I’m writing to you in case you ever find yourself here, in this position as unfortunate as me. Consider it a survival guide for people for whom living is already a tedious thing. Because living anymore is already a full time job, so if you’re working on top of it, you’re already spent.
When they did the intake for me, they took my phone, my purse, my hand sanitizer (“we don’t want you smuggling in alcohol,” the clerk said). They left me pencils and a notebook. The stationary I write to you on now, that was a special request.
How wealthy we’d be if we got paid for the emotional labor!
At about the time the psychology people handed me test forms did I realize I was going to fail the assessment. This nurse—not even the actual doctor—said, “No wrong answers.”
I took it to mean that I wasn’t allowed to answer wrong, not that no answer I could give would be. I sat in a small white office, on a chair next to the bed covered in plastic they would’ve examined me on if there was anything wrong with me you could see. I worked off a clipboard and half a pencil without an eraser. The form said:
On a scale of one to five, how strongly do you identify with the following answers, with one being “not at all” and five being “strongly.”
I generally feel down and unhappy.
I don’t get as much satisfaction out of things I used to.
I easily get impatient, frustrated, or angry with people.
I feel lonely, and that people aren’t interested in me.
I have trouble getting to sleep or that I sleep too late.
I have trouble finishing books, movies, or TV shows.
I think about death, or about people being better off without me.
I have less interest in sex than I used to.
I was up enough to get here, and I don’t know anyone anymore who gets the same satisfaction out of things they used to. I easily get impatient, frustrated, or angry with forms more than people. I’m not sure if lonely or alone mean the same thing, or that it matters that people aren’t interested in me—I happen to be interested in them, and isn’t that enough? I don’t know anyone who has ever finished a book or a movie or a TV show—I don’t know any writers. And death, well, I think death thinks about me, and isn’t that enough? And wouldn’t the better question be, Sex has less interest in me than it used to?
This test was like a pain scale for the brain.
Once, I had stepped on a nail visiting a boyfriend at a construction site, and it shot straight through my foot. It wasn’t one nail, it was four. Four nails, in a straight line, from my heel, up to just before my toes. I didn’t have to sit in the waiting room for the ER long, and we never took the board out. When the doctor would see me, I got wheeled in on a chair, with a big hunk of wood attached to my foot.
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad does it hurt?” The doctor asked.
“Four,” I said. I said, “It hurts like a nail in your foot times four.”
When the doctor started pulling the board out of my foot, and there was the sound of the nails coming out of my skin, and scratching against my bones on the way out, I counted up. “Six. Seven! Eight! Fuck! Twelve!”
When the doctor got the board off, and got my shoe off, he suspended my foot up, and I could make eye contact with him through one of the holes. He said through the holes in my foot, “What’s the number now?”
I pointed up at the ceiling. If there wasn’t a ceiling, I would’ve pointed at the sky past that, and if there wasn’t sky, I would’ve pointed past that.
One of the people here, Jordi, always began whatever he said with, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.” He says it like everything that he’d ever say’s already been said by someone before. That if something’s already been heard, we don’t need to hear it again. Judging by my pain test for the brain, you’d think I’d agree on the grounds that everything loses its satisfaction for me, but then there’s the songs we listen to over and over. Some people insist that Jordi is new here, like me, but then there’s others who say that Jordi’s always been here.
Jordi said, “Almost nobody’s got a favorite hotel. I’m just privileged that way.”
Where we were wasn’t a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest kind of place. Nobody wore a straight jacket, or grip-bottom socks. Our bedrooms really were like hotel rooms—with night stands and reading lamps; the pillows—gosh—they were better than anything you could find to take home. The floors weren’t checkered tile, they were walnut. In group therapy, we sat together on leather couches, with a coffee table in the center. It was early spring, and the sun burst through the sliding glass door that led to a community garden—cared for by us.
So stop me if you’ve heard this one.
A man stops by a head shrink. He says to the shrink, “Shrink, I’ve lost all sense of joy and humor. My smile feels always just painted on. All I want to do is sleep—being awake is a painful experience for me.”
