All This Life

TheGreatJake: Meet me there in an hour for the finale!!!

He is at 4 percent battery life.

He powers the phone down to save juice but still holds it in his hand.

He passes all the customers and the redshirts in their bustling cathedral. He nods at the security guard and makes his way to the bus stop. He’ll be back at the Golden Gate soon.

Not thirty seconds later, reflexively, Jake checks his phone, even though it’s off, like someone scratching a phantom limb, a part of himself that’s missing.

19

Kathleen is inside a body bag, and she can’t work the zipper from the inside. She is hung-over. She is still a little drunk. She is a relapsed alcoholic.

She can barely make out her surroundings; everything seems filmy to her boozy and dehydrated eyes. This isn’t her room, her apartment. In fact, that’s not her arm thrown across her stomach. That’s not her snoring. That is a man, someone who she can’t remember meeting last night.

Three years of sobriety die, lit on fire, and now here she is, squirming around in its ashes, these sweaty sheets. She took the easy way out last night, she knows that, but what she hadn’t known — and you can’t really understand relapse until you do it yourself — is the visceral and profound shame.

Her head feels like someone is smashing windows in there.

The thing with relapse is that it’s accompanied by suffocating melancholy. So she’s not only dealing with her mistake to dive in all that bourbon; she’s dealing with dismal extrapolations, running through a maze of what this means. Namely, she won’t be able to stop, won’t be able to resist alcohol now that the levee buckled. It’s like she has all these dormant demons living inside her and, once revived, they start galloping around her head, shouting. They have opinions, desires. They have to-do lists, and number one on all of them is to have a morning beer. This will help her head feel better and will dull the shame, tamp it down into a corner of her psyche, something she can ignore.

The man keeps snoring next to her. Kat hasn’t looked at his face, only his forearm thrown across her stomach. There is a mole. There is an impressive amount of hair. She lies there on her back, naked and hopeless.

That’s the thing about being sober. It’s not like the compulsion to get wasted goes away. It’s always lurking inside. Kathleen has not been feeding it liquor, and without any nourishment the impulse goes into suspended animation. These sleeping monsters might not be in charge once you get sober, but they hibernate, bide their time to take over again, waiting for you to be at your weakest moment, and, with soft, fraying defenses, they ruin everything.

She ruins everything.

“Hey you,” a groggy voice says. It’s guttural, baritone.

The fingers on the hand on the arm connected to the body of a man she’s recently screwed but doesn’t remember; these fingers stretch and have too-long fingernails, and then he pats her on the belly, asking, “How did you sleep, mama?”

“Do you have any beer?”

“We bought a six-pack on the walk home. There should be a couple left.”

She still hasn’t looked at him. The room is a disaster, like a teenager lives here. There are posters on the wall of rock and roll bands that Kathleen has never heard of. A desk that only has a pair of sunglasses on it. A snowboard propped in one corner.

“Can I have a morning kiss?” he says.

Okay, it’s time to look him in the face, if not for the simple pleasure of alerting him that there won’t be any kisses. There won’t be anything except a morning beer, getting dressed in a rush, bolting, cringing, crying, dreading, drinking. Kat’s eyes start at the hand and wrist and forearm resting on her and work up the arm, but she doesn’t even need to see his face. She knows exactly who this guy is by the art on his bicep. He has a fresh Celtic cross, the ink intensely black, brand-new and shiny.

“You,” she says, aghast.

“You,” he says back, smiling.

Kathleen stares in his young face, thinks about her old one. She thinks about how he and his ilk are running Kat out of San Francisco, pricing out all the oddballs. She wonders if he shouted “You’re evicted!” when he came.

He makes a couple hyperbolic puckering sounds, waiting for that smooch.

Kathleen sits up and places her feet on the floor, her back turned to him. “Oh, my head,” she says. “How much did we drink?”

“How much did you drink,” he says. “I only had a couple beers. You were already cross-eyed when I got there.”

“Did I call the shop or something?”

“Dumb luck,” he says. Kathleen hears the bed creak, the guy standing up. He walks around and he’s naked, though not completely naked: He’s wearing his amphibian shoes. If he wore those during sex, Kathleen might have to kill herself. “I stopped in the bar for a quick pint, and there you were,” he says. “Lucky, huh?”