12 Steps and a House of Cards

You're talking to her now

And you've eaten something minty

And you're making that face that I like

And you're going in… in

For the kill… kill

For the killer kiss… kiss

For the kiss… kiss

I need your money, it'll help me

I need your car and I need your love

So break me to small parts

Let go in small doses

But spare some for spare parts

There might be some good ones

Like, you might make a dollar

Ode to Divorce… by Regina Spektor

12 Steps and a House of Cards

You've always hated the 12 Steps. This second time through you hate them even more. You sit here tonight with your credit card sized laminated 12 Step reminder card between your fingers and you seethe silently in your disdain.

Step 2 is all wrong.

Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

God never meant much to you. You have an education—years' worth of science and math. There are fundamental principles—math is the universal language, DNA is the creator of life, science is the Gen-X god.

But that's not why you're a nonbeliever. You're just a pawn—everybody's pawn—on too many boards. It began even before you were born—a trophy daughter ignored by a mother whose only practical skill was being the trophy wife of a scheming politician; trophy daughter to the politician who was never too good to turn a blind eye and take a helping hand to move him along in his career; trophy daughter to the politician who barrels his way through and takes what isn't handed to him. He never needed people for their love. People are made in his image, molded to his needs and designs, built to serve his purposes. There's never a second chance; no redemption. God has nothing on Daddy. If you don't keep up, you're shucked and tossed out with the chaff. Love is found in the pages of polls and editorials. And when he ranks poorly in the former because you appear in the latter, he lets you feel the weight of his hand—the hand of the almighty—and it is anything but divine.

You know even before First Communion that God would never mean much to you because you're sure you never meant anything to him.

The first time you went through rehab, it was more like a resort than a hospital. Expensive. Luxurious. Paid for by Daddy. A gift, he had said, a rare and expensive chance to redeem yourself with a modicum of decorum and decency. He said it like the words meant something to him.

No, you prefer the Cliff Notes version of Step 2: Turn elsewhere for help.

12 Step leaders don't know a goddamn thing about biochemistry. Drugs—morphine, coke, meth—they all act the same way on the brain. They flood the nucleus accumbens in the brain with dopamine. Simple answer to addiction—don't ever do anything to stimulate the brain's pleasure centers ever again. No dopamine means no drugs, no food, no fun, no laughter… No sex. Well… let's not get carried away. 12 Steps leaders want your life to be monochromatic—living in the past, always penitent. But you don't need God to fight addiction. You just need the devil, a substitute, something to make your 12 Step world a little sweeter, a little sharper. Ball-busting Daddy by taking a position at Fox River Penitentiary serving the poor, the uneducated, the indigent—criminals—rather than helping him win over privileged voters whose hands dive deep into trust funds, drive Beamers, and have unlimited PPO insurance… That's a pretty kick-ass substitute. You don't care to admit that Fox River, too, served as a reminder of where you might be had it not been for Daddy's checkbook good graces.

Then there's Step 1:

We admit we are powerless over our addiction and our lives have become unmanageable.

Powerless… Fuck that. You're not Pavlov's dog. Higher reasoning will win out over classical conditioning. You can be here, in a bar with a friend—your weekly meeting with your sponsor—sharing a good but overpriced meal and meaningless conversation. Mum's the word while he watches ESPN over your shoulder and idly discusses the fumbles and fouls with the TV screen. You tap the laminated 12 Steps card on the table as you drink your new favorite—club soda with lime—out of a tumbler that looks like and feels like and is just as heavy as it always was. Drink it fast enough and there is still a burn, numbing only momentarily your throat, but still…

You're here, in a bar with your sponsor, and Step 1 says neither of you should be. But your sponsor will still sign your probation documents—he was never much one for rules. He makes his own rules. Together, you make your own. He'll pay for dinner. You'll take him back to your place where you'll have sex on the floor or the kitchen table, but never the bed—you'll never let him get that far. Sometimes, you'll let him fuck you over the back of the couch just so you don't have to look at him. How's that for decorum and decency, Daddy? If he isn't right for you, he is at least right for the part. It's easy, even if there is no real hope he can satisfy the ache between your legs; you want him to, you let him try, but you're always getting off alone when he leaves the papers—signed—on the coffee table and it is quiet enough where you can imagine another set of hands on your body. It's a hallucination of your own design, and, just like the drugs, it brings you glorious, momentary peace… followed by an uncomfortable night of restlessness.

