Neal took some expensive mocha blend out of the refrigerator. He had bought it specially to help him work on the paper. The coffee shop around the corner was his favorite in the city.
“Are you going to lecture me, or just sit there?” he asked Graham. There were days, many of them, when he hated Graham.
“I’m going to lecture you. I’m just dragging it out because I’m enjoying it so much.
“You see, Neal, when you want to get lost, the first thing you got to lose is yourself. You got to become a different person, otherwise you bring all your habits, and likes and dislikes, and all your connections with you. Anybody who knows you has a good shot at finding you. And I know you, son.”
“Yes, you do, Dad.”
“I know you got this spring vacation. I even know you got a thing to write. I know you want peace and quiet.
“I also know you’re too cheap to rent a hotel room, even though Friends would have picked up the bill, and I know you haven’t got your driver’s license, so you didn’t drive out into the country, where you probably should, have gone.”
Neal carefully poured the ground coffee into the filter and measured out the water in the carafe.
“I hate the country.”
“So where is Neal going to find a place? From a classmate who lives off campus but is going away on a nice little student vacation. So your Dad gives you this assignment and then does some asking around. Now I know Neal isn’t going out to Queens or Brooklyn, because he wants to enjoy himself. And I know he’s not staying on the Upper West Side, because he doesn’t want to bump into his Dad on the street, but he also doesn’t have the discipline to stay inside and really hide like he should. And I know he’s not going to the East Side, because it’s all rich people and he’s prejudiced against them. And I remember how many times Neal has told me that if he ever left the West Side, he would move to the Village. So it became a simple matter of elimination and a little legwork. How many of Neal’s classmates live in the Village and are going to Florida for spring break?”
“One.” Neal was disgusted.
“I only waited the two days so you could get some work done on your paper so you don’t flunk out and embarrass me.”
Neal looked at him with true awe. “That’s amazing. That really is. That’s like Sherlock Holmes!”
“Right. Also you wrote down the address on your phone pad.”
“You broke into my apartment?”
“I have a key.”
Neal was confused. “Yeah, but I took the note with me. I remember ripping it off the pad and putting it in my pocket!”
“Are we going to drink the coffee or admire its delicate aroma?”
“It’s not done yet, and tell me.”
“You tell me.”
Neal thought for a minute, then he knew. He was so goddamned angry at himself, he wanted to scream. “I wrote the note with a ballpoint pen and it left an impression on the next page.”
“That’s right. You’re an idiot.”
“I am.”
“But you’re a live idiot.” Graham stood up, walked over to Neal, and took him by the collar with his one real hand. “Listen, son, anytime you have to disappear, it’s serious. You disappear because you have to. Now your fuckup with the notepad made it easy, but I would have found you anyway, for all the reasons I told you. When you disappear, you don’t leave anything behind except yourself. You become somebody else. Or you’ll get found. And the next time you get found, it might not be me, but someone who wants to kill you. You got that, son?”
“Yes, Dad.”
Graham let go of him. “Good. Now get lost. I’ll drink the coffee.”
Neal walked down the stairs and onto the street. Two days later, he was unhappily ensconced in a sleeping bag in a state park in Rhode Island. He hated every minute of it.
Graham didn’t find him, however.
28
Getting off heroin won’t kill you. Problem is, you wish it would.
The body is a vindictive fucker. It wants what it wants, and when it can’t get it, it starts dreaming up ways to motivate you: runny nose, runny eyes, aching joints, aching muscles. It makes your skin crawl and your nerves jump. It makes you shake, rattle, and roll. You get cold, freezing cold, and then you get colder, and you think you’re going to shake apart, actually shake to bits. You start to breathe in short, nasal snorts and exhale in long sighs and groans. Sometimes the floor starts pitching like the deck of a small ship in a big storm, and then you just want to lie there and hold on to your knees, because they hurt so much. And if you could just get warm…
Neal wrapped Allie in blankets. She shivered anyway as she stalked the bedroom, trying to walk away the ache and the cold.
“‘She can’t take much more, Captain,’” she said.
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you ever watch Star Trek? When Captain Kirk would make Scotty take it up to Warp Eight and the Enterprise would start shaking and Scotty would get on the intercom and say, ‘She can’t take much more, Captain’?”
“And then they’d all tilt from one side to the other.”
“Yeah. Right. But then it would be okay.”
“Until the next week.”
“Give me something.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Please…”
“I threw it all away.”
He was sitting on the bed. She dropped to her knees in front of him.
“I’ll blow you,” she said.
“Alice…”
“I will. I’m good.”
“C’mon,” he said, lifting her up. “Walk. I’ll help you.”
He put his arm around her shoulder as they paced the room.
“Neal. I’m not going to make it through the night.”
“Yeah you will.”
“I’ll die.”
“No you won’t.”
Yeah you will? No you won’t? Brilliant stuff, Neal thought. Maybe you can open up an office, charge forty bucks an hour, and say, “Yeah you will,” “No you won’t.” He almost wished he hadn’t thrown the smack away. This girl was hurting bad. And his record at getting women off heroin wasn’t so great.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Wrong answer, you asshole! You’re scared? Now you fucking tell me? This whole thing was your goddamn idea!”
She started to laugh. “You’re scared.”
She was laughing as she started pounding on his chest and his arms with her fists. Her laughter quickly turned to tears.
The cramps started later. She tried to throw up but couldn’t, and her retching dry heaves hurt as much as the cramps. Neal held her from behind-one hand on her neck, and the other pressed into her lower stomach muscles. Between heaves, he draped her head with a cool cloth and talked to her, telling her she’d get past it, she’d be okay, that she wouldn’t die. He sang her songs, whatever lullabies he could remember from his mother’s snatches of maternal cogency. He summarized the plots of Star Trek episodes, playing all the parts and making the noises of phasers and communicators. They played games: Name a rock group for every letter of the alphabet (The Angry Aardvarks, The Zony Zebras), sing the theme music from old TV shows. (They got The Brady Bunch but couldn’t recall The Partridge Family.)
Morning came at last.
Neal thought it had probably been the toughest night of his life.
He knew it had been the hardest of Allie’s. She had sweated it out, hung tough, all those good cliches. Now she was finally asleep. With the dawn had come a little peace.
He needed it. It had been a night spent with a tortured Allie, and a night spent with his own ghosts: a girl that he could help, a mother he couldn’t. A thousand memories of that woman in pain and need, and a little boy unable to do a thing who hated her for it, hating himself for it. But on this night, in the here and now, he had helped, And they got through it together.
As he slumped in his chair, watching Allie sleep, getting rested for the next paroxysm of need that would hit her, he realized that his rage was gone. The sorrow would always be there, he knew, but the rage was gone. Maybe there is a God, he thought, and he sent, me Allie Chase.