Angel, page 5
So that Ian would not have a chance to change his mind or find an excuse not to go, they would go back to Ian’s apartment, pack up whatever things he would need, and then go to Paul’s house. Ian’s car would not be an immediate problem. The police had impounded it and would not release it until after the case came to court. First thing in the morning, Paul would make some calls and find a center that could take the young man. Ian was in no position to argue.
Paul paid Ian’s bail and drove him back to the brick-block dwelling. As it happened, it was rather conveniently located to the jail, only a couple of blocks away, in the same ugly section of town. Paul parked this time and got out. He made a point to lock the car, something he didn’t bother doing in his own driveway.
Ian fiddled with his keys. “It’s a little tricky,” he said. He turned the handle of the heavy gray door to the left and to the right. He jiggled the key, turned it again, and finally it swung open. “Oh, if you ever come here, the buzzer doesn’t work,” he said. “My window’s in the front, you have to knock on it. Most people just call with a cell phone.”
Inside was a dark, narrow corridor. Ian produced a second key and opened the door to his unit. “Home sweet home,” he said.
The apartment was just about the smallest Paul had ever seen. It was laid out like two walk-in closets in an inverted L shape. The living room portion had a fold-out sofa—which was apparently Ian’s bed—a small folding table, and an old television, which rested on the floor. There was only one decoration. Taped to the back of the door was a picture of a mountain, which had been ripped out of a 1998 calendar. The second part of the L was the kitchen, which doubled as the entryway. Tacked onto the end of the kitchen was a bathroom small enough that you’d have to walk sideways. Sitting on the edge of the counter, which was barely wider than the sink and stove, was a bottle of Jack Daniels with about a fourth remaining.
“Did you drink all of that yourself?” Paul asked.
“Who else?” Ian shrugged.
“You drank it all tonight?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” Ian said. He opened the bottle and poured the remaining contents into the sink and dumped the bottle into the brown paper bag that contained the trash. He turned and saw Paul’s expression of triumph at the gesture.
Ian gave a half smile. “Don’t get too excited,” he said. “I’ve done this before.”
“Well, hopefully you won’t have to do it again,” Paul said.
Ian grabbed a green backpack from the sofa, reached underneath, and pulled out a cardboard box that contained his clothing. As he was throwing underwear and shirts into the bag, Paul looked in Ian’s cabinets. There were three packets of ramen noodles, a box of macaroni and cheese, and a can of tomato soup. In the refrigerator was half a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of ketchup.
Ian seemed to know what Paul was looking for. “You’re looking for more booze?” he asked.
“Sorry,” Paul said, “I just wanted….”
“It’s okay,” Ian said. “I wouldn’t trust me either. It’s hidden in the water tank in the back of the toilet.”
Paul went into the miniature bathroom, lifted the top off the tank, and discovered a bottle of rum hidden there. Paul brought it back to the kitchen so Ian could dump it out too.
“Is that all of it now?” Paul asked.
“Yeah,” Ian said as he opened the bottle and dumped its contents in the sink.
On the ride to Paul’s apartment, Ian sat in the passenger seat with the green backpack on his lap. He clutched it to him like a child might hold a stuffed toy. It fascinated Paul that Ian, who lived in such a terrible environment, would be so trusting. He had just put his fate entirely into the hands of a near stranger. Then again, he hadn’t been given a lot of choice. The alternative was to stay in jail. As if sensing Paul’s thoughts, Ian broke the silence.
“Why are you helping me like this?” he asked.
“I suppose it’s part of my faith.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“No, that’s cool.”
“I remember. You said you and the church were divorced.”
“I said that?”
“Yeah. The first time I drove you home. I know you don’t remember it.”
“I don’t know. I’ve just met a lot of Christians who were pretty ugly. My mom was a ‘good Christian’. She threw me out of the house.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t like my boyfriend.”
“Why?”
“He was a guy.”
“Oh.”
“She’s going to Heaven and I’m going to Hell with my ‘worthless drunk’ old man.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Not all Christians think that way, you know. Jesus preached about forgiveness, not damning people.”
“What about those guys with the signs, ‘God Hates Fags’?”
“God doesn’t hate. You shouldn’t lump us all in together. Just because they call themselves Christians…. I don’t want to be associated with that. Most Christians don’t.”
“I think I believe in God. But that word ‘faith’.”
“What about it?”
“It’s like ‘listen to whatever I say and don’t question it’. I don’t like that.”
“You don’t understand faith the way I do.”
“So what is it?”
“Faith isn’t about believing things that aren’t true because some authority told you to do it. It’s about trusting in things that are true, even if you aren’t in a position to prove it. Sometimes you have to believe in something before you can see it…. I have faith in you.”
The corners of Ian’s lips curled up into the distinctive smile that Paul loved so much. “Are you going to do a sermon about me this Sunday? The sinner you bailed out of jail?”
“You’re not a sinner,” Paul said firmly. “You have an addiction. God doesn’t damn people for being sick.”
Ian chewed on his lip for a moment. “It would be cool, though,” he said, “if you wrote a sermon about me. That stuff about faith. I’d come and listen.”
