David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Leo nodded. He couldn’t help it. His eyes had actually gone wide.

“Think you could help me inside?” Al said.

“Shit. Yeah. Of course,” Leo said.

“Here, gimme that chair.”

Leo manipulated a white plastic patio chair in front of Al.

“Now, take my cane.”

Leo took the cane, one of those orthopedic-store jobs, with the clicktety-sprung-ball-through-the-line-of-holes system for adjusting height. Al steered the chair across the patio and Leo walked beside him, bearing Al’s cane and offering him a shoulder. When they reached the patio door, they saw that there was a minor hubbub within. The credits were rolling on the movie, and the men were hopping off the couches like locusts. A man called Phil patted frantically at the pockets of his sweatpants, then began digging in various wedges of upholstery, looking for his lost cigarettes. Men who could claim not to have come down to the pit at all during the movie squared the pages of their reading and sucked from the straws of their juice boxes.

“Dang. Looks like I don’t get to know what Harry done to Sally,” Al said. Leo opened the sliding door for the older man. Al put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and tried to step up the high threshold. But the top of his sneakered foot scraped against the metal drip edge on the door sill, and he fell back in pain. For a moment, Leo had the man’s whole weight on him; he felt like a stack of plates. Leo put his hand on the small of Al’s back to steady him. Through cardigan and checked shirt, he felt some of the armature of the plastic brace.

“Shit,” said Al in a pained exhalation. Leo put his hand on the underside of Al’s thigh and helped him to raise up his foot. Their entanglement barred the exit of the smokers, who had to give way before Leo and Al. Al told someone inside to fetch his walker, and Leo, beneath and behind him now, handled a man twice his age into another piece of scaffolding.

“I thank you, Leo,” said Al. “You think on what I told you,” he said as he walkered away.

Leo was thinking on what Al had told him an hour later as he lay in bed. James was flossing his teeth, wearing boxer shorts and a law-school T-shirt, as attorneys will do.

“What did you and that geezer talk about?” asked James while examining some bit of floss dross.

“His name’s Al. He scared the shit outta me.”

“Yeah. Man looks like he’s mostly parts.”

“No, it wasn’t that. He just made a very concise and compelling case against ever drinking again.”

“Yeah, but that was probably in the abstract.” James worried up his spent floss and dropped it in the wastebasket.

“Not really,” said Leo.

James flicked the light switch and got in bed. It wasn’t that dark. A pale spreading light from the parking lot seeped into their room.

Leo considered again that he should stay here awhile. The tomato juice was cold. There was a little weight room beneath the cafeteria, beside the laundry room; a rough jogging track scored into the hill before the railroad tracks. (Some high-quality chain-link fence between Quivering Pines and the railroad track. “They never said it wasn’t a fenced facility,” James had pointed out.) He could eat the hell out of those mini-yogurts, run-run-run around that track. Just get his wits back about him. He should hear what they had to say here; give it a chance. James was here. Al was here. This might be just the place.

On Monday morning Leo was sitting in the large round room with all the men trying to pay attention to a sort of science class — the onion-looking counselor was drawing pictures of confused neurons on a whiteboard — when Keith, Leo’s Small Group counselor, interrupted the class.

“Sorry, Gene,” he said to the Onion. “Can I see Leo out here?”

Leo did not want to go. He was afraid, as he left the circle, that he was Leaving the Circle.

Outside, Keith told Leo that the doctor wanted to see him again, and it couldn’t wait until the afternoon. Keith said that was weird.

“Listen, Leo,” he said, “I really think you should try to stay here. You have to dry out, man. You’re not going to be okay unless you do. There may be some, you know, comorbidity here. Like, you have mood issues. But sobriety will help you.”

“I know, I know,” said Leo. He truly wanted Keith to believe him. “I’m actually totally down with that.” He had really lathered on the fruity soap that morning, and brushed his teeth until his mouth gleamed like a bank lobby. “I think that maybe I might stay.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” said Keith. They were outside what was called the medical building, which phrase Leo could have told them was needlessly creepy. “Why’d you put down such crazy stuff on your MMPI?”

“My what?”

“The true-false questionnaire you took when you got here, the personality profile.”

“Oh, the are-you-afraid-of-doorknobs thing? I thought that was a joke.”

“Just tell him you didn’t mean it. The doctor. Make him believe you want to be clean and sober.”

“Clean and sober. Got it.” Man, did Leo want to be clean and sober.

“So, Leo,” said the doctor. He was in a grand mood, and wearing a lab coat today. That must be an affectation; there was no laboratory at Quivering Pines. The folder on Leo had thickened. “Do you know what it is we do here?”

Leo’s heart began to race. “You treat addiction. I got that.”

“Yes, we treat addiction. And you, Leo Crane, are an addict.”

Leo didn’t like the tone at all.

“Thing is, we don’t want to waste your time”—the doctor might have smirked there—“so if you aren’t receptive to certain basic assumptions, I’m afraid you’ll find that we don’t have that much for you here.”

“No. No. I am receptive to those assumptions,” said Leo, sipping at the stale air of the office to keep a lid on the part of him that wanted to object to this doctor, to push back, because you got the best stuff when you pushed back. “More than receptive,” he said. “I am powerless over…in this case, I guess, alcohol and marijuana.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that,” said the doctor. He opened and closed the folder on his desk, swiveled around in his seat a bit, made Leo wait. “The thing is, Leo, you have, oh, a sort of preexisting condition.”

“You mean depression, right? I know, but I think that’s related. To the drugs and alcohol. I mean it’s gotta be, right?”

“Well, it may be,” said the doctor. “It probably is. But I think there may be a problem with your personality.”

Well, I guess there’s nothing to be done about that, then, thought Leo. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean that I think you suffer from a personality disorder.”

“You think I’m mentally ill?”

“A personality disorder is not the same as mental illness,” the doctor said. He flicked some fuzz from the cursively embroidered and overpenned breast pocket of his lab coat. “You exhibit certain clusters of symptoms,” said the doctor. “The brief, intense bouts of anger, depression, anxiety; the engagement and then rapid disengagement with jobs, with women; the feelings of worthlessness. It’s true that your capacity for delusional elaboration and self-centering is not usually part of the presentation. A mild form of BPD is not something that would ordinarily stand in the way of your being treated here—”

“BPD?” asked Leo.

“Borderline personality disorder.” The doctor swiveled around in his chair twenty degrees. “It even occurs to me that you might be somewhat Aspergian.”

Yeah, and I think you’re somewhat assholian . He really shouldn’t have had such fun with those tests. Why did he have no good instincts about what to take seriously and what to blow off? It had always been that way.