Away From Everywhere Read online

  Biting her lip now, rapidly, subconsciously, over and over, waiting for a solution, for an answer to what they were going to do with him.“I can see to it that he’s kept overnight, but they’ll want that bed by tomorrow afternoon, and I really don’t think he should spend another night alone.”

  More silence. A deep exhale, thirty seconds long.

  “There isn’t a rehab in the province, Alex. And I don’t think he’d go if there was one. It’s not that easy to convince people–”

  It burst out of the phone: “Oh, he’s fucken going, Abbie!”

  “Alex, this isn’t going to happen that easily.”

  Her pager went off then and she read the number. “I have to run. My old phone number at home is the same, and if you don’t have it, I’m in the phone book under Adam Fleisher. Or you can call this number back if I’m not there. I’ll do what I can to have Owen kept here until you show up, but I can’t promise you anything.”

  She sat next to him now, the mattress sagging just slightly with her weight. Owen slammed his eyes shut. She was close enough that he could hear Alex now.

  “I appreciate it, Abbie.”

  “Yeah, well…like I said, Alex,Owen’s troubles run deeper than alcoholism. He’ll need one of those therapy-based programs while you’re looking into it, okay? He needs to leave this hospital and go straight there. Tonight needs to be his rock bottom.”

  Alex was silent for so long she had to check that he was still there. “Alex?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m just–”

  “I know, Alex. I know.” Her pager went off again. “Listen. I’m going to play the he is a danger to himself card to keep him here against his will. That’ll buy us forty-eight hours. You’ll be here by then.”

  “Thanks, Abbie.”

  “Take care, and leave talking to Owen about getting help to me, okay? I know these aren’t your kind of conversations, and we both know he’ll put up less of a fight with me.”

  “Abbie …are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. I know how to appeal to him a little better too, I imagine. You just take care of the arrangements. I can do this much for your mother’s sake, if not for his.”

  She hung up the phone, turned to look at Owen, and caught him with his eyes open.

  “Oh! Hey you! Feeling any better?” She was too forcefully jovial, too obviously cheery. It made him feel pitiful.

  “Abbie …why are you doing this …for me? Really?”

  “Because a man can lose his footing sometimes. That’s all this is for you. You lost your footing. I care about you enough to do what I can, and maybe I’m doing this for your mother as well. And a woman can love a guy in a non-romantic way, Owen. But I have to go. I’ve been paged, like, four minutes ago. I’ll be back though, by your side until you’re dismissed.”

  He watched her walk away and pull his door to. He saw the doorknob stay twisted for five or six seconds, then she let go and sped down the hall, like she needed five seconds to shift gears between sympathetic ex-girlfriend and friend of the family to a nurse five minutes late on a page.

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  THEY SHIPPED HIM TO VANCOUVER. That’s how he felt: shipped. And it all started in less than twelve hours, the tell-tale shakes, “sweating it out,” and the headaches that send most alcoholics back to the bottle, but he had nowhere to go. Being in that clinic was like being locked in a room on fire, there was nowhere to run, no way to end the pain, nothing but time ticking slowly and indifferently by. It got worse from there. He was vomiting and retching enough to temporarily distract himself from the shakes and headaches, but never the cramps. His body was writhing with a stiff, sharp pain. He’d lost all control over his own body. When the nausea was at its worst, his vision was distorted and the colours of everything seemed hazy and vibrant. There was always a bright blue or blazing orange halo around the edges of things, especially his windowsill.

  He wasn’t expecting it to be that bad. He thought he was having a bad reaction to the pills they were giving him, until they told him the pills were only Ativan. He felt continuously on the verge of a seizure, maybe even death, and he couldn’t pry himself from the bed, not even for food. He just rocked back and forth in bed, wanting to fall asleep, dying to sleep through the rest of his withdrawal, until he started having nightmares, visions of his mother on the day she died.

