All This Life

Kathleen doesn’t know what to do after hearing that fetid word. She’s standing in the tattoo shop with the phone to her ear and Deb is looking at her and the guy with webbed feet is looking at her and she’s been called that name, the noise of it still clanging, and she hands the phone back to Deb.

“What happened?”

Kathleen utters that wicked word and her sponsor sighs. Even the guy with webbed feet averts his eyes. The whole moment feels like a caricature Kat could draw. She could exaggerate the idiosyncrasies in such a perfect way: It would be easy to turn the guy’s shoes into huge amphibian feet, the size of surfboards, and it would be easy to show Deb with tattoo guns for hands; it would be so easy to show Kathleen, stupid Kathleen, with a phone to her ear, her high hopes being speared by Felix’s dismal syllable. The phone would have fangs. It would bite her ear, chew on her, chew her right up.

“Well, it’s the start,” says Deb. “Congrats on making that first call.”

“I have to go.”

“No. You have to stay.”

Kathleen almost sprints to the front door: “I can’t.”

“Don’t isolate,” Deb says. “Be around people who care about you when—”

But she can’t hear the end of the sentence. She can’t hear anything except Felix’s syllable, over and over, and she’s off, not running, but not walking, somewhere between these two, as though she can’t out-hustle the syllable, leave it at the shop. And there’s still the various clogs of yuppies out front of three-star restaurants, still the mothers ambushing her with their babies and toddlers, and Kathleen sees the gypsy with her sign, its perfect font, KNOW YOUR FUTURE.

Kathleen already does.

Her future is in a bar.

Her immediate future starts right this second in a bar. Yes. Starts with pushing past the smoking hipsters out front and opening the door and bellying up and looking around at all the bottles and beer taps and hearing Jack White singing about a girl who had no faith in medicine. It starts with someone saying, “What would you like?” and this somebody happens to be the bartender, and she happens to be talking to Kathleen, who happens to answer with this: “Bourbon.”

The bartender is young and Asian, and Kat pines for the simplicities of youth, yearns for an existence that hasn’t marred so much that forgiving yourself is impossible.

“Any preference?” says the bartender.

“I don’t care.”

“We got Old Crow in the well.”

“Fine.”

Kathleen meant what she said before, about starting over being impossible. She cannot have this one drink without reliving all the ones she already had, without tasting every spirit that ever traveled down her throat, experiencing the aftershocks of every hangover, the shame she already feels and the bourbon hasn’t hit her lips yet. She knows she shouldn’t do this, knows that this won’t solve anything, not really, but who said she was interested in a solution? Who said this was an exercise in making things better? No, this isn’t about improvement. It’s not about making things worse, either. It’s just about this one moment and she wants a drink. She hasn’t been rewarded for all her sober days; in fact, her life’s been harder living clean, all that pure access to her mistakes. Her whole prison break fantasy is phony and faraway and pointless, and her palms are on that boulder again, the calluses ready for another shove. She feels that greedy eagle land on her stomach, ready to feast on her liver for the umpteenth time, appetite never tiring of the same square meal.

The bartender hasn’t put the drink down in front of her yet. There’s time. There’s time to walk away, Kathleen. Go to a meeting. Tell them what happened and let their empathy wash over you. Be around other people who have disfigured their lives, amputated all kinds of happiness. They’ve died in a million ways and glowed electric with embarrassments and somehow lived to tell. Let them talk you out of this. Let them say Don’t give up.

She hates that she’s so easily rattled. That she’s fragile. She thought her years in the program and working the steps would have given her the tools to deal with life when it reaches out and calls you a cunt, but here she is, one syllable from Felix, one phone call, and now she’s watching the bartender put a shot of Old Crow down in front of her.

“Six bucks,” the bartender says.

Kathleen throws down ten and tells her to keep the change.

She’s alone. She has a picture of her son in her pocket, the boy she’ll never see again. She has a caricature of the girl with the black eye and her hopeful baby. She has bourbon in front of her. She has a hand for grabbing the glass. She has a mouth and a tongue.

She should have stayed in the tattoo shop. With Deb. She should call her, text her; she should say, “I’m about to do something dumb,” giving her sponsor the opportunity to crank some clarity. She should shove herself onto her feet and flee outside and ask the gypsy, “Will I ever see him again?”

She should do any of these options, but she can’t.