Slowly We Rot (10 page)

          The time had come to
hit the road, but Noah remained atop the SUV a few moments longer, surveying
the clogged lanes of eternally stalled traffic.  It struck him that he was
sitting in the middle of a vast graveyard.  Not only that, but he’d slept in
it.  Being a lone wanderer in the ruins of the old world was bad enough, but
this impression genuinely disturbed him.  It made him feel like a ghoul.

          Noah climbed down from
the SUV, packed his gear, and strapped on the utility belt.  He felt another
twinge of the surreal as he started walking.  Strolling down the middle of an
interstate highway with no fear of being squashed flat by a trailer truck just
felt strange.  Stranger still was the near absolute silence.  There were all
sorts of noises he associated with a sea of unmoving vehicles.  Horns honking, a
steady rumble of engines, music blaring from open windows, maybe a scream of
sirens as emergency vehicles streaked along the shoulder of the road to a wreck
somewhere far up ahead.  But there was none of that.  The only sounds were the
soft sighing of the mild breeze, the tread of his shoes on asphalt, and his own
breathing.  It was spooky enough that he whistled for a bit just to hear
something else, but he soon stopped.  The whistling didn’t feel right in the
midst of all this echoing nothingness.

          The miles ticked by as
the morning lengthened and grew warmer.  In a few hours, he caught his first glimpse
of tall buildings in the distance, denoting the location of Knoxville’s
downtown area.  At first they were just blurs on the horizon, but they came
into crisper focus another mile or so down the road.  Road signs promised
downtown exits not far ahead.  For a while, he considered going into the city
to forage for supplies.  There were some good reasons to follow the impulse. 
Even a dead city would still possess a wealth of potential resources, far more
than he could hope to find in the vast nothing between cities.  He might even
get really lucky and find a working vehicle, one that had been stowed in a
garage and protected from the elements all this time.

          But even a car
protected from the elements would have a dead battery by now.  And
if
he
could procure a functional battery, which he doubted, it wouldn’t matter,
because any gas left in the tank of a long-unused car would have gone bad long
ago.

          Noah dropped the idea
and did not veer into the city as the exit ramps drew closer.  He figured he’d
wind up wasting a lot of time there to no good end.  He had enough food and
water to last him a little while yet, so onward he went.

          Time crept by.  More
miles ticked away.  He began to near the outskirts of the western side of the
city.  The lanes of stalled traffic had thinned out for a while, but now he
discerned a thicker concentration of vehicles up ahead.  This was where traffic
had ground to a halt flowing out of the city in the direction of Chattanooga. 
As he drew closer to the tangle of vehicles and observed more signs of long ago
chaos, he thought about all these people making that last minute call to get
out of the city before it was overrun.  He couldn’t understand why they had
waited so long.  On the other hand, his dad had acted far earlier than most and
it still hadn’t been soon enough to avoid tragedy.

          Noah supposed he
couldn’t blame these people too much for their shortsightedness.  The majority
of people in the civilized world simply hadn’t been able to believe society
could collapse that quickly.  They’d had a blind faith in the ability of the
people in charge to come up with a solution.  When it finally became clear
there would be no solution, it was too late for almost everybody.

          Noah shifted his
shoulders and pulled at the straps of the backpack, an attempt to relieve the
discomfort of bearing the weight of the thing.  It was nearly time to stop and
take his first rest of the day, maybe even help himself to a few more sips from
the canteen.  Before doing that, he did a mental inventory of the pack’s
contents, frowning when he remembered the two fifths of Maker’s Mark.  The
impulse to bring the booze along bothered him, as did the way he’d rationalized
it.  Given his penchant for alcohol-related disaster, having the bottles in the
pack was like carrying around a pair of ticking time bombs.  Getting rid of
them when he stopped would be the smart thing to do.  Not only would he have
removed a dangerous temptation, but the pack would be lighter, too.

          Another fifty-some
yards down the road, the desire to stop and rest moved into the realm of
absolute necessity.  He removed the pack, leaned against the median, and drank
some water.  These weren’t the conservative sips he’d limited himself to until
now.  He knew as soon as he’d done it what a mistake it was, but he blamed the
distraction of his troubled thoughts for it.

          After he capped the
canteen and reattached it to the utility belt, he knelt and opened his pack,
rooting through the contents until he’d located the bourbon bottles.  He pulled
them out and stared at them a long while, trying to work up the will to smash
them on the asphalt.  Many minutes passed as his thoughts drifted back to his
troubled past.  His hands clenched tight around the necks of the bottles as he
remembered still more things he’d tried hard to forget.

          In the end, he returned
the bottles to the pack, rearranging the contents to ensure they were secure. 
He wrapped clothes around them for padding to reduce the risk of accidental
breakage.  Once this was done, he sat with his back against the median and
cursed his weakness.

16
.

Six years ago…

The name of the place was
Discoveries.  It was a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center, probably
the best-known one in the area.  Noah had seen ads for the place on TV.  In them,
an announcer whose tone straddled the line between somber and optimistic promised
addicts a place of tranquility where they could rediscover themselves as they
began their “journey of recovery”.  The ads boasted of a relapse rate among the
lowest in the country.

          Noah had snickered at
the ads when he was younger, secure in the belief that he would never set foot
in such a place, which were only for losers and weak people unable to manage
their habits.  His was a life of promise and privilege.  His dad made a good
living and provided well for his family.  They’d never wanted for anything.  He
just wasn’t the kind of person who wound up hopelessly hooked on substances or
locked in a seemingly intractable downward spiral.

