I remember the pain. I had something called complex regional pain syndrome, and my foot felt like a skinned rabbit, every nerve ending exposed. It was a freezing burn, a burning cold, a hypersensitivity to touch that made it excruciating to put my socks on. I don’t mean uncomfortable. I mean excruciating, like sandpaper on an open wound. Yet there was nothing wrong with my foot. The problem was with my autonomic nervous system. A steroid shot between my toes had switched it into high gear, and now it could not be switched off. My brain was convinced that my foot was on fire. Which is not to say that it was all in my head. I wasn’t imagining the pain. The pain was real. It was just a consequence of a malfunctioning nervous system rather than an injured foot. The condition used to be called “reflex sympathetic dystrophy.” Before that it was called “causalgia,” and I like that name best, I think. I had never imagined anything like it before, never imagined that so much pain could come from—or feel like it’s coming from—some tiny part of my body, in this case my foot, or, more particularly, my toes. I had never imagined that a pain in your toes could take over your whole identity. They say causalgia is more painful than childbirth, though I didn’t believe it at first. Try telling someone that something is more painful than childbirth. They won’t believe you. Everyone will scoff and say, That’s according to some man. But the truth, I learned, is that most of the people who get complex regional pain syndrome are women, and if they say it’s more painful than childbirth, I have to believe them. I couldn’t sleep for longer than an hour at a time. Before my wife and I knew what it was, before I had a diagnosis, I considered buying a shotgun and blowing my foot off. Seriously considered it. I’d rock back and forth, breathing like a woman in labor, baffled and terrified, not knowing what was happening to me or if it would ever stop. All I could think about was the pain. Once we got the diagnosis, they started me on massive doses of oxycodone and oxymorphone, the latter of which, I seem to remember, is ordinarily reserved for terminal cancer patients. I say I seem to remember because I do not actually remember. I feel as though I remember getting the information, but I don’t remember where I got it, or when I was told, or by whom. I only remember the pain. Beyond that, my memory is fucked, maybe because of the pain, or maybe because of the drugs. I remember the entire period of my illness as though I were a child when it happened. I remember images, not words, how I felt about what was said rather than what was actually said. I remember it as hazy snapshots taken through a dirty lens, everything coated with a thin layer of gray, like the residue at the bottom of an old glass left too long in the cupboard. I remember my wife’s tears after one of our fights. I remember kneeling on the kitchen floor, asking her for forgiveness. I remember the way the light seemed to fall in patches on the linoleum, which, like my memory, was also fucked, old and rippled and bubbling up in places, a warped plastic carpet over concrete.
We’d been arguing about money. At least, that’s the way it started. I was still sick, but my sick pay had dried up, and my wife wasn’t working because she was staying home with our daughter, and we were behind on everything. We were behind on the mortgage. We were behind on our student loans. We owed the power company and the water company and the credit cards. So I had to go back to work, and when my first paycheck dropped, she spent it all the first day, paying those bills. We didn’t have anything left for groceries. I was livid. It was a day in January or February, I think, near sunset. There were wispy black clouds in the sky, and I was on my way home from work, stopped at a light on East Glenn, when I got her text. The argument had been in progress via text for some time by then, and I must have written something to the effect of What were you thinking? because she came back with “I felt pretty damn heroic paying all those bills.” I still remember those words—pretty damn heroic—and how angry I was, knowing that we were back to zero and she still thought she was right, even expected to be praised.
I remember walking to the front door, walking with a cane, my foot burning and throbbing, and I was feeling angry, not about the cane or the fact that I had to use it—though I’m sure there was some underlying anger about that—but about the parking arrangements at our marital home. She was still parking in the driveway, while I had to park in the street. The parking arrangements had not changed in light of my condition, and I remember resenting that as I hobbled from my car to the house that evening, which seemed a very long way, because every step was a nightmare. I remember thinking, The only place where I don’t get the handicapped spot is at my own fucking house, and then I went inside and found them, my wife and child, eating chocolate-chip muffins on the couch. It was all they’d had to eat that day, I later found out. I don’t remember what I said, but it went from being an argument about money to an argument about childcare. Though I am unclear on exactly what I said, I am quite certain what I did not say, or that what I did say was wrongly interpreted. One thing I said had to do with the chocolate-chip muffins. My wife thought I was commenting on both her weight and her mothering skills, when in fact I had been attacking only the latter and as a rule never said anything about the former. She was desperately unhappy about her weight, and I knew she was desperately unhappy about it, and, no matter how bad things got, I never wanted to make her feel bad about her weight. I only meant to make her feel bad about her mothering. Maybe that was worse. But it hadn’t been my idea for her to stay home and take care of the kid. It had been her idea. She would stay home and take care of the child and the house, she said, and that would save us money on everything from day care to groceries to maids. But she did not take care of the child or the house. So I didn’t mind telling her she was doing a lousy job as a mother. I just didn’t mean to call her fat. I never would have weaponized her insecurities like that. And when she thought that’s what I had done, I dropped to my knees to apologize, even though the original argument still had not been resolved. That’s why I remember the way the light hit the kitchen floor. I remember standing up again too. Trying to hold her. Being rebuffed. Her skin was cold. She may have said, “Don’t touch me.”
