“Family in Decline” traces the shaky beginnings of Lethe’s family unit as it highlights a self-absorbed artist-mother and a psuedo-spiritual father. The blog explores the stories behind each member of Lethe’s family, including his sister, and shows how Lethe evolved into an impulsive idealist and nascent drug addict.

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The commercial iron gate swung open, clanging against a metal pole. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, Lethe crossed the hard, crumpled grass of the quadrangle. The air on his face was cold as steel. Forty feet ahead of him, two black men were rooted under floodlights. They appeared to be guarding the base of the building, their rugged profiles hidden under hooded sweatshirts. A hunched black lady with a little girl was also walking across the quadrangle.

“I need your help.” He said.

The child inched closer to her mother’s leg.

“What-u need?”

“Dope. Can you help me?”

“Do I look like a pusherman to you? Not every black person sells drugs. Can’t you see I got my baby with me?”

“I’m desperate here. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“How much you got?”

“Fifty bucks.”

“Maybe you should stay away from ‘dem drugs.”

“Sixty?”

“Give me two hundred.”

She strutted with a limp ahead of him. They passed the black men in hooded sweatshirts, entering the cavern-like darkness of the corridor. The stairs went up the side of the building which was shielded by chain-metal, cold air pouring through the chinks. On the ninth floor she had him wait while she went down the hall to knock on somebody’s door.

“What-u doing?” The little girl asked.

“Just waiting for your mom to come back.”

“She ain’t my momma. She my granny.”

“Sorry. Your granny—”

“Why my granny buying you drugs?”

“She’s not buying me drugs, okay. She’s doing me a favor.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever you say . . .”

“I just want to get out of here. This place freaks me out.”

“Scardy-cat.”

“Hush, will ya?”

“Crackhead.”

“What did you just say?”

“Crackhead.”

“I’m not a crackhead.”

“Crackhead. Crackhead.”

How Lethe woke up in the emergency room

His father’s Middle Eastern nose and black mustache loomed above him. The unforgettable scent of deodorant and anxiety was radiating from the Doctor’s silk shirt.

Beside the hospital drape, his mother was hunched over in her wheelchair with a bag of unopened Twizzlers on her lap. She yawned under the weight of her slouching upper body. The Doctor made a motion to the caretaker to pull her up. As her body was being raised, Rose turned her face upwards to her son. Spittle ran down the side of the mouth, which the caretaker was quick to blot with a sodden napkin.

In the fog of a semi-conscious state, Lethe tried to make out his surroundings. Coughing, he felt something lodged in his throat.

“You weren’t breathing.” His father’s voice was stern.

“I wasn’t?”

Beside Lethe, a respiratory machine emitted a constant beep. The Doctor inspected his son’s eyes.

“The police came to the apartment. They found heroin all over.”

“They did?”

From behind the partitioning drape, voices of doctors and nurses made a circling chant. Lethe’s father stepped back from his son, assessing his overall physical status.

“You’ll be moved into the psych ward later tonight.”

“I will?”

Lethe turned to his mother. Her pensive gaze was weighing on him. Was she upset? Worried?

“What mom?”

“Your mother brought you some candy.” His father said.

A Conversation with Dr. Offenbach

The confines of the mental ward produced a very strange reaction in Lethe. Whereas most of the adolescent patients rebelled against their captivity in the ward, Lethe found a certain comfort in being taken care of and treated as if he were different. The schedule for each day involved stretching in the morning, breakfast, arts and crafts, group therapy, meeting with your doctor, lunch, naptime, drug and alcohol classes, afternoon activities, and dinner. He had his own room with a double-plate glass window that looked out at a heating unit on top of a hospital building, and his mother and father usually came once a week to bring him Twizzlers.

Lethe took an extreme pleasure in meeting with his learned psychiatrist each day. Dr. Offenbach, having studied psychology for many years, was a precious resource to Lethe. As Lethe saw it, his doctor was helping him to discover the secrets of his mind. Dr. Offenbach was like his personal assistant on the journey toward self-realization.

Dr. Offenbach wrote in his reports: “the patient says he is cultivating himself to become a genius” and “the patient says he has to return to college where he can resume his work in solitude”. When confronted about his use of drugs, Lethe told the doctor that “he occasionally took Ritalin to concentrate better”.

“But the police found heroin all over your mother’s apartment, correct?”

“Heroin? Yes, I did that.”

“But I thought you were studying to become a genius.”

“I am. I have a duty to myself, to cultivate myself. I can’t be bothered by anyone.”

“What about the heroin, Lethe? Were you taking heroin?”

“Only as an experiment.”

“But the police found fourteen separate plastic baggies of heroin in your mother’s apartment. That sounds like a little more than an experiment to me.”

“I liked the way it felt.”

“But you agree that heroin wasn’t going to help you study?”

“No, it wasn’t going to help me study. But it did more than that. It brought me to that place.”

“What place, Lethe?”

“The place—you know—where Authors go.”

In the meantime, Dr. Offenbach arranged for his patient to be flown out to Tucson, Arizona where Lethe would attend a thirty-day rehabilitation program.

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Creosote de Tucson, a resort for addicts

In the late 1990s, following the lead of institutions such as Hazlden and the Betty Ford Clinic, chemical dependency treatment centers began to sprout up across the country, turning over a multi-billion dollar industry. Buttressed by his father’s medical insurance plan, Lethe was admitted to one of these new-fangled 30-day treatment programs.

In the foothills of the Sonoran Desert, with over 35 acres of beautiful desert landscape, scenic hiking trails, a luxurious swimming pool, Native American mosaics, interlacing cactus gardens and ornate fountains, reposed Creosote de Tucson. Yoga instruction was offered daily. Massage therapy. Group therapy. Nature excursions. Individual counseling. And in addition: how to quit smoking, anger management, the skills of recovery, and the Twelve Steps.

Despite all of the services in modern addiction treatment that were offered at Creosote, most male and female patients gravitated to the smoking tables, which were the hubs of socialization. There they loafed on the benches most of the day, chain-smoking and talking about what they were going to do when they finally got out of rehab. Lethe, who made friends quickly, was offered a place to stay after treatment by another patient.

Some of the characters at Creosote

Out by the smoking tables, a lanky, unshaven patient named Morris thrummed on his guitar and sang country songs in the moonlight. Around eleven o’clock, Nurse Debra came out to tell him to go to bed, but he cradled his rickety guitar in his arms and kept on singing, “Oh, Ida Red, Ida Red, don’t you—don’t you do this again . . .”

From his cabin, Lethe could hear the sonorous string of laments. He always thought of Morris as a semi-talented country singer. Then, one night, Lethe couldn’t sleep and he went over to the smoking table and listened to Morris for awhile. He realized that the songs he had been listening to night after night didn’t make any sense. He had been hearing the melodies, but now, sitting next to Morris, he heard the words. There were a couple lines in the chorus that made some mention of a gal from the state of Texas or Louisiana, but everything after that was a bunch of gibberish. It seemed to Lethe that Morris was a little crazy. “I make them up as I go along,” Morris said. “I’m a television writer.”

“Really?” Lethe wanted to know.

“Have you ever seen NYPD Blue? I wrote the first season.”

“So then, you’re famous.”

“No, just a television writer. Hollywood is filled with them.”

“How did you end up here?”

“Too much Ritalin. 120 mg a day. I snorted it while I was working on scripts.”

Morris wasn’t the only patient who used to have a job in Hollywood. There was an ex-movie director at Creosote, a bald-headed man in his late fifties, who was there for depression. Lethe asked him what it was like to live in Hollywood. The ex-movie director talked about Studio 54 and Andy Warhol.

“So you never took any drugs?” Lethe asked.

“You kidding me? I did tons of drugs. But it was different back then. Everybody did drugs in the 70’s and 80’s.”

The movie director was always paired up with Chesterfield from Palm Beach. Chesterfield was nicknamed Mr. Bronze because his face was permanently copper-toned. His family owned a huge pharmaceutical company, and evidently, he never worked a day in his life. He was in his early thirties and this was his twelfth stay at Creosote de Tucson. Chesterfield had a sociable, carefree, casual relationship to the world, and was endearing and even charming until one glimpsed into the private man’s infinite self-delusion.

Lethe often talked with Chesterfield about his addiction. “I can’t do anything about it,” he used to say. “When you’re addicted to drugs, you just have to accept the fact that it’s never going to change. You’ll always be an addict. That’s what they say, right? They say no matter how much clean time you have, you’ll never be ‘cured’. I believe that man. I really believe it.”

He lit up a cigarette. Pall Malls, he smoked.