  The worst was realizing that he wasn’t dreaming; it was more like he was hallucinating. He was in too much shock and discomfort to assess whether he’d gone mad, but he was seeing his dead mother’s body in the corner of his room. His frantic reaction was upsetting people in adjacent rooms, and a staff medic had to examine him when the tremors and hallucinations peaked. The medic stepped around the puddles of puke in Owen’s room, jabbed Owen’s arm with a needle, explaining, as if legally obligated, not emotionally involved, “I am administering Haldol. You are going through a serious complication of alcohol withdrawal. Delerium tremens.”

  Owen begged for alcohol, just a little at a time to get him through this before his body shut down on him. He was left throwing up and locked in a cage of a body that was attacking him, exacting some revenge on him for years of abuse. When it got worse, the medic administered some heavier sedatives. Every few hours he was being stuck with needles or chewing up chalky pills.

  Looking back on his forty-hour detox,Owen preferred to call those hallucinations “visions.” It sounded less dramatic, and that made him feel less pathetic. In those visions, somewhere between sleep and lucidity, somewhere between this world and another, Owen was staring into his mother’s eyes as she lay on his bedroom floor. She was slowly dying, all over again. He didn’t want to look but had to. Like there was something to take away from it.

  The night the withdrawal finally let up, he fell asleep for thirteen hours. He dreamt that he and Alex were playing the dollar game with their father. It was game they played as kids where his father would throw a dollar on the ground and the three of them would wrestle for it. Whoever held the dollar had to try and keep it from the other two. It was essentially a wrestling match, but their father manipulated their bodies to minimize contact so that no one ever got hurt. The dream played out until they all lost sight of the dollar and couldn’t find it. Then he realized that he and Alex were grown men in the dream, but their father was a younger version of himself: before the schizophrenia, before the Waterford Hospital, before the grey hair and crow’s feet. His father stood up, waved goodbye, and walked out the patio door into the bright distance.

  When he’d disappeared, Owen looked at Alex and they both agreed there was no use looking for the dollar now, or playing that game without their father. Then the room started shaking, like an earthquake, and it was no longer their childhood home. Seconds before the room started shaking, Alex looked at him and said, We should go now , and took off running, wondering why Owen wasn’t following him. It was ominous the way he said it, but Owen never followed his brother. Even if he wanted to, he could tell the corridor his brother ran down was too narrow for them both and that the ground behind Alex was crumbling with every step he took. He sat down and could hear his brother calling out to him, his voice growing more and more faint, the room filling with dust. At some point, the room transformed into his old apartment, and he was surrounded by dirty dishes, rusty serrated steak knives, and piles of empty wine bottles. There was a snowbank in the corner of the room where his computer should’ve been. When the shaking stopped he stood up to walk outside. It was bright when he opened the door, too bright to see where he was walking. In that brightness there was nothing to see and nothing to fear. There was no past to run from and no future to cower from; there was only the sound of his feet clapping off the pavement beneath him. Nothing was pushing or pulling him, his mind was clear. He stopped walking when he felt like he was where he had to be. He took a deep breath and felt calm. With each breath, he was sucking up the brightness and about to reveal where he stood, where he could go to feel as away from everywhere as he did in that
dream. He woke up. He felt weak but revived.

  Full days had escaped him, and he had no recollection of that lowest point in his recovery, but the world seemed more subdued now, and his room looked more detailed. He felt himself in his body now: before it was just a shell that housed him. Now he could feel his tongue between his teeth, the sensation of his fingernails across the backs of his hands as he scratched himself.

  Over the course of his forty-two day rehabilitation,Owen let himself fall apart. He brought everything to the surface and dealt with his issues one by one, dwelling on each until there was nothing left to ponder, or at least until it was clear there was nothing he could do about it now. At what point had he let his life go?Why? He thought about what it means when there is no more for a man outside of a rehab clinic than there is inside. The place encouraged him to journal. Anything that came to him. So he did. He also researched the course details of a few culinary school programs. He could love to cook for a living, for his wife and kids. For his brother and the two nieces he barely knew. He’d get to know them when he left this place. He was sure of that much.

