I Am Pilgrim(48)

I’ve been to enough Narcotics Anonymous meetings to know it only takes about twenty minutes before somebody gets up and says they had to hit bottom before they could start the long climb out. So it was with Marcie. Sitting up late one evening, she’d begun filling in the forms she had received that morning from the Wellness Foundation in Hudson Falls.

With Ben asleep in the next room – watching people die over and over in his dreams – and a questionnaire taking her back through so many shared experiences, she found herself deeper in the canyons of despair than she had ever been. She didn’t know it, of course, but she had finally found ‘bottom’. One question asked what personal items the patient would enjoy having with them. Nothing really, she answered – what was the point, she had tried providing all of that. As she was about to continue, she stared at the word and a strange thought took hold. ‘Nothing,’ she said quietly.

Marcie was a smart woman – a teacher at a charter high school in New York – and, like most women, she had thought a lot about love. She knew, even in marriage, if you advanced too far to please the other person it let them edge away, and you ended up always laughing and fighting and screwing on their territory. Sometimes you had to stand your ground and make them come to you – just to keep the equilibrium.

She turned and looked at the bedroom door. She knew she had done so much to try to restore her husband’s mental health that the equilibrium was way out of line. Maybe the trick was to make him emerge from the deep cell he’d built and edge back towards her.

When Ben woke seven hours later from his drug-assisted sleep, he thought he was in the wrong life. This wasn’t the bedroom he and Marcie shared, this wasn’t the room he had closed his eyes on. Yes, the doors and windows were in the same place, but all the things that individuated it, that made it his and Marcie’s space, were gone.

There were no photographs, no paintings and no mess on the floor. The TV had gone and even the kilim they both loved had silently disappeared. Apart from the bed and some physio equipment there was, well – nothing. As far as he could see, it was the white room at the end of the universe.

Confused about where he really was, he swung off the bed and, hobbling from his smashed thigh, crossed the room. He opened the door and looked into a parallel universe.

His wife was in the kitchen, trying to hurry up her coffee. Bradley watched her in silence. In the twenty years they had been together, she had grown ever more beautiful in his eyes. She was tall and slim with simply cut hair that accentuated the fine shape of her face but which, more importantly, seemed to say she didn’t care much about her own good looks. That, of course, was the only way to handle such a gift, and it made her appear even more attractive.

Looking at her in the midst of the home they loved gave him a terrible catch in his throat. He wondered if he was being shown what he had left behind; maybe he had never got out of the building and was already dead.

Then Marcie realized he was there and smiled at him. Bradley was relieved – he was pretty certain people who saw a dead guy in their bedroom doorway didn’t act like that. Not Marcie, anyway, who didn’t care much for Hallowe’en and had a deep aversion to graveyards.

For the first time in months Marcie’s spirits ticked higher: the new strategy had at least made him come to the cell door and look out. ‘Another minute and I’m leaving for work – I’ll be back in time to get dinner,’ she said.

‘Work?’ he queried, trying to get his mind around the idea. She hadn’t been to work since he was injured.

She said nothing – if he wanted answers, he was going to have to work for them. He watched her jam a piece of toast in her mouth, grab her travel cup of coffee and head out the door with a small wave.

It left Bradley marooned in the doorway, so, after a moment of silence and unable to keep the weight on his strapped leg, he did the only thing he thought sensible – he left the parallel world and went back into the white room.

He lay down but, try as he might, he couldn’t think clearly about what was happening with so many psychoactive drugs in his body. In silence, alone in the decaying morning, he decided the only practical thing to do was to wean himself off them. It was a dangerous but crucial decision – at last he was taking responsibility for his own recovery.

Despite her promise, Marcie didn’t fix him dinner that night; he was in a fitful sleep so she decided to leave him be. Instead of a meal tray, she placed a new hardcover book on his bedside table, hoping that, with nothing else to occupy him, he would eventually pick it up. The idea for the book had come to her that morning, and immediately after school she had hurried down to a store near Christopher Street. It was called Zodiac Books, but it had nothing to do with astrology – it was named after a serial killer in Northern California whose exploits had spawned a one-maniac publishing industry.