Sirens by Joshua Mohr

Author:Joshua Mohr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio

6

For the few weeks after the peek-a-boo fiasco I carry around all sorts of selfish fantasies about copping and drinking, and because the world’s rising oceans are polluted with irony, something unbelievable happens: I have to relapse.

I need surgery that will require opiate sedation.

In the junkie community, it’s called a freelapse. You relapse, but it’s okay. You get a free pass. You’re supposed to get high, just following the doctor’s orders.

I’d been praying for drugs and alcohol since seeing Ava fall, and a wicked god heard me, granting my wish with one malicious twist.

___

Which brings us back to where we started: Six in the morning, New Year’s Day, me retrieving Ava from the crib and bringing her back to bed, the three of us lying like a happy family, then the numbness starting, no feeling on the right side of my body, from shoulder to toes, and me saying to Lelo, “911,” and me saying to Lelo, “It’s happening again,” and she says, “What?” and Ava crawling all over me, yelling, “Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop!”

The night before, we’d been on a nearly empty New Year’s Eve flight from Seattle to SF and I said to Lelo, “I hope 2015 is better than 2014.”

“Me too,” she said.

“It has to be, right?”

But eight hours after the flight, I’m numb and Lelo snatches the phone fast, propelled into action with desperate tunnel vision because we have some unfortunate experience in situations like these: Three years earlier, we went south from our home in San Francisco for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I was scheduled to sit on a panel with some other indie press novelists and heard a popping noise in my head and lost the ability to talk, ended up at a Hollywood emergency room on a Sunday morning. After a CT scan, a chest x-ray, and an MRI, we were told the terrible news. I had a stroke. I was thirty-five years old.

And actually, I hadn’t just had one stroke. The MRI showed a lesion on my brain, a scar from a stroke in my past. When I mentioned my enthusiastic drug history to the neurologist, she said I probably had the first stroke when I was loaded and might not have known. I imagined myself sitting at a dive bar, coked up and twisted on whiskey, and stroking right there, surrounded by other sorrow machines, me speaking in tongues, brain curdling, and no one noticing, including me.

Once Lelo and I traveled back north from Hollywood, over the next few months, my neurologist would run a gamut of tests and eventually shrug her shoulders. She’d note a ubiquitous heart defect called a patent foramen ovale, or, PFO, say it’s nothing to worry about, it’s found in twenty percent of the population. She’d say, “The stroke seems to be an anomaly. Take a baby aspirin every day and hope for the best.”

I didn’t know this at the time, but it wasn’t an anomaly, nor did I have a PFO.

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