The parking lot for the Center for Addictions Treatment was in the back of the building, as was the front door. The entrance opened on the only addition to the original farmhouse, a smallish room where the receptionist sat at one of two desks. The area was called the secretarial pod. The entrance to Ray’s office, both medication and technician area, was right behind the secretary’s desk. To the left was another door, kept closed, which led down the hallway to the client sleeping rooms, the dining room and the kitchen.
There was a phone right inside the front door (or the back door, depending upon who you asked). When Ray wanted to smoke, he would lean out the front door, propping it open with his back in such a way that he could see down the hallway if he propped that door open as well and answer the phone should it ring. Smoking was prohibited inside the building, a policy which grew increasingly unpopular with both the staff and the clients as the course of the year wore on. By December, Ray would have to do weekly fire drills around three a.m. as a way of politely reminding his anti-social and policy impaired population that any building more than a century old was actually little more than well formed kindling. After enough of those, any problem he had been having with people smoking in the building usually went away. Given the right incentives, even this population could be relatively self-regulating.
The telephone rang before Ray was even half-finished with his cigarette.
“Admit it now, Ray.” She sounded petulant.
“Fine, I admit it. Do I get the booby prize?”
“That depends on whether you intended a double entendre or not.”
“Of course I did.”
“Then you lose. Get your mind out of the gutter.”
He took a drag on his cigarette, then made himself sound insulted. “I’m not the one sitting around naked and calling strange men in the middle of the night.”
“I’m not naked.”
“Oh, I forgot. Panties.”
“And socks and bathrobe now, thank you very much.”
“Extortionist! You led me to believe we were still having an honest conversation predicated on the fact of your nudity. I take it all back.”
“We’re on the phone. I’m allowed to lie.”
Hung in his own noose. He liked that. It pleased him to be caught by her in such a way.
She continued. “So what happened this morning? Everyone said you had a meeting, but no one’s talking about details. You know how I love mysteries.”
In fact, he did. He knew she carried three paperbacks (and little else) in her purse at all times. She was reading often when he arrived at work. When she had been new to the job, she had been plowing through the collected works of Sherlock Holmes. It had given him an excuse at conversation, though he was not normally a big fan of detective fiction. He did, however, like Doyle.
“Detectives,” she had said at the time, “have a quality I admire, at least the Golden Age ones. Poirot” She had used the correct pronunciation. “Holmes, others, they practice their craft in an ordered universe. The mystery is a logical puzzle that depends upon perspective. The clues are only kaleidoscope glitter which, when turned, reveal meaningful patterns. But this only works because order is assumed as the foundation of human and social life. Crime is an eruption of chaos into that order, an aberration the detective rectifies. It’s a very comforting universe to escape to. A little counter-Darwinian it seems to me, but a nice place to visit.
“The detective is only good at solving the mysteries, though, because he understands the way the chaos functions; he understands the mind of the criminal. Watson talks about how Holmes would have been a delicious criminal, uncatchable, if he hadn’t chosen to be a detective. That’s what I like. These men are capable of embracing chaos, crime, ugliness—they are perfectly comfortable living in that terrain. They can thrive there in the darkness, but something inside them, some critical element, turns their heads toward a restoration of order and normality and good.
“And even then, society marginalizes them. Did you ever notice how the idiots at Scotland Yard don’t like Holmes? Of course, he’s stealing their thunder, but it’s more than that. They don’t trust him. It’s like they know he could be their worst nightmare if he only chose to be. The tenuous nature of his connection to ordered society terrifies them. But I look at them and all I can think about is the titanic struggle it must be to be good when being evil would be so much easier, so much more fun, so much more profitable. It seems to me the definition of nobility.”
Ray had known then, at that moment, that she was a recovering addict. It was easy to read between the lines. He began to read a few mysteries himself after that, mostly volumes she had recently discarded or mentioned that she particularly liked. It gave them a common reference for conversation. But unlike her, his natural tastes ran toward the post-modern. Pynchon, especially Pynchon.
“So what was the deal with the meeting?” she prompted him.
“We reviewed the last contact with the client, made sure the chart was in order in case a review is called. Standard stuff,” he said. “I didn’t have much to say. I mean, he and I didn’t really connect before he took off.”
