ABATE

(to put an end to)

§

 

Somehow the reality of this room is not what you’d expected.  You’d expected things to be painted in bright, welcoming colors, giving off some false appearance of cheer.  Not this wash of icy grays and blues.  You’d expected fluorescent lighting and wide-open windows, but it’s all drawn curtains and the lights are turned off.  The air smells faintly musty, and the temperature is that temperature where your body doesn’t notice that there’s any air in the room at all.

It is the kind of place where you put someone when you want to forget about them.

 

There is a chair sitting next to the bed, just a plain thing made of metal and brown plastic, and you find it horribly depressing.  Perhaps it’s because you know you’re one of the few people  to bother sitting it besides the ones who work in this awful place.  You wish you would have come sooner, but you can barely handle being here now.

 

He is lying on his back on the bed, and it doesn’t seem as if the difference between asleep and awake means anything anymore.  His blue eyes are open and looking at you, but his gaze seems vacant and lost, as though he’s looking through you.  His hair looks as though it hasn’t been washed in days, and it’s clear that he hasn’t shaved in ages.  His face is pale and gaunt, eerily reminiscent of what CC looked like when cocaine was his primary food group.

 

You watch him for a moment, trying to imagine the demons in his mind, trying to figure out what derailed trains of thought have led him to wherever it is he’s finally landed.

 

You sit heavily in the chair and rest your elbows on your knees, then prop your head on your hands so the only thing in your field of vision is the floor.  Somehow the inside of your head seems very loud all of a sudden.

 

“We should have seen this coming,” you say softly to the floor.  There is no response and you draw a shuddering breath. 

 

You force your head up and again look at Bret’s motionless form on the bed.  His eyes are still pointed in your direction, and you find that even now you can’t hold his gaze and instead you look around the room some more.

 

There isn’t much to see.  On the bedside table is a lamp that’s turned off and a phone that you know has never rung.  There is also a cup of water that looks like it hasn’t been touched, and next to it an empty paper cup.  Your stomach twists and you wonder what they’re pumping him full of.  Is it helping him, or has it turned him into what you see before you today?

 

The room makes you want to cry.  It seems so cold and impersonal, nothing here to show whom its inhabitant is.  You bite back the urge to run out of the room and find someone who’s in charge, demand that they do something, anything to make the room look more like a place where he should be. 

 

You take a few deep breaths and try to deal with the onslaught of conflicting emotions.  The man lying in the bed is someone that you love intensely, loathe fiercely, and fear terribly.  The emotions you’ve felt for him over the years you’ve known him were contradictory at best, but they were always vehement.  A few months ago, you’d been certain that you hated him more than you loved him, but seeing him here like this changed the playing field to an alarming extent.  He was no longer the powerful front man who could change the world with his cocky smile, no longer the man who held the key to your entire life.  Here he was, helpless and alone, reduced to such a basic state that it almost embarrassed you to see him like this.  You want to reach out and touch his face, but the irrational fear that he will break stops you.

 

“We should have seen this coming,” you say again. “All of the signs were there.  The sleepless nights, the strange behavior, the sudden outbursts… we just didn’t pay attention.  We should have.”  Your voice nearly cracks.  “We could have stopped this.”  And now you’re blinking back tears, looking back in your mind to a time when everything was so very different.  You’d give anything to turn back the clock.

 

You feel a hand on your shoulder, but do not turn around.  You know that it is Smoothie standing behind you.  You hadn’t seen him in nearly as long as it’s been since you’ve seen Bret, but you’ve stayed in contact.  It is Smoothie who has been coming to see Bret regularly, and it is he who finally convinced you to do the same.  For nearly three months, you’d refused, vacillating between hating him too much to want to see him and loving him too much to handle seeing him like this.  And even your greatest fears of what this day would bring seemed pleasant in the face of the reality of what has become of Bret.

 

“I don’t know why I didn’t come sooner,” you say quietly. “I should have.”

 

“It’s understandable that you didn’t,” Smoothie says.  His voice is strong and reassuring, and like always, he knows just what words need to be spoken.  “No one expected you to.  I certainly didn’t.  I know this isn’t easy, but you’re here now.”

 

What he says is true, even if he has no idea just how true parts of it are.  You nod slightly, feeling guilty for talking as though Bret isn’t even in the room.  You glance at his face again, see his eyes meet yours, but still he says nothing.  You are taken aback by how afraid he looks.

 

“Have you been in to see him at all?” Smoothie asks haltingly.