“I know when I go back to Palm Springs my disease will be waiting for me. That’s why I always keep three bottles of Valium under my mattress.”

In a good-natured way, he patted Lethe on the back, saying, “We’ll never be cured buddy. Never.”

A Group Consensus

On his twenty-seventh day of treatment (one day before completion), Lethe was told to report to his case-manager’s office. The confidential air of this order gave Lethe cause to suspect that he was being summoned for no small potatoes. As he quickened his steps along the tiled walkway, he tried to guess what he could have done wrong. Since the day he arrived at Creosote, he thought he had done everything perfectly. He was expecting to leave in less then a week.

When he entered the office, Lethe found six people gathered in a circle looking as if they were about to do a séance. They had sly smiles planted on their lips and were questionably tranquil. He picked out his psychiatrist, the director of the program, his parents who must have flown in that morning, his case-manager, and the yoga instructor. (What was the yoga instructor doing there?)

His father’s face was comical. He looked foolish and proud—just what Don Quixote must have looked like whenever he was showing Sancho Panza that he was superior.

Similarly, the Doctor saw that his son had an asinine expression on his face; Lethe was trying to undermine his authority again. To avoid looking at him, the Doctor turned his attention to the case-manager. From all sides, she was a rather large woman, ornamented with a big, bright flower dress.

“Today is a very important day in your treatment, Lethe.” She said.

Lethe glanced at his mother who was hunched over in her wheel chair, spittle dripping down her chin as usual. Her face was angled to the floor with her small black pupils peering up at him in confused apprehension.

The case-manager resumed: “Let me ask you a question, Lethe. Have you thought about your plans after treatment?”

“I plan to live on the West Coast.”

The psychiatrist and the Director exchanged a smile.

“I see,” the case-manager said, nodding her head incredulously, “the West Coast.”

“First we want you to consider,” she handed him a glossy brochure showing a wooded area with cabins and young men walking on a nature trail, “Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche.”

“What language is that?”

“I’m not sure, Lethe. Now your parents arrived here less than an hour ago and I have been talking to them about this program. This is an outstanding program for young people.”

Lethe examined the brochure.

“The Camp is located in the Nebraska backcountry,” the yoga instructor pointed out.

“Hey, there’re only guys in these pictures,” Lethe observed.

“Yes, this is a male-only program.” Another voice gave the affirmation.

Lethe bolted upright in his chair, “Nobody can make me go here.”

“Now Lethe,” the Cuban psychiatrist chimed in, “Your specific medical history requires a great deal of attention. Twenty-eight days is not enough to make a difference in your life-habits. Over the course of your stay here, we have diagnosed you with a number of other disorders including manic-depression, infantile grandiosity syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche has an outstanding reputation in helping adolescents deal with these issues. We feel that you would really thrive in an environment like this, and it would only be six or eight months before you could go home.”

“Six or eight months?”

“Lethe,” the Doctor’s voice was imperious. “You must do this program. There is no choice in the matter.”

“I’m not doing it! You’re not sending me to that place. I already told you I’m going to the West Coast.”

The Director of the program, who had been silent up to this point, now spoke. “I’m afraid, Lethe, if that is your final decision we are going to have to ask you to leave Creosote.”

“What?”

“Unless you agree to the treatment plan we have outlined here, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to give you an unsuccessful discharge.”

“But that’s absurd. We’re in the middle of the desert. Where am I supposed to go?”

“Go to Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche,” the room chanted.

Chesterfield and the ex-movie director help out

Lethe marched to the men’s smoking table, and venting his spleen, said, “Can you believe they’re just going to put me out on the curb?”

“When?” They asked.

“Tomorrow.”

The patients commiserated with the frustrated youth. They patted him on the back and offered him cigarettes. Then Chesterfield said, “Where would you like to go?”

“I was planning to go to the West Coast but now I’m going to be stuck here in Tucson.”

“Not if we buy you a plane ticket,” said the ex-movie director, glancing sidelong at his buddy Chesterfield.

“How does San Francisco sound?”

“Who’s going to buy me a ticket?”

“We are.”

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The halfway house sat on an unassuming corner of a suburban street. There were linden trees and a stone bird bath in the backyard. Everything about the exterior of the house suggested conventionality, cut grass, plucked weeds, white-picket fence. Lethe’s fellow residents included one gay hairdresser, one former steroid junkie/ex-body-builder, a newly-converted Mormon, a recovering heroine-addict/used car salesman, a motorcycle mechanic with ADHD, and various others. . . twelve residents in total.

Walter, the house-senior, was twenty-nine years old and worked at McDonald’s. There was a heavy awkwardness about Walter that gave one the impression he might be autistic. He was reserved and quiet and lumbered around the halfway house in his slow, heavy manner. You would never guess by looking at him that he was a recovering drug addict. He appeared too tame and defenseless to have ever picked up a dangerous substance.

For over ten years, however, he followed the Grateful Dead, selling acid in parking lots. He stayed in motels and trailer homes, and hitchhiked across the United States. He mixed drugs together, experimenting on himself. For most of his life, he had been a lonely, self-tortured individual. Few people stayed with him long enough to become his friend. But once Walter moved into the halfway house and got clean, he was introduced to the Church of Mormon. The boys in white ties and brown pants came to tell him about their religion every week. He was interested and so he went with them to church. There he met Elora Gladdis, the fourteen year old girl Walter fell in love with. After she pasted her picture on the back of his Bible, Walter took a vow of purity and abstinence.

The inside of the halfway house was shadowy and humid. In certain places, the curtains were taped to the windowsill to prevent the sun from seeping into the living room. The wall panels were imitation wood and the carpet a dull cappuccino color. Next to the kitchen, there was a payphone on the wall and an antique Apple computer with a green screen coated in dust.

Attempting a voice of authority, Walter said, “Before you come into the house you have to take off your shoes.” He was referring to the plaque of House Rules. “Also, there is no smoking. If you want to smoke, go into the garage.” The residents had built a makeshift smoking lounge with secondhand couches and a beat-up Zenith.

All of the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen were labeled. Each resident was allowed 1/3 of a cabinet and a section of the refrigerator. Walter stressed the importance of everyone having their own supply of food. Theft was obviously looked down upon. As they passed the rooms of the residents who had been living in the halfway house for a year or longer, Walter discussed seniority. Seniors were “chiefs” while newcomers were “little Indians”. If you wanted to stick around and get to be a chief, then you had to clean twice as hard on Sunday mornings. That meant the toilets in both bathrooms and the weeds out front.

Walter led Lethe up to his room. The newer residents slept in bunk beds on the second floor. Lethe counted six roommates total. The room looked like it would be a bit cramped.

“Everyone’s shoes are tucked neatly underneath the bed.” Walter highlighted.

Lethe nodded his head, following the house-senior back downstairs.

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The following chapters continue to tell the history of Lethe Bashar: Family in Decline. However, they will no longer follow chronological order. Some parts of the history, such as the next three chapters, “A California Halfway House,” “Rehab,” and “The Projects,” are replicated here as individual sections for the purpose of linking.

Following “The Projects,” I will take a liberal stance toward retelling certain poignant events from Lethe’s history, namely events that occur to me as I’m writing other parts of the novel, such as the Spain and Las Vegas sections.

Each of these additional chapters will be like a short story, contained within itself.





Table of Contents

Lethe ventures into the Projects

The commercial iron gate swung open, clanging against a metal pole. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, Lethe crossed the hard, crumpled grass of the quadrangle. The air on his face was cold as steel. Forty feet ahead of him, two black men were rooted under floodlights. They appeared to be guarding the base of the building, their rugged profiles hidden under hooded sweatshirts. A hunched black lady with a little girl was also walking across the quadrangle.

“I need your help.” He said.

The child inched closer to her mother’s leg.

“What-u need?”

“Dope. Can you help me?”

“Do I look like a pusherman to you? Not every black person sells drugs. Can’t you see I got my baby with me?”

“I’m desperate here. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“How much you got?”

“Fifty bucks.”

“Maybe you should stay away from dem drugs.”

“Sixty?”

“Give me two hundred.”

She strutted with a limp ahead of him. They passed the black men in hooded sweatshirts, entering the cavern-like darkness of the corridor. The stairs went up the side of the building which was shielded by chain-metal, cold air pouring through the chinks. On the ninth floor she had him wait while she went down the hall to knock on somebody’s door.

“What-u doing?” The little girl asked.

“Just waiting for your mom to come back.”

“She ain’t my momma. She my granny.”

“Sorry. Your granny—”

“Why my granny buying you drugs?”

