On their last day together, Hank had looked him over, grunted his approval as one would over a steak on the grill.
“You’re done,” he said. “I’m going home.”
And he had collected his coat, the book he was reading, and made for the door.
Ray, justifiably or not, panicked.
At the door to the office, Hank stopped, turned around. He hung his jacket back on the wall peg and sat down with a heavy sigh right back in the chair he had vacated.
Ray just stared.
“Never forget that feeling, Ray. It’s a scary thing to be abandoned in the world, to be on your own without access to support. Fear keeps you sharp, keeps you on your goddamned toes. You have to watch yourself.
“I’ve told you all I can about what you need to do for these people. You’ve got the training, all of it. The rest is just gathering experience and putting it into action. You’ll make your share of mistakes, help a few people, maybe, but those will all be by accident. Things you did instinctively without even noticing. Little things you didn’t even imagine were important will change some idiot’s life. You have no control over any of that.
“But this you can control, must control. Understand this, Ray, above all, from somebody who has done this work longer than you’re likely to. This business, the treatment business, either makes you ugly on the inside or makes you beautiful. There is no middle ground. You either fall into a pattern of help or harm. It is instinctual. The choice is instinctual. It is a matter of how you elect to defend yourself from all the shit that floats in the air in places like this. You will defend yourself from them at their expense, or you will help them at yours. The balance is knowing when you’ve had enough—given so much of yourself that you have to back off while you’ve got anything left, or taken so much from them that you’re sick of your destruction.”
He held up a broad, brown hand. “Don’t start with me, boy. I see your bright, shiny eyes all full of hope and help. You’re so fucking naïve it’s painful to look at. Quit with the helping people routine. I believe you. We’re past that now and putting our asses right on the brass tacks of the hard truth.
“You will be irrevocably changed from what you were. You will spend your waking hours seeing only broken, blasted, lying, worthless human beings. They will be your reference set for your entire experience of the world. You will come to believe that everyone is this way. In order to defend yourself from absolute bitterness, you will objectify. Not just on the job where it is good and necessary and healthy, but in every facet of your life. You will become hard, uncaring. Even the lives and problems of those you want to touch you will not. You will have abandoned the habit of caring. And one day, you will be forced to confront that truth, that you have become a mean, arrogant bastard. When you feel that way, Ray, don’t try to reform yourself. Don’t try to be nicer or more helpful or more loving. That cheats the people who depend on you to be that way for an opportunity at sobriety. Don’t do anything except this: quit the job.
“You’ll have been used up. You’ll have done your service, put in your time. You will have the credentials for sainthood. Know your mind and your time, and when you feel it starting to be wrong, starting to impair your ability to function in the real world, let it all go. The damage is temporary. You will heal. You will become a living, breathing, walking in the sun human being again. Every bad habit can be killed given the right time and right environment. As long as you take that window of opportunity when it comes.
“That’s the pisser, Ray. Don’t miss that window. You miss it and you’ll be fucked for life. You will be a miser before you’re thirty, measuring out your turnip’s worth of blood-caring in ever smaller doses until your hands are full of shit and mush.
“Your position is worse than that of your day and evening shift counterparts. They live in the sun, Ray, they have a frame of reference outside the job. Ugliness is a component which makes them appreciate the beautiful that much more. Night shift compounds the ugliness. It cuts you off from human converse, leaves you feeling isolated, insensitive, uncaring, self-absorbed so that the only real world is that of the shift. All else is twilight.
“Then your dependence on yourself alone, your trained mental set to take only your own advice becomes the trap rather than a benefit. You won’t reach out for a helping hand when you most need it.”
Hank leaned forward in his chair, made the entire length of it shudder and squawk with his mass. He pushed his face to within six inches of Ray’s own and said finally, lastly, above all: “On that day, the one that should be your last, you will open your eyes or wake up or whatever the fuck you’re doing when clarity blasts through the rusted and tarnished doors of your mind, and you will suddenly ask yourself Is this all there is? All there is to the world, to hopes, to me? Is it all darkness and loss and defeat? The grime of hopelessness rubs off in the mental health universe, Ray, because you’re surrounded by it. First just on your cuffs, or your elbows and knees. But the next thing you know, it’s all over. It blackens, and in that blackening, it reinforces your own natural perceptions of hopelessness and entropy as the ultimate end of the human condition.