She hummed in his ear. Ray could almost imagine her rubbing her chin, pretending she was that Marple broad. “He didn’t state an SI or anything?”
“No suicidal ideations, at least not to me. Definitely no mention of a plan. I’d have called Emergency Services or shipped him off to the hospital. You know that.”
She gave it up with a verbal shrug. “It doesn’t really surprise me. He seemed troubled from the start, but withdrawn, too. Whatever was bugging him, he wasn’t going to talk to us about it.”
“And he shouldn’t,” Ray added.
The totem pole of mental health bureaucracy had lodged them both very near the bottom under the label “psych-technician”. They were prohibited by professional guidelines from dispensing treatment advice. If a client even wanted to talk about addictions issues, the tech’s singular duty was to refer him to somebody with letters after their name. This was not a condition about which most technicians complained, though it was frequently inconvenient for clients who had trouble understanding the necessity of scheduling their crises between nine and five when there were professionals deserving of the title on the premises.
But they adapted or didn’t stay long. The suicide had lasted less than seventy-two hours. But, as she had said, the kid was noticeably withdrawn, isolated, and probably wouldn’t have spoken to the counselors even had he hesitated until after nine to elope.
“You’re up late,” Ray said after a time.
“There’s a guy in my bed.”
“You’ve got a couch.”
“I feel creepy going to sleep when I haven’t even spoken to him. It’s like having a stranger in the house.”
“Or a white elephant at the table.”
He wasn’t going to advise her to kick the guy out again. It was her problem. She’d figure out something or fall asleep trying. He had given what he considered the best solution to the problem, and frankly, her ambivalence about pursuing it bugged him. The guy bugged him, and her impenetrable feelings toward him bugged Ray even more. His cigarette had burned down to the filter. He tossed it on the ground and put his heel on it, but decided not to go back inside just yet.
“You could come back here, hang out,” he offered, though it sounded pathetic to him to do so.
“No thanks! I wasted enough of my evening there.”
The alacrity with which she dismissed his offer—dismissed without even a hint of playfulness—disappointed him.
“Go have sex with him. At least you’ll get some sleep.”
He had wanted to say go fuck him, to make it sound dirty, disgusting, even a little bestial. His head filled with the image of this stranger as a chiseled and olive adonis, pushing his wide salami cock up her asshole. She made a grunting noise, on her hands and knees, looking back at him over her shoulder, part pleasure, part surprise, part pain.
He kept imagining her firm, round ass and the sound that was both pain and not pain. A mimicry of a feeling she thought she was supposed to be having when she, in fact, was having it not at all.
A sense that she secretly liked the thing that repelled her, horrified her. That she had become something she hated or was doing something she hated, and finding it not so bad after all.
Ray wondered if he felt that way only because he had heard addicts talk like that about using. Loving it and hating it at the same time. Being fascinated by your hatred and powerlessness until the fascination became a kind of love, a way to abrogate the self-hatred that came along with the shame of impotency.
Addicts thought that way whether they realized it or not. Even years into sobriety they kept up the pattern, often substituting a “safe” thing for the destructive. Sex was a popular substitute. Ray knew, had seen, had heard, and all manner of warped and dysfunctional relationships blossomed in early recovery as a result. Because the pattern of thinking took longer to eradicate than the behavior. It was always easier to control what your body did than what your mind wanted to do. In AA, it was said a man could be sober his whole life without ever being in recovery. Ray had come to understand it in this way.
Four years was not a very long time. She would have been the first to say so, in fact had said so. She once told him, “Every day the twenty-four year old addict in me has this big argument with the four year old sober kid inside me. They have it out over who’s going to get to run the show even just for today. But the kid, she’s no dummy. She knows if the old girl gets to hold the reins of the chariot, she’s not going to give them back for a very long time. And so far, the kid has always won.”
Four years. Not a very long time at all.
Substitution. Prostitution. They kind of rhymed. Jewish mystics had perfected a system for analyzing the content of the Torah based upon substituting number values for the letters in the alphabet. It was called Gematria. The idea was that any two words which added up to the same value had the same meaning. Thus, God equals love. Same number value. Ray wondered if in Hebrew substitution and prostitution had the same value. Maybe only if you took them out of the Hebrew translation of the Big Book rather than the Torah.