 

You’re certain that he already knows the answer.  If he’d thought you’d been here before, he wouldn’t have felt the need to drive out here and meet you beforehand.  There wouldn’t have been that hint of uncertainty in his voice when he’d explained that this all might be hard to grasp.  Even though it was Smoothie who had thought it was a good idea that you visit, it was clear that he also didn’t think you could do it alone.  You shake your head, still not looking at him.

 

“No,” you say.  You clear your throat nervously.  “Is it okay to…” you begin hesitantly, motioning towards Bret.

 

Smoothie nods solemnly.  “It’s fine,” he says, and those two syllables go through you like knives.  He hesitates.  “You don’t have to talk about this, you know.”

 

You look up at him.  “Yes, I do,” you say.  “I haven’t… the last time I saw him was the night we admitted him.”  You haven’t breathed a word about it since it happened eleven weeks ago.

 

“I should have been there,” Smoothie says.  You can see in his eyes that he hasn’t forgiven himself for making you go through this alone.

 

You wave the idea off.  “It wasn’t your fault.  If it was anyone’s fault, it was ours.”  Before he can argue, you continue, again focusing on the floor.  “I still don’t really know what happened that night.  I play it over and over in my mind, and it’s all so… it’s all so crazy that I think that I’ve forgotten some important part of it, or something.”  Just talking about it is all it takes, and you’re back to the night that everything finally snapped.  You can still smell the whiskey on Bret’s breath, see the wild instability in his eyes.  “He just came into the room… I didn’t even know he was in town, Smoothie.”

 

Smoothie nods sympathetically.  He doesn’t seem to know what to say.

 

“He just came in, and he was screaming, and at first it was just words that didn’t make any sense,” you continue, trying not to cry.  “He wouldn’t let me go anywhere near him, he was looking at me like he didn’t know who I was.  It killed me.  I couldn’t do anything to stop it.  I couldn’t help… he wouldn’t let me help him.”

 

“He’s sick,” Smoothie interjects.  “It isn’t your fault.”

 

But it is your fault, at least partially, and no one seems to understand that.  “His hands were bleeding,” you continue, rather than talking about the blame.  “I didn’t know what had happened, it looked as though he’d been punching walls for the entire day.  And he was just… I don’t even know how to describe it.  It was like he was possessed.”  You pause to draw a breath.  “He was just… shaking, and crying, but crying like he didn’t know he was crying, and words were coming out, but they didn’t go together.” 

 

You close your eyes tightly against the memory, but it doesn’t work.  You can still see him exactly as he looked that night, from the moment that he barged in unexpectedly until the moment when the ambulance drove away.  You had been staying in a hotel in Hollywood, for no reason beyond a desperate need to not be at home, and the feeling that home was a concept lost a long time ago.  No one had known you were there, and you’d wanted it that way.  Bret was the last person you’d expected to see that night.  Only really, you didn’t see Bret that night at all.  You didn’t know who or what you’d seen, but it wasn’t him.  Not the him you’d always known.  He didn’t even look like himself when he’d come flying through the door, his hair dirty and unkempt, his eyes wild, his face scratched and bleeding.  His condition was so shocking that you hadn’t even had time to contemplate just how he’d known where you were, much less gotten into your room, but now you vaguely wondered how he’d maintained the presence of mind to find out which room was yours.

 

Up until that night, you’d barely seen him for over two weeks.  Once the tour had ended, the four of you had virtually run away from each other, eager to get away from all of the emotions and responsibilities and fears, not realizing that those things would follow you no matter what.  You hadn’t really been worried about him, or if you had been, it had played second fiddle to everything else.  There was just so much going on that you’d ignored all of the signs, signs that in retrospect paved a very clear path to where you were standing right now.

 

Things hadn’t been right for a long time.  Maybe if you had still been out on the road, in constant contact, it would have been more noticeable.  Or if you hadn’t had your head so far up your ass, is more like it.  Bret had always been touchy, always been flighty, but there were moments when you had been flat-out stunned by his actions.  More than once you’d heard him talking when there was no one for him to be talking to.  He’d always have this look on his face like he thought something was about to fall out of the sky.  Conversations with him were unpredictable and jumpy, and his emotions would vacillate wildly, and for no justifiable reason.

 

The worst part wasn’t that you couldn’t find an explanation for his behavior, but that you’d never even bothered to try.

 

The last time you saw him before the night he’d busted into your hotel room should have been the night you’d called for help, unquestionably.  You still don’t know why you didn’t. 

 

You’d gone to his house, although the reason that you did escapes you now.  When you’d gotten there, the front door was hanging open, halfway off the hinges, and for just a moment, you thought that someone had broken in.  But then you’d heard the music playing.  Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got (Til It’s Gone)” at an ear-shattering volume.

