Rachel Dorn

God’s Plan

I got indicted by the feds, you write to me in an Instagram message. You tell me you’re hoping for house arrest, but you’ll probably have to do some time.

It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to you, even longer since I’ve seen you. I think back to the December night two years ago when you sent me an Uber to your apartment by the river and we sat together on your living room floor, our faces illuminated by the glowing red light of your snake’s cage. Your wall was one big window, and outside the downtown skyline lights gleamed across the water. My eyes followed you as you got up and walked to your kitchen, plucked a stiff, white mouse from where it was thawing on the counter, and dangled it by its tail over the glass edge while Ghost, your snake, pretended not to see it. You told me he hadn’t been eating much lately and you weren’t sure why.

Time passed in silence while we waited to see if Ghost would make a move. When he finally did, it was in one fell swoop, shooting upward and unhinging his jaw, snatching and swallowing the dead thing whole. We watched the mouse’s body pass through his body.  Afterwards, we made out on your couch, your long hair smelling of tea tree oil, the TV droning on in the background. You led me to your bedroom, peeled off my shirt, my leggings, my underwear, our bodies pressing into each other. You tossed and turned all night and in the morning, you called me an Uber. A few months later, I got sick and didn’t get better.

We’d met each other a couple years before, when the world had just shut down and I wanted drugs. You handed me a pack of edibles in a parking lot and told me we should hang out sometime, flashing a smile that could turn anyone’s day around. Those weeks were filled with listlessness and uncertainty, in the world, of course, but in my own life too. I’d just ended a tumultuous, years-long relationship with a man I’d been living with and moved back in with my parents. You, too, had just gone through a breakup. We started texting often, talking on the phone late at night. At the time you were working as a counselor in a group home for men; on the side you modeled, on the side-side you sold drugs. You told me about all of it. You were charming, handsome, a little aloof in the way that a person who has something that everyone wants could afford to be.

Social distancing was the phrase in everyone’s mind that spring, the CDC told us that close contact was a risk, the news reports showed us bodies piling up in trucks outside of hospitals. We met up anyway, at the eerily empty campus of the women’s college down the street from me, on one of the first perfect-weather days of the year. Sitting on a bench outside the chapel, you told me about the trip you took to Dubai the summer before to be an extra in a film, the insufficient safety protocols at your job, the story behind the face you have tattooed on your arm. You had this light, this warmth. During a time when nothing felt good, basking in the glow of it felt good.

A week later I invited you to the house where I was housesitting, it belonged to a friend of my parents, and we sat on her backyard deck until the early hours of the morning. Eventually you said you should probably get going and lingered in the kitchen until I pulled you into me and kissed you, pressed up against Nancy’s granite island. It felt dangerous, when anyone could be harboring this virus, a plague with so many unknowns—why did some people die on ventilators while others just got the sniffles?—to abandon caution for the thrill of intimacy, the forbidden fruit. It felt inevitable.

We drifted in and out of each other’s orbit over the next couple of years, seeing each other sporadically, always after midnight, once you’d finished your runs. I’d buzz you up to my apartment on Selby Avenue, above the florist shop, the first place I lived alone, the one with the French doors. I’d pour you a glass of red wine while you told me about your life in the fast lane: the dealings on the dark web, the trips to Mexico for Xanax, the run-ins with the cops. You did a stint in rehab and a night or two in county. Once, you didn’t text me back for a week and I thought maybe you were dead but it turned out you’d done peyote outside Zion and gotten lost in the desert. Or so you said.

We’d talk, too, about the woman who’d broken your heart and the man who’d broken mine, about your sister’s psychotic break and how she kept dropping out of treatment. “I don’t think I’ll ever get her back man,” you told me. A few times I asked you if you ever thought about walking away from it all, doing something else instead. By then you’d lost your group home job and were feeling a little unmoored. You’d never finished college. You said it was the money that kept you in it, that there was just no way to touch that kind of money legally, unless you became a surgeon or something. I think you liked the danger too. You had a tarantula tattooed on your hand and eventually you’d run it across my thigh, whisper into my ear that you’d missed me, our bodies taking over. And in the morning, you’d slip me something you’d saved out for me, a few benzos or a baggy of weed, kissing me quickly on your way out the door.

In the weeks after I receive your message, I think about calling you. I’m not sure what I’ll say. You know about my illness, vaguely, but you don’t know the extent of it.

I think about calling you and in the meantime I text my closest friends. Do you want to hear something crazy? Remember that one guy? The drug dealer?

I call you on a Wednesday night, after my support group meeting. You’re waiting on a DoorDash order from the pet store; I’m lying on my back in my childhood bedroom–the same room where I’d first fallen for you years ago–eyes fixated on the ceiling fan. We ease back into the smooth rapport that we once had, but we don’t have to say what we both know: we’ll never be those people again.

