The Drift
Alex’s alley was better lit than the street. When she’d moved to San Diego several years before, Alex had started going for walks in the twilight hours, when the sun was dipping behind the trees but before it got too dark.
In Chicago, she’d preferred to walk at night, when people were home from work and she could glance into their picture windows to see their living rooms lit up inside. But Chicago had regular streetlights every few houses. In San Diego, she was lucky if there was one on every corner. The stretches between the lights were long and the sidewalks uneven. Runners wore headlamps, dogs had light-up collars.
She assumed it had something to do with light pollution and looked up whether it was an overall California thing, but no, it was just San Diego. The city had skimped on streetlights back in its early days, and they’d never updated their policy or budget to add more lights and protect pedestrians. There were more pressing civic concerns. Not that the city was focusing time or money on those either, but Alex realized the issue of lighting was relatively minor, comparatively.
So Alex tried to walk during the day.
When Alex moved into her condo at the back of her complex, she assumed it would be quiet because it was so far from the street, but it didn’t take long to learn that the alleys of San Diego were the real thoroughfares. All night, she heard people rolling their strollers full of belongings by. She peeked through her curtains at couples fighting and lonely men screaming their frustrations.
If she worried someone was in danger, she slid open her window to threaten to call the police. She hated doing this and never actually called. She wanted only to break up the fights or to get people to move on. So far, it had always worked. She kept Narcan in her bathroom cabinet now, but she’d never had to use it.
Despite San Diego’s reputation for perfect weather every day, the nights left a chill in her bones that felt colder to her than the coldest Chicago winters. There was something about the lack of insulation in the buildings and the seeping humidity that allowed the cold to linger even under two comforters and a sweatshirt, and she’d squirm to try to generate heat. She worried about the people outside and draped old sweaters and blankets over the back fence for them to take.
A friend, or someone Alex was trying to make a friend, came over for coffee one day. She ignored the ruckus in the alley that afternoon like a true San Diego native. “Sorry about all the noise,” Alex said.
The friend sniffed. “Just let them be. They don’t want to hurt you in the same way you don’t want to hurt them.”
Alex thought the friend had grossly misunderstood. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. If anything, I err in the opposite direction. If people are hanging out downstairs, I bring them water and snacks.”
Her friend recoiled. “You have to be careful or you’ll start attracting more.”
“They’re not cats,” Alex said. Indeed she rarely saw the same person twice.
There was one man she did see regularly on the street, Ben. Sometimes he seemed clean and coherent. She bought him sandwiches around the corner and chatted with him while he ate. He’d grown up in the area, but his mom and dad had given up on him. Sometime in the last year, he’d seen a real estate sign go up on his old lawn, and he’d thought about stopping in to say goodbye, he’d said, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Now, he didn’t know if he’d ever see them again. Alex could only say she was sorry.
Alex didn’t talk to Marusya anymore. There had been a time when they’d been inseparable, right when Alex had moved to San Diego. They’d enabled each other, encouraged one another to stay for one more, to try anything once. Alex had gotten clean when it felt like her livelihood was in danger: not when she worried she might kill herself or someone else, but when she worried that she could lose her job. Only the threat of shame and the risk of not being able to support herself was enough to push Alex to go to meetings and give away her stash. Marusya couldn’t understand why Alex would give it all away to anyone but her.
Alex and Marusya had tried to hang out when Alex was sobering up, but Alex didn’t like the feeling of holding Marusya back and Marusya said that Alex had changed. She insisted it wasn’t the lack of drinking, but that Alex had started taking herself too seriously. She was quieter. She didn’t babble hilariously about nonsense in the same way. She no longer unleashed her fury about the injustices of the world. These had been the things, Marusya said, that she had loved about Alex. Alex had wanted to think of herself as the same, but she wasn’t sure she was. She was frightened by the degree to which she felt like her personality had shifted after she’d stopped fizzing herself up with alcohol and drugs.
They’d tried to do breakfasts for a while, but then it seemed like Marusya had also changed. She started showing up still drunk or high from the night before, cogent one minute and then incomprehensible the next. Alex didn’t want to be a drag, but she’d asked if Marusya wanted to come to a meeting with her. Alex had offered that Marusya might stay with her through the roughest days, so Alex could take care of her. Marusya had declined. Alex could tell Marusya was trying to be polite and not insult her sobriety, but the implication was there that Alex was nothing more than a born-again puritan trying to proselytize, and it was clearly unwelcome.