The shrink says, “You need to get out. Go find something that makes you laugh. There’s a clown in town: the Great Paglioso! I always leave in hysterics when I see his shows. You should go see the Great Paglioso!”
“But Doctor,” the man says, “Paglioso is me.”
Jordi told this joke many times, and nobody’s ever stopped him, because we are all Paglioso, and there’s nothing sweeter than being told your story back to you by someone else. Even when we weren’t in group, we walked the halls of this place like ears waiting to be told about ourselves.
From where I’m writing this, outside, the skinny saplings lean against the building. When the wind blows, the saplings brush their branches along the windows, making a scratching sound. I think there’s a metaphor here about how the living depend on the dead—because the saplings are still alive and they lean on the dead wood boards of this building to stay up—but the metaphor ghosts me.
Sometimes they let us out for trips. Whenever I went, I went with Babs. Babs walked slower than everyone else. When we went to antique stores, she’d spend more time looking at her reflection in the display cases than she did looking at whatever was behind the glass.
When looking at a sterling silver turquoise necklace, instead of asking a clerk to unlock the case for her, Babs stood so her reflection would overlap with the necklace just so, and she could see herself wearing it without having to put it on.
According to Babs, she gets everything all backwards. Babs has a white poodle named Vodka. When she’d play fetch with Vodka, he would get the tennis ball, and throw it somewhere else. Then Vodka would bark until Babs went and got the ball so the poodle could throw it again.
“Maybe this whole thing is like obedience school,” Babs said. “But for me. By the time I get out, I’ll be fully trained.”
Another thing about Babs is, she used to win sweepstakes and giveaways. She’d sit by the radio with a bunch of burner phones from Radio Shack. She’d wait for the DJ to announce whatever prize, and she’d call with all the burner phones at the same time. She’d go to magazine stands and pick up multiple issues of the same magazine, and fill out the same survey over and over.
“I once won three pairs of tickets to the Killers this way. I sold all but two, so there was an empty seat between me and the strangers who bought my tickets on Craigslist,” Babs said.
I told her I liked Mr. Brightside.
“The Mr. Brightside video is better than the Killers live,” Babs said. “They can’t hide that they can’t dance without the video. It’s almost like a lesson in itself: you can be a bad dancer, or bad at anything, but as long as you hide how terrible you are behind lots of changes, apples, and maybe a blonde with blue eyes, no one will ever know. ”
Before we returned, Babs stopped by a nearby convenience store to pick up some magazines. While Babs was at the store, I had the clerk open the glass cases and tried on turquoise necklaces. It didn’t matter which one I picked; I wasn’t Babs’s reflection in any of them.
The point I wanted to make is that it isn’t about how we look in anything, it’s about how we feel. The question I’m asking is, do our reflections make us beautiful, or ugly? If I were the Killers, I’d never watch my own concerts: I’d only watch Mr. Brightside.
The counselor asked me to tell him about the moment after which I was different. The counselor was shaped like an egg on top of an egg—like God sculped his jaw thinner so he could focus the clay on top of his head. Me and the others, we wanted to call him Mr. something-or-other, but he insisted we call him Dean. But with all of us sharing the same counselor, calling him by first name would have made it sound too much like we were all sleeping with the same person, so I just called him the counselor.
The counselor fidgeted with the buttons on his collar that won’t close and said, “What do you think brought you to this place?”
I told him there were two kinds of people in this world: those who hit the snooze button, and the rest of us who have a right to be suspicious.
“Maybe,” the counselor said. “Or maybe the two kinds of people in the world are those who hit the snooze button, and those who don’t try to split people into categories.”
The two people in this world are the people who cry really loud in their sleep, and my neighbors who heard it through my open window and came over to tell me about it. When my next door neighbor told me, I said, “Thank you for checking on me.”
“Have you tried sleeping with the window closed?” he asked.
I explained this to the counselor. I asked, “What kind of person is that? The one who doesn’t do the crying and makes sure he can’t hear anybody else?
The counselor scribbled this down on a clipboard and said, “Which room are you in again?”
“Room 4. Why?” I asked.
“Because Room 6 and Room 2 have been asking for ear plugs and white noise machines,” The counselor said.
