Brightness Falls (44 page)

The fat nurse rapped on Jeff's door and called, "Time for your breakfast, honey."

Always the same old shit, he thought. Every morning breakfast. Then it's time for lunch. Then dinner. It all tasted like cardboard and cigarettes. and it didn't satisfy, because it wasn't what you really wanted. You wanted something else and you thought about it all the time, and these other approved channels of desire and fulfillment seemed hopelessly second- rate. At night, every night, he dreamed of white powder deliquescing in
a
spoon, turning milky clear above an ice-blue flame. Going downtown in his dreams.

This, apparently, was the way it was going to be for the rest of his life, the fucking diurnal shuffle. Ella, the nurse, though—there was a girl who enjoyed her pancakes and eggs. Three hundred pounds, give or take, and the white uniform made her look even bigger. An improvement if they would dress the help in black, perhaps. Little black uniforms. Slim them down a little.

"Couldn't we change the order, at least. Start with dinner, say?"

"You being silly, now."

"Silly?
Is that a technical term?" he called after Ella's retreating bulk. "Are you trying to confuse me with that psychological jargon?"

The impeccably groomed lawn had turned silvery-gray overnight, dusted with the first frost of the season.
Winter is icumen in, Ihude sing goddamn.
Going outside was still a shock, the world appearing new, not quite real, like something wrapped in an invisible layer of plastic, or possibly like a brand-new yet inexplicably stale planet from which the plastic had just been removed. He hadn't been straight in a year, and now, with his pupils at normal size and his brain stem detoxified, everything looked different.

For those not restricted to their rooms, meals were taken in the dining room of the big house, which resembled a cheerful country inn—a white Georgian colonial sitting on a hill amidst acres of lawn and satellite buildings. Jeff trudged up the footpath from Glover House, his residence for the past two weeks. Just like being back in prep school, except that it wasn't. Different curriculum: group therapy, AA, biofeedback, arts and crafts, individual therapy and more AA.

Warily passing Carlyle House, from which he had recently graduated—the setting of his hellish withdrawal, where the tuxedoed new arrival would wake up sweating tomorrow. Abandon dope, all ye who enter here. Jeff dubbed it the Wildlife Refuge. New inmates often arrived at the end of long benders, still drunk and stoned from the party, whacked out when they started the tests, drawing blood, checking blood pressure, separating out the pill and scag freaks from the coke and booze people. Pharmaceutical downs were allegedly the hardest, but downtown was none too fucking easy. When Jeff really started to get sick they kept waking him up to check his pulse, the handy green plastic bucket always there beside his bed in anticipation of the violent revolution of his outraged cells. A real sickness unto death, walking between two nurses up and down the hall to keep the heart moving, that beat-up old heart. DTs, of course, and the taste like living metal at the back of the mouth. Phenobarbital for seizures and Clonidine to get rid of cramps. At one point he suffered a vision of Russell and Corrine coming after him with Henckel's kitchen knives, slicing his guts into pink and blue ribbons— the cause of this horrible pain.

For forty years a discreetly famous dry-out tank for Park Avenue drunks, Carlyle House had been a small, lucrative colony of the main psychiatric facility. But detox admissions had doubled and trebled in recent years; depression was showing steady growth, but substance abuse was
booming.
Some of the inmates were double threats—depressed addicts. Jeff admired the manic-depressives, believing that they were most closely attuned to the roller-coaster spirit of the age/state of the nation.

Depressives and addicts mixed freely at meals. Jeff had his little group of misfit toy friends. Dropping his tray of rubber eggs and cellulose toast this morning between Delia and Mickey. Beautiful, skinny Delia with her insane raccoon eye makeup sat motionless in front of her tray, the former cover girl of the year, looking out the bay window while her nurse exhorted her to eat. Delia fit every category of pathology covered by the establishment.

"Want to hear my dream?" Mickey said, lighting a cigarette and dropping the match in his orange juice. Mickey was a seventeen-year-old crack addict. Though he had been in for three months and was presumably clean, he always arrived at breakfast dressed for the nightlife, his long, stringy hair unwashed, his black linen jacket wrinkled and stained, reminding Jeff of the bad old mornings of his recent past.