“She’s not buying me drugs, okay. She’s doing me a favor.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever you say . . .”

“I just want to get out of here. This place freaks me out.”

“Scardy-cat.”

“Hush, will ya?”

“Crackhead.”

“What did you just say?”

“Crackhead.”

“I’m not a crackhead.”

“Crackhead. Crackhead.”

How Lethe woke up in the emergency room

His father’s Middle Eastern nose and black mustache loomed above him. The unforgettable scent of deodorant and anxiety was radiating from the Doctor’s silk shirt.

Beside the hospital drape, his mother was hunched over in her wheelchair with a bag of unopened Twizzlers on her lap. She yawned under the weight of her slouching upper body. The Doctor made a motion to the caretaker to pull her up. As her body was being raised, Rose turned her face upwards to her son. Spittle ran down the side of the mouth, which the caretaker was quick to blot with a sodden napkin.

In the fog of a semi-conscious state, Lethe tried to make out his surroundings. Coughing, he felt something lodged in his throat.

“You weren’t breathing.” His father’s voice was stern.

“I wasn’t?”

Beside Lethe, a respiratory machine emitted a constant beep. The Doctor inspected his son’s eyes.

“The police came to the apartment. They found heroin all over.”

“They did?”

From behind the partitioning drape, voices of doctors and nurses made a circling chant. Lethe’s father stepped back from his son, assessing his overall physical status.

“You’ll be moved into the psych ward later tonight.”

“I will?”

Lethe turned to his mother. Her pensive gaze was weighing on him. Was she upset? Worried?

“What mom?”

“Your mother brought you some candy.” His father said.

A Conversation with Dr. Offenbach

The confines of the mental ward produced a very strange reaction in Lethe. Whereas most of the adolescent patients rebelled against their captivity in the ward, Lethe found a certain comfort in being taken care of and treated as if he were different. The schedule for each day involved stretching in the morning, breakfast, arts and crafts, group therapy, meeting with your doctor, lunch, naptime, drug and alcohol classes, afternoon activities, and dinner. He had his own room with a double-plate glass window that looked out at a heating unit on top of a hospital building, and his mother and father usually came once a week to bring him Twizzlers.

Lethe took an extreme pleasure in meeting with his learned psychiatrist each day. Dr. Offenbach, having studied psychology for many years, was a precious resource to Lethe. As Lethe saw it, his doctor was helping him to discover the secrets of his mind. Dr. Offenbach was like his personal assistant on the journey toward self-realization.

Dr. Offenbach wrote in his reports: “the patient says he is cultivating himself to become a genius” and “the patient says he has to return to college where he can resume his work in solitude”. When confronted about his use of drugs, Lethe told the doctor that “he occasionally took Ritalin to concentrate better”.

“But the police found heroin all over your mother’s apartment, correct?”

“Heroin? Yes, I did that.”

“But I thought you were studying to become a genius.”

“I am. I have a duty to myself, to cultivate myself. I can’t be bothered by anyone.”

“What about the heroin, Lethe? Were you taking heroin?”

“Only as an experiment.”

“But the police found fourteen separate plastic baggies of heroin in your mother’s apartment. That sounds like a little more than an experiment to me.”

“I liked the way it felt.”

“But you agree that heroin wasn’t going to help you study?”

“No, it wasn’t going to help me study. But it did more than that. It brought me to that place.”

“What place, Lethe?”

“The place—you know—where Authors go.”

In the meantime, Dr. Offenbach arranged for his patient to be flown out to Tucson, Arizona where Lethe would attend a thirty-day rehabilitation program.

Interlude • On the airplane

The Doctor opened up the sequel to The Road Less Traveled and began reading. There was a tension between father and son like an elastic band being stretched to its breaking point and held there for the duration of the flight. Lethe was writing furiously in a spiral notebook. He resented his father for leaving his mother and these feelings were coming out in a malicious rant.

Lethe was not in denial about his drug-use. Ever since freshman year in college, he had been abusing drugs—he would agree to that. He would agree that he spent six months in hotel room in Madrid snorting cocaine and copying books. He would agree that he took Ecstasy and acid to feel good on a Wednesday night. He would agree that the police found fourteen separate baggies of heroin in his mother’s apartment. But, ultimately, Lethe saw his drug-use as an effect, not as a cause.

And the cause? His father was mostly to blame. That man sitting next to him with the self-satisfied grin on his face and the perfectly trimmed mustache. The man who used to preach to him about the importance of the family. The man who took care of people for a living. The man who lectured him about treating others with respect. Now he knew his father was all bullshit. A total hypocrite.

The Doctor continued to read his book as Lethe openly ridiculed him on the plane. What his son didn’t understand was that the decision to divorce Lethe’s mother was a spiritual decision and the result of long, serious meditation. His son was immature. His perception of things was distorted. The Doctor wasn’t going to allow his twenty-year old to tell him about “reality”. The Dance of Universal Peace had showed him what was real and what was not; he would never go back to being a guilty father again. He was free of guilt and self-pity and nobody had power over him anymore. He had done the right thing with Lethe’s mother. He didn’t need to justify himself to his family. His son was a drug addict and needed help.

Creosote de Tucson, a resort for addicts

In the late 1990s, following the lead of institutions such as Hazlden and the Betty Ford Clinic, chemical dependency treatment centers began to sprout up across the country, turning over a multi-billion dollar industry. Buttressed by his father’s medical insurance plan, Lethe was admitted to one of these new-fangled 30-day treatment programs.

In the foothills of the Sonoran Desert, with over 35 acres of beautiful desert landscape, scenic hiking trails, a luxurious swimming pool, Native American mosaics, interlacing cactus gardens and ornate fountains, reposed Creosote de Tucson. Yoga instruction was offered daily. Massage therapy. Group therapy. Nature excursions. Individual counseling. And in addition: how to quit smoking, anger management, the skills of recovery, and the Twelve Steps.

Despite all of the services in modern addiction treatment that were offered at Creosote, most male and female patients gravitated to the smoking tables, which were the hubs of socialization. There they loafed on the benches most of the day, chain-smoking and talking about what they were going to do when they finally got out of rehab. Lethe, who made friends quickly, was offered a place to stay after treatment by another patient.

Some of the characters at Creosote

Out by the smoking tables, a lanky, unshaven patient named Morris thrummed on his guitar and sang country songs in the moonlight. Around eleven o’clock, Nurse Debra came out to tell him to go to bed, but he cradled his rickety guitar in his arms and kept on singing, “Oh, Ida Red, Ida Red, don’t you—don’t you do this again . . .”

From his cabin, Lethe could hear the sonorous string of laments. He always thought of Morris as a semi-talented country singer. Then, one night, Lethe couldn’t sleep and he went over to the smoking table and listened to Morris for awhile. He realized that the songs he had been listening to night after night didn’t make any sense. He had been hearing the melodies, but now, sitting next to Morris, he heard the words. There were a couple lines in the chorus that made some mention of a gal from the state of Texas or Louisiana, but everything after that was a bunch of gibberish. It seemed to Lethe that Morris was a little crazy. “I make them up as I go along,” Morris said. “I’m a television writer.”

“Really?” Lethe wanted to know.

“Have you ever seen NYPD Blue? I wrote the first season.”

“So then, you’re famous.”

“No, just a television writer. Hollywood is filled with them.”

“How did you end up here?”

“Too much Ritalin. 120 mg a day. I snorted it while I was working on scripts.”

Morris wasn’t the only patient who used to have a job in Hollywood. There was an ex-movie director at Creosote, a bald-headed man in his late fifties, who was there for depression. Lethe asked him what it was like to live in Hollywood. The ex-movie director talked about Studio 54 and Andy Warhol.

“So you never took any drugs?” Lethe asked.

“You kidding me? I did tons of drugs. But it was different back then. Everybody did drugs in the 70’s and 80’s.”

The movie director was always paired up with Chesterfield from Palm Beach. Chesterfield was nicknamed Mr. Bronze because his face was permanently copper-toned. His family owned a huge pharmaceutical company, and evidently, he never worked a day in his life. He was in his early thirties and this was his twelfth stay at Creosote de Tucson. Chesterfield had a sociable, carefree, casual relationship to the world, and was endearing and even charming until one glimpsed into the private man’s infinite self-delusion.

Lethe often talked with Chesterfield about his addiction. “I can’t do anything about it,” he used to say. “When you’re addicted to drugs, you just have to accept the fact that it’s never going to change. You’ll always be an addict. That’s what they say, right? They say no matter how much clean time you have, you’ll never be ‘cured’. I believe that man. I really believe it.”