 

The entire place had been trashed.  Overturned furniture, broken bottles, and various articles of clothing covered the floor.  You suppose that maybe at the time you’d let yourself believe you were just witnessing the aftermath of a roaring party.

 

You were just turning around to exit the kitchen when suddenly he was in front of you, just inches from your face, his expression wild.  He was wearing a purple bandana that was doing little to hold his hair in place, and he had his white tour coat on over his clothes.  Before you had a chance to speak or even think, his hands were on your shoulders and he was shaking you.

 

“It should have been me, Bob,” he says, his voice one long high-pitched note of desperation.  “It should have fucking been me!”

 

You’d said his name, tried to say more, but he wasn’t having any of it.  He just kept screaming the same thing over and over again, adding other, equally nonsensical sentiments here and there.  At one point, he had leaned in so that your noses were practically touching and hissed, “There are no fucking answers, you know,” and you were amazed at how snakelike he seemed.  And then he’d pushed you so hard that you’d stumbled backwards into the table behind you.

 

“You might think that this all started with me,” he’d said in a voice that had sounded so completely insane that it had actually frightened you.  “But we are all the same thing, three points,” here he raised three fingers in the air, “of the same star,” he lowered the fingers one by one, “and every… point… hurts.”   And then he’d turned and run out of the kitchen, leaving you standing there wondering what the hell drugs he was on.

 

Suddenly you feel a hand against the small of your back and you are jarred out of your reverie.  “You couldn’t have expected him to say anything clear,” Smoothie says gently.  “He was… things must have been really bad by then.”

 

You shake your head vehemently with your head still down and your eyes still closed.  “Eventually it started to make sense,” you say.  “Well, not make sense… but I could understand what he was saying.”  You force yourself to look up at Smoothie’s face.  “He kept… god, Smoothie, he kept saying, ‘Rikki’s dead.  I can’t believe Rikki’s dead’.”

 

You can see that Smoothie is clearly taken aback by what you’ve just told him.  Up until now, you’d spared him the details of what had happened that night, not wanting to cause any pain where it wasn’t deserved.  But now, sitting here next to what was left of Bret, the words just spilled out on top of one another.  You hadn’t realized how badly you’d needed to get them out to someone.

 

“I tried to tell him… well, you know,” you say, unable to form a coherent thought.  “He just… I don’t know, it was like he didn’t even know I was there.  He just kept talking about Rikki being dead, about how he’d… slit his wrists…”  You trail off.  The idea is too painful to bear.

 

Smoothie puts his hand back on your shoulder.  “He’s sick, Bob,” he repeats.  “He didn’t know what he was saying.  It’s a wonder he made even as little sense as he did.”  You know the words are supposed to be reassuring, but what’s reassuring about one of your closest friends being crazy?  It was like someone had locked Bret in a room that you couldn’t get into.  You could see in but you didn’t know if he could see out, and there was just no way of getting to him.  You clench and unclench your fists, your jaw. 

 

“If I’d just paid attention,” you insist, “if I’d just listened to him, talked to him… something…”  You stand up, shaking his hand from your shoulder.

 

Smoothie shakes his head sadly.  “This isn’t anyone’s fault,” he tells you. 

 

“Yes, it is,” you say softly. 

 

“Bob,” Smoothie says, his voice strained, “I don’t know what happened a few months ago.  I don’t need to know.  That’s between you guys.  But I do know that Bret’s been sick for a long time.  Maybe whatever was going on coincided with him getting sicker, but Bob, you have to believe me.  It would have happened anyway.  It was inevitable.”

 

You want to believe him, but you don’t.  Not that it matters.  You can’t go back and do things differently to find out what would have happened.

 

There’s a tentative knock on the door and you glance at Smoothie nervously.  “Do you think it’s okay to…?”

 

Smoothie nods, already reaching for the doorknob.  “It’s fine,” he assures you.

 

You watch the last visitor as he crosses the floor, stopping beside you.  You haven’t seen each other since this had all happened, both of you too caught up in your private guilts and miseries to handle the outside world at all, much less each other.  But seeing him now makes you forget how fucked up everything really is, and unable to stop yourself, you wrap your long arms tightly around him and pull him against you.  Never mind that maybe this isn’t the time or the place for such a show of affection.  Never mind if it isn’t what you’re supposed to do.

 

For a moment, he stiffens, but then you feel him return the embrace, and for a few long moments, the two of you just stay still, holding each other while Smoothie looks on passively.  When you finally break the hug, you can feel the tears in your eyes and see them in those of your friend, who turns to Smoothie.

