Garden of Fiends Read online

  A soft touch. An arm around my shoulders. A body seated next to me on the cold ground, in the rain, pressing against me. Fingers stroking my hair, a cheek pressed against the top of my head. Comfort.

  My God, how I wish so desperately I could escape into love, into her, and hide inside her warmth forever. But I am my own anchor, and it always pulls me back into the cold reality of a world with no solid edges save one: the bottom.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “It’s okay,” Melinda says. I wonder why that’s so. What has happened to her? What other monsters has she endured to bring her to a place where a broken wretch like me is okay under any circumstances?

  I raise my head and she looks at me, those eyes green even in the dark. Her mouth is a tight line of worry. “Why don’t you come back inside and get cleaned up? I can make us some coffee.”

  “Is there any wine left?” I ask, as panic begins to weave outward from its spindle at the center of my chest. I won’t look, but I can see the man standing behind her now, a blockade between us and the open front door. The rain passes through him, but he is too real to be a ghost.

  “I need a drink, Melinda,” I tell her, because that’s what the presence of that raging figure means. It’s what it has always meant.

  “I know, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

  The figure, too tall, too thin, too disproportionate, moves closer without moving at all. Even in the light from the streetlamps, he has no features, and that is a mercy. But I remember what he looks like all too clearly. No amount of drink can erase that from my beleaguered mind.

  “Please take me inside.”

  She does, helping me up as if I’m a ninety-year-old man with no flesh left on his bones. She leads me back inside the house and closes the door on the rain.

  And on him.

  * * *

  She makes us coffee. While she’s busy in the kitchen, I drain the last dregs of wine from the bottle we left on the coffee table, then from our wineglasses. I wish I’d left some for just this occasion, an occasion I should have known would come. Nowadays it nearly always does. I drink to forget what drinking has done and that only seems to make it worse, summoning specters I can never outrun.

  Namely, the sponsor.

  “You might need stitches,” Melinda says, setting the coffee down before me. The smell of it activates my gag reflex. “And, my God, what happened to your teeth?”

  I pull away from her attempt at an oral examination, no less ashamed of my teeth now despite the absence of three of the worst offenders.

  “I need a drink.” The desperation in my voice is terrifying.

  “We finished it,” she says. “And nothing’s likely to be open at this hour.”

  “Something must be.”

  I have already searched my coat and found the flask empty. I can’t remember when I finished it off, but that hardly matters now.

  “I’m here for you,” she says, and I know she means it. “Talk to me.”

  There are two kinds of concern, I’ve found. The first is closer to pity, with no commitment for the sympathizer to make any active effort to change the circumstances of the afflicted. It’s a passing concern, you might say, and makes the observer feel better just for feeling it. And then there are people like Melinda, who are not repulsed by tragedy but perversely attracted to it, less out of any legitimate philanthropy and more because it makes them feel needed, necessary, a consequence of their own affliction: an inability to accurately gauge their own self-worth, which makes it directly proportionate to the well-being of another. Next to me is a beautiful woman who has and maybe never will believe that she is a wonderful person because she will spend her life courting people and situations designed to hurt her. It explains her patience, the look of recognition and lack of alarm when she found me outside. She has seen, if not this, then something comparable before. Maybe even something worse. But she doesn’t quite yet know how bad this is.

  “Please find me something. Nail polish remover. Cleaning fluid. I don’t care. I just…I can’t be sober. Not right now. Not for a while. Please.” I’m aware that I sound like a child, but I can’t afford to care. I feel hollow inside, dangerously close to exploding into panic and who knows what else if I don’t pacify the demon.

  “Just calm down,” she says, moving closer.

  I look at her and wince at a bolt of pain. This one is not from my injuries, but from my liver and kidneys, where it feels as if my shadowy attacker has buried his hands in me.

  “Are you all right?” Her warm hand on the nape of my neck is like the hand of God.

  “No. No I’m not. The sponsor found me.”

  “The what?”

  “The man I killed.”

  I feel her stiffen, but she doesn’t yet move away. “Tell me,” she says.

