David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Sorry. You want one?” He proffered the open pack to Leo.

“No. Thank you,” said Leo. The smoke coming off James’s cigarette looked greasy.

“See, the Stoics, they probably wouldn’t let us smoke. Maybe there’s a Stoic treatment facility. If I say the Stoics are my Higher Power, they have to send me there, right?”

“Speaking of, what are their powers of sending?” Leo asked James. “And do people ever just walk out of here?” Leo was beginning to put together a plan for getting out of Quivering Pines. Clearly, the sisters would have to be appeased, as would Dr. Smugpens. He didn’t want to push too hard; he was still worried about landing in a worse place, an electrodes place.

“Well, you know, it’s not a locked facility.”

“Yeah, why do they keep saying that?”

“I think it helps if they get a runner every now and then. It keeps things taut. We had a genuine B-list rock star here last week.” James mentioned a name. Leo shrugged to indicate he had never heard of him. “The drummer for Skinflute?” said James. Leo nodded as if that meant something. “Wore leather pants. A girl came and got him in a Jaguar after dinner. Can you imagine? How we workshopped about that one.”

Another man shouted to Leo from the patio. “Hey, new guy. You smokin’?”

“Only two men at a time allowed at the smoking station,” James said to Leo, and then he called back to the shouter: “Leo and I are talking, Bob.”

“Smoking station’s for smoking, is all I’m saying,” called Bob.

“Sounds like you’re harboring a resentment, Bob. Go journal about it,” James called back, and he gave Leo a wicked smile, as if they were prank-calling the supermarket. “Some of these guys aren’t so bad, actually. It’s kinda fun, you know?”

Leo did know. Even thirty-six hours into his stay, the interesting absurdities of the place were offering relief from the self-hatred and the incessant buzz of dread that had filled the last weeks.

“It’s a phantasia,” said James.

Leo didn’t understand the word.

“The impression left behind by sensations,” said James. He did a lot of bodywork while smoking and talking: he cupped his elbow in his palm; he scratched at his goatee; he rolled the ashen tip of his cigarette carefully on the rim of the ashtray until it was a clean and rounded ember. “Even that guy Phillip, the guy with the bass boat. He’s an egomaniac, but he’s okay. I mean, when it comes down to it.” James straightened; the light breeze dropped and the sun warmed the earth. He quoted some Stoic into the morning air: “‘I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.’” He scraped his cigarette out on the little metal grate, rubbed his hands together, and then said to Leo, “Come on. Let’s go make some memories.”

In the cafeteria line, waiting for breakfast, Leo met a one-eyed man named Kenny; he was in his twenties, small, wearing a tracksuit, and clearly rougher than most of the other men here. Kenny said that on the outside he collected scrap metal from “unsecured” job sites; he exuded a street knowledge that made him stand out at Quivering Pines, with its pretty paths across clipped lawns and its selection of juices at breakfast. Still, Kenny must have had rich parents, thought Leo, to have ended up here.

“What’s your drug of choice?” Kenny asked him. “Or are you just an alcoholic?” Leo felt cornered by the questions. The phrasing presupposed a certain on-boardness with Twelve Step precepts, and he was trying to stay noncommittal on the point. He could answer, Dunno. I haven’t tried them all, or Drugs aren’t really my problem . But in the context, either answer would seem snooty. Kenny was just being kind, chatting to the new guy in the cafeteria line. So he said, “Pot, I guess.”

Kenny nodded, unimpressed, and said his was crystal meth. Then he said he lost his eye when he leaped from a train car while being chased by cops. Leo, who hadn’t asked about the eye and had been considering eggs, opted instead for cereal, which he dispensed by turning an auger beneath a clear plastic bin.

It seemed that the men here wanted to get a read on Leo and tell him their stories. At the table, a youngish anesthesiologist volunteered that he was at Quivering Pines to keep his medical license. He said he’d been found by his hospital to have installed a hep-lock in his own ankle so he could mainline synthetic opiates between procedures. He clearly considered his drug habit to be of a higher order than the drug habits of his fellow patients, with their hidden jugs of vodka and nasty little vials of specious, tub-produced amphetamines and attention meds swiped from their children.

After breakfast, the men returned to their wing, some to pull ferociously on cigarettes at the smoking station, others to finish their homework or do crunches in their rooms before Morning Small Group.

Leo showered. In the previous weeks, his personal hygiene had slipped noticeably. Correcting this was a low-hanging fruit in the show-them-you’re-better orchard. And he liked the shower in his room. It was one of those one-piece plastic-stall kinds, and it had a big soap dispenser that released a zippy, viscous, dish-detergent-type soap that Leo just slathered on. Brushed the hell out of his teeth. Combed his hair. Shaved like an ad man, leaning close to the mirror. There were men here who shook just bringing Cheerios to their moist mouths. Leo’s hand was steady. I am going to be okay, he thought.

But James was not in Leo’s Morning Small Group, and Morning Small Group was really in a very small room; Leo felt his anxiety ratchet up. His Small Group counselor was called Keith. Keith was a sharp-looking dude in jet-black jeans. He kept his lanyarded ID tucked into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved button-down shirt.

If you had to wear a lanyarded ID, that seemed to Leo to be the classy way to do it. They began with a check-in: You were supposed to say your name and ascribe to yourself a feeling word. Keith was clearly having an ongoing disagreement with Kenny, the tracksuited scrap-metal collector, who sat hunched and fidgeting in his chair. Kenny tried to use pissed off as his feeling word.

“ Pissed off is not a feeling word, Kenny,” said the counselor.

It’s a feeling phrase, thought Leo.

Fidget-fidget hunch. “But that’s how I feel.”

“Can you find a less aggressive way to put it?” asked Keith. Kenny scanned the list of feeling words on the sheet taped to the back of his notebook. He chose angry, though it seemed to make him more pissed off to do so.

Leo chose bewildered . He liked the wildness in the word.

Leo was hoping that in Small Group he could start talking his way through and then right out of rehab; that he could, politely, make clear the differences between himself and the men around him. His binges were symptom, not syndrome, he reasoned. Sure, it might help to sit in circles and talk about distant fathers, about daily disappointments, about the strange tide of anger that sucked at the sands of a day. But who was going to give a shit, really? The mean world waited outside for them all, and it seemed to him that what was going on here was a willful oversimplification of the problem. He was embarrassed for these men, who were quickly able to see thirty years of estrangement from their families as evidence of their common disease. Who laid every problem at the feet of addiction. Well, it’s probably not that simple, he wanted to say. They were shifty here on what the word addiction even meant. Usually, they said it was a medical disease, like diabetes, but then suddenly they’d get more abstract about it, as if it were a sinister and scheming nemesis, like a wraith from a Blake woodcut.