The day shift arrived promptly at 8:00a.m. Ray told them everything they needed to know about the disposition of the clients in the house, which did not include the visit from the police detective, the arrival and departure of Jennifer Ackerman, or the call from Sam Boler. He did tell them about drunken Tom, just because they’d get a chuckle and roll of the eyes out of it, but neither of them expected to see him anytime soon even if he had gotten picked up by the police and jailed for a PI. They did not ask about the suicide kid, which allowed him to not feel guilty about not volunteering any information.
By 8:30a.m., Ray had completed the staffing process, shouldered the book bag he carried with him to work every night and pushed out the door. He felt rushed, though he wasn’t sure if it was anticipation of his expected date or fear of that same date. It was, he thought, completely appropriate for him to be nervous. The feeling was somewhat intoxicating.
Ray went to his car, parked right outside the front door beneath the pine tree. He opened the car door, tossed his book bag inside. As he lowered himself inside, a car turned into the parking lot behind him. Black, sporty, convertible with the top up because of the rain. He did not recognize it, and he paused short of closing his door. The vehicle rolled to a stop, blocking him in. The driver’s side window slid down eight to ten inches. Ray took that as a signal to get back out, turn around.
Beneath her sunglasses and blond hair, Jennifer Ackerman was not smiling. They watched one another for a moment. Ray said hello with a nod. If she had come to him again, it was not his responsibility to make the first move. He thought about the myriad ways in which his position could be compromised legally just by being seen talking with her.
“I’m on my way to the funeral,” she said.
What did one say to that? Have a nice time seemed both questionable in terms of taste and unsatisfactory with regards to the response she was obviously expecting from him. More to the point, what did someone in Ray’s position say, when he could not officially recognize that he knew her or the person to whom’s funeral she was going. The logic of silent acceptance, of passive listening worked at four in the morning when she and he were the only ones awake and alert. In the light of day, with staff witnesses who might question Ray’s judgement in fraternizing with an individual prepared to initiate a lawsuit against the facility, there were other considerations. There was less he could safely reveal.
She seemed to sense his discomfort, maybe even his dilemma. “I thought you might want to know that it was today. You may not have known my son, but as you said, you know me. I thought in sympathy for me you might think about coming along.”
“I think that would be awkward for both of us.” He said it loudly, too loudly, as though he expected the day shift to be eavesdropping.
“As a friend.”
“I don’t believe I qualify.”
“Of mine.” She made a bleak effort to smile, failed. Ray looked into his car, at the building, back to her. “I could use the emotional support from someone with your skills at neutrality. My ex-husband will be there. Him and his wife. We haven’t gotten along in the best of circumstances.”
“I have a previous engagement this morning.”
If he expected her to break down again, he was disappointed. Strangely enough, he did not. She had gone way beyond frailty since he had seen her last. Something in her demeanor suggested numbness, a numbness so profound it could easily be mistaken for strength.
“This should be brief,” she said. “Perhaps you could postpone your plans. I would like you to be there with me. It will be a mutual adventure in discovery, and someone with your background is more familiar with the types of things I might encounter.”
He stood there, waffling, wondering how it would look for him to be seen stepping into her car.
Very quietly, barely audible above her idling engine, she said, “Please, Ray. There isn’t anybody else.”
And that more or less clinched it. There was no graceful way to deny a grieving mother’s request. Protocols for such things did not exist, either in one of those handy etiquette books or in the version of human race memory Ray may or may not have inherited.
He said, “Let me make a call.”
*
Back inside, he slipped past the office, managing not to attract any attention because he did not demand it like the other six or seven people crowding the office door. He went down the long hall to the physician’s examination office and opened the door with his keys. He sat down at the desk, picked up the phone. It felt strange to be the one dialing her telephone number for once, though he found he did not have to refresh his memory with the rolodex to get it right the first time.
She answered on the fourth ring, sounding muzzy. “I fell asleep watching a movie,” she said. “I’m glad you called.”