Step 11 is your favorite.

Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

You smirk with disgust. Seek His will? The apocalypse descended upon you in the form of a lock on a door. His will. It was a simple spark that smoked out chaos from order and ignited a cataclysm between good and evil. Michael Scofield. He's the closest thing to a god you know, manufacturing your destiny from the moment—or before—he stepped in your infirmary. But even he—the Archangel, standing guard at the gate of paradise, bringing forth his brother to freedom and guilty souls to judgment—found yours, once again, like everyone before him, unworthy of love or common decency. A pawn.

Step 8 is wholly unacceptable.

Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.

It's always about everybody else—how they were wronged, how they were hurt. What about me? Oh, yeah. I'm the one to blame.

It's been six months since you last saw Michael Scofield. Lincoln's exoneration, Michael's pardon, the downfall of a conspiracy, the collapse of a presidency all happened in less than the twenty eight days you spent literally lying in rehab, doing whatever, saying whatever to bide your time until you could get the hell out of there. It wasn't the luxurious, private resort from before with famous people seeking temporary enlightenment and a break from the paparazzi. No, people there were paying their own way through that place. They wanted in. They wanted to recover and move on. All you wanted was a way out. But there were guards and cameras and doors and nobody to play for a key. Fucking locked doors… Fucking Fox River.

The day after you got out, he came to you with apologies, made it sound pretty, tried to tame you with stories about how it was all for his brother. Yeah? Well… Everybody lies. You know because TIVO records House on Tuesdays. How come House doesn't have to go to rehab? An addict who pops pills and still gets to treat patients?... Shitty excuse for a doctor-drama. It didn't occur to him that the fact that it wasn't about you made it all worse—it was impersonal, and you were intentionally nothing more than a puck in yet another power play. Words were said—things you didn't mean. Fuck. That. You did mean them—the words that wounded him. It didn't matter that they wounded you, too.

There's one thing you know—rehab's for quitters and liars. And there's one thing you said and meant—he wasn't good enough to judge you. You've been judged a thousand times over by much more important and prominent people than he, like lawyers and judges and politicians like Daddy and your own mother, having been told just as many times—every time—that you're not quite good enough… Who the hell is he to have an opinion of me anyway? Just like the others, he'd say it eventually. You were just saving him the trouble.

Yet, here he is—walking with a woman on his arm into this high-end bar in this upscale district, just sitting down in a secluded booth in the corner across the room, sliding in against the smooth leather, hidden in shadows of the low light, the candlelight is the only spark in his eyes.

Dress slacks, suit jacket, perfect pleats. He obviously got some semblance of his career back. He looks like a million bucks, not an ex-con. He sits back a little—not too far to be aloof, but not close enough to be giving the woman he sits with any ideas. First date? He loosens his tie with his right hand that still bears the scars of his self-imposed injuries that you yourself had cleaned and sutured. As he removes his jacket, you notice he's wearing a t-shirt beneath his dress shirt and you can see the darkness of the tattoos on his arms that lay underneath the thin fabric that cuffs uncommonly low on his wrists—it's faint, but it's there, and only the most observant would notice. You may have LLI, but you don't have the corner market on details, Michael.

Despite this imperfection, the woman's eyes are wide shut and she seems to notice only his good looks, easy money, and a flirtatious smirk you recognize from the dozen times you saw it in the infirmary. You workin' a game on her, too, Michael? But the tattoos… maybe they're a turn-on… maybe she's in to bad boys… risks… danger. Maybe she, too, is into men with deep-seated emotional problems she can make her own. Say, Michael? Has she seen your feet yet?

Though the room is relatively quiet, you can't hear him at this distance over the piano, cello, and sax jazz that seems to resonate a brooding melancholy. But you watch his jaw move in his most unique way as his words fall from his pursed yet full lips that barely move. He looks at his companion with his intense gaze—eyes that see everything and reveal nothing except what he purposefully manufactures. You imagine the richness of his voice, how it vibrates the baritone register and punctuates with a quality of breathlessness. It's a subtle luxury. Smooth. Intoxicating. You can almost feel it. It's effective—a subtle trick in his repertoire.

Your eyes scan your reminder card and fall on Step 5:

Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our weaknesses.

