21. Roman #2
And I get a recording. A flat machine voice, no apology in it.
The number you have dialed is no longer in service.
That’s all. No longer in service. I stand there and dial it again, slower, sure I fumbled it.
I get the same three seconds of nothing-voice, the same dead end, and I understand that the door I wasn’t strong enough to close myself has been closed from the other side.
He’s gone. The number’s dead. Whatever’s happening to him out there, he has cut the cord I was about to climb back down.
I lean my forehead against the cold wall of the hallway with the receiver still in my hand, the dial tone humming.
I don’t know if what I feel is grief or rescue.
I think it might be both, all the way down, both at once.
And standing there in my socks in the dark hall, I do the thing Russ told me to do when the want comes, which is to put something real in front of it.
So I think about Sammy. I think about the empty chair with the party hat, the plate in Theo’s freezer with my name on it, the kid I taught to skate, the boy who set out a place for an uncle who didn’t come because the uncle was two miles away getting worse on purpose.
That’s the thing it costs me. Not the career, not even my own life, those are abstractions at two in the morning.
Sammy’s plate is not an abstraction. Theo putting his shoulder through my door is not an abstraction.
I have a small number of people who would break themselves to keep me alive, and every single time I dialed those ten digits I was choosing a dead number over all of them, choosing the locked room over the kid on the pond.
I am twenty-five years old, and I have wasted a year of being somebody’s hero to be somebody’s wreck.
I want to be the uncle again. That, more than the ice, more than the name, is the thing I let the receiver fall back into the cradle for.
I want to be a man Sammy could set a plate for and have it not stay empty.
I push off the wall and I go find Russ’s words for the rest of the night, and I do not dial again.
—
So I go back to group. The late one, the after-dinner meeting. I walk in late, and Maren looks up and doesn’t say anything about the chair I left empty a day ago, just nods me toward an open one. I sit down in it.
I wait until there’s a pause. My hands are doing the steady thing, which I’m grateful for, because the rest of me isn’t steady at all.
“I left yesterday,” I say, “because you asked me who wrote the prescriptions, and I didn’t want to answer it.
” The circle waits. Maren waits. “My doctor wrote them,” I say.
“The team doctor. He wrote them and he kept writing them, stronger and stronger, when anybody honest would’ve stopped.
” I make myself keep going, into the part that costs, the part that’s mine.
“And I asked him to. That’s the thing I keep trying to leave out.
I wasn’t a guy something happened to. I went to him.
I asked for more. Every single time, I asked.
He had his reasons for giving it to me and they were bad ones, and someday I’ll have a lot to say about him, but he didn’t pour it down my throat.
I drove to him drunk and I asked. I’d have found somebody else to ask if it hadn’t been him, because by then I wanted the off-switch more than I wanted my own life, and that part doesn’t have his name on it. That part’s just mine.”
It’s quiet when I finish. Nobody claps, this isn’t that kind of room, but Russ across the circle gives me one slow nod, the nod of a man who knows exactly what that cost. Maren says, “Thank you, Roman,” and means it, and then she moves us on to the next person.
And I stay in my chair. That’s the whole victory, the entire thing I came here to learn how to do.
I told the true version with the hand in it, my hand, and then I didn’t run.
I sat in the folding chair with my heart kicking, my coffee going cold, and I stayed all the way to the end, through the next guy’s story, the one after that, the closing.
When we stood up to say the words at the end, I was still there to say them.
I stayed. For the first time in a year, when the real thing got close, I stayed in the room.
It doesn’t feel like a triumph. That’s what nobody tells you about the good days in here, that they don’t come with music.
It just feels like sitting in a hard chair past the point I wanted to leave, which Russ says is the whole thing, actually, the entire program in one sentence: you stay past the point you want to leave.
The wanting-to-leave never goes away, he says.
You just get a little stronger at staying than the wanting is at pulling, and you build that strength the only way it gets built, one hard chair at a time, one true sentence at a time, one dead number you don’t dial twice.
I walk back to my narrow room after the closing and I look at the schedule taped to the wall, all those hours spoken for.
Tomorrow I’ll do them again, group, work, the meeting, the hard chair, and the day after that.
I get the smallest flash of something I haven’t felt in so long I almost don’t recognize it, which is the feeling of being at the start of something instead of the end.
Not fixed, not safe, just here on day whatever, with steady hands and a true story and a man down the hall who’ll pick up when I call.
It’s not much. It’s the most I’ve had in a year.