“I’m going to be late.”
“Then I’m not so glad. Are you having second thoughts?”
“No.” He had said that way too fast.
She giggled.
“Something came up.”
“That’s supposed to be the whole idea.”
“Not that. Another tangle in the suicide kid saga.”
Instant concern on her part. He found it gratifying. “Do you have time to talk about it?”
“Not right now. I have someone waiting on me. I shouldn’t be later than ten thirty or so.”
She shrugged. “I’ll keep the bed warm and the door unlocked.”
He whistled. “Are you always this forward?”
“Only when I want to be.”
“Ten thirty,” he said.
“Not much later, Ray. I don’t want to be late for work this afternoon.”
In Ray’s experience, few people ever managed to effectively pass out when it was appropriate to do so. Nor did he this time.
*
Ray opened the passenger door and climbed in, strapped on his seat belt. Jennifer Ackerman neither looked at him nor thanked him, but busied herself turning the car around. They exited onto Seventh street, crossed the Rogers intersection and made their way toward downtown in silence.
He said, “This is different than last night.”
She did not immediately understand.
“The car.”
“Oh, no. It’s my husband’s, or rather, ex-husband’s. The second one. He couldn’t come today, a business meeting in Toronto, but he was gracious enough to let me use the car. I thought it better matched my outfit and the occasion.”
People color coordinated vehicles. For funerals, no less. Ray could not but find that vaguely amusing.
“I think I’m hardly dressed for a funeral,” Ray said.
In fact, he was not. Blue jeans, a Boston Red Sox tee shirt, a frayed at the collar button-up that only marginally matched over that. He had on a pair of hiking boots that had seen better days, and only lacked a faded baseball cap to complete the impression that he had been prepping himself to work in the yard.
Of course, in terms of generally appropriate funereal dress, neither was she in his opinion. She was wearing black, which was better than his attire, but the silk blouse hugged the contours of her breasts too tightly, and there were one too many buttons undone at the top to have a stranger look at her and make the automatic assessment: funeral. Her skirt was no looser and rode well above her knees. Ray could see almost pornographically up the inside of her thigh when she lifted her foot to work the clutch.
She looked very nice, he had to admit, and very appropriate for, say, dinner and dancing, right down to the bright herring bone gold choker at her neck with dangling diamond solitaire and matching earrings.
But for a funeral, she was somewhat underdressed, or undressed, or whatever. Ray thought she should have a hat, maybe a veil. Even stockings would have been something of an improvement. The sunglasses made her appear cavalier, and Ray wondered if she would wear them into the service itself.
“You’re fine,” she said, but he did not find her assessment particularly reassuring. Then, as if it mattered, she explained. “It’s a mortuary service. We weren’t church goers.”
“Which one?”
“Do you think I might be kidnapping you? I’m not that deranged with grief.”
“Just curious.”
“Gallagher’s. Mike, the middle boy, was Eric’s godfather. He went to college with Eric’s dad. He made all the arrangements.”
“Convenient for him, I suppose.”
“You make it sound so mercenary. Can’t you give anyone credit for being genuinely nice?”
“Not very easily.”
She sighed, then curled her lips into the closest thing he had yet seen to a grin. It didn’t keep her from looking tired. “I suppose that’s one of the reasons I brought you along. Are you always this detached and critical?”
“I was an English major in college.”
They reached Walnut Street by the Justice Building and turned right, south. Until she had mentioned it, Ray hadn’t thought about being kidnapped, but her adherence to the quickest route to the south side of town was oddly relieving. He squirmed in the leather seat.
“You’re nervous,” she said. “You can smoke if you’d like.”
“In a bit,” he answered, and squirmed some more.
