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“Well, get dressed. I’ll make some breakfast and we can go.”
Huntington Hospital
Mount Rainier rises ten thousand feet from its base to the heavens. Its massive cap of snow and ice flows contains as much frozen water as the twelve other Cascade volcanoes combined. Each year, ten thousand people try to test their limits by scaling the massive peak. About half will not succeed.
The climbers with their ropes and crampons and supplemental oxygen tanks fascinated Paul. How does one prepare for an adventure so complete that he might never return? If a climber returns, he comes back internally changed, with his limitations and boundaries forever shifted, and yet outwardly he is entirely the same.
From the outside, The Huntington Hospital for Alcoholism and Addiction Treatment looked like a small college or a country day school. Set on a vast landscape of rolling hills, the defining features of its campus were a large white building that looked like a farm house and a cozy white chapel with a large steeple. Once you got inside, however, it looked more like what it was—a hospital. There was a reception with a gray institutional tile floor, a small seating area with the familiar collection of waiting room magazines, and a sliding-glass widow dividing the staff from the visitors. During Sara’s cancer treatment, Paul had developed a strange relationship with hospitals—a mix of distaste and relaxed familiarity.
“I’m here to see Ian Finnerty,” he told the receptionist.
“Just a moment,” she said. She flipped through a tabbed binder under F, put her finger on his name, and then walked to the back of the room. Next, Paul heard her voice over the hospital speakers.
“Ian F., Ian F., please come to reception. You have a visitor. Ian F., Ian F.”
Paul sat down in one of the chairs to wait. He was holding a gift for Ian. Flowers had seemed inappropriate, but he wanted to bring something. He had settled on a small potted plant, a Venus fly trap. He sat up straight as he waited, and his legs shook. He was aware of his physical presence in the chair and wanted to seat himself so that he would project the right image when Ian first saw him. He was shuffling in his seat, trying to find the best comfortable pose, when the door swung open. There it was, the face that had existed every day in his imagination, now in front of him in real physical form. Ian’s eyes were bright and alert, and he was taller than Paul had remembered. He wasn’t hanging his head anymore.
“Hi,” Ian said. He smiled broadly, revealing the little gap in his front teeth.
Paul’s pupils dilated. “You look great,” he said. “Here.” He thrust the plant at Ian.
“What is it?”
“I brought you something. It’s….”
Ian raised one eyebrow. “You brought me a fly-eating plant?”
“I was looking at the plants in the shop and I thought you might like one that actually does something. I thought it might be more interesting for you.”
Ian held it up at eye level and looked at it from all angles. “Does it have a name?”
“It’s a plant.”
“I think I’ll call it ‘Fido’. Come on, Fido! Let’s go to my room. I’ll show your new home.”
They went through the swinging doors and down another antiseptic hallway. Ian greeted everyone he passed by name. “Hi, Heather. Hi, Joe. This is my friend, Paul.” My friend.
“Wow, you know everyone,” Paul said.
“There’s something about being the same kind of freak that tends to bring people together.”
“Hmm. Maybe, but I think it’s you.”
“Oh, I have a joke,” Ian said. “Want to hear my joke?”
“Sure.”
“An Irishman walks into a bar…. Do you like it so far?”
“I think I’ve heard this story.”
“So this Irishman goes into the bar, and every night he orders three glasses of whiskey. The bartender asks, ‘Why do you always ge
t three glasses?’ The guy says, ‘I get one for me and two for my brothers in America’. So one night he comes in and he only orders two drinks. The bartender says, ‘I’m sorry about the loss of your brother’. And the Irishman says, ‘Oh no, my brothers are fine. It’s just that I quit drinking’.”
They arrived at the elevator, and Ian pushed the button. “It’s an alcoholism joke,” he said. “I heard that one in group.” They looked up at the lights over the elevator door. “I like group. People tell their horror stories, and you listen to them one after the other and you say, ‘Well, at least I never did that’. Makes you feel better about yourself.”
The up arrow illuminated with a ding, and the elevator doors slid open. Once they had stepped inside, Ian said, “There was this one guy, in group, he was staying in all these shit-bag hotels. He said, ‘Happiness was checking into a hotel and not finding pubic hair on the bar of soap’.”
