A week passes. No, it’s been three weeks. I don’t know. I’ve lost count in the undistracted days. Cluttered minds need a clear channel to run at high power, I’m learning, and mine has become electrified in its dreaming state.
It’s late afternoon. I’ve awakened from a two-hour slumber, remaining outstretched on my rented bed, counting heartbeats, and turning the practice into a sort of pacemaker to get myself to the next moment. My stomach rumbles for food, for engagement with other humans, if only in passing. With less than $300 remaining in my checking account and no prospects of a paycheck, I’m driving to a nearby P.F. Chang’s for happy hour appetizers. I considered taking a walk first, or a shopping stroll, pretending consideration for things I can’t afford, but was unable to summon the energy. I need food in my stomach, because my aloneness is growing there dangerously. The tables in the restaurant are mostly full, leaving the only available seats at the actual bar, where I’ll have to look away from tall pours of wine and cocktails.
Before AAA, I’d covet a seat at the bar for dinner. I’d sit alone when traveling, ordering food along with rapid refills of red wine. It occurs to me now as I give in and take a seat that I’ve never once sat at a bar in the last twenty-five years without ordering alcohol.
I’ve seen people do it, eating at the bar while imbibing water or Diet Coke. It reminded me of watching TV without the sound on. But if they can, I believe I can, too. I crave half-price pork dumplings and dry-rub seasoned kabobs and more socialization than I’ll find in the drive-through at Jack in the Box across the street.
There are plenty of open seats, and I choose one on the right elbow. My mouth waters as I scoot a stool up close and drop my bottom onto it, placing my hands and forearms onto the bar. My plan is to order a Diet Coke, wet, salty, fizzy, and caffeinated enough to tease senses into divergent acceptance. But the memory of the sweet and bitter taste of pinot noir erupts in my mouth, rippling around my imagined tastebuds like an electrified pinball gone wild, and there is only one thing to do.
Order one.
No, order two, at once.
I raise my right hand for the bartender, who is talking to a coworker on the far end.
He catches my wave and nods to say, Be there in a moment.
Hurry up, I think, my hands fidgeting and mouth watering, waiting.
The image of a man approaches the center bar, taking a seat, and I look his way.
“Dear God,” I mumble audibly, as my breath momentarily freezes on inhale.
His face. The man’s skin is so thin and translucent I can see through to jaw and teeth like an X-ray. He’s a heavy drinker, of course. That’s why he’s here at the bar alone at 5:30 PM for happy hour, taking a seat he’s likely claimed many times before. That’s why the skin on his face looks like wax paper.
I touch my own face, staring at the man, remembering how months before my skin felt different, slick almost, and thinner, and how I’d searched the internet for why and learned that alcohol slows collagen and elastin production, damaging skin, notably on the faces of chronic drinkers. I remember thinking I wanted that damage to stop.
Someone on my end of the bar speaks to the man, and as he turns to answer I watch and gasp, seeing the skin on the right side of his jaw is gone, completely, like it has rotted and disintegrated, exposing the skeleton of his mouth.
I feel sick and look down at my trembling hands.
Think, I tell myself, think. Look at your hands. Count your fingers. Yes, ten there.
This isn’t real.
It’s impossible to see through someone’s skin like an X-ray. You’re imagining, hallucinating in withdrawal from the Adderall and alcohol.
There’s a voice. Familiar.
The Dreamer. He’s back.
Believe, he says, it’s real.
The man’s face isn’t real in the sense that I can see through it transparently. No. But it’s indisputable that his skin shows signs of alcoholism, and that’s how I will soon look if I continue drinking, starting with the two pinot noirs I plan to order.
Perhaps this man at the P.F. Chang’s bar is a vision sent to guide me in the right direction, the direction I want to take my broken life—the path I’ve been searching for since I joined the world as a professional, as a married man, as a father, hoping to give value to each role, crumbling instead from the weight of what felt like underperformance, which only led to more, a downward spiral of negative energy that sucked me in. Perhaps it’s a new sort of conscience, pulling me toward this destiny I keep hearing about, that I’m trying to follow. It makes sense, because, if I drink these pinot noirs I’m foaming at the mouth for, I’ll want more, and then my aloneness will lead me down the wrong path, into arms where I don’t belong, or into the side of a car.
I’ve never had a DUI or been arrested. But I’ve been jailed metaphorically by substances for years, and finally, I’m free from the shackles. If believing in this mirage is what’s required to stay the course, I’ll believe. What exactly in the world is real, anyway? Hair is dyed, Botox injected; parishioners worship what they can’t see. So what if my reality blurs slightly in this moment? My faith in the image of this man won’t infringe upon anyone else. If anything, others will benefit from my vision—the world, in the tiniest but most important of ways, will be better from my vision, safer from my vision.
I wonder: What is faith, anyway?
I think about those Sundays in church, when I pretended belief but focused more on impending lunch, when I heard “amen” but thought, Hell no. I think back to several months ago, when I was driving across the country in the record cold with my son William, my oldest child of three, who was accompanying me on my escape West. We stopped in the higher elevations of New Mexico, the temperature sixteen degrees below zero, the coldest we’d ever experienced. When I looked into the stars that frigid night, faith had bolted through me like a meteor, sparing my shattered soul, and we’d shouted joy into the night for something I felt and knew was real, though I didn’t yet understand its implications.
I’m beginning to understand.
I think.
“What’s it gonna be today, sir?” asks the bartender, now before me. “Beer on tap and house wines are half price for happy hour, so that’s a two-for-one bargain.”
I can do that math. Instead, I’m working on a new equation: two minus two equals zero. I don’t want the drinks because they will betray me, firing dopamine for an immediate burst of pleasantry when I need to feel my predicament wholly to find my way out of it, and because my mind and body weren’t made for such betrayal. Look where it got me; look where it got him.
I pause, looking back at the man at the bar, before turning my eyes to the bartender.
“You know,” I say, standing up from the stool, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want anything. I’m just gonna hit the drive-through across the street at Jack in the Box.”
I step off the stool and walk briskly from the restaurant to my car because I’m hungry—no, starving—for a double-stack cheeseburger, for a purpose in this life more profound and richer than chasing an immediate stoke of dopamine, which is only about me and never pays off beyond the moment anyway, and even then, it comes at a high price because it keeps receipts, always demanding a costly return.