Ray winced at himself, regretting his own thoughts, what felt like his own insight. He had crossed a line, seen too deeply into her. The penetration—and his willingness to penetrate—disturbed him. It made him feel dirty, like a voyeur or a purveyor of secrets. She had become, for that moment, an object. Objectified. Non-individuated. She had become a story in the newspaper of an earthquake in Nepal that killed four hundred kids in an orphanage. Tragic, but without any personal impact. Something sad, but which did not touch him.
Ray lit another cigarette. He did not want to think of her as just another addict.
*
As Hank had frequently advised him, Ray had adopted the habit of caution. On the filing cabinet in which the current client files were kept under lock, there was a bumper sticker which read Cover Your Ass. Hank claimed he had put it there. It was, he said, the official night shift motto, passed on to green schleps like Ray to remind them that they worked alone, and therefore possessed no recourse to corroboration for their version of events. Though a staff member’s word was ostensibly worth more than that of a client, especially in a legal proceeding, the only guarantee that justice would tip its hat in a tech’s direction was adequate documentation.
It’s not what you say, but what you record that matters. You can get as creative or retroactive as you want to back up your position, as long as you write it down. After that, it doesn’t matter what anybody says, because the accepted truth is there in black and white for the clinical world to see.
And the clinical world will always believe the chart, the documentation, regardless of its source. Because the beginning of doubt is akin to the opening of Pandora’s box. It would be the death knell for a profession one step removed from pseudo-science status.
For this reason, when Ray had received the first AA call about the suicide kid, he had immediately taken the chart, trudged to the back office and photocopied every goddamned page. For his own reference.
If he was going to have to cover his ass, he was going to make sure his narrative was consistent with everyone elses.
*
With a practiced eye, a clinical chart can be a revelatory thing, a way to piece together, tile by tile, the mosaic of an entire life. Their traumas, their medication histories, the secrets they thought were just between themselves, their therapists and the walls. The availability of this kind of information is not a closely guarded secret. The average counselor or therapist in the mental health system has to do a reconstruction of this type every day so they’ll have an idea what the hell to talk about to the total strangers who stroll into their offices eight hours a day. Any professional worth his salt learned long ago that their most valuable skill is not listening, caring or even intuitively grasping the murky core of their client’s problem, but rather haranguing the living fuck out of his screening staff so he doesn’t end up looking like a complete idiot in front of the customer.
Even drunks do not respond to obvious fools with immediate trust.
It would be a good idea, Ray had realized, if he knew something about the suicide kid before somebody started asking him questions. There wouldn’t be (and as it turned out, was not) much in the chart, because the kid was nineteen and had never received addictions services before. Ray had been hoping he had been the receptor of some other branch of service, though he expected no better than he got.
In one sense, the dearth of documentation was good, because it gave Ray more latitude in establishing the actual events—no one else would have the benefit of knowing any more about the kid than Ray did. No one else would be able to contradict the pattern of events and the implied psychological framework upon which those events were built which Ray himself would project.
Still, the rankling anorexic look of the chart troubled him. The only paperwork in it was that done at CAT. Good in the sense that no one in the mental health universe knew the kid from Adam. Bad in that Ray would have to go searching for fabric if he was going to start making shit up out of whole cloth.
What he learned as a result was basic. Don Ackerman had come in at roughly nine o’clock in the evening, some eight odd hours after his last use—an eighty dollar speedball taken IV—and had more or less given his name, address and phone number. He had signed every form from the Consent to Treatment to the Eating Disorders Contract. But to every question, every form of inquiry which would have given concrete information about himself or his history, he had simply said a yes or no in such a way as to not have to say anything else.
Have you ever had any other incidents of substance abuse treatment? No.
Do you have any history of mental illness, either personally or in your family? No.
Did you ever try any substance other than heroin? No.
Have you ever been arrested? No.
How about broken bones, surgeries, hospitalizations? No.
Ever been physically abused? Sexually abused? No.
Have you been through withdrawal before? Yes.
Just on your own, then? Yes.
Any serious physical problems during those times? Seizures, convulsions, violence? No.
