Liz woke, and didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there.  There was a tube going up her nose.  It wasn’t comfortable, so she pulled it out.  It was a lot longer than she expected it to be, and she kept pulling until she had maybe two feet of plastic tubing coiled on her chest, and before she could figure out how they had gotten the whole thing inside her head, she fell asleep again.

She woke a second time because something was chewing on her feet.  When she opened her eyes to see what it might be, she was in an unfamiliar room, and there was a gallery of people looking at her out of a frame.  They were waiting for her to do something so that they wouldn’t die, and she was running out of time.  No, no, they weren’t, it was a nightmare.  Liz clutched at the railing on her bed with her right arm and pulled herself toward it, and the nightmare faded.

When she woke again she knew she was in a hospital.  That wasn’t much of a surprise.  She woke from another horrible, vivid nightmare, of things crawling inside her veins and a giant monkey climbing around the outside of the hospital looking for a way to reach through her window, pull her out and eat her brain.  She could remember the pitying looks the nurses and passers-by she had screamed at gave her, too.  Once the delirium tremens ended, and they untied her, she called her mother.

Her mother was in a white-hot rage.  When Liz called and told her where she was, Midori Bahti shouted at her daughter in Japanese.  The noises of the Italian restaurant she owned filled the background at first, and then faded as activity came to a halt at the hands of the proprietor’s screaming.  “No more!” Midori shouted.  “No more! I don’t need you to call and tell me you’re still alive to torment me!  I am sick of you, do you understand?  Sick of my daughter!  I have no more to give you!  You show up drunk and ask for money, or the car, or a place to sleep, and I give it to you.  You go away and don’t call at all until you need something, and I am not going to take it any more.  You’ve taken too much from me!  It’s too much. I can’t give you any more.  Too many times, you’ve shown up drunk and asking for money.  Or asking for the car, or for a place to sleep, and I always give you everything. Or you don’t call at all, and you say you’re sorry, that things have been hard.  And worst of all, Liz, you’re always getting it together.” Midori lapsed in and out of Japanese; Liz barely noticed which language she was speaking.  “Every time, you’re getting things together, and you’ve got a job lined up, and you’ve got big plans, and the next time you’re too drunk to remember them.  I’ll bet you can’t remember even now what the last big plan was.”

She tried.  She couldn’t.

“I am not going to take this any more.  I can’t help you any more, Liz.  It’s too much.  I’ll pay for the hospital, and then you stay away.  Don’t fly up here. If you don’t stop drinking, don’t come back.  You hear? No more!”

“I’m going to quit,” Liz offered.

“Words aren’t good enough! You come back when you’ve done it. It makes me sick and I don’t want to look at you and wonder when you’re going to die. Not if. When.”

“But Mama, I need help. I can’t even get home.”

“Why not?  I thought you had a motorcycle.  That green one, that looked like your hair.  That expensive one.”

The speech would have gone on to describe exactly how expensive the bike in question was, and Liz remembered, foggily.  She did have a nice bike, and it had been expensive.  How had she paid for it?  Midori would have insisted the money could have gone into better things, into a bank perhaps.  Yeah, right. Liz didn’t even have a bank account.  “My bike, right. I don’t want…” She wasn’t sure how that sentence ended, exactly.  She hadn’t been sober much for the past year or two.  Who knew where that motorcycle was now?  She certainly didn’t.

“Then call your father.  Make it his turn for a while.”  Midori hung up on her.  That wasn’t much of a surprise either.  Of course, her father was two thousand miles away in Michigan, so it wasn’t like he was going to be able to help much.  Liz didn’t want to call him.

The doctor who finally came in was condescending.  Liz forgot his exact words as they fell out of his mouth, but he told her that she hadn’t consumed much that wasn’t alcohol for months, had lost about thirty pounds, was lucky to be alive, and lucky that gonorrhea was the only disease she’d managed to catch during her binge.  He told her he knew she’d gotten desperate because they’d pumped half a bottle of rubbing alcohol out of her stomach.  He told her that she had reached the point at which she had to make a decision:  quit or die.  She wasn’t going to make it to her twenty-fifth birthday otherwise.

