There's a short story by Sartre called "La Chambre," and in it a man named Pierre is tormented by malevolent statues that buzz around his head, driving him deeper into insanity. His sole control over them comes through his zuithre, strips of cardboard glued together in a spider shape. On one strip is the word Black, the words Power Over Ambush on another, a third holds a drawing of Voltaire. I was sitting in the dark with the heads of Jeremy and my parents buzzing around me like shadowy statues, wishing I had a zuithre, when a car crunched into my drive. I heard a long bleat of horn and saw a taxi in my driveway, the white dust of crushed shells drifting past its headlamps. It bleated again and I yanked open the door thinking, God grant me a zuithre for the idiot taxi drivers of the world as well.
"I didn't call for a cab," I yelled. "You got the wrong damned address."
A heavyset guy with a black pompadour leaned from the driver's window.
My security light was in his eyes and he porched his hand above his brow like a salute.
"You owe me sixty-three bucks," he called up. "Fare from Mobile."
"Listen, buddy, I don't owe you "
The back passenger-side door opened and Ava stumbled out. She took two halting steps toward the house before her knees crumpled and she dropped to the ground.
"Carson, help me, please," she cried as she tried to push from the sand, her voice a slur of tears and alcohol.
The driver and I wrangled her up the steps and onto the couch. I peeled four twenties into his palm and he looked happy to escape. Ava tried to push herself up, brushing sand from her face and mumbling semi coherently "I got drunk, Carshon, I fuck tup and got drunk and I wasn't goin' to again but I got drunk and "
"Shhhh. You don't need to explain."
"I need assistance"
She stunk of booze and sweat and fear. I stripped her to her underwear and guided her to the floor of the shower and adjusted a spray of tepid water. Her head was on her knees and she shivered and sobbed while I sponged water over her.
Several minutes later I helped her to stand, covering her with a robe as she fumbled from bra and panties. She was more coherent and her words made halting and desultory pictures of her last few hours. She worked Saturday, with Sunday and yesterday off. She'd gotten drunk Saturday night after work and couldn't stop drinking. This morning she'd arisen sick and ashamed. She'd called in ill and gotten Clair, who'd tongue-whipped Ava for her absence, an increasingly common event.
Ava looked at me through eyes more red than white. "I thought I'd sober up today an' go in tomorrow and get through it somehow and I'd stop this… ugliness. Yesterday would be the last." She hugged herself and shivered.
"But as soon as you hung up you started drinking."
Her hands made the hard gripping motion I'd overseen from Will Lindy's office. "I can't stop. What's wrong with me what's wrong with me what's…"
"You have to go to a detox center, get the poison out of you."
She grabbed my sleeve with the iron fingers of someone at the edge of hysteria. "No! I can't. People'd find out. I can't do that. No.