Do you mind if I just make some shit up so somebody will believe you are actually a real person?
When the standard admission questionnaire failed to provide the relevant data (which was not extremely uncommon—the incoherently drunk often aren’t conversive, and the guys who have answered the same damned questions a dozen other times become recalcitrant about one more go around), the admission note prepared by the admitting staff usually filled in the salient details. How the client seemed, how they reacted to the process, to the questions. Sometimes silences were as informative as outright lies.
This note read: The client appears guarded.
No, Ray had thought, shit.
Similarly, upon admission, ninety nine out of a hundred new clients asked one of two questions: Will you have to tell my PO I’m here? Or, How soon can I use the phone? Because both inquiries were keys to understanding a given individual’s motivations for treatment, both in terms of content and sincerity, it was standard procedure to include a comment on which one they asked.
Don Ackerman hadn’t bothered with either. He had, by all available evidence, gone straight to bed. A couple days later, he had gotten out of bed, utilized the same level of communication skills, and slipped away.
In the interim, his vital signs had been good, his perceived withdrawal trajectory was normal, his physical complaints minimal to non-existent. Piecing together every available resource, Ray could definitively conclude that Don Ackerman, the suicide kid, was just as determined in death to hide what the fuck had been going on with him as he had been in life.
And that he was fast becoming a rather large pain in the ass to have only marginally existed.
*
The impromptu chart review session to which Ray was summoned as a result of the suicide and for which he had copied the chart to prepare, was not the official review. That one would be conducted in depth by the mental health center, an independent panel of therapists and the center’s lawyer. The CAT meeting was a localized phenomenon responding to tragedy, a Red Cross triage for the chart. It was, in fact, just what Ray had done with his own kidnapping of the chart, only on a larger scale.
The only invited guests were Ray (because he had no choice) and his boss (because she had been through this process enough times over the years to know just what squeaks needed tweaks).
In the meeting that morning, Ray had given a narrative account of events which concluded with the suicide kid’s departure. The facts according to Ray. In relating his gospel account, he had, by and large, said just what he was expected to say based on his memory (both actual and enhanced) of the events of the day the kid had eloped.
One moment the kid was there, the next he was gone.
Shortly after the event, Ray had followed standard charting procedure and crafted an innocuous discharge note, written in such a way that it both protected the facility and himself as well as betrayed no knowledge of the client’s subsequent actions. This had been easy, since during the point at which he’d written the orignial note, he’d had no knowledge of subsequent actions.
However, he’d kept in mind that in the event of subsequent actions, that is, should actions which would be deemed objectionable to legal representatives of the recently eloped client happen to occur, it was always a good a idea to have written the average discharge note in such a way that no suggestion of knowledge or premonitions relating to those general classifications of actions was hinted at.
Something like: I don’t know nothing except that he left.
You shouldn’t say: Bob really wanted to go drink again. He got into his car saying he was driving straight to a bar where he was going to get really loaded, then drive home so blitzed he couldn’t even open his eyes, where he was going to stumble inside the door, grab his loaded .38 pistol out of the nightstand and fire six consecutive shots into the head and body of his domestically violenced wife for having him arrested a couple of weeks ago, sent to jail and subsequently sentenced by an officially recognized and duly elected judge of the Monroe County Circuit Court two weeks in an addictions treatment inpatient program. Staff believes the client may have been just pissed off enough when he left to do such a thing.
The logic behind this disparity between the actual or suspected events and the manner in which things were recorded might be confusing to folks mired in a sane version of reality. To mental health professionals, it made perfect sense.
And as confusing as the logic might or might not be, the notes themselves were not confusing at all. Mental health professionals understand that in most cases, they cannot afford to be misunderstood.
In the case of the suicide kid, Ray’s original discharge note was not much different in form or content than any discharge note written for any other client. It had conformed to the accepted industry standards.
Technically, he was assured after his boss had reviewed it, he had done nothing wrong. Just, in delicate situations like these—suicides and mass family executions and whatnot—_everything right_ was preferable to nothing wrong. Documentation had to reflect a certain chain of events, an argument that both Ray and the facility in general had done everything within their power to prevent the kid from leaving. To prevent bad things—which, of course, they couldn’t predict, because everything had seemed fine at the time—from happening. They had done everything legally required of them to protect the victim from himself.
