The Opposite of Dusk

Ron Riekki

There’s a knock on my door. No one ever knocks on my door. Ever. I stop what I’m doing. What I’m doing is progress notes. Endless progress notes. My brother’s a cop and I asked him what the job’s like and he said, “Endless paperwork.” My sister’s an EMT and she told me that the job is “basically more paperwork than anything.” And I’m a therapist and a quarter of my time is spent with patients and three-quarters of my time is writing notes about my patients.

     “It’s open,” I say. It’s not, but for some reason that came out.

     There’s another knock. I guess they didn’t hear me. I go to the door, open it.

     “Hey.”

     “Hey.”

     “Can I come in?”

     “Sure.”

     It’s Don. When I met him, I thought he said Dom, so he told me, ‘Don, like the opposite of dusk.’ Whenever I see him, I think of the opposite of dusk.

     “Can I close this?” he says.

     I’m assuming it’s about a patient. He does couple therapy and individual. Me too.  Sometimes I send him clients from my couple’s therapy and he takes them for individual. I can’t see them for both individual and couple therapy at the same time. It’s a rule.

     He closes the door.

     “You have a nice view.”

     “Same one as you.”

     “Except I’m on the factory side.”

     “You can see Canada,” I say.

     “Through the smog.”

     “That’s how Detroit is.”

     “I know. I live in the smog.”

     “Where are you?”

     “I’m by the bridge.”

     “Which?”

     “Ambassador.”

     “You live by the Ambassador?”

     “Not far.”

     “I heard it’s polluted as hell over there.”

     “Canada must hate us. Most polluted part of all of Michigan and we put it as close to Canada as possible. And right by the bridge, so you gotta drive straight into the carbon monoxide when you enter.”

     “You ever notice how Detroit’s always like five degrees warmer than all the other cities around us?”

     He nods, sees my computer. “Progress notes?”

     I nod.

     “How you handling the job?” he says.

     “Oh, I’m fine. I don’t have that many clients.”

     “No?”

     “No, I don’t wanna be—I gotta be in a good mood to counsel, so I just take just the right amount.”

     “How many?”

     “Clients?”

     “Yeah.”

     “I don’t know. Twenty-five. Twenty-eight. Eighteen. It shifts all over the place.  People quit, join back up again. It’s chaos. People ask me how much I make and I’m like, ‘I don’t know. It changes week to week.’”

     “I got thirty.”

     “Clients?”

     “Yeah.”

     “That’s a lot.”

     “I do substance abuse. We’re overwhelmed.”

     “I heard that.”

     “The cannabis dispensaries make it so we’re nonstop with cannabis use disorder, but it’s hard because, you know, it’s hard to know when it’s a disorder and when it’s not, you know?”

     I nod.

     “And we’re getting hit hard with AUD right now too. Ever since the pandemic.”

     “I heard that too.”

     “It makes me wanna drink.”

     I laugh.

     Outside the window, you can tell the factories are going full tilt. I can’t see the chimneys, but that’s not clouds out there. That’s fine particle matter. I still remember the word hexafluoropropylene from a paper I had to give for a presentation in grad school. About social justice and the environment. I thought the word sounded like a magic spell. It even begins with hex. A sort of abracadabra meets hydrocarbons. I had to quit researching climate change because it was giving me panic attacks.

     “No,” Don says, “It really makes me want to drink.”

     I look from the clouds to Don. His eyes are cloudy. It’s like his eyes are smogged. I wonder if he’s been drinking.

     “You have a hard job,” I say.

     “You do trauma,” he says, “That’s not easy.”

     “Substance abuse is trauma,” I say.

     “That’s true,” he says.

     There’s a sun out there somewhere but I can’t see it. For some reason, I want to find it, but it’s buried alive.

     “You know,” he says, “I went to grad school, ‘cause I was an alcoholic before. I started drinking in undergrad. It was undergrad that kicked in my alcohol use. And then I graduated, got sober, and it wasn’t easy to get sober, not at all, but I got sober, after I lost my wife from it, and I don’t mean to just drop all this on you.”

     “No, go ahead.”

     “I figure if I can come to anybody, it’d be a therapist.”

     “Are you seeing a therapist?”

     “No,” Don says, “No, I can’t.”

     “What do you mean you can’t?”

     “Well, I don’t got—we don’t got insurance. They didn’t give you insurance, did they?”

     “No.”

     “It’s beautiful. We’re in health care and we got no insurance. It’s just beautiful how corporations work nowadays.”

     “You could go out of pocket.”

     “Student loans. That’s why I got thirty clients. They put you in serious debt in grad school. Then you get out and gotta work like a beast to survive.”

     “It’s sounds like a therapist could help though. There’s sliding scale. And you could do it short-term even. You know short-term therapy can be helpful.”

     “I know all the therapists. Who’m I gonna go to? I’d have to do a hell of a commute.”

     “You could do telehealth.”

     “Look,” Don says, “Can I just talk with you?”

     “Well, yeah, we’re talking now.”

     “No, I mean, for real.”

    “We’re talking for real.”

    “But I mean, like, a therapist.”

     “You mean have me be your therapist?”

     “I mean, it’d be short-term.”

     “I mean, you’d have to go through the boss and get that approved, but they’re not going to approve that, because I know you. Well.”

     “Well, then how about we don’t tell the boss?”

     “That I’d be your therapist?”

     “I really need someone to talk to.”

     “I get that. I do. I just can’t do that.”

     “I’m just having a bit of a struggle right now in that I need this job, but also I’m drinking. Again.”

     “How many? How many drinks?”

