Carson Knight
Part I: Radio Reveal
Another Day in Texas
The last few weeks had been all the same, making him wonder how the hell he could get a weatherman’s job around here. Another sweltering day in Texas, thought Thomas as he peered through the doorway into the morning sun. He could picture the guy on TV with his Colgate smile and tailored suit, collecting a fat paycheck while the rest of us jerks worked for a living.
“Hot as hell! No Chance of rain! See you tomorrow, folks!” Rinse. Repeat. For three or four months, at least here in North Texas. He usually didn’t mind the cloudless skies and the absence of anything even remotely resembling shade or comfort in the shape of a cloud (any cloud!) However, this June, it was beginning to wear him down. Wear him down like an incessant caller who keeps trying to get through. Finally, you deal with it. Accept the call. Be polite.
Thomas shut the door of his house with a sigh and sauntered back to his bedroom. His feet felt cool on the tile floor of his home, but his house shoes were driving him crazy. His damn dog, Lady, had gotten bored and chewed off the front end of his left shoe, making the cheap rubber of the sole dig its jagged little teeth into his toes. He got to the closet, slid the doors open, and found a pair of tan shorts and a cheap T-shirt he kept for his Saturday meetings. Always a cheap shirt on Saturdays, he thought.
The weather, the house shoes, the damn dog, even the cheap T-shirt, it was all annoying Thomas lately. The problem was – well, that was the part that was hard to tell himself, after all. The problem was… let’s start with the weather. It was climate change. That’s why it pissed him off more than usual. The New York Times writes that every problem in the current millennium, from a rainstorm to inflation, was due to the malevolent beast that is climate change, so he wasn’t wrong to be pissed off. Right? It didn’t help that his early-1980s-era A/C was older than he was, and over the last two weeks, it couldn’t handle it all, kept flipping the breaker, and shut off rather than exploding. He’d have to let it sit for 30 minutes and reset it daily.
The house shoes, that’s an easy one. Thomas knew; he just knew they didn’t make things like they used to. A pair of shoes used to last 10 years or more! Now, the soles wear down faster than an ice cube in Texas in July. Useless. Globalization has gone mad! Cheap shit made in China with the same ol’ American prices. That was it. Or was it more?
A Look in the Mirror
Looking into the mirrored glass of his sliding door, Thomas ran a shaking hand through his dirty blond hair. He looked tired. He could see that. The bags under his eyes were more pronounced. His hair seemed to be getting crazier. He was losing weight at a pace that most Americans would envy. And to make matters worse, he had a rash on his cheek, about the size of a nickel, that didn’t seem to want to go anywhere. It was here for the summer. Here to stay. Politics and the state of the world aside, Thomas had something else on his mind. He was 10 months sober. And at times, it was driving him positively mad. No, not angry. He was under duress. Emotional duress. Physical duress. His own duress.
The meetings helped. Thomas joined AA the day after he got out of rehab. Thomas understood that he was no longer going to try to find a middle ground with booze, that cruel mistress he had kept around for 20 years. She had to go. Not like the other times: only on weekends, only in the evenings, only on holidays, hell, only on days that ended with the ‘y’. No, that cruel bitch had to go for good and not even stick around anymore for parties. He knew a group of people who swore by this exact mantra. Alcoholics Anonymous.
It was not easy getting to this point. Thomas guessed it wasn’t easy for anyone. In his case, it took being brought to his knees in a way that few people he knew in his 40 years had. The ones who had been brought to their knees, his friends along the way, hadn’t lived to talk about it. At first, it was an anomaly. Jack died? That’s terrible! But how? Walked off a building in a stupor… For shame. What once was an anomaly is becoming a perennial culling. Chris died in a car wreck. Jennifer bit the bullet in her sleep. Ted’s heart gave out after a bit too much cocaine. Anthony got drunk and did what Stephen King might call the “danse macabre” with fentanyl. One after another, like soldiers marching off to some senseless battle, they had no reason to fight.
But Thomas had pressed on. In what would seem to be a fit of insanity, Thomas decided to imbibe more booze with each fallen friend rather than choose to cut it out. Until he could no longer do it. Thomas eventually had a road-to-Damascus-like moment. Except it came as a culmination of a violent seizure at his friend’s cabin an hour north of Houston and didn’t stop there.
