Dave Zeltserman - Bad Thoughts

“Sure.” DiGrazia stood up, continuing to avoid eye contact with his partner.

Shannon took a deep breath and then stood up and forced a smile. “Well, Marty,” he said. “I guess I’ll be seeing you in two weeks.”

“I certainly hope so. Send us a postcard.”

The two men left the office in silence. As Shannon passed through the squad room he could feel his fellow officers staring at him with a mix of curiosity and amusement. He had an urge to grab Poulett and kick his smirking face in, but he swallowed it down and kept walking. At the door, he turned and addressed the room, announcing that due to his remarkable service he was being given two weeks paid leave and the rest of them could just go screw themselves. Someone threw a half-eaten doughnut at him. He barely got out in time to avoid the barrage that followed. DiGrazia hadn’t been as lucky. His eyes burned as he picked part of a tuna fish sandwich out from under his jacket, but he kept his mouth shut.

Outside, they got into Shannon’s Grand Prix, with DiGrazia behind the wheel. Shannon broke the silence, calling his partner an asshole.

“I don’t know what you’re bitching about,” DiGrazia mumbled, stone-faced. “Two weeks paid leave sounds pretty good to me.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“Yeah, well, in this case it’s well deserved.”

“You didn’t give me any choice,” DiGrazia said. “It was either get you on leave or get another partner. And I don’t want another partner.”

Shannon sat quietly, his face forming a peevish look. Finally, he thanked DiGrazia for spreading the word about his fainting.

DiGrazia started laughing. “You’re really losing touch with reality, aren’t you, buddy boy? There were half a dozen fellow officers in that apartment watching me drag you out of the kid’s bedroom. Think about it.”

The ride turned silent again. Finally, Bill Shannon asked to be dropped off at an address in Brookline.

“I need to see my therapist real bad,” he explained.

Susan Shannon had been out of it all day, making mistakes, losing her concentration. As the afternoon wore on, her frustration built, severely creasing her brow and tensing her small face. When she lost an hour’s typing by hitting the wrong mouse button, the color dropped right out of her. She sat frozen, struggling against the impulse to smash her computer against the wall. Then she stood up, her body rigid, and held her breath before heading towards the ladies’ room. Sid Lischten, one of the law firm’s partners, spotted her and was about to start bitching about how long it was taking to get his contract typed up. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Even though Susan Shannon stood only five-foot-one and weighed at most ninety-five pounds, at that moment she didn’t look like anyone you wanted to tangle with.

When Susan saw herself in the ladies’ room mirror she let out a disgusted giggle. Her face looked like a ridiculous parody of itself-frozen into a hard, anxious mask.

She leaned over the sink and splashed cold water over her face. After a while she could feel the hardness softening. She glanced in the mirror and saw her face was almost back to normal, only a little tightness stiffening her mouth.

There were obvious reasons for her anxiety. The workplace was stressful as all hell. The associates for the most part were bastards, the partners petty little tyrants. They were adapting well for the nineties, cutting three secretaries and dividing their work among the remaining four. The official message given to the office staff was just be thankful you have a job. The unofficial message was a little more blunt; if you complain about having to work lunches or coming in an hour early or leaving an hour late, then your ass-even if it’s as pretty as Susan Shannon’s-will be out on the street.

But that was only a small part of it. She could live with all that. What she couldn’t live with was what was happening to her husband. As much as he promised her this year would be different-that he was making progress with his therapist-she knew it was going to turn out the same as it always had.

It was all starting up again. A week ago he jolted up in bed at four in the morning, moaning, his body soaked in sweat. It took her almost a half hour to get him out of it. Since then, the nightmares had come nightly. After the nightmares came the moodiness, the depression, his just staring into space. She didn’t have a clue if he’d gone to work today. She had tried calling home a half dozen times and no one answered, but that didn’t mean a thing. If he was home, he’d just let the phone ring. Probably wouldn’t even be aware of its ringing.

Once he got out of bed he was better, almost functional, but getting him out of bed was becoming harder and harder.

She knew the signs as well as she knew anything. She’d been living with them for over ten years. Two days ago he had stopped showering or shaving or even brushing his teeth. That was bad. That meant the drinking was only a few days away, at best.

Dave Zeltserman

Bad Thoughts

And once the drinking started…

Her stomach tensed thinking about it. Absentmindedly she put a hand to the pain and massaged it. Once the drinking started was when the real fun began.

The drinking would be heavy and intense, but it wasn’t even like he’d get drunk. More like he’d just fade away from her. Sometimes he’d become catatonic, other times he’d move around their apartment like a zombie, looking through her as if she didn’t exist, as if he didn’t have any idea where he was. The more alcohol he’d pour into himself the more frequent his trances would come. Sometimes they would last ten minutes, sometimes an hour, and then he’d be back, staring at her blankly, not even aware that anything had happened. Not even able to remember that anything had happened.

Then one day he’d be gone. Just plain disappear. He’d usually come back a week later looking emaciated, like he’d just gotten out of a P.O.W. camp. One year, he was almost dead with pneumonia when he staggered back to their apartment. Another year, he had rat bites up and down both his legs. Then last year, he was so dehydrated he had to be hospitalized. The doctor told her another day and she would’ve been out shopping for a casket.

He would never be able to tell her what went on during his disappearances. The way he would explain it was that one moment he would be drinking in a bar or restaurant or out of a bottle in some alley and the next moment he would be someplace else, realizing he’d better get home. He could never remember what happened between those two moments even though they could’ve been more than a week apart.

They never found out what happened during his disappearances. Except for one year…

Three years ago, he had ended up in a crack house in Chelsea living with a prostitute. A few weeks after he came back home, the girl showed up at their apartment to give Susan back Bill’s driver’s license. She also wanted to tell Susan about it. She was no more than eighteen, haggard looking, thin, her skull just about shining through her flesh, her arms nothing but a mess of scars. It broke Susan’s heart to look at her. The girl was pretty much doped up but she was able to describe in detail her week with Bill. She thought Susan had a right to know about it. She was also hoping that maybe Susan could give her some money.

Susan almost left him then. She came within a heartbeat of packing her clothes and getting the hell out, but she knew he didn’t have any idea of what he’d done. That it was a completely blank screen to him. So he begged and pleaded with her, his eyes as tortured as anything she’d ever seen, and in the end what choice did she have? Besides, at the time she probably still loved him. She wasn’t sure, though, whether she could forgive him.