9. Roman
ROMAN
Theo calls for the third time this week, and I sit on the couch and watch the phone buzz itself in a circle on the cushion. I don’t pick up. The TV’s been muted for two days, some highlight package looping teams I used to play, and I haven’t had the will to find the remote.
I can’t. That’s the truth I dress up as I’m busy and I’ll call him back.
I can’t pick up because Theo’s voice does a thing to me now, the warm worried rumble of it, hey man, just checking in, the kids miss their Uncle Roman.
Every word of it is a hand reaching down to where I am, and I can’t let it touch me, because if it touches me, I’ll feel how far down I’ve gone and I’d rather not know the number.
So I let it ring out. The screen goes to the photo of us, Theo and me and the cup, three summers ago, both of us sunburned, stupid, whole.
Then it goes dark, and the little red one sits on the voicemail icon like a wound I’ll deal with later.
It’s eleven in the morning. I pour the first one at eleven-fifteen.
I’ve stopped pretending there’s a clock for it.
The clock was the last fence, and I took it down sometime last week without ceremony.
Now the whiskey just goes in whenever the day gets too loud—and the day is always too loud.
The bottle’s down past the label, a case that came free turning out to be the most expensive thing anyone ever gave me.
I drink it standing at the window of the glass box, looking down at a city that’s gotten up and gone to work without me.
The knee throbs its dull background throb.
And somewhere under the throb is the thing that’s actually wrong, the thing the pills and the whiskey only move one room over, and I cannot sit in this apartment one more hour with it.
My thumb’s already moving before the rest of me votes on it. I text him.
knee’s bad today
Four words. A lie and not a lie. The knee is bad, the knee is always bad, but that’s not why I’m texting and we both know it isn’t.
The second it sends, my heart starts going like I’m nineteen and I’ve texted a girl.
Except it’s not a girl. It’s the cold doctor who put me on my knees on a treatment-room floor and turned the whole world off.
And I stand there at the window holding the phone, hating how much I need the three dots to come.
They come. Take the scheduled dose. Ice twenty minutes. I’ll see you at your session Thursday.
The professional answer. The wall with the door painted on it.
And I know him well enough now to read what’s under it—the held line, the making-me-wait—and it lights me up worse than a yes would.
I pour another drink and I don’t text back and I spend the whole afternoon losing a slow argument with myself that I already know how it ends.
The argument goes like this. The sober part of me, what’s left of it, lays it all out clean.
You’re a twenty-five-year-old man who let his doctor bend him over a table.
You drove drunk to do it. Theo called three times and you deleted the messages instead of answering him.
This is the part of the story where the guy gets help, where he calls his best friend, where he tells somebody the truth and lets them pull him out.
And the rest of me, the bigger part now, the part that’s been growing in the dark like something in a cellar, just waits the sober part out, calm, patient, because it knows the one thing the sober part won’t say.
There’s no help that turns the noise off.
Theo can’t turn the noise off. My father can’t, never could; the man only ever knew how to time a slap shot.
The whiskey moves the noise one room over.
The pills move it two. Elias is the only thing I’ve found that switches it off at the wall, all of it, the knee, the silence, the question I still can’t stop hearing: What are you so afraid of?
And when one thing in the world is the off switch, you don’t argue yourself out of it. You just wait for dark and go.
I pour another and watch the light go gold and then grey over the city. I let the argument burn itself down to ash. And the whole time, underneath, I already know I’m getting in the truck.
—
By midnight, I’m in my truck outside the facility with the engine ticking.
I don’t have a session. I don’t have a reason.
I have a key card they never deactivated, a knee that hates the drive, a need that drove anyway.
I sit in the dark lot looking at the one lit window on the second floor, his office.
I think about Theo’s unheard voicemail, my father’s silence, the framed dead man on my wall.
And then I stop thinking, because thinking is the thing this turns off, and I get out of the truck.
The wing’s dark. My footsteps are too loud on the rubber matting.
The emergency signs glow green. I limp down the corridor toward the strip of light under his door like a moth doing the one thing moths do.