“So what happened?” I finally ask.

You give me the rundown. It was raining, the DEA agent approached you in the lobby of your downtown apartment building. You were heading to work. You were wearing these ridiculous rain boots—you’re laughing as you tell me this part—and he told you to change out of them because they were going to have to cuff you at the ankles. You asked if you could have a smoke. He told you to hurry up. Someone had snitched, a kid you’d met on some shady forum, years ago. You hadn’t seen it coming.

You tell me that you spent two months in a federal holding facility, how the filth in that place nearly killed you. “You know how I am about cleanliness,” you laugh. You tell me that you got out on a recognizance bond, you’re sober now, that your lawyer is also your sponsor. You tell me that your sister just had a baby; she’s clean now too. You’re living court date to court date, the long judicial process dragging out, but you tell me the judge could give you life if he wanted to. “I don’t think he will, I’m a first time offender, I have a good lawyer,” you say. “But he could.”

And then you ask me how I’ve been and I tell you what I hadn’t seen coming either, that while you were being detained last summer, up in Sandstone, I was being wheeled through the bowels of a hospital on a gurney, stickers dotting my chest, wires jutting out from them. I was listening to a doctor tell me that what I had was incredibly rare. I was searching the name of the disease, seeing the survival statistics, hyperventilating. I could die from this. Pulmonary hypertension was a lot of people’s biggest fear, their nightmare WebMD search, their frantic Reddit spiral. But it hadn’t even been on my radar.

I tell you how just recently I’d had another procedure to track the progression of the disease, to see if the medications were working. The only way to do this is through an invasive catheterization: on the operating table, the doctor inserts a flexible tube through a vein in my neck, then pushes it through into my heart where it measures pulmonary pressures. I tell you that I had to be awake for it, no sedation, and how the pre-op nurse told me it would feel like a butterfly but it felt more like a snake. The meds were working, but not well enough. I’d need to add yet another one and repeat the procedure in six months.

Damn, you keep repeating as I tell you all this. Damn Rachel.

Neither of us says anything for a while. I change the subject. I ask you if you’ve been reading anything lately.

“Okay don’t laugh at me but,” you say, “I’ve been reading the Bible.”

Instead of laughing I admit that I too have been “kinda getting into God.”

I’d grown up Catholic, a childhood steeped in tradition. First Communion, first confession,  admitting my sins to a priest behind a screen, that little voice shaking in a plaid pleated jumper.  Rosary beads, stained glass gleaming, stations of the cross every Friday of Lent. I memorized the books of the Bible and recited them out loud in Mrs. Sullivan’s 5th grade religion class, standing on a ladder in the corner of the room: Matthew Mark Luke John Acts Romans Corinthians Corinthians. Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Memorares, I can still recite them all. The guilt stayed with me too, the fear of eternal damnation. But I never felt close to God.

As an adult I wasn’t sure what I believed. Mostly I didn’t think about it because I didn’t need to think about it. The remnants of my strict education had left a bad taste in my mouth and I hadn’t set foot in a church in years. If pressed, I would say I was agnostic, that I wasn’t really sure if God was real. There’s something though, about a turn-your-world-upside-down life event, the unrelenting helplessness, that makes you start asking the big questions again. You know this, I know this. For all my critiques of organized religion, I’ve always admired the way believers have something figured out about how to weather a storm, that innate sense of trust that it’s part of a plan, that everything could be endured as long as you believed that something greater was waiting on the other side.

During my sickest months, and for a long time after, I prayed every night, even though I still had my doubts. I prayed that I would wake up the next morning and when I did I would say a prayer of gratitude. I had a renewed understanding of the impulse, the need, steeped in desperation, but all the while I wasn’t sure if I was getting closer to God or just further from the life I used to have, with all of its illusory comforts and predictability.

A progressive illness is like a prison sentence in that it marks a loss of freedom, the death of a future. Any illusion we had of being in control of our fate was gone now. Here we are, you and I, at the edge of an abyss, reaching for a hand to hold us, a reassurance that everything is going to somehow work out, that it’s all a part of a grander scheme. Because if we don’t, then what is there? Is wanting desperately to believe as good as believing?

I want to ask you if you think we’re being punished, if we need to repent, but I don’t. The topic has changed again and soon we’re saying goodbye, hanging up and returning to the private universes of our own overwhelming problems.

A month goes by and you text me from outside a federal courthouse somewhere in the middle of Illinois. Going in in 30 minutes. Little nervous!

Praying for you, I reply. I don’t hear from you again for a long time.

When I talk to God, he doesn’t answer back.

 

Rachel Dorn is a writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in various publications and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on a memoir and a novel.

 

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