Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

Finally, at 12:37 p.m., I pull into the parking lot of the Best Western Plus Butte Plaza Inn. I retrieve my duffel bag from the trunk and trudge inside to check in.

“Whoa, buddy, what happened to your face?” the desk clerk says.

“I got punched.”

“By who?”

“By whom, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody who didn’t like my sweatshirt.”

He peers over the top of his glasses at my chest.

“Huh. Good team.”

“Are they?”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t care.”

He shakes his head.

“Well, they are.”

I start to say something but abandon it. His attention is on his computer screen, and he doesn’t seem interested in talking to me anymore, which is fine. I sigh, and he frowns. Finally, he hands me my keycard. I take it and walk away.

“We have a continental breakfast starting at six in the morning,” he calls after me.

After a shower, I lie across the motel room bed in my robe and close my eyes. I keep thinking about the young man who punched me, and I keep wishing I could see Dr. Buckley again, because this is something she and I would have talked about extensively. My trust in her was complete, and that’s something I don’t enjoy with Dr. Bryan Thomsen—which, I suppose, is why I don’t call him and tell him what happened.

I think back to Tuesday, February 1, the day when Dr. Buckley told me that she would be retiring at the end of April. She said that her husband had already retired from his job as a cardiovascular surgeon at Billings Clinic, which I didn’t realize because, first, Dr. Buckley and I talk mostly about me and not her and, second, my family gets its medical attention at St. Vincent Healthcare. My father was on the board of directors there and was loyal to it. He died there three years, one month, and ten days ago. I haven’t thought about it before, but I hope wherever he is—if he is anywhere at all other than the Terrace Garden Cemetery—he’s happy that he died at St. Vincent Healthcare instead of Billings Clinic. I think that would have mattered to him.

Dr. Buckley said she and her husband wanted to do some traveling before “we’re too old to get around anymore,” and I told her that was silly, that she looked young and vibrant and ambulatory (I love the word “ambulatory”). She said, “You’re sweet, Edward,” but I wasn’t trying to be. She really does look good, or at least she did on Tuesday, April 26, which was the last time I saw her. It would be conjecture to say what she looks like now. In any case, I have no way of knowing whether her husband is healthy, as I have never met him. Maybe he’s about to die. Maybe Dr. Buckley’s haste is warranted.

Before Dr. Buckley and I parted ways, we had five joint sessions with Dr. Bryan Thomsen. Dr. Buckley said this would allow me and Dr. Bryan Thomsen to “ease into” a patient-doctor relationship. She said that she was sure we would “hit it off” and that Dr. Bryan Thomsen, being more my age, might even relate to me in a way that she could not. I had my doubts about this, because I never saw any evidence that the age gap between me and Dr. Buckley was an impediment (I love the word “impediment”), but I told her that I would try.

I’ve been right so far in my suspicions about Dr. Bryan Thomsen. He’s been a poor substitute for Dr. Buckley. Most of the time, that doesn’t bother me, but it sure does right now.

Unable to sleep because I keep touching the part of my face that hurts, I decide to watch Adam-12 on my phone. I am so far behind. I have not been good about watching this show daily like I used to do with Dragnet . But I’m trying to hang in there. Dr. Buckley and I worked diligently to break my destructive compulsions while properly channeling those that brought balance to my life, like the daily complaint letter I used to write. But in this shitburger of a year, it seems that many of my routines have been shattered. I hope that reestablishing a balance with my show watching will help settle me down. Hope, of course, is fleeting and unpredictable. I’d rather have facts.

I’m watching the twenty-second episode of the first season, called “Log 152: A Dead Cop Can’t Help Anybody.” I should have watched it two days ago, but I fell asleep, and then the excitement of planning my trip overtook me.

It has taken me a while to figure out things about Adam-12 , and while I still think it is vastly inferior to Dragnet , I’m starting to warm up to it. Neither Officer Pete Malloy nor Officer Jim Reed is as wise and logical as Sergeant Joe Friday, but between the two of them, they make almost the perfect cop. Malloy is older and more crotchety (I love the word “crotchety”), while Reed is a young hotshot. Their respective attributes—wisdom and reserve, youth and strength—serve them well as they tackle crime in the streets of Los Angeles.

I think I will keep going with this series.

After eating a grilled chicken dinner at Perkins, I take a walk around the immediate area. It’s a nondescript place close to the interstate. Tomorrow morning, in fact, I’ll have to go west for 6.6 miles farther on Interstate 90 to get to Interstate 15 South, which will carry me into Idaho.

The sky has gone dark. While the weather is variable, the time of sunset is not. We have not yet reached the winter solstice, when the stretches of daylight will begin growing longer. The sun was down before 5:00 p.m. I pull my coat up to cover my ears. It’s quite cold here—much colder than it is back home in Billings.

I’m adrift. That’s the feeling I’ve had since setting out today—and, really, for much of this shitburger of a year—and I’ve finally found the word to describe that feeling. My home is 223 miles behind me, and my destination is still 463.5 miles away. I don’t feel comfortable here, my feelings are still badly hurt over getting punched, and I’m nervous about seeing Donna and Victor and Kyle again. That seems strange to me. If you’d asked me on any of the 189 days since they moved whether I’d like to see them, I would have jumped up excitedly and said, “Yes, please, that would be very nice.”

Now I’m about twenty-four hours away, and I feel scared.

That flummoxes me. It’s hard to know how much of that feeling is because I’ll be seeing my friends again and how much is because of everything else. I don’t like not knowing things.

I wake up at 2:37 a.m., and I’m discombobulated (I love the word “discombobulated”) and short of breath. As my eyes adjust to the absence of light, I stop fighting for air, and my heart rate slows. I remember now where I am.

I had a weird dream.

In it my father was alive. I frequently have dreams in which my father is alive and with me. Usually, he is showing me how to do something or telling me something he thinks I ought to know. I never dreamed about my father while he was alive. At least, I don’t remember doing so. I’ve dreamt about him often in the three years, one month, and eleven days since he died. It’s odd, but it’s also comforting, so I do not complain.

This dream was strange in that what happened in it also happened in real life, many years ago. I was with my father in a bar in a little town called Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. I was nine years old. I remember that because the Dallas Cowboys had beaten the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII earlier that year. A few months later, after school was finished, my mother let me go with my father to Cheyenne Wells, where he was going to oversee some work on the oil pumps that the company he worked for owned there. That’s how we ended up at the bar.