They crossed Third Street, and she shifted into fourth gear, taking advantage of a break in the morning traffic. Her hand came off the gear shift nob and settled on Ray’s leg, midway between his knee and hip. The interior of the car was a small, closed space, like the cockpit of a fighter plane. Ray could not determine if the action was accidental. He stopped himself from squirming and watched her hand. It was tan, soft, her fingers long with thin nails. Red. She applied no pressure to indicate any intent behind the placement, but didn’t move it, either. No Oh, I’m sorry, and blushes on her part. Just there. Just a fact with no apparent meaning.
Ray retrieved a cigarette from his shirt pocket and cracked his window.
Thirty seconds later they rolled to a stoplight in front of the high school. She had to shift again, and the hand was gone.
Ray was aware that his hands were shaking.
*
The black sports car pulled into the parking lot of Gallagher’s Funeral Home, two miles from state road 37 and the rural highway to the Monroe County Reservoir. The lot was almost empty at this time of the morning. There were four cars in spots against the rambling, powder blue and limestone building. More cars with their asses hanging out from behind the corner of the structure, but those were quite obviously hearses. Jennifer Ackerman plowed slowly through the lot, drove past the glass front doors, and turned around the back of the building into the small employee lot. There were two other cars here, both empty, and she chose the slot between them. She backed in and turned off the car.
Ray put his hand on the door handle, but noted that she did not immediately move. She only sat there, both of her hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the loading dock door at the mortuary’s rear. It was, Ray thought, not a sight that someone preparing to bury their only child should be in a position to see. But whatever she was thinking, he observed that she wasn’t crying.
Then slowly, almost absently, she removed her sunglasses. She set them on the dash. Just as casually, she touched the buttons on her shirt and one by one began to undo them. She tugged the tails out of her skirt and kept on. At last, she turned to him. She had, he saw, changed her bra from the evening before. Just like the car, she had color coordinated in lace. She had no tan lines that he could see.
Her hands touched him, his hip, his thigh. She opened his pants as if it was something he had asked her to do. He was, as the romance novelists tended to say, firm in his manhood. Her lips, her mouth, circled his penis, and he jumped at the rush of sensation. She took one side of his ass in her free hand and began to knead his skin. Ray shuddered, caught his breath.
“Touch me,” she whispered to him, though how she managed it in her position, he could not guess.
And he actually began to. He raised his hands, placed one on the delicate nape of her neck. Very gently, he traced a line with his finger from the space just behind her ear to the ridge of her spine, then back again. She had a soft, almost white, tracery of hair which glossed her skin. Ray leaned toward her, just a bit, put his lips against her neck. He smelled her.
She was, he thought, so very lovely.
He said her name, and she began to work more vigorously.
He said her name again and squeezed her neck. She moaned, a quiet and pleasant sound.
A final time, and he withdrew himself from her mouth, feeling her teeth scrape his head hard enough to make him grimace. He pulled her head up, pinching her to get her attention. She flared back, put her shoulders against her door and stared at him. She was flushed, her eyes shining, fierce.
It was not numbness he had seen, he realized, but bitterness.
“What are you doing, Jennifer?” he said to her.
“I’m trying to fuck you.”
“I had gathered that much. Why are you doing this? Why here, why now?”
“Because I need to.”
Ray put himself away, zipped. “Bullshit. What is that? Because you’re tense? Because you need to re-affirm life in the presence of death? God, that is so much psychobabble bullshit. You don’t need to do this.”
Her nakedness made her defiant. “I want to. You want to, too. I know what you’re thinking, Ray. This has nothing to do with the lawsuit. I’m not trying to screw information out of you. I promise you, I’ll call John off as soon as the funeral is over. It was all his idea—he’s been my family’s lawyer since I was a girl. He’s just watching out for me, doing the only thing he knows how to do because he thinks it will make me feel better. He thinks it will fill the void if I have someone else to blame.”
Strangely enough, that had not even crossed his mind.
“I’m here as your friend,” Ray said.
“Then be my friend. Help me take my mind off this.”
“Christ, why would you want to?”
