Between Nights

by Marguerite Alley

Lionel gets out of the hospital and then we’re back on the tour bus, midsize venues abounding. Hassan proposes that we cover an Amy Winehouse song; I tell him I don’t think he has the range. He laughs, because laughing is what he does now. No one else has much to say. 

The three of us spend our nights together inhabiting king-size hotel beds, the doors to the en suites firmly shut. Lately, I lie awake and listen to Lionel’s breathing, counting the inhales. Sometimes I position myself strategically so I can casually wrap a hand around his wrist, feel the pull of a pulse beneath his skin. I camouflage this action as one done in my sleep.

I bought the Naloxone injector pen in a Walgreens in Baltimore between the end of a sound check and the beginning of a show. I understood, more or less, that in the event of The Worst, I would have to jam it into Lionel’s thigh and hope for The Best. There was some chemical method by which the Naloxone molecules bonded to the opioids, reversing the effects of an overdose. Breath would roar back into stilled lungs. The dead would never have to die.

The thing about saving a life is that, afterward, you own some piece of it. I try to explain this to Lionel while keeping one eye on the bathroom door. )

I think there is a version of this story wherein Lionel goes to rehab or some such thing and gets clean and lives a long, prosperous life that he owes to me and he knows it. He names his firstborn daughter after me and I become her benevolent godmother, a messianic figure in the background, graced with life-giving powers. I ask him to consider the effect all this has on me, the weight of the responsibility I feel. 

It’s not that simple, Lionel tells me, and excuses himself to the restroom.

In the hospital they’d offered him some literature on addiction treatment programs, which he’d taken with him upon discharge. When I asked him later about these programs he said he’d give it some thought once the tour was over. There was no need to interrupt things for his sake, he said. 

In Chicago, the three of us stop at Target to buy Hassan a thicker coat. At some point Lionel slips off into some corner of the store and I pin Hassan next to a shelf of gleaming shampoo bottles, stare him down until he laughs nervously. 

“Aren’t you worried about him?” I ask.

Hassan won’t look at me. I grab his forearm, run my thumb over the unmarred vein of his inner elbow. He is taking the easy way out, I know, and I envy him—he can’t confront the situation, and so he doesn’t.

That night the three of us don’t have sex, but rather Hassan and Lionel fall briskly into sleep. I stay up wondering if this distance between us bothers me, or whether it feels like a relief. 

There was one particularly wild night in New York where I’d ended up with rug burns on my ass that none of us noticed until the morning, engrossed as we were in our usual elaborate lovemaking. They’d laughed as I stood and craned my neck in front of the mirror. The red marks stung, but we had nothing for it. At the time I’d thought it was funny, too, but it was I alone who sat with the pain and now, with little effort, I can summon the memory of the raw ache. 

Hassan turns to me in sleep, lays his head against my collarbone with gentle precision. I can feel every minute motion of his breath, from its origin in his chest to its exit on my skin. My eyes are wide in the dark.

It pours incorrigibly through most of Montana, but eventual clear skies warrant a rest stop in Missoula. The sun sets behind the mountains, and I admire the saintly glow of waning light over a black ridge. A concrete bench invites us to sit and eat; Lionel offers me the rest of his fries. Hassan reads out an old Kerouac short story from the New Yorker that I can’t make much sense of, but the boys get a good laugh out of it and after a while I do too. We sit until the story’s finished, and then we sit a bit longer, and I take both of their hands and hold them close to my chest. My palms are sweating. I am holding too tight. 

In Tulsa, Lionel disappears after the show. Hassan says it is useless to go after him, but I make a cursory sweep of the block until the night feels thick. We don’t see him again until dawn, when he finds Hassan and I curled around each other in bed, awake and wide-eyed with fear. 

I can’t shadow every step he takes, ready to jump in and save him at the essential moment of collapse. I can’t insure my investment in him; even if I saved him again I’d own another piece of a life that is rapidly depleting its own value.

You guys really don’t need to worry so much, he tells us. I’m not a child. 

A definition of mother could be giver of life. You could say that. You don’t have to, but you could. 