  “I will, but please, find me something to drink.”

  At first, she resists, but as I sit there dabbing the blood from my ruptured gums, my eyes full of tears, I see the pity take over and, with a shake of her head, she begins a cursory search of the house. It doesn’t take long before she returns with a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  “Tell me,” she says again, “And after that, I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  I do not argue.

  “And you need to sip. Small sips or it’ll kill you.”

  Ignoring her, I take a gulp from the bottle. It’s hell on my wounds, burns its way like molten lava down my throat, and curdles in my stomach. But it works, if only to pacify the panic that courses through my veins like a living, lunatic thing. After exhaling the fumes on a noxious sigh, I tell Melinda about Stephen Carver.

  * * *

  The first time my wife threatened to leave me and take our kids away, I pacified her by promising to quit drinking. It was not an empty promise, or at least, not consciously empty. I was willing to try whatever it took to get better, so I stripped the house of alcohol, shocked as I did so by how many secret stashes I uncovered. It began to bring home to me just how far gone I was. And yes, I’m well aware how fucked up it sounds that after all the arguments and embarrassments, the violence and the arrest, it was the discovery of those bottles that delivered to me the message that all was not well.

  So, out they went, and I altered my mental routine in an effort to stay dry.

  I lasted three months before I dropped my phone while in bed and found the cheap plastic bottle of vodka stashed behind the nightstand. I left it there, waited for my wife to fall asleep, and then took the bottle down to the garage. There, in the dark, after a struggle I like to mischaracterize as titanic and torturous, when it was actually pretty brief and insincere, I drank the whole fucking thing. Though I’d anticipated it, there was no guilt, no shame, no disappointment in myself. Instead, I felt right, like I’d allowed myself to be me again. Things changed after that. I made some concessions for the sake of my marriage. I kept regular hours, drank at work instead of at bars, made sure I smelled good, and behaved like a good husband and father. I also took to staying awake and drinking in my garage.

  Which is where Abby found me one night in late summer, choking on my own vomit.

  Hospital. Stomach pump. Detox. AA.

  I went to counseling, and even found a sponsor. He was an old, grizzled guy, eighteen years dry, who liked to spout philosophies and share Buddhist wisdoms while sitting too close to me and touching me far too often. His teeth were too big, his eyes too small. His name was Stephen Carver and he knew what I was going through, understood it, had been there himself and vowed to be there and guide me through my darkest hours when I needed him. Only, I didn’t want to get better, and ultimately that’s what undid me then and undoes me still. I don’t want to be better. I want to just ride this train in the safety of numbness until it goes right off the edge of a cliff and takes me with it. What I don’t like and can’t seem to stop from happening, is hurting other people along the way. People like my wife, who quit on me once she’d admitted
me to the hospital, and my kids, who still don’t really understand when and how and why I became a monster. People like you, Melinda, who try so very, very hard to be there and to heal me and to listen, when really there’s nothing to say that’s worth hearing. And people like Stephen Carver, a man I hated with a passion just for forcing me to be perpetually aware of my disease. And it is a disease. This, I know. It’s a maddening thirst that never goes away and it cares little about the source as long as it, and I, am sustained.

  Christmas Eve of last year. My first Christmas alone, without the kids. Abby allowed me to see them for an hour. I’d lost my job and could only afford to get them gifts from the dollar store, which they were too young to be able to fake appreciating. Abby stood in the corner, watching, making no attempt to hide her distaste for my apartment, which was admittedly a fleapit. On her face, I saw no regret, no love, no wishful thinking that things had worked out differently. I saw only condemnation and disgust and anger, all of which I deserved. The whole affair was awkward, and forced, and I knew when my kids left with Abby, I would never see them again.

  That night I went out and bought a bottle of whiskey.

  I drank half of it before I thought of calling my sponsor.

  He was disappointed, obviously, and concerned, but also as good as his word. He promised to come see me and we’d talk. On Christmas Eve! What a guy!