“When the clay jar is all that exists and the divine spark is gone from your vision, hang it up. Hang it up at that precise moment, and never put it back on again.”
*
In his car, Ray drove. Mentally, whimsically, he had traveled the route many times. From work to Walnut. Across Walnut on down Seventh street like he was going back to campus, back to school. Then a right turn, across Kirkwood, down past the post office. Further south, leaving the university behind and into the district of cookie cutter, ginger bread houses reserved once upon a time for professors. A parallel track to Walnut itself, much as he had gone this morning, earlier, under entirely different circumstances and to an entirely different destination.
And he found himself similarly thinking of Jennifer Ackerman. Not of her firm, round breasts and black lace, or even the soft experience of her lips enwrapping him. Offering him pleasure. But of her grief, and her friendship. A friendship he had offered with his mouth, accepted in turn with his mouth. But a grief which did not touch him. A grief that bore no revelation of pain, of shared sympathy. He had said so many things to her, all the right things, in fact. Noble things which offered her a perspective beyond pain, and which she seemed to have grasped with some success. Dead words he had once read in a book by someone whose name he had forgotten about codependence. Treatment language.
What had he said? Caldwell, the police detective, what was it? I was just hoping someone had actually cared about him before he kicked off, even if only a little. Him, the suicide kid. Don, or Eric, or whatever. A name is a contextual thing. It has a perspective, a meaning, a relevance to time and space and definition that goes beyond its use as a tag for differentiation. We give names to the things we care about so that we can individuate them in special or significant ways. Which had he been? In his mother’s mind, he was an Eric, but that descriptor was a myth, and an aged myth at that. To Ray, to an entire staff, he had been Don or Donald, when they could manage to remember to call him anything at all. But those were themselves contexts which didn’t encompass the actual experience of the suicide kid.
What had he called himself, Ray wondered. What name came into his own mind when he saw himself in the mirror? You could reconstruct the entire identity of a person with only the referent they applied to themselves.
Names. There was something revelatory about names. Something intimate in the exchange. Ray’s ex-wife had always used pet names. Dear. Honey. Jellybear. Others (worse than that). But even at the last, the end, up to the top of the courthouse steps, when she said his name, his real name, called him Ray in that simple, singular way that only she could speak it, his heart thrilled just a bit. It had made him ache with a revelation of loss that had previously been denied to him.
He called clients by their last name. Caldwell was utilitarian, as much so as simply Detective, implying distance. Sam Boler. Ray called him Sam, plain and simple, to his face. But in his mind, it was one word. Samboler. A tag, a cardboard cutout of a job both like and unlike Ray’s own. It felt like, had all the emotional weight of, an address on a street in an unfamiliar town. Jennifer Ackerman. The same, but maybe in his own town, just not a part he was familiar with. John Donovan—Mr. Donovan, even heard in his own inner ear with a tinge of derision, said with a curl of the lip either real or imagined.
There was no electricity, no thrill.
In the Bible story, God’s first big job given to Adam had been a difficult one. The first one…why was it first? Because it was important, it was essential. The naming of names. The individuation of plant from plant, beast from beast. God himself did not say Let there be. And light was. He named it, then called the light, day and the darkness, night. Differentiation. Simple names, this and that, but over time and experience by human beings, that which had been called day took on a connotation, a brilliance, an importance and parallel referents which imbued each correlation with a deeper and more profound meaning than each held alone This and its opposite and its cognates all wove together to form an identity. An eternal spiraling webwork of experience which tied the perceptions of a billion billion human individual conscious minds into a shouting distance facsimile of cohesion.