He lit up a cigarette. Pall Malls, he smoked.

“I know when I go back to Palm Springs my disease will be waiting for me. That’s why I always keep three bottles of Valium under my mattress.”

In a good-natured way, he patted Lethe on the back, saying, “We’ll never be cured buddy. Never.”

A Group Consensus

On his twenty-seventh day of treatment (one day before completion), Lethe was told to report to his case-manager’s office. The confidential air of this order gave Lethe cause to suspect that he was being summoned for no small potatoes. As he quickened his steps along the tiled walkway, he tried to guess what he could have done wrong. Since the day he arrived at Creosote, he thought he had done everything perfectly. He was expecting to leave in less then a week.

When he entered the office, Lethe found six people gathered in a circle looking as if they were about to do a séance. They had sly smiles planted on their lips and were questionably tranquil. He picked out his psychiatrist, the director of the program, his parents who must have flown in that morning, his case-manager, and the yoga instructor. (What was the yoga instructor doing there?)

His father’s face was comical. He looked foolish and proud—just what Don Quixote must have looked like whenever he was showing Sancho Panza that he was superior.

Similarly, the Doctor saw that his son had an asinine expression on his face; Lethe was trying to undermine his authority again. To avoid looking at him, the Doctor turned his attention to the case-manager. From all sides, she was a rather large woman, ornamented with a big, bright flower dress.

“Today is a very important day in your treatment, Lethe.” She said.

Lethe glanced at his mother who was hunched over in her wheel chair, spittle dripping down her chin as usual. Her face was angled to the floor with her small black pupils peering up at him in confused apprehension.

The case-manager resumed: “Let me ask you a question, Lethe. Have you thought about your plans after treatment?”

“I plan to live on the West Coast.”

The psychiatrist and the Director exchanged a smile.

“I see,” the case-manager said, nodding her head incredulously, “the West Coast.”

“First we want you to consider,” she handed him a glossy brochure showing a wooded area with cabins and young men walking on a nature trail, “Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche.”

“What language is that?”

“I’m not sure, Lethe. Now your parents arrived here less than an hour ago and I have been talking to them about this program. This is an outstanding program for young people.”

Lethe examined the brochure.

“The Camp is located in the Nebraska backcountry,” the yoga instructor pointed out.

“Hey, there’re only guys in these pictures,” Lethe observed.

“Yes, this is a male-only program.” Another voice gave the affirmation.

Lethe bolted upright in his chair, “Nobody can make me go here.”

“Now Lethe,” the Cuban psychiatrist chimed in, “Your specific medical history requires a great deal of attention. Twenty-eight days is not enough to make a difference in your life-habits. Over the course of your stay here, we have diagnosed you with a number of other disorders including manic-depression, infantile grandiosity syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche has an outstanding reputation in helping adolescents deal with these issues. We feel that you would really thrive in an environment like this, and it would only be six or eight months before you could go home.”

“Six or eight months?”

“Lethe,” the Doctor’s voice was imperious. “You must do this program. There is no choice in the matter.”

“I’m not doing it! You’re not sending me to that place. I already told you I’m going to the West Coast.”

The Director of the program, who had been silent up to this point, now spoke. “I’m afraid, Lethe, if that is your final decision we are going to have to ask you to leave Creosote.”

“What?”

“Unless you agree to the treatment plan we have outlined here, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to give you an unsuccessful discharge.”

“But that’s absurd. We’re in the middle of the desert. Where am I supposed to go?”

“Go to Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche,” the room chanted.

Chesterfield and the ex-movie director help out

Lethe marched to the men’s smoking table, and venting his spleen, said, “Can you believe they’re just going to put me out on the curb?”

“When?” They asked.

“Tomorrow.”

The patients commiserated with the frustrated youth. They patted him on the back and offered him cigarettes. Then Chesterfield said, “Where would you like to go?”

“I was planning to go to the West Coast but now I’m going to be stuck here in Tucson.”

“Not if we buy you a plane ticket,” said the ex-movie director, glancing sidelong at his buddy Chesterfield.

“How does San Francisco sound?”

“Who’s going to buy me a ticket?”

“We are.”

Lethe meets Julian in San Francisco

His sheer good-fortune was astounding. He couldn’t quite figure out how one minute he was confined to a treatment facility and the next free to roam the continental United States. His parents must have thought they were leaving their son stranded in Tucson to contemplate his life of drugs (ha-ha). His case-manager, the Cuban psychiatrist, and the Director probably figured that once Lethe realized what a big mistake he was making, he’d turn right around and beg them to accept him back at Creosote. This unexpected turn of events not only revived Lethe’s confidence in his own genius, but created the wonderful illusion that he was in command of his destiny.

As Julian’s brand-new Volkswagen Bug pulled up to curb, Lethe noticed someone in the front passenger seat. She was twirling her hair distractedly, almost like a decoy.

The two friends greeted each other, and Julian introduced his girlfriend.

“So what brings you to San Francisco?” She said, angling her face to the back of the car.

“Just doing a little traveling.”

Julian put on his turn signal and tried to navigate out of a traffic buildup in the far lane. Once the car got onto the highway, Julian said, “There’s something I need to tell you Lethe—”

“What?”

“Your father called earlier.”

“Really?”

“He told me you ‘ran away’ from rehab.”

“I was going to tell you—”

“It doesn’t matter now. I’m taking you to San Jose.”

“What’s in San Jose?”

“Your father wants me to drop you off at a halfway house.”

“Erggghhh.” Lethe groaned. “I can’t believe this shit.”

A California halfway house

The halfway house sat on an unassuming corner of a suburban street. There were linden trees and a stone bird bath in the backyard. Everything about the exterior of the house suggested conventionality, cut grass, plucked weeds, white-picket fence. Lethe’s fellow residents included one gay hairdresser, one former steroid junkie/ex-body-builder, a newly-converted Mormon, a recovering heroine-addict/used car salesman, a motorcycle mechanic with ADHD, and various others. . . twelve residents in total.

Walter, the house-senior, was twenty-nine years old and worked at McDonald’s. There was a heavy awkwardness about Walter that gave one the impression he might be autistic. He was reserved and quiet and lumbered around the halfway house in his slow, heavy manner. You would never guess by looking at him that he was a recovering drug addict. He appeared too tame and defenseless to have ever picked up a dangerous substance.

For over ten years, however, he followed the Grateful Dead, selling acid in parking lots. He stayed in motels and trailer homes, and hitchhiked across the United States. He mixed drugs together, experimenting on himself. For most of his life, he had been a lonely, self-tortured individual. Few people stayed with him long enough to become his friend. But once Walter moved into the halfway house and got clean, he was introduced to the Church of Mormon. The boys in white ties and brown pants came to tell him about their religion every week. He was interested and so he went with them to church. There he met Elora Gladdis, the fourteen year old girl Walter fell in love with. After she pasted her picture on the back of his Bible, Walter took a vow of purity and abstinence.

The inside of the halfway house was shadowy and humid. In certain places, the curtains were taped to the windowsill to prevent the sun from seeping into the living room. The wall panels were imitation wood and the carpet a dull cappuccino color. Next to the kitchen, there was a payphone on the wall and an antique Apple computer with a green screen coated in dust.

Attempting a voice of authority, Walter said, “Before you come into the house you have to take off your shoes.” He was referring to the plaque of House Rules. “Also, there is no smoking. If you want to smoke, go into the garage.” The residents had built a makeshift smoking lounge with secondhand couches and a beat-up Zenith.

All of the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen were labeled. Each resident was allowed 1/3 of a cabinet and a section of the refrigerator. Walter stressed the importance of everyone having their own supply of food. Theft was obviously looked down upon. As they passed the rooms of the residents who had been living in the halfway house for a year or longer, Walter discussed seniority. Seniors were “chiefs” while newcomers were “little Indians”. If you wanted to stick around and get to be a chief, then you had to clean twice as hard on Sunday mornings. That meant the toilets in both bathrooms and the weeds out front.

Walter led Lethe up to his room. The newer residents slept in bunk beds on the second floor. Lethe counted six roommates total. The room looked like it would be a bit cramped.

“Everyone’s shoes are tucked neatly underneath the bed.” Walter highlighted.

Lethe nodded his head, following the house-senior back downstairs.

Trip to Santa Cruz

On the payphone in the front hallway, Lethe called Julian to tell him how crummy his life was living in a halfway house. He tried to make Julian feel guilty about conspiring with his father.

“What else was I supposed to do?” Julian asked, defensively.

“You could’ve let me stay at your place.”

