He waited but no one moved. Finally he pointed to the back row.
"Everett. How about you? We haven't heard from you in a long time. How about it?"
Ev stood slowly. He looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat twice before speaking.
"My name's Everett," he said, "and I'm an alcoholic."
Knotting the fingers of her hands together, almost as if in prayer, Lisl leaned toward the strip of light before her and listened.
Everett was nervous at first. He hadn't done this in a while, but he was overdue for some testimony. It was time.
His nerves eased as he began talking. He knew the patter of his story like he knew basic calculus. He'd told it often enough.
"It started for me when I'm sure it started for most of you—as a teenager. I wasn't a drunk right away. That took time, and lots of practice. But the warning signs were there, right from the start. All my friends drank now and again when we could liberate some booze from our folks or persuade some stranger to buy us a case of beer, but I always seemed the happiest when we could get some and the most disappointed when we couldn't.
"And once I started to drink I couldn't stop. I didn't realize it then, but when I look back now I can see that even as a kid I didn't know how to stop. The only thing that kept me from seeing it then was the fact that our supply was always limited. Our purloined booze always ran out before I could get myself good and sick.
"My fraternity house at Emory fixed that. We bought beer by the keg and I got thoroughly ripped on a regular basis. But only on weekends, at our parties, where I became something of a legend for the amount of alcohol I could put away. During the week, though, I managed to keep up an A average. I was the envy of my peers—the honor student who could party with the best of them. This was in the mid to late sixties, when pot became the campus drug of choice. But not for me. I was too ail-American for that hippie locoweed.
"Not that I didn't try it. I did. At one time or another along the way I've tried everything. Plenty of times. But I remained loyal to my friend the bottle. Because nothing else could ever find that special spot within me that needed touching. Only booze could reach that place and soothe it. I was at Woodstock, and like too many of the people there, I don't remember much about that weekend other than endless rain and oceans of mud. I had to see the movie to find out what it was really like. But I wasn't wrecked on pot or mescaline or the bad brown acid that was going around. Oh, no. That would have meant I was some hippie freak with a drug problem. Not me. I had my friend along. I was wasted on the case of bourbon I'd brought from my good old home state of Kentucky."
He shook his head as he thought of the years that followed. So much pain there. He hated dredging it up, but he had to. That was what this was all about. He couldn't allow himself to forget the misery he had caused himself… and others.
"You can all guess how the rest of the story goes. I graduated, got a job with a technical firm that had just moved into the Sun Belt, began working in computer technology. In those days it took a roomful of equipment to do what a desktop PC does today. If I were still with the company today, I'd probably be a millionaire. But the booze used the pressures of the job to tighten its hold on me.
"Then I fell in love with a wonderful woman who was made foolish by her own love for me. Foolish enough to believe that she could be more important to me than my old friend the bottle. Little did she know. We married, we started a life together, but it was a menage a trois—my wife, me, and the bottle. You see, I still thought of the bottle as my friend. But it was a jealous friend. It wanted me all to itself. And slowly but surely it poisoned my marriage Hntil my wife gave me an ultimatum: her or the bottle.
"Those of you who have been there can guess which one I chose."
Ev took a deep breath to fill the emptiness inside him.
"After that it was a steadily accelerating downward spiral for me. I lost one job after another. But my superiors always gave me a decent recommendation when they let me go. They thought they were doing me a favor by helping me hide it from the next company that had the misfortune to hire me. This prolonged my intimate relationship with my friend the bottle because it delayed my inevitable bottoming out.
"And did I ever bottom out. I went through detox three times before I finally realized that my friend of twenty years wasn't really my friend. He had taken over my life and was destroying me. The bottle was in the driver seat and I could see that if I didn't take back the wheel, he was going to run me off a cliff.
"So that's what I did. With the help of AA, I took back control of my life. Complete control." He smiled and held up his coffee cup and cigarette. "Well, not complete control. I still smoke and I drink too much coffee. But everything else in my life is under strict control. I've learned to manage my time so that there's no room left in my life for booze. And there never will be again."
He considered mentioning his daily challenge—standing outside Raftery's Tavern every time he passed and staring in the window for exactly one minute, daring the booze to try to lure him in—but decided against it. Someone else here might decide to try the dare… and lose. He didn't want to be responsible for that. He figured he'd said enough.
"So that's it. I've been dry for ten years now. I went back to school, got my doctorate, and now I'm doing exactly what I want to do. I'm back in the driver seat—for good. Thank you for listening."
As he sat down to a round of applause, he thought he heard hurried footsteps in the hall outside. He heard the upstairs door slam. Had someone left while he was speaking? He shrugged. It didn't matter. He'd spoken his piece, done his share. That was what counted.
Lisl composed her emotions as she crossed the street. Ev's story had shocked and moved her. Before tonight he had seemed little more than a collection of compulsive mannerisms. Mr. Machine. Now he was a person, a flesh-and-blood man with a past and a terrible problem, one he had been able to overcome. He'd beaten the bottle, but he didn't trumpet it around like some recovering alcoholics on the faculty; it was Ev's private victory, one he'd kept to himself. Lisl was proud of him, and suddenly proud to know him. And if he wanted his past kept secret, it was safe with her.
She stopped on the sidewalk before the shadowed doorway.
"Let's head back to the car, Rafe."
He stepped out into the light and looked at her expectantly.
"Well?"
"Well, nothing. It was a prayer meeting, that's all. Just a bunch of people sitting around reading from the Bible and stuff like that."
Rafe only stared at her. She hooked her arm through his and started them walking back the way they had come. His voice was very soft when he spoke.
"You wouldn't be telling me a story now, Lisl, would you?"
"And what if I was? What difference would it make?"
"Primes shouldn't lie to each other. I've always been completely honest with you. I expect the same."
Fine. Now she was trapped between two guilts: betray Ev's secret or betray Rafe's trust. She wished they'd stayed home in bed tonight.
"Can't we just drop this whole subject? I'll concede to your position that Ev isn't a Prime and we'll let it go at that, okay?"
Rafe stopped and turned her toward him. His intense stare made her uncomfortable.
"You're protecting him," he said. "Don't do that. He's one of them. He's not worthy of your misdirected loyalty. He wouldn't do the same for you."
"You don't know that."