Begin to Exit Here (22 page)

T
aped onto the bathroom mirror with jaggedly torn sections of masking tape was a crumpled copy of the metro section with my story in it, the interview, and this note scrawled on it in blue ink:
It's not funny to me.
My stomach began to sting and burn, like acid, and a panic went through me so quickly it seemed as if I quit breathing for two or three seconds and was suddenly sweating and slammed my head into the doorway because I couldn't see or forgot to see, realizing I'd hurt Janice, rushing through me the panic that she could be gone. I called her at work, the woman on the phone saying she was at lunch. I was supposed to eat but my stomach was burning. I went back to the bathroom, looking at the crumpled story on the mirror,
it's not funny to me
, drinking some water from the faucet which I threw up into the toilet, praying to Jesus that whatever I'd done I'd know, that it would be explained, Janice showing her pain to me I'd try to take it back from her, absorbing all of it although I couldn't absorb her pain even if she'd allow me the attempt. Looking again at the paper on the mirror, trying to make my eyes focus on the print and whatever I'd done wrong, I read the lead saying: “A $2 million grant for AIDS research by epidemiologists at the University of St. Beaujolais comes out to about $2.99 per AIDS sufferer in America, or approximately the cost of a breakfast at Shoney's.”

Maybe the injury was there, contrasting an AIDS grant with how much it was worth per person per breakfast. I didn't know and couldn't have known, having no knowledge of whatever hurt her except that I came home for lunch and saw the crumpled newspaper taped on the bathroom mirror, not even thinking of returning to work then but waiting and waiting for Janice to get back to her office and I'd find out what I'd done and how far she'd moved from me that morning alone. I called again and she was in.

Cautiously I said, “Janice, what did I do? I saw the paper in the bathroom.”

“You don't even know,” she said distantly.

“I don't. You have to tell me.”

“That's just it. I don't
want
to tell you. You didn't know
to begin with that anything you could do so goddamn cleverly in the paper could have any effect on me, even though we were lovers.”

She said were. “Did the lead make you angry?” I said.

“And why would that make me angry?” she said quietly. “Why would I care that a newspaper story with
me
in it, representing
my
department and a major grant makes the public imagine we're all happily, joyously comparing the deaths of thousands of people with breakfast at Shoney's?”

She was both angry and hurt, and it wasn't going to end. Nor was there anything sensible or useful I could say then to explain why I did it or why I was stupid or that I was sorry for her because it wouldn't reverse anything or even seem honorable. But I said, “I'm sorry, Janice.”

“Well, I'm sorrier,” she said. “I'm writing letters to my bosses today explaining in detail that I said nothing at all to make you believe the department of epidemiology compares the worth of this grant to an ordinary breakfast, Kurt, because they might
think
that's what I told you.”

“But it's just
me
, the reporter, doing that. Won't they realize that?”

“They will when they get my letters, which they can use to explain to anyone else who asks, after reading your story today, if everyone at work is just having a lot of damn fun trivializing AIDS. And they
will
think that,
Kurt; just because you introduced the idea. And it doesn't matter that it's a harmless, clever idea. People are going to wonder if we've diminished the awful seriousness of this disease because it was so important to you to write something that pleased you. Well, it didn't please
me
, Kurt. You didn't even
tell
me you were doing that. You didn't call me and say, ‘Hey, guess what I've decided to write, Janice. I've decided to make your job seem fun and amusing, and screw the world if they don't like it.' And damn you for it, too, Kurt. It really hurt me, just goddamn hurt me to pick up the paper and read what you did, with no thought at all how it might affect me at work. So think about it now. I want you to stay away from the apartment for a while and don't call me. You hurt me, Kurt, and you didn't even know. Well,
know
it for a while.”

And she hung up.