It was determined that Ray’s original note—which was shredded as he wrote its replacement—had simply been too general in its non-betrayal of knowledge. It was innocent, naïve about the future, anticipatory of the lamb wending its own way home without a shepherd’s intervention.
The second note was crafted, Machiavellian, byzantine, loaded with implied intrigue by stressing certain things which before had gone unstressed. It was post facto and anticipatory in its own way. A very measured statement of what the first note had only assumed would be understood.
We spoke briefly, and he stated no plan of intention to harm himself.
Both stories told, the original and the revised, were more or less true. The nuances might have been contradictory, but both held accurate accounts of the incident. Only the perspective had changed.
For all that, the note which actually appeared in the chart was fairly short.
5/17/99 Unauthorized Discharge Note: The client elected to leave the treatment program this morning at 8:00a.m. Other clients report that the client had expressed dissatisfaction with the trajectory of his treatment progress. He had declined to approach the counseling staff with his concerns. Staff spoke with him briefly around 7:30a.m., but the client stated no intention of leaving the program at that time. The client did not approach staff a second time before terminating his treatment episode without consulting staff. Clients on site at the time reported observing the client leaving on foot. Staff received this information at 8:30a.m. A search of the facility and grounds revealed the client was absent. Staff’s assessment based upon the evidence of client behaviors and documented medical assessment data is that client was in acute opiate withdrawal and was unwilling to receive treatment at this time. Should he return, addictions services should again be extended.
That was fine. It placed the responsibility squarely on the client’s shoulders, it reiterated the program’s mission statement of providing access to the tools necessary for early recovery. (Ray personally thought the last line about extending services again was laying it on a bit thick, but other, more legally minded individuals had insisted upon it). The note also restated the next part, the unofficial part of addictions treatment philosophy, the part about horses and water troughs. If they don’t get it, fuck ‘em. It’s their own fault. We’ve got ten people on the waiting list all ready to snap up their spot. Somebody who really wants recovery should get it anyway.
Once, Ray had talked to a friend who worked at a halfway house on the other side of town. She had told him that they were having problems with a guy on their waiting list who was so desperate to get in that he had taken to putting chilled six packs of beer on the porch every morning for the current residents. He figured it would speed up their discharge rate and consequently his own arrival date. Ray and his friend had only chuckled about it. How clever, he had said, and she had agreed. He must really want in.
*
Business concluded, chart in order and adequately girded against scrutiny, Ray’s employer had turned her attention on him. It never occurred to her that he should not find this incident disturbing. It did, however, occur to him that he should allow her to keep her illusions on that score.
Gladys Fuller was a mammoth figure. Not in terms of her physicality; she was actually quite tall, thinnish, graceful in an earthy sort of way. She was old enough to be his mother and had been “doing addicts” (as she called it) longer than Ray had been alive. She was so grounded, she left furrows wherever she stood from dragging her roots behind her. But she exuded energy. Her hands did not move when she spoke so much as they windmilled. She acted the way the word “frenetic” felt. On her desk in the Director’s office, she had a plaque which simply read “Change”. Her passion alone held the disparate strings, drives, motivations and troubles of the entire program in some approximation of cohesion. What she called a comfortable level of chaos.
“How are you, Ray?” She had asked, jabbing her finger at him as she spoke. Loud. It was the only volume she had.
“I’m okay,” he answered.
This was less than two hours after they had been officially informed of the fact of the suicide. Ray decided he could appropriately act numb. He had to relax his shoulders by pure force of will to keep them from shrugging on their own.
“Good. Stay that way. This is not your fault.”
She had offered a reassuring smile. And so it had gone.
*
“Are you still with me?” she asked.
Ray continued to smoke for a moment or two, his third cigarette of the conversation, as he attempted to frame some response that would lead him back to where they had been before, to see her as he had previously. He did not want her to know what he had been thinking. He did not want himself to remember what he had been thinking.
“I’m still with you,” he said finally, mostly certain.
“I thought maybe there was something going on there, except you didn’t seem to be screaming at anybody.”
“I’m outside,” he said. “Distracted.”