“Why would you want to, Ray? Tell me that. You’re able to do it. I talked to you enough last night to know that. Nothing bothers you. You’re surrounded by tragedy every day. John said you’ve been doing what you do for five years. There’s a strength there, in the ability to do that, to live with that, which most of us don’t have. I want that secret from you, Ray. It’s the only way I can survive this, even if I can only share it vicariously.”
He shook his head. “Do you have any idea how sick that sounds?”
“Do you have any idea how sick this feels?” She jabbed her finger at her chest. “I don’t have any other answers.”
“I don’t have any answers to give you, Jennifer. Least of all this one.”
She closed her eyes, pressed the back of her head against the car window. “I’m getting old, Ray. Old. I was sixteen when I had Eric. I had to drop out of high school. I was lucky, I thought, because Eric’s father was older, out of school. He wanted to marry me. But you know what I did? I had the baby, I went back to school. I went to college. I got a master’s degree. I redeemed my life; I salvaged it from the wreckage.
“But somewhere along the line while I was trying to be a good student, a good employee, a good wife…while I was focused on proving that my life was worth something, my son was growing up. I was too absorbed in myself to notice. I didn’t have your objectivity to be able to analyze my actions and see the mistakes I was making.”
“I was a bad mother,” Ray whined.
“Stop it.”
“It sounds that pathetic.”
“Stop.”
“Fine. I told you, I don’t have any answers for you. What can I say? Shit happens. People make mistakes. People suffer, and most of the time it’s not even because of something they did or did not do. Come on, Jennifer, you’re smarter than this. You know what I’m saying is true. You didn’t make your son a heroin addict. You didn’t put the needle in his arm. He’s the bastard. He’s the stupid motherfucker you should be blaming. Not you.”
She began to button her shirt. “You sound like an Al-anon meeting.”
“And you sound like you didn’t pay enough attention when you went. How many did you make before you gave up on them? Two?”
“Four.” More defiance, more anger.
Ray said, “Four whole meetings? Or did you walk out on the last one?”
She glared at him, hard. Then bent her head down to tuck in her shirt. She was laughing. “You really are very mean,” she said. “A real asshole.”
“I hear that a lot.”
Eric Ackerman’s mother smiled at him. She leaned forward, kissed him squarely on the cheek. “But probably never from someone not wearing any underwear.”
“You would,” he answered, “be surprised.”
“Tell me that this feeling will go away, that one day I’ll be able to live with what I’ve done.”
Ray arched an eyebrow. “What is it exactly that you think you’ve done?”
“I had a son, and when he started to slide, started to throw his life away, I ignored him. I didn’t notice.” She stopped herself there, as though that was the end of it. She lowered her eyes, then, with a visible effort, made herself lift them again. “But most of all, I found that when he had finally died, it didn’t mean as much to me as it should. That it was a stranger who had died, and I’ve only been mimicking the emotions I thought a mother was supposed to feel. The problem was that I had started mourning my son three years ago and frankly, I’m just about all out of grief to spare.”
“And you thought that if you did something to make you feel guilty, it might make it all real.”
She nodded.
“I didn’t know your son, Jennifer. Not in the way you would have wanted me to, but I think he would have been amazed at the amount of punishment you’re giving yourself to prove how much you loved him.”
“Thank you for being my friend, Ray,” she said, and let herself out of the car.
Ray attempted to follow her, but found walking more difficult than he had expected.
*
The casket was closed. The ceremony was very short and very sparsely populated. Heroin addicts do not tend to attract friends of the lasting sort. Nothing was said about heroin or suicide by the minister who appeared to do the service (probably because he knew neither Eric nor the family which had originated him, at least so Jennifer informed him). Ray accepted a few ugly but sidelong looks from Eric’s father, a whole set of more obvious ones from the new wife and twelve year old daughter. He found them amusing. He sat next to Jennifer, their hips touching, but she didn’t cry or do anything lugubrious which would require him wrestling around in his pockets for the handkerchief he didn’t have. No one said anything about his mode of dress, not even Gallagher, who sat on the father’s side of the room during the brief ceremony and hardly even managed to acknowledge Jennifer.
