Breathless

short of the door, he turned from it and went to his backpack. The previous night, from a bridge, he threw an unsampled pint of tequila into a dry creek. Five pints remained in his supply.
    He extracted a stuffsack from the backpack, a bottle from the sack. The glass was smooth in his rough hands, smooth and cool.
    The journey ahead and the task at its end required commitment, focus, sobriety. He had spent his life fleeing from all three.
    Smooth and cool.
    Considering that he was forty-eight, still alive, and not in jail, an argument might be mounted that he had fared better than some who made more responsible decisions than he did. Fundamental change at his age might bring the opposite of what he desired; he might be trading failure and sorrow
not
for hope and peace, but for worse misery and despair.
    One incident, one moment of recognition in decades of barren existence, did not justify a revolution of the mind and heart. At the time, his head and stomach turning in spirals of vertigo, he had been vomiting into a barrel, not a situation in which his perceptions or his judgment were necessarily reliable.
    The pint bottle of tequila felt smooth, cool, full of power, full of promise, the power of forgetfulness, the promise of death by incremental self-destruction. The power of the tequila passed through the glass container and into his clutching fingers, causing his hand to shake, then his arm, then his entire body. The tremors shiveredcold sweat from his palms, and he gripped the suddenly slippery bottle with both hands.
    Although he needed a drink, a long one, he intended instead to empty the bottle into the bathroom sink.
    He stood no more than six steps from the bathroom door. The sink lay one or two steps beyond that threshold. Eight steps. During the previous night, he walked mile after mile. Now eight steps seemed to be a greater distance than he traveled from his cave to this room.
    Except for the shakes, Tom Bigger couldn’t move. He trembled so violently that his teeth chattered and each exhalation stuttered from him, but he could not uproot either of his feet.
    He must have been in a brief fugue when he twisted the cap off the bottle, for he had no memory of cracking the seal. Suddenly the cap lay on the floor between his feet, and with the mouth of the bottle to his nose, he inhaled the fumes of death in life.
    Another fugue—how long?—and somehow the familiar taste was in his mouth, and the fragrant toxin dripped from his chin. Held in both hands, the bottle revealed the weakness of his will, for the level of the tequila was an inch lower than before.
    Inch by inch, he would lose the future, the world, the hope that he had so recently allowed himself, and he knew what he must do. He must slam the bottle against his face, slam it and slam it until it shattered, puncturing and slashing his face, perhaps this time bleeding so much, so fast, he would be done with life at last.
    But he was a coward, gutless, not energized by self-hatred but paralyzed by it.
    The motel-room door opened, and with the flood of daylightcame screaming. Screaming and sobbing simultaneously, the most wretched and despairing cries that Tom had ever heard.
    In the sunlight, on the threshold, stood the seventy-something man in the cardigan, the front-desk clerk who had told him to enjoy his stay. Beyond the man stood an old woman with a cell phone in her hand.
    Neither of them was screaming or sobbing, and then Tom realized that
he
was the source of these terrible lamentations, a howling siren of anguish and grief and self-loathing.
    Tom tried to warn off the desk clerk, for fear his rage would at last turn outward. In another fugue he might smash the bottle against that kindly face and slash the old man’s jugular with a shard of glass.
    Indeed, another fugue took him. But the next thing he knew, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, no longer clutching the pint of tequila.
    The old man held the bottle, twisting shut the cap. He set it on the dresser.
    No screaming anymore. Just the sobbing.
    The old man returned to Tom and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve never been in your place, son. But maybe if we talk about it, I can help you find a way back from where you are.”

Fifty-nine

P aul Jardine wanted two hours for the debriefing, but after five minutes, Grady said, “This is bogus. I’ll give you half an hour. Keep it tight, get it done. If half an hour isn’t enough, bring charges against me, and I’ll fight for