35
I
'VE NEVER
been so exhausted in my entire life," Myra said, draining the last of her cosmo. Her voice was hoarse with fatigue, her body slumped.
I nodded and took a long drink of Maker's Mark. We were at the Henry Street Alehouse, the only PDs still there. Zach, Julia, Max, Michael, and Shelly had all come out after work, but none of them had stayed long. There wasn't much to say to lawyers who were waiting on a verdict; little you could do but keep them company. Neither Myra nor I was fit for conversation, both staring off into space, withdrawn and distracted, lost in our waiting. Our colleagues had drunk with us for as long as they felt obligated to, then went off to do something more entertaining than watch two worn-out lawyers marking time.
Judge Ferano hadn't finished charging the jury until late afternoon, so the jury had only deliberated for a little over an hour before calling it a day. There was, of course, no telling how long a jury would be out—it could be a few minutes; it could be a couple of weeks. Myra and I would try to get other work done tomorrow, although I suspected that I wouldn't be able to concentrate until we had a verdict, my mind constantly tugged back into speculating on what the jury was up to.
Even though Myra had done much of the heavy lifting at the trial, I felt completely exhausted myself. The pressure had been there even when I was just sitting at counsel's table. It had been like being onstage for eight hours a day, still performing even when you didn't have any lines. The jury was always watching, or at least it felt like they were. The slow grind of a trial had worn me to the bone.
"We did what we could do," I said.
Myra fixed me with a look, evaluating me. "So," she said. "Was it
what you expected? Was this what you threw away your big-money corporate job to
do with your life?"
"I didn't actually throw away my law-firm job to come work here," I heard myself reply. It was something that had been there for me to say to her for some time, and it felt both scary and good to have said it.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I didn't actually quit my job to come work here," I said.
"In fact, I didn't quit my job at all."
"I don't understand what you're telling me," Myra said.
"I was fired from my law firm," I said, my hand shaking slightly as I took a sip of my bourbon.
"They were old-school about it—officially I was asked to resign. Then I was
suspended from the practice of law for six months. Then I came here."
"You punking me?" Myra asked, tilting her head quizzically.
"This isn't really when or how I would do that."
"This is what, then? Your confession?"
"Isaac's known all along," I said. "I'd actually just sort of
assumed it would leak out."
"Not to me it hadn't. Why was your license suspended?"
"Long story short, it was drug related."
"Drugs, huh?" Myra said. "Yeah, I guess I can see that with you."
I laughed sourly. "Thanks."
"You're okay now?"
"I don't get high, if that's what you're asking."
"I guess that's part of what I was asking," Myra applied. "You in
NA?"
"Not since I was required to be," I replied. I'd been obligated to go to meetings the whole time my law license was suspended, but they'd just been a waste of my time. I'd never spoken more than the bare minimum that was required of me, never even been tempted to open up. I had nothing in common with the true down-and-outers whose bottomed-out lives were the focus of our nightly discussions. I was not really an addict. At least, that's what I'd told myself to get through.
"It was like that, huh?"
"It was, yes," I said. "Losing my law license was a real
possibility."
"What're we actually talking about in terms of drugs?"
"Heroin," I said. "And that wasn't all of it. I had someone, a
young woman, a person from my firm, whom I did it with. She OD'd."
"OD'd as . . . ?"
"She died, yes. In the firm's library bathroom. It was a bit of a
scandal."
"Shit, Joel," Myra said. "You're a badass motherfucker."
We laughed, cautiously, then descended into silence. Myra had again picked out songs on the jukebox, and the music abruptly shifted from The Clash's
"Guns of Brixton" to an acoustic song by Aimee Mann.
I propped my window up and then
I turned my back to lure you in
To rifle through what I might have been
"So what actually happened?" Myra asked.
"I don't like talking about this stuff with people."
"I'm not a roomful of strangers drinking bad coffee in a church basement," Myra said.
"Tell
me
what happened."
And so I did.