I stop outside it, and I don’t knock. I just stand there.
I want him to know I’m out here and come open it.
I want to not have to ask. I put my hand flat on the door and lean my forehead on the frame and I wait, breathing, the want so big now it’s hard to stand inside.
The metal of the frame is cold against my skin.
Down the dark corridor a vending machine hums and somewhere a pipe ticks and my own pulse is louder than both.
I count my breaths like he taught me on the ice, in through the nose, out slow, and on the fourth one I hear the chair move on the other side.
The door opens.
He looks at me leaned on his doorframe at midnight, drunk, uninvited, wrecked, and he doesn’t look surprised, that’s the thing that takes the last of my knees out.
He expected me. He built me to come, and here I am, and he knew I would be.
And instead of shame, what I feel is relief so total it’s almost grief, because somebody in the world knows exactly what I am and opened the door for it anyway.
He checks the corridor over my shoulder. Then he steps back. He lets me in. He shuts the door, he turns the lock, and the click goes through me like the first swallow of the good stuff.
“You drove here,” he says. “On that knee. Drunk.”
“Yeah.”
“Say what you came for.”
And here’s the part of me I didn’t know was in there until him.
The captain, the guy with the C, the guy who’s never asked anybody for a thing he couldn’t earn with his hands.
And he wants me to say it out loud. I want to die, and I want to say it more than I want to keep my pride, and the second one wins so fast it scares me.
“I came so I’d stop—” My voice cracks. “So it’d stop hurting. You make it stop.”
“That’s not all of it.” He’s close now, that cold patience, not touching me, making me reach across the whole distance myself. “Say the rest.”
“I want you to.” It comes out of me raw. “Whatever you want. I don’t care. I just want you to.”
—
He’s not gentle and I didn’t come here for gentle.
He gets a hand in my hair, the grip I’ve started to need, and he walks me back against the desk, looks me over with something cold and pleased moving behind his eyes, taking inventory of how far I’ve fallen since the last time.
Then he tells me to strip, low and flat, and I do it, fumbling, drunk, my hands not working right.
He watches me do it without lifting a finger to help.
And being watched like that, undressed and unsteady in the bright office while he stands there fully dressed, unhurried, lights up something in me I don’t have a clean name for and don’t want one.
“Turn around. Hands on the desk.”
I turn around. I put my hands on the cold surface and he crowds up behind me, still dressed, the wool of his slacks against the backs of my thighs.
His hand comes up, grips the back of my neck, presses my cheek down to the desk.
And the degradation of it, the captain of a hockey team bent over a desk begging, should be the worst thing.
Instead the throb in my knee goes quiet, the noise in my head goes quiet, and I’d let him do anything to keep it quiet.
His other hand cracks down across my ass, hard, an open palm, and the sound of it and the sting of it shock a sound out of me I’ve never made.
“Quiet,” he says, and does it again, and the second one I push back into.
He works spit down into me with his fingers, rough, not patient, no kindness in it, the only slick either of us is going to get, and he makes me feel the lack, makes me feel exactly how little he’s going to give me.
And the part of me that’s been a piece of equipment to everyone for twenty-five years sinks into being used like this, and finds—God help me—that it’s a relief.
To be wanted for the one thing I’ve still got.
To not have to perform anything but taking it.
“Tell me you want it.” His voice is right against my ear, his weight over my back.
“I want it.”
“Beg.”
And I do. I beg, my face pressed to the desk, the words coming out of me with no floor under them, please, please, I need it, please, and he makes me say it past the point where I have any dignity left, makes me hear myself, and only when I’m fully there, fully down, does he give it to me.
It hurts. It’s meant to hurt, spit and no patience, his hand fisted in my hair.
And the hurt is clean, it’s a pain I chose, it’s the only pain in three weeks I had any say in, and it drowns the other one completely.
He smacks the side of my face, once, not to injure, to remind me whose I am right now.
And I take that too, and I’m gone. I’m nowhere.
I’m just the body bent over his desk getting used, the blessed silence where my whole ruined life usually is.
