It was an October night seven years ago when Jen sat alone in the den, listening to Leonard Cohen’s mournful dirges, watching the smoke curl up to the stucco ceiling. Saint was fast asleep, Gary presumably beside her. She’d heard them come in a few hours ago – some shouting, a door slam, conciliatory wafts of lovemaking – while she lay in her room, unable to sleep, unable to get up. Breathing quietly so they’d forget she was there. It hadn’t turned out to be required. After another hour and an urge to smoke in bed, she dragged herself to the refuge of the den, dim lights, and tired pages of thoughts she once found unique. She slopped an inch of Grand Marnier into her favorite cut crystal snifter, imagining that she was a ‘40s glamour queen. She wanted to scream and smash things, and yet this deadly emptiness was crawling throughout her.
She began a letter they will find taped to the mirror of a hotel room a few hours later, after she sought refuge in the Best Western in the sky. She started the with Saint’s immortal words to her:
I cry for all the things I’ve touched, sucked life from, breathed life into. It is my right to meet my dark stranger on the shore tonight. Do not concern yourself with your altruism, it is but an illusion designed for self-comfort. I alone can throw the chips on the floor and say the party is over.
The longer she wrote, the more convinced she became the party was over. She crawled into her car and laid rubber all the way down Lakeshore. But it was empty. No cruisers, no pedestrians, no one to kill or be killed by. She sat under the bridge by the river and watched the 11s dance, just like that birthday her Dad said he’d lit them for her. She pulled her ID from her wallet and methodically began slicing little ribbons off and tossing them into the dark water. Erasure. Several times she nicked herself with the Swiss Army knife. Plastic was harder to cut. But she enjoyed the smears of blood on her hands. Suitably dramatic. She was upping the ante.
When she finished, she felt a little freer. She staggered over to the trunk and opened it, rooting around for a screwdriver. She removed the license plate from her car. The river, now hungry, received this last remnant of her identity. She watched the current suck the plate down with an almost audible slurp. What else can she sacrifice to this dark sluice?
The contents of her bag that she did not throw into the river were as follows: 12 black beauties; 1 phial of rat poison; 3 pouches of neo-citron; 1 bottle of prescription of codeine; 2 packs of diet pills; half a bottle of aspirin; 1 mickey of Southern Comfort.
For a moment, she stared into the mist. She could sacrifice these implements of her demise to the magic river. She could get on a plane and drift away to a new city, a new identity, a new life. This thought invigorated her. No one would know the difference.
Then she realized there’s no way to board a plane without an identity. She could hitchhike, she’d thought. Suddenly, she grew bored, exhausted with the details. She clutched the wad of bills she stole from the bank deposit and marched to the Best Western a few hundred yards away. She checked in, not without suspicious glances from the desk boy. Little wonder; she was drunk; had no luggage; no credit card to give him. Maybe he recognized her pseudonym: S. Plath.
She was past caring about the desk boy and his unpressed white shirt. She stumbled down the hall to room 104. It was like every other Best Western in which she’d spent far too much time thanks to a dead-end job as an area manager for a direct marketing firm. Slim pickings for a debt-ridden grad.
She contemplated the character of sex she’d had in this motel chain. The carefree, exciting, but deeply unsatisfying dramatic acts. The mornings when they became strangers once again. The glory of traveling a territory to teach welfare mothers and high school drop outs how to work harder for less. She was not proud of her job. She was not proud of herself. She didn’t know how she got this far astray.
When Janet had first seen Jen on her return from Toronto, her flight from the vibrant mother city of the arts, from the notion of an all-encompassing love Jen would never obtain, she began to cry. “Your eyes are black squares,” she said.
Lights out.
But no, it wasn’t drugs or derring-do that had extinguished that light. It was the awesome realization that she was wholly alone, whomever she was with. That her mind was not designed to share a life. Like a fetus whacked in an accident, there was something misshapen and pathologic in her emotional life, and it would not stop bleeding all over those who came near. Hard to keep a secret like that.
Jen stripped off all of her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. She pulled the remaining tube of lipstick from her now anonymous purse and scrawled these words across the mirror: And now to the Best Western in the Sky.
She tried to think of a way not to do this. She came up empty. All roads lead her to this hotel room, this night, this state. She climbed into the crisp white sheets and began her misadventure. Soon she was gagging, choking, on the volume of pills. No one ever mentioned how your throat starts to swell, close up, how after a while you can’t swallow. The Southern Comfort wasn’t helping. She staggered to the bathroom to fill the ice bucket with water. She attempted to drink it, sloshing water down her shivering naked self. She floated back to the bed, her final bed, and shut off the bedside lamp. She had not swallowed the rat poison. She did not have the nerve. But she figured, in the haze, that the pills should be enough. A coward, even in exercising her only right.
Things began to swim in the dark. She was somehow still conscious, hyper-conscious. There was a whirling vortex above her, black velvet, sucking her up. She could not hear her heart, could not hear her breath, could feel the thickness in her throat. She heard Janice Joplin and if she were able to move she would have laughed:
As we discover on the train, man, it’s all the same fucking day, and nothing really matters.
Suddenly, a knowing hit. A knowing of an eternal, centrifugal trip. Horror. It is not her right after all. With all the power she could muster, she gasped, her body unwilling to execute her intent. Another part of her reared itself up and grasped at the phone. But her throat. She couldn’t speak. Help, she whispered to the boy in the crumpled white shirt, Help Me.
