Down Time – Andrew Martin

That first night, a Tuesday for God’s sake, ended with Aaron vomiting into the curb and me supporting most of his drunken weight all the way back to his apartment. We shared some work with each other soon after, though the pages Aaron sent me were so embryonic as to be almost insulting, more scattered notes than a workable draft.

How did things go from that to the book he eventually published? I certainly didn’t help him achieve any such transformation. I saw something flash between Cass and Aaron in the first moments after I introduced them, an odd extra beat of interest when they began talking. He was an even bigger lift, rescue- wise, than I was, and like Cass, an honest snob. Had I put them together out of spite, knowing they’d screw each other up?

Or was it a rare act of selflessness, knowing that, even if that was the case, they’d be into it? By the end of the night, Aaron had picked a fight with somebody bigger than him, and Cass, God bless her, had called a cab after Aaron threw a (feeble, mostly symbolic) punch, got hit (glancingly) in the face in return, and was asked (told firmly) to leave.

I wondered whether they were still together, and whether Cass was still grateful I’d introduced them. They’d both long since gone offline. I texted Cassandra: “You doing OK with all this?” Ten seconds later, I checked my phone for a response. Nothing. I put the phone on the windowsill facedown, picked my book back up. I read half a page, picked up my phone again. I texted Violet. “I hope things are a little better today. I promise my attitude has been adjusted.

I’m a new man.” She didn’t respond. Fine, good. One more thing to hold against her. Maybe I should text this to Cassandra too? “I feel like a new person now,” I wrote to her. “I just wanted you to know that.” “Person” seemed better than “man” in this instance. I stared at the phone and, to my wonder, she was writing back within seconds.

“you seem exactly the same,” she said. I drained my drink and maneuvered myself back through the window, an awkward, multi-step process that my occasional yoga did not seem to have much improved. I felt an urge to move. I was different now. I could act if I needed to. I looped the strings of a much-used surgical mask behind my ears and left the apartment.

The day Aaron finished rehab, Cassandra picked him up and drove him to New York City. Though they lived in Boston and the facility was farther north, in New Hampshire, it seemed obvious to her that New England, and Boston in particular, was no place to celebrate. For one, it was Boston, and second, it was the site of Aaron’s most recent bout of trouble. Though they would be returning soon enough, it seemed kinder to prolong the time away for as long as possible.

New York, she knew, had its own triggers—even if Aaron claimed not to believe in the concept—but it was where they’d met and spent their first happy years together. And there was just so much more to do there than drink. She hadn’t considered the fact that it might not be a good idea to “celebrate” finishing rehab at all.

“I guess I need to spend some time at a place again,” he’d said two months earlier, as she drove him home from the police station. He’d been picked up wandering into the sparse traffic on Melnia Cass Boulevard at three in the morning. It would be his second time at “a place” in their seven years together. It made her sad, and weary, but in that moment she couldn’t quite summon anger.

He was smart and kind and endlessly curious when sober, and a weeping, pants- pissing maniac when he got drunk. The pattern was well-established. Weeks, sometimes months, spent as a productive citizen – writing, teaching, even drinking in sociable moderation – were followed, without clear provocation, by violent jags of self-debasement, then hospitalization or other intervention by private or municipal parties.

In the past year, the cycles had gotten shorter and more intense. The inciting incident for this particular descent had been a neighbor’s Hannukah party, where he’d tripped headfirst into a bonfire and then rolled out of it with a drunkard’s clowning grace, pants slightly charred but otherwise unscathed, to general applause. 4 He’d insisted on staying at the party long past the time Cassie wanted to leave, long past what good manners dictated.

Their hosts, whom they barely knew, were accommodating, even amused, which Cassie did not appreciate. Her exhaustion had eventually overridden her protective instincts and she’d left him there after he’d accepted his god-knew-how-manyth shot from a large plaid-shirted man whom Aaron, she intuited, had resolved to outdrink. She shouldn’t have left, she knew that. Aaron had not made it home that night, nor the next day.

The cops found him on Sunday morning. They told most people, or allowed most people to believe, that he was going to an artist’s residency— “New Hampshire” had a euphemistic plausibility among their artistic friends similar to “New Haven” for an (overlapping) group of the intellectual elect. It wasn’t that she was so afraid of judgment.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: a729094319da8de1
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,090,470 bytes (1.04 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 269
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 403.6 minutes
• Total Words: 80,719
• Total Characters: 466,967
• Average Words per Page: 300.07
• Average Characters per Page: 1735.94

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