“You’ve got to get a handle on this, Ray. It’ll eat you up if you don’t.”
He realized she was still talking about the suicide. Why did everyone assume it bothered him at all? The kid was not the first to have kicked off. Ray read the obits every morning, looking for client names so he could post them on the bulletin board in the dining room. Object lessons for the current clients. The kid was not even the first suicide, just the most recent.
“I have the handle firmly in hand,” he said.
“Over the telephone, at least.”
“You think I don’t? Do I look like I feel guilty? Have I been acting grieved?” He was hissing at her, as if he was angry.
“Who could tell, Ray?”
*
“Some people can do this job,” Hank had told him, either as a warning or as a challenge. Ray couldn’t say for sure. “Some people can’t. Nothing bad there, nothing wrong with them. I don’t mean to imply anything like that.
“And I don’t just mean handling the drunks, either. I’m talking about the shift itself. You have to leave your humanity at home. It’s a matter of native capacity. It can’t be learned. You either have it inside you from the start or you don’t. It is not an acquirable taste.
“Both the job and the shift, but especially the shift, are exercises in isolation. Always alone, you have to learn how to be self-sufficient in everything. You have to know how to answer your own questions, how to objectify, how to depend on yourself. When you get to that place, that zen place, where nothing in the world matters to you, nothing touches you, except the moment—the here, the now, the what you are doing and the who that you are, then you’re set to do this job forever. But you’ve got to get there or you won’t last. You’ve got to be able to spend time with yourself without singing. To share the silence with your own mind and find the camaraderie comfortable. It’s not so easy as it sounds, to become a universe of one. Most of us just aren’t that interesting when we start out, at least not interesting enough to amuse ourselves forty or so hours a week every week.
“My point being that things tend to happen all at once here. One crisis spawns a dozen others unless you clamp a lid on it as soon as it erupts. All of these people are emotionally vulnerable and physically ill. That is a compounding dynamic. A threat to one of them is perceived as a potential threat to them all. You wait and see how when one guy decides to jump off the wagon the rest of them go like dominoes. His crisis is contagious. It’s like a lemming thing, believe me.
“You have to exist in a vacuum. You cannot get caught up in their crises. You cannot afford to connect to the situation or the cast of characters emotionally. Your role is to embody the rules, the procedures, the protocols. Even as you are reacting, making it up as you go along, you have to project an illusion of standard operating procedure. Tell the clients you’ve seen this before, dealt with this situation a dozen times, whatever. Make them believe you, even if it is a lie. No, check that, especially if it is a lie. They want to believe your competence. They need to, so the job is half done by them. All you have to manage is not fucking up the illusion. You get all tied up trying to save somebody from some bullshit crisis because you’re reacting to them on an emotional level—and the impulse to help is nothing more than a glorified way of describing the emotion of pity—and you’re causing yourself a whole world of problems.
“Embrace isolation and nobody dies, nobody gets hurt. Everybody goes away happy. Sure, some of them split to use because they’re all torn up or been talked into it or bullied into it or whatever the hell, but they’ll nearly always come back. You just got to not care about that. I’m not saying this is the best way to do things, Ray. I would love to have real doctors and real nurses here around the clock to handle medical emergencies and an individual counselor here at the same time for every yahoo in the facility, but us and most of the treatment places on this level and with a target population this far down and gone do not have that luxury. Hell, nobody does. We can’t afford that quality of care. All we can offer are solid people acting with a little common sense in uncommon circumstances. Most of the time, that’s going to be good enough.”
*
Cynicism, professional cynicism, has all the features of cruelty in the beginning. As a wide-eyed trainee, Ray had simply believed Hank and the others were flat out mean. Everything was rigid. The rules had no exceptions. There was no such thing as extenuating circumstances. Hank said frequently to clients who had fallen on the wrong side of the rules, “Only God can give second chances. I am not God.”
That was right before he kicked them out in the rain at two thirty in the morning with no place to go, no way to get there and no hope for the immediate or distant future.
It took less than a month for Ray to understand. Chaos is porous. It’s edges seep, forming and reforming. Its surface is plastic and moldable. Structure is rigid. It has to be to contain the darkness. There are doors, but chaos, because it is liquid, floods the exits as they open. Better that the doors never be open than to have all the compartments fill and founder the entire vessel.
