” He snatched the bottle of pills away. “Frank, call an ambulance!”
***
He’d lost consciousness before they reached the hospital, and woke in a private room with a breathing tube down his raw throat. An IV dripped fluid into his veins. His arm and knuckles had been bandaged.
“They had to pump your stomach,” Jacob said. Alex blinked until his vision cleared. Jacob was sitting beside him on the visitor’s chair. “And gave you naloxone hydrochloride to keep you breathing.”
“I’m sorry,” he grunted around the tube. I’m sorry I’m still breathing.
“They’ve called for a psych consult as soon as they think you can breathe on your own. Unless you can convince them it was an accident, they’ll hold you for at least seventy-two hours. The problem is it wasn’t an accident.”
Alex stared at the ceiling.
“What’s going on with you, man? You tried to kill yourself!”
He was supposed to cry or something. Feel bad. Guilty. But inside he saw only the shapeless, everlasting void eating away at whatever remained.
Somebody please make this stop.
“Listen, I’ll do whatever we need to so this stays out of the news, because that’s the last goddamn thing you need. Is there someone I can call to be here with you?”
His parents were in Russia. Stephanie was on the other side of the country. There was no one. Maybe there had never been anyone. He shook his head.
“Please, please tell me it wasn’t over her. I know you love her, but no one is worth this.”
He shook his head again. He couldn’t speak anyway, but how did one explain nothing? How did one fight it?
“I know you’re going through a lot. More than you should have to, and it’s happening all at once. But this? I don’t understand.”
No. He wouldn’t. No one would. Alex could barely understand it himself, except it had seemed the only way out.
“I hate to leave you here alone.”
He’d always been alone. That was the funny thing about fame. The more popular he became, the lonelier he got. Built up to be torn down by the people who believed he owed them his career, talent be damned. Waiting for him to fuck up so they could put him in his place. He sighed softly.
“I’ll be back after the morning skate tomorrow. Just…When you come off the breathing tube, be honest with the psychiatrist, okay? You don’t have to tell anyone else, but tell them.”
He nodded.
“Hang in there, Sasha.” Jacob squeezed his shoulder. “People do care about you, even if you don’t believe it right now.”
He lapsed into a fitful sleep. Early in the morning, a physician and two nurses came in for the extubation. First they checked his heart and respiratory rates and found them satisfactory. Then the doctor explained the procedure and elevated the bed so Alex was sitting upright at a ninety-degree angle. They oxygenated him, removed the tape holding the tube in place, and began suctioning.
“Breathe slowly and deeply. That’s it. All right, deep breath and cough.”
He obeyed. More suctioning, then the tube slithering out of his throat. He gagged. Soft plastic prongs entered his nostrils and with them, more oxygen.
“Very good. We’ll have someone checking on you regularly.”
“Thank you.” His voice scraped through his throat, his ears, like metal on metal, and he winced. But he owed them gratitude for wasting their time on someone who had abjured life.
He floated into a shallow sleep. A middle-aged woman was sitting in the visitor’s chair.
“Hello, Aleksandr. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Dr. Adams.”
The psychiatrist. Great.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
He stared at the opposite wall. He wrote his answer on a pad of paper they’d given him because he could not yet speak without pain.
I’m on painkillers for my tendon injury. I took some and drank some vodka.
“Intentionally?”
He did not respond. Her pen scratched against the notebook balanced on her lap.
“There was a very high dose of acetaminophen and codeine in your system. Traces of cocaine were also found. In the event of a suicide attempt, it’s policy to put the patient on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold. After the third day, we’ll evaluate your situation. As you don’t have a prior history of suicide attempts or mental illness, I expect we can release you after the hold and provide you with a list of therapists for follow-up treatment.”
So I have no choice.
“It’s for your own safety, Aleksandr. Please don’t think of this as punishment. We want to help you figure out what got you to this point and what we can do for you.”
They warehoused psychiatric patients needing care more than he did in the ER or even the hallways, while his magical name had granted him a room in an instant. He was not hallucinating. He was not violent. He simply did not wish to live any longer, which harmed no one but himself. Letting him continue to exist, on the other hand, hurt everyone.
“We will do everything in our power to keep your situation confidential in accordance with HIPAA laws. I’m aware you’re a professional hockey player.”
The best in the world, according to some. Look where it had gotten him.
“I’ll be back this afternoon to do a full assessment. Get some rest.” She patted his hand and left.
