tenth grade. She’d been abused by her stepfather and had left home when she was seventeen. She’d worked, briefly, as a prostitute in East Providence, a subject she was surprisingly candid about at one meeting and then never mentioned again. By the time she was twenty she was addicted to heroin and alcohol. To get off the heroin and alcohol, she’d gotten religion. “I was drugging just to dull the pain, you know? Got so doped up I didn’t know where I was. Pretty soon I lost my job, my apartment. Lost everything. My life had got to where it was unmanageable. Finally, I moved in with my sister. Now, my sister, she have this dog named Grover. Grover a pit bull mix. Some nights, when I had came back to my sister’s apartment, I used to take Grover for a walk. Didn’t matter how late it was. When you walking a pit bull don’t nobody bother you. You come down the street and everybody like, Ho, shit! Me and Grover we had this cemetery we used to go to, because they had grass over there. And so this one night we back behind the church, and I’m drunk, as usual, and I look at Grover, and Grover look back at me, and all of a sudden he say, ‘Why you killing yourself, Darlene?’ I swear to God! I know it was just in my mind. But still, it the truth. Out of the mouth of a dog! Next day, I went to the doctor, and the doctor sent me over to Sunbeam House, and next thing I know they’re admitting me. Didn’t even let me go home first. Put me right into a room to detox. Then, when I had got myself clean, the depression hit me. Like it was just waiting for me to get off the smack and the alcohol so it could fuck me up good. Excuse my language, Ms. Neuman. I was in Sunbeam House for three months. That was two years ago. And here I am again. Things have been a little hard lately, financial problems, emotional problems. My life getting better, but it ain’t getting any easier. I just need to keep working my program in terms of my addictions and keep taking my medications in terms of my illness. One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain’t something you just get off of. You can’t get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though. That’s all I have. Thanks for listening. Peace.”
It didn’t surprise Leonard that Darlene was religious. People without hope often were. But Darlene didn’t seem weak, credulous, or stupid. Though she often referred to her “Higher Power,” and sometimes to “my Higher Power that I choose to call God,” she seemed remarkably rational, intelligent, and nonjudgmental. When Leonard was speaking to the group, unfurling the long, tangled loop of his bullshit, he often glanced up to see Darlene listening encouragingly, as though what he was saying wasn’t bullshit, or as though, even if it was, Darlene understood his need to say it, to get it out of his system so that he could discover something true and meaningful about himself. Most of the patients with substance abuse problems had picked up the religious inclination of 12-step programs. Wendy Neuman looked like a secular humanist if Leonard ever saw one, but she never tipped her hand one way or another, as was surely right. It was clear that everybody on the unit was barely hanging on. No one wanted to say or do anything that might hinder someone’s recovery. In this way the unit was very unlike the world outside, and morally superior to it.
To believe in God wasn’t in Leonard’s power, however. The irrationality of religious faith had been obvious to him long before reading Nietzsche had confirmed his suppositions. The only religious studies he’d taken was an oversubscribed survey course called Introduction to Eastern Religion. Leonard couldn’t remember why he’d signed up. It was the fall semester following his diagnosis the previous spring and he was taking things slow. He sat in the back of the packed lecture hall, did at least half of the reading, and showed up for section but never said anything. What