Free Bad Thoughts by Dave Zeltserman Page B

was all starting up again. A week ago he jolted up in bed at four in the morning, moaning, his body soaked in sweat. It took her almost a half hour to get him out of it. Since then, the nightmares had come nightly. After the nightmares came the moodiness, the depression, his just staring into space. She didn’t have a clue if he’d gone to work today. She had tried calling home a half dozen times and no one answered, but that didn’t mean a thing. If he was home, he’d just let the phone ring. Probably wouldn’t even be aware of its ringing.
           Once he got out of bed he was better, almost functional, but getting him out of bed was becoming harder and harder.
           She knew the signs as well as she knew anything. She’d been living with them for over ten years. Two days ago he had stopped showering or shaving or even brushing his teeth. That was bad. That meant the drinking was only a few days away, at best.

       And once the drinking started . . .
           Her stomach tensed thinking about it. Absentmindedly she put a hand to the pain and massaged it. Once the drinking started was when the real fun began.
           The drinking would be heavy and intense, but it wasn’t even like he’d get drunk. More like he’d just fade away from her. Sometimes he’d become catatonic, other times he’d move around their apartment like a zombie, looking through her as if she didn’t exist, as if he didn’t have any idea where he was. The more alcohol he’d pour into himself the more frequent his trances would come. Sometimes they would last ten minutes, sometimes an hour, and then he’d be back, staring at her blankly, not even aware that anything had happened. Not even able to remember that anything had happened.
           Then one day he’d be gone. Just plain disappear. He’d usually come back a week later looking emaciated, like he’d just gotten out of a P.O.W. camp. One year, he was almost dead with pneumonia when he staggered back to their apartment. Another year, he had rat bites up and down both his legs. Then last year, he was so dehydrated he had to be hospitalized. The doctor told her another day and she would’ve been out shopping for a casket.
           He would never be able to tell her what went on during his disappearances. The way he would explain it was that one moment he would be drinking in a bar or restaurant or out of a bottle in some alley and the next moment he would be someplace else, realizing he’d better get home. He could never remember what happened between those two moments even though they could’ve been more than a week apart.
           They never found out what happened during his disappearances. Except for one year . . .
           Three years ago, he had ended up in a crack house in Chelsea living with a prostitute. A few weeks after he came back home, the girl showed up at their apartment to give Susan back Bill’s driver’s license. She also wanted to tell Susan about it. She was no more than eighteen, haggard looking, thin, her skull just about shining through her flesh, her arms nothing but a mess of scars. It broke Susan’s heart to look at her. The girl was pretty much doped up but she was able to describe in detail her week with Bill. She thought Susan had a right to know about it. She was also hoping that maybe Susan could give her some money.
           Susan almost left him then. She came within a heartbeat of packing her clothes and getting the hell out, but she knew he didn’t have any idea of what he’d done. That it was a completely blank screen to him. So he begged and pleaded with her, his eyes as tortured as anything she’d ever seen, and in the end what choice did she have? Besides, at the time she probably still loved him. She wasn’t sure, though, whether she could forgive him.
           As it was she wouldn’t have sex with him for six months, and after that only with condoms for another year. And