          But life had surprised
him in a lot of nasty ways in the year since graduating high school.  One of
the biggest shocks was how emotionally unprepared he was for dealing with
moments of genuine setback.  At first it seemed he would bounce back from the
one-two punch of his “breakup” (if that was the right word) with Lisa and the
academic disaster that was his first semester of college.  He got a job shortly
after coming home in early December and did his best to convey an image of
repentant sobriety.  It was an act he managed to pull off convincingly through the
holiday season and a few weeks into the New Year.

          In truth, however, he
was partying hard with his new coworkers at the Winn-Dixie grocery store in his
hometown.  He was able to maintain the façade of sobriety for a time because he
was rarely at his parents’ house that first month back.  When his shift ended
at midnight, he would go off with his friends and drink until dawn.  Sometimes
there was cocaine involved and the party would go on even longer.  The group he
partied with all lived the same way.  They’d sleep through the day and get up
just in time to go back to work.  Noah always crashed wherever he happened to
pass out any given night.

          He was drowning his
sorrows in a big way, but at the time he managed to convince himself he was
having fun.  The truth became apparent when his excesses began to go well
beyond those of his hard-partying friends.  He drove his Camaro off the road
one night and crashed it into a tree.  The car was totaled and later he
realized he probably should have died.  It was pure luck he’d been wearing his
seatbelt that night, because this was something he frequently forgot to do.  He
walked away from the crash and hid out at a friend’s place overnight.  The next
day he told the cops the car had been stolen and probably crashed by the
thief.  The cops were dubious, as were his parents, but no charges were filed. 
He got off lucky that time, relatively speaking.

          Next came the punch-up
at the grocery store.  He showed up for the shift with a few beers already
under his belt.  This wasn’t unusual behavior for the store’s young, minimum
wage-earning staff.  It was, in fact, a point of twisted pride.  But most of
his Winn-Dixie pals managed their intake better than Noah, achieving just a
mild buzz for the early hours of the shift.  The day of the punch-up he came in
smelling like a brewery, having made no attempt to disguise his breath.  Some
customers complained to management and there was a confrontation.  Noah decked
his supervisor.  That was his last day at Winn-Dixie.  His father somehow managed
to talk the supervisor out of pursuing charges.  Noah guessed there was an
exchange of money.

          His father was livid. 
The next few days at home were punctuated by screaming arguments.  Noah fled
the house in a rage after one of them and soon thereafter crashed the
replacement car his father’s insurance had purchased for him.  Once again, the
car was totaled.  This time there would be no avoiding legal trouble.  There
had been some damage to public property and he hadn’t been able to walk away
from the wreck.  He was given probation and a suspended sentence on the
condition that he complete an eight week in-patient rehab.  As an added
incentive to stay on the straight and narrow, his father warned Noah he would
be kicked out of the house and barred from returning if he ever again caught so
much as a whiff of alcohol on his breath.

          And so now he found
himself sitting in the waiting room at Discoveries.  There were other people in
the room with him, more incoming patients sitting quietly with supportive loved
ones.  Noah was alone.  His parents hadn’t accompanied him.  They were still
too angry.  He guessed he could understand that, especially since he was
effectively here under coercion and not because it was what he wanted.  And his
friends from Winn-Dixie weren’t talking to him anymore.  So he was on his own,
unlike all these other people.  He felt lonely and unloved.  And now that he
was sober, he couldn’t help thinking about Lisa again and wondering how things
could have ended the way they did.  It was unfair.  The universe was conspiring
against him.  Or so it felt.

          He had tears in his
eyes when he was summoned into the intake counselor’s office.  The counselor
asked him what was wrong as they took their seats, and Noah said, “I fell in
love with a girl.”

          The counselor, whose
name was Dwight Cook, nodded and said, “It may feel that simple to you, Noah,
but in my experience, there are often underlying issues when it comes to
addiction, things that go well beyond these obvious trigger episodes.  In
group, we’ll help you explore these issues.  We’ll also introduce you to some
new ways of coping with your troubles.  You won’t be cured when you leave
here.  There’s no such thing for addicts.  But we’ll do our best to help you
discover a better way forward, that much I promise you.”

          Noah nodded.  “I’d like
that.”

          This was a lie.  He’d
never wanted a drink more than he did in that moment.  The craving for booze
only increased throughout his stay at Discoveries.  He was shaking from the
need for it at times, but he did his best to play the game and say the things
he figured the counselors wanted to hear.  In group sessions, he shared like
everyone else, telling his tales of substance-related woes with the same mix of
regret and self-deprecating humor that was the norm for patients at
Discoveries.  Noah thought he did a good job of acting the part.  As far as the
counselors and his fellow patients were concerned, he was a guy who’d gained
some hard-earned wisdom from his experiences, one with a genuine interest in
recovery.

          Lies upon lies.

          Many of his fellow
patients, he soon realized, were playing the same game.  They made a show of
accepting the blatantly false things the others said at face value.  After all,
they were all in it together.  Why not make things easier on each other by
glossing over hard things as much as possible?  The counselor leading the
sessions would usually try to keep things on point and honest, but it was a
difficult, close to impossible job.  Noah was therefore able to float along in
group without much difficulty until his fourth week at the center.

          That was when a new
patient saw through his bullshit and, rather than ignoring it like everyone
else, called him out on it.  As usual, when it was Noah’s turn to share, the
subject eventually shifted back around to Lisa.  Also as usual, he took care to
emphasize how young he was and how he’d been unprepared for such a crippling
emotional blow, implying that his substance issues stemmed entirely from this
incident and would probably go away for good if he could just finally get over
her.