“Twenty-sixth,” she said quietly.  She was already twenty-five, and her birthday was in March, six months away.  The doctor didn’t hear her; he had delivered his doomsday message, and was mentally out of the room already. As he left for real, something went “thunk” against the window. Something small, light and solid, like someone had thrown a piece of cardboard at it. Liz looked, but didn’t see anything.

The counselor who came to see Liz said her name was Martha and seemed to know her.  There was another “thunk” when she came in.  Liz didn’t remember the woman, but it wasn’t inconceivable that she’d met her in another hospital room.  She had straight blond hair so fine it seemed to be evaporating from her head and a perpetually worried expression.  Martha was full of, “oh, Liz, how long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?” and, “you’ve been lucky so far,” and other such pap that Liz wasn’t in the mood for.  Martha said some things that made sense, too, but they were buried under a lot of rhetoric, much of it irritatingly Christian, so Liz mostly looked out the window.  While she did that, she discovered the source of the thumping sound. There was a huge yellow grasshopper in her room, and it was trying to get out, leaping into the glass over and over.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

It had to hurt, slamming into that barrier over and over again.  Liz sympathized with it.

Eventually the counselor sensed that she was being ignored, and left with a promise to return “to talk” later.  She left an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet.  The moment she was gone, Liz tore it to shreds and wadded up the pieces.

That bit of petty destruction complete, Liz folded her arms, careful not to pull her IV out, and watched the grasshopper.  It seemed to have tired of slamming into the window and was sitting on the ledge.  It was almost three inches long.  How the hell did a big-ass grasshopper like that get to Los Angeles, anyway?

She called some friends, dialing as many numbers as she could remember.  It seemed like there should have been more.  She certainly felt more popular than the four or five phone numbers she could remember, although the feeling didn’t last long.  Charlie was too busy to come and get her.  “What about the party you dropped me off at?” she said.  “I almost died there, asshole.”

“What are you talking about? I haven’t been to a party with you for almost two months.  I haven’t heard from you in three weeks, and I’m kind of pissed about that.  It makes me feel pretty fucking unimportant to you.”  Judging by the tone of his voice, Charlie wasn’t surprised, just pissed off.

Didn’t anyone care that she’d almost died? “Well, forgive me.”

“Well, fuck, don’t get mad at me. I don’t know how you got there. Last I heard you were out in the Valley.”

“Sorry,” she said, meaning it this time.

“Whatever,” Charlie replied. “Anyway, I’m headed out the door to work, so I can’t give you a lift.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“I’m working then, too. Give me a call when you’re feeling better, and maybe we’ll hit a few things this weekend. I know some stuff that’s going on.”

She was in no mood for a night of raves, that was for sure. House parties, either. “Well, shit, do you know Janice’s number? I can’t remember it.”

Charlie sighed. “Janice moved to Las Vegas a month ago, Liz. Nice of you to remember.” He hung up.

She ran into answering machines until she finally got through to Pogo, whom she actually woke up.  Twelve in the afternoon was early for him.  “Liz? How you been?”  His slightly nasal voice sounded surprised to hear from her.  Had she not called him in a long time either?  She could remember having had a dream about him; maybe that was why it seemed she’d talked to him recently.

“Like shit. I’m in the hospital. I need a ride home.”

“Aw, man.  I ain’t got a car, though.  My brother took it to San Jose for the week.”  Pogo snuffled loudly. She could hear him lighting a cigarette. “How’d you end up in the hospital? Was it Valentine again?”

Valentine?  Even with her fractured memory, she knew she hadn’t seen him. “I haven’t talked to that psycho. I got myself in the hospital.  Alcohol poisoning.”

“Aw, man, that sucks. Valentine wasn’t there? I thought he said he was going to see you.”

“He’s delusional.  I haven’t talked to him in three months.”  Valentine had tried to drown her–in a public pool of all places–the last time she’d seen him.  In spite of everything else that had happened, she doubted she had gotten drunk enough to talk to him again.

“You sure about that?”

“Pogo, don’t mess with me right now.”

Ever the submissive, Pogo didn’t argue. “Okay, whatever. I can try and get a car, maybe, if you need a lift,” Pogo offered. “Valentine might loan me his car.  He wouldn’t have to come or anything.”

Another bit of information was coming back to Liz; Pogo’s network of friends consisted mainly of Valentine, his brother, and herself.  Anything he did was going to involve Valentine.  “That’s okay,” she said.  There was some dim unease about what Pogo might say to Valentine as she hung up, but she was too tired to think about it much.

