Susan the Illusion

My memory of the night with Susan is like half an hourglass. But a few made-up details aren’t a problem. Not when you’re the way I am.

Susan didn’t like going to the Club on her nights off. So we would’ve found some other bar and hung out there. Got a table, ordered two rounds of drinks, taken turns going to the restroom to do the drugs. At the time, I still let her keep the drugs in her purse. We had a system: We ordered two rounds of drinks—who knew when you’d be able to get the waitress again? Never, maybe—and took turns at the drugs. We established a rhythm, and the bar tab always got split fifty-fifty. It was a pretty good system.

“You’re missing the bigger picture, Jack,” Susan might have said as we sat at our table. That was me, all right. Always missing the bigger picture. “We misplace trust in our unfaithful sensory perceptions. Tu comprends? Do you get it?”

I would’ve lit two cigarettes, given her one. This was back when bars still allowed smoking. These days, you can’t smoke inside anywhere. Not even here, where I am now. These days, nothing is the same.

Even here at Phil Dean’s place—where I’ve checked in for another couple months while I try and get things together—we have to smoke outside. Phil says it’s the law; he smokes more than anyone. He’s set two plastic chairs in a rough patch of grass out of earshot of the house. He sits in a chair and one of his residents in the other. Phil’s the type, knows what to say. But mostly just smokes and listens. He’s been sober twenty-two years. Since long before Susan and I ever met. If we ever did meet, that is

You’ll see what I mean.

Today I sit a plastic chair, but the other is empty. The smoke from my cigarette makes shapes as it drifts towards the clouds. The clouds make shapes too. They change so fast, those shapes the smoke and clouds make. You can’t believe how fast they change.

“Let me tell you a story,” Susan said, taking the cigarette from me. “S’il vous plaît. If it pleases you.”

Susan didn’t speak French. But she used these French expressions. Not even expressions, just little French words thrown in all over the place. She would define them. Explain what they meant. Translate.

“One day,” she said, “you were driving along the freeway…”

“Where?” 

“Who knows? Out on a test spin, maybe. In the market for something new.”

“I mean, where on the freeway?” I arranged myself, trying to get comfortable.

“Oh, it could’ve been anyplace, Jack. Knowing you. But let’s say the Two-eighty.”

“Okay.” I gripped the table and shifted. “We agree.”

“Fine.” She sipped through a straw, like she liked to. Her hair was dyed a shade of lavender and she wore copper bracelets. She heard copper’s properties were good for joint flexibility, freedom of movement.

“So, Susan…you say I’m driving.”

“You drove, Jack. This story is true. You aren’t inventing it.”

“Of course not.”

“You took your little spin,” she pursed her lips, “within what you thought was the speed limit, thinking you obeyed the rules of the road…”

“I’ve always tried to be a safe person.”

“When, all the sudden, WHAMMO!”

She slammed her palms on the table so her copper bracelets rattled. Shouted ‘WHAMMO!’ loud enough that people a couple tables away turned to look. This was Susan. It got quiet around us, until the hubbub returned.

“Whammo? Susan. What happens?”

“What happened, you mean.” The light caught her lavender hair and she smiled and wove into her story. “You got hit by an enormous truck, barreling right at you. You didn’t even see it coming.”

“Hit…by a truck? But I thought I was safe. You said so yourself.” As if she’d somehow betrayed me. “How could I not see it coming?”

“No, you said so yourself. I simply didn’t mount an argument. Reality is what it is, regardless of how we attempt to portray ourselves.”

“Maybe I missed a signal, or something.” I glanced in the direction of the waitress. “This is quite a scenario, Susan.”

“The word scenario suggests it’s made up.” She shrugged. “This is real, I keep telling you. You got lucky.” Her smile faded as she traced figure eights on the table, like a big rig’s wild spin into oncoming traffic. “Luck, Jack. Your accident was a few miles from Stanford University. The hospital there. Some of the finest doctors in the land! An ambulance ride away.”