***
Seventy-two hours later, Alex hobbled out of the hospital with a three-day growth of beard, a dead cell phone, and a psychiatrist referral along with a prescription for Zoloft. The doctor would do a more thorough evaluation and determine whether depression was the culprit or he’d had a “modern mental health crisis,” what they used to call a nervous breakdown. He hailed a cab, grateful to return home, to his own bed. To the simple comfort of a cup of tea. His throat was still sore, and the awful black void lurked on the fringes of his consciousness. He grappled with the persistent inability to feel something, anything, but he was willing to keep an open mind about treatment.
His first appointment progressed as expected. Alex remembered what Jacob had told him, and honesty was of course in his own best interest. Dr. Reese could help him banish the void. She was kinder than he’d expected, with warm and compassionate brown eyes. Not jaded like the hospital workers, who had to deal with hundreds of people both in acute crisis like he had been and those who were fishing for attention. Maybe she hadn’t been doing it long enough. He guessed she was in her late thirties at most.
The clinical interview took an hour and a half, the seventy-three-question behavioral inventory
another hour or so. In the interim before his next appointment, he increased his workout schedule as much as his body could tolerate and attended PT, but there was little else to fill the time. Sleep. Answering emails and voice mails. Obligatory social media updates full of happy bullshit to pacify his fans. Long, barren stretches of nothingness, though Jacob called often and visited when his scheduled permitted. Alex could not bring himself to watch hockey. Sometimes he wondered what Stephanie was doing, who she was with.
That following Monday, he arrived at Dr. Reese’s office ten minutes early. Despite the April chill, he was sweating. He sat in a chair with worn upholstery outside her door and waited for her to open it.
“Good morning, Aleksandr,” she said when she did. “Come on in.”
They sat across from each other by the picture windows. She kept staring at him in silence. Reading his body language, assessing him in ways the interview and inventory could not. “Would you prefer to be called something else? A nickname?”
He avoided eye contact. “Sasha is fine.”
“This is a safe place, Sasha. I’m not here to judge you but to help you, and everything you say is in confidence.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled. He drummed his fingers on the chair’s arms.
“Are you nervous?”
“A little. Maybe.” He needed a cigarette. “So what’s the deal?”
Dr. Reese smiled. “It’s common for people to go many years without a proper diagnosis. In your case, much of your behavior may have seemed normal to you, and the media attention fed it.”
“There is something wrong with me, then.” With it came an odd sense of relief, a light shining on that forbidden room in his psyche. “Is it serious?”
“Given what you told me in the interview and your answers on the inventory, there’s a strong indication you have bipolar type two disorder. The difference between it and type one is that type two manifests with more frequent, more intense depressive episodes, a milder form of mania called hypomania, and shorter ‘normal’ periods. You express your hypomanic episodes not through euphoria but through inflated self-esteem, irritability, hypersexuality, and a drive to achieve. Unfortunately, type two is associated with a greater risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors than type one or even clinical depression.”
She must be mistaken. He could not have this disgrace upon him, this weakness. His parents were good people who had raised him well. “Are you sure?”
“I know it can a difficult thing to accept, and my patients’ first instinct is often to hide it from their loved ones.”
And he would have to. He had failed in character and in his soul. He had disgraced the Volynsky name. All the crazy shit he’d done. Done because he was literally crazy.
“What’s going through your mind right now, Sasha?”
He pressed one knuckle after another into the palm of his opposite hand, lightening the tension with each crack. “I’ve dishonored my family,” he said, laying his hands in his lap.
“How so?”
“Mental illness is a defect of personality. A deficiency.” He obliged himself to look at her, and now humiliation jabbed at him because he was acting like the ignorant Russian immigrant she surely believed him to be. One distrustful of formal medicine, who thought sickness was caused by lack of warm clothes or poor eating and who treated illness with steam baths and sunlight. Things like addiction and mental illness, when not remedied with imprisonment, were often handled through hypnosis and other techniques the West had repudiated decades ago. He despaired of his motherland ever shaking off the aftereffects of the communist-capitalist culture wars, and that they could infect him after the better part of eight years in America. “Isn’t it?”
“It’s not your fault, Sasha, and you did nothing to deserve it. This is a combination of genetics, environmental stressors, and a neurotransmitter imbalance. But being bipolar won’t prevent you from living a normal life.”
You tell my family that. As far as he was concerned, they need never know.
“However, I want to address the fact substance abuse is also very common with this disorder. You mentioned you recently started using cocaine again, and you’re a moderately heavy drinker.”