The nurse who brought Liz’ lunch didn’t notice the grasshopper.  Lunch was watery and bland, mostly fruit and vegetables in deference to her tortured stomach.  Liz considered it for a long time.  She was hungry, barely. She wanted a drink more. Liz could almost taste it just thinking about it, the burn in her throat and the lovely boost that took the hard edges off of the world. If she just kept it in check this time, watched how much she drank, and what she drank, she’d be okay. She could handle it…

Liz thought again about vomiting up blood, and about not being able to speak English briefly, and about her mother being so pissed off at her for all these times she’d been taken advantage of, that she couldn’t quite exactly remember.  And she’d been drinking rubbing alcohol? 

“This is not a good life,” she said, speaking to whom she didn’t know.  Maybe the grasshopper, who seemed to agree.  She still wasn’t hungry, but she ate something runny and greenish anyway.  Her stomach clenched around it like an oyster around a rock, considering whether or not it would accept this meager gift.  Liz closed her eyes until the cramps went away.

Even as sick as she was, her mind was spinning.  Fast.  It was always like this; she felt like she was thinking about too many things, trying to take care of too many things.  It was one of the things about real life that made an attractive alternative of being drunk and burning every possible bridge that linked her to anyone or anything.  And this was where it had gotten her.  She’d almost died, and no one would have noticed.  The skaters would likely have tossed her body in a Dumpster and made a speed-addled adventure out of it.

She closed her eyes, but didn’t want to sleep. She asked a passing nurse if she might be able to take a long, hot bath, but the gentle smile she got in return wasn’t encouraging.  That was well and good anyway; she was too tired to move.  Liz fantasized about finding out where she had been picked up, so she could go back and kick the shit out of the skaters who had apparently been perfectly willing to let her die.  And if she had died, what then?  None of her friends would have known.  Or been particularly upset, from the sound of it.  Liz felt as though she’d killed herself but somehow survived without anyone knowing, and everyone had already mourned and gone on with their lives.  As far as they were willing to care, she might as well be dead.

This is not a good life, she thought again. 

It was going to get harder before it got easier.  Everything always did, didn’t it?  Liz had to stop thinking, or move, so she got up.   There was a bandage on her foot, and a twitch of pain that said she’d cut it somewhere.  Her head went light as she got vertical, as if her brain had forgotten how tall she was.  Her little hospital room looked different, from this vantage.  Liz hated being tall.  She had to stand still for several minutes before she felt confident enough to take a step.

She stuck her finger into her lunch plate, limped to the window and smeared a thumbnail-sized dollop of mashed banana on the windowsill for the grasshopper.  It moved warily away from her, making her smile.  “Give you some energy,” she said.  “Maybe you’ll break that window yet.”  The grasshopper wasn’t impressed.

The trip to the window had made her so tired she didn’t care, and Liz tumbled gratefully back into the bed.  Her body’s meager supply of excess energy expended, she was able to finally stop thinking for a few minutes, too.

She thought again about her life.  About the ties she’d severed.  She couldn’t even remember why she’d run away from everyone.  Had life really been that bad?  She’d never been abused, or particularly unpopular, or even particularly poor.  Up until the alcohol had fucked everything up, there hadn’t really been anything terribly wrong with her life.  And maybe, just maybe, that had been the problem, because she felt horrible anyway.

“At least now I have a reason to be miserable,” Liz said darkly, speaking to the grasshopper again.  She closed her eyes, and an hour passed.

Her father, when she finally decided to call him, issued an ultimatum.  “Answer me one question,” Ted Bahti said.  “Do you want to quit?  Do you want to get your shit together?”

The way he said it made the short hairs on the back of her neck rise.  Her father hadn’t spoken to her in his State Cop voice for years.  It was the voice she imagined him using with his traffic stops–the voice that would take no bullshit.  It was also a voice that seemed to know that she didn’t have her shit together, and she’d always thought she’d been successful at concealing the dark underbelly of her life from him.  He was never there anyway, how could he have known?  “Yes,” she replied, her voice much more tremulous than she wanted it to be.

“Then I will help you, and this is what I will do.”  He took a deep breath.  “You’re going to come back to Michigan.”