“Guess I caught a break, on the Two-eighty, there.”

“Not so fast…wait until you hear this next part. Oh, just you wait. You got to Stanford Hospital. Fate spared you—but after a rather odd fashion.”

“Fate spared me after a rather odd fashion.” I took my time repeating the words.

“I’m glad you’re invested in all this.” She twisted a lavender strand around her thumb. “Very glad. See, the doctors couldn’t do anything…except sever your head.”

“They sever my head?”

“They severed it, Jack. From your mangled, ruined body.”

Severed. Mangled. Ruined. All words of French origin, I would later discover.

Beads of moisture condensed on my two drinks. Like they sweated out my situation, too. The waitress was with a group of young men, her back turned to me. She was tall and thin and her bra strap showed along her shoulder blade. I watched the men laugh and flirt with her. Susan’s purse was between her and me.

“They cut off your only worthwhile part, Jack. And they put it in a vat, full of chemicals and nutrients. All you are—even now—is a head, floating around in its vat.

“So,” she said. “Comment ça va?”

Life follows the usual routine here at Phil Dean’s place. Although little about life here is usual, or routine.

Robert checked in a couple weeks ago, fired up and set on beating heroin. His first night, he delivered his newcomer share in the upstairs dormitory. All us other residents sat on our single beds, after chore time. Held spellbound by his tale of narrow escape to America. He showed around his green card. The guys all had a quick look and passed it, but I took my time, feeling the plastic edges, examining the photograph behind the laminate. His name was different on the card, but he wanted us to call him Robert.

The next day he started getting down to business on Phil’s program. Before long, he was doing well…as well as any of us. It’s matter of perspective, I guess. He landed a job at a coffee shop. Mornings found him risen early and arrived at work on time. He hid his teeth when he smiled and served patrons their cafés. Their coffees. When Phil had Family Day, Robert’s wife and daughter showed up—the first time he’d seen them in eighteen months. They cheered as he pitched our softball game against another rehab. By the way, if ever you wish to witness a sporting contest showcasing spectacles of sheer athleticism coupled with displays of stunning physical grace? Check out a softball game between two rehabs. After leading our team to a second-place finish, Robert called his parents. They answered the phone, even knowing it was him. Robert’s life went in the right direction, until matters took their turn.

Somebody—another resident—noticed he’d been bringing his backpack with him into the bathroom. The implications were clear. Word got back to Phil, who asked Robert to take a drug test and confronted him during process group. Robert confessed. He’d been keeping dope and points in his backpack, shooting up in the toilet stall. Phil didn’t back off his policy; Robert had to leave. He showed up again a week or so later. But not to check back in.

His clothes were filthy and his eyes hollow and he didn’t care about hiding his teeth anymore. He asked around whether anybody would buy his shoes. The shoes he wore, the only pair he had. He needed money to score H. The guys started saying the next time he gets arrested, he’ll lose his green card. Get sent back to wherever he escaped from.

I would’ve stayed fixed in my seat and patted myself down around the upper body and legs, hoping to find everything where it was supposed to be. Downed the rest of my first cocktail and found my second on one side, Susan on the other.

The waitress faced away from me, attending to a woman sitting alone, taking her time deciding. Maybe the woman wanted someone to talk to until whomever she waited for finally arrived. Maybe that someone had gotten lost and not asked for directions. Didn’t foresee his companion not being there when he showed up long past the agreed-upon time. The woman nodded while the waitress explained. The waitress went to the bartender, who wore a blue-and-white tie and listened, filling a beer mug. Behind the bar a plate-glass window offered a view of the street. I considered Susan’s purse, the drugs inside, and started drumming my fingers on the table.

I was thinking.

“You are a head in a vat, mon ami!” She put a strand of her hair into her mouth. It dug into her cheek like a river cutting through a gorge, until she let it go. “Little more, my friend. And thus do we examine you, as truly you are.”

