The Dead Student (2 page)

“Big trouble?”

“Not yet. Just the
want
, you know. It kinda shook me up.”

“Did something specific happen, you know, that triggered …”

His uncle, Moth knew, was always interested in the underlying
why
because that would help him decide the overarching
what
.

“No. I don’t know. Nothing. But this morning there it was as soon as I opened my eyes. It was like waking up and finding some ghost seated on the edge of the bed watching me.”

“That’s scary,” his uncle said. “But not exactly an unfamiliar ghost.” Uncle Ed paused, a psychiatrist’s delay, measuring words like a fine carpenter calculates lengths. “You think waiting until six tonight makes sense? What about an earlier meeting?”

“I have classes almost all day. I should be able—”

“That’s if you go to the classes.”

Moth stayed quiet. This was obvious.

“That’s if,” his uncle continued, “you don’t walk out of your apartment, take a sharp left, and run directly to that big discount liquor store on LeJeune Road. You know, the one with the big blinking goddamn red neon sign that every drunk in Dade County knows about. And it’s got
free parking
.” These last words were tinged with contempt and sarcasm.

Again, Moth said nothing. He wondered:
Was that what I was going to do?
There might have been a
yes
lurking somewhere within him that he hadn’t quite heard yet but that was getting ready to shout at him. His uncle knew all the inner conversations before they even happened.

“You think you can turn right, start pedaling that bike nice and fast, and head toward school? You think you can get through each class—what do you have this morning?”

“Advanced seminar on current applications of Jeffersonian principles. It’s what the great man said and did two hundred and fifty years ago that still means something today. That’s followed by a required two-hour statistics lecture after lunch.”

His uncle paused again, and Moth imagined him grinning. “Well, Jefferson is always pretty damn interesting. Slaves and sex. Wildly clever inventions and incredible architecture. But that advanced statistics class, well,
boring.
How did you ever end up in that? What has that got to do with a doctorate in American History? It would drive
anyone
to drink.”

This was a frequently shared joke, and Moth managed a small laugh. “Word,” he said, the historian in him enjoying the irony of employing teenage-speak already in disuse and discarded.

“So, how about a compromise?” his uncle said. “We’ll meet at Redeemer One at six, like you said. But you go to the lunch meeting over at the campus center. That’s at noon. You call me as you walk in. You don’t even have to get up and say a damn thing unless you feel like it—you just have to be there. And you call me when you walk out. Then you call me again when you walk into the statistics class. And when you walk out. And each
time figure on holding that phone up so I can hear that professor, droning on in the background. That’s what I want to hear. Nice, safe, boring lecture stuff. Not glasses clinking.”

Moth knew his uncle was a veteran alcoholic, well versed in the myriad excuses, explanations, and evasions of everything except another drink.
His
personal tally of days sober was now well into the thousands. Maybe nearly seven thousand, a number that Moth believed he would find truly impossible to attain. He was more than a sponsor. He was Virgil to Moth’s drunken Dante. Moth knew his uncle Ed had saved his life and had done so more than once.

“Okay,” Moth said. “So, we meet at six?”

“Yeah. Save me a comfy seat, because I might be delayed a couple of minutes. I got an emergency appointment request for late this afternoon.”

“Someone like me?” Moth asked.

“Moth, boy. There ain’t nobody like you,” his uncle replied, slipping into a fake Southern drawl. “Nah. More likely some sad-eyed suburban housewife depressive whose meds are running low and is panicking big-time because her regular therapist is on vacation. All I am is a glorified, overeducated prescription pad waiting to be signed. See you tonight. And call. All those times. You know I’ll be waiting.”

“I’ll call. Thanks, Uncle Ed.”

“No big deal.”

But of course, it was.

Moth made the specified phone calls, each time safely bantering about nothing important for a few moments with his uncle. Moth had not thought he would say anything at the noontime meeting, but near the end of the session, at the urging of the young theology professor who ran the gathering, he had risen and shared his fears over his morning desires. Almost all the heads had nodded in recognition.