Weakness… Now here's one they almost got right. You're full of weaknesses. You feel too much, give too much, want too much, expect too much. Forget love. You have been denied the most basic of human capacities—affection—since before you were born and you spent a lifetime trying to find it without the conscious thought of defining what it was you were missing, needing, craving.

By the time you were six, you knew how to sit with your back straight and your legs crossed—at the ankles, not the knees—which fork to use and when, and that tradition must be respected and upheld—that children, girls, women were meant to be seen, with as much skin so as to be sexy, yet decent, as you stand aside that higher education diploma you're not expected to put to use while you stand behind a man more powerful, yet less intelligent, than you—and not heard. Human interaction is manufactured for an ulterior motive. Nothing but the lies are real.

At fourteen, you learned that the movies had it all wrong—sex wasn't love either. It was attention-seeking behavior—a deep, primal instinct that you used to buy a few friends and a reputation that would piss off Daddy.

But pair up sex and drugs… Jackpot. Suddenly, you were everybody's friend—day or night. Those who would turn their nose up at you… well, there was enough drugs to purchase affection, to purchase what you thought must have been love, to purchase an uncomfortable, tenuous peace. However twisted, it felt better than anything you ever had.

But this is where Step 5 goes wrong. You used drugs to buy love. A + B = C. It's simple math, simple logic—take away the drugs and C – B = A. You're back to being unloved. What if it's more than that? What if it strikes harder, slashes deeper? What if—at the very core of things, at the very core of your existence—you are unlovable? Who's gonna admit to that?

So years down the road, you attempt to reinvent yourself and make yourself loveable. You construct yourself precariously with order. Tireless order. You fight the entropy with rules. Lots of them. Way more than 12. You eat 'no carbs' bland food—but never after six—and you never drink, and never eat chocolate. No dopamine rush here. You drop six of the ten pounds Daddy says the cameras add. You work too much to have fun, and you never laugh because there's nothing funny about anything. You return to your residency at a second-rate teaching hospital because you know being board-certified will keep you busy and your social calendar closed, even if it doesn't redeem you or resurrect the boy who died when you were too high to offer him any competent medical help. You do humanitarian work in third world countries to come to terms with that and because you can, for once, actually forget for a while that you are a cliché—a trust fund baby with a drug problem from a dysfunctional family.

You take an appointment as a physician at Fox River Penitentiary because there you don't have to make up the rules—there are lots of them and they're already defined. There are doors and locks and guards, and your world is neatly compartmentalized into finite units with clear boundaries, written rules about crossing them, and penalties for doing just that. There you can support yourself with ethics and laws and the first covenant of the Hippocratic Oath—First, Do No Harm—and you can help, and listen to, and raise up, and comfort other people who have been left behind in the rearview of your father's—Frontier Justice Frank—politicized, public version of tough love.

No, Step 5 should read: Stay fucking busy. Then there's no time left to think you're unlovable.

But after all—the rules, the structure—there's a center core of instability you fear still exists, you know still exists. You deny it still exists. You've done nothing but order a house of cards. Then he walks in, Michael Scofield, your personal King of Spades—the grave symbol of death—hiding behind pliant words, infectious charm, and a compelling sincerity that mask the darkness of his secrets you think you recognize in his eyes at times. One by one, he opens the doors on all the rules you designed, and your house of cards sways in the breeze. Wait for me… It won't always be like this… in this room… in this place. He reaches in and rattles the card buried at the bottom—the Queen of Hearts. But you're proud—you're shaken, but you still stand. Until then, I can't.

You're the only one who can help. I didn't come here to debate. I'm asking you to make a mistake… Clever. It was an entitlement he exacted from you, yet he actually made it seem like it was a choice. With that, he uses his other hand to latch onto the card of happiness, the card of peace—the Ace of Diamonds. He waves it in front of your face. This is about Lincoln. Don't make him pay for my mistakes. You're utterly sick with nausea at allowing yourself to be played again—you didn't even see it coming this time. But your ethics and principles won't allow what you honestly believe is an innocent man to be put to death, and your spite can't let Daddy take this from you, too. Then your heart shatters when you realize it's really just that you can't be responsible for taking away the brother from this man—this man holding your Peace, your Heart, your future. He takes your Ace and your Queen in his hand and presses them to his lips, breathes the faintest puff of air, and blows your house down. It disintegrates. You look down and find there's only one card left on which to rebuild. You smirk at the sight of it. Joker's wild.