I'D CALLED
Beth at home a week or so after the night when she'd first told me about her using. I wasn't calling out of curiosity about heroin, though I supposed that was there, but rather out of lust. I'd called her from my office on a night when I was working late. It didn't make a lot of sense on one level—we spoke at work a couple of times a day—but I wasn't about to ask her out within the transparent confines of the firm.
Beth sounded amused but not surprised by my call. I'd made the briefest possible small talk, then asked her if she was free that Friday.
"Why?" Beth had said. "What did you have in mind?"
"I figured we could play it by ear," I said.
"Are you calling from work?" Beth asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Okay then," Beth said. "I guess we'll leave it at that."
WE HADN'T
talked about it during the rest of the week at work, interacting as we always had. I suspected there was a lilt of self-consciousness, or perhaps self-parody, to our banter now.
On Friday the forecast was for a severe winter storm, perhaps even a blizzard. By the time I left Walker's Midtown office to take the subway uptown to Beth's apartment in Morningside Heights, the sky was thick with drifting snowflakes.
It was snowing even worse by the time I got there, ankle-deep and growing, dancing through the air in angry gusts. I trudged the two blocks to her apartment through piles and drifts.
When I rang Beth's buzzer there was no response. I pulled out my cell phone and was dialing her number when Beth walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. She was wearing a peacoat without a hat or scarf, her hair covered with snow.
"What're you doing out here?" I said.
"I was doing some last-minute shopping before the blizzard," Beth said, walking past me and opening her building's front door.
Beth's studio apartment was both cluttered and dirty, old newspapers and magazines on the floor, dishes stacked in the sink. It reminded me of how I'd lived in my very first apartment, as a sophomore in college.
"The maid's week off?" I said as I shook snow from my coat.
"I was going to tidy up," Beth said, plopping down on her futon.
"But then I didn't."
"So what kind of shopping were you doing this time of night?" I asked, sitting on the swivel chair by her desk.
"You're the kind of person who always has to know, aren't you,
Joel? I bet you think your curiosity knows no bounds."
"It hasn't come up against them yet."
With a small sigh and a lift of her hips Beth reached into the front pocket of her jeans, drew something out, and handed it over to me. Upon inspection it proved to be several things: identical white packets that looked like miniature envelopes. The same words were stamped in bleeding ink upon each:
Lethal Injection
.
"Is this what I think it is?" I asked.
"Do I know what you're thinking? But my guess would be yes."
"This is H?"
"It's not called H anymore," Beth said. "It's called D now."
"Do you mind if we just take a time-out for a moment?" I said.
"Like if we put the movie on pause or something?"
We tried for a few minutes to speak of other things, but with little success. I felt as though I'd been set up, although I realized this feeling was not particularly supported by the facts. We'd talked about it before, after all. I had made my curiosity known. Beth was, perhaps, only doing what I'd asked her to do. This was, apparently, something I wanted.
"Okay," I said. "I'll admit to being curious. There's a grim sort
of appeal. But there are practical considerations as well."
"Such as?"
"Such as the fact that people die from it."
"You're scared?"
"Goddamn right I'm scared," I said. "If there was a loaded gun
sitting there on the table between us I'd be scared of that too."
"It's not a loaded gun."
"If that's the best thing you can say in its defense, I have to
say your case is pretty weak."
"It doesn't in any way resemble a loaded gun," Beth said. "It's
not at all what you're thinking it is. After you do it, you won't even believe
we had this conversation."
"I already can't believe we've had this conversation," I said.
BUT LATER
I realized Beth was right. By then I was lying down on her futon, unable to remember the last time I'd moved. Beth was on the floor, slack-limbed, propped up against a wall. There was a complicated geometry of knots in my stomach: it was like I could feel every one of my internal organs, the whole intricate mechanism of sustaining my body. Yet the feeling was not an unpleasant one; no feeling was an unpleasant one. The pleasure was almost sexual, yet lacking sex's strain, its battle with self-consciousness, its animal need.
