David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“‘In return, my sisters will not make me go back to Quivering Pines or any other inpatient rehab facility—’”

“Or nuthouse of any kind.”

“‘—or nuthouse of any kind. Though, of course, if I go crazy again or can’t stay off the weed or the booze, my sister Daisy will be unable to plead my case anymore, and without Daisy advocating for me, I will be screwed.’ Because Rosemary totally thinks we should have brought you straight to a serious psych facility back east.”

“Wait. Is this part of the contract?” he asked.

“You don’t have to write that bit down,” she said. “But you get my point, right, Leo? This is the last bit of slack you get.”

He did get her point. From where his sister stood, he probably appeared to be loitering at that fork in the road between eccentric wanderer and mentally ill loser. Daisy was just trying to call to him from down the road she had chosen.

That being the case, Leo knew at once that he must concede at least some of the claims he had made earlier were delusional — like that Marilyn and Brand-New Day and the people hanging warning signs by the light-rail tracks had been acting in concert and against him, because of his greatness. He knew that that was all nonsense, all bullshit; that was just bad genetic code; that was uncles.

But he also knew not to tell her the and yet part. And yet it turns out that he had been right about a lot of it; that there was a terrible plan afoot to collect and commoditize all our information; that SineCo was bad and was in cahoots with other bad guys, including his old friend Mark Deveraux; that not all facilities and institutions were what they seemed; that many were not, in fact, what they seemed.

He wanted his sister to see that he knew that he was lucky to be relieved of the self-spangled connectivity, the elation, the certainty. He didn’t even want them back. Truly. The plain old world was strange enough, turns out. What he wanted back was that girl. But when he imagined trying to convince Daisy of Lola’s role here, he saw that she’d probably end up saying something like I believe that you believe it, Leo .

No, the kinder thing here was not to make his sister worry any more than she was already legitimately worrying about his sanity and grip. She had enough on her plate. Everybody did. Groaning plates, all around.

He knew that Lola was real. He remembered putting his hand on her breastbone, remembered how little space she had occupied in the driver’s seat and on the mattress. And when the blanket had fallen: chin and neck and swale of clavicle and rise of breast and fall of rib. Anyway, he had kept her note. And she left a hair elastic on the white cliffs of his sink. He was wearing it on his wrist.

So he signed the contract. Daisy booked a flight home for three days later. She said she wanted to stick around to see that Leo still had what she called a basic set of life skills.

She woke him for seven a.m. walks and light breakfasts. She made checklists for him and taped them to his fridge beside his placemat contract . Walk. Breakfast. Meds. Meeting. Look for work. Clean big stupid house. Walk. Dinner. Sleep.

Daisy was keeping a very close eye on him, and she was bossy. But she was not unreasonable. Leo liked having her around, and he was allowed to give her a hard time in his way. “On the walks, I don’t have to carry those stupid little pink weights you carry, do I?”

And she to him. “No, you’ll probably get a workout cleaning this Richie Rich house of yours.”

Zinger. It wasn’t a Richie Rich house, though. She meant it was too big for one person. He had bought when the neighborhood was still rough.

Daisy drove him to his first session with Alice Waters, who turned out to be a totally uncreepy blue-spectacled Buddhist social worker. The next day Daisy drove him to his first session with Larry Davis, a bearded and besweatered old hippie who explained to Leo without condescension the pharmacology of and current theory on a drug called lamotrigine. He gave Leo his home and mobile numbers to use in the event of an adverse reaction.

Daisy didn’t have to drive him to his first AA meeting, because there was one a few blocks from his house, in a dingy building in a still-ungentrified patch of his neighborhood. The building announced itself as Promises — the word painted brightly across the pocked masonry of its facade. Leo had always assumed it was some sort of evangelical outlet, or maybe a bar for black people or for the kind of white people who felt able to walk into black bars. So he was embarrassed to discover, when he consulted his little meeting guide, that Promises was the opposite of a bar — it was a sober club — and that the addictions and afflictions that brought people in there were highly democratic. This was no Quivering Pines. This was folding tables with that sticker of wood grain — that, but peeling — and tubes of powdered creamer made from hooves, and all types of people. It skewed a bit rough, but it was as mixed a room as Leo had ever seen in Portland.

After his first meeting, he drank thin coffee with Len, a grizzled electrician who had appointed himself Leo’s sponsor. Len said Leo was clearly white-knuckling it and that he should Let Go and Let God.

Such meaningless advice. Not even noise, really. Leo wanted a new sponsor. Maybe he could break James out of Quivering Pines. Len said that Leo should try sharing in the meeting or talking to some people afterward; that he should try to tell the others what he was going through.

“You have to trust that there is some knowledge in the room,” said Len, pulling from a Pall Mall. “Knowledge that could benefit you. Like, you ain’t the first one been through this shit.”

Leo tried to take that on board. But as beautiful and strange as the stories here were, as real as the suffering was, these people’s predicaments were deeply unlike his own. This objection is said to be a form of denial called terminal uniqueness . The phrase was supposed to mean it was a false position. But a secret global network had sent a beautiful girl to involve him in a worldwide counterconspiracy. And then she’d asked him to blackmail an old friend, and when he’d said no, she’d left in the night and broke his heart. You tell that to the room.

He thought it could work — the meetings and the sit-ups and the attempts at prayer. The checklists and the granola and the lamotrigine.

But oh, how he wanted her back. The way she had made him feel; the way she had asked him straight, and told him straight; the way she had walked up the stairs.

He should forget about her, her wild claims of a secret world, her half nakedness, her having asked for his help. Yeah, right, he should forget about her, her wild claims of a secret world, her half nakedness, her having asked for his help.

Leo liked his sister’s regimen. Her lots-of-leafy-greens diet; her bed-before-eleven, rise-at-seven policy. And he had to agree that the morning walk was a good idea. It gave his brain a baseline for the day. Or maybe that was the lamotrigine. So the day after Daisy left, he called his friend Louis, the guy whose wife was a public defender, early in the morning and asked would he like to take a walk in the woods.

Louis picked him up in his ratty Mazda truck, his old dog Cola on the bench seat beside him. Leo squashed in beside the musty brown dog and the trio drove to Forest Park, across the river, up over the arched back of the Fremont Bridge.

“Hey, do me a favor,” said Leo, as they debouched at the trailhead. There were only a few other cars parked on the verge. “Leave your phone here, will you?”

“This more of your Gene Hackman conspiracy thing?” Louis asked him.