I didn't. I dumbly held the phone to my ear as if she might be there again, even when the phone just buzzed. Before I cried, which I knew was going to happen in its pathetic and pointless way, I thought of praying again, praying that Janice would stop being hurt, that my sentence in the paper would be regarded as harmless by everyone, that Janice wouldn't leave me, and that I'd learn to know what might hurt Janice so I wouldn't do it; and even after I did it, prayed that prayer, I knew it wasn't going to work, that pain always grew and gathered strength in its
ordinary duty to smother us, and today I was its creator. It didn't come from some random force in the world. It came from me.

And then I didn't cry, possibly because I deserved pain, but not the luxury of my own sadness.

T
he psychiatrist said you aren't cured. You never are. The people who think they're cured are the most lethal because, having satisfactorily and wondrously pronounced themselves healed because it's so awful not to be, they naturally enjoy the delusion of being normal and ordinary and so they have one harmless beer or one harmless glass of wine or an obviously innocent mixed drink. Just one, as a public, celebratory ritual to prove that they aren't alcoholics because they don't
deserve
being alcoholics. Belief supplants fact. I'm well, I'm well. Don't worry, be happy. Reality only exists when I invent it, and so on. But when you take that drink and recognize its taste and feel that peculiar warm rush resulting in elation or euphoria, it's no
longer a celebration of being cured but a resumption of your slow and ugly suicide. You might as well jump into a blast furnace. It's quicker.

We don't have any blast furnaces around here. Will I have to drive to Pittsburgh for that? That's too far.

She said there will be stresses and fears and sadnesses you can't avoid, and you'll want to drink quite badly, like in the wine commercials on TV, with pretty, well-dressed women your age who appear to be so bright and healthy and voluptuous and sane as they chit-chat happily and have their friendly intimacies, and
they
aren't dying,
they
aren't being crushed with anxiety and depression as they cheerfully drink their delicate wine. But you are. What will you do when there's a great loss in your life?

Hurt.

Yes, you will. And you'll be tempted to drink, because it's the most exquisite painkiller and sedative you know. Do you use any other drugs?

Love.

Love's not a drug, generally.

It could be. The Food and Drug Administration wouldn't be able to regulate it.

Actually, love can be addictive.

I don't know why I talk to you. You depress me. Do you need a doctoral degree to depress me, or can less qualified people do it?

At home, which wasn't really home but just this building I was in filled with the constant absence of Janice, a complex emotional need that, once constructed, now had no source, a beer commercial came on TV with people dancing in the desert and a woman in her long summer dress smiling with love and sex and the personal moisture you could only smell up close, along with Michelob Dry. Everything was a complete, stunning absence, a hollowness in me that was expanding and getting hollower, as if I was overcome by the intense presence of nothing. My head felt swollen and I was afraid and put all the weights I had on my long steel bar, not even adding up the weights to wonder how heavy it was, just symmetrically arranging all of the weights on opposite ends and lifting it all over my head in such pain and wobbling violence to imagine, without hope, that I might exhaust myself enough to sleep, or exterminate my consciousness.

Which failed, and I knew I could go to the store, although Janice would be hurt by this, and buy dry sherry to numb my head and give me a kind of warm tranquillity that couldn't be shared or even healed. It didn't seem like Dante put any alcoholics in hell. Maybe this was wise. People who had tranquillity that needed to be healed would have found hell a little bit primitive.

To prevent or at least delay what was looking like the renewed slaughter of myself through incurable tranquillity, I went to an AA meeting. The only requirement you
had to meet to attend an AA meeting was that something was wrong with you. I was qualified. When I walked into the room, trying not to seem anxious or not to seem peculiarly calm or not to seem like I was seeming anything, I thought about walking up to one of the people, introducing myself, and saying the only thing I didn't like about AA meetings was that they let so many alcoholics in.

A few of the people I recognized from the last meeting I'd been to about five months ago, although most of them were strangers to me and probably strangers to each other. Of the thirty or forty people scattered across the room in plastic chairs or going into the little kitchen to fill styro-foam cups with hot coffee to have with their cigarettes, the majority were men, as if men were more reliable alcoholics than women. There were maybe a dozen women, and when I studied them casually and wondered what had happened to them, they looked as if they'd been hurt at least as well as the men. I didn't think anybody should hurt that well, but the room was filled with them. Us.