He doesn’t let me finish on my own terms. When he’s done with me like that, he turns me around and pushes me down by the shoulders, back onto my knees on the hard floor, my own knee screaming, the scream a thousand miles away.
He makes me open my mouth and take him until he comes, his hand in my hair holding me where he wants me, and I swallow because he tells me to.
And I kneel there after with my chest heaving, my face wet, my whole body wrung out, and I have not, for twenty solid minutes, thought about a single thing that’s wrong with my life.
That’s the drug. Not the pills. This. The twenty minutes of nothing.
And here’s the thing I understand now that I didn’t a month ago, kneeling on the floor with him pulling himself back together above me.
I used to think addicts were weak. I did.
I’m an athlete, or I was, and I believed what athletes believe, that the body does what the mind tells it, that wanting something badly enough is a character flaw you can train out of yourself like a bad habit on your backhand.
I had opinions about guys who blew up their careers on this stuff.
I was sure it would never be me, because I was disciplined, because I had the C, because I could squat four hundred pounds and run a room.
And it turns out none of that is armor. It turns out the discipline just means I’ll be more thorough about my own destruction, that I’ll drive across a city at midnight with the same focus I used to bring to a faceoff, that the strongest part of me got handed straight over to the thing that’s killing me and went to work for it.
I’m not weak. That’s the joke. A weak man might have left after the first time. It took everything I had to come back.
—
He gives me almost nothing after. A hand on the back of my neck, brief, the closest he comes to kindness.
And then he’s straightening his clothes, telling me to get dressed and get home and hydrate.
The cold’s already coming back down over him like a shutter.
I dress with my hands still shaking, and I go, because that’s the deal, even if neither of us ever said it.
You get the twenty minutes and then you get put out into the night.
A better man would feel used. I keep waiting for it, the insult of being walked to the door by a man who had me on his floor a minute ago, the sting a worse kind of wanting ought to leave.
It doesn’t sting. That’s what should scare me and doesn’t.
I’ve spent my whole life being wanted for what I could do for people, the goals, the wins, the highlight that makes a kid put your poster up, and every bit of that love came with a bill attached: stay great, keep producing, don’t get hurt.
Then I got hurt and the love packed up and went home, all of it, in about a week.
So a man who wants me when I’ve got nothing left to produce, who wants me precisely broken, wants the wreck and not the highlight, that doesn’t feel like being used.
It feels like the most honest thing anybody’s ever offered me.
He’s the only one who never needed me to be okay.
I’d rather be his ruin than anybody else’s hero.
I know how sick that is. I think it anyway, and I carry it down to the truck like something warm.
It’s three a.m. when I’m driving home, one-footed, the city empty and orange-lit, and I feel the warmth receding mile by mile, the wrongness coming back up to meet me, the knee, the silence, the apartment waiting.
At a red light I pick up my phone. Theo’s voicemail is still sitting there, the little red one, hey man, just checking in.
I look at it. I think about the photo, the cup, the sunburn, the version of me he’s trying to reach.
And I delete it. Unheard. I press the trash and it’s gone.
And I tell myself it’s because I’ll call him properly tomorrow, and I know it’s because I can’t stand to hear a good man love a guy who’s not here anymore.
I tell myself the thing I tell myself every time now.
This is the last one. I’ll stop after this one.
I’ve said it about the whiskey and the pills, and now I say it about him.
And some sober watchman way down in me, the one who saw the lock turn the first night, says quietly that I’ve never once stopped after the last one, that there’s no such thing as the last one, that’s the whole disease.
The light goes green. I drive. And at a stoplight two blocks from home, before I’ve decided to, my thumb finds his name and I text him.
good night
I don’t expect an answer. I just need him to have it, need the day to end on him.
I drive the last two blocks holding the phone in my lap, and the screen stays dark, and that’s all right.
I’ll be back. We both know I’ll be back.
There’s no decision left in it, hasn’t been for a while now, only the dark between one time and the next, the drive, the lock.
I think that might be the only true thing left in my life.