 

“It’s good to see you, Smoothie.  Even if it does have to be like this.”

 

Smoothie smiles sadly.  “It’s good to see you, too, Rikki.”

 

Rikki turns to look down at Bret and a moment of uncomfortable silence passes.  “How is he?” he finally asks, his voice barely above a whisper.

 

“We don’t know,” you admit. 

 

“He… he really doesn’t know we’re here?”

 

You shake your head sadly.  “No.”  You can’t help but stare at him.  The only man you’ve ever truly loved, and the only other person in the world who knew what had happened the night that Bret had been sent to the hospital. 

 

Rikki looks over at Smoothie imploringly.  “You’ve been coming to see him?” he asks. 

 

Smoothie nods.  “Every weekend.”

 

“Does he…”  He clears his throat.  “Does he ever… talk to you?”

 

“He did in the beginning, sort of,” Smoothie replies.  “Nothing that ever made much \sense.”  He takes a breath.  “He’d often mention a diary.  A brown leather diary.”

 

Your eyebrows furrow.  “A diary?  What diary?” 

 

Rikki frowns.  “My diary from the last tour was brown leather,” he says.  He looks at you.  “But when… when all of this happened, I burned it.  I didn’t want to see it again.  Bret couldn’t have read it.”

 

“Of course not,” Smoothie agrees.  “He didn’t know what he was saying, Rikki.”

 

“Did he say anything else?” you ask. 

 

Smoothie shakes his head.  “Not really.  Nothing coherent.  And nothing at all for the past few weeks.”

 

A few moments pass in silence as the three of you look at Bret lying on the bed.  He hasn’t moved the entire time you’ve been here, and now his eyes stare vacantly off, not focused on anything.

 

Rikki takes a few halting steps toward the bed and crouches down next to it so that his face is level with Bret’s.  You can tell by the way his shoulders shake that he is crying, and you want to reach out to him, but you know that he needs to do this and you stay where you are, silent.  You watch as Rikki gently kisses Bret on the cheek, then finally straightens up and turns back to face you and Smoothie.  “It’s like he’s not even here,” he says in a choked voice.  You can’t imagine the pain he’s feeling.

 

“He’s not,” Smoothie says quietly.  The words are among the most final you’ve ever heard.

 

Just then, the door to the room swings open and a doctor in a white coat breezes into the room.  Rikki hurriedly wipes at his eyes and looks down at the floor again.  “I’m afraid visiting hours are over,” the doctor tells you.

 

You open your mouth to speak, but no sound comes out, and for once even Smoothie seems unsure of what to say.  It is Rikki who finally speaks.  “We’ll be back tomorrow,” he says.

 

The doctor’s expression softens.  “You’re welcome to do that,” he says.  “But you need to understand that he doesn’t know you’re here.  He never will.”

 

You watch Rikki’s face contort in pain.  “Are you saying… will he never leave this place?” he asks.  You close the distance between the two of you and put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently.

 

The doctor shifts his weight uncomfortably.  “I’m afraid not,” he replies, and you can tell that he wishes he had something more encouraging to tell you.  He watches the three of you for a moment to see if you have anything else to say, but no one speaks, and so he turns and walks back out of the room.

 

You look from Rikki to Smoothie and back.  The shock and sadness in the room is almost tangible.  You want to speak, but you know there is nothing to say.  It is Smoothie who finally makes a move for the door.  “We should go,” he says as he walks through the doorway, and then he is out of sight.

 

You look over at Rikki, who looks back at you with an expression more heartbreaking than any you’ve ever seen.  “You all right?” you ask lamely.

 

“No,” he says simply. 

 

“Me, neither.”

 

Another moment passes before he speaks again.  “What are we going to do, Bob?”

 

Your heart leaps into your throat.  Rikki has never asked you a question like this one, has never given you the power to answer like this.  You have never seen him look so lonely and small before.  “I don’t know,” you say finally.

 

He takes a final look at Bret before he, too, walks toward the door.  You follow him out of the room and close the door behind you, glancing only briefly through the small window at the motionless body in the bed.  When you turn, Rikki is standing in the middle of the long gray hallway, looking at you.

 

“Don’t leave me,” he whispers.  It is the most honest and childlike thing he has ever said to you.

 

You swallow hard.  “I won’t,” you promise, and then you follow him down the hallway, past the countless dismal gray rooms full of stories that will never be told, and out into the frightening unknown that is the rest of your lives.

 

Together.