  ALEX

  AFTER READING ALL ABOUT THE horrors of alcohol withdrawal, Alex flew to Vancouver to be there for Owen as he went through the worst of it, but the clinic had a strict policy that no visitors were allowed for the first few weeks, and Owen wasn’t in a state to be visited anyway. Alex understood and left a message for Owen that he would check back in three weeks, and that their Aunt Lillian wanted to come along as well, if that would be okay.

  Before he left, he pleaded with the clinic director that his brother be treated with a drug called Librium. He said he’d write the prescription himself if someone could administer it. The staff patronized him: he wasn’t the first doctor to come in and tell them how to do their jobs, and Alex left knowing he’d be ignored.

  On the plane back home in February, Alex considered inviting his brother to come live with him and Hannah for a while, so that they could keep an eye on him to monitor his recovery. He figured being submerged in a new and positive environment would have to help, but it was a lot to ask of his wife, and could be a lot to subject his daughters to if things got bad.

  On a Sunday in March, Alex went back to Vancouver. As he walked towards the doors of his brother’s clinic, the idea of Owen coming to live with them came back to him.

  He knocked on his brother’s door, heard a “come in,” and was surprised by the luxury of the room. The television set. It looked even nicer than in the brochures. Real hardwood floors, a stylish bed, modern colours on the walls.

  “Hey hey, little bother! How’s the luxury life going? Jesus. This place is nicer than my house!”

  “Yeah, well, we sort of graduate to different tiers of the building as we get better. Maybe it’s some kind of reward system, I dunno.”Owen looked sheepish.

  “So, how is it going now then? How are you feeling? Did they mention I was by last month? I brought some books for you. Hannah is an avid reader. The modern literary stuff, just how you like it. She suggested a bunch of titles to bring to you.”

  He laid four books on an end table and Owen examined them right away.

  Reading a back cover.“This is very kind of her. I’m touched, seriously, be sure to thank her, and tell her I was impressed with the choices. I thought by now she’d see me as some family burden who was stealing you away.”

  “No, not Hannah. She says everyone has a story. She says you can’t judge a person until you’ve weighed their story against their character to see how it all lines up. And she insists that anybody can get off track.” He caught himself then, felt like that was a degrading or accusatory comment. “I mean … not that you’re some kind of walking tragedy or anything, that’s not what I meant. Just that …”

  Owen laughed a little at his walking on eggshells.“I know, Alex, calm down. And listen, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been wanting to apologize. I’ve been a prick and a burden and I am sorry for that. This isn’t the part where I talk about seeing the light and really turn my life around, but it’s the part where I can accept a lot more than I could before, and feel like I have the energy to start from scratch, and you got me here. I appreciate that. The booze made a mess of me and I made some horrible decisions. Things just, I don’t know, weigh on you a little more heavily when you’re drinking, like you can’t see around them. I mean, Jesus Christ, you’ve got two daughters I’ve only seen in photos. What kind of brother was I during these last few years? I am sorry for that. And I can’t say I feel like I can just spring back to life now, but I know that all that dark shit I had trapped and festering in my head these last few years, I’ve gotten rid of it all or accepted what I cannot change. You put up the money for this place, and you saved my life.”

  These weren’t the types of conversations Alex was comfortable with, and his brother was all over the place anyway. He nodded once and sat down in a recliner near Owen’s bed. “She’ll be glad to know you liked the books. She’d be pretty excited if you called her sometime to talk about one of them too. I think she’s going stir crazy lately. Too much time around the house doing nothing. She could use a friend if you need one.” He rolled his eyes. He pulled the lever and reclined back in the chair.“So?”

  “Sooo.”

  They laughed.

  “So what do two brothers talk about in a rehab clinic?”

  “Yeah …wanna take a walk around the place, grab a few soft drinks and play catch up?”

  “Funny thing is I’ve seriously been having this craving for a Mountain Dew these last few days.”He cocked the recliner back into place.“Let’s do it. You can try and explain to me how all this started in the first place.”

  Rising up off his bed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “C’mon, you know what Momma always said.”They both laughed. “I don’t have to understand to listen.” Alex held the bedroom door open for his brother.