Step 9's not right either:

Make direct amends to all the people we've harmed.

Right. Amends.

You bury yourself in shadows and watch him from across the room as the other woman excuses herself from the table, bag in hand, laughing a little, her hand lingering on his shoulder as she walks past him toward the back hallway. He sinks back against the leather with a heavy sigh, almost relieved, it seems, to have a break from his performance with her. As his eyes roll shut, he tents his hand over the bridge of his nose, pushing his fingers into his eyes. His thumb and middle finger pinch together as he drags his hand down from his face. Glass in hand, he rocks it back and forth, the last melting ice cube clinking against the side.

With quiet now surrounding him, you watch as his back straightens and his shoulders tense, like he is waiting for something, expecting something. The ambient noise dies down to silence, and for a moment it seems that time has stopped. You haven't moved, haven't blinked, haven't breathed, and yet he just seems to know you are there. He senses you, feels you.

His lips part and he draws a faint, shuddering breath. When he finally lifts his eyes to you, his look is direct, heavy, confining, and it threatens to break the floodgate on six months' worth, years' worth, a lifetime's worth of suppressed emotions.

He tilts the glass to his mouth and downs the rest, never relinquishing your eyes as he does it. It sparks your anger—Hey! That was good scotch, damn it! He didn't let it linger on his tongue. He didn't even taste it. It was too fast, it burns going down, and he narrows his eyes and grimaces at the effect of it. His heart rate increases—you know because yours does, too. It's all rush and no calm.

The waiter passes between you and he lets go of your eyes. You watch from across the room as he mouths the words, Another scotch, rocks… Double.

You blink and direct your eyes past him to the hallway. The woman is pacing slightly while talking on the phone. Blinking again, your eyes go back to his. You lick your lips and relish having the upper hand—he's asking himself how long exactly you've been watching him. He's been under the microscope and hadn't even realized it.

Payback's a bitch.

A new tumbler filled with amber liquid and a few pieces of clear ice is placed on the table before him. It's only a moment—the empty glass is being pushed away, the new one being picked up. Though he hasn't even tasted the fresh drink, the words fall from his lips, Another.

The waiter hesitates. He finally lets go of your eyes, leveling a heavy, condescending look at the man serving him, making it clear that he hadn't minced words. Top shelf. Double. He pauses for a moment, raises his eyebrow, and slightly cocks his head. Please.

Well, he had always been polite while exacting his demands.

With his eyes on his glass, his hand falls around it, tipping it on its edge as he swirls the liquid inside. His forefinger rests on the top edge momentarily before he starts a lazy tap with it, a tap that grows in demonstration and speed and soon involves his other long fingers. In moments, his fingers still and he levels his eyes on you, quickly raises the glass to his mouth, and finishes his chilled scotch—three fingers high—in a single gulp. The glass comes down on the table with a loud knock that echoes in your ear.

The room is charged with a current arcing between you, piercing the dark, running silent and deep. It carries sparks of emotions at lightning speed—the emotions from him you recognize, pity, fear. Dark and divisive, you can see the chasm they leave in him. There is more you share, you're forced to admit, than just your time at Fox River.

The waiter passes between you again, momentarily breaking the tension—another drink, another heavy knock of a full tumbler on the table. You have a passing thought that tempers you slightly. Better slow down, Michael. Trust me. It doesn't help.

His eyes drop back on you, his hand on the glass. He slouches forward in his seat, his forearm on the table supporting his weight, his piercing eyes sharp beneath a furrowed brow. Elbow on the table, he picks up his drink. You notice his hand on the glass—a casual three-fingered grip juxtaposed his deep glare. His forefinger atop the rim taps slowly, but heavily. You realize this may be the one genuine thing you know about Michael Scofield, the one thing he brought with him into the infirmary that was real—how his anxiety, his frustration, his anger manifests in the simple inability to keep his fingers still.

He drops his head down and to the side and averts his attention as if he is listening intently to something behind him. From the depths of the shadows behind, you hear the unmistakable sound of the other woman's high heels and exaggerated laughter. She is heading back to his table. With phone in hand, a smile on her lips, she says her goodbyes and drops her phone in her purse as she slips in next to him.

He sits back and turns toward her, opening his posture to her, more so than before. With the way she falls against him slightly as her arm slides around his shoulder, you know that her leg and hip bumped into his. She's a little drunk. And so is he.

