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By Root 166 0

cut into the wooden banister. Some were enclosed in lopsided hearts. Lewis wondered if anybody who ever went together in junior high school actually got married and stayed married all their lives. He thought about a girl he went steady with in junior high, a black girl named June with a French last name he couldn’t recall. She was very dark, though her hair was naturally straight. She was the first black girl he’d ever kissed. That he had a black girlfriend was a big deal to everybody. White girls had black boyfriends, but not the other way around. This girl had fine, sharp teeth and liked to bite down on his tongue and lips. A few times, she drew blood. At first, he was surprised and excited by her biting, but soon his mouth was so sore that he lost any desire to kiss her. They broke up, and although they went on to the same high school together, they eventually stopped acknowledging each other. Within two years, they were strangers again. Lewis had run into an old friend who went to their tenth reunion and reported that June what’s-her-name, the biter, had won the award for having the most children: six.

In the first old classroom at the top of the stairs, Lewis found half a dozen beds, each with a dresser / nightstand unit in an area made separate, if not exactly private, by chin-high white Formica partitions. The room looked like a secretary pool, only with beds instead of desks. Three guys had gathered in the first tiny bedroom space, two Latinos and a little guy who was white except for arms and shoulders covered with green tattoos. Lewis recognized them from the AA meeting last night. They took this AA stuff seriously and needed to, because to hear them tell it, their lives were all messed up with crack cocaine, heroin, prison, insane women, you name it.

The next classroom didn’t have any partitions, just five beds in a row, like an old-fashioned hospital ward. None of these beds was taken. Every surface in the room itself, including the bottom half of the windows, had been painted the same dull pale green. Hand-lettered cardboard plaques were stuck on the walls, each with a saying: EASY DOES IT. LET GO, LET GOD. ONE DAY AT A TIME.

Lewis lay down on one of the beds and lit a cigarette. Somebody had written JESUS CARES on the pillow in blue ballpoint pen. He tried to make this meaningful, something that someone had written just for him to find—a divine message, humbly drawn—but he didn’t have the energy for such creative thinking. He didn’t believe in Jesus, except as a man and maybe a spiritual genius, a Buddha for literal white people. Once he had a dream about Jesus and Jesus was nicer than anybody Lewis had ever met, and his hair was long and glossy like in ads for cheap shampoo. Jesus also had long fingernails, fetishistically long. Frankly, even though he seemed so nice, Jesus had creeped Lewis out.

Lewis smoked his cigarette and listened to his heart thump. He could see the shadow of a tree through the painted glass. Traffic surged outside. The central furnace rumbled. There was a sweet chemical scent of floor wax he recalled from every school he’d known.

No matter how hard he tried, Lewis couldn’t remember how he ended up here, in Ventura County Social Model Detox. Bobby told him that a woman in Oxnard named Clarice Martin had called an ambulance because he was having convulsions in her front yard. “Flopping like a fish in her dichondra,” Bobby put it. Lewis had never heard of Clarice Martin and didn’t have any idea how he got to Oxnard.

The last thing he did remember was being in Westwood at a small party in married-student housing. He didn’t recall whose party it was or what he was doing there, but he was in a knotty-pine kitchen talking to a short, plump girl. Her face was rapt and bright with hope and coming at him like a bucket of fresh milk.

To hold her at bay, Lewis ranted about Rilke, erected a wall of words. Or no, come to think of it, maybe he was lecturing on Goethe. Of course it was Goethe, whom he’d never read. The only thing he knew about Goethe was from an old Time/Life book that said