Ninety Days Read Online Free Page B

Ninety Days
Book: Ninety Days Read Online Free
Author: Bill Clegg
Pages:
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around, and sure enough, the pretty prick is leaning against the counter, arms crossed, with a look on his face that can only be described as disgust.
    I can’t take another second so I leave. The rain is coming down in sheets and the streets are empty. I walk to the end of the block and head what I think is east. It’s 3:30, I’ve already been to my gym (the year’s membership has luckily been paid) and two meetings, but have two hours to kill before I can go back to Dave’s place before meeting Asa later. I stumble onto Hudson and realize I’ve gone west. Barnes & Noble in Union Square is the only place I can think of going where I can disappear for a few hours without it being obvious that I have nowhere else to go. It’s at least a twenty-minute walk, but I turn around anyway and head back toward Jane. The rain is colder than it was before, pushier. I find a broken umbrella sticking out of a Dumpster and for a few blocks agree to a fiction that it’s actually keeping me dry. There is a moment—water sloshing from my shoes, T-shirt plastered to my chest, rain dripping from the brim of my NYC Parks Department cap—when I stop and look around. I have no idea where I am. Not one building or business looks familiar. I’ve gone east past Jane and what I thought was north. I don’t see any street signs. Am I anywhere? I wonder. Do I even exist anymore? I’ve lost all sense of direction and feel as if the rain is about to blast me into a billion microscopic particles. I’ve never felt so small. I start calling people—Dave, Jack, Kim, Jean, Asa—and reach only outgoing voice mail messages. I have nothing to say so I hang up each time and dial the next number. I imagine them all safe in their warm, dry offices and apartments, surrounded by colleagues, pets, ringing phones, and freshly brewed coffee. I think of the agency, now gone, and the night only months ago when I showed up and the locks had been changed. How on the other side of that locked door sat furniture that Kate and I had picked out and carried from a store on Park Avenue South. After that night, I would never see that office again. I stop dialing the phone, which is now slick with rainwater and very likely to be broken soon.
    I’ve been back for five days, have sixty-four days sober, and with ninety days almost in sight I don’t know how, on the other side of it, I’ll be able to hold things together, how I’ll stay in the city. Jack’s slogans and Asa’s assurances aren’t helping. There is no money coming in, it’s all going out, the bills are mounting, and I have to find an apartment in the next week before Dave throws me out. I feel like one of the street urchins Dickens describes in his books. Like little Jo in Bleak House, who dies of something bronchial and grim like consumption once his use to the world has expired. Mine has too. Like this ridiculous umbrella, whatever fantasy I had of being OK, of making my way back in a city of overachieving winners, is now quite obviously a figment, a pathetic shield against an overwhelming truth. It’s over. I’m a Dickensian speck in a city that no longer has use for me. I had my time here and in that time got lucky, played my cards well for a while, and then very badly.
    I put the umbrella down, let the rain drench any remaining patches of dry clothing and skin, put my face to the sky and think, and then say, OK. The city disappears around me and there are only the elements. Wind and water, freezing and clean. OK, I say again, not really understanding what it is I am agreeing to, what it is precisely I am accepting. But I am accepting something. The truth of my circumstances? The reality I have until now avoided? It’s much worse than I imagined and also somehow better. Is this the bottom I hear people refer to in meetings? The grim despair that makes change possible?
    I walk without any sense of direction. At this point I don’t care where I go. I’ll walk until five, get soaked until Dave
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