"I'm in my car—I don't even have my driver's license yet, right?— but anyway, I'm in a car cruising down the West Side Highway way down in the Village. Around the Meat District, you know where that is? I can tell that's where it is, too, because there are these, like, sides of beef hanging on hooks all over the place. And I'm cruising in my car. So like I see this transvestite hooker, you know, one of those horrible creatures that work the orifices between Manhattan and its colonies, you know, I mean, isn't that what a tunnel is—it's like a hole, think of what that does to you, driving into a hole every day to go to your shitty little work cubicle in the city and then driving back out the hole to return to this aluminum-sided box where your wife is waiting. The really hilarious thing is, a lot of these transvestite hookers are saving up for operations so they can be
real
women and get married and live in some shitty little subdivision in Jersey. Do you know that most transsexuals get married and more than half don't tell their husbands?"

Jeff suddenly recalled a rumor he'd heard, that Bernie Melman's wife was a transsexual. He couldn't remember where he'd heard it.

"So anyway, I cruise past one of these fake chicks and then I'm slowing down my car but I'm kind of looking in from outside my dream and saying, Whoa, wait a minute, this is a dude, as in a male-type person. And then I wave the guy over—he's still dressed like a girl, right?—and he gets in the car and starts going for my zipper. I notice his makeup's melting. It falls away from his face like skin and I'm expecting to see this guy and instead it's my mother, man. My mother disguised as a guy disguised as a hooker. I mean, how twisted can you get? Taylor's gonna love it."

Mickey tapped his ashes carefully into his eggs, making two gray nipples on the glistening yellow aureoles of the yokes, and looked sideways at Jeff. "What do you think? You're speechless? Personally, I think it's got everything, big analytic box office—sexual ambiguity, homoeroticism, explicit Oedipal scene. Everything except the cigar. She didn't actually go down on me or anything, I woke up before that. But the transvestite thing raises some interesting issues for me. Like, when I was twelve or thirteen I started dressing up as a girl so I could get into the clubs. No way could I look old enough as a guy, but I could always get in as a cute girl. I got in everywhere, the Milk Bar, Area—even the after-hours clubs, A.M. P.M., Save the Robots. Then I'd slip into the men's room and change back into a boy. Dr. T thinks it had to be more than a matter of convenience, of course, a cigar is never just a cigar in this fucking place, is it? He thinks my adventures in cross-dressing were deeply significant. So hey, I admit, sometimes I got into being a chick. Once in a while I forgot to change my clothes. My mom found my makeup kit one time. I was like fourteen by then. Want to know what she said?" He looked around the table, soliciting curiosity.

"I'll tell you. She didn't say a thing."

"You want a cigarette, Delia?" Having mangled a piece of toast he had painted with jam, Jeff felt entitled to light up.

She was still looking out the window. Jeff was about to repeat the question when she turned her head toward him and met his eyes. He tapped out another Marlboro and placed it between her full, chapped lips, smeared unevenly with red lipstick. He lit the cigarette from his lighter. Delia had not spoken in two weeks. Without really having known her, Jeff had seen her around for years. Born of hillbillies in Arkansas, she was a hot model in the early eighties. He would see her out all the time, and one of his favorite rock singers had been her consort for a year or two. She was only twenty-seven, and the life she had lived in Hotel Manhattan had seriously abraded her; she hadn't modeled in several years, and she'd been here about four months, having arrived after slitting her wrists at Minky Rijstaefel's party. Jeff seemed to recall having been there himself. Maybe. That line from
Vile Bodies
—"Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties." He didn't seem to remember much of the last year—-fortunately. Delia's medical bills were allegedly paid by her last patron, a wealthy and titled European. Even in this sanctuary for the twisted and the broken, Delia was considered deeply weird.

Mickey's cigarette hissed and died in his coffee cup. "It's been unreal," he said, standing up and reaching behind his head to touch his ponytail. It was a habit he had, as if he thought the fashionable appendage would disappear. Or maybe he did it for luck. People here were superstitious, readers of signs and omens, susceptible to peripheral visions and invisible currents of airborne malevolence. Standing beside the table, Mickey looked like a crooked little flagpole trailing a thin pennant of hair. He'd been on the cocaine diet for five years, freebasing his way to that slim boyish figure.