  Walking towards a vending machine. “Well … it was actually this thing Baron said, when we were living there. How there is no place left in the world for people like Dad and me. I couldn’t see around that notion for a while. I could only see two things clearly: how the world is and how I didn’t fit into it. And I imagined there were only two kinds of people: successes and those who fail to succeed. You have your CEOs, doctors, lawyers, that type, living in three-storey houses, plasma screens in the bathroom, three cars in the garage, and then you have the people who have tried and failed, or who just don’t have the capacity to achieve that sort of life, so they spend their time feeling bitter, dejected, and jealous about it. But then there was me, not fitting into either of those descriptions and not fitting into the world. I got bogged down by it all after Abbie and me split.”

  They were at the vending machine now, and Owen put in enough for two Mountain Dews. Handing one to Alex. “I weaned myself off the booze and took up a real sweet tooth for soft drinks in its place. There’s something about the burn of soft drinks that makes them a readymade substitute.”

  They sat on a windowsill, almost hidden behind the huge potted plants on either side of the window.

  “And then I guess at some point, I got to hating myself for having thrown my life away trying to get a book published, putting that before everything, and hitting thirty with no solid career, no foundation set up to settle down on with someone.”Owen plucked a leaf off a tree, rolled it in his fingers, threw it back in the pot. “Anyway. Once I noticed how the wine was helping me write, it was all over then, because I could justify it.”

  Before Alex left Owen’s room that day, he pulled five sheets of looseleaf from his brother’s garbage can and stuffed them into his briefcase while Owen was using the washroom. He’d seen his name on them and curiosity got the better of him. He’d read it on the plane ride back home, if only to pass the time.

  He was hoping it was just another story, that the character name was a coincidence. Another one of his brother’s dark and depressing stories, flirting with the boundari
es between fact and fiction. Alex always admired Owen’s honesty though, and his lack of concern about how people perceived him. Everything Alex did, he did to prove himself flawless, or at least respectable to the world. He was envious of the freedom Owen must have felt in expressing himself so openly, in not caring what others thought of his life. Owen found a liberty in mocking himself, in acknowledging his flaws; it meant there was nothing to hide from. Alex hid all of his flaws and lived constantly on edge, always worrying someone would see through him and all his achievements like Owen could. And he was always jealous of the simple places Owen could find pleasure and meaning, like in his writing, or even simpler, in a hike with a camera around his neck.

  But this time around, his brother’s honesty on those pages he was reading was too intimate, and it wasn’t even a story. It was an essay, or a journal entry, or whatever it was that clinic was encouraging him to write, and his brother was putting himself out there on display like some bizarre sculpture in a museum. The one no one gets. The one people stick their chewed gum under and question the value of. Every line of those five pages was filled, front and back, with Owen’s childlike and urgent scribbles. Alex was desperate to know what prompted his brother to write this, but would never ask.

  “Reflections on Guilt” Assignment

  We are not as strong as we’d like to believe. We are frail and ever-deflating, but lie to ourselves and act strong. Those scars from our childhood get infected and burn bright inside us, begging to be dealt with. They want closure, they want stitches and to heal. But how?How do I bury a memory, how do I bury a lifetime of haunting memories that have made me who I am, without burying myself along with them?They are a part of me, and there’s not much left of me to bury.

  I can still see that look in my mother’s eyes, in everything I see around me. I dream of it, every twisted incoherent dream sequence leads me back to that shelter, staring into my mother’s dying eyes and watching all the life in her escaping. Each breath was laboured, numbered, each breath left her body more and more motionless and empty, until there was nothing left inside her. A doll now, a memory. It was the longest and most helpless minute of my life; I suppose that’s why it stands out more than any other. I can still see those flakes of soil blowing on and off her face, and that pool of her crimson blood that her head lay on like a pillow. By the time they took her body away, that pool of blood had seeped down into the soil, and my childhood had drowned in it. I wondered what would grow there above it.Grass, dandelions, nothing?Her favourite wildflowers in St. John’s were always striped toadflax. It grew like weeds around that old shelter. I could hope for that. It felt like both a morbid and peaceful notion.