The fits began coming in waves whenever Thomas would put down the bottle. They’d range from violent convulsions to full-blown attacks that had his (now ex) girlfriend call 911 to get him to the ER. Thomas eventually had to keep a nearly constant intake of alcohol to ward off the next violent spasm.
It wasn’t just the seizures that were crippling. That wasn’t good, as it were. Thomas would wake up in a fog, his muscles so sore that he could barely scratch his head without aching all over, the feeling that he had been in a vise grip for hours. That was bad, but the pervasive fear of more gripped him. And its grip was ice cold and around his neck – a very real specter. It was as if he were in a suicide pact with the bottle where he only got comfort from the thing that was eventually going to kill him.
It had to stop.
Finally, after 12 hours of convulsing in his bed like Linda Blair, Thomas screamed out to his ex-girlfriend, Nic. He begged her to take him to a rehab center about 30 minutes away. He had Nic call his job, put in his two–week notification for “health” reasons, had Nic drive him to rehab, and checked into the center with a BAC of 4X the legal limit. 13 days later, after being pumped full of anti–convulsion drugs and God knows what else, Thomas checked himself out (against the doctors’ advice) and walked out of there feeling like Paul from Saul. It was a bona fide miracle.
Almost the very first thing Thomas did upon leaving, after getting himself a chocolate milkshake from Sonic, was to get on his laptop at home and find a local AA meeting. He was pleasantly surprised to find they were all over the place and would accommodate just about any schedule. The next day, Thomas walked into a meeting and found a new home away from home. He was sober from then on, but as one of the more philosophical attendees put it, sobriety wasn’t all blowjobs and pillow fights.
Radio Cackles
Now was the challenging part. After being given the gift of desperation that so many alcoholics require to kick their habit, Thomas had to decide, every day, to stay sober despite the mental sparring that often went on inside his head. His biggest ally in this constant battle was his support group at AA. That’s why, even when the last thing he wanted to do on a Saturday morning was to step into the unrelenting furnace that is a Texas summer day, he went ahead and got his tired, mangled, irritable self together and drove the half-hour to the meeting. It was life or death. He chose life.
He chose life, but that didn’t mean he always did it with a smile on his face. On days like today, Thomas did it with a grimace, and each action he took until he reached his car felt like he was weighed down with lead. But that was okay. He knew that peace lay on the other side of his little commute amongst friends and redeemed his local meeting. Thomas finished getting dressed, put the brown leather wallet he had picked up in Thailand in his back pocket, pet the dog, and left the house, closing the red door behind him.
When Thomas grabbed the Kia’s door handle, the scorching heat made him jump away. “Damn it!” He said aloud. He cursed himself for not parking the car in the garage. Being a first-time homeowner, he was still getting used to the garage and usually just parked out on the driveway. He opened the door using his untucked shirttail like a kitchen mitt, got into the car, and started the ignition, blasting the a/c while rolling the windows down to release the trapped-in air.
Holy shit, he thought, 8:30 am, and already this place is a hellscape. He turned on the radio to the local news channel before deciding he had better grab a cold drink for the road and walked back to the house. With the car door ajar, the radio cackled:
The body of a 19-year-old student from the University of North Texas was found dead this morning off a walking trail in Denton County. At this time, we know that the victim was Jessica Lily, a promising young student on the school volleyball team. Police are saying that the cause of death is foul play and are encouraging anyone with any information on the matter to please call 1-800-388-TIPS. She is survived by her mother, father, and her younger brother. Next up, the weather.
Thomas got back into his car and put his can of Waterloo flavored water into the beverage holder. The weatherman came on the radio:
Another hot day here in North Texas! I hope you have a plan to beat the hea-
Thomas turned off the radio in disgust.
“Asshole,” he murmured. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He shifted the car to reverse, backed down the driveway, and drove towards the solace of his meeting without knowing that his favorite former high school student had been brutally murdered the night before.
Part I of this four-part story ends, but the story will be continued…
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or read his previous serial, Shadow Man – One Man’s Redemption, Another’s Horror – Horror Obsessive
