11
The first night was the most dangerous one. After his rage and terror had burned themselves out, Theo spent the afternoon trying to talk to Auggie. But Auggie wouldn’t answer his calls or texts. Auggie wouldn’t come to the door when Theo went to the apartment.
“Not right now, Theo,” Orlando said. He was a big kid, strong, and he was leaning into the door with his whole body. “He’s really upset.”
“Tell him I didn’t mean it,” Theo said.
Orlando nodded.
“Tell him I was—I don’t know, crazy. Or I can tell him. I’ll only take a minute.”
“Theo.”
“I can talk to him through his bedroom door. He doesn’t even have to see me.”
Orlando had offered a small, sad smile and shut the door, and Theo heard the deadbolt go home.
I was crazy, Theo thought, one hand on the painted fiberglass. I was just so damn scared. It wasn’t me; I was out of my fucking mind.
At some point, he went home. He tried to sleep. He got up and paced. He opened the fridge and stood there, staring in at the last of the Christmas ale. It would be a key in the door, but whatever it locked up, it would unlock something else too. He knew where to go—the right bars, open late. He knew how much it would cost. He closed his eyes and thought about what it would feel like, to feel good for the first time in a long time. Then he shut the fridge door and sat on the back steps, his breath steaming, until he’d lost feeling in his fingers and was hardly shivering anymore. Then, inside, wrapped in a blanket, he walked again. Chafing his arms turned into scratching—restless movement that gave him something to focus on. When dawn came in, he saw blood, and his thought was dull, distant: Boy, I really went at it.
He called his NA sponsor, Lyn, at nine, and he couldn’t tell him what was wrong. Lyn seemed ok with that. The silence had a kind of tensile strength that Theo could cling to. And when he finally said he needed help, Lyn talked him into going to a meeting at noon. When he got home after the meeting, Theo felt like something festering had been lanced, and he slept. And that was the first day.
After that, it got easier. He dove into his routine. He worked on his dissertation, which had evolved from his thesis, and found the chapter on Pericles coming along nicely. Like the chapters that had formed his thesis, this one focused on the intersection of identity and communication in Shakespeare’s works. To Theo’s surprise, the chapter seemed to flow out of him, the research and the analysis and the actual prose itself running together like tributaries until they became something vaster and larger rushing through him. He worked past dark on campus, some nights until eight or nine, in the library as much as in his office. The first few weeks, he was afraid he might run into Auggie, but it never happened, and soon he stopped worrying about it.
His teaching assistantship provided the only real breaks from his work. He enjoyed the class well enough—a seminar on Modernism—and even got to teach a few breakout sessions on the connections between Early Modern and Modern literature, which gave him a chance to dust off his T. S. Eliot and talk about “Marina.” He had forgotten, during that last hellish semester of worrying about finding Harley Gilmore’s laptop and keeping Auggie safe and passing his exams, how much he enjoyed teaching, and the Modernism class reminded him of why he had gone to grad school in the first place.
He visited Lana several times a week—he had more free time now—and the nurses and care techs assured him that she was doing well. He checked her for bruises, of course, but he didn’t have to worry as much about bedsores because, thanks to some miracle-working PTs and OTs, she was starting to walk.
When he did come home at night, there were still echoes, flashes—the rustle of a bag of chips, the expectation that he’d find the Jordans on their sides near the door, the sound of sprinting footsteps on the stairs because he’d seen something on Instagram that he absolutely had to show Theo, right now. But to Theo’s surprise, they didn’t hurt as much as he’d thought they would. They didn’t hurt at all, really. Nothing hurt. Life had taken on a tap-water indifference, as though everything was lit by fluorescents. Like this, Theo thought one day, looking at one of the watercolors he’d done, back when he’d tried his hand at it. Like this, only mass produced and hung on motel walls.
Sometimes, he didn’t sleep. Sometimes, he lay in the dark, his breaths getting shallower, until he wasn’t sure he was breathing at all. He ran through lines of the play those nights. Fair glass of light, I loved you, and could still. You could scan it as a perfect line of iambic pentameter. Or you could read it so that the last two feet were trochees instead of iambs. The possibility of the metrical inversion mirrors the potentiality of Pericles own precipitous moment, broken by the stage directions that immediately follow. Yes, he thought. That sounded good. He could use that in the paper. And other nights he thought of Eliot. What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow. Yes, he would think. Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? It was a hard poem. The students always had trouble with it. His daughter, he would tell them. In Eliot’s poem, Pericles finds hope in his daughter. But when Theo read, This form, this face, this life / Living to live in a world of time beyond me, he wasn’t thinking of Lana. You have your whole life ahead of you, he wanted to say, if they could talk just one more time. You’ll live to a world of time beyond me. Pericles, in the poem, is escaping a world of death by hoping for a better life for someone he loves.
It was one of those nights, working his way through the poem’s labyrinths, when he started to cry. He cried all night. And in the morning, he went through his old papers, found the number for his therapist, and called.
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