11. Roman #2
A pause. “Okay. Okay, sure, how far are we—?”
“I don’t know. Just push it. The knee’s not ready.
” It’s a lie shaped like a truth, the knee’s part of it but the knee’s not the reason.
The reason is I am not, anywhere in me, ready to leave the dark wing and the locked door, ready to go back to being a man with a season.
I can’t say that to my agent, so I say the knee.
“Tell the gear people spring. Tell everybody spring.”
She’s quiet a second, and when she talks again the brightness has gone careful.
“Roman, that’s the third push. People are going to start—” She stops herself.
“I’ll handle it. You just focus on getting well.
” And the kindness in it, the getting well, lands wrong in my chest, because I’m not getting well, I’m doing the precise opposite with my whole heart, and the people who love me keep handing me their faith like I’m worth it and I keep spending it on the thing that’s killing me.
That’s the part the pills-and-bottle version of the story leaves out, the part nobody warns you about.
It’s not just that you destroy yourself.
It’s that you spend everyone else to do it.
Dara’s going to go to bat for me with the gear company a third time, going to put her own name on the line saying he’s coming, he’s almost back, trust me, and she has no idea she’s vouching for a man who’s using her phone calls as cover for the thing he actually drives across the city to do.
Theo’s sending me hearts. My father, somewhere, is telling people his boy’s working hard on the comeback, the one thing he knows how to be proud of.
They’re all of them invested in a Roman Vane who’s grinding through rehab, coming back stronger, and that man doesn’t exist anymore.
I let him die in a locked room weeks ago.
Every day I don’t tell them is another day I take their belief under false pretenses and convert it into more time in the dark.
I used to be a guy people could count on.
The C on the jersey meant something. Now I’m a confidence scheme that loves the people it’s running, and the loving doesn’t make it better, the loving makes it so much worse.
I hang up the phone. I pour another drink and cannot stand to be in the same skin as myself for a while.
—
Late, in bed, in the dark, I do the thing I’ve started doing.
I scroll up through his texts. All of them, weeks of them, from the first you should be asleep to tonight’s water with the night dose, and I read them looking for one.
Just one. One text that isn’t an instruction.
One that’s a question about me, or a joke, or a thinking about you, one line that came from the man and not the doctor, one crumb that says I’m a person to him and not a protocol he’s running.
There isn’t one. Page after page, all the way back, and every single message is a command or a correction or a dose.
Take the scheduled dose. Ice twenty minutes.
Sleep is part of recovery. Water, not whiskey.
Drive safe. Care, all of it, you could read every line as care, and not one word of it is warm, not one word reaches for me like I reach for him.
I lie there in the glass box with the phone lighting my face and feel the loneliest I have ever felt, which is a thing I didn’t think was possible anymore, to find a new floor under the floor.
He doesn’t love me. I know it like you know cold, in the body, before the mind agrees.
He runs me. He turns the noise off and he runs me, and the running looks enough like care that I can pretend on the good nights.
But there’s no message in this whole phone that a man sends to someone he loves.
I am in something all the way up to my neck with a person who has never once, not by accident, been warm to me.
His last text sits at the bottom, unanswered.
Water with the night dose. I should write something back.
Good night, even. I don’t. For once I don’t.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and I lie in the dark not answering him, the smallest rebellion there is, the only card I’ve got left to play, and I tell myself it means I still have a self in here somewhere that he doesn’t own.
I don’t believe it. But I hold onto it, and I don’t pick the phone back up, and that’s the closest thing to winning I’ve got tonight.
It nearly doesn’t last the night. I lie there in the dark being strong, not answering.
The knee starts up its slow throb. The silence of the glass box gets bigger and bigger until it’s the only thing in the room, and the rebellion that felt like a self with a spine in it starts feeling like a kid holding his breath to punish a parent who isn’t watching.
He’s asleep. He doesn’t know I’m not answering.
The only person my big stand is happening to is me.
And somewhere around one in the morning I cave.
I reach over, turn the phone face-up, and type good night into the box, my thumb actually over send.
Then I stop. I look at the two little words sitting there, one more good dog reporting in, and something in me I didn’t know was still alive refuses, just barely, just this once.
I delete them letter by letter. I put the phone back face-down on the nightstand with the last text still unanswered.
It’s nothing. It’s the smallest thing a man ever did.
But I deleted them myself, and I hold onto that in the dark like the one chip I’ve still got in the game.
That’s where I live now, hoarding a rebellion the size of a deleted text and calling it proof I’m still in here.