I fool the doctor. He asks me about the nasty black shit they make me drink that has the consistency of paint, and I joke about why they don’t sell it in vending machines. I think, What would a person who isn’t suicidal do in this situation? Obviously, a normal person would go crazy, asking questions about why they couldn’t go home, but so would someone trying to get home to off themselves, so playing “normal” means I’m not even freaked out because I know I didn’t do anything wrong, and so I’m just going to be chill and joke around. It’s the fat, annoying nurse who sees through me. “What happened? So were you trying to hurt yourself?”
I don’t know how the laws work, but I’m pretty sure the doctor isn’t going to call the cops if I tell him I do dope. But I don’t. I tell him I have anxiety attacks and took more Xanax than I should have, and also I drank some wine. I don’t know if they will test me and figure out the truth. The nurse looks at me like she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying.
The nurse is a short-haired, bitchy cunt. How can you work in health care and be on your feet all day and still be that fat? How much does this woman eat?
The nurse seems suspicious, and I’m pretty sure that even if it was an accident, she would still be suspicious. She knows there’s more to the story.
I overhear the doctor and the nurse discussing me. The doctor sounds pretty sure it was an accident. The nurse is adamant it wasn’t. The doctor compromises; they will put me on a normal ward (instead of the loony bin) but keep me for observation.
This is not good for a number of reasons. The most immediate one is I am starting to get dope sick. Maybe it’s just knowing I will be dope sick, since it hasn’t been that long since I used. But it will happen, and the anxiety makes me feel queasy and desperate. Douglass needs to get in a cab and go back home and get my shit and then bring it back before they move me to a room. I can’t find my phone. I don’t want to appear too anxious. When I ask about it, the nurse says I’ll get a phone once a bed opens up. When will that be? She doesn’t know. Can I just have my phone back? She says she’ll try. She won’t try.
Hospitals are full of people trying to help people. There is not one person who can help you.
Can I just walk out? I decide to give it a shot. But then the curtain opens, and they are taking my blood.
“I have to pee.”
“This will only take a second.” The woman is already putting the rubber thing around my arm, pinching the fuck out of my skin when she twists it.
“Fuck.”
I normally look away, but this time I look right at the horror-movie-huge needle as it spikes into my vein. I sneeze. And then sneeze again. She tells me to sit still. I can’t. I am in the middle of a hospital and am sick and nobody can help me.
When she’s gone, I leave. I found my clothes under my bed, so the plan is to transform from patient to visitor. I walk past the dying people. Wives and husbands. A smattering of lonely old people. There is a gay couple. The dude looks like a poster for AIDS. Weird how AIDS seems kind of retro now — even diseases have a golden age, a prime, and then they seem played out. How annoying to get AIDS now, feeling like a song people remember being on the radio a lot but have since forgotten completely. His lover is holding his hand and whispering to him. All the other waiting people sit around like they’ve done this a million times before.
I don’t get far. I stick to my story of how I’m feeling fine now, and so I wanted to go out just for a smoke, but the nurse goes and tattles on me to the doctor, and he is not entirely positive I wasn’t trying to flee.
Over the following days I undergo a horrible, nasty withdrawal in the hospital. But finally they get ahold of my shrink, who tells them I need to be on Suboxone. At last, some relief. I sleep. The shrink also okays clonazepam, and they are generous with it. Then there’s talk about where I’m going to go. My mother and Raj are there. I don’t know when they came. I don’t even know what the conversation is. I’m too out of it to stay awake longer than forty-five minutes. There is a twenty-four-hour period when I am almost asleep the entire time. Then there is a twenty-four-hour period where I can’t sleep at all, and I have no visitors. I try to watch the television, but it’s only loud enough to be annoying.
I can’t focus but feel alert. The nightmare withdrawal symptoms are pretty much behind me. It’s plausible I could be clean. I call my mother. She doesn’t believe me. She says she’s tired and doesn’t know what to do. I get angry. She thinks it’s reasonable I tried to kill myself, or at least stupidly OD’d. “I know you were taking. .” She doesn’t finish the sentence. Like there’s a word that can’t be spoken aloud. She won’t say it. Which is weird, because she always has something to say.
I end up on a plane with my mother and brother. I keep thinking, Sound normal. But I can tell by the worry on their faces that I’ve scared the shit out of them. My mother tries to figure out where I’m getting the dope. She doesn’t know Douglass has been staying with me. Thank god he was gone when they went back to the apartment before I was discharged.
There are thirty-four texts. Johns. Money.
It is so hard to know money is waiting for you, a lot of money, and every single problem you currently have — feeling like shit, wanting to die, guilt, anger, resentment, feeling soft, feeling vulnerable — could all disappear easily, and you really would be completely fine.
You try to stick with this thought process, but you know eventually you will feel this way again. You will be in this same exact position only more time will have passed, and so it’s better just to clean up now.
A small voice says, “You won’t ever get high again?”
Another voice says, “No, one day. Like in six months, it will be okay to do a few bags, and your tolerance will be so shitty you will feel incredible.”
And then another voice says, “It’s time. Just fucking stop it. You are too old for this to be cute.” I try to hold on to that. I am a former drug addict. Oh god, that sounds terrible.
I’m actually clean. The Suboxone is helping me along.
The place they put me in is like a prison with carpeting. There is a door you have to punch a code into to leave.
I scream at my mother, “How can you fucking leave me here?” She just cries. She says she doesn’t know what to do anymore. “So you just fucking lock me up? I have rights.” I didn’t know that my shrink and my mother had conspired when I was in the hospital in New York.
Here, kid, this is what you did with the life that was given to you.
I cry a lot. I think about how Peter would have visited if we were still together. My mother annoys me with her questions, and my brother is eager to get back home. He’s annoyed I do whatever I want, and he has to take time out of his life to deal with my shit. Like I had asked him to come. “Here, deal with my shit.”
Glad-Ass, the head of the useless nurses, says my roommate will be in soon. I ask if she can leave me alone for a while, but she says I’m on twenty-four-hour watch. She follows me to the bathroom and looks directly at me when I pull down my pants and go. She takes me to the rec room, which is just one big room with a couch and a big table, the kind they have at preschools, and a TV and a Ping-Pong table. The whole place feels like an after-school recreation center.