“No—it wouldn’t have worked out.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m living with a girlfriend.”

“So?”

“What’s wrong with the recovery home?”

“Everyone hates me here. One of them says I stole his sugar.”

“And?”

“I thought it was communal sugar. How was I supposed to know?”

Julian was cursed with a brooding conscience. He felt guilty for dropping Lethe off in San Jose. To make up for it, he suggested they take a daytrip to visit Scar Face who lived in Santa Cruz. Lethe became excited and prepared his things immediately. Since he came to California, he had been thinking a lot about Scar Face. He knew that his friend was only a couple of hours away.

But midway through the trip, Julian started brooding again. Maybe Santa Cruz was not the best place to take a recovering drug addict. After all, along with his tomato patches, Scar Face grew small tracts of marijuana. Not to mention the downtown area of Santa Cruz was teeming with hoodlums and hippie dope fiends. When they got there, Lethe would want to get high, and Scar Face wouldn’t have a problem with that.

“Why are you turning the car around?” Lethe asked, anxiously.

“We can’t do this, I forgot, Scar Face is a stoner. There’ll be drugs all over his house.”

“So? Who cares?”

“You’ll want to get high.”

“I just want to see my old buddy. That’s all. I’m not planning on getting stoked.”

Lethe sounded genuinely upset. Julian was being swayed to feel guilty in his favor. The Volkswagen Bug advanced through a hilly, wooded area with flowering oaks, date palms and eucalyptus trees growing on the edge of the forest. Small ranch homes appeared tucked inside canopies of wilderness. Scar Face’s rented bungalow, basking in a pool of sunshine, looked quaint and restful, like a traveler’s oasis. Lethe got out of the car and knocked on the front door. Julian hung back, brooding over his big mistake.

Nobody answered the front door. They went around back to see if anyone was home; the sliding door was unlocked. Without hesitation, Lethe walked inside. Julian followed, cautiously.

“Scar Face?”

“You in there?”

“Heeeellooo?”

But nobody answered. The house was in a disrupted state—drawers flung open, dirty silverware, dirty plates out on the counter, an empty pizza box in the sink, the television on. The curtains were swaying from a breeze through an open window. The moss-green carpet in the living room looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Empty beer cans littered the floor.

A cat sneaked into the kitchen to see where the noises were coming from. Lethe continued to search the rooms with Julian following closely behind him. One of the bathroom lights was on, with an open tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush lying out. Long strands of black hair were clinging to the toilet bowl, bathmat and shower. At the end of the hall was Scar Face’s room with the small church organ in view of the doorway. On top of the organ, a small plastic fan was running.

“Watch out.” Lethe said to Julian.

“What?”

“There’s a snake on his bed.”

“Jesus Christ, that thing scared the shit out of me.”

Lethe guffawed.

“Can we just get out of here?”

“First I want to check the basement.”

They followed the stairs down into the basement and groped for a light switch in the dark. Lethe felt a string with his fingertips and pulled. Julian remained on the stairs.

Heaped in the dusty shadows of the California bungalow was Scar Face. His long, limp body clung to itself in the fetal position. His right nostril was torn off but no blood poured out—only a shadow where there should have been blood. His face looked like a carved pumpkin.

“It’s a chemical imbalance in your brain,” he heard his psychiatrist’s voice.

“Why not leave the room? Go to the park, a short walk down our street. The fresh air is good.” The Senora said.

“It’s in the papers you signed. I can show you . . .” The Director . . .

“Don’t you dare come in here Lethe Bashar.” His mother . . .

“Keep the smoke inside your lungs.”

“Your mother brought you some candy.”

“Come up to the front of the room and demonstrate to the class how this problem is done.”

“Crackhead. Crackhead.”

“I think I need some dope.”

“Leeeeeeth!” The caretaker was calling him from the other room.

Lethe dug his hands into the black, frizzy hair and matted dreadlocks. Scar Face’s body wriggled loose, unfurling from the fetal position. His countenance awoke, the shadows under his nostrils disappeared. Obscene laughter came out of his mouth.

In which Lethe is asked to leave the halfway house

When Lethe returned to the halfway house, he was halted by Walter standing in the doorway. Dressed for bed, Walter was wearing his favorite red and green plaid robe and matching slippers. The house-senior looked doleful and immensely disappointed. Lethe tried to walk past him.

“Can I have a word with you?”

“What?”

“There’s something important I need to tell you.”

Lethe stopped.

“The residents have been complaining about your behavior,” Walter stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The house voted 14-2 to have you dismissed.”

“FANTASTIC!”

“I’m sorry, Lethe.”

“What are you sorry about? It’s not your fault. When do I have to be out of here?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“That soon, huh?”

“Sorry Lethe. Those are the rules.”

Walter hated to do this sort of thing. He really liked Lethe. He didn’t want to be the one to have to tell him to leave the halfway house. That night Walter went through his collection of Grateful Dead bootlegs and took out his favorite show, Las Vegas 1977. With his headphones on, he fell asleep to the music.

The next morning Walter woke up and made coffee. Lethe was lugging his army duffle bag into the front room.

“You can have some of my coffee if you want. The sugar’s on the counter.”

“Thanks.” Lethe poured a cup and went into the garage to smoke a cigarette.

Walter followed, “I forgot to tell you something last night . . . I’m the one who’s responsible for getting you kicked out.”

“Oh.” Lethe blew smoke rings. He didn’t really care anymore.

“Before you leave, I want to give you something.” Walter handed Lethe a CD.

“What is it?”

“A Grateful Dead bootleg. But don’t open it.”

“I don’t understand. Why are you giving me a Grateful Dead bootleg?”

“It’s my favorite show, Las Vegas 1977. I can’t listen to it anymore, cause of the Church. Figured I might as well give it away—”

Without thinking, Lethe opened the case; five one-hundred dollar bills sprang out.

“My wages from the last two weeks—I told you not to open it. That money’s also for you.”

“Don’t you need this money?”

“I have an inheritance coming from my grandmother when she dies. Plus, the Church says we’re not supposed to have too much money.”

Lethe took one more glance at the makeshift lounge. The second-hand couches were bursting at the seams.

“Why don’t you buy a bus ticket with the money?” Walter asked.

“And go where?”

“Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

“No.”

“Not a bad place to be if you have loose morals. . .”

A smile appeared on Lethe’s face. He went to get his duffle bag.



End of this section of the Novel of Life

To visit the next Novel in the series, click here.

Table of Contents

Ritalin

It was common at Cranely College for students to complain about attention-deficit problems to their psychiatrists back home. Subsequently, an enormous amount of students were being prescribed study drugs such as Ritalin, whether they had a medical need for them or not. Almost every student seemed to have a prescription for Ritalin or knew someone who had a prescription. The reason so many students wanted prescriptions for Ritalin was because the drug motivated you to study. On Ritalin, you could sit down in one place and concentrate unstintingly for six or seven hours at a time. This is why the drug became such a desirable commodity on the college campus, especially right before finals week when the students were cramming for their tests.

In the beginning, Iron Sandwich shared his Ritalin with Lethe. They crushed up the pills and snorted them for “fun”. The baby blue powder clung to the hair follicles on the insides of their nostrils as they chain-smoked and talked incessantly. Ritalin made them jittery and compulsive but also intensely focused. During their dorm-room discussions, they anticipated almost every word the other person was about to say, and oftentimes the high was so intense that they believed they could read each other’s minds.

When Iron Sandwich was out of the room, however, Lethe rummaged through his things, looking for the little blue pills. He found the prescription bottle hidden underneath his roommate’s socks in his top dresser drawer, or stuffed in his roommate’s travel bag, or under his pillow. It was as if Iron Sandwich knew that Lethe was going through his things because the bottle was hidden in a different place each time. Lethe pictured his roommate suddenly opening the door and seeing him with the pill-container in his hands. He pictured the gargantuan Sandwich flaring up into a rage. His roommate could be unpredictable at times, and wouldn’t hesitate to throw Lethe across the room.

After checking his nose in the mirror to make sure the blue powder wasn’t visible, Lethe disappeared from the room. He marched to the college library, hyped up on the pharmaceutical stimulant.

