Doctor Sleep

group was supposed to talk about the material just read. Sometimesthey actually did. Quite often, however, the discussion veered off in other directions, like an unruly planchette scurrying around a Ouija board beneath the fingers of neurotic teenagers.
    Dan remembered a Thursday night meeting he’d attended when he was about eight months sober. The chapter under discussion, “To Wives,” was full of antique assumptions that almost always provoked a hot responsefrom the younger women in the Program. They wanted to know why, in the sixty-five years or so since the Big Book’s original publication, no one had ever added a chapter called “To Husbands.”
    When Gemma T.—a thirtysomething whose only two emotional settings seemed to be Angry and Profoundly Pissed Off—raised her hand on that particular night, Dan had expected a fem-lib tirade. Instead she said,much more quietly than usual, “I need to sharesomething. I’ve been holding onto it ever since I was seventeen, and unless I let go, I’ll never be able to stay away from coke and wine.”
    The group waited.
    “I hit a man with my car when I was coming home drunk from a party,” Gemma said. “This was back in Somerville. I left him lying by the side of the road. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive.I still don’t. I waited for the cops to come and arrest me, but they never did. I got away with it.”
    She had laughed at this the way people do when the joke’s an especially good one, then put her head down on the table and burst into sobs so deep that they shook her rail-thin body. It had been Dan’s first experience with how terrifying “honesty in all our affairs” could be when it was actuallyput into practice. He thought, as he still did every so often, of how he had stripped Deenie’s wallet of cash, and how the little boy had reached for the cocaine on the coffee table. He was a little in awe of Gemma, but that much raw honesty wasn’t in him. If it came down to a choice between telling that story and taking a drink . . .
    I’d take the drink. No question .
    2
    Tonight the reading was“Gutter Bravado,” one of the stories from the section of the Big Book cheerily titled “They Lost Nearly All.” The tale followed a pattern with which Dan had become familiar: good family, church on Sundays, first drink, first binge, business success spoiled by booze, escalating lies, first arrest, broken promises to reform, institutionalization, and the final happy ending. All the stories in theBig Book had happy endings. That was part of its charm.
    It was a cold night but overwarm inside, and Dan was edging into a doze when Doctor John raised his hand and said, “I’ve been lying to my wife about something, and I don’t know how to stop.”
    That woke Dan up. He liked DJ a lot.
    It turned out that John’s wife had given him a watch forChristmas, quite an expensive one, and when she hadasked him a couple of nights ago why he wasn’t wearing it, John said he’d left it at the office.
    “Only it’s not there. I looked everywhere, and it’s just not. I do a lot of hospital rounds, and if I have to change into scrubs, I use one of the lockers in the doctors’ lounge. There are combo locks, but I hardly ever use them, because I don’t carry much cash and I don’t have anything else worthstealing. Except for the watch, I guess. I can’t remember taking it off and leaving it in a locker—not at CNH or over in Bridgton—but I think I must have. It’s not the expense. It just brings back a lot of the old stuff from the days when I was drinking myself stupid every night and chipping speed the next morning to get going.”
    There were nodding heads at this, followed by similar stories ofguilt-driven deceit. No one gave advice; that was called “crosstalk,” and frowned on. They simply told their tales. John listened with his head down and his hands clasped between his knees. After the basket was passed (“We are self-supporting through our own contributions”), he thanked everyone for their input. From the look of him, Dan didn’t think said input had helped a whole hell of a lot.
    After the Lord’s Prayer, Dan put away the leftover cookies and stacked the group’s tattered Big Books in the cabinet marked FOR AA USE. A few people were still hanging around the butt-can outside—the so-called meeting after the meeting—but he and John had the kitchen to themselves. Dan hadn’t spoken during the discussion; he was too busy having an