I think Hassan is the truest artist among us. On stage, he is singular; he expands to fill the room. His disinterest in the mundane, his inconstancy, his distance from my practical concerns—all these breed creation. This is a trite thought. This is an excuse. It’s easier with him. I understand him; I know how to protect him. Lionel is never easy.

We’re not famous, not really, and it’s only famous people who survive addictions like this. Or at least they have a fighting chance—a network of enablers, a wide circle of people who will pour air back into their collapsing respiratory system. When you’re not famous, you just die, and I need Lionel to understand his fundamental irrelevance. I cannot be the only one standing between him and the precipice. 

I’m not asking you to be, he tells me. 

I ask him if next time he would prefer that I let him suffocate on the bathroom floor. 

There won’t be a next time, he says. 

During the long stretches of time spent on the bus, watching the empty western sky expand behind us, I teach him to knit. We find that there is some parity between modes of needle usage. I fall asleep with him in my arms, my chest like a weapon against his back. My warm skin, proof of life, a knife at his throat.

In Reno, we stay in a boxy hotel at the edge of the desert and swim in a pool that boils in the sun. We get interviewed by a local radio station and play a few songs crammed into their basement studio. I am living the dream, in a dream. But in nightmares the dead rise all around me, suck in a few shuddering breaths. The desert is a blank slate, a kind of oblivion, and I turn my head away from the window. 

In a new age restaurant around the corner from the station, Lionel breaks glasses liberally, sometimes with a charming, disdainful giggle. Hassan sweeps the shards under the table with an indifferent foot. If I apologize to the waitress, if I leave a bigger tip, I am shunned mercilessly by the boys. The fun, says Lionel, is all over. I think I may have found this funny at one point. 

I understand why Lionel is so nonchalant about his bathroom-floor death. He didn’t have to see it.

Hassan and I trade between us a massive Stephen King book, moderating our reading so that neither of us gets too far ahead. Sometimes, we read simultaneously, our heads bent together, waiting to turn the page until the other has finished. Lionel sleeps beside us, around us, but we read into the night. 

I dream of myself onstage, soaked in blood, all eyes in the room attached to my hands. I dream of myself in a bathroom, soaked in blood, but that is a different story. 

Lionel sleeps through the continental breakfast. Hassan and I read at the table, eating mini muffins with our free hands. I ask him, quietly, if he thinks Lionel will ever get clean. He turns the page, and I think he will pretend not to hear me. He cannot have this conversation, not if he intends to keep his head above the waves. But then he says that, maybe, it’s none of our business. That there’s only so much anyone can do for another. That death is a matter for the dead.

Here it is. Or some of it, at least. That night in the bathroom, with the Naloxone. Before that was the bedroom, though, and the three of us in it, all tangled up. And just as I was nodding off between the two of them, I felt Lionel slip from the bed and pad toward the en suite, felt the brief fluorescence of the light behind my closed lids before he shut the door behind him. I could have gone to sleep, but something ticked inside me, made me buzz as I waited for him to return. He didn’t, and then there came the sound of flesh meeting porcelain—a thick, wet thump where I would find his head had collided with the side of the tub when he fell sideways, unbreathing and still. 

I don’t need to tell the rest of this story. I don’t need to say whether his eyes were open or closed, whether I hesitated, whether I screamed for Hassan, whether I cried during or after. Whether I held his unmoving form against me, thinking he should be kept warm while we waited for an ambulance because the floor tiles were so cold. But he was warm, and already stirring sluggishly in my grip; I think I knew he would be fine then because molecules were bonding to molecules, respiration roaring inward, death pulling back like the tide. The dead never have to die. I did many things and I did nothing; many things happened, and none of them. I don’t remember and I’m not sure I understand. All there is is this: you break it, you buy it.

A year or so ago, the three of us attended a party hosted in an apartment in New York and at some point in the evening, Hassan and I were elected to make a booze run. It was an unpopular job, given the frigidity of the weather, and we linked arms as we trotted down to the sidewalk. From above us came a shout, and we looked up to see Lionel out on the fire escape waving down at us. No coat, his smile wide, one arm raised high above his head as though in triumph. 

“I love you both,” he called down to us. Breathless.

Published December 13th, 2020