“I haven’t touched coke since before I went to the hospital.” His skin crawled with more humiliation at the recollection. “And yeah, I like to drink.”
“What if we channeled that impulse into something more constructive? Rather than focus on the things you’ve lost, what do you enjoy that you haven’t had time to pursue while you played hockey? What are some things you’d like to do?”
He looked out the window and said nothing for many minutes. Whatever. He could afford the extra time. “I used to play the piano. And sing. My mother teaches music. Sometimes I still sing, like karaoke and stuff.”
“How long has it been since you played?”
“Ten years, almost.”
“How do you think you would feel if you started playing piano again?”
He examined his hands, the crooked fingers. Hands that could finesse a stick, could move a puck in ways guaranteeing a spot on the nightly highlight reel. Elegant hands for a man of his size, long-fingered like his mother’s.
“I think people would laugh at me.”
“Because they only know you as a hockey player?”
“I have a certain…image. Which is apparently from being bipolar.” He rubbed his forehead. His head ached, as if his brain were trying to escape the confines of his skull.
“And now that you can’t play hockey anymore, now that you know why the image exists in the first place, how do you feel about shaping a different one for yourself?”
“I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“Then let’s find him. But this has to be for you, Sasha, not for anyone else. This is your chance to be who you want to be. The person that makes you happy.”
“This is a lot to absorb.”
“I know. But your illness won’t define you if you don’t let it. You’re a bright young man with your whole future ahead of you.” Dr. Reese scribbled something, then tore the sheet from her prescription pad and handed it to him. “For now, I’d like to get you started on lithium and Latuda and see how you respond. They’ll take a few weeks to reach full effect, but I think you’ll do well. With antipsychotics like Latuda, there’s a risk for metabolic syndrome and tardive dyskinesia, so visit your doctor regularly. Let them know immediately if you develop grimacing, lip-smacking, or other movements you can’t control.”
“Okay.” An antipsychotic. Crazy people took those.
“In the meantime, we’ll work on cognitive behavioral therapy to help you learn coping mechanisms for managing your stressors and symptoms. Sound good?”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean…thank you for helping me.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not very good at this.”
“You’re in a dark place right now, but there’s a way out, even if you can’t see it yet. Don’t give up on yourself, Sasha.”
“Thank you. Again.” He rose from the chair, gathered his crutches, and shook her hand. “I’ll see you next week.”
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket as he was unlocking the door to his condo. He cradled it between his neck and shoulder and hoped he wouldn’t drop the crutches while he finagled the keys. “Hi, Danny. What’s up?”
“I’m hearing Emporio Armani is eyeballing you for a photo shoot for their men’s underwear line.”
“You have got to be joking.” David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo had done it, but footballers and hockey players were different animals.
“They like what they’ve seen in People and Sports Illustrated. This is why you need me, you know. These companies will be flocking to you for modeling gigs. You’re what, only twenty-six next month? Besides, I heard about your ESPN shoot. No problem showing off your dick to the crew, huh? Dolce & Gabbana should be in touch any day.”
He snorted. “I don’t care who sees my dick. I’m European. I have no
shame.” He pushed the door open and proceeded to his teakettle. You could take the boy out of Russia…“But why me?”
“Why you? When did you get so goddamned modest? Listen, you know I’m a happily married man, but I’m just saying, if I was gay, I wouldn’t throw you out of my bed.”
Alex laughed and not because he was supposed to, though he feared he might crack open. His scar would split in half and bisect his entire face, revealing the terrible thing dwelling beneath.
“Anyway, this isn’t even why I called. I got a request from someone representing the family of a boy with a medulloblastoma.”
“A what?”
“A malignant brain tumor.”
“Oh.” The cup of Russian Caravan had lost its importance.
“Anyway, he’s a huge fan, but he’s taken a turn for the worse. The cancer was caught late to begin with, and it’s spread. They’re not sure he’ll make it to the end of the month. I know you’re on bed rest, but can you get out there?”
Out there. “You mean…Buffalo.”
It was better if she didn’t know.
“Is that a problem?”
“No. No problem. Let me pack and get some stuff together for him. I’ll catch a flight tonight and meet the family in the morning.”
A keyboard clacked in the background. “Excellent. I’m emailing you all the info now.”
“Danny, when I get back, I need to talk to you about something.”
“You sound serious, kiddo. Everything okay?”
Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Page 21