Lethe spent most of his days in the library. He was an excellent student. His father had been an excellent student. In his youth, he had three or four private tutors and attended school one summer just so he could skip a grade the following term. Behind the Doctor’s discipline for study was a drive to please his parents, especially his mother. In a similar pattern, Lethe was driven to academic exhaustion. By college, his studying verged on an obsession. Even before he started taking Ritalin to study, Lethe spent hours in the library each day, reading additional chapters, outlining additional material, and making notes, endless notes. Repetitive behaviors, such as copying and recopying, or reading and rereading, had a calming effect on him. His meticulous efforts gave him the sensation that he was doing everything perfectly. Lethe’s persistence in studying was almost inseparable from a full-fledged mania. Hiding himself in numberless study rooms, young Lethe forgot about the world outside. He dedicated himself to each task (all of them imaginary tasks), until he felt a certain level of satisfaction. Like his father, he clung to the idea that things could be done perfectly.

When Lethe discovered Ritalin to study, he had the same blissful encounter that one has when they first fall in love. Just as life can seem like a mundane repetition of events at times, so studying to Lethe was rote and mechanical but necessary for him. Then when he discovered Ritalin, the burden that he had always felt while studying, immediately dissolved. Now without any effort he could escape into knowledge and disappear. He entered a trance of self-absorption. The state of concentration while studying gave him a rapturous feeling of his unlimited potential. This fantasy was gratifying and euphoric, and the longer he studied, the deeper he fell into a hazy mental abyss.

Ritalin also promoted another desire. The youth had always wanted to be better than other students; this too he learned from his father. Lethe craved an identity that would set him apart from the rest. He craved a sort of excellence that was well beyond his powers. He knew fully well that he wasn’t a genius, but the very sense of his own lack of genius, this dearth which felt like a vast expanse of barrenness in the his genes, prompted him to achieve more and more, until at last transforming himself into . . . a genius.

Now the idea of “genius” fluttered through the vast expanse of barrenness like a colorful, flapping butterfly from another world. “Can one become a genius?” He wondered.

Table of Contents

The waiting room was closet-size, four feet by five, approximately. There was a small magazine rack and two chairs. A stream of classical music ran down from a speaker in the ceiling. The narrow dimensions of the waiting room reminded the Doctor of a confession booth; though he had never been to confession before. His wife had asked him to go with her to marriage counseling about ten years ago. Rose agreed to see the Doctor’s church-recommended psychiatrist, but later she complained that the psychiatrist was biased in favor of their separation. The results of every one of the marriage tests said divorce was inevitable. They never went to marriage counseling again.

The Doctor was greeted by his new psychiatrist in a cold, offhand manner. He stepped out of the closet-sized waiting room and into a slightly larger office. Her office was on the fifty-eighth floor of a Chicago building. In between five or six other high-rise buildings, the view offered cut-up rectangles of blue sky. The sun reflected off the buildings. Three or four spotted plants clung to the window ledge.

“Take a seat,” she said.

Nervously, the Doctor lowered himself onto the peeling leather couch. Not knowing where to put his hands, he reached for a Kleenex and began to blow his nose.

With a grey notebook in her lap, she took down the Doctor’s information.

“Are you sick?” She asked.

“No, Ma’am.”

“Call me Dr. Levy.” After turning her notebook to a fresh page, she said, “My girlfriend told me about what happened in the massage studio.”

“Yes . . . I feel horrible.” The Doctor’s posture on the leather couch was rigid. He held his back from sinking in, and this was causing some tension in his face.

“Tell me what’s going on with you, Salem?”

“Well, my wife is sick with a degenerative disease . . .”

Dr. Levy looked up at him. She had small, penetrating eyes.

The Doctor continued, “I realized that I couldn’t take care of my wife anymore. So we hired someone who could lift her out of bed and wash her in the mornings . . .”

After the Doctor finished the story, he wiped his neck with a handkerchief. The sweat was bleeding through his collar.

Dr. Levy jotted a few final notes. “Do you know anything about the theory of adolescence, Salem?”

“Other than that my children are in their adolescence . . . I know what they go through, I think.”

“And what can you tell me about what they’re going through?”

“My son seems to be doing fine. My daughter on the other hand has some problems. Too many friends.”

“What do you think happens during adolescence?”

“I’m not exactly sure. It’s the period of teenage independence, isn’t it?”

“That’s correct. During the period of adolescence a healthy teenager will undergo a basic change in attitude. The mark of adolescence is a strong opposition to dependency on the mother and father. Perhaps you can see some of this behavior in your children. After listening to you describe your marriage, Dr. Bashar, I’m led to believe that you too are undergoing some of these changes. You may have never fully outgrown your adolescence.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m talking about an unconscious teenage rebellion against your wife/mother.”

“Unconscious teenage rebellion? Up until now I’ve done everything for her. I don’t understand. I’ve done everything to please my wife.”

“Including cheating on her?”

“But that was a mistake. You can tell I’m not—”

“How can you say that you’ve done everything for your wife, when before, you just told me you didn’t think you loved her.”

“No, I don’t love her.”

“Then, how can you be a loyal husband?”

“Because I’ve stayed with Rose for almost twenty-five years.”

“Exactly my point about the theory of adolescence. You still haven’t broken away from your dependence on your mother/wife. If you had developed your adolescent independence, then you would’ve divorced your wife a long time ago. You would have broken off the marriage when you first realized things weren’t working out. But instead, you stayed in a dependency because it mirrored your dependency on your mother.”

“This may be too Freudian for me to handle!”

“You have to admit Freud changed our view of human relationships. He is hard to ignore—especially in your case.”

“I don’t know.”

“Salem, if you want, you can walk out the door right now, I won’t charge you a dime. All I’m telling you is that you haven’t been loyal to your wife. And you haven’t been faithful to her. Because of your dependency, you may think you have. But you haven’t. You’ve been lying to her for nearly two decades. If you truly cared about your wife, then you would’ve gotten out of this marriage a long time ago.”

The Doctor looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“It’s time to grow up, Salem. You may think that I’m being harsh with you. And I admit—I don’t give much leeway to my patients—I have a ‘Dr. Phil’ approach.”

“What can I do?”

“You can tell your wife the truth. Ask for a divorce. She doesn’t deserve to be lied to anymore.”

The drive up north

On a Saturday morning at the end of September, the Doctor and his wife took a long drive up north to attend a wedding of their mutual friends. Over the cornfields, a hazy sun rose into the sky and a dim, pewter light covered the plains. Every twenty miles or so, they passed wooded areas and rest stops with streaks of grayish-violet in the branches. Rose asked her husband to shut the window because she was feeling a chill. The Doctor couldn’t understand how she could possibly be feeling a chill on such a mild, autumn day.

He closed the window; but now it felt stuffy inside. He turned on the air-conditioning. But again, his wife complained about being cold.

“What do you want me to do?” The Doctor said sarcastically. “You’re always cold.”

“I know I am,” she replied.

The Doctor was thinking about the sessions with his psychologist . . . “You’re stuck in an unconscious teenage rebellion.” Was it true? Is that why he stayed with her so long? Dr. Levy’s analysis sounded a bit too “psychological”. Her confidence in summing up his life in a single sentence bothered him slightly. He knew that his relationship to Rose was more complicated than that. But Dr. Levy did help him to understand that he had been lying to his wife for all these years.

“Honey, I’ve been lying to you. I’ve been lying to me. To everyone.” But he couldn’t say it. Not yet.

Rose stared out of the window, thinking about her artwork. Last week Dora had put a small easel in her bedroom. It wasn’t even a real artist’s easel like the one she had downstairs. It was a children’s easel.

She couldn’t paint in her art studio anymore. Walking downstairs was treacherous. She could barely walk, let alone use stairs. And the canvases were too big for her. Her legs grew tired from standing; her hands began to shake. With the children’s easel, she was hoping that maybe she could paint something smaller. “Have Dora bring up a chair from the basement,” she made a mental note to herself.

As the drive continued, the Doctor looked out the windows at the haystacks and brush pastures along the way, imagining the breezy atmosphere, mournfully. Rose needed to stop at a gas station to use the bathroom. Every time they had to stop, the wheelchair needed to be taken out of the trunk and reassembled. “Unconscious teenage rebellion,” he said to himself as he pushed her toward the bathrooms.

The Encounter

“I want a divorce,” the Doctor said to his wife after twenty-five years of marriage. He took his eyes off the road to register his wife’s reaction.

There was a placid melancholy on her face. The reaction was subtle, barely noticeable. And what emotion he thought he glimpsed in his wife’s expression was now gone. The lines on her face were disappearing. Her cheeks were becoming as flaccid as those of an eighty year old woman’s.

He pictured her as a mime, with her face painted white. She was tense, mute, rebellious. Like a deaf and dumb child. His eyes darted from the road to her face, the road to her face, and back again . . .

His thoughts were racing, “I’ve wanted to say this to you for the last ten years. But then we had children. And after the children, you became sick.”