I left the room before the counselor could get around to the masturbation questions. I didn’t think he was going to ask—I just wanted him to want to ask and for me to be out of the room when he did.
Jordi’s body laid on the walnut floor by the couch. He was still and I counted the moments until others would realize someone would have to come along and draw a chalk outline around him.
That questionnaire: 7. I think about death, or about people being better off without me.
I answered three, or maybe four. But I wanted to answer, I think about death, or maybe me being better off without other people. Jordi, who asked us to stop him if we’ve heard this one, and then say one we’d heard. Jordi who looked young enough we always thought he was new here, but the truth is, he left and came back.
Jordi was chatty, which meant he came off clever more than wise. Except that he managed to game the system for himself. Before Jordi came here, he lived in a small trailer on an abandoned lot on the south side of town. The trailer was on bricks, and had no water, no electricity.
Jordi bragged about how down and out he was. He said, “In the winter, it would get so cold, I’d fall asleep under the fog of my own breath.” In group, he was always the first to say, “Oh yeah? You think you have it bad?”
Then Babs said this:
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one,
“There were two monks who’d taken an oath of chastity—one was young, the other was old. A beautiful woman approached them and said she needed help getting across a river. The older monk offered to let the woman on his back so he could swim her across. The woman agreed, and climbed onto the monk’s back. The two monks swam her across the river, and she left without saying thank you.
“As the monks continued their journey, the younger monk became irritable, and complained of the woman’s disrespect toward his master. He said, ‘Master, how could you help that woman? We’ve taken vows, and you touched girl-flesh, and she didn’t even give thanks!’
“The older monk said, ‘I may have broken my vow, but it was me who carried her across the river. You’ve been carrying her this whole time.’”
Then Babs said, “You, Jordi, have been carrying that trailer all over this place.”
Maybe it was because Jordi was going to have to leave this place soon that he let the trailer crush him here in the rec room.
The way the tears welled up in my eyes, Jordi’s body looked like a mirage on the floor. Something about it reminded me of you.
Do you remember that time, when we were at the coast, and the bartender slipped something in your drink? It was in Lincoln City, and we were just walking distance between the hotel that overlooked the sand and the sea. The bar was a dive—which is to say, people went down in their depths inside, into their own darkness secluded by the ambers in their glasses. Some sat and drank so long that their glasses ringed the table with wet. We drank faster, played on each other’s legs with our fingertips beneath the counter. Something about this struck the bartender wrong and he slipped something in your drink.
When we started walking those dark backroads back to the apartment, you lost who you were. I got caught beneath your arm, your sweat smell washing over me with whiskey stink. When we got inside the hotel room, you dropped onto the brown carpet, lips turning blue, and you stopped breathing. I fell with you, my mouth over your blue-turning lips. My palms slammed into your big chest, and I pushed down, thumping until I heard cracking.
In hospitals, they call it rib breaking, these chest compressions. I thumped and thumped, my heart doing the work of two. Each push sounded like bone snapping. What might have been the length of a music video felt like hours. The wheezing sound flooding the room—I couldn’t tell which of us it was, but it sounded like a different kind of leaving.
And then the wheezing stopped. You gasped the heavy kind of gasp people make when coming out of a deep dive in the water. Your lips went back to their normal color—too rosy for a man, the sort of shade I would have worn for a fancy dinner. You got up and acted as if you never fell. That night, a bruise grew where your heart was supposed to be. My hands fit over it exactly, and my lips were too small to kiss it away.
I look back on that night and wonder if it was me who died in that hotel room, if only for a few minutes. I had died and I’ve been waiting on this moment, with Jordi on the floor, for someone to tell me.
That miracle happened again. Jordi moving under the waves filling my eyes. He wiggled his butt side to side. His shoulder gyrated, and his arm disappeared beneath the brown leather couch. It came back, and Jordi pushed himself off the floor. He held up his hand, pinching something pink and rubber between his finger and thumb. He held it up for all of us to see. He picked something out of his ear, another pink rubber pill.
“Dropped an earplug under the couch,” Jordi said. He said, “Forgot to take them out this morning.”
He put the plug back in his ear, and went back to his room next to mine. Room 2.