"It's like sex without the sex," I said.
The heroin had come in tiny doses of blocky gray powder. Beth had cut it with a steak knife on the surface of a CD case. The lines were small and dirty-looking, uneven and vaguely woebegone. They'd gone down with a slight burn, a chalky taste at the back of the throat, like a new manner of thirst.
"What?" Beth said.
At first I had felt nothing. Before the high came a spell of nausea, as brief as it was unsettling. When the dope hit it wasn't with the rush I'd expected, but rather a loosening, a final triumph of detachment.
"Never mind," I said.
It was a glorious physical glow, a slow burn. The room acquired a stillness. Movement had become unnecessary, extraneous. We were both still, our eyes closing as if in sleep, some deeper species of rest.
"No," Beth said. "You're right. That's exactly what it's like."
"It's not what I expected," I said. "Not at all. It's much, much
easier."
We'd turned off all the lights. The only illumination came from the street below, leaking through the curtains and into the room. Everything was shadowy, inert, the shadows slow dancing in the pattern the wind made with the tossing tree branches just outside the window.
"It's the easiest thing in the world," Beth agreed.
I sat up and instantly regretted doing so. Nausea rippled through my body in a swelling wave.
"So you do this a lot," I said, swallowing hard, waiting for the tremors to subside.
"I wouldn't say a lot," Beth said. "I'd say enough. Want some
orange juice?"
I nodded weakly, my eyes open now. Beth slowly leaned forward and slid the carton along the floor toward the couch. I looked down at it helplessly. After a long moment Beth noticed that I'd made no effort to pick it up.
"You feeling sick?" she asked.
"I'm great so long as I don't move," I said.
After another minute or so Beth stood up and handed me the carton.
I drank deeply and rashly, the juice tasting as good as anything ever had. A moment later I was in the bathroom, throwing up. I was pleasantly surprised that my vomiting had been sufficiently foreshadowed to allow me to make it to the toilet.
It was the best puking experience of my life, the orange juice still cold coming back up. I walked back into the living room feeling terrific, better than ever. Beth was now sprawled on the futon, blinking fast as I flicked on the overhead light.
"Another round?" I said.
THE SNOWSTORM
had turned into a blizzard, and I had ended up spending the entire weekend with Beth in her cramped apartment. We hadn't even kissed on that first night, but then somehow the next morning, both of us coming up out of nodding off in Beth's bed, we'd ended making tentative, fragile love.
I hadn't been expecting it—I thought heroin had already taken the place of sex between us. We'd gotten high again that night. By the time I left on Sunday evening, emerging onto wet city streets with slush and gray chunks of icy snow, I felt sick and exhausted and more than a little afraid.
Back home, I went straight to bed, slept for nearly twelve straight hours, woke up Monday morning feeling almost back to normal. I wasn't looking forward to seeing Beth at the office, could not decide how to play it when I did. I knew the obvious: I should never see her again outside of work, should stop things now, should probably even try to get her transferred off of the case, avoid working with her.
But I also knew that things between us weren't over, knew it through my resignation, as though I myself had no choice in the matter.
When I'd seen her Monday morning the sight was a jolt. My body reacted to her mere presence: a thudding heart, awkward shyness, all the tired symptoms of a pounding high school crush. My resolution drained away at once: I was officially in trouble.
Later in the week I confided in Paul. We'd been working late, were taking a dinner break in a conference room, each of us with nearly fifty dollars' worth of food, an easy indulgence since it was billed directly to our clients. It took me only a minute to convey the relevant facts, after which we'd sat in a long silence.
"I'm trying to come up with something to say that you won't already know," Paul said at last.
"I do already know."
"But I can tell that knowing isn't really doing it for you."
"I suppose that's right," I said.
"If you just need confirmation of what a bad idea this is," Paul said,
"I'm happy to give it to you. You're risking everything—your job, your health,
your bar license, your fucking life."
"Yes."
"But you're not going to stop." Paul did not say it as a question.