Disconnected (2 page)

“Druggie scum!” he told the cop, who gave a philosophical nod. Shannon ducked her head. She’d lifted things—fruit, bottled water, a tube of toothpaste, a package of condoms—but not from here. She’d never stolen from people she knew, unless she counted her parents.

In her room, she filled the empty soda bottle with tap water and drank it with her dinner. When she turned on the telephone, she was relieved to see her new number pop up on the home screen, along with the words, spelled out a single electronic letter at a time,
HI SHANNON
. Working carefully, taking her time with the unfamiliar keyboard on the shiny screen, she entered “Home” under Contacts, and then her parents’ number. That was the only number she wanted on her new phone. But when she hit “save” and then “show contacts,” there was another name. Devonté. Who was Devonté? For a moment, she felt dizzy with fear, trying to remember if she knew a Devonté and had somehow wronged him. Then she shook her head, smiling, and pulled the T-Mobile guy’s business card out of her back pocket.
Devonté Harrison
, it said.
Night Manager
. But why had he given her his number? She was staring at the phone when it started to quiver in her hand, and she jumped, almost screaming. Her startle reflex was off the charts. One of the counselors three rehabs ago had asked if there was any trauma in her background.

“Could be anything. Like a car accident or being in a war or your parents abusing you.” Shannon had shaken her head. That was one of the worst parts about rehab, especially for someone who still occasionally thought of herself as a writer—everyone there had a better story than she did. The other girls had been beaten by their fathers or their husbands or their boyfriends. They’d grown up poor, deprived, maybe even homeless. They’d survived the deaths of parents, siblings, boyfriends, babies. Whereas Shannon had grown up in a nice house in the suburbs, had gone to a private liberal arts college that her parents had been happy to pay for, then had moved to an apartment in Park Slope, with the assistance of a small but not insignificant trust fund left by her grandmother. What excuse did she have? What, exactly, was her tragedy—that
Tin House
and
Antaeus
had both declined to publish her short stories, that
n + 1
had turned down her essay on the commodification of disdain in literary fiction? It sounded like bullshit, even in her own head, so she never said it out loud.

NEW TEXT MESSAGE FROM DEVONTE
, read the screen. Cautiously she poked a button.
How’s ur phone? N E problems?
she read.

Phone is fine,
she wrote back, once she got her hands to stop shaking. She needed a pill. She needed a shot, a snort, a swallow of something. She needed that deliciously syrupy forgetfulness cascading thickly from the top of her head down to her toes. The world was too scary and sad for her to move through naked. Chemical protection was required; a warm down jacket to keep out the cold, a blanket to bury herself in and hide away.

Play the tape
, the counselors would say. Shannon forced herself to remember herself in the hospital, the nurse’s pale face, her lips forming the words
God, we thought we’d lost you!
She made herself remember the rough fabric of the futon burning against her legs as the guy huffed and sweated on top of her, his jeering voice as he said,
How ’bout you move your ass, honey?
She made herself remember what it had felt like to come swimming through the darkness back to consciousness, with no one who loved her there to greet her. The doctor asked if there was anyone they could call and she shook her head no. The last time she’d been home, she found that her parents had emptied out her room. No bed, no desk, no dresser, no pictures on her bulletin board or posters on the walls. No clothes except for a single navy-blue dress that hung in the closet, floating like a ghost.
We’re saving that to bury you in
, her mom had said.

That should have been the worst thing, the fabled bottom of which drunks and druggies spoke in the unchanging narrative of the Program—
I was down, but this program saved me; I was lost, but now I am found
. Shannon knew it wasn’t even close. Her bottom, the worst thing she’d done—or, really, the worst thing she hadn’t done—was something she had no intention of remembering, let alone speaking of it to another living soul.

She’d read all the novels by her bed, so she thumbed through the Big Book they’d sent her home with, her third copy. Tomorrow she would steal something from one of the independent bookstores with their carefully curated selections of young writers, men and women who’d gone to colleges like hers, who were her age or even younger, who tried so hard to look serious in their author photos, as if even the hint of a smile would reveal them as frauds.