Somewhere between Babs studying earrings in her reflection and vintage audio equipment, we stumbled upon a bookshelf. Most of the books were those kind of dime-store paperbacks people threw away as soon as they were done, those and biographies of people who fought in the second world war. Below the veterans, the shelf contained books on manifestation, on business communications, strengthening your relationships, moving through grief—as if grief were a pond we paddled across, and not the ocean that surrounded us, got sucked into the sun, and came back down on us when we weren’t expecting it.
Babs said, “Behold, the handbooks of productive Americans.” She pulled one off the shelf. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. “I wonder what effects these people need to achieve before they’re happy.” She pulled out another book on seduction, another on how to make more money.
“In America, or maybe anywhere, you’re only a real citizen if you’re getting paid or getting laid,” Babs said.
“What about spiritualism? Or religion?” I asked.
Babs pulled out another book written by a guru from India. She flipped to the back and said, “In this book, the author has his contact information in the back for remote guided meditations, and helping you manifest. The book is basically a 256 page long commercial for his services; it’s like he knows that reading his book over a cup of coffee in a crowded place playing pop music won’t lead to enlightenment: someone else already covered that by fasting under a tree.”
“So maybe that book should be in the “Weight Loss” section.” I said.
“Thinner people get laid and paid more,” Babs said. Babs pulled a book from Weight Loss and held up the cover. “Look at this woman,” she said.
The glossy cover showed the woman, standing back to back with herself. On the left side, the woman was obese. Her hair was dry and frizzy, and her frown seemed to reach down past her second chin. She wore a gray tank top, with sweat stains trailing from her armpit down to her waist. Without makeup, her face looked only like the kind of clay yet to be sculpted into anything beyond a full mouth. On the right side, the woman was tanner, and she wore a green sleeveless dress that shimmered with light. All that clay had been carved off her, revealing marble, muscle tone, a jawline you could slit your wrists on. She smiled the way young people smile the day they finally get their braces removed. Even her hair seemed thicker, glossier—as if losing weight improved your silk dead ends.
“Imagine losing all that weight, and writing this book, and on the cover is the old you,” Babs said. “This woman, her whole identity is still wrapped up in who she was, not who she is and who she’s becoming.”
“An anorexia book once told me I am not enough of the woman that I am.”
In a book I found on dating, the experts encourage me to be something I’m not an expert in: being mysterious. It’s the same logic as pornography, as advertising. Look on TV and tell me if you’ve ever seen someone eating a banana fully peeled. In romances, more time is spent describing the lovers’ underwear than what’s underneath. I think of the scene from that paperback I read on a plane coming to see you—the woman of the situation had just left, but the man still had her panties. The morning after, he crushes them against his nose and smells them like a bouquet.
I’m telling you all this so someday you can tell me all of you. The world we live in scares us into caging our hearts, so I’m putting mine on the table. This letter I’m writing for you is my underwear.
When me and Babs finished with the books, I found a tape recorder.
I asked the clerk, “Does it work?”
“All sales are final. We can’t do returns,” the clerk said.
“But does it work?” I asked.
Babs started the recorder, and the tapes started spinning. She held it up to her mouth and sang, “ But it’s just the price I pay / Destiny is calling me, / Open up my eager eyes because I’m Mr. Brightside…”
When she finished, she put the tape recorder on the counter, and dug money out of her purse.
I recorded myself at night, asleep. When I hit play the next morning, first there was Bab’s singing Mr. Brightside. Then came the rustles of bedding, of turning over in my sleep, the occasional cough. When I hit fast forward, the tapes spun faster, and there was a whole lot of nothing, just at a higher pitch. A squeaking wail came out on the device, and I hit play normal. The voice on the recorder started on a low rumble, like a hard groan. One of those deep inside yowls, followed by chokes.
It sounded less like me and more like my father. It sounded like the moment my mother left him—she had fallen, first in steps, and then in leaps, into the arms of a coworker. My father crumpled himself into a cornered heap, between the felt couch and the wall.
Ever since I was a girl, when I’d get upset, he’d grip my wrist and say, “You can cry or you can do something about whatever’s upsetting you.” Oh, how with nothing he can do, a man is reduced to a mess.