A couple of days or weeks later—again, I don’t remember—I thought everything had blown over when I came home from work and found her crying, saying she didn’t want to pretend everything was fine. Things were not fine, she said. She’d been thinking of leaving and taking the child with her, of not even telling me, just taking off. I don’t remember how I reacted. I just remember the color of the sky outside the window, that blue-gray, just-after-sunset color, and the kitchen table—an old wooden table I’d had for a long time—shiny and clean. There was a bright patch in the middle where the fluorescent light hit what was left of the varnish and formed a pool of reflected light, and my wife said she didn’t want to leave; she just didn’t know what else to do. She was cleaning the kitchen while she cried, and I was afraid of her in the way you might be afraid of a snake. But I don’t remember what I said. I only remember the fear: She was going to take the child.
I remember the next day more clearly. We had lunch in a little garden café—a place my wife liked because it was pretty and they put avocados on everything—and after lunch we sat in the car in front of a row of potted sunflowers and she told me that my being high all the time was unacceptable. She was referring to the painkillers, of course, as though I’d been taking them recreationally. She was careful to say she didn’t mean that. “I know you’re in pain,” she said. But she wanted me to manage the pills better. She thought I needed help managing them better. I remember the sunflowers. I remember the pots, ordinary reddish-brown pots like you’d see at any garden center. There was nothing memorable about them. I remember them only because I happened to be looking at them when she was saying something important. Ordinarily I looked at her when she spoke. Ordinarily I wanted her to look at me. I thought eye contact was important, especially in conversations like this one, but she was talking to the side of my face that day, because I was looking mostly at the sunflowers. She wanted me to learn how to manage the painkillers, she said, because I was taking them all the time. I didn’t take them as prescribed. I took handfuls and then threw up. She had a point. And if she wanted to take the child, she could, I thought. She could have taken her from me, and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could have done about it, because I wasn’t well enough to take care of our daughter on my own. As a father, I had rights in Alabama, but I would have been declared incompetent on the grounds of my health alone at that point, and the child was only three years old. She needed her mother. So I agreed to go to AA. It didn’t seem like I had a choice.
My wife was very happy about this decision. She insisted that it hadn’t been an ultimatum, that she’d only suggested it because she knew I’d gone to AA to quit drinking in my early thirties, before we’d even met. She had never known me in my alcoholic days, never known me to have the shakes at eight o’clock in the morning and be stumbling drunk by noon. I’d been a liter-a-day Scotch drinker. She’d never met that version of me, didn’t know the first thing about how bad I could get, and therefore how bad I was not at that moment. What she had seen of my substance abuse had been tame, like the night I’d gotten drunk and cried at an Indian restaurant. That sort of thing. It would happen once every couple of years, but it was never anything crazy, with one exception. The only crazy night was the night I didn’t remember. And this was not that night. Nothing about complex regional pain syndrome had anything to do with that night. I wasn’t taking more than the prescribed amount because I wanted to get high. I was taking more than the prescribed amount because I was in pain, and because the prescribed amount was hardly enough, and because I was still going to work in that condition, still supporting her, and yet she had threatened to take the child, who was everything to me, who I put to bed every night. She didn’t put the child to bed. I did. I put her to bed every night and sang to her and taught her how to sing her first song, “Space Oddity,” by David Bowie: “Here am I sitting in a tin can / Far above the world.” This child—who, when asked her favorite color, said, “All the colors in the world”—was the meaning of life to me, and my wife had threatened to take her away when I was at my very weakest, and this was a betrayal I couldn’t forgive. I agreed to her terms. I agreed to AA. I even agreed to a lockbox for my meds, with a key she wore around her neck. But I hated her, and after we got home and she thanked me for having lunch with her—thanked me sincerely, as if we had taken our first steps towards making things new—I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom and cried and said out loud, “I’m sorry. I hate her.”