When he exited from the meeting, he took his Trek 20-speed mountain bike to the university’s playing fields. The high-tech rubberized quarter-mile track that encircled a football practice field was empty and despite a
warning sign that told students to keep off unless under supervision, he lifted the bike over a turnstile gate, and after a quick look right and left to make sure he was alone, started riding in circles.

He picked up his pace quickly, energized by the clicking of the gears beneath him, the torque as he leaned dangerously into each turn, the steady accumulation of speed mixed with the high cloudless azure sky of a typical Miami winter’s afternoon. As he pumped his legs and felt muscles tightening with energy, he could sense
the crave
being pushed aside and buried within him. Four laps rapidly became twenty. Sweat started to burn his eyes. He could hear his breath coming harder with the exertion. He felt like a boxer whose roundhouse right has staggered his opponent.
Keep throwing punches
, he told himself. Victory was within sight.

When he finished the twenty-eighth lap, he pulled the bike to a sudden stop, tires squealing against the red synthetic track surface. Chances were good a campus security officer would swing by any second—he’d already pushed that envelope.

What would he do, yell at me?
Moth thought.
Give me a citation for trying to stay sober?

Moth lifted the bike back over the gate. Then he leisurely retraced his route to the wrought-iron stand adjacent to the science building where he could lock up the Trek and head to statistics. He passed a security guard in a small white SUV and gave a cheery wave to the driver, who didn’t wave back. Moth knew he would probably start to stink as the sweat dried after he entered the air-conditioned classroom, but he didn’t care.

Miraculously, he thought, it was turning into a small, but optimistic day.

A hundred now seemed not only attainable, but probable.

Moth waited outside a bit, right until a minute shy of six, before going inside Redeemer One and heading to the meeting lounge. There were already twenty or so men and women seated in a loose circle, all of whom greeted Moth with a nod or a small wave. A thin haze of cigarette smoke hung in the room—
an acceptable addiction for drunks,
Moth thought. He looked at the others. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, professor.
Tinker, tailor,
soldier, spy
. And then himself:
graduate student
. There was a dark oaken table at the back of the room with a coffee urn and ceramic mugs. There was also a small shiny metal tub filled with ice and a selection of diet soft drinks and bottled water.

Moth found a spot and set his tattered student backpack down beside him. The regulars would easily have guessed that he was saving a space for his uncle—who had, after all, been the person who introduced Moth to Redeemer One and its high-class collection of addicts.

It was not until perhaps fifteen minutes into the meeting that Moth began to fidget nervously when there was no sign of his uncle. Something felt misshapen, a note out of tune. While Uncle Ed would sometimes be a few minutes late, if he said he was coming, he always showed up. Moth kept turning his head away from the speaker toward the door, expecting his uncle to make an apologetic entrance at any moment.

The speaker was talking hesitantly about OxyContin and the warm sensation that it gave him. Moth tried to pay attention. He thought that was a most commonplace description, and differed little whether the speaker was sharing something about morphine-based pharmaceuticals, home-brewed methamphetamine, or store-bought cheap gin. The plummeting, welcoming warmth that permeated head and body seemed to wrap up an addict’s soul. It had been true for him during his few years of addiction, and he suspected his uncle, during his decades, had felt the same.

Warmth,
Moth thought.
How crazy is it to live in Miami, where it is always hot, and need some other heat?

Moth tried to focus on the man talking. He was an engineer—a likeable guy, a middle-aged, slightly dumpy, bald-headed man of tolerances and stresses, employed by one of the larger construction firms in the city. The realist in Moth wondered just how many condo buildings and office skyscrapers might have been constructed down on Brickell Avenue by a man who cared more for the numbers of pills he could obtain each day than the numbers on architectural plans.

