I ARRIVED HOME, FEELING EXHAUSTED. Force of habit made me flick on the light in the hallway, even though the bulb had gone. We’d been meaning to replace it but kept forgetting.
I knew at once that Kathy wasn’t there. It was too quiet; she was incapable of quiet. She wasn’t noisy but her world was full of sound—talking on the phone, reciting lines, watching movies, singing, humming, listening to bands I’d never heard of. But now the flat was silent as a tomb. I called her name. Force of habit, again—or a guilty conscience, perhaps, wanting to make sure I was alone before I transgressed?
“Kathy?”
No reply.
I fumbled my way through the dark into the living room. I turned on the light.
The room leaped out at me in the way new furniture always does until you’re used to it: new chairs, new cushions; new colors, reds and yellows, where there once had been black and white. A vase of pink lilies—Kathy’s favorite flowers—was on the table; their strong musky scent made the air thick and hard to breathe.
What time was it? Eight-thirty. Where was she? Rehearsal? She was in a new production of Othello at the RSC, and it wasn’t going particularly well. Endless rehearsals had been taking their toll. She seemed visibly tired, pale, thinner than usual, fighting a cold. “I’m so fucking sick all the time,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”
It was true; she’d come back from rehearsal later and later each night, looking terrible; she’d yawn and stumble straight into bed. So she probably wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours at the earliest. I decided to risk it.
I took the jar of weed from its hiding place and started rolling a joint.
I’d been smoking marijuana since university. I first encountered it during my first term, alone and friendless at a fresher party, too paralyzed with fear to initiate a conversation with any of the good-looking and confident young people around me. I was planning my escape when the girl standing next to me offered me something. I thought it was a cigarette until I smelled the spicy, pungent, curling black smoke. Too shy to refuse, I accepted it and brought the joint to my lips. It was badly rolled and coming unstuck, unraveling at the end. The tip was wet and stained red from her lipstick. It tasted different from a cigarette; it was richer, rawer, more exotic. I swallowed down the thick smoke and tried not to cough. Initially all I felt was a little light on my feet. Like sex, clearly more fuss was made over marijuana than it merited. Then—a minute or so later—something happened. Something incredible. It was like being drenched in an enormous wave of well-being. I felt safe, relaxed, totally at ease, silly and unself-conscious.
That was it. Before long I was smoking weed every day. It became my best friend, my inspiration, my solace. An endless ritual of rolling, licking, lighting. I would get stoned just from the rustling of rolling papers and the anticipation of the warm, intoxicating high.
All kinds of theories have been put forward about the origins of addiction. It could be genetic; it could be chemical; it could be psychological. But marijuana was doing something much more than soothing me: crucially, it altered the way I experienced my emotions; it cradled me and held me safe like a well-loved child.
In other words, it contained me.
The psychoanalyst W. R. Bion came up with the term containment to describe a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain. Remember, babyhood is not a time of bliss; it’s one of terror. As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own. But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us—if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled nameless dread. Such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources—he needs a drink or a joint to “take the edge off” this endless anxiety. Hence my addiction to marijuana.
I talked a lot about marijuana in therapy. I wrestled with the idea of giving it up and wondered why the prospect scared me so much. Ruth said that enforcement and constraint never produced anything good, and that, rather than force myself to live without weed, a better starting place might be to acknowledge that I was now dependent on it, and unwilling or unable to abandon it. Whatever marijuana did for me was still working, Ruth argued—until the day it would outlive its usefulness, when I would probably relinquish it with ease.
Ruth was right. When I met Kathy and fell in love, marijuana faded into the background. I was naturally high on love, with no need to artificially induce a good mood. It helped that Kathy didn’t smoke it. Stoners, in her opinion, were weak willed and lazy and lived in slow motion—you pricked them and six days later they’d say, “Ouch.” I stopped smoking weed the day Kathy moved into my flat. And—as Ruth had predicted—once I was secure and happy, the habit fell away from me quite naturally, like dry caked mud from a boot.
I might never have smoked it again if we hadn’t gone to a leaving party for Kathy’s friend Nicole, who was moving to New York. Kathy was monopolized by all her actor friends, and I found myself alone. A short, stubby man, wearing a pair of neon-pink glasses, nudged me and said, “Want some?” I was about to refuse the joint between his fingers, when something stopped me. I’m not sure what. A momentary whim? Or an unconscious attack on Kathy for forcing me to come to this horrible party and then abandoning me? I looked around, and she was nowhere to be seen. Fuck it, I thought. I brought the joint to my lips and inhaled.