I wondered where Janice was, if she was having dinner at home or if she went out, maybe to talk with a more sane and pleasant man than me who would smile at her and not be a sudden and bewildering injury to her like I was, which was going to make me cry but I was trying to believe that being sad wasn't a privilege of mine anymore. I was the only one who knew about
this
drama, pretending I couldn't hurt because Janice did. Being crazy and fractured was for
me just too convenient. I wanted Janice to see me there and love me, to walk in the room and pull me out. That was just magic, and I never had magic.

The room was loud with private chatter and mumbling and some laughter before the meeting began, with people split up like at a party in their personal groups, or with solitary people sitting in pure quiet in all this noise, holding themselves in or holding themselves down, some of them looking as wounded and frantic as I was the night I quit drinking and had nothing to occupy me but endless panic. Nothing would actually characterize the whole group or be its identifying description. There was always too much detail, most of it hidden and never spoken, but in the two times I'd been to meetings before and this time, I always thought of the people as pretty brave to gather there with their common disease, one that was still despised and maligned as if they had knowingly and premeditatedly become ill, satisfying the public's desire for a contemptible enemy. I thought they were pretty brave just to look at each other. And me. I was one of them, too, although I had a neat psychological tendency, and I assumed others did also, to imagine myself to be among the best of the alcoholics, whatever that meant; as if in our fraternity of controlled illness,
my
disease wasn't quite as severe as other people's, or I was blessed with an ability to endure my disease more admirably and with less effort, like I'd get a fucking prize for the complexity and grace of my pain. Pain could be funny, if you did it right.

I didn't even know why I was there, unless it was the unbearable absence of Janice. And suddenly a concealed part of me, the demon who is just me, assumes it's now time to resume drinking because it gives you peace when no one else does. And even when you defeat that, it always comes back, waiting to placidly seduce you, which isn't hard. There is the sense that even when you are okay, you really aren't.

The man, some leader of the group, called for everyone's attention and established the beginning of the meeting, which was no more than everyone being quiet now, as anyone at all talked for a while about what was hurting them and scaring them, or some successes they were having. The ritual was to say your first name only and say you were an alcoholic, then begin talking about anything you wanted, which could get awfully sad, such as when a young woman named Dolores explained to us that she was already manic-depressive and one week ago she drank a quart of Tequila and began vomiting blood. It was like listening to ghosts, listening to characters from Dante's
Inferno
who'd been temporarily excused from hell to come to this room and describe what they hoped to escape, if something would only work. And we didn't know what was supposed to work, except the religion of not doing. I wouldn't really call it a church, since you couldn't look in a phone book and find the First Church of Not Doing, or Our Lady of Not Doing. But that was our religion, in a primitive and desperate sense. The veterans there, the guardians of the
AA doctrine, probably would've said Not Doing certainly wasn't a religion because actually they wanted you to have faith in Christ, insisting that this faith was the single power that could defeat alcoholism, but even so, that still made Not Doing a religion. The Church of Last Resort. It was odd to me that Christianity was this haven for alcoholics when you considered that during communion in Christian churches, you drank wine. I wondered if you could kneel at the altar one Sunday and, as the priest bent over to you with the wine in the chalice, say, “Don't tell me Christ's blood has
alcohol
in it.”

Something that began to annoy me was the ritual in which each speaker said only their first name and always added “and I'm an alcoholic.” The whole point of us being there was that
all
of us were alcoholics, and I found it kind of dumbly dramatic to make everyone say “and I'm an alcoholic.” Maybe this was good for some of us, to publicly acknowledge being an alcoholic, as if saying so in front of several dozen people cleansed them or helped make them brave. But it still annoyed me. It made me want to act as if it were my turn to speak, and I'd stand up, glance around the room to acknowledge the presence of everyone there, then say, “My name's Kurt, and I'm a Sagittarian.”