Drug Plane

I was fifteen, then sixteen, then twenty. My high-school friend was my now college roommate. His stepfather was less mysterious but more compelling. He was having trouble with his marriage. He was having trouble in general. I was drunk, all the time, and blurry from cocaine and antidepressants. I no longer wanted a father, I wanted something else. I don’t know what he wanted. What is it that goes to work in the morning and comes back home rumpled, tie loosened, top button unbuttoned? What is it really? What is its function? Why does it come back home? I didn’t want to be a son and I didn’t really want to be a husband. There wasn’t a name for it. How can you build a life with someone if you can’t build a life for yourself? How do you make yourself necessary? I couldn’t figure it out, so I concentrated on sleeping with strangers and doing drugs. I loved drugs. When there were drugs I would do all the drugs until there were no more drugs. The antidepressants weren’t working and I had no plans for getting better so I had decided to give up and settle in. What did I want? My best friend’s stepfather. I wanted him, or to be him, or to be like him with someone like him. He was a grown man and he was kind to me. I guess that’s all it took. My best friend’s stepfather, a double substitution. It’s cold. It’s early. My best friend’s stepfather is getting ready for work. Light from the kitchen spills into the carport. There is no one I can be, no role I can fill that will get me inside this house. I dreamed up scenarios. I went over them in my head. I broke him out of jail. He didn’t care. I saved him from a car crash. He was unmoved. I bought a drug plane. We smuggled drugs across the border. We did drugs all the time and flew back and forth, evading the law, but it didn’t matter. I imagined addictions and seductions, obligations, coercions, all manner of magic and threat. I was ulterior and predatory. I was gracious and charming. It didn’t work or it fell apart immediately. I couldn’t bend the story to my desire. There wasn’t a place he wanted to be, so it was impossible to maneuver him into one. I couldn’t get him to choose me. Even in my imagination, I couldn’t get his shirt off. I was trying to shoulder myself into something but it didn’t make sense. I was trying to get into his house but he wasn’t in his house anymore, he was down the street, in an apartment with his girlfriend, cheating on his wife. I didn’t have what he wanted. No one had what he wanted. He didn’t know what he wanted. I heard the propellers of the drug plane everywhere. I was in the waiting room, in the outpatient wing of a mental hospital, contemplating the inpatient wing, when I saw him. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Things must have gotten worse. I wanted to go over to him. I wanted to run away. My life was unraveling and he knew it. His life was unraveling and I knew it. It was ridiculous, the terms of the contract: silent and adjacent, silent and adjacent. It was impossible to navigate. It changed my breathing. There was a tenderness that I imagined could be there in a different situation. I still couldn’t imagine what kind of situation. I wanted to have a human moment but I didn’t trust myself. We were stories that didn’t touch, that shouldn’t. He waved hello from across the room and I waved back. Technically, it wasn’t a real moment.

Time Travel

I found a place to live. A friend had an extra room so there was space for me. It made sense, I was afraid to live alone. The first few months were bewildering. I was unable to remember where the light switches were. The bathroom made me nervous—it had a tub and shower combo and the rounded bottom was slippery. It was hard to step over the edge. My glasses were still broken but my vision hadn’t resolved. It didn’t make sense to get them fixed. I put my walker in the closet and started using a cane but I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t move my foot fast enough to switch from gas to brake. When it was time to refill my prescriptions, I couldn’t remember all the numbers in a row. I would lose my place and enter them into the phone in the wrong order. And I slept. I slept often and hard. I slept and slept and when I got up the avocados were black and the milk was sour. Sleep was a gap, a stutter in the sentence. Time was thick. It was slow and thick and dark. I added my forks to the fork drawer. I put my plates in the cabinet with the other plates. Things came in the mail. I looked at them but I didn’t understand them. I answered emails with anger, self-pity, and typos, or I didn’t answer them at all. I made calendars, lists. I labled the drawers: medications, bills, underpants. There wasn’t anyone to talk to but I practiced speaking out loud. Some words made my body hum. I didn’t like them. I used the words I could keep in the front of my mouth: quick, this, yes. The back-of-the-throat words made me queasy. Grease, glaze, sing. Phlegm, plague, Baton Rouge. Strangled and estranged. I didn’t like the throat feel, like glue or heavy cream. I didn’t like the reminder: This is your body, your stupid body. I didn’t want to be in this body, to make these sounds. I was different, not just broken but fundamentally struck-through. Eveything had shifted. People said I was the same but I didn’t feel it, craving lemon bars and and hot sauce, raisins and nuts, my seventh-favorite dessert raised up to number one, my favorite colors skewed toward green and gold. The emotional weight of everything was different, shuffled—the broken lunch box on the playground was sadder, the humor on the TV didn’t register, the strangest things would make me mad. Underpants. I wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it to the drawer.

Orbit

They moved me to a rehab facility several buildings down the road from the hospital. I didn’t know where I was and no one had told Drew. He couldn’t find me. I didn’t call for an ambulance when I stroked out. I wasn’t thinking right and I wanted someone to keep track of me because I was afraid of getting lost. Now I was lost. Drew called from the hospital. He said I wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to tell him. An ambulance is a cluster of things: a siren, fast duty, the right of way. An ambulance is hurry, pure function, it doesn’t care if you have your wallet or if your phone gets broken. It doesn’t care about the small potatoes because time is against you. Because there are minutes. Because the minutes are against you. Because sometimes you collapse on the sidewalk and turn into a swarm of bees. It only took Drew a few hours to get to me but I was unravelling. I could hear myself getting louder. It seemed inescapable. He sat on the bed with me and I yelled at him. I yelled at him until I wore myself out. Is this who you are now? I don’t remember him leaving but I woke up hours later alone. The bed had a control pad. There was a button for the nurse and buttons that raised or lowered the back of the bed. I raised and lowered the back of the bed for a while. My arm was slow. My leg was useless. I was frustrated. I held on to the rail at the side of the bed and stared at the wall. I had forgotten the regular things I obsessed about—my favorite ugly places, where I would dwell endlessly: old wounds, slights, embarrassments. Now the weight of their importance seemed questionable. I had done worse, been hurt worse. The field had been swept clean of habit. I circled regrets I had forgotten. I dredged up deeper shames. I didn’t know who had forgiven me or hadn’t. I circled new darknesses, things I had buried. I forgot how to suppress them. A satellite finds its orbit once it’s hurled around the earth, endlessly falling as it’s held in place. A planet circles in its groove; it finds its path, a dirt rut—and that’s the shape of things. The solar system spins in its galactic arm, nine trillion miles long. The center holds but moves.