My mother’s advice: “Love is like labor: don’t leave what you have until you’ve lined something else up first.”
You had told me about your parents divorce, a long affair that dragged itself out throughout your teenage years. You said, “I don’t know what’s worse, that they divorced, or that being outside of marriage made them both happier.
You said, “Almost always it’s the woman leaving what does a man in. How it happened to Dad. I read somewhere on the internet that men are happiest in relationships, and that women are happiest when they’re single. Fucks me up, knowing that my joy comes at the cost of anothers.”
You said this to me like I wasn’t in the room holding two cups of coffee.
The wash of the tape recorder changed, and the noises sounded like beach sounds—hissing, and wet. One of our worse memories: going to the lighthouse in Tillamook.
The day was fogged over. We walked past the Octopus Tree—that giant thing with 8 super branches reaching in all directions. Over every cliff, we only saw miles of gray. You threw a rock and it disappeared into the fog before it hit the ground. I worried the rock would have hit an animal, or a child.
The fog was clearer overlooking a jetty, and past that, a ravine. The cliff faces were gouged through, and at the bottom, there was a cave. You said, “Did you know the Tillamook tribe used to take settlers down there? Ever since the original Lewis and Clarks, they would kidnap people in the middle of the night, drag them down to that exact cave, and keep them there as hostages. When things didn’t pan out the way the Tillamook wanted, they would scalp the hostages and feed them their own fingers.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, slap your chest. I said, “Oh, stop,” and then instead of your name, I said someone else’s. I said the name of the boyfriend I’d gone to see at the construction site, the day I got nails in my foot. In that moment even the gulls went silent. It was just waves. I spent the rest of the day apologizing and begging you to talk to me.
How the name came out, I don’t know. The most importance difference between you two was this: You were there, and he wasn’t.
I brought the tape to the counselor and played it. Again he asked, “Is the moment after which you were different in here?”
“Just listen,” I said, and fast forwarded past the rustles, past the low groan.
“I want to listen to you, here and now. We’ve already covered that you cry in your sleep,” he said.
The boxy recorder felt heavier in my hands. Through the fake-wood paneling you’d find on cars, my fingers felt the tapes roll. Once the squeaky sounds in the tape got choppy, I stopped fast forwarding and let it play normal. “Do you hear that?” I said. I held the tape recorder up to the counselor and he craned his egg shaped head so close and low, I thought yolk was going to pour out of his ear.
“Listen,” I said. The sound on the tape recorder wasn’t the normal kind of crying. The way it stuttered.
“I can’t tell what I’m hearing,” the counselor said.
“I’m laughing!” I said.
We listened, and the recorder sounded the kind of chopped sobs you’d hear when someone makes a joke at someone else’s expense.
Have I forgotten to mention the help? I know I said this place isn’t like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but there are people around—by people I mean workers. Aids, like nurses, but also more like housekeepers. I couldn’t tell the difference, just that they all wore smart skirts and white New Balances.
Some of them serve us continental breakfasts. Every morning in the living room, which is the group room, which is the rec room that leads outside to the garden—walnut floor—they serve us continental breakfast. At first, only a few of us would wake up early enough to find tin foil trays of scrambled eggs, pancakes, fruit, sausages, and bacon waiting. Even the toast was already toast, but by the time anybody gets to it it’s already cold. By half-past noon, they are already dumping pitchers of orange juice down the sink.
While we are in group, they push carts down the halls and dip into our rooms. They take our laundry from our bins, change our sheets, vacuum, replace soap if we are running out. They are available after hours if we call.
In group, Babs said, “I think one of the orderlies likes me.” She said this with her fingers drawn to her chest, tracing a circle below her collarbone.
“How do you figure?” Jordi asked.
Babs reached under her shirt, and scooped out a sterling silver chain. A teardrop of turquoise spun at the end. “Someone left this on my pillow. Isn’t it darling?” she said. She said, “I hope it’s the latino one—that would be spicy. Or maybe it’s one of the girls, but look, look, I look like a reflection in it.” Babs pulled her hair up behind her head so we could see the entire length of silver around her neck. She turned side to side, modeling everything but the stone.