  But, he never made it. The lowered blade of a fucking snowplow sideswiped his Toyota a mile and a half from my house. He spun the wheel and slammed into a streetlight. Went straight out through the windshield. He didn’t die instantly. They hospitalized him. I got a call from Todd Nolan, the irritant who kept us all in line at our AA meetings and spoke to everyone like a priest. He filled me in, said he knew Stephen had been on his way to see me. Thought I should know Stephen was in the hospital. He gave me a breakdown of the injuries, but the gist of it was that he had hit the pole headfirst, shattered his neck and spine, blinded himself, ruptured his spleen, brain damage, internal bleeding….and so on and so forth. It wasn’t looking good. He asked me to come see Stephen. I said I would. I didn’t. Instead I shut myself up in the apartment and sat beside my pitiful wretch of a Christmas tree and drank myself into oblivion.

  The next day the phone rang again and again and again. I ignored it, but saw the text from Todd.

  Stephen has passed.

  And with it, all last lingering shreds of my sobriety.

  The twist in the tale, the truly funny thing about it all, is that any guilt I might have felt or feel still is mitigated by something else Todd texted me, a week or so later.

  Did you know Stephen had been drinking that night?

  All his wisdom, all his promises, and the fucking guy was on the sauce, still. No wonder he was so secure in his pontificating. It was all bullshit. So, now I tell myself he shouldn’t have been driving, and that he was on his way to share a drink with me, not berate me for lapsing, when he had the accident. I tell myself he swerved into the path of that snowplow, maybe because very secretly, behind that smarmy façade, he wanted to die. Just like I do.

  He’s dead, Melinda. Dead deep down in the drunken dirt.

  And I saw him tonight. I see him almost every time I black out.

  But when it’s bad, when I’m truly lost, only then does he make me suffer.

  * * *

  I emerge from my bitter reverie and open my eyes. My throat is dry from talking and I am startled to find myself alone in the dark. I am still on the sofa, though I have switched sides. I’m sitting where Melinda sat only moments before, though I can’t be sure it was moments and not hours. The scent of her fills my nose. Her perfume and a metallic, coppery smell. I am cold and shivering and there is something wet on my chest. I must have spilled the rubbing alcohol while I was telling my tale.

  I need a drink.

  “Melinda?”

  I stand on shaky legs, bracing my hand on the arm of the couch for support and try to blink the room into focus. Sinister shapes hunched over in the dark reveal themselves to be nothing but the furniture.

  “Where are you?”

  Something soft brushes against my shin and I scream.

  The cat bolts from me with a hiss, its claws skittering against the hardwood, and I stagger back against the wall, barely preventing a lamp from falling to the floor.

  A few moments to catch my breath. It’s all right, I counsel myself. It’s okay. You just fell asleep. Wandered. It’s all right.

  The house is dead and dark.

  Clumsily, unsteadily, I make my way to the stairs. I feel the agony of drink-starved limbs and organs tightening in protest and practically climb the steps on all fours. I so often awake consumed with dread and confusion and the stark certainty that everything is horribly wrong that more than once I have considered finding something sharp and cutting my throat before I am forced to confront whatever it is. My days have become a reel of badly edited scenes. Cut together, they make little sense. I am afraid to sleep, afraid to be awake. I don’t even know if the people I meet are real anymore. I’m the product of some ill-advised experiment to monitor the body’s reaction to obscene quantities of alcohol, to see the emotional cost and the time it takes to go insane.

  Upstairs and the halls are drenched in shadow and moonlight. Gingerly, I navigate the chiaroscuro, afraid those crooked bars of darkness might snap shut and cut me into pieces. The floorboards creak beneath my feet. I hear the clicking of the cat’s claws on the stairs behind me.

  “Melinda?”

  Her bedroom door, slightly ajar, is at the end of the hall. For a moment, it appears to move away from me, obviating my progress, as if in mockery. I will it to stand still. I need Melinda now as much as I have needed her all night, and feel a pang of guilt that I have burdened her with this. I need her eyes, her warmth, her understanding and patience. I need her to be the anchor that keeps the tide from casting me back into the current just for a little while longer.

