todd of tacoma

One poor chap committed suicide in my home. He could not, or would not, see our way of life.

—Bill’s Story, Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book

Todd, alcoholic, woke up in his basement having never been asleep. Some friends were there. Notables included God and Satan from the Book of Job. Polonius and Gertrude. Frankenstein and his monster. Hecate and the witches from Macbeth. Francis Bacon, George Dyer, Edvard Munch’s sister.

Others.

They had their noses in his old books pretending to read, like this was all they were doing, hanging out down there and reading. But the second he’d try to move, they’d turn to him, all at once, asking if he could turn the television off, or down, so they could have a talk, or if he could bring them some fresh pages to doodle on, or track down the orange notebook purchased late summer or fall three years ago, find the entry that includes the phrase “only half of what I need,” edit for clarity, and strike through with a permanent marker.

Then tear the page out. Little housekeepings, for protection.

Fever

His fever was giving him a little break, so he took some time to find the notebook. There were three entries in it and an address and time listed. He did as required of him and Polonius gave him a nod that said, “Good man.” The witches were already dreaming up his next assignment. They knew everything he needed to destroy.

When his fiancee, who worked from home and was unofficially monitoring his detox, left for a meeting in Seattle he took the page he’d torn out up to her office and slipped it in her paper shredder, along with some pages from the day before. When the batch had been churned to noodles, he took the shredder bucket to the compost bin. Hecate had admonished him to burn the contents, but it had been a scorching summer and a dry autumn and he was afraid of sparks. So, he broke a dead branch off his neighbor’s walnut and stirred the shreds in the bin. In with the egg shells and banana peels and coffee grounds and cucumber skins, bean ends, egg cartons, paper towels, rice, dirt, leaves, moldy sauces. Wool of bat, tongue of dog.

Fruit flies pelted him when he let the bin’s lid fall. He felt them burn up on his lava hot skin and one or two tink-tinked against his right eye, the withered eye, the only one he could hold open in the sunlight. He shook his head and spat and clawed and tore his shirt. He used this one burst of energy, the only one he’d get today, to beat the air with the empty shredder bucket.

Sleep

His friends were as zonked as Jesus’s disciples by the time he returned to the basement, so he turned the television back on. He tried to search for a movie, any movie about an alcoholic who flourishes during detox and rehab, but was unable to type with his remote given his failing eyesight. It came and went. All the excitement had disoriented his fever.

Shakes came next, heralding tremors, chills to follow. And a few minutes’ relief if he could just manage the cold. How you manage is you pull your blanket, you have to have one preset, pull your blanket up over your shoulders and head leaving a small opening for your nose and mouth. Like a cinched hood. Lie completely still, you can’t help it, and sleep will descend on you as your core temperature rises.

Like twenty-odd hands caressing him sleep fell over Todd. Five or six minutes by the feel of it. He was a tide pool of sweat, a toilet bowl. His clothes were being flushed down his pores. His forehead was a water feature.

But it was not a rain gauge that told Todd how long, or how briefly, he’d been out, it was the screen in front of him. It still showed a keyboard and a search bar with the word elboha typed into it. His legs would not move, so he could not grab a towel. Was there even a dry one in the house? There was no water in his glass, either, not that he could hold onto it. Nor was real hydration possible. His tongue was being choked out by expanding spray foam insulation, and his throat was filling up with it, too. He could not swallow or cry out.

Beyond the television, a wave of panic building. The notable friends there with him that he knew weren’t there with him were not at all there anymore. They never are when you wake up.

Except for a few fruit fly hangers-on he was all alone in the light of the search bar, just looking at what he’d typed while his temperature dropped again and his kidneys fogged up the room and he felt like he was urinating dry ice even though he was not peeing and probably never would again. He was dying, this was dying, the kind you do when you’re dying. He whimpered in a puddle of himself waiting for the Roku screensaver.

Elboha

Maybe needless to say he’d gotten a wrong idea of the general color of detox. If he’d known he might have skipped it, jumped straight to death by alcohol poisoning or a car crash. Whatever’s clever.

Detox is supposed to be a saccharine montage. You’re supposed to knock on a friend’s door and say something like, “I need to make a change,” and he lets you inside after an embrace so tight you can feel the force behind it of every friendship ever.

You’re supposed to endure a month of sleeping in till eleven a.m., finding encouraging notes next to a coffee maker, eating cold cuts with the fridge door open, Netflixing with a zany Abyssinian named Paul Westerberg, reading stacks of classics and Patti Smith poetry, taking up photography, learning piano, reformatting your resume, going to job interviews, or starting a business or your screenplay.

A detox like this one, the movie kind, requires generational wealth and very rich, very patient friends. In his basement, Todd was getting the actual picture. What was lavender in his mind had turned the shit-green purple of a bruise.

Words

When you’re dying you fantasize about killing yourself, but you never have any good ideas. Todd wanted to shoot a sixteen-penny nail into his temple, but he remembered standard framing nails were twelve-penny and he didn’t have a framing nailer anyway. And he couldn’t just go out and buy one. He’d have to call a friend, maybe quite a few. Shotgun approach. Someone’s bound to have one, if anyone picks up.

Or he could talk. No schemes, just talk. He had to get rid of some words. Really, it’s imperative you do. They’re the ones feeding you all the ideas.

Sister Inger pulled his phone out of the couch. No notifications. She encouraged him to call the National Suicide Hotline first, while she wrote down what friends he had left.