Funerals, in Ray’s experience, tended to be surreal events. Since he didn’t know anyone there, had only marginally known the deceased, and quite obviously wasn’t appreciated in his attendance by anyone except the woman who had tried to suck him off in the parking lot, he felt perfectly comfortable in thinking that this one in particular had gone way past surreal and straight into weird from the very beginning.
The only person he actually managed to feel sorry for was the imported minister, who, since he hadn’t known the kid at all—even less than Ray himself—had what was obviously the hardest time of all. Ray made a mental note to see a lawyer himself, draw up a will and name somebody who actually knew him to perform the eulogy. He figured that would be nicer all around to everybody involved.
On the way out, he made sure to slap the guy on the shoulder and say something about how moved he had been. There are, after all, only so many ways to say “Boy, he sure was a good kid.”
*
After Jennifer dropped him off back at detox, Ray let himself into the building. He waved at the secretary without speaking to her and went once again to the back office, to the phone, where his conversation would not be overheard.
She was, to his surprise, awake this time.
“What time is it?” she asked. “I’m too lazy to get up and look.”
“Just shy of ten.”
“You’re early, then.”
“I am.”
“So, how did it go?”
He thought about telling her. Part of him wanted to tell her, knew that he should, or at the very least he would feel guilty about getting what he had gotten (but rejected, he reminded himself ) before going on to get the other thing. The rest of him terminated the deal, though. Despite what Jennifer Ackerman had said about calling off the legal dogs, he wasn’t sure that co-workers would view his actions as entirely appropriate. He was not in the mood for judgment.
“If I use the word ‘innocuous’ in my reply will you leave it at that for awhile?”
Of course, she didn’t like that, but said she would accept his terms.
“I can’t believe you’re awake. I thought you were going to keep the bed warm.”
“I was, but I got to thinking about one of our conversations last night. You asked me why I keep doing this.”
“I asked you if you thought you’d been doing this for too long.”
“But I didn’t ask you the same question, and I think you wanted me to. I think for once you wouldn’t have given me one of those glib answers.”
“But I also might not have given you an honest answer. Just the lie that best suited the situation.”
“I don’t think you really lie as much as you say. I think the truth is that you don’t know the answer to your own questions. You’re afraid to look that deeply.”
“Or maybe I’ve seen the truth and don’t like it. Maybe the truth needs dressed up or obfuscated so nobody else gets as disillusioned as I am.”
“What is the truth, Ray?”
“The truth about why I do this? I think that’s a conversation that needs to wait until I can get there.”
“I want it now. I let you slide on your appointment. I do it again, and you’re taking advantage of me—not a good start to a relationship that’s already getting off on tenuous footing with blatant sexuality.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
She purred. She was playing with him, but even the playing was just a game. Underneath it all, she was flat serious.
“Tell me something Gnostic.”
“But if I tell you, it won’t do you any good. Gnosis is all about revelation.”
“Is that what makes you so arrogant? Revelation?”
“I stay,” he said, knowing it was a mistake to do so, knowing it could potentially drive an irrevocable wedge between them…but at the same time knowing he could not but speak the truth. The why of it was still hidden, still in some ways inchoate inside him. Wending its way home. “I hang around hoping to be convinced that the system works, that we do something valid. In that, I suppose what I’m going to say is not a Gnostic answer. At least in the same way that Marcion was not a Gnostic, but shared parallel patterns of reasoning with the Gnostics but for very different reasons. It is, instead, anti-Gnostic, I suppose. I look at the system and all I can perceive is a great fundamental flaw of both the Gnostic and addictions treatment philosophy.
“It is a massive and unsatisfactory paradox that I see, and I’m waiting to be proven wrong.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I went to the suicide kid’s funeral this morning.”
“You what?”
“I went, and all I saw was the great failure, the grand paradox in action. How we failed, every one of us.”
“Ray, you’re not making any sense.” There was concern in her tone.