Ray’s boss called their work being on the frontlines. A military metaphor, like they were soldiers in a secret civil war, fighting against an amorphous enemy. It often seemed that the clients themselves were the enemy. They were the faceless, unindividuated Them. Frank Capra’s “identical prints off the same photographic plate.” It seemed ludicrous, counter-productive.
But really, it was all about discipline. Hank called it transcending the limitations of human compassion, but sometimes it felt more like dehumanization.
There are two kinds of cynicism: that which expects nothing but hopes for everything, and that which expects everything but hopes for nothing. Both are surprised by anything out of the ordinary. Success is always a shock because it is rare. It is an aberration. As such, it can be a dangerous manifestation of chaos.
In the recovery community, addictions professionals like to say, “Our goal is to put ourselves out of business.” The idea is that everyone can be saved, should be saved. But at the same time, everyone is stunned when someone actually succeeds. It is an industry which designs methods it fundamentally believes will not, cannot and do not work. Still, they call what they do “help”.
Help. A contextual word, either plea or mission.
It was a paradox Ray had never interested himself in resolving. It was, after all, outside the parameters of his job.
*
During his first week on the job, a client had decided it was appropriate to ignore Ray’s advice because Ray was not a recovering addict. Generally, he later discovered, addicts are not interested in the suggestions of people who have not shared their experiences. Non-addicts have nothing valid to say in the addicted or the recovering community. Having lived a normal life was not considered adequate credentials indicative of expertise for those aiming to achieve a normal life.
The non-recovering professional then must either lie about his substance abuse history to gain credibility or must simply give no advice or assistance at all.
This also had always seemed odd to Ray, but he used either technique as appropriate, when he had to talk to the clients at all.
*
She was still on the phone. He was still outside, leaning his shoulder against the door frame, though one of them—himself or the door—had gone numb several minutes before. He thought about getting a chair.
“You were married once, weren’t you?” she asked.
“Some time ago.”
“But you still wear your ring.”
He looked at his hand. White-gold band. After the divorce, he had moved it to his right.
“It’s a reminder,” he said, “of all the lousy things I’m capable of when I stop paying attention.”
“You sound like you still miss her.”
That made him laugh, a sarcastic, barking sound. “Not at all. I don’t even remember what it was like being married to her enough to miss it. We only lasted a couple of years. I was nineteen.”
It should have been sufficient explanation. A trite story of stupid youth and decisions rushed.
“So you had an affair,” she offered.
Another trite story which he confirmed. “Typical tale of growing apart, self-absorption, being bored and not noticing any of it until too late. That’s my side, anyway. I couldn’t tell you hers. I don’t think I ever asked.”
“Sounds like an ugly split.”
“I don’t know that I’d even say that. Maybe she thought it was. Again, I didn’t ask. I didn’t care enough to think about those types of issues.”
“But you wear the ring.”
“It hit her out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. We’d been drifting—I knew that, in some ways agonized over it. But I didn’t do anything to rectify it. Frustration feeds on itself, builds walls, atrophies your ability to care about finding the root of the problem. It all seemed so obvious. I mean, how can you not know your marriage is falling apart? When I told her about the affair, she seemed to just crumble. It was like watching her implode, like watching a mountain cave in. Clueless, she was that clueless about everything. I was ashamed that I had seemed to know about it all along without bothering to tell her.
“It was the most disgusting and destructive thing I’d ever done in my life. To shatter another person’s reality—love them, hate them or be indifferent—there is nothing worse you can do. The ring reminds me to walk lightly, to do as little harm as possible.”
“I didn’t know you were such an asshole.”
Ray frowned. “I hear the sound of my pedestal crashing.”
“At least you still had one,” she said. She sounded acrid. Or arid. “I lost mine a whopping two years into recovery. A guy asked me to marry him, a nice guy, but he had problems taking a retired hooker home to meet his mother. That’s what you get for being honest.”
“Once an addict, always an addict.”
“The same applies to assholes,” she said, and it was her turn to laugh. “Secret for secret, Ray. We’re getting honest again.”
It was a good time to hang up. They weren’t telling stories they hadn’t heard a hundred times before anyway.