I went to AA, got a sponsor. He was an ex–military man who told me that if I didn’t want to get divorced, I would agree to everything. Whatever she wanted, I would give it to her. So a couple of weeks or days later, I can’t remember which, when my wife said she wanted to join a multilevel-marketing company, I agreed to that too. Not immediately, of course. I was hesitant. But eventually I agreed. I agreed one night after we had sex on the living room floor. It’s not what it sounds like. She didn’t trick me with her feminine wiles. We’d spread out a blanket and tried to make up—or she’d tried to make up, anyway. I was only trying to do damage control, trying to make sure she thought things were fine between us so she wouldn’t take off with the child. I was not actually trying to make up. I may have wanted to believe that I was trying to make up, but in my heart I still didn’t trust her. I didn’t even like her, and I didn’t think the multilevel-marketing thing was a good idea. In fact I thought it was stupid. Everything about my behavior that night was a lie. But I agreed to put the start-up funds on the only credit card we had left, a Sam’s Club card in my name with a $10,000 line of credit. I did this because I was afraid that if I didn’t, she would take the child. It felt like extortion. I’m sure she didn’t intend it that way. It simply would not have occurred to her to be that manipulative, to leverage the child to get what she wanted. It only felt that way to me because the two conversations—I’m thinking about leaving, and Can I have ten grand to start a clothing company?—had taken place so close together, and because I was still sick. The pain was isolating, and the medicine distorted everything. I was paranoid. This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that I was right to think what I thought. That is to say, even if my wife had never intended to be manipulative, who knows what would have happened if I’d said no? She was already unhappy. If I’d stopped her from doing what she wanted to do, she might have become even more unhappy. She might have felt trapped and decided to leave—not immediately, but after a while. And who could have blamed her? Things were miserable. I was miserable. The pain was miserable, and it made everything miserable. Even when I smiled, there was misery hanging all around me. So, without having any grand design, she might have taken the child just to get away from the misery. It didn’t have to be a plot to be a possibility. So, again, I agreed to her terms. I put the money on the card. And, just like that, we were $10,000 deeper in debt.
The company was called LuLaRoe, and they promised a quick return on your initial investment. They sold leggings and dresses in a lot of crazy patterns, a lot of colors. Big women could buy flattering clothes from them, so it was wrapped up in the body-positivity movement, which was a major draw for my wife, because she had trouble finding clothes she liked in her size. And she was not the only woman who had that problem. If there was anything I’d learned from being married to a fat woman, it was that no one in the fashion industry gave a fuck about them. So this LuLaRoe thing must have looked pretty good to her. And there was a way in which it seemed economically viable. I mean, it did fill a gap in the market. And it was a Mormon thing. The people who owned the company were Mormons, and my wife was Mormon. So that was another draw. After we made love on the living room floor that night, she showed me one of their promotional videos featuring smiling women driving and playing with their children and going through racks of clothes. It made the company seem wholesome. They presented it as a way for stay-at-home moms—women like my wife—to help their families financially. They could be movers and shakers and preserve their identities as wives and mothers at the same time, because they didn’t have to get jobs that would take them out of the home. It was a scam, of course. The time commitment alone was more than any real job could have asked for. She was always on the phone, always on Facebook, always hustling off to one place or another for a pop-up boutique, and every penny she made had to go back into buying inventory just to keep her afloat. She spent more than she made, and she stopped paying attention to our family altogether. She didn’t mean to. She just didn’t have a choice. She was always working. I mean, there’s a documentary about these fuckers now, but back then we didn’t know. I should have known, part of me probably did know, that it was going to be a bust, but I caved because I didn’t think I had a choice. I couldn’t say, Yes, you’re right, I need to get a better grip on these painkillers, but LuLaRoe is a bad idea, because that would have meant being honest with her, and I couldn’t be honest with her, not only because I was angry with her and afraid of what she might do, but because she was right: I was high all the time. Even when I didn’t want to be high, I was high. I was so high I didn’t even know I was high, because I was so used to it, and I was still in so much pain that I never actually felt high. I felt terrible. It’s no wonder I can’t remember anything.
