I now know that most people have to drink hard for at least a couple of decades before they’re in real danger of killing themselves. Of course, you can die at any time from blacking out at the wheel of your car. You can stumble around a ravine until you fall down a slope and break your neck.
Abel had been drinking for only nine years when an ulcer in his stomach ruptured and he hemorrhaged. He did try to stop drinking. It was his decision—nobody pushed him—to live at the treatment clinic, and he stayed there for two months. But as soon as he checked himself out, he headed for the liquor store, and six months later, while driving his taxi, he hemorrhaged again.
He would have gone into shock if his passenger hadn’t taken over the wheel and raced through red lights getting him to the hospital. The Richters and I only heard about it once he was back in his apartment and then only because the passenger, who happened to be an eighty-year-old retired police chief, told his story to the Toronto Star as part of an article about heroic senior citizens. We had assumed Abel was off visiting some French-Canadian friend from the clinic. I’m not saying he lied to us. He took care never to lie outright.
Not even to himself. Better than we did, he knew his symptoms, and his odds. At the clinic he’d read all the pamphlets, attended all the sessions, and when he was still strong enough to drive a taxi, he spent part of every afternoon taking notes at the University of Toronto’s medical library. You couldn’t get him to talk about those notes, but one day I looked at some of them (he’d gone to the bathroom, and I pulled a few pages out from under a stack of musical scores) and what I read was “life-threatening complication of portal hypertension,” “black tarry stools,” “convulsions,” “poor prognosis.” On the second page was a list of words: “bewilderment, denial, fear, anger, grief, mistrust, aversion, apathy, alienation.” When he returned to the room I held up the list and asked,“The range of your feelings?”
He checked his surprise. “Other people’s feelings. Family and friends.”
“Family and friends of alcoholics.”
He tugged on his earlobe. Nodded.
“My feelings,” I said, ignoring his discomfort.
He gave me a keen look. “Are they?”
I studied the page. “Not the last three.”
I put the pages on the top of the piano and he came over and began to rearrange them. With his head lowered he looked only preoccupied, a bit prim, but when he glanced up I caught an expression of pleasure so private it was almost obscene. He blinked, startled. Had he forgotten I was there?
‘You reduce your horizons,” he said,“and all the little things, the slightest things, they suddenly …” He shook his head.
“Matter,” I finished.
“Grow,” he said. “Expand out into the world.”
“They only seem to because you’re ignoring all the big important things.”
“That’s the idea. You have to go right in close and concentrate on every detail and on every move you make and then you start realizing how it’s all joined together. But so … so delicately. So delicately and eternally. It’s like overtones in music, they go on forever, we just can’t hear them. You put a pile of papers in order and the principle of order itself is solidified. You straighten a picture on the wall and a flock of birds corrects its flight path.”
I said woodenly,“You don’t have any pictures on the walls.”
He smiled like a man deeply charmed.
“If you love me,” I said,“why don’t you just straighten yourself out?”
And then I was crying.
“Oh, God.” I swiped at my tears. “Look at me. I suppose some plugged-up drain somewhere is starting to flow.”
“A seed is germinating.” He reached out and stroked my head. “A baby is being born.”
I flinched from his hand. “Why did you say that? Why would you say a thing like that?”