“Maybe it’s a bribe,” Jordi said. “Maybe, whoever it is, maybe they want your pills. Have you heard about the fox and the crow? The Aesop story? Stop me if you’ve heard this one, it’s about a fox showering a crow with compliments until—”
Stop! We all said.
Jordi’s mouth made that tape recorder sound, the one I tried to show the counselor.
I never did get around to telling Babs it was me who left the necklace. I had gotten it for her even before she bought the tape recorder. It isn’t how the thing makes you look, it’s how it makes you feel.
A friend told me, “As a beautiful woman, I can’t have a male therapist, or a woman who at least isn’t pretty. They cannot possibly put themselves in my shoes.”
It comes to mind when talking to the counselor. The tape recorder plays on his table. We’ve made it through another half hour of sleep, after me laughing. There’s heavy breathing—sex breathing, but no one else can be heard in the room.
That night I died in the hotel room, the night someone drugged you, and I worked your heart until you came back to life, the tape recorder played that sound.
You initiated while I kissed the bruise I made on your chest. Your fingers combed through my hair, down my shoulders, down my waist, and then lower. When I asked what you were doing, you said, “I could die any minute again.”
At first I stopped you—sex being the barrier between where we were and where we needed to be. But there you were, alive. There was nowhere else I needed to be.
But you turned me over and kissed down past my hips. You’d shaven that morning and your face was still smooth against me. The way you breathed while licking with your fingers inside—it sounded like one heart doing the work of two.
Those were the sounds the tape recorder played, and the egghead therapist, for once, looked away from his clipboard and straight at me. If I had to wager a guess, the therapist does not know what it’s like to be looked at.
Then the therapist looked back down at his clipboard, and flipped through my sheets. “From your charts,” the therapist said, “I wonder if your medications are working. Normally libido is the first to tank. Are you experiencing any side effects?”
I do not want him to tell me anything about him, so I do not tell him anything.
When I left the counselor’s office, everybody was in the living room watching music videos. Can you guess which one played? I’ll give you a hint. The musicians can’t dance, and the video distracts you from this with an icy blonde sharing apples with a devil in a Hugh Hefner robe. There’s cabaret scenes all over it, and there’s a moment when all the girls turn their butts to the camera. In unison, they lean forward, and lift their skirts up, showing their butts attached to long legs, adorned with garters and stockings. And then the Devil in the Hugh Hefner robe—who looks like he’s played a lawyer or a CEO in some other movie—bites an apple.
And maybe the only reason why Brandon Flowers doesn’t cry over this affair is because of all his eye makeup.
Sometime when the colors started to change did I realize how long I had been here. I looked out the window one morning and the leaves started to burn. Even the leaves on the saproling that leaned against the side of the building, brushing against my window, had begun to fall off.
It was around this time that the aids had stopped their room service. They still served breakfast, but when we returned to our rooms, our beds looked the same as when we left them. My pillow looked like a half a dark mask—the wet side of my face doing all the crying in the night I couldn’t do in the day.
When we asked one of the orderlies about our rooms, they said, “We’re weening you.” She snapped her fingers and pointed down the hall. “The washers are that way.”
This was on the day that Babs had requested her sitter bring in Vodka. The dog, not the drink. When her sitter, or friend or family member came in, Babs shrieked, “There’s my Vodka! My white Russian! My little Vodka baby!”
Vodka was tall for a poodle, with long awkward legs. White as snow. When Vodka saw Babs, he charged, and his front legs wrapped around her shoulders, crossing behind Babs’s neck.
You’ve never been kissed the way Vodka kissed his mom.
The dog watcher, a young man, set down a bag and said, “Food and toys are in here. When do you want me to come pick him up?”
Under the barrage of pink tongue, Babs shouted, “Never again! We’re getting obedience training together!”
The counselor poked his head through his office and said, “Dog’s gotta go by seven o’clock.”
“Then you can come pick him up at seven-thirty,” Babs said.
When the dog had his fill, Babs reached into the bag. She said, “What toys do we have?”
The dog’s eyebrows went up just like a persons.
She pulled out a ball. She turned to me and said, “Watch, Vodka is going to make me fetch.”