I do remember that the blanket we laid on the living room floor that night was blue, and then soon after that I remember big metal clothing racks lined up two by two from the living room to the playroom, which wasn’t a playroom anymore. It was a boutique, and I seized on this as evidence of my wife’s insincerity. She couldn’t really be thinking about how she could help her family if she’d just turned our daughter’s playroom into a boutique. She was out for herself, doing what she wanted to do. And all of a sudden that was to sell dresses. Never mind her PhD. Never mind me, for that matter. We’d started work at the university together, had even arranged it so that we’d be sharing an office that year. It was what we’d always talked about. And yet, just before the fall semester began, she’d quit her teaching job, saying she couldn’t stand it anymore, she was too depressed. And I understood, of course. I understood how it could be a depressing job. It was my job, for God’s sake, and it depressed me. But I didn’t quit. I kept working, even when I was sick. And it wasn’t as though I wanted her to go back to a job that depressed her, but I kind of did. I mean, Jesus. We were broke, and buying and selling dresses did not seem like a reliable source of income. She drove us $15,000 further into debt before it was all over, and I couldn’t say or do a thing about it, because I was high the whole goddamn time. It doesn’t matter how many AA meetings you go to. As long as you are taking oxycodone and oxymorphone, you’re going to be high, and, as long as you have complex regional pain syndrome, you’re going to be taking something serious for the pain. Even after I got the lockbox and gave her the key and started taking the stuff as prescribed, like a good boy, I was high. I’d given her complete power over me, let her dole out my meds one pill at a time. The trouble was that just one was enough to make everything hazy, even if it wasn’t enough to adequately address the pain. I didn’t have to rock back and forth panting like a woman in labor anymore, but I couldn’t do much more than sit like a zombie in front of the TV. So I watched us go deeper and deeper into debt, watched my wife working the whole time, always on the phone, always half dead with exhaustion, trying to make a profit, and I watched without sympathy, like a robot programmed to view her only with suspicion. Instead of marveling at how hard she was trying or thanking her for the money she was bringing in (still way less than she was spending) or telling her I was sorry or asking how I could help, I froze inside and stopped touching her because I didn’t want anything touching me, because having anything touch me was painful. And, anyway, I was mad about all the clothing racks between me and the kitchen. It was like navigating an obstacle course trying to get from the living room to the counter to make myself a cup of tea. All I cared about was the tea. I took it with milk and honey and made myself several cups a day. I remember that I accidentally splashed boiling water on my hands without feeling a thing. All the pain was in my foot.
After about eighteen months the doctor got the pain under control with a series of sympathetic nerve blocks. I’d go in, and he’d stick a needle in my back and inject lidocaine directly onto the nerve that went down to my foot. Then he’d do it again a couple of weeks later, and again a few weeks after that. We’d do two or three shots, wait a few months, and start over. He must have given me eight or nine shots before he weaned me off the painkillers. Once it was done, I felt better than I had in years, except for the anger. I was still insanely angry with my wife. So I had an affair. The multilevel-marketing company got sued. And we got divorced. Joint custody.
Sometimes I regret everything. But it’s still hard to remember anything. She must have ten million memories of me in that state, at my worst, while all I have is a blur. And sometimes I like to think we were both victims of the culture, that there were vast social forces at work, and we got caught up in things that were bigger than us, and it wasn’t our fault, we never had a chance. Like LuLaRoe. The documentary said a lot of women lost everything. My wife was just one of many, a victim of a five-minute segment on the evening news. And, in retrospect, it’s easy to think that I was just prey for the opioid pushers. I would like to think that. And maybe I could think that if it weren’t for the fact that I had a substance abuse problem all the way back in high school, when I used to cut class to drop acid. It’s harder to think of yourself as a victim of capitalist machinery when you’ve always been prone to get high, even when the machinery wants you to get high. It’s hard to blame the culture for anything when I think of those nights I don’t remember. When I remember the night I don’t remember.
It was long before complex regional pain syndrome. We’d only been married about six months, and we were living in Massachusetts, where my new shrink prescribed Klonopin for anxiety, and instead of telling her that I had a history of substance abuse or asking for alternatives, I smiled and took the scrip, and instead of taking one pill for anxiety that night like I was supposed to, I took twenty-two of them for no particular reason, and I must have gone for a ride at some point, because one of my headlights was busted in the morning, but I don’t remember how it happened. Nor do I remember the argument my wife and I had when I got home. But I know that we argued. That I scared her. That she walked away from me, and I apparently wanted her to look me in the eye, so I put my hand on her shoulder and turned her around. I evidently did this quite forcefully.
I do remember that the cops came. My wife was unharmed. She’d called them because she was afraid. They were both thin and white. I remember I was surprised to see them: I was sitting calmly on the couch when they arrived. They smiled a lot and took me to the psych ward. They didn’t charge me with anything or make me wear handcuffs. They just gave me a ride to the hospital.
I once knew a guy who said his girlfriend had called the cops and told them that he’d punched her in the face. He told me this as though it were absurd. “That’s crazy,” I said, to which he replied, “Yeah, man, I didn’t punch her in the face. I shoved her in the closet and spat in her face.” I once had a girlfriend who punched me in the face and gave me a black eye when we were drunk one night. But I’d said something to her. I don’t remember what it was, but I know I’d said something to her. I know that I’d provoked her, that I’d been drunk and pushing her buttons. But it was something I said. Not something I did. I never did anything. I never hit anyone. What I did was reach for my wife’s shoulder, and I still regret it, not only because it was unacceptable but because I don’t remember it, so I don’t know how scary it actually was. I can only speculate. I can only tell myself that it could not have been as scary as being punched in the face or pushed in a closet. I cannot know. How can I know when I can’t remember? I remember that it was snowing. I remember walking across the street in the dark at some point before the cops came. I don’t remember what I was doing out there. I just remember the snow falling all around me. There were snowflakes everywhere.