The one, the wandering sheep, what had the shepherd called it? The ninety and nine were just the herd. Group. But the one, it was something else. Maybe even just fucker or stupid or something similar, but differentiated, singularized, and in the process, cast back into the shepherd’s mind as a comparison with all the ones who had been lost before. Lost and found. And in the comparison of experience, there was both fear for those which had been lost, and hope for the equal number which had been found. A webwork of memory and experience which made the life of the one not insignificant, but referent of the entire mission and capability and usefulness of the shepherd. The skill of the shepherd was to maintain a balance of the lost lamb as one of a series of like circumstances and the individual relevance of the absent one.
The lone sheep, the name of the sheep, as a symbol for the tenor of an entire life.
The significance of a name. A new beginning or a repetition of a pattern.
*
He had to stop himself. He had arrived at her building.
*
She met him at the door to her apartment, as if she had been anticipating his arrival as avidly as he had been anticipating arriving. Ray found himself breathless, her flushed.
“I’m a little early,” he said. It was just after ten.
“You’re a little late.”
She reached out, took him by the hand and pulled him inside.
“This won’t be very spontaneous, I’m afraid,” she said.
“I’ve found that spontaneity is often just another word for awkwardness.”
Which, of course, was precisely what he was feeling, right down to shuffling feet and an inability to meet her eyes. Not her eyes, no, but the rest of her, the casual her, the her in her own private domain. The electric her. She was, quite simply, stunning. Her hair was down, slightly tousled and tangled from her episodes of intermittent sleep. She was dressed casually as well, early morning intimate attire. A sapphire silk kimono, a pearl camisole. Her legs were smooth, bare, enticingly pale.
Her apartment was precisely what he would have expected. Bright, warm in beiges and blues. It emanated a hopeful brilliance from the crystal knick-knacks set in their alcove shrines to the carefully eclectic furniture pieces. Her pictures were all of landscapes, all the images serene. Mountains, meadows, streams. There were no signs of single slovenliness (of which Ray was too familiar). No randomly cast laundry, no half-empty glasses busy leaving rings on her endtables or growing cultures in their bottoms. The shag tan carpet had vacuum lines.
It was a cool space, and not just in terms of ambient air. It radiated a warm sterility, if such a thing was possible, both frigidity and heat rubbing shoulders in a wary cohabitation. A sense of cautious welcome, or potential barricades which had been withdrawn for his benefit alone. A manufactured home, a forced image. A concrete molding form for a substance which had not possibly yet arrived, but was prepared in advance because the arrival could be at any time immanent.
To Ray, it felt like a sacred place, his hand in hers a holy touch, she herself an icon. It was like walking flat into the pudding embrace of the pleroma.
“You are,” he said to her, “an exquisite being.”
“I am.”
“I wanted you to know. I never told you.”
“Not in so many words, no.”
She turned to him and they stood, face to face, scarcely a foot apart. Ray could feel her breath, her small, rapid gasps, against his neck. She had to lift her head to look at him, something he hadn’t ever noticed. In general, one of them was always standing to go as the other sat to stay, like interconnected pistons, a dance of oppositions. Her forehead just came to the level of his chin.
“Are you hungry, Ray? I could make some breakfast.”
“That would be very domestic of you.”
“I have compensatory domestic compulsions, for all the times they didn’t stay long enough to even shower.”
Ouch. “Is that honesty?”
Her eyes, so green, so wide. He wanted her to twine her arms around his neck.
“I’m sorry, Ray. That was inappropriate. An inappropriate anecdote.”
Inappropriate. A work word. A treatment word, which Ray didn’t want to hear from her. It made her feel distant from him.
“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Only farting in enclosed spaces is inappropriate among friends.”
She laughed, and at the same time, she blushed. A pink corona covered her ears, lit her cheeks like cherry lanterns.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” he said.
She leaned away, opened her arms, let him look at her. “I can’t dress like this at work.”
“You can’t act like this at work.”
She nudged him with her hip. “Look at us, Ray. We’re both babbling like virgins. We’re wasting time, putting it off.”
“I thought you were being sweetly demur.”