You're not even close to being numb.

You watch him speak as he forces a smile across his lips that doesn't quite reach his eyes. What took you so long?

She giggles and pushes him away slightly as she sits forward, puts an elbow on the table, and lowers a hand to pick up her own bulbous wine goblet to bring it to her lips. As she takes a less than dainty sip, he leans forward to whisper in her ear. She turns her head toward him to accommodate him, her blonde hair falling against his cheek. He reaches up, brushes her hair away from her face and drapes it across her neck, his fingers lingering on her skin.

She whispers something back—you can't quite make it out—something playful, suggestive. It's like déjà vu. He smirks as he turns away slightly from her in mock surprise. You hear the scripted words, you think, as he speaks. Haven't even finished our first date yet and you're already inviting me in. It's a statement, not a question. Another entitlement.

Something changes right then—the moment becomes intimate and you're much more than a voyeur. His forehead rests against your temple, his nose brushes your cheek, his lips a whisper on the edge of your ear. You feel his breath feather-light and warm on your skin. You focus intently on what he murmurs—sweet nothings?

Jealously rolls through your anger, engulfs you, suffocates you.

But you see the woman's lips part and she shows her teeth in a coy, impish smile. A blush falls across her cheeks. His eyes are heavy-lidded, hazy. Not sweet nothings after all—the words are hot, indecent, and foretell how he is going to fuck her as soon as they are out of the cab and across the threshold in her apartment. Over the couch so you don't have to look at her, Michael? She arches her back, exposing her neck in tipsy laughter. It is everything she wants to hear and nothing that she doesn't. Though the words are edgy, on the tip of dangerous, he is still mannered. He'll put her needs first to assuage the guilt of satisfying his own while ignoring the vulgarity of his base actions—using her body as a proxy. What he doesn't say is that he is choosing her apartment so he can leave at the earliest moment etiquette allows, feigning the excuse of an early morning business meeting. He isn't your average bad boy. He's just more polite, seductive, cunning.

You hear from across your own table the disconnected, oblivious voice of your sponsor. "What are you staring at?"

He startles you and your eyes dart to him. "Nothing," you say. You're surprised he's paying any attention to you. The game must be on commercial. "I just… Step 9 is…"

Wrong. Step 9, you think, could be better summed into one word. Karma. Payback is a bitch.

Movement from across the room catches your eye. The card is still in your hand. You'll read Step 12 later. Its relevance will hit you.

The result of these steps is a spiritual awakening.

They're getting ready to leave, money's being exchanged, the last gulp of scotch burns as it goes down too quickly. He's coming this way and his lean, tall stature only adds to the paralyzing threat of it all. He hesitates ever so slightly at the corner of your table. You think he is going to speak, but you see that it is simply too much for him. This man who conquers all—he's broken, you realize, and it frightens you. It isn't that Fox River remains timeless, omnipresent, etched beneath his skin and burned into his being. It has nothing to do with his brother. It isn't the fact that he forfeited so much, sacrificed so much—too much—and gained so little, or that he witnessed or instigated dark, evil things, or even committed them himself. It's the sheer intensity of what he feels—that he feels everything and he can't get go of anything—and he absorbs it, consumes it, drowns in it. And the effect of it impresses you, shocks you, scares you.

It's beautiful, macabre, horrific in its loneliness—his loneliness. He's not at all like you. He's not unlovable. He is, by far, most deserving of love. He is, however, just simply incapable of being loved in the capacity, the manner, the sheer intensity that he offers it. It's impossible. He deserves it, but he'll never have it. Not even close. The one person who deserves it most will have to settle—always settle—for what he can get.

The woman he's with reaches back and grabs his hand, pulling him. He's reluctant, but he resigns, you see, but not before he levels one last look at you—one that is heavy as stone and steals your breath. You hear his thought. I wanted to be there… with you… for you… and it's killing me to know you'll never believe that.

You startle again when your sponsor speaks from across the table, "Ready to go?"

You blink heavily a few times before you find the ability to breathe air into your lungs.

"That guy… He seemed like he wanted to say something to you. Do you know him?"

"No." You turn away and head for the door, hiding the tears that have formed in the shock of your epiphany. You realize in that very moment you know everything about Michael Scofield you'll ever need to know. "I never did."

~finis~