“No. I’m making perfect sense. You’re choosing to see through the glass darkly.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“The cosmology of both the Gnostics and the treatment milieu revolves around a simple belief that knowledge saves. Gnosis. Tools, we call them. Recovered addicts ‘came to believe’, and in that revelatory moment of clarity, of enlightenment, there was something salvific. The knowledge.
“If knowledge alone saves, if that is our model both as Gnostics and service providers, we are left with a position that the flesh and its behaviors are evil. They distract us from the attainment of clarity. Deny the flesh, the urges of the body, the craving for substances, and you open the door to a saving knowledge. This is what we tell our clients. The Gnostics said, be an ascetic, turn your back on the temptations of the world. It is the same idea in different eons.”
“What is wrong with that?” she countered. “Sobriety doesn’t occur at random. It’s not maintained by luck. You know that.”
“I know. Pay attention. But don’t you see, this is the fundamental flaw at the same time. The dependence on revelation knowledge for salvation, both from an addiction and from sin, has the effect of objectification. It severs the connection between human beings on a basic human level, because on one stratum of experience, there are those of us who have this knowledge, these tools, but the nature of the experience is such that my clarity cannot be communicated to you until you are ready for it. In short, we can’t talk effectively until you are engaged in your own moment of clarity and at that point you no longer need my revelation—you have your own. Because I know, I can’t relate to those who don’t. Because they don’t know, they can’t relate to those of us who do. We’re operating in similar but unconnected universes of experience.
“Which means, of course, that we’re professing to help those we cannot help, and those who are receiving help are achieving it through some self-generated means which renders our contribution invalid. It isn’t even that we’re just trying to help and they’re not listening. It’s that the entire modality of our help is contradictory to the basic system we are arguing for.
“What we have done is to create a myth of a dichotomous spiritual, recovery universe of the haves and the have nots. We have revelations which we can’t impart, because you won’t get them because of your degraded, flesh-focused perspective. The haves despise those who don’t have and don’t seem to have the dedication to get in the first place.
“But again, this runs contrary to the idea of revelation knowledge which definitionally cannot be dispensed except via the mechanisms of grace, or capital-G Grace, depending on which system you’re talking about. In fact, when an individual attempts to gain the knowledge for themselves, they end up with a Sophia caliber debacle. Because fundamental to the whole system is the idea that it is grace which saves, not works, not what you can actually do.
“The problem, of course, is that this is an existential argument, and it can be abused in the same way that the discarded disease concept was abused to justify destructive behaviors.
“And yet, at the precise same time, by the Gnostic philosophy, it is counter-productive to despise the have nots who haven’t been given access to revelation. To blame them for failure or lack of effort is a denial of the entire philosophy of salvation by knowledge. It just isn’t their fault. You can’t rush clarity. No one is responsible for their depravity. Not us, like they want to believe and not them, like we want to believe. There is no responsibility.
“Consequently, the have nots, the addicts, despise the haves, the recovered, because they seem to intentionally misunderstand the basic experience of not having. They seem to have forgotten what it is like to be human. Or, in the specific case of addictions treatment, the enlightened in recovery have forgotten what it is really like to be an addict, and all that remains is a set of empty platitudes.
“The problem with a revelation knowledge based argument or model for recovery is that one forgets the need of being human, flawed, dependent upon grace rather than our own efforts. Because all we perceive is the divine spark within us and neglect the fact that we still live inside the clay jar. We credit them with a clarity they do not have, cannot obtain, and which we cannot impart by sheer force of reputation. But we tell them that is the answer, increasing their dependence on us but benefiting the actual fact of their recovery not at all. But we tell them to go through the motions, as if those dry forms will bring them closer to the golden moment of revelation, as if they can do what we know damned well they cannot. We hold them to a standard they cannot reach.”
“God, Ray,” she said. “I think you need a meeting.”
“I think I need you. It’s been a very long day.”
“Then get over here.”
He didn’t know why he had expected her to get it.