The police, ambulance, soon found Ms. S. Plath in room 104. There are slivers, snatches of a dream, lights, a hospital table, her doctor asking what the hell. Tubes down her throat, charcoal. Waking up in ICU with no feeling in the right side of her body.
“You’ll be lucky if you walk again,” spat a nurse, clearly disgusted with her. She was crying. The man next to her was dying. How did they find her doctor? How did they know who she was?
Now everyone will know, she’d thought. Now she’ll have to explain that which she can’t explain to herself.
The pill bottle, it turns out. The evil pill bottle betrayed her.
The part Jen couldn’t believe, could NOT believe, was the part about being three months pregnant. Three months. She’d had no recollection of sex. Hadn’t even missed a period, though they’d been light. Immaculate conception, un-divine interruption of life. She bled forever, and checked into 3 East, voluntarily. The ole real world held nothing for her..
That’s where she met Duncan. In the beginning, he’d seemed charming. A shy smile, glittery eyes. Reminiscent of Roly. They met in group.
He never did say what brought him there that night, several nights after her unceremonious arrival in the land of walking wannabe deads. They pumped his stomach out and delivered him to the ward next to her, into the squalor and stench of three other men.
Jen’s room was a private. She still had coverage.
The first time, he’d stayed three days and then left, full of promises about the new life he and AA would together fashion.
A week later, she lay in the quiet semi darkness unique to hospitals, listening to his shouting fury as they dragged him down the hall to isolation. The next day, bandaged arm and stitches contouring his temple, he’d smiled shyly at her in the line for breakfast.
“You’ll do anything to see me again, won’t you,” Jen joked. “You coulda just called.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, not in the negative, but in an apparent recollection of the events that brought him back. Events that culminated in his walking – or charging, no one is sure which – through a plate glass window at Comfy’s. Even he was unclear how he’d managed it. One of those “what the hell” moments in a fight gone terribly wrong. Jen was no stranger to these urges. She wasn’t one to judge. He stayed another three days, then off he went into the world again.
Six weeks later, a shaft of light was hammering Jen’s eyelids. She pulled the comforter over her head. She could smell metabolized whisky and pungent man. Through the fog, she began to understand where she was. What she had done.
That next-day-smell was making her gag, reminiscent of all the drunks who’ve tried to use her. To grasp. Clutch. Hands that feel like paws. Gaping black eyes like wells begging echoes.
This one is no different, except, of course, he’s also crazy.
Not crazy enough to warrant a continued bed at 3East. Just crazy enough to smash lives, including his own. Unrecoverable, they’d said, when they explained to Jen why he couldn’t stay that day, why without a cop or doctor’s order he could not return a mere few hours and shots of tequila later, why they were leaving this suicidal wreck of a human on the streets, now calling Jen for help. 72 hours and out. By this time, Jen had been in the psych ward six weeks. No one asked for her bed.
Give him my bed, she’d said. I don’t need it.
No, they said. He’s here all the time. Don’t get involved.
Is that what gets you through the night? she’d asked. To “not get involved.” To not help. To tell yourself that some humans are more disposable than others? That this human is not worthy. I may be nuts, but I’d rather be nuts than be an inhumane cunt with an inflated sense of the value of my judgments.
Puffed up, as close to alive as Jen had seen her, the head nurse began a flurry of activity while Jen packed her clothes and rolled up her comforter, an object as highly coveted at 3East as her apparent power to sass staff.
The police will stop you from leaving, she sputtered. I’m calling the doctor. You have to be discharged. You can’t leave, she squealed.
Jen reminded the woman she’d checked herself in. Her car was in the parking lot. Watch her discharge herself. It was past midnight. Nurse Ratchet would never find the doctor in time.
Jen grabbed her belongings and rushed to the elevator. Duncan didn’t need 3East. He just needed her.
Now she shook herself awake in the dank boarding room, dim light peeping through the tattered drapes salvaged from a 1950s Better Homes and Garden auction. Her comforter is the only bright spot in the dingy room. Duncan was absorbed in the fitful, deep sleep of the stone drunk, sweating and tossing, twitching like a dreaming animal. His mouth is open slightly, revealing his broken teeth. Jen is flooded with a sick wave of disgust. Save yourself, she thought.
He didn’t wake when she rolled up the comforter, leaving him only the matted, threadbare bedspread you’d find in an hourly motel. She cast one more glance at the room, his torn jeans on the floor, the institutional water picture clearly pilfered from 3East, the few coins on the cluttered desk that held the hot plate, instant coffee, a kettle.
I will be well, she’d thought. After all, our lives are scripts we write, then live. Duncan chose drama and pathos. Jen’s own dark path was littered with hairpin turns and suspenseful moments. What had the hospital told her parents, she wondered. Whatever it was, she’d put it right. 3East was no place for recovery. Jen needed a clean, quiet place to gather herself ‘round, to rock, to soothe, to find the slivers of festering destruction and coax them out. The conviction of it flooded her. She didn’t belong in places like this.
So she drove herself along the river road, eyes burning in the light of day, tears and sick foreboding flooding her, home to a family terrified by greatly exaggerated police reports that she was on the lam with a violent and psychotic drunk.
Home to where she could start over, a wet clump of clay ripe for reinvention.