Alex worried that she had pushed Marusya into a darker place. With Alex, they’d enabled one another, but they’d also kept one another at a certain level. Alex was never as keen to do harder drugs as Marusya was, and so they’d reroute to get another glass of wine or head home to forget about a frozen pizza in one of their ovens until the sobering blare of the smoke alarm woke them up. Without Alex, it was possible there was no one to keep Marusya in check.
When Alex had visited Marusya’s place the last time, she saw burn marks on the bathroom counter, and the laundry pile smelled tangy. Marusya’s normally messy mass of hair was now mashed solidly on one side of her head. Her fridge was empty, her dishes caked in the sink. “I think you might be getting out of hand, Mar,” Alex had ventured to say.
Marusya had pretended not to understand what Alex meant. “I don’t need your judgment. You can go.”
And it had been that simple. Alex hadn’t fought to stay. The phone calls had stopped, and somehow they never ran into one other. Both of their routines had distorted that distinctly.
So when Alex bought Ben a coffee and a muffin at the shop, she felt like she was providing a little care and support to someone who needed it, when it was too complicated to do the same for someone she’d loved.
Were friendships harder to establish because she was older or because she was sober? Though she thought of herself as an introvert, friends had always come easily. She opened up quickly, sharing something personal and paving the way for others to do the same, and the friendships had instantly solidified. Now, she still tried to stay open-hearted, curious about even the people she didn’t quite agree with. But something had changed: either San Diego was less friendly, or her sobriety had locked up her gears, or people were just too set in their ways at her age, or the pandemic had made everyone withdrawn, or—
She never wanted to be the type of person who only hung out with her boyfriend, but her social life was starting to look like just that.
She’d liked Pratesh immediately. He had a wry sense of humor, and he seemed genuinely interested in what she did, and he had a very sexy way of arching his eyebrows that made Alex feel a little sick in the best way. When Pratesh slept over, he slept through every alley commotion. Alex was amazed. What a gift to be able to sleep so deeply without being totally drowned in alcohol. Between Pratesh’s snores, Alex listened to the car doors of transactions slamming, the bang and clatter of garbage cans being overturned. She bought a pack of rubber gloves for cleanup in the mornings. She came back inside to find Pratesh drinking his coffee at the window. “You’re a good citizen, cleaning all of that up,” he said.
“It’s my building’s trash. Who else would do it?” She poured her own cup and asked, “You didn’t hear any of that last night, huh?”
Pratesh shrugged. “Slept like a baby isn’t really a logical saying, considering the stories I hear from new parents, but yes, I slept soundly.”
Alex sighed. In the beginning, she’d listened closely to the nature of the arguments right below her window. They’d provided insight into a life far from her own. The quarrels had quickly become predictable though. Usually some mixture of jealousy, greed, or betrayal having to do with shared resources or a volatile relationship. In short: life outside sounded similar to life inside.
Alex hadn’t seen Ben in a while. She looked for him on her walks, even asked about him at the local coffee shop, but it seemed like he might have drifted away.
The house next door to Alex’s complex sold, and within weeks, the demolition equipment showed up to do its work. Developers had bought the lot and planned to place an eight-condo complex in place of the single-family home. Yes, this would provide more housing, but Alex knew they’d charge almost as much for each unit as they’d paid for the entire lot. It would be new housing for the wealthy, not the people who genuinely needed it. More people would be forced to move out of their homes or out of the city entirely.
It was amazing how quickly construction could move when enough money was driving it. Each day, Alex contended with the grind of drills and the punch of pneumatic tools. She apologized for the disruption on video calls, but no one could ever hear the clamor except her.
The volume of the night seemed to rise, too. She woke more frequently to the shouts and cries. By the time she’d get up to investigate, usually the people had wandered out of sight. Sometimes she worried that the silence was worse, what it might indicate. She’d go back to bed and turn on or off her white noise machine. All that mattered was change. She tried to empty her mind. She’d recently been trying to believe she could meditate herself to sleep. Her thoughts would drift and she would pull herself back. A thought is just a thought. She’d try again to think of nothing.