“If that will get you into church, I’ll do it.”
“I want to help you win that trip to Tahiti.”
“If I do, I’ll take you with me.”
“Deal.”
After Sara died, Paul couldn’t stand to be in the house they had bought together. It had too many memories, too many ghosts. There were the happy memories, of course, like the day he had carried her in across the vestibule to mark their new life together, the wallpaper in the bathroom that Sara had picked out herself and curiously hated—a source of constant playful teasing—and the plans they had made together at night in bed. All of those joyful moments had been rendered painful by the loss of Sara.
Like the guest room that they had planned to one day make into a nursery, each room contained dreams of a future that would now never be. The kitchen table would now always be the place he’d been sitting when she gave him the news about her diagnosis. The bathroom off the master bedroom was now the place where Paul had cleaned up the vomit and scooped the strands of red hair from the sinks and the drains. The sofa in the front room was where he sat in a daze and met with the many church members who came to bring him hot meals and sympathy. He couldn’t face any of it.
He bought a modest two-bedroom condominium. The master bedroom contained a dresser and a king-sized bed. The second bedroom Paul filled with books and made into his study. The living room was open and airy and under-furnished. There was a black futon, a matching chair, and a wide-screen TV in a wall-mounted shelving unit.
Even though Paul had lived in the condo for some time, Ian was to be his first overnight guest. Paul was about to apologize for how small his home was when he remembered Ian’s apartment.
“Wow,” Ian said, looking around. “This is a great place.”
“Thanks,” Paul said. “I don’t have a guest room, but the futon folds out. I hope that will be okay. It’s comfortable.”
“This is great,” he said. “Is this your wife?”
Although Paul had moved to escape Sara’s ghost, he had decorated his new place almost entirely with framed photos of his wife—their wedding, their honeymoon travels, early dates they went on together.
“Sara,” he said.
“She’s pretty.”
“Thanks,” Paul said. It seemed like the appropriate answer, although it was odd to thank someone for a compliment about someone else—as though Sara’s looks were his achievement.
“So you’re not together now?”
Paul hated those kinds of questions. He hated to have to give the answer, to make the other person uncomfortable. He hated that moment after they said, “I’m sorry,” when they would both stand for a moment in quiet reverence. He never felt like his response was quite right.
“Cancer,” he said.
“That sucks,” Ian said.
The unexpected blunt answer made Paul smile. “You’re right. It does.”
As Paul unfolded the futon, Ian kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks. Next he reached over his head and pulled off his T-shirt. Paul willed himself not watch. He busied himself with the sheets. Tucking them in, straightening them. Straightening them some more. He heard the metal clank of Ian unbuckling his belt. Paul arranged the pillows.
“You don’t have to do that,” Ian said. Shirt off. Belt unbuckled. Jeans slightly unzipped. “I can make the bed.”
Paul straightened the sheets some more. Hospital corners, maybe he should try to do hospital corners. What are hospital corners, anyway? “Do you think you’ll have enough blankets?”
“Oh yeah. Definitely. You really don’t need to make a fuss.” He slid his jeans down over his narrow hips and stepped out of them. He was now wearing nothing but a pair of blue briefs, and there was a new discovery. He had a tattoo. It seemed to be some kind of leaf or a vertical Celtic knot. Just the top of the design was peeking out from the briefs on Ian’s right hip bone. It drew Paul’s eye downward. Gave him permission to stare at….
In an instant, a whole scene played out in his mind. He would ask about the tattoo, come in close, and inch the briefs down, slowly, to see the rest of the image. And what would happen next? Paul knew that tattoo and its placement were going to invade his thoughts day and night. He could not help it. It was completely inevitable. And he hated it. He knew that this was exactly what it had been designed to do. How many men had seen the full design? How many had acted out the very scene Paul had just scripted in his mind?
“Well, I hope you have a good sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Ian said a bit nervously as he climbed under the covers. “Goodnight, Paul. Thanks for rescuing me.”
The next morning, Paul got up early. He sat at the computer researching alcoholism treatment centers and making phone calls trying to find one that could take Ian right away. From his study, he could see the futon and watch Ian sleep. As soon as he seemed to stir, Paul got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a glass of water. He sat down at the foot of the futon.
Ian sat up, squinted, and looked around to get his bearings. When he saw Paul, he smiled with recognition. His hair was tangled, and there were slight dark circles under his eyes.
“I figured you’d be thirsty,” Paul said, handing him the glass of water.
“Thanks,” Ian said. He took the glass, gulped down the water, and handed it, empty, back to Paul.
“Do you need more? I have aspirin too if you need any.”
“No, I’m okay,” he said as he tried to undo a knot in his hair with his fingers. “You seem like you’ve done this before.”
“What, brought a man home from jail?”
“No,” Ian said, blushing slightly. “I mean, maybe you know something about… drunks.”
“I’m playing this by ear,” he said. “You remember what we talked about last night?”
“Yeah, this time I remember.”
“You still want to do this?”