“I don’t know how to be demur. Let’s go to bed.”
He stopped her, he had to, before they could go any further. “One question first. I have to ask.”
She winked at him. “Because I like you, Ray, even though you’ve been too stupid to realize it. I like you as much as you like me.”
“That’s it?”
“And because you’re not a stranger. I’m tired of feeling alone, and as obtuse as you can be, I think you have somewhere inside you the skills to cherish me.”
Ray said, “Okay, then.”
*
She said nothing about being nervous, nothing about being excited or attracted. Nothing about the fresh, crisp cotton sheets on her bed. Nothing about his fumbling with his clothes, or her liquid, cat-graceful shedding of her own.
She did not ask him to pause to admire her, not her firmness and roundness, her supple skin or her rosy areolas or erect nipples. Nor did she mention her limpid, stunning perfection, her strange, fantastic, outrageous ability to satisfy every fancy that had ever bothered to cross his mind (at least the ones in which she had been featured). She did not ask him to kneel before her and worship at the temple of her divinity, to kiss the jagged flame of her lightning spark.
But Ray drank it all in like water, drank all of her in her absolute wonder until he was filled.
And at the end of it all, in the moist heat of the early afternoon, they lay tangled and nude, chest to chest, playing the old wrestling game of whose arms go where. Between them, just as unspoken as the fun, the fantasy and the delight, Ray could sense the fullness. It swelled in his chest, rushed out from his loins like the mystic silver chord, touched her, enfolded her, filled and entwined her. It burned his lungs, scorched his villi as though he had breathed Egyptian sand. Heavy fullness, the weight of her perfection and paired desire, twin millstones on his chest.
She dozed, spent. He lingered in the twilight between floating pleasure and stygian sleep. She sighed the sound of echoes at him, distant, faint, scented with sandalwood.
In dreams, she said, “I love you, Ray.”
His dream or hers, he could not say.
*
Ray dressed himself in silence, in the gathering evening, as she slept. Shirt, pants, shoes, just as he had been when he first came in. He did not check his reflection, only assumed.
He had slept awhile, as she had, still did, sharing a womb of warmth between her arms, beneath her comforter. Then he had awakened to gloaming. Her alarm had failed, no one had called to entice her to work. He did not know why. Rather than impersonate a stranger, he had unplugged her phone, let her rest. Lastly, he kissed her, once, on her unblemished shoulder, watched as she did not move beneath his lips.
He let himself out the door, locked the deadbolt with the shining copper key she had given him for his very own after the second time, or some time subsequent.
Down the hall, down the stairs, through the narrow lobby and out the door into a sticky Indiana dark. He found his car.
Of course, it did not, would not start.
Ray put his head against the steering wheel and closed his eyes.
*
There are times, he thought, when a man’s screaming, naked soul fills the universe. When everywhere he looks he sees only himself, and in that moment of leaden clarity, he suspects the vast network of his formation. That which he makes, and from which he is made.
Then he sees himself for the first time. What he is and what can become, a dense, instant, entire understanding of potentiality.
And like Sophia, the Wisdom of God, he does not observe his creation as good, but he sees, he groans, he weeps.
But even that only if he is able.
*
Ray had been in the main hallway, just off the client’s dining room when Eric Ackerman had come down the stairs. The kid was pale, his long hair stringy with sweat. He wore the same clothes he had been in when he was admitted. He had slept in them, Ray knew. He’d noted it in the chart after he had taken Eric’s vital signs at five. Ray had encouraged him then, because he’d been having problems sleeping, to take a shower. Ostensibly to help him relax, but really because he smelled badly and his roommates had come down earlier to complain about the odor. You all stink when you come in, Ray had told them. Don’t hassle the kid. Still, he’d done his best. Eric had creases of dust grimed into wrinkles on his face. But even dirty, even prematurely wrinkled, he looked younger somehow than nineteen. It was easy to think of him as a kid.