“That place next door is really going up fast, huh?” Pratesh said at dinner a few weeks into the construction.
He’d brought Thai food and a fresh case of seltzer and grocery store bakery chocolate chip cookies, which were both of their favorites. He’d had to work late, but it was a Friday, and they’d decided to still try to make dinner work.
After eating, they moved to the bedroom, where Pratesh was focused and Alex distracted. “They’re so loud out there,” she said, but Pratesh pressed on, finishing, and Alex declined any further stimulation. She put a robe on and went to the window. “I don’t see anyone,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Pratesh asked. He pulled on shorts and joined her, and indeed, the well-lit alley was completely still.
But Alex heard a groaning. Like someone in pain. She wondered if she should get properly dressed and go down to see if the person was okay. “You’re saying you don’t hear that? Someone could be dying,” she said.
“I don’t hear anything,” Pratesh said. “I think it’s honorable you worry so much about these people, but I almost think you’re getting paranoid. It’s not your job to save each of them.”
Alex wasn’t sure she agreed. Wasn’t that sort of thinking that led to the problem growing so out of control? No one thought it was their responsibility. Was the idea of homelessness what people called a hyperobject? Too big to comprehend? And so everyone thought they could hide in the masses of people who did nothing.
Pratesh rubbed her back. “Some people want to live off the grid. Some people choose this life.”
“Pratesh, I’m talking about a person moaning in pain. You’re saying that person wants to feel that pain? And we should just assume that? Rather than the much more reasonable assumption that they need help?”
He backed down. It wasn’t that Alex thought he was a bad guy, but his liberalism didn’t always extend to a personal sense of generosity. “I’ll go out there with you if you really want to,” he offered.
It was like he knew this would get her to back down. It made her feel like she was being completely unreasonable. She shook her head, angry and defeated, and he started hunting around for a movie instead.
It was Pratesh’s turn to pick and he always chose to show her something he’d already seen that he loved. When it was Alex’s turn, she wanted to watch something new. She wanted to make new memories—form new ideas—together. She worried that Pratesh’s preferences indicated that he wanted to mold her into his life rather than make a new life with her. She tried to tell herself that she was overthinking it as the woman in Night of the Living Dead tried to hide herself from the staggering zombies inside an abandoned house.
Alex fell asleep like she usually did, adding to her collection of movies she’d seen all but the end of. She woke up alone on the couch. A sound summoned Alex from her haze, and her ears tuned in to listen. Outside, she heard the groaning again. She tried to look out the windows, but she didn’t see anything. She had to go downstairs. She should have woken Pratesh, but she knew he’d object, even hold it against her tomorrow when they found nothing. So she put her phone and her keys and the box of Narcan into her hoodie pocket. She slipped on some clogs and went outside in her pajamas. She let the back gate slam more noisily than she normally did in the hopes of not startling anyone in the alley when she emerged.
She walked cautiously down the whole length of her building, peering around the opposite corner, but seeing no one. She could hear the sound now, like it was coming from the lot next door, and she doubled back. “Hello?” she called, but no one answered and she saw nothing.
She walked beside the construction fencing with its unsettling smiley faces cut to let the wind through the webbing more easily. The fabric brushed her arm and she jumped forward.
Right there, she felt a sharp slice of pain in both of her Achilles tendons. She fell to the ground, wishing for the relief of a shriek to rip its way through her, but she could produce no sound. She leaned against the fencing, but it gave too much against her weight. She tried to brace herself to muscle the pain into submission. Her eyes combed the ground for a clue as to what had happened, but she found no blood and no weapon. She was freezing cold. She could not hear the groaning anymore above the blaring din of her pain. She tried to stand, but she couldn’t. She focused on the agony, told herself that this was just a feeling in her body. Her vision went dark, and then, when her vision returned, the alley around her was full of people. It was like the alley had suddenly been replaced with a bustling market. People moved in every direction. Alex tried to call out to one of them and then another, but she could tell she was still locked in her silence. She looked at all the people, but they barely acknowledged each other. She corrected her impression of the moment before; it was less like a busy market where people interacted with one another and more like an airport, where everyone was intent on getting to their own destination, oblivious to the presence of others. It seemed like she was watching a hundred people have separate journeys, but all of them were layered over each other like scrims.