  I open the door. It makes no sound.

  The sponsor is standing in the corner. He lights a cigarette, it lights up his face, or rather, where his face used to be before the windshield glass sheared it away. His voice, when he speaks, is the sound of a rusty saw through a stubborn stump.

  “Welcome back.”

  I look at the shape on the bed. Melinda is half-naked and lying on her back, the sheets covering her lower body. Both arms are by her sides. I approach, my heart beating so violently it is as if the sponsor is punching a rhythm into my back.

  “What…what did you do to her?” I ask, and almost fall over on top of Melinda as my thighs meet the mattress.

  Her skin is pale as alabaster, except where the blood has run and pooled. The sheets are dark beneath her.

  “What did you do?” I scream at the shape in the corner.

  He chuckles. “I did nothing.”

  My hands flutter over her body like butterflies. I want to touch. I’m afraid to touch, but I don’t see any wounds and her hair is covering her face. Could the blood be mine?

  “You were thirsty,” the sponsor says, expelling blue smoke. “So, you drank.”

  I bend over and move Melinda’s hair away from her face. Her mouth is slightly open. So are her eyes. I tap her cheek gently. “Melinda?” She does not respond and her skin is cold. I withdraw in horror, but not before I see her breasts, how big the nipples are when I know they weren’t before.

  It’s because they’re gone.

  In their place, ragged wounds. Dark, bloody holes.

  Bile floods my mouth.

  “You uncorked her like a fucking bottle of Chardonnay,” the sponsor says, chuckling.

  I fall to the floor in a quivering heap and the vomit rushes out of me in a torrent. Even in the poor light, I can see how dark it is, how thick. I can taste the copper. I can taste the blood.

  “Her blood was the only place left to get alcohol at this late hour,” the sponsor says, and I jerk away from him. He is standing beside me now, looming over me. I can�
�t run. The strength has left me. I am overcome with horror, with shame. He pats my head like a master will a loyal hound. “You drank it all, drained the bottle. Just like always.”

  I start to shake my head, the tears rushing in to blind me against what I have done, what he, what we have done, and he grabs my hair.

  “Closing time,” says the sponsor, and rams my face into the locker beside the bed hard enough to shatter the door.

  * * *

  “Hey, buddy, I said we’re closing. Time to get gone.”

  I raise my head from the bar, and open my eyes. Only one of them obeys. The other is swollen shut. A fight, probably. My face is all cuts and bruises. My face is a rubber mask that has tightened in the heat. My skull feels as if someone has filled it with broken glass.

  “Hey,” I say to the bartender, waving a hand to get his attention. He’s at the far end of the bar, sweeping up, a big man, all hair and gut and attitude. “What happened to me?” I indicate my face and the bloodstains on my shirt.

  “Fucked if I know,” he says gruffly. “You came in here like that. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d make your exit.”

  “Bottle for the road?”

  He sighs. “You got no money, remember? Spotted you your last round because you looked like you had a bad night, but I’m all out of charity and I’d like to get home sometime tonight, so, if you please, vaminos.”

  I push away from the bar and all the sites of pain register in my brain at once, as if I’m a human Christmas tree. I’ve gotta stop. I don’t know where I am. I barely know who I am, and this has happened once too often. Tomorrow. A familiar chorus, comforting in its bold insincerity. Tomorrow I’ll make the change.

  “What time is it?” I ask the barkeep.

  “Almost three.”

  “Okay.” I slide off the stool and almost collapse in a heap. “Sorry, sorry.”

  My path to the door is uneven, as if the tavern is aboard a listing ship. Outside, the air is cold and I shiver, squint against the emptiness of the night. The stars look like glints in the eyes of predators. My chest aches. My stomach is full of acid. My mouth tastes as if I have been sucking on pennies. I look at my watch and find only a pale band of skin where it used to be. Must have lost it, or, more likely, sold it. Doesn’t matter because time doesn’t matter.