If we can catch them before they’re twenty one, Ray had often said, we’ve got a real chance. He had no evidence for that, of course, just a gut feeling. Catch them before whatever substance they used could mold their mind into a pattern of defeat, of failure, of powerlessness. He believed that.
Eric had stopped briefly as he rounded the corner from the stairway. Saw Ray with his clipboard of house chore assignments for the clients. Ray had been attempting to determine who the house captain was so he could wake him, so the house captain in turn could begin the ugly and thankless task of getting everyone else out of bed. It had been just a brief look, an appraisal, then the kid had started down the hall, brushed past him and through the dining room, out the side door to the smoking porch.
Ten minutes later, Ray had been in the office, lining up the morning medication boxes and figuring out who needed what as they got up. A shadow had fallen across the desk. Ray glanced up. Eric, intense, his eyes brooding, his expression sullen. Ray expected him to ask for medication for his withdrawal—medication for which the doctor had elected not to approve him. Nineteen, the doc had said. Only a three year use history, and only escalating toward the end, the last few months. He shouldn’t need anything. Mentally, Ray prepared himself for that argument.
But he started off friendly. “How are you feeling?”
Eric only stared down at him. He leaned forward slightly, as if on the verge of speaking, then settled back on his heels again. He shrugged, a gesture that seemed to mean everything and nothing. Then he nodded, indicating the legal pad on the far edge of the desk.
“Is that poetry?”
Ray followed his eyes.
“What makes you think that?”
“I came down the other night…I think, the first night I was here. Came down to smoke, but thought I should check to see if it was okay. I saw you were writing on a pad like that. It looked like you were very into it, so I decided not to bother you. For some reason, I thought it might be poetry.”
“I’m not much of a poet.”
“You’ve been to college?”
“English degree.”
“I liked that in school. Literature. Not the grammar and research papers, though. That was all technical stuff. Rules to learn that I didn’t like. But stories, yeah. Sometimes I’d get all these ideas in my head for stories. I wrote some of them down, but I didn’t have the discipline to see them through to the end. You ever write stories?”
“A few.”
“All the way to the end?”
“Not as many as I started.”
“I’ve always had that problem. I start things, then can’t finish them. My dad said I was just lazy. I don’t know. It’s like I’d have all of these big ideas, so rich and exciting, every one of them new and fresh like a whole field of spring flowers. I couldn’t pick one from the other, they were all so beautiful. Most of the time I’d just lay back and dream on them. Day dream. Flash through the scenes as they came and see where the story took them. I mean, I couldn’t share them with anyone afterwards because they were still just in there, in my mind. But they were there. They were complete, whole.”
They had been watching one another as they spoke, both it seemed very aware that they were talking around the issue. But it was something marginally in common, an ice breaker.
“I think you understand me,” Eric said. “At least, more than some of the others. Those girls on day shift…I mean, they seem nice, but I’m not very good at talking to girls.”
“They make you nervous.”
“You?”
“Those girls make me nervous.” Ray laughed as he said it, though it was not actually true. Eric grinned faintly.
“Can I talk to you about something?”
“Like what?”
A look away, the budding of shame. Eric began to sweat. He licked his lips. “I’m trying really hard. I don’t want you to think that I’m not. But I’m having some really bad cravings.”
As expected. Ray was firm. “The doctor didn’t approve any meds for you.”
“I know that. He said so when he examined me. That’s okay. I just thought that if maybe I had somebody I could talk to about it, that it would, you know, make it easier to get through.”
“That’s what the meetings are for.”
A toss of the head, indicating derision. “AA. They don’t like non-alcoholics to talk. I tried once, and some them asked me not to come back. They weren’t mean about it, not at all. They just didn’t want the group to defocus from their problem. They gave me a paper with some NA meetings on it, but I lost it.”
“That happens. We’ll be going to an NA meeting tonight or tomorrow, I think.”
“That’s a long way off.”
“You should talk to your counselor, then.”
“I tried that yesterday. He didn’t even know my name yet. He said I should get back to him because he had four other one on one sessions today.”
“They’re very busy, I know. Sometimes you have to pester them, but they get around to you eventually.”