“I figured that.”

“Don’t interrupt.  I’ll find you a job.  You’re going to get a full-time job, and you’re going to keep it.  I’ll find you a place to stay, and you’ll pay for that place with your own earnings.  You’re old enough to pay your own bills, and that’s what you’ll do.  I’ll cosign whatever you need, and I’ll help you out, as long as you stay clean.  You slip up, you drink so much as a single swallow of booze, and I’m through helping you.  For good.”

“Funny, that’s what Midori said,” Liz muttered in Japanese.

“In English, please.”

“I said, Mom told me the same thing, without the part about being willing to help me out.”

“I probably shouldn’t be doing this either.  You should have gotten your shit together a long time ago.  I’m going to test you, too.  I’m going to show up at your door as often as I think I have to, and you’re going to blow a Breathalyzer for me.”

She sat forward in the bed, nearly pulling her IV out.  “Are you fucking crazy?” Liz gasped.  “You can’t do that!”

“I’m your goddamn father; I can do whatever I want.  You say you want help, I’ll help you, but it’s going to be my way.  Cold turkey.  No twelve-step shit.  No second chances.  Because, frankly, it disappoints me to see you like this, Liz.  You’re twenty-five years old, for God’s sake, it’s time to quit partying out there in California and get on with your life.”

Liz looked at the phone, her eyes tracing the cord to the wall as if there was some answer there.

“Well?  What’s it going to be?  Yes or no?”

Fuck that.  She didn’t need his help.  She could do everything he suggested right here in LA; find a job, work her ass off, and just quit, quit with Charlie and all the rest of them.  She didn’t have to be under Ted Bahti’s microscope twenty-four-seven, blowing goddamn Breathalyzers like she was a DUI.  No.  No way.  Liz closed her eyes for a long moment, and thought about dying in a filthy bathroom surrounded by losers who didn’t even know her name, didn’t know her from a piece of meat.  And another thought, on the heels of that–did anyone in Los Angeles know her from a piece of meat?  Even Charlie?  Did she have any real friends in California?  Something had changed, between the Midwest and the West Coast, and she wasn’t sure what it was.  “My God, I almost died, you know?” Her voice came out small.

“Yeah,” her father said.  “But you didn’t.”  His voice was as uninflected and stony as always.  He could have given voice lessons to Clint Eastwood.

The next words came unbidden.  “I want to come home, Papa.  I want to come home and be someone else.”

“Good.  I’ll get a bus ticket for you and have it waiting at the station.”

“I have to take the bus?”

“Plane tickets cost money.”

“Can’t you just send me cash or something?  I’ll buy a car and drive.”

Ted Bahti laughed.  “Like I can afford to buy you a car!  If you need one, I know a guy who’s got one for sale.  It’s in Canton.  I’ll tell him to save it for you.  No arguments, Liz.  I’m sending you a bus ticket.  See you in a week or so.  Happy trails.”  He hung up.  Neither Ted nor Midori ever said goodbye on the phone.

“Yeah, well, I love you too,” she said without feeling.  Liz looked at the grasshopper, which was still on the windowsill, within an inch of where she’d last seen it.  The smear of banana was gone.  It wasn’t on the floor, either.  Her head felt too heavy, and her shoulders and thighs and back and neck ached as if she’d spent two days in a mosh pit, but she got up again anyway, with another smear of banana for the grasshopper, and placed it where the first one had been.  The grasshopper backed away from her again.  “Yeah, big tough guy, I know,” she said, smiling.  When she returned to her bed and looked back, the grasshopper had approached the lump of fruit and was eating hungrily.

The nurse who checked in on her late that evening was younger, with a henna-colored pageboy haircut.  She was more inclined to talk, too.  Her name was Jessica.  “You’ll look so much prettier when your face fills out again,” she told Liz.

Liz shrugged the comment off.  She knew her face had gotten gaunt; she’d seen it when she was in the bathroom.  “Being around my dad’s house should take care of that,” she said with half a smile.  “Long as being around my stepmother doesn’t make me puke too much.”

“Aw, you’ll be all right,” the nurse said cheerily. “How big is the tattoo on your back, if you don’t mind me asking?  I couldn’t help but notice.”

“From the base of my neck to my tailbone,” Liz said.