     “A lot.”

     “How many?”

     “Per week?”

     “How many? Yeah, like, per week?”

     “Thirty.”

     I look at the river below. They have us on a river. I love that river. I see beer cans in it all the time. And cigarette butts. And cannabis vape pens. And I’ll stand by the river and think of all these people needing to turn to alcohol and nicotine and cannabis when they’re standing right there on this gorgeous shore that’s so peaceful and I’ll always think to myself: ‘Who would want to change that feeling of peace inside when you’re right by water?’ But they do. And then just toss it into the water that they’re standing there enjoying. It feels a bit like kissing someone and then slapping them in the face when you’re done. It makes no sense.

     “I can’t stop,” he says, “It started in grad school.”

     “Drinking?”

     “Getting my MSW. I was focusing on substance abuse and I started drinking. At the same time.”

     “Why?”

     “It was—I don’t know. It was cancel culture. I’m a white guy. I was the only white guy in the class. I stood out. I couldn’t say things right. I had anxiety. I had no social work background.  I was aviation for undergrad and then I saw Flight, the Denzel Washington movie, about the guy who—”

     “I seen it.”

     “Yeah, where he’s—the drinking. And I saw that realized I can’t be a pilot. But I can help people to be pilots and I just switched everything. I mean, it was too late. I was graduating, but I applied for Social Work and I got in and I got into class and it was all women. Completely. Who had minors in Women’s Studies. And I just said everything wrong, even when I was trying to agree with them.”

     “I mean, you’re gonna have problems trying to convince people how hard you have it as a white male,” I say, laughing.

      “No, I get it, but that’s the problem. Who do I talk to? I’m not allowed to talk about not fitting in and I’m sure the hell not going to tell my faculty advisor that I’m drinking again when I’m specializing in substance use disorders and, here’s the thing, I’d go to class drunk. At the end. I was going to class drunk. Not wasted. But buzzing and no one knew. Not even the teachers. Because, to be honest, the prof I had for final semester, for my main class in Advanced Methodologies in Addiction Clinical Studies was someone who’d never worked with patients in her life. She was admin. She was on the admin side. And I’d be in class and people were saying all these textbook answers. I mean, answers straight out of the book, but I’d been volunteering for a MAT team in Detroit for opioid addiction and none of the stuff they were saying works with those clients.”

     “So, you started drinking?”

     Don looks at his shoes. It’s like he’s had those shoes since he was seventeen. I wonder if maybe it’s true. Maybe he just never wanted to let them go.

     “I have to report if a therapist isn’t able to function in their job,” I say.

     “That’d kill me.”

     “Look, Kelly’s good. Our boss is good. She understands SUD and she understands a lot of us are either coming from trauma backgrounds or substance use backgrounds or both, so she’s going to understand. Just take a break and take care of yourself.”

     “Will you be my counselor?”

     “No.”

     “But you’re good.”

     “Well, thank you.”

     “But you are.”

     “Why am I so good?”

     “You don’t do everything by the book. Your clients talk about you in my sessions. They tell me you curse and make inappropriate jokes and that you care.  Greatly.”

     “I don’t make inappropriate jokes.”

     “Didn’t you make a fart joke?”

    “No.”

     “With Carson. The tall guy. Carson. He said you made a fart joke and it was hilarious.”

     “Oh, it wasn’t a fart joke. It was a joke.”

     “About farting.”

     “I didn’t say the word ‘fart.’ I hate that word.”

     “Whatever, a feces joke. Whatever. The point is I want someone who’s real that I can talk to.”

     “Then get a real counselor. Get someone who’s not working with you currently in an office right next to yours,” I say, laughing.

     “It is ridiculous.”

     “That you’re drinking while doing substance use counseling?”

     “I’m an idiot.”

     “You’re a human. It’s so incredibly human.” I stand up, go over to him. “I also heard you’re an incredible counselor. My clients talk about you too.”

     “Saying what?”

     “That you understand addiction like you’re in the Harvard Neuroscience Department.  That you have eighty books in your office with titles like The History of Addiction and they can tell you’ve read every one of ‘em. And, even better, they say you care too.”

     “I try.”

     “Get sober. Again. It’ll teach you so many things that are going to be helpful for your clients. That’s the wonderful thing. Your getting sober is going to help so many people.”

     “Are you going to tell Kelly?”

     “Let’s go talk to her right now.”

    “Now?”

    “You ever have a client where you’re trying to get him into A.A.? Where you’re telling him, ‘Let’s make the call right now’ and then the client says they want to do it later, when they get home, and you know they’re not going to call when they get home, so you’re just crossing your fingers like crazy in your mind hoping that they’ll just make the stupid call in your office and get them on the way to healing right away.”

     He stands up. We go out into the hallway. I have no idea what’s going to happen.  I work with too many clients. It’s infinity. It’s chaos. I have clients who come in using meth and alcohol and MDMA and mushrooms on a daily basis where they’ve lost their job and family and they get sober and get their job back and get their family back and it’s like this incredible miracle happens seemingly so easily, not seeing all the hard-core struggle the person went through in the 167 hours of the week that I didn’t see him. Then I have a client come in where he just has a cannabis use disorder. That’s it. But he can’t quit. I mean, no way in hell can he quit. And, five weeks in, he drives high, really high, gets in a head-on car accident, comes back after incarceration, and he’s smoking more cannabis than ever. Nothing makes sense. I have no ability to predict what’s going to happen. I tell Don this while we’re sitting in the waiting room to talk with Kelly.

     He says, “I know.”

© Variant Literature Inc 2023