Eric sighed through his nose, almost a snort. Frustration. “Can’t I just talk to you?”
“You need to talk to your counselor. He’s a lot more helpful with these types of things than I can be.”
“I don’t need help or analysis or psychotherapy. I don’t need drugs or meds or whatever you call them. I don’t need meetings or support groups. Not right now. I just need to talk. To somebody that seems to think a little bit like I do. To somebody who might understand.”
And that was the problem, though Ray could not tell him so. The first sign of codependency, of a lapse in professionalism, was getting hooked by a client. Hooked, like a fish. A reciprocal relationship. The client perceived in a particular staff member someone they could more easily relate to than others. The client’s tendency would then be to approach only that staff member, to only confide in them. In the client’s mind, the relationship was almost a form of friendship, and definitionally from a clinical standpoint, counter-therapeutic. It was not helpful to encourage the client to develop the illusion of friendship.
The other side was the staff member’s ability to be hooked, to favor one client over others, to individuate in such a way that the client took on a specificity of character not shared with the rest of the treatment population. Getting to know someone on a different level than all the others were known was a short step away from treating them differently. Preferentially. Giving them an unfair measure of attention, and thereby possibly disproportionately increasing their chances of treatment success at the expense of others. It happened. It happened frequently, usually beginning with the revelation of a shared interest. We have this in common. We like this thing in the same way. The danger was two-fold. It both urged you to treat the client differently, more individually, and therefore without the necessary clinical detachment to design or enforce an effective treatment regimen, and it tended to give you something else to talk about than the bare bones of addiction. It led you to assist the client in defocusing from treatment. In short, it cheated them.
Professionalism meant being able to recognize when you were on the verge of being hooked by a client, and having the fortitude to step back and objectify. For the client’s own good.
Ray said, “You’ll have to talk to your counselor. I’ll leave him a note indicating that you would like to speak with him today. That’s all I can do.”
“But I just need to talk to somebody, anybody.”
“Fine. Talk to your counselor.”
“I just need to talk. Can’t you just talk to me?”
“I can’t.”
Eric stared at him, not even fiercely. A sort of bewildered look. His jaw worked without sound for a moment or two.
Then, almost a whisper. “Can’t you just talk to me?”
Close. Almost. Ray had felt the desperation there, the almost visceral tug at him for something, anything, some form of attention. But it was personal attention that Eric wanted. He wanted Ray to cross that invisible line. He was obviously a smart kid, a sensitive kid. The illusion of caring that so many others took at face value was not sufficient. He could recognize the counterfeit.
Ray said nothing and bent his head back to the medications he had been working on.
“Can’t you just talk to me?”
Louder this time, demanding. Ray picked up a pencil and started making out the medication log, working methodically client by client. Name, medication, dosage, time.
“Can’t you just talk to me!”
Shouted at the top of his voice, his arms straight and rigid at his sides, his face fierce with supplication. In his peripheral vision, Ray watched the kid tremble, spend his outrage in impotence, then disappear out of the doorway.
He scratched a request for the kid’s counselor to talk with him on a post-it note and slipped it into the staffing book for the next shift to see.
*
If I could have one gift, it would be the ability to cherish.
*
Ray turned the key in the ignition one final time, listened to the useless whine. He had run out of curses to spend. He lifted his face to her window, the bedroom window which he instinctively knew. It was dark, closed. He should not wake her from pleasant dreams. Across the lot, on the corner, he could see the telephone booth.
Two options, avenues of rescue from his condition.
Ray released his seatbelt, pushed open the car door, locked it behind him. Wavered between possibilities, variant futures open for his inspection. He scanned the horizon in all directions, seeing nothing. The snarling engines, blaring horns, vivid life of a thoroughfare just out of sight.
Still early enough, he thought. Still early enough. He wouldn’t have to bother anyone.
He straightened his back and moved off, north toward the heart of the city, toward the glowing light and heat and thumping rhythms of campus.
Ray went off in search of a bus.
END