“Wow.  Can I…do you mind if I see?”

“Help yourself.  Can’t help not showing it off in this gown,” she replied, and leaned forward in the bed so the nurse could have a peek.  A maze of Celtic thorns and curls covered Liz’ back.  Monarch butterflies floated through the pattern, as if it were some kind of rosebush without leaves or flowers.

“That’s beautiful,” the nurse said, reaching out as if to touch it but not quite doing so.  “Did it hurt?”

“Gee, they injected ink into the skin of my entire back with a little tiny needle, over the course of a couple of months.  You’re the nurse,” Liz said.  “What do you think are the odds that it didn’t hurt?”

Jessica smiled with a hint of mischief.  “I always ask that anyway.  To see if people lie about it.  How much did it cost?”

“A lot.  Almost two thousand.”  Liz suddenly wondered if having most of her back tattooed was a waste of money.  Sitting here, it seemed like an act of colossal self-indulgence.  Just like the rest of her life had been.  Liz didn’t like feeling sorry for herself.  She wanted to be proud of her tattoo, and everything it represented…but just right now she couldn’t be.  She pulled her gown back over her shoulders.

“Do you have any more?”

“Two on my ankles,” Liz said.  “A Celtic bracelet on one and a Red Hot Chili Peppers tag on the other.”  She didn’t show those off.

“I thought about getting one,” the nurse said.  “Never got up the courage, though.”

“You’ll do it if and when you’re ready.  It just happens.”  She didn’t feel like helping boost Jessica’s confidence about getting ink, and masked the feeling with a humorless smile, hoping that the subject would change.

Jessica smiled and nodded, sensing Liz’ reluctance.  “Martha tells me that you weren’t interested in joining AA, even after what happened to you?”

Liz kept her voice as neutral and cheerful as she could.  “I’m not Christian enough.  All they do is get on my nerves.”

“You should do something, though,” she said with a look of honest worry.  Liz looked into the girl’s blue eyes, and saw…she wasn’t sure what.  Jessica seemed honestly worried that she might have to go on living in a world that didn’t include Liz.  It wasn’t a look of someone who had a crush on her, or needed something from her, just naked, honest caring that was somehow not diminished by the fact that Jessica probably extended it to every idiot that she met.

“I know, I know.  Downward spiral, all of that.  I’m breaking out of it, though.”  Liz met the nurse’s skeptical look.  “I am.  I’m going home.  My dad’s going to help me quit.  I’ll be okay.”

She tilted her head.  “You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

“I am,” Liz said.  “And I’m pretty stubborn.  But I’m going anyway, as soon as I get out of here.  Which will be…?”

“Tomorrow,” the nurse replied.  “They wanted you to stay one more day for observation.  You may have more hallucinations, too, as your body adjusts.  You should make sure you’re around people who’ll support you, if you’re not willing to go to AA.”  Liz could tell Jessica wanted to pressure her more about AA, but had decided it would be futile.  Good.  More people telling her what to do was just going to piss her off, at this point.

She slept well.  In the morning, the grasshopper was perched on the headboard.  Liz shared her breakfast with it.  When they discharged her and brought her some clothes from a goodwill box–grungy tennis shoes, some exceptionally ugly slacks that were too short, and a Pizza Hut t-shirt–she scooped the grasshopper into a plastic cup, covered the top with her hand, and took it with her.  “Don’t worry,” she told the insect as it hopped frantically against her palm and the clear walls of its prison.  “You need to get out of LA, same as I do.  You’ll just die here.”  The nurse at the desk looked at her like she was nuts, but she talked to the grasshopper anyway.  Liz felt a little nuts, and it always felt good to scare the norms.  “You’ll see.  I know some great, huge fields in Kansas you’ll like.  All sorts of green things to eat, and lots of other grasshoppers, too.  You’ll get laid like crazy.”

Liz decided to take the bus home.  Might as well get used to it, if she was taking a bus to Michigan.  She opened her fingers enough to let the grasshopper breathe, but kept it imprisoned until she got home.

She smelled her apartment before she got there.  She didn’t have keys, so she’d planned to go in through a window, but that became a moot point when she saw that her door was standing wide open.  A pungent stink of sweat and burned tortillas reached her nose before she’d even gone upstairs.

Liz wished she could remember who she might have given the key to.