She plugged in her phone and pulled down the shade. That night she dreamed she was in her parents’ basement rec-room kissing her high school boyfriend, the taste of his cigarette smoke and strawberry wine coolers and his tongue, thick and warm, in her mouth. Someone was smoking a joint in the backyard—she could smell the sweet, skunky scent of the smoke, along with the smell of leaves, of rotting pumpkins, of Halloween candy still wrapped up and ready to go. Then the dream shifted. She was naked, her futon was covered in dirt, and there were men in masks looking down at her. The masks, made of white plastic, obscured the men’s faces. High slits turned their eyes into black holes. One man grasped her wrists, the other took her ankles, and they lifted her easily. Her body swayed as one of them said,
Put her in the bedroom. We can all have a turn.

No
, she screamed.

Shut up
, said a man in a mask.
Shut up, don’t you know you’re dead already?

She screamed again, and that scream was what finally woke her up. Her telephone was blinking.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
, it said.

***

It was a snapshot of a bottle of pills. Blue ones. Oxys. One of her old loves. The pills were on a table in the foreground. Behind the bottle, Shannon could make out a refrigerator, a blur that might have been a window. She stared at the picture for a long, quiet moment—the words
SENT FROM
, followed by a string of digits that meant nothing—and swiped her thumb over the glass screen, left and right and left again, until she managed to make it go away.

Her first thought was that someone was fucking with her. She’d heard about stuff like this during rehab, stories about what happened when you tried to leave your low companions behind. One girl had a boyfriend who’d bring her a cup of coffee every morning, a needle and tourniquet and spoon and lighter beside it. The heroin would be in a sugar bowl, and all of it would be arranged on a tray, a hellish version of breakfast in bed. Another complained that her boyfriend had agreed to stop drinking in the house, but he’d go to the bars and come home reeking of cigarette smoke and Jack, which used to be her drink, and crawl into bed beside her, passing out, leaving her lying beside him slick with sweat, hands shaking, guts cramping, wanting it so badly that she could taste it.

Shannon had never been a drinker. Aside from strawberry wine coolers, which they’d probably kick you out of Brooklyn for drinking, she hated the taste of booze, the way it made her feel flushed and sweaty and sleepy. She was an opiate girl. She’d enjoyed pills in college and as an occasional treat when she was fresh out of school, trying to gain a toehold in the city’s literary scene, which felt to her like walking into a party where everyone knew everyone else already, where they all spoke the same language, a code you’d never crack made of shared references and in-jokes and nicknames and knowledge of the secret histories of institutions and people—who was sleeping with whom, who used to work with whose ex-wife, who used to be straight (or gay), whose career was on the rise and whose on the descent. Shannon had done her best, gamely submitting her stories and essays and résumés, papering her apartment’s bedroom walls with rejections. She’d done an internship at a literary quarterly, where her job consisted of sending form rejection letters to people just like her and fending off the advances of the editor, a man forty years her senior who’d been a finalist for the National Book Award years before. She kept writing and rewriting, sustained by the few words of praise and encouragement she had received, certain that she was both talented and determined, and that talent and determination would take her to where she wanted to go.

She was twenty-three and an editorial assistant at Paragon the first time she’d tried heroin. At first the drug had been a delightful treat, something she’d done with Mickey, her boyfriend, an options trader by day and bass player by night, in a Brooklyn band that was starting to get some buzz on the blogs. Mickey was a year younger than she was, all clear eyes and shiny hair and exclamation-mark-peppered texts. His mouth tasted as sweet as a peach, but ultimately she’d found all of that boyish enthusiasm, not to mention his easily found success, a little tiresome. She had never loved Mickey. Only the drugs.