The Doctor’s head was flooded with confusion. Her silence was making him uncomfortable. But she couldn’t say anything—she couldn’t talk.

“This has been the hardest decision in my life . . . Rose . . . I can’t live with you anymore. I need to be honest with myself and that means being honest with you. It’s not fair to either one of us anymore. I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, all I know is that this has been extremely hard for me. Maybe if I still loved you, Rose, it would be easier for me to take care of you. But I’m not at peace with myself in this marriage and my feelings aren’t there anymore. It’s like I’m an actor putting on show for everyone else. I can’t imagine what this must be like for you. You’re probably going to hate me for awhile. Please Rose, forgive me. I’ve given this decision a lot of thought. I’ve been talking to a psychologist . . .”

His voice was exhausted. Once more he looked at his wife to see her reaction—upset, confused, alarmed?

Her body was slouched into the passenger door, her face leaning against the window, her eyes lightly shut. The medication sometimes put her to sleep. He wondered how long she had been sleeping, and whether he would have to tell her again tomorrow . . .

The window came down. A gust of cool air ran into the car. His forehead was sweating—he needed some air.

Table of Contents

Baba’s seminars were typically held in upscale hotels and retreat centers because they attracted therapists, physicians, New-Age spiritualists, and psychiatrists, all of whom could afford the cost of a three-day seminar. On the first day, the Doctor was surprised to find over five-hundred people in attendance. Throngs of spiritual seekers flowed into the giant banquet hall. The Doctor merged with the throbbing crowd. He sat down next to an attractive woman who looked like she was of Eastern European descent. After a moment of sitting in silence, he casually remarked to her, “This better be good. I took three days off of work to come here.”

“You must be a doctor,” she said with a smile.

“Yes, I am. How did you know?”

“I work at Lutheran General; I think I’ve seen you before. I’m a pediatrician, my name is Gabriela.”

Before the lecture began, they talked about their families and why they had decided to come to the seminar. Meeting this friendly woman on the first day reassured the Doctor he was in the right place.

Meditation, etc.

“During the Wisdom Seminar I told you about the importance of the body. We must care for the body. This is true. The body is sacred. Today I am going to talk about how the physical and spiritual are one. When you take care of the physical—you take care of spiritual. If you nourish the body, you nourish the soul. Meditation is how we nourish the soul. We call it ‘body-breath’ because it unites. Today I want you to notice how the breath is the doorway to the three dimensions of body, mind, and spirit.”

Omarjeet promenaded up and down the rows of cushions, his long robe undulating, his calm, honeyed voice imparting sage instruction along the way. His students sensed his presence hovering over them as he adjusted their chins and straightened their backs. Later in the afternoon, during a silent group meditation, Omarjeet knelt down beside each person and whispered a secret mantra in their ear. When the sacred words were uttered, the Doctor had his first experience of transcendence. Though unable to describe his experience in words, he would admit to all of his close friends that “something happened that day.”

After the meditation course, the Doctor woke up early every morning and applied himself with seriousness, dedication, and rigorous self-discipline. He withdrew into himself and his mantra. When he had difficulty concentrating, he projected the guru on the screen of his mind. Omarjeet’s characteristically mellifluous voice reassured him, “your thoughts will disappear”. Hearing those words, “your thoughts will disappear,” slowly the Doctor regained his composure on the mat. Soon he was able to forget the reality of his wife’s illness and the stresses of his work. He continued to practice assiduously, and for awhile the meditation seemed to be working.

But then another distraction came into the picture, disrupting the middle-aged man’s calm and measured breathing: it was that woman he met at the seminar. They had kept in touch and communicated over the phone several times since then. Now they were meeting for coffee, discussing spirituality and exchanging books. With each rendezvous, the Doctor was becoming more attracted to this woman who was also on “the path”.

She was born in Hungry and traveled to the United States to get her medical degree. The Doctor identified with her foreign background because he too was born out of the US. Her icy, blue eyes and burnished skin mesmerized him. Even the freckles on her shoulders held mystique. Gabriella was a paragon of health with shapely dimensions. During their lunch dates, she told the Doctor some of the stories from her childhood, when her father used to teach her to ski in the Alps.

But more than any of these qualities, it was Gabriella’s intellect that attracted the Doctor the most. When they met together in cafes, they had the most stimulating, thought-provoking conversations about science and religion, medicine and philosophy, Christianity and Buddhism. Gabriella had read M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled and loved it. As a pediatrician, she knew more about child psychiatry, German existentialism, and the ideas of Carl Jung, Freud and Wittgenstein than anyone he had ever met. And the Doctor was beginning to compare Gabriella to his wife, who never had any interest in intellectual ideas.

Despite his physical attraction to Gabriela, the Doctor restrained himself from entering into a sexual relationship. Naturally, he was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. Although he admired Gabriella in so many ways, he could never cheat on his wife, who was sick. But their meetings continued, and the question of his own fidelity began to re-surface in his conscience. He asked himself, “Am I even capable of cheating on my wife?”

The Kiss

Meanwhile, between the Doctor and Gabriela, meeting for coffee and discussing books soon became going for long walks in forest preserves and eating in fancy restaurants. On their nature walks in particular, both sensed a quiet intimacy growing between them.

And then it happened, the kiss. One afternoon in August, they were parked outside a forest preserve. They had just finished their languid, dreamy walk through the woods. Before Gabriela put the key in the ignition, she paused to look through her purse for her sunglasses. Without thinking, the Doctor bent his head forward and kissed her. Gabriella responded with pleasure.

The quivering thrill transported the Doctor to the days of his adolescence. Then too he had been sexually frustrated. The constant focus on his studies had led him to fantasize about the young maids who came to work for his mother. He loved the attention they gave to him. After studying for long hours in his bedroom, he joined them in gossip. They were flirtatious and sometimes grew excited, smothering him with kisses . . .

Or the house of Lavasha Alba where his parents brought him many times. Lavasha was a tease. He was afraid of her. He was “chicken”. The adults always became distracted, and Lavasha and Salem escaped into another part of the house. Twice, she led him into the dark, dark guestroom where they sat next to each other on the bed not saying anything. Touch me. Touch me. She took his hot, quivering fingers and placed them between her legs.

Three days later, Gabriella apologized for what had happened in the car. Her tone was serious. She said she didn’t want to get involved with a married man, but she offered to keep their friendship. The Doctor said that would be too hard for him. They didn’t speak to each other for another four months.

Dinner with Gabriella

They met at a trendy sushi restaurant in downtown Chicago with techno-music thumping in the background. The Doctor sat at the table for nearly fifteen minutes before he saw Gabriella come through the revolving door in an orange sequin dress. He was starting to get worried—he remembered how they had parted last.

The waiter offered them sparkling water and a bottle of wine. The Doctor made a selection from the wine list and Gabriella accepted.

He hadn’t spoken to her in over four months. They had parted ways without knowing if they would ever see each other again. But after the conference, he wanted to tell someone about all of the wonderful things that happened to him in Puerto Vallarta. The person he thought to call was Gabriella. As he explained this to her, Gabriella’s attitude toward him seemed to have changed. She was smiling cheerfully now, emitting positive rays. Even by the way her body was slanted in his direction, the Doctor had the sense that she was making herself more open to him. Later in the evening, she told him that she was single. Before, when they kissed in the parking lot, she had been dating another man.

Digging their spoons into caramel apple pie a la mode, the Doctor mentioned, “I asked my wife for a divorce . . .”

“Really,” Gabriella looked surprised. She wiped her mouth with a napkin, and some lipstick came off.

“I don’t think I ever really loved her.”

“That’s horrible. How can you say that?”

“But it’s true. Twenty-five years of marriage. I don’t remember being in love once.”

“Come on, it wasn’t all pain and misery . . .”

“No, no, maybe you’re right. After all, we had the children together. And Rose, with her illness, you know, it wasn’t her fault. I just didn’t love her. I couldn’t.”

“Why do think?” Gabriella probed.

The Doctor was silent. He munched on the crust of the caramel apple pie and muttered, “She was trying to possess me all the time. She made me into a thing.”

“And you never tried to possess her?”

“No, not really. She wanted to be an artist. She wanted to go to school. I never said anything.”

“And when you asked for a divorce, what did you say?”

“I told her I was unhappy. I said that if had I loved her, then maybe things would have been different.”

“Mourir pour ce qu’on aime/ C’est un trop doux effort . . .”

“What’s that?”

“French. It means: To die for one you love/ Is too sweet an effort.”

“I couldn’t die for her because I didn’t love her.”