She tossed the ball across the room, and the dog fetched it.
“Wait, hang on, when did you learn fetch?” Babs said. She looked out through the front door in the parking lot as the dog watcher drove away. She yelled, “Did you learn him to play fetch right?” But the man was already gone.
Babs tossed the ball again, and Vodka caught it and brought it back to her.
“I don’t believe it. My dog got better before I did.” Babs said.
She threw it one more time down the hall, and at that moment, Jordi stepped out with a bundle of clothes. The dog raced under him, and he fell, sending his underwear and socks and shirts flying. Vodka raced back with the ball in mouth, and a pair of boxers over his head. He skidded across the socks on the floor. Blinded by the boxers, Vodka spun around and tore through the living room. He knocked against the continental breakfast table and knocked down the eggs, the sausage, the orange juice, the fruit plate, and the cold toast. Vodka shook his head back and forth until the boxers dropped into the eggs with orange juice seeping in.
Then Vodka dropped the ball, and started lapping up the sausage and the bacon and the orange-juice soaked eggs.
Jordi shouted, “Don’t eat those! You don’t know where they’ve been!”
Babs said, “They’ve been on the continental breakfast table. What’s wrong with that? And it’s a dog, Jordi, he won’t care. Vodka is as Vodka does: he don’t give a fuck.”
“I mean the underwear,” Jordi said. He rushed over and scooped up his soaked boxers. They were dark with juice, and smattered with egg chunks. Pale stains covered the crotch.
Babs pointed at the underwear and said, “Since when did we start keeping the creamers on the food table?” Then she looked down at the mess, combed through the eggs and the bacon and the sausage and the cold toast and the orange juice and her dog getting the fur on his face orange and covered in grease on the walnut wood floor.
No creamer.
One heart doing the work of two. Babs hand clutched the turquoise teardrop on her chest. From deep in her throat came a retching sound, a sound like what played on the tape recorder some nights. She heaved, and said, “Oh my God that’s disgusting. There’s so much the scrambled eggs could get pregnant. And my dog’s mouth!”
Babs rushed over to pull the dog away from the food. She locked Vodka in her room and the three of us spent the next twenty minutes or so cleaning up the main room. Babs and I handled everything but the eggs—that was on Jordi. While Jordi went back out in the hall to clean up the clothes that had spilled on the floor, Babs and I took Vodka outside.
We took turns throwing the ball for Vodka.
Babs said, “The first day without help, and we made a total mess. At this rate, we’ll never graduate.”
“Graduate?” I said.
“Graduate. Like maybe we get a diploma that says we’re fit to be in the world again.” Babs said.
Vodka brought the ball back again, but set it off to the side. He went back out into the garden and plodded through the peonies, the daffodils. He lifted a leg by one of the blueberry bushes that Jordi had been watering during the summer and peed.
“Is that what being in the world looks like?” I said.
Babs said, “Does it have to be anything else?”
In group, the counselor guided us on a meditation. It went something like this:
Picture your body as a well. Deep in the well, is water. The water is still, and cool. If you would go beneath the water, you will find your pain. Right now, the pain is mysterious, but if you would give it texture, or color, what would the pain look like to you? Find the color of your pain, it can be blue, or orange, or red, or green, or many colors all at once. What is it shaped like? Is it hard? Soft? Does the surface of your pain feel like the tender skin of an orange, or is it rough, rigged, like a pine cone? If you touch your pain, you may find it is not the same temperature of the water in the depths of your well. Deep inside you, it sits, contaminating the water. Reach into the water and hold your pain in your palms. Roll it around in your hands. Can you smell it? Does it smell like gasoline, ammonia, burned wood, pine, or something else? It can smell sweet, it can smell like the maple syrup drizzled on the melted butter of your pancakes in the morning when you were little, and it was Sunday and you didn’t have school. Hold your pain, and put yourself into it. Your pain is becoming clearer. It loses its texture in your hands. It becomes smoother, warmer. Your pain starts to glow, until it becomes an orb of light. Draw the pain through the well of your body, out of the water, slowly. Raise it from the stone walls you’ve built to protect your pain, and pull it from the mouth of the well. Sit with this orb of light and tell it a story. Tell it your story. Tell it the story you tell yourself before you go to sleep. We all tell ourselves bedtime stories before we sleep, don’t we? Tell the story and forgive the story. The story is only there for you to tell it. The orb of light that was your pain, if you let it go you will find that it doesn’t fall. Instead it floats up, like a balloon, into the sky to join the stars. Look up at the stars, at the millions of pain-stories told and forgiven, and how much light they cast on our dark nights so we can find the way from where we are to where we are needed.