Just like that, I was back where I had started, as if there had been no break. My addiction had been patiently waiting for me all this time, like a faithful dog. I didn’t tell Kathy what I had done, and I put it out of my mind. In fact I was waiting for an opportunity, and six weeks later, it presented itself. Kathy went to New York for a week, to visit Nicole. Without Kathy’s influence, lonely and bored, I gave in to temptation. I didn’t have a dealer anymore, so I did what I had done as a student—and made my way to Camden Town market.
As I left the station, I could smell marijuana in the air, mingled with the scent of incense and food stalls frying onions. I walked over to the bridge by Camden Lock. I stood there awkwardly, pushed and nudged by an endless stream of tourists and teenagers trudging back and forth across the bridge.
I scanned the crowd. There was no sign of any of the dealers who used to line the bridge, calling out to you as you passed. I spotted a couple of police officers, unmissable in their bright yellow jackets, patrolling the crowd. They walked away from the bridge, toward the station. Then I heard a low voice by my side:
“Want some green, mate?”
I looked down and there was a small man. I thought he was a child at first, he was so slight and slender. But his face was a road map of rugged terrain, lined and crossed, like a boy prematurely aged. He was missing his two front teeth, giving his words a slight whistle. “Green?” he repeated.
I nodded.
He jerked his head at me to follow him. He slipped through the crowd and went around the corner and along a backstreet. He entered an old pub and I followed. It was deserted inside, dingy and tattered, and stank of vomit and old cigarette smoke.
“Gissa beer,” he said, hovering at the bar. He was scarcely tall enough to see over it. I begrudgingly bought him half a pint. He took it to a table in the corner. I sat opposite him. He looked around furtively, then reached under the table and slipped me a small package wrapped in cellophane. I gave him some cash.
I went home and I opened the package, half expecting to have been ripped off, but a familiar pungent smell drifted to my nose. I saw the little green buds streaked with gold. My heart raced as though I had encountered a long-lost friend; which I suppose I had.
From then on, I would get high occasionally, whenever I found myself alone in the flat for a few hours, when I was sure Kathy would not be coming back anytime soon.
That night, when I came home, tired and frustrated, and found Kathy out at rehearsal, I quickly rolled a joint. I smoked it out of the bathroom window. But I smoked too much, too fast—it hit me hard, like a punch between the eyes. I was so stoned, even walking felt difficult, like wading through treacle. I went through my usual sanitizing ritual—air freshener, brushing my teeth, taking a shower—and I carefully maneuvered myself to the living room. I sank onto the sofa.
I looked for the TV remote but couldn’t see it. Then I located it, peeking out from behind Kathy’s open laptop on the coffee table. I reached for it, but was so stoned I knocked over the laptop. I propped the laptop up again—and the screen came to life. It was logged into her email account. For some reason, I kept staring at it. I was transfixed—her in-box stared at me like a gaping hole. I couldn’t look away. All kinds of things jumped out before I knew what I was reading: words such as “sexy” and “fuck” in the email headings—and repeated emails from BADBOY22.
If only I’d stopped there. If only I’d got up and walked away—but I didn’t.
I clicked on the most recent email and opened it:
Subject: Re: little miss fuck
From: Katerama_1
To: BADBOY22
I’m on the bus. So horny for you. I can smell you on me. I feel like a slut! Kxx
Sent from my iPhone
_______________________________________
Subject: Re: re: re: little miss fuck
From: BADBOY22
To: Katerama_1
U r a slut! Lol. C u later? After rehearsal?
_______________________________________
Subject: Re: re: re: re: re: little miss fuck
From: BADBOY22
To: Katerama_1
Ok. Will see what time I can get away. I’ll text u.
_______________________________________
Subject: Re: re: re: re: little miss fuck
From: Katerama_1
To: BADBOY22
Ok. 830? 9? xx
Sent from my iPhone
_______________________________________
I pulled the laptop from the table. I sat with it on my lap, staring at it. I don’t know how long I sat like that. Ten minutes? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Maybe longer. Time seemed to slow to a crawl.
I tried to process what I had just seen, but I was still so stoned, I wasn’t sure what I had seen. Was it real? Or some kind of misunderstanding—some joke I wasn’t getting because I was so high?
I forced myself to read another email.
And another.
I ended up going through all of Kathy’s emails to BADBOY22. Some were sexual, obscene even. Others were longer, more confessional, emotional, and she sounded drunk—perhaps they were written late at night, after I had gone to bed. I pictured myself in the bedroom, asleep, while Kathy was out here, writing intimate messages to this stranger. This stranger she was fucking.
Time caught up with itself with a jolt. Suddenly I was no longer stoned. I was horribly, painfully sober.
There was a wrenching pain in my stomach. I threw aside the laptop. I ran into the bathroom.
I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up.
“THIS FEELS RATHER DIFFERENT from last time,” I said.
