Part 19 (2/2)
What Jack says issues frouished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code couldlike this: Get on your knees and find soht about here Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about o Surrender, Dorothy Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky Surrender, Mary Surrender, Mary
I want to surrender but have no idea what that aze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry Enter into that quiet It's a cathedral It's an ehts on And pray to be an instrument of peace Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope
What if I get no answer there?
If God hasn't spoken, do nothing Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen Make the containers you promised to tape and staple Go quietly and shi+ne Wait Those not impelled to act et so lonely sometier But I have to go to aand er and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it Like a coal froht sky edges across our s, and I'et drunk makes sense to me, and I like how nobody rebuked him after But there were also no-bullshi+t acts like not letting him speak-crazily he'd wanted to testify about his sobriety But Gerry took his car keys, and
It's my life outside these oddballs that scaresforward
Yes, ed that frosting?
Gross, Gerry says You're not gonna eat that
David unzips his backpack, flips off the frosting lid, and hands it back, saying, I feel like I should wipe the edge onthe can, I dig in and run e, then stick it infor the handoff
28
Halfway Home Everyone I metWore part of my destiny like a carnival mask”I'm Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter”Me, too,” he replied-Charles Simic, ”St Thorant, I start to steeltoward me like a jail on wheels David and Jack convincehalfway house The place sits on hospital grounds across from a methadone dispensary A favorite joke of the residents is to use n on the clinic, so eventually the panicked n on the clinic, so eventually the panickedinto the house, I expect to find tattooed thugs and strippers and for stiffs, plus a professor There's even a disbarred laho'd once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot-the blackened appendages having been a the homeless, it turns out
On my first afternoon there, David bends over a forh school equivalency exam, and I see the hooker later help a Boston banker handle his own toddler during a visit-the sae ht: a stork-thin blonde witha no-cussing rule for the house, for one: say a bad word, you chip in a buck to the party fund Save for a slightly spastic right hand, she looks like a runwayhair the color of sunflowers In the recovery coendary Mother Teresa with altitude, I overhear one resident say She did biochemical research for NASA before her career in che convertible she drives has a high-test engine, and I once heard a felon remark she looks like a dentist's wife, ie, never done a day's work in her life and so care of her teeth
Her name is Deb, and when I whine about how hard it is not to drink on afternoons alone with Dev, she invites the two of us to stop by the house for a snack I can bring a video for him She'll even personally counsel me if she has time
Fat chance, I think at first, but the lure of a sober hangout proves too great to stay away The writers I once passed flasks of vodka back and forth with have been scarce since I pledged off
On Dev's first visit to the house, he passes two residents exhaling plu movie I tuck Dev's head under ?
Grown-up show, I say
In the director's office, Deb stands to greet us, and her shaggy dog licks Dev's face, alhtly drawn-up hand for hi with it
She bends to fix her brown eyes level with his blue ones to explain that she got drunk and overdosed on a nasty drug called cocaine
I try to steer Dev off the subject, but Deb says, It's normal to be curious Anybody with a disability needs to be co questions about it She holds out her ar to Dev, You can touch it if you want to
He pinches it like a rabs her wrist and pulls it away fro will, saying, Does that hurt?
Deb says, No, it just feels tight
You were drinking cocaine, and your ared up that way? Dev wants to know
Oh, no, she says The stuff kind of poisoned my head, and I fell down and hit it I woke up and I couldn't move at all Paralyzed Couldn't talk, either, not even yes or no
Which draether as Deb You can believe that she was married to an Oxford biochemist, that she modeled, that she ran a lab-all true But that she drank like me and couldn't quit? Impossible to picture
I was four or five years in and out of rehab, she tells us On the night of uy I'd met in one detox-found me passed out in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor He'd driven by the house and seen otten worried, and broken in
Dev says, What did you think when you woke up and couldn't move?
I'll tell you exactly what it was, she says Boy, do I need a drink Boy, do I need a drink
Dev giggles at this Part of e, I wouldn't have wound up such a sot
It took ain, she says I could show you how to eat with a spoon, but I couldn't say the word spoon spoon
Over ain, then read, then write with her left hand
Letrises She walks across the rooht leg forward apace She does it with a rock star's prance, adding a runway spin at the end
Dev says, You walk pretty good That leg goes a little crooked, but you go fast
She looks at rown-up talk?
It pains me how visible my shakiness is, but it touches me also (Such small kindnesses-so commonplace inhow I really feel; now that
She tells Dev to put in the video we've just picked up I tell her the guys in the front roo, and Deb says, They won't uys on the sofa that the afternoonstory froht a cobra
Picture the blond tyke on the couch with a paper plate holding potato chips in his lap He's flanked by two uys named Sam and Joe (I'll later learn that black-haired, aisted Sam was a forovernment cheese) At a nearby table, I ask Deb how she caure rich parents bailed her out
Both my parents had just passed, she says, about a year apart, and I was an only child Then my doctor husband divorced me the second I woke up