The pain pulsed through her in an almost divine way now, until she felt someone tug her arm and pull her out of the vision. The person dragged her for five or ten feet, the skin of her left hip sandpapered by the concrete. When she looked up, she saw Ben. He collapsed on the ground next to her, overexerted.
The throbbing was gone, as was the feeling of illumination.
“You got to keep clear of that spot,” Ben said, shaking his head.
Alex rubbed her ankles, but they were fine. “What did you just do?” she asked him.
“I got you out of there. A person can really get stuck if they’re not careful.”
“Where?” Alex said. She looked behind her. She saw no place and no people. It was just the regular alley.
“The Drift,” Ben said. “It’s like a rip current. It’ll pick you up and take you away, but it’s no place to stay for long.”
“The Drift,” Alex said.
“The Drift,” Ben said.
It seemed like Ben was his most sober self. He was dirty, but his eyes focused on her with a clarity that was often absent.
Alex was afraid she’d lose everything that had just happened to her if she didn’t pin it down. “Let me buy you breakfast to thank you,” she said. “I just need to get my wallet.” She ran upstairs, pointing at Ben to stay right where he was.
Inside, she looked at Pratesh, still sound asleep. She thought about waking him, but she’d probably be back before he even stirred. She grabbed another sweatshirt.
When she reemerged downstairs, she offered the shirt to Ben. He put it on and they walked to the diner a couple blocks up. At the counter, it seemed clear that the waitress recognized Ben. There was a moment when Alex worried the waitress might turn him away, but she sat them at a booth. Alex told him to get whatever he wanted, but he ordered only a standard breakfast plate, a coffee, and a juice.
Alex ordered coffee and some Rice Krispies. Since she was a kid, she’d wondered who it was that just ordered cold cereal in restaurants, and today was the day she was going to do it herself. She wasn’t sure she could eat at all, but she didn’t want Ben to feel strange eating alone.
“So, the Drift,” she said. She wasn’t sure how much more Ben knew, but she wanted to know as much as he did.
“Yeah, there’s something weird going on in that part of the alley lately. Like a portal. It will gather you up and take you somewhere else. I was in there for a long time. Took forever to find my way out. Did you see all the people?”
Alex felt that stark emptiness form in her belly, that void of fear that could hollow her without any warning. “Yeah, I did.”
“There must be a bunch of places you can enter and exit.” He gulped half his juice in one go. “You know I don’t wander too far though.”
“How did you get out?” Alex asked.
“Huh?” Ben looked up.
“You’ve been in, right? You pulled me out, but how did you get out when you were in there?”
“Oh, it spat me out in Talmadge, but then I couldn’t find the spot again. They move around.” He bit a sausage and shoved the bite in the side of his cheek to keep talking. “Not that I wanted to go back in. Seems like a lot of us have been in there. If not this one, then somewhere else, I guess. The portal there in the alley by you moves at a creep, real slow. It’s easier to find.”
Alex nodded. So that’s where he’d been all that time. “But you said it just showed up recently?”
Ben shrugged. “If it was there before, I didn’t know about it.”
Alex realized she had nothing else to ask, and Ben wasn’t offering more. “How have you been?” she said. It was a question just a step away from “How are you?” but it suddenly felt incredibly intimate. She wanted to know genuinely, but she also worried it wasn’t her place to ask.
He assessed her before speaking. “I’ve been clean for a few days,” he said. They’d talked about sobriety before. He knew that Alex had been through her version of it. “But the same people are still pissed at me, and now some are angrier because I’m never holding, and others are mad I’m not buying. It’s a whole life you have to leave behind, and for now, there’s nothing to replace it.”
Alex couldn’t pretend that she had an answer. Even with the sober time she’d accrued, she still hadn’t found a better option, something to replace all that had come before. She still felt that empty spot where the addiction had been, and she had to be careful to step around it every day.
And Alex knew, too, that Ben had a more serious habit than she’d had, and that he’d gotten himself into an even tougher position. AA tried to push identification over comparison, but Alex knew there were problems in that. To fully empathize you had to acknowledge the additional challenges some people faced. She knew there was a lot about Ben that she could never fully understand.
She thought about what would happen if she called Marusya. Was she still alive? Was she still struggling, or had she given up? What even was giving up?