She kept at it, Susan did. “Wires stick out of your head like porcupine quills. The wires connect to buttons. The doctors push the buttons and it makes you see and hear and sensory experience all you imagine is real. Electrically speaking, of course.”

“Electrically speaking?”

“You know…our brains get electrical impulses from our eyes and ears and skin. You still have your impulses.” She scowled. “But they come from the doctors, gazing at you through your murky soup of chemicals. After they chopped off your head.”

I stopped drumming my fingers.

“All of this is just some fantasy.” She waved her arm, almost hitting one of the young men from the other table as he threaded past us towards the bar. “The Stanford doctors invent it for you, while they speculate as to what might happen when someone finds a way to bring you back into our world.

“If that day ever comes,” she said. “If.”

I sit in Phil Dean’s plastic chair, dreaming up a story about a story somebody dreamed up. Or am I…or did she?

Phil wanders out from the house and puts a hand on my shoulder and wants to know am I okay. He nods for a minute and stares at the street, the cars motoring past. After a while he asks if I’ve seen our version of a traveling shoe salesman. I shake my head and return to gazing at the clouds in the sky.

The clouds might not really be there. The sky, either.

A few characters find their way here. That much seems certain. There’s Frankie—his wife encouraged him to check in when he started spending too much time on his hobbies. His hobbies were crack cocaine and prostitutes. Now that Frankie’s here, he’s taken on new responsibility. He’s taken it upon himself to roust everyone when the fire alarm goes off. It always happens…somebody forgets his Pop Tarts in the toaster oven or leaves dirty clothes too close to the water heater in the basement laundry room. Frankie races around the house screaming, “Fire alarm! Fire alarm!” He has to scream, if anybody’s going to hear him over all the racket the fire alarm makes.

The other night, during House Meeting, the guys held a mock ceremony and presented Frankie with a toy plastic firefighter’s helmet. He grinned like a kid at Easter, holding it up to show the gang.

It was quite a gang.

Alex got the nickname Prime Time. He was a regular on a TV show. Not a star or anything, but still. During the show’s run, Alex made a few runs of his own. Cocaine runs. Multi-day benders. Multi-week, multi-month. The show got cancelled. So too did Alex. One morning, a highway patrol officer stopped him, and ventured a few friendly questions. She was interested to learn why he chose to exit the San Diego Freeway using an on-ramp, and while driving in reverse. The officer was patient as she explained these do not cancel each other out. Not in the eyes of the law. She then voiced her concern as to the peculiar nature of Alex’s passenger.

The passenger was Scottish. More to the point, the passenger was Scotch—a half-full bottle. The officer offered up some conjecture as to what might have become of the other half. Alex had a response to her questions—his response was to vomit and lapse into unconsciousness. A blanket response. The officer rightly concluded a field sobriety test would only prove a foregone conclusion. Instead, she gave Alex a ride to his destination. Of course, his destination was jail, thanks to the officer’s intercession. 

Soon thereafter, a discussion centered around Alex. Those involved included an attorney, a different kind of attorney, a prosecutor, and a judge. They reached an agreement, and thus Prime Time serves a suspended sentence and six months here at Phil Dean’s. Up in San Francisco…away from it all. The judge will consider how to proceed, once Alex completes his six months. If he completes them. Alex is always muttering about how he plans to bug out of this place. He doesn’t seem to feel six months here is an option.

Susan shook her wrist, bracelets jangling. The waitress turned, and you could see her bra strap from the new angle, too. On the wall behind her, an old-fashioned map had latitude-marking gridlines like bars on a cell.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “These doctors, the ones beaming signals through wires sticking out of my head in my chemical vat. They’re the reason I’m drunk and high in some bar? I would think they’d send me to a museum, or a library, or something. You’d think I’d be somewhere else, if it wasn’t up to me.”

“Maybe the doctors want you to be with somebody who can make you listen.”

“To a movie, at least. A dark film…what are those called?”