“I’m sorry.” Gabriella pouted.

“Don’t be sorry. I have the rest of my life to look forward to. It’s never too late . . .”

“Do you want to get married again?”

“I’m not sure, we’ll have to see. First things first, I need to get this divorce out of the way.”

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The Doctor was beginning to realize the gravity of the situation surrounding his wife’s illness. Years before when Rose mentioned that she thought something was wrong with her health, he had brushed her concerns aside, attributing them to her neurotic personality or the vagueness of her symptoms. But now the Doctor was admitting to himself that his wife was indeed sick and something had to be done. He could clearly see that his wife’s condition was declining—she lost her balance with more frequency, her energy level was quickly depleted, she couldn’t drive anymore. All of these things were causing her to rely on her husband’s assistance more regularly.

Being in the medical profession, the Doctor wanted to find out the exact condition she suffered from and how it might be treated. Together they visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he watched his wife take a number of tests and sat in on interviews with medical specialists. The final diagnosis was that Rose had the rare neurological disorder, Multiple Systems Atrophy, a variant of Parkinson’s disease. There was some speculation concerning the toxic chemicals that Rose had been using in her art studio, but the doctors at Mayo Clinic eventually dismissed this conjecture in favor of the opinion that her disease was most likely hereditary. They gave her approximately five years to live.

After learning of his wife’s degenerative disease, there was a sensation in the Doctor’s gut, a sort of dropping out of the abdomen from the inside. This uncomfortable roller-coaster sensation reminded the Doctor of when he first fell in love with Rose. He remembered a vacation they took before they got married, a vacation to Marco Beach. He couldn’t stop himself from talking about the future, words leapt out of his mouth, promises about marriage and kids. And she believed him. She wanted to marry him. After that, he couldn’t break her heart and tell her it was all a lie.

He knew Rose’s expectations. She didn’t even have to say anything—he felt her dependence on him.

And what were his options? He had to assume the role of caretaker; he didn’t have a choice. Luckily, he was good at taking care of people; that was his profession.

A Talk

One evening, Rose asked her husband to sit with her in the bedroom. He propped his wife’s back up against a couple of throw pillows, and she extended her legs on the mattress. He noticed her thighs were bulbous and pale.

At first she didn’t speak. Her chest heaved up and down with difficult breathing. Her glasses fell down to the tip of her nose and stayed there. Her small eyes darted for a moment and then rested on her husband. The bedroom had been cleaned that morning and the scent of citronella radiated off the carpet. Outside in the yard, the setting sun was casting shadows on the lawn, a small blackbird was cooing in the tall elm tree.

The Doctor perched on the edge of the bed, barely sitting. It seemed as though he might get up at any moment. Rose was much calmer but her calm was weighted down with a slight sadness. She still had not said a word. He waited silently, anxiously, hoping she would at last produce one of her sighs and say something.

“We’ll have to put some money aside for my health.” She said.

“What do mean?” Her husband asked.

“Maybe I’ll need people to take care of me. You know, eventually.”

“That won’t be necessary. I told you I’m going to help out.”

“But it might be longer than five years—”

“I told you I’m planning on taking care of you.”

“And what about the children?”

The Doctor’s face furrowed. “Isn’t it a little premature to say anything to them?”

“Premature? They need to know about their mother.”

“But is it necessary to tell them right this minute?”

“There’s nothing to keep secret, Salem. I’m sick.”

“I know you’re sick—”

“I don’t think you do. You’ve ignored my illness for the last two years.”

“What are you talking about?’

“Before the doctors diagnosed me, I told you I was sick. I told you I couldn’t keep up with you on vacations. I needed to rest all the time and you blamed me as if it were my fault.”

“You don’t have to tell me this, honey. I know you’re sick.”

“I could be dead in five years. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Please relax. You’re getting all worked up about this.”

“Salem, you don’t understand. I’m sick.”

At the Arts Festival

Downtown Albuquerque is a motley place with cobbled streets and Pueblo-revival architecture. In the month of September, the downtown area fills with an odd mixture of tourists and locals, as hundreds of artists and artisans set up booths in open plazas and along Gold Avenue and Fourth. The buildings are decorated with lights and colorful tapestries. The showcases include jewelry, painting, ceramics, photography, sculpture, wood-making, metalwork, and pastels. You can hear Native American flutes and bongo drums playing in the streets. The local food shops bring out an assortment of their finest soups and sandwiches. Venders sell trinkets and balloons. As in the crowded streets of a Turkish bazaar, the atmosphere is humming with vibrancy and perpetual movement.

Rose had mentioned the Arts Festival in Albuquerque to her husband before, but this was the first year he suggested they go. His attitude toward the arts was changing. In fact, now he took pride in having a wife who was an established artist. Just recently her artwork had been shown publicly for the first time, and she was written up in three Chicago magazines.

The Festival was in full swing when they arrived. This was the largest outdoor arts festival that Rose had ever been too. On side stages, music and dancing caught their attention, and both were enchanted by the eccentric artwork and media-displays. Rose told her husband that she wanted to meet some of the artists.

As Rose mingled with the local artists, the Doctor saw that his wife was at home in this community. He could see how comfortable and relaxed she was among the creative types. He glimpsed a side of her character he had not seen before. She was enjoying herself immensely, opening and closing her wings, as if she were a lush, transparent butterfly delighting in its surroundings. After all these years he finally understood his wife. She belonged to this community of artists. Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico Rose was celebrating herself, and the Doctor had the pleasure to partake in this celebration also.

Up in the sky, more than a dozen hot-air balloons loomed over the city. The silky reds, bright yellows, and hot pinks seemed to correspond to his amazement and awe with his wife’s purpose. As the massive floaters climbed into the blue heights, Rose turned to her husband, and squeezing his hand, she said, “The International Balloon Competition. I completely forgot.”

That weekend Rose and her husband fell mysteriously in love again. Their lovemaking had the fleeting splendor of youth. They relished each other’s company for the first time in over fifteen years.

The last day, as they were leaving the Guadalupe Chapel after a tour, Rose lost her balance and fell face forward onto the cobblestones. Within seconds the Doctor bent down to lift Rose’s head up from the ground. Her glasses were smashed and her face was cut in three places. A large group of people was forming around them and a man in a Safari jacket was calling an ambulance on his cell phone. When the ambulance arrived, the Doctor told the medic, “She has Multiple System Atrophy—it may be getting worse—this has never happened before.”

While the Doctor sat in the hospital waiting room, he replayed the accident over and over again in his mind. She had fallen straight onto the cobblestones. Her reflexes were so bad that she couldn’t even hold up her hands to block her face. “What’s happening to her?” He thought. “She’s completely vulnerable without me.” He pictured her face with its bruises and cuts from the fall—a torrent of sympathy broke inside of him. He couldn’t stop this disease from happening to her. She wasn’t going to get better. Things were only going to get worse.

A Colossal task

On some nights the Doctor waited forty-five or fifty minutes for his wife to urinate. On some nights she couldn’t urinate at all. She seemed to think that she had to go to the bathroom. But maybe she was wrong. As he waited for her, the Doctor remembered the surgeries he had scheduled for the next day, his meetings with other doctors, and matters pertaining to his office staff. In the depths of his mind, he could hear the ceaseless electric current of frenzied thoughts racing.

He worked nearly ten hours a day, and then came home in the evenings to take care of his wife. Soon he was overwhelmed, exhausted and unhappy. There was little communication between the two of them—only the heavy looks and feelings of resentment as the Doctor grudgingly obeyed his wife’s orders. He almost felt as though she were imposing her medical condition on him.

Meanwhile, a horrible spell of insomnia was taking its toll. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, he worried endlessly about what he had to do for the next day. He obsessed over his lack of sleep and his inability to perform his duties at work. Then his wife roused him out of a daze of semi-consciousness, pleading for help. In a sullen mood, he led her to the little chamber, cloddishly lowering her onto the toilet seat.

With less and less sleep, the Doctor was losing his patience and ability to concentrate at work. In the operating room, he lashed out at the nurses for not giving him the right instruments, or he complained to the anesthesiologist for not being on time. The administrative position that he had taken up was also adding to the amount of stress in his life. For some reason, he had the impression that his colleagues on the hospital board were not respecting his opinions. They wanted to push their own agendas, rather than concede to his beliefs. Despite the fact that he was expected to be president of the medical staff next year, he had the sense that he was slowly becoming surrounded by enemies.

By the end of the day, after numberless irritations, the Doctor made his forty-five minute drive home. He narrowly averted accidents on the highway more than once, falling asleep at the wheel.

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