Tim Murphy - Christodora

“Shit!” It was the voice of Elysa, Millimom’s actress friend. In a moment, he heard her footsteps recede back up the stairwell. He peered around the corner to find Katsu, her new pit mix — Kenji, his childhood love, had died years before — double-tied to the stair railing, panting just aside Elysa’s wide-open pocketbook. Apparently she’d forgotten something and run back upstairs. He peered inside her bag, absently stroking the panting Katsu’s head for a moment, then plucked out Elysa’s wallet, extracted the wad of bills in the fold, dropped the wallet back in the bag, and ducked out of the Christodora just as the elevator doors were parting for him. Not until he was halfway across the park did he dare to thumb through the cash, which totaled $187. He’d intended to rummage around inside the apartment to pull together the bills and change for his next fix, but now he didn’t need to. In less than an hour, he was back in Jersey City, nodding — as was the pimply high-school kid and a few other randoms, all of it compliments of Mateo. He’d safely averted the worst of the dopesickness.

When he looked at his phone seven hours later, he saw a voice mail from Jared-dad: “Do you know you were caught on camera?” went the message, in an impossibly flat tone of disgust. “You need to get home right away and tell us what exactly is going on. We are assuming you have a drug problem and now basically the whole building knows, too. You are in deep shit, Mateo.”

There was also a text from Millimom: “Please please please come home.”

He didn’t come home until the next day, protected from dopesickness with the rest of the stash he’d bought, tucked between his shoe and his sock, terrified they’d find it and take it away from him. Ardit glanced up at him as he shuffled in and looked away, disgusted, shaking his head.

“You better get upstairs now,” Ardit said.

Upstairs, he found them sitting at the kitchen table — they’d stayed home from work waiting for him to come back. His jig was up. At least he didn’t have to sneak around them anymore. He stood there, staring at them, fighting the urge to scratch himself or hug himself against the oncoming achiness, and they stared at him with a hollow, resigned look. They were sad, he could see, because their best-laid plans were blowing up in their faces.

“Is it heroin, Mateo?” Jared-dad asked.

He nodded. Millimom started to cry.

“You,” Jared continued slowly, “have to go upstairs with us and apologize to Elysa, so she understands you have a drug addiction. Then you’re packing a bag and we’re getting on Metro-North with you and taking you to a rehab in Connecticut. We’ve already called. This is all part of the deal, and if you don’t like it, you can get your things right now and turn around and never set foot in this house again. We didn’t sign up for this.”

“Why’d you sign up at all?” Mateo was surprised to hear himself shoot back through his achy malaise.

Milly stood. “Mateo, sweetheart, please , just go along with us on this. You need help before it gets worse.”

He capitulated to her — not him, but her. He went to the rehab. But a few months after that, it got worse anyway, culminating with the infamous Sculpture Incident of October 2011, which had gotten him kicked out of the apartment for real. That’s when Drew stepped in and got him into that rehab in California, then to her place — and to the AA meeting that day with Carrie, track marks fading under his long-sleeved jersey. And the round-robin coming around to him. “I’m Mateo and I’m a addick.”

“Hi, Mateo,” everybody said, singsongy.

“I have seventy-nine days today,” he said. Everybody clapped and said things like “All right!”

“Uh—” What should he say? “I guess I’m grateful for my sobriety.” Then — he didn’t know why — he kind of laughed a little. Like he was laughing at what he just said. It did sound mighty clichéd. “Uh, I have a lot of cravings. A lot of fantasizing.”

Heads bobbed in accord around the room.

“And a lot of — like, about the future. I wanna go back to New York. I’m an artist. I wanna finish school. L.A. freaks me out.”

People laughed.

“It’s too fuckin’ warm, man, this is fuckin’ January!” he said, egged on a bit by the laughter. “But I guess — some nice people are putting me up. And my parental figures in New York really can’t deal with me now anyways. So I guess I’m just trying to stay focused on today and not freak out over the future.” Always best to fall back on a twelve-step cliché if you’re stuck for your next line, he thought. So, voilà. “Thanks.”

“Thanks, Mateo,” everyone chorused.

Carrie was sitting across the room from him, three rows back in the concentric circles of chairs, so the round-robin never got to her. But when he finished speaking and was twisting his torso in his seat to stretch, he caught her eye and she smiled sweetly, as though to say, Nice job, and he smiled back.

At the end of the meeting, when he was helping put away chairs, she came over and asked if he was going out to coffee with the others. At the IHOP, they sat together at the end of a long booth full of their fellow struggling derelicts, some crankily silent, some too boisterous, no one at ease in their skin.

“I want a cigarette but I’m gonna wait till we leave instead of going outside now,” announced Carrie, apropos of nothing. She had something like twenty-two days clean — unless you counted chain-smoking, the last acceptable fix of the recovering junkie — and she was a mess, a ball of bad, shaky, nervous energy, constantly pulling at her lip and looking away. But fuck, she was cute.

“You look a little like Jean Seberg,” Mateo told her.

“Who’s that?”

“Are you serious?” he asked. “You never saw Breathless ?”

“No. What’s that?”

“It’s a Godard movie.”

She shrugged at him. “I don’t know what that is, either.”

“He was a filmmaker.” Okay, he thought, so a cutie, but not so well versed. Where had she said she was from originally? Arizona? That probably explained that.

“Maybe you can show me the movie someday,” she said. She was glancing at him sideways while she pretended to look at the vast breakfast options on the laminated menu.

“That could be arranged,” he said in a coy kind of maybe-maybe voice.

It’s not like H ever came up. It was more like, when they swapped numbers before everyone parted ways outside of IHOP, he just knew it wasn’t a good idea. He didn’t tell his sponsor about it, just like he hadn’t told his sponsor he’d been thinking more and more about Hector, missing their dream sessions, wondering if Hector was in Palm Springs, not two hours away. He didn’t tell Drew and Christian. No wonder he felt so crappy that afternoon throwing all his shit in his bag, plucking those credit cards out of Drew’s wallet, out of her bag, on the kitchen table, and slipping out of the house while he knew she was deep in her writing time. He took the cards almost as a kind of self-guarantee; from here on out, it’d be easier to go ahead and use than to turn back around, hand over the cards to Drew, fess up to his aborted plans.

His heart was pounding as he clomped his way down the winding streets out of the hills toward Sunset. On some level, he knew he was going back to square one, undoing absolutely anything he had achieved in the past eighty-six days — that whole expensive time he’d spent at that second, fancy rehab with the yoga and the organic food, the goodwill he’d built up with Drew and Christian since he’d been out. And he knew the text he was about to send was wrong, that he was pulling someone else down with him. But he had no choice. The time had come. In his heart, he never really believed he’d go more than, say, ninety days without the stuff. That just wasn’t a viable way to live, and part of him pitied the AA people who truly believed it was. In fact, he liked the hard, pragmatic focus it took to sideline every other intervening thought and wend his way, deftly and efficiently, toward the prize. It was a bit like making art at its best — a clean, totalizing focus.