He turned to the door when he heard it open, but it was a woman—an
assistant state attorney, probably a dozen years older than he was. Dark-haired, intense, she wore a trim blue business suit and carried a leather portfolio case instead of a designer pocketbook and even at the end of the workday, she looked carefully put together. She was a relative newcomer to Redeemer One. She had attended only a few meetings and said little on each occasion, so she remained largely a mystery to the regulars
.
Recently divorced. Major crimes. Drug of choice: cocaine.
“Hello, I’m Susan and I’m an addict.”
She mumbled her apologies to no one and everyone and slid quietly into a chair in the back.

When it was his turn to share, Moth stammered and declined.

The meeting ended without a sign of his uncle.

Moth walked out with the others. In the church parking lot he shared a few perfunctory hugs and exchanged some phone numbers, as was customary following a meeting. The engineer asked him where his uncle was, and Moth told him that Ed had planned to come, but must have gotten hung up with a patient emergency. The engineer, plus a heart surgeon and a philosophy professor who’d been listening in, had all nodded in the special way that recovering addicts have, as if acknowledging that the scenario Moth described was most likely true, but just maybe it wasn’t. Each told him to call if he needed to talk.

None of the people at the meeting were so rude as to point out that his earlier exercise on the track had resulted in a stale, ripe odor about him. Since he was the youngest regular at Redeemer One, they all cut Moth some slack, probably because he reminded them of themselves—just twenty years or more earlier. And everyone at the meeting was familiar with the foul scents of nausea, waste, and despair that accompanied their addictions, so they had developed tolerances for rank odors that went far beyond the norm.

Moth stood around, shuffling his feet. He watched the others disappear. It was still warm: a humid, thick blanket that made it seem like the evening had wrapped itself around him, cloaking him in tightening shadow. He could feel himself sweating again.

He was unsure when he made the decision to go to his uncle’s office.
He just looked up and found himself on his bicycle, pedaling fiercely in that direction.

Cars sliced through the night around him. He had a single flashing red safety light attached to the rear wheel frame, though he doubted that it would do much good. Miami drivers have loose relationships with the rules of the roadway, and sometimes yielding to a person on a bicycle seemed either like a terrible loss of face or a task so difficult it was beyond anyone’s innate ability. He was accustomed to being cut off and nearly sideswiped every hundred yards and secretly enjoyed the ever-present, car-crushing danger.

His uncle’s office was in a small building ten blocks away from the high-end shops on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, which was only a mile or two from the university campus. After the shopping district, the road became a four-lane too-fast boulevard, with frequent stoplights, east and west to frustrate the Mercedes-Benz and BMW drivers hurrying home after work. The road was divided by a wide center swath of stately palms and twisted banyan trees. The palms seemed puritan in their upright rigor, while the ancient mangroves were Gordian knots and devilishly misshapen, gnarled with age. Each direction seemed almost encased, tunnels formed by haphazard sweeping branches. Auto headlights carved out arcs of light through the spaces between the trunks.

Moth pedaled quickly, dodging cars, sometimes ignoring red lights if he thought he could zip safely through the intersection. More than one driver honked at him, sometimes for no reason other than the fact that he was there and using up space that they believed they both needed and deserved for their oversized SUV.

He was breathing hard, his pulse throbbing, when he arrived at the office building. Moth chained his bike to a tree in front. It was a dull, redbrick building, four squat stories with an old, slightly decrepit feel to it, especially in a city devoted to modern, young, and hip. There were wide windows in the back of the office that overlooked a few side streets and the rear parking lot and a single tall palm tree and not much else. It was,
Moth had always thought, a very unprepossessing place for a man so successful in his practice.

He walked around the back and saw his uncle’s silver Porsche convertible parked in its designated slot.

Moth did not know what to think.
Patient? Emergency?

He hesitated before going up to the small suite. He told himself that he could simply wait by the Porsche and sooner or later his uncle would emerge.