So they’d drifted apart, and then Shannon lost her job after calling in sick or showing up late or spending forty-five minutes nodding out in the ladies’ room a few times too many. Things had gone downhill fast, so damned fast she still couldn’t believe it. Blink and you’re collecting your diploma—summa cum laude, if you please—on a perfect June afternoon. Blink and you’re snorting from a little bag of brownish powder someone pulled out of his pocket at a party. Blink and someone named Money is teaching you how to tie off, sliding a needle into your vein, murmuring
Express train to happy.
Blink and you’re stealing gold coins out of a shoebox in your parents’ closet while they set the table for Christmas dinner. Blink and you’re in rehab, out of rehab, in rehab again. Blink and you’re letting a guy flip you facedown on a stained futon, listening to him and his friends joke about playing the B side, focusing on the one, two, three, four bags on the table that will take you away from all of this, because you are nothing.
Don’t you know you’re dead already?

The phone was still in her hand.
She
gave a little screech when a text from a string of numbers that meant nothing to her appeared on the screen:
Dude U redE 2 partE? Bcuz she’s all redE for U!

She turned her phone off and put it in her purse, handling it by its edges, as if it were a grenade. There was a meeting at St. Patrick’s at nine o’clock. She went to it, and when the leader said it was time for anyone who wanted to share, she put her hand in the air.
I have no life,
she would tell them.
There is no one who knows I’m alive. Someone is sending me pictures of pills on my new phone. I am scared. I am alone. I don’t think I can do this.
But she didn’t get called on, so she put four doughnuts in her pockets, two on each side, like ballast, and then went back to the T-Mobile store.

***

“Easy explanation,” said Devonté when Shannon showed him the text and the picture. “You’re getting texts for someone who used to have your phone number.”

“So I’m gonna get all this guy’s texts and messages?”

“Hopefully he gave his bros his new number. Let me see something.” He took her phone, pressed a few buttons, wrote something down, then scooted his wheeled chair over to a computer screen, and tapped and peered and tapped some more. She caught a muttered “That’s weird” as she drifted to the display of customized cases and high-end headphones. There were exactly three limp dollar bills in her pocket. She’d had four, but she’d put one in the basket that morning.

Devonté beckoned her over. “If someone had this number before you got it, he had it marked private. No way to find out who it is.”

“How about where it is?”

He shook his head. “Two sixty-three is one of the new area codes. They’re using it all over New York. You want my advice, just ignore it. Eventually whoever’s texting will figure out that you’re not their friend.”

“I could text him back and tell him that.”

“You could,” said Devonté, drawing out the last word. He put his hands against his head and used his fingertips to massage his scalp. “Sometimes people are real assholes when it’s just texts or messages. If whoever’s sending the messages knows that he’s bugging you, he might, you know, raise the stakes.”

Shannon frowned.

“Think of it as a window into someone else’s world,” he said.

“It feels like I’m eavesdropping.” She remembered something from Chaucer:
Peep not at a keyhole, lest ye be vexed.

“It’s a nuisance,” Devonté said, “but I guarantee, it’ll stop after a few days.”

“As long as it’s not costing me anything.”

“To receive texts? Nope. You’ve got the unlimited data plan, remember? You can send and receive all the texts you want. Go ahead,” he said, and pushed the phone across the counter. “Send a text.”

She bit her lip and wondered if he’d looked at her contacts, a list that was still only two names long. She slid her finger over the screen, clicked on Devonté’s name, and wrote, “Hi.” In his breast pocket, his phone shuddered and buzzed. “See?” he said, without even reading what she’d written. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

***

The man leading the Night Owls meeting, at eleven o’clock in a meeting room at Roosevelt Hospital, had terminal brain cancer. He had a square white bandage over one cheek, and the backs of both hands were mottled black and blue. His white hair hovered around his bald scalp like milkweed fluff. His body seemed to float in his clothes. “I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m happy to be dying,” he said. “But I’m glad I’m dying sober. I’m glad I can be there for my wife and my kids, and that I’m not in a fog. I can hear it when they tell me they love me, and I can mean it when I say it back.” He gazed around the room—there were only eight of them—making meaningful eye contact with each one, lingering on Shannon. Shannon slipped out back when she felt her phone buzzing in her hip pocket. Another text from that string of unfamiliar numbers:
Dude. Get here. This party is EPIC.