Susan rolled her eyes and moved her ice cubes around with her straw. I had finished my cocktails and wrestled with thoughts about that waitress, about the drugs in Susan’s purse. Music thumped, the keyboard-heavy tune by the Who. It had begun to rain and on the other side of the plate-glass window the street was black and glistening. A taxi schussed past, its roof light lit so you knew it was vacant.

“Or…wouldn’t the doctors enroll me in Stanford Medical School? Share all their knowledge, so I could invent a way to reattach myself.”

“Look,” she said. From the way she said it, I knew I was missing out on the bigger picture, again. “At long last are you aware of your true reality. How will you fix it?”

“You mean, the fact it’s not me who does the things I do.”

“I mean, don’t you know that you can discover what’s worth the most to you, now that you understand how much of you is lost?”

I thought about it. You bet I did. But at the time, there was nothing to come up with. The rest of it—that important piece—was still so far away.

“So…everything is an illusion? Even you, Susan?”

“Yes, Jack.” She closed her eyes and stirred her melting ice. “Especially me.”

That morning on the San Diego freeway was Alex’s third arrest for driving while intoxicated. Yet he doesn’t hold the all-time record at Phil’s. He doesn’t even hold the record for residents here right now. That honor belongs to Gene. 

Gene starred on his high school football team. Played so well, Bill Walsh recruited him for his college squad. But Walsh left to coach in the professional leagues, so Gene turned pro, too: professional burglary and methamphetamine manufacture. Cooked speed long before it became fashionable. He still bears scars from the quarter-sized holes the iodine crystals burned into his skin. One autumn Gene stayed up for a few days or weeks and decided to rob a bank. Upon returning home, he noticed unusual activity in the sky above. Helicopters, like butterflies around nectar. FBI, Sheriff’s Department, police.

Gene served five years in prison and got paroled with the condition his first six months outside be spent as a resident at Phil’s. Four months into it, Gene went to the store for a pint of ice cream. Instead he got a pint of bourbon. Borrowed a girlfriend’s car and took a little trip.

The next day, an alert officer of the Sonoma County PD observed Gene piloting his girlfriend’s vehicle in the wrong direction. With its roof on the pavement and wheels pointed skyward. Somehow, there were no injuries. Phil got a call and drove up to Sonoma to speak with individuals in the justice system there. Now Gene’s got six more months here at Phil’s, then he’ll learn whether his drive in Sonoma earns him a return to prison for the time left on his bank robbery case. Two-and-a-half years.

The girlfriend left him, of course.

“Before you make for the restroom,” Susan said, as if reading my mind. “Before you call your waitress. Imagine it—you don’t have to be in a vat. You can be anywhere you choose. Maybe there isn’t any vat. No Stanford University. There may not be an Earth! You might be an alien, floating through space on a long, long journey.”

“Sure,” I said, liking this new version of myself. “A being foreign to it all.”

“There isn’t much air on your spaceship,” she continued. “Or much else. So you go into a deep sleep. All your life is the dream you’re dreaming, until you arrive at your far-off destination.”

“Or…Susan…maybe I’m a caterpillar in a cocoon.”

“Yes! There are no limitations on what you are.”

The waitress appeared. I smiled at her without thinking and she showed me a little smile, too. As if we recognized each other. There was no telling how she’d known to stop at our table, and I had little more than an instant in which to decide.

It all might’ve lasted forever…it seemed I’d been given the chance. C’est la vie. But in those days? Asking me if I wanted to drink and do drugs was like asking the surf if it wanted to pound the shore. That’s all the surf does! Yet it takes eons to smash boulders into endless grains. Time required to make decisions gets measured in heartbeats. 

As for whatever became of Susan the Illusion? When I think about her enough—which I almost always do, here where I am today—it seems easy to recall those times we spent together. There was the one night…there would’ve been others, too. Me and Susan, we mostly got along pretty well. A few made-up details aren’t a problem. Isn’t that right? I guess the only piece I know for certain—what Susan taught me most of all—is that there really is a way to discover what’s worth the most to you.