“There is no old life,” I said. “I’m a different person now. You know that. I took drugs to be someone else, to feel like someone else, but I know who I am now. I like who I am. You taught me that.”

“It’s not as easy as you think,” Frank said.

“It will be easy for me,” I said. “Watch me.”

“I will,” Frank said and I had a place to stay.

—

Frank had a small one-bedroom apartment when I moved in. There was a mattress on a metal frame and a nightstand and lamp in the bedroom and a chair in the living room. And books everywhere. “I still have more than I need,” Frank said.

“Anything in the cupboards?” I asked.

“Plenty.” He had dishes and pots and pans – all of which he knew how to use – and food on the shelves and in the refrigerator. “I don’t like to go out much,” he said. So we didn’t. We did get another chair. And a few months later we bought a couch, which I took as a major victory and Frank took as a cause of concern. “I don’t want a lot of clutter,” said the man who had books strewn all over the place.

“Not a lot,” I said, “just enough to make it look like someone lives here.”

Frank came to his aversion to things from books, a philosophy cobbled together from a variety of sources, distilled down to what was useful for him, sort of the way, Thomas Jefferson cut out the parts of the Bible and the Koran he didn’t agree with or find necessary. I came to my aversion through experience. I didn’t want anything because I’d already had everything taken from me once. I wasn’t going to let them take anything again. And if I didn’t have anything, there was nothing to take, nothing to lose. One thing treatment teaches you is how to do without. You deny yourself the things you want most, the feeling you get from the drugs, the drugs that give you the feeling, the want itself. You do without today and then you worry about tomorrow when it comes. You do without every day until the want goes away, which it rarely does. Or not for long. Most people can’t deny the want, can’t do without, and they relapse. There’s no shame in it, but I didn’t think it would happen to us. Frank and I could do without. Maybe taking other things helped us with that, I don’t know. I let Frank think about that. And what he thought, he put into practice. “We don’t have too little,” he liked to say, “Everybody else has too much.”

—

“I’ve got a partner now,” I told Froehmer.

“What’s he do for you?” Froehmer said.