"See you at basket weaving."

Everybody smoked. They were all addictive personalities and this was the only permissible compulsion. In group or AA, you looked around the room and smoke was pouring from lips as if from internal conflagrations, everybody burning up inside. In group last week they'd set off the smoke alarm. Alarm shrieking, the dazed and confused looking more so, hunched in their chairs holding their hands over their ears.

It was like prison or the army, where you had so little control over your own destiny that you seized every opportunity to mark time in your own manner, to gratify yourself independently of the people who controlled the keys and the passes and the med cabinet. So you smoked.

Pale from detoxification, the dancing fool whose arrival Jeff had witnessed a few mornings before smoked Gauloises, from the blue package Robert Motherwell had stuck in that famous collage. Well, if you were going to die, why not get on with it, and the hell with low-tar sticks? After all, half the people in the room had tried to do it. Self-inflicted razor tracks trickling out from under shirt cuffs. The druggies did it on the installment plan, although they denied it at first.

While they all fired up their cigarettes, Beverly, the MSW, was asking the new guy to introduce himself. His name, he said, was Brad Balfour.

"Why are you here, Brad?"

"I've always wanted to visit Connecticut. "

"Tell us a little about yourself. "

"I'm a venture capitalist from New York City, capital capital of the world."

"Anything else?"

"Five-eleven, one-fifty, blue eyes, and yes—I'm single."

"What else?"

He exhaled a cloud of smoke that would have done a blast furnace proud, looked out the window and sighed archly. Jeff wondered how he could possibly be so feisty after detox, and decided, a little scornfully, that the guy had a minor coke habit. For all his insouciance, though, his hands trembled and his eyes were ringed with the unflattering mascara of sleep deprivation.

"I'm a drug addict."

"Good." She nodded and let him off with this admission.

"Jeff, do you want to talk today?"

"Not really," he said.

"I've got a problem with that," said Fran, the alcoholic editor whose magazine,
Woman Today,
had published, as threatened, an unflattering profile of him after he turned down its request for an interview. Jeff didn't know if she had anything to do with this sordid transaction, but he disliked her instinctively and suspected her of being here to research an article.

"Why don't you tell us about that?" said Beverly.

"It's like, Jeff has this superior attitude. He doesn't share with us. He thinks he's too famous or something."

Beverly swiveled her head to Jeff. "What do think about that?"

"When I can think of something intelligent to say I'll
share
it with you."

"See? It's like he's saying the rest of us aren't intelligent."

"I don't think Jeff means that, do you, Jeff?"

Jeff sucked a big ball of smoke into his lungs and blew it out. "I keep seeing this glossy magazine page with an article by Fran called 'How to Get the Most out of Rehab.' "

"That's not very kind, Jeff."

"Or maybe, 'GroupSpeak: How to Sound Smart (and Look Good) in Therapy.' "

Beverly frowned. "I think Fran has a valid point here, Jeff. Perhaps you should reexamine your attitude toward the group."

In arts and crafts Delia stenciled pink bells on the handle of a basket as her special nurse, who was charged to stay within arm's length, stood by and watched. It was her fourth basket. They were manufactured elsewhere and the hospital bought them in bulk. Woodworking entailed sharp tools—clearly out of the question. Old Evelyn Salmon dithered past, supported by her cane on one side and a nurse on the other, followed closely by blue-haired Babs Osterlick.

"That's a lovely basket, dear."

Delia continued to paint.

"She's such a pretty girl," said Babs, puffing as she came to a stop beside her friend, her coif shining bluely like a polished sapphire.

"Lovely, but so thin," said Evelyn. "It would be all right if she just had a little more up top." Evelyn herself was endowed with a massive outcrop of bust, to which she often alluded in the presence of the younger men at the institution. Evelyn and Babs were approaching seventy. There was nothing particularly wrong with them—a touch of geriatric flakiness—but both had become lonely when their husbands died. Both husbands leaving behind piles of money, they had decided to spend their latter days here rather than in a nursing home, making generous contributions to the capital fund and paying full hospital rates for their lodging. The company amused them. They referred to detox patients as "the drunks" and the rest as "the loonies."