“Yeah.” He sounded nervous but committed.
“Well, get dressed. I’ll make some breakfast and we can go.”
Huntington Hospital
Mount Rainier rises ten thousand feet from its base to the heavens. Its massive cap of snow and ice flows contains as much frozen water as the twelve other Cascade volcanoes combined. Each year, ten thousand people try to test their limits by scaling the massive peak. About half will not succeed.
The climbers with their ropes and crampons and supplemental oxygen tanks fascinated Paul. How does one prepare for an adventure so complete that he might never return? If a climber returns, he comes back internally changed, with his limitations and boundaries forever shifted, and yet outwardly he is entirely the same.
From the outside, The Huntington Hospital for Alcoholism and Addiction Treatment looked like a small college or a country day school. Set on a vast landscape of rolling hills, the defining features of its campus were a large white building that looked like a farm house and a cozy white chapel with a large steeple. Once you got inside, however, it looked more like what it was—a hospital. There was a reception with a gray institutional tile floor, a small seating area with the familiar collection of waiting room magazines, and a sliding-glass widow dividing the staff from the visitors. During Sara’s cancer treatment, Paul had developed a strange relationship with hospitals—a mix of distaste and relaxed familiarity.
“I’m here to see Ian Finnerty,” he told the receptionist.
“Just a moment,” she said. She flipped through a tabbed binder under F, put her finger on his name, and then walked to the back of the room. Next, Paul heard her voice over the hospital speakers.
“Ian F., Ian F., please come to reception. You have a visitor. Ian F., Ian F.”
Paul sat down in one of the chairs to wait. He was holding a gift for Ian. Flowers had seemed inappropriate, but he wanted to bring something. He had settled on a small potted plant, a Venus fly trap. He sat up straight as he waited, and his legs shook. He was aware of his physical presence in the chair and wanted to seat himself so that he would project the right image when Ian first saw him. He was shuffling in his seat, trying to find the best comfortable pose, when the door swung open. There it was, the face that had existed every day in his imagination, now in front of him in real physical form. Ian’s eyes were bright and alert, and he was taller than Paul had remembered. He wasn’t hanging his head anymore.
“Hi,” Ian said. He smiled broadly, revealing the little gap in his front teeth.
Paul’s pupils dilated. “You look great,” he said. “Here.” He thrust the plant at Ian.
“What is it?”
“I brought you something. It’s….”
Ian raised one eyebrow. “You brought me a fly-eating plant?”
“I was looking at the plants in the shop and I thought you might like one that actually does something. I thought it might be more interesting for you.”
Ian held it up at eye level and looked at it from all angles. “Does it have a name?”
“It’s a plant.”
“I think I’ll call it ‘Fido’. Come on, Fido! Let’s go to my room. I’ll show your new home.”
They went through the swinging doors and down another antiseptic hallway. Ian greeted everyone he passed by name. “Hi, Heather. Hi, Joe. This is my friend, Paul.” My friend.
“Wow, you know everyone,” Paul said.
“There’s something about being the same kind of freak that tends to bring people together.”
“Hmm. Maybe, but I think it’s you.”
“Oh, I have a joke,” Ian said. “Want to hear my joke?”
“Sure.”
“An Irishman walks into a bar…. Do you like it so far?”
“I think I’ve heard this story.”
“So this Irishman goes into the bar, and every night he orders three glasses of whiskey. The bartender asks, ‘Why do you always get three glasses?’ The guy says, ‘I get one for me and two for my brothers in America’. So one night he comes in and he only orders two drinks. The bartender says, ‘I’m sorry about the loss of your brother’. And the Irishman says, ‘Oh no, my brothers are fine. It’s just that I quit drinking’.”
They arrived at the elevator, and Ian pushed the button. “It’s an alcoholism joke,” he said. “I heard that one in group.” They looked up at the lights over the elevator door. “I like group. People tell their horror stories, and you listen to them one after the other and you say, ‘Well, at least I never did that’. Makes you feel better about yourself.”
The up arrow illuminated with a ding, and the elevator doors slid open. Once they had stepped inside, Ian said, “There was this one guy, in group, he was staying in all these shit-bag hotels. He said, ‘Happiness was checking into a hotel and not finding pubic hair on the bar of soap’.”
“That’s disgusting,” Paul said.
“Yeah, but it’s kind of poetic too, don’t you think? You’ve never checked into a motel and found, like, a used syringe in the middle of the floor?”
“Uh, no.”
“That doesn’t happen so much at the Hilton, huh?”
“Hardly ever.”
The elevator arrived at the third floor. “Come on,” Ian said, “let’s go show Fido his new home.”
Ian’s room was also hospital-cold and antiseptic. It had its own bathroom, complete with wheelchair railings. There were two hospital beds with a pair of small rolling tables designed for bed-ridden and post-operative patients to eat their Jell-O. Ian’s bed was on the far side of the room near the window. He set the fly-eating plant down on his rolling table. “Here you are, Fido. Look for flies! Go on! I don’t think he sees any. Do you think I have to feed it if it doesn’t catch anything?”