Before we got discharged, our last outing brought us to the beach. We brought towels, sandwiches, beer, soda, and Vodka—the dog, not the drink. Even the counselor and some of the aids came. We threw frisbees on the sand, and if Vodka caught the frisbee, instead of returning it, he threw it for one of us to fetch.
I brought the tape recorder, and listened to it through headphones. I sat at the edge of a beach towel with my toes in the sand. On my foot, the purple scars from when I stepped on a wood board with nails winked at me. My foot buried itself beneath the sand.
Would you believe me if I told you we were in Lincoln? The hotel where you almost died hung over my back. Couples could be seen leaning on each other in hot tubs on the patios behind the building.
We dipped ourselves into one of those hot tubs. It was the first time you saw my foot. You held it out of the water, cupping the heel in the palm of your hand. With your other hand, you drew circles around each scar—all four of them. You asked me to tell the story, how I stepped on the board.
I told a story of how I had gone to visit a man at a construction site. My heart doing the work of two.
Then you told me to tell the real story. Your hand moved around to the other side of my foot, where the nails had driven through. “This isn’t from a step. This is from a stomp.”
The truth was I met you. I had gone to see the man to tell him. He stood on the roof of a house they were building with a tool belt and a nail gun in his hands. I yelled at him to come down, but he pointed down at me and said something to someone, and they started laughing.
I put my foot down.
It was only after we got to the hospital, and the good doctors numbed me up with shots and took the board out of my foot that I finally told him.
Is the number higher on the pain scale to break the news, or have it be broken to you?
I didn’t see that man again until I opened an obituary.
All this I tell to the tape recorder, with the sounds of the waves and the gulls as my backdrop. Babs and Jordi squealing in the background, Vodka shaking off the beach water on them. The beach brings out Babs blue eyes and they look teardrop turquoise. The questionnaire: I don’t get as much satisfaction out of things I used to. Maybe satisfaction isn’t the word we’re looking for anymore. Maybe the word is supposed to be peace.When you receive these letters, the return address will still be home. I just did the work I know you would’ve done for me if you could.
When we got in the car for the drive back, the counselor asked, “How is everybody feeling about going back into the world?”
“Scared,” I said. “I’m scared that—finally now—I want to be better.”
I left the tape recorder laying in the sand. Someone will find it and bring it back to their hotel. They’ll hear Babs sing Mr. Brightside as they lie in the hotel bed, and they’ll hear the sounds I make at night. That mantra, that guided meditation of the pain in our wells covered shape and color, but not sound. They will hear my well, my story without words, and then some of it with words. Vodka barking, Babs laughing, Jordi telling someone stop me if you’ve heard this one, the human heart doing the work of two. They’ll listen to the rasp of voice trying to help itself.
Somewhere deep inside them, there will be light.
THE END
A stunning work of literary fiction, a masterclass in interiority. The lines are dense with imagery, pathos, and poetry (“'No wrong answers.' I took it to mean that I wasn’t allowed to answer wrong," "The bar was a dive—which is to say, people went down in their depths inside," "a jawline you could slit your wrists on"). You've taken on a remarkable challenge, namely to (through the epistolary device) assemble a story in vignettes and reflections, a collage of objects and moments spoken to a listener who may—or may not—be listening. There's a novel's worth of quotable lines and memories in this.
(Disclaimer: I used Substack's reader to listen, rather than read. I wish the reader would've given me a female voice.)
Colton!!! This is a drop dead gorgeous piece of writing. I am so glad I met you, so I could read these words. It is such an Oregon story, such a Portland story. If there was still a Plazm magazine, we would be publishing this for you ❤️