“Would you want me to help you track down your family?” Alex asked Ben.
He ate his last forkful of eggs. “They know where to find me. They could come scrape me up if they wanted to.” He drained his coffee and was on his feet, ready to go.
Alex felt a burning in her chest. She didn’t want to agree with him.
“Thanks for the breakfast,” he said, standing above her. “Hey, don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”
The burning flared. Did he think she had bought him breakfast so she could brag about it to her friends? “Of course. I’m just so grateful for your help.” She searched for a way to reassure him about her intentions. “If you need a place—”
“Stop.” He cut her off. “We’re not the same,” he said.
Alex nodded. “I know,” she said. “I get it.” If she’d asked in a different way, would he have accepted? Did she ask too late? Could either of them have believed the offer was real?
Ben tipped his chin at Alex and left while she was still paying the bill. When she looked at her phone, there was a message from Pratesh. He’d woken up and left.
Alex tried to decide if she was disappointed or relieved. She longed to tell someone about what had just happened, but she knew it would be too much for Pratesh to believe. He’d tell her that her fear had gotten the best of her, or he’d ask if she wanted to go to the ER because if what she said really happened then Alex needed medical attention. Neither extreme was what she wanted. She returned home.
Pratesh made the bed when he was being sweet with her, but he had not made the bed today.
Soon, the hammering started. The clatter of timber against itself. The crunch and beep of the earthmover treads backing up.
She sat with her coffee and watched the construction. Even on its busiest days, it all moved so much more slowly than the bustle she expected of a construction site. She could see the spot where she’d been sucked into the Drift, just barely beyond the construction fencing. It was totally indistinguishable from the rest. Who knows? Maybe it wasn’t even there.
Alex picked up her phone and pulled up Marusya’s number. After a long minute, she called. Marusya’s voicemail stunned her, so familiar and yet so surreal to hear that same message, years later. She figured she’d hear nothing back, but still, she spent the rest of the day cooking and cleaning on the off chance.
When the phone buzzed with Marusya’s number, Alex panicked before picking up. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then Alex said, “Thank you for calling back.”
“Yeah,” Marusya said. “How are you?”
Alex was already crying but tried to hide it. “Do you want to come over tonight?”
Marusya paused, but Alex thought the pause was a formality. “Yeah.”
Alex didn’t ask Marusya if she was clean. She didn’t try to skip ahead and say she was sorry or ask for an apology from Marusya. She just told her to come as she was. No need to bring anything. She gave Marusya her new address.
Alex made up the guest room just in case Marusya wanted to stay. It had been so common, just a few years before, for Marusya to crawl into Alex’s bed with her rather than making the dark trek home when they’d lived only a few blocks apart.
Marusya arrived several hours later. Alex expected her to make a comment about her place, how nice it was, a dig about how Alex had left Marusya to fend for herself. But Marusya just thanked her for inviting her over.
They talked as though they were both meeting for the first time and also like they had known each other forever. Neither asked questions about the past. It felt as though every word spoken was the tiniest step forward.
They ate together. Alex had made far too much food and Marusya made fun of her for it. That felt like a bigger step.
After dinner, they sat in silence for a long time, sipping mugs of tea.
Marusya looked well.
Alex asked if she would want to stay the night. She showed her the guest room, ready for her. Marusya smiled, but they both knew they were moving forward, not back. “It’s a lovely room, but I’m not far actually.”
Alex tried to make Marusya take a flashlight, but Marusya said her phone was charged. Its light worked well enough every other night.
Alex made a dish for Marusya to take home, and Marusya wrapped Alex in a huge hug. Alex forgot to breathe for the length of the hug: an infinite, endless amount of time. When they released one another, they didn’t say another word.
Alex shut the door and went to do the dishes and watched through the window as someone dug through a bin for cans and bottles.
She tucked herself in and fell asleep quickly that night. A couple hours later, she was awoken just as easily by the sound of familiar turmoil in the alley. When she cracked the curtain, she saw nothing, again, but the sounds persisted. She put on a sweatshirt and sneakers and exited her building’s front gate. The streets were no darker at 2:00 a.m. than they were at 6:00 p.m. On the sidewalk, the night was completely quiet. Alex went for a walk.
