The recliner squeaked when Al reached over to turn on the table lamp. I squinted against the soft light diffused by the corrugated shade. Fucking Al. Sometimes AA feels like a game of who can one-up the other with the terrible shit they’ve done during the throes of addiction. No one can one-up Al. He’s the only reason I’m sober. Or was. I didn’t think sobriety was possible until I heard how bad he’d had it. Then I knew, if Al could get sober, so could I.

“She’s fine, Jess,” Al said in his gruff voice from decades of torment. That man right there had blown more coke than Escobar ever trafficked from Columbia. “She’s upset’s, all. Called me when you didn’t come home after your show. Then, well, when you sent that stuff. Man, Jess. What can you expect?”

The light grew brighter as the bulb warmed. And then I remembered that the room was bugged, and that we were almost certainly being watched.

“Watch what you say,” I said. “Our conversation is being recorded right now.”

Al leaned toward me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I pointed toward the ceiling fan like that explained everything. “Room’s bugged.”

He relaxed back in his chair and shook his head. That three a.m. silence returned.

“What do you remember?” Al said.

I proceeded to tell him everything I remembered up until the moment in The Mule Kick’s men’s room when things got fuzzy. The gig, the radio station, waking up to the doctor with the walrus teeth, Malia, Professor O’s experiments, the reenactment of the night my son fell from his crib. I left out the bit about strangling the man in the dark hallway. I didn’t know what had happened back there and wasn’t ready to confess to murder. Especially when it had most likely been a hoax. Like all the rest.

That was a lot for anyone to take in, even Al, who has heard it all. He sat with his arms crossed, thinking. Then he turned toward me. Scrutinizing my backwards shirt. My bloody and swollen face. Vindication was coming, I was sure of it.

“Don’t bullshit me, Jess,” he said. “The fuck did you take?”

So much for salvation. “That is the truth,” I said. My croaking voice was less than convincing. “Crazy as I know it sounds. I swear it.”