No response.
Alicia sat opposite me in the chair, head turned slightly toward the window. She sat perfectly still, her spine rigid and straight. She looked like a cellist. Or a soldier.
“I’m thinking of how the last session ended. When you physically attacked me and had to be restrained.”
No response. I hesitated.
“I wonder if you did it as some kind of test? To see what I’m made of? I think it’s important that you know I’m not easily intimidated. I can take whatever you throw at me.”
Alicia looked out the window at the gray sky beyond the bars. I waited a moment.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Alicia. That I’m on your side. Hopefully one day you’ll believe that. Of course, it takes time to build trust. My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to—and that doesn’t happen overnight.”
Alicia stared at me, unblinking, with an inscrutable gaze. The minutes passed. It felt more like an endurance test than a therapy session.
I wasn’t making progress in any direction, it seemed. Perhaps it was all hopeless. Christian had been right to point out that rats desert sinking ships. What the hell was I doing clambering upon this wreck, lashing myself to the mast, preparing to drown?
The answer was sitting in front of me. As Diomedes put it, Alicia was a silent siren, luring me to my doom.
I felt a sudden desperation. I wanted to scream at her, Say something. Anything. Just talk.
But I didn’t say that. Instead, I broke with therapeutic tradition. I stopped treading softly and got directly to the point:
“I’d like to talk about your silence. About what it means … what it feels like. And specifically why you stopped talking.”
Alicia didn’t look at me. Was she even listening?
“As I sit here with you, a picture keeps coming into my mind—an image of someone biting their fist, holding back a yell, swallowing a scream. I remember when I first started therapy, I found it very hard to cry. I feared I’d be carried away by the flood, overwhelmed. Perhaps that’s what it feels like for you. That’s why it’s important to take your time to feel safe and trust that you won’t be alone in this flood—that I’m treading water here with you.”
Silence.
“I think of myself as a relational therapist. Do you know what that means?”
Silence.
“It means I think Freud was wrong about a couple of things. I don’t believe a therapist can ever really be a blank slate, as he intended. We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally—by the color of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk. Just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself. Despite my best efforts at invisibility, I’m showing you who I am.”
Alicia looked up. She stared at me, her chin slightly tilted—was there a challenge in that look? At last I had her attention. I shifted in my seat.
“The point is, what can we do about this? We can ignore it and deny it and pretend this therapy is all about you. Or we can acknowledge that this is a two-way street and work with that. And then we can really start to get somewhere.”
I held up my hand. I nodded at my wedding ring.
“This ring tells you something, doesn’t it?”
Alicia’s eyes ever so slowly moved in the direction of the ring.
“It tells you I’m a married man. It tells you I have a wife. We’ve been married for nearly nine years.”
No response, yet she kept staring at the ring.
“You were married for about seven years, weren’t you?”
No reply.
“I love my wife very much. Did you love your husband?”
Alicia’s eyes moved. They darted up to my face. We stared at each other.
“Love includes all kinds of feelings, doesn’t it? Good and bad. I love my wife—her name is Kathy—but sometimes I get angry with her. Sometimes … I hate her.”
Alicia kept staring at me; I felt like a rabbit in the headlights, frozen, unable to look away or move. The attack alarm was on the table, within reach. I made a concerted effort not to look at it.
I knew I shouldn’t keep talking—that I should shut up—but I couldn’t stop myself. I went on compulsively:
“And when I say I hate her, I don’t mean all of me hates her. Just a part of me hates. It’s about holding on to both parts at the same time. Part of you loved Gabriel. Part of you hated him.”
Alicia shook her head—no. A brief movement, but definite. Finally—a response. I felt a sudden thrill. I should have stopped there, but I didn’t.
“Part of you hated him,” I said again more firmly.
Another shake of the head. Her eyes burned through me. She’s getting angry, I thought.
“It’s true, Alicia. Or you wouldn’t have killed him.”
Alicia suddenly jumped up. I thought she was about to leap on me. My body tensed in anticipation. But instead she turned and marched to the door. She hammered on it with her fists.
There was the sound of a key turning—and Yuri threw open the door. He looked relieved not to find Alicia strangling me on the floor. She pushed past him and ran into the corridor.
“Steady on, slow down, honey.” He glanced back at me. “Everything okay? What happened?”
I didn’t reply. Yuri gave me a funny look and left. I was alone.
Idiot, I thought to myself. You idiot. What was I doing? I’d pushed her too far, too hard, too soon. It was horribly unprofessional, not to mention totally fucking inept. It revealed far more about my state of mind than hers.
But that’s what Alicia did for you. Her silence was like a mirror—reflecting yourself back at you.
And it was often an ugly sight.