Second Place: The Loneliest Road in America

Beneath the September mountain sky, ecstasy shimmers in my veins. It lights up each of my pleasure centers gradually—a string of Christmas lights turning on bulb by bulb. I don’t notice I’ve peaked until Robbie says, “Look at me.” His eyes click back and forth across mine and he smiles, satisfied at the two black holes staring back. “You feel it, don’t you?”

I nod, close my eyes, and sway to the sound reverberating against the smooth, ochre rocks of the amphitheater. Robbie places his hand on my chest. I set mine on his, so we’re touching each other’s hearts. Thump-thump, thump-thump. We’re only three dates in, but I can’t help but notice that his heart is tiny and real, same as mine. I can’t help that he feels like home.

*

Two Novembers ago: the afternoon my brother’s wife came home through their unlocked door to find the oven smoking and the house empty, searching through each room until she peered down the basement stairs and yanked the light bulb chain, illuminating her husband’s near-lifeless body on the concrete. Breath shallow, mouth slack, needles and baggies sprinkled around him like confetti.

“Kevin!” yelled my sister-in-law, though it was a quiet shout, one that preserved the possibility that if his eyes didn’t blink open, it was merely because he didn’t hear it and not because he was dead.

When my brother woke, Mom believed him that the heroin was just one time, so it was eventually his wife who saw the truth, who said, “I can’t do this unless you get help.”

We thought he’d be better off with us in Colorado, but on the drive to the airport he leapt from the passenger seat and bolted toward the tent-dwellers downtown, looking for a final fix. His wife called my sister screaming with her car door lolling open in the middle of traffic.

My sister called me and said, “What do we do?”

I left my graduate classroom in the middle of a discussion on finding your voice, walked onto the empty quad where the sun shined so hot I sweat instantly, and whispered, “I don’t know.”

Eight hours later, the image of my brother carrying a six-pack and a suitcase appeared through my windshield at the Denver airport. He slept tangled in mismatched sheets on an air mattress in the foyer for two days while the rest of us stepped over him to reach the back door, waiting for the poison to loosen its grip. While he rested, my sister and Mom and I took turns tackling a list of rehab centers that took Medicaid.

The first time, we called together on speakerphone.

“We don’t know what he’s doing, exactly,” my mother said in a curious tone.

“What kinda stuff do you see? The intake coordinator sounded tired.

We listed the symptoms we’d heard from his wife. Snorting white powder. Pills in a bag. Falling asleep randomly. Stealing money. Itching. Puking.

“Sounds like opioids.” He sounded about my age. “I know, I've recovered myself.”

“Oh,” we echoed, surprised it wasn’t heroin. We didn’t yet know they were the same thing.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have room.” He gave us his name and a number. “Call if you need anything. Don’t give up on him.”

We called New Mexico, we called Arizona, we called California. The west was full of rehabs, but the rehabs were full of people. The private centers with palm trees and vacancy, we’d never be able to afford. That would be the case even if Mom wasn’t helping back-pay his rent and utilities, the toolbox debt from the garage he got fired from, and the leased tools he pawned.

Whether or not we could afford it turned out to be arbitrary. I remembered the most important truth anyone who loves someone must know: You can’t save a person from their own darkness. My brother refused the idea of an in-patient facility, unwilling to barter his deepest feelings in a circle of strangers every morning, or share a toilet with roommates who might’ve just yesterday shit in an alley. That’s when Mom remembered an ad she saw on the back of Westword, a Denver magazine. It was for an emerging treatment that claimed it could heal depression, anxiety, and addiction. Desperate, she dialed the number on the glossy page.

A week later, my brother started ketamine-infusion therapy.

*

Robbie has been talking about ketamine since our first date. But instead of doing it under the supervision of a doctor, he does it whenever he feels like. In fact, it’s become clear that Robbie buzzes with the same breed of wanting I know from my brother and my father. But instead of waiting for a Friday paycheck to afford a hit, his binges are dotted between 24-hour work trips to Vegas and $300 sushi dinners. The time we spend together he’s either high on ketamine or talking about the next time he will be.

“I just need to get some in my system,” Robbie says in the kitchen after a hard day at work. In his finance job, he dons a suit the color of crushed oyster shells and shakes hands with the kind of men who own longhorn ranches and hockey teams.

I offer an alternative. “Maybe you need to get out in nature, meditate and escape for a few days?”

“Nah,” he says. “This is the only thing that works.”

I don’t know much about ketamine, but the way he talks about it and how it makes him feel better about everything all the time, I don’t see why he’d ever want to stop.

The first time I watch him snort ketamine is the same night we roll at Red Rocks, under the endless stretch of dark sky. I get high on molly in the spirit of experimentalism; a chance to see if anything about myself felt different since I last tried it eight years ago. But Robbie’s relationship to substances doesn’t seem to be mindful at all: In one night, he takes a pill full of molly, smokes two joints, eats mushrooms, snorts ketamine, and swallows a little acid.

On the bus home from the concert, Robbie can’t access his own ketamine because it’s in his wallet and I’m sitting on his lap, so he turns to his friend, and asks: “Will you put some more drugs in my nose?”

Robbie’s frank tone carries a wickedness, the dangerously aloof part of him I’m beginning to fear. I wish he’d call it Special K or Kelly’s Day, anything other than drugs. His friend nods, sifts some powder onto his own palm, and stretches it under Robbie’s nose. Robbie sniffs up the white crushed bits and licks the length of his friend’s lifeline. The gesture feels rehearsed, like a spell. The back-seat divination of a functioning junkie.

A few minutes pass; he seems far away now. The bus exhales steam on the road back home. I’m an eager moon circling his red-hot planet, trapped in an orbit where our paths can’t cross. This kind of loneliness is familiar. When the person whose attention you seek can’t stand to be inside their own body, you’re left with nothing but a vessel; someone incapable of connection. The first men I ever loved taught me this. But if my past is the inverse of what I want for my future, why do I keep winding up here, begging for affection from an empty shell? I turn to the window, let the lights on the freeway siphon the last of my high.

*

My brother has been laughing more since his first few infusions at the clinic. You aren’t allowed to drive after a session because your state is so altered, so sometimes I pick him up. In the passenger seat he’s quiet and dreamy. It reminds me of when he was a baby waking up from a nap, and my sister and I would put our heads near his face to watch him breathe. Back then he smelled like a cupcake, and we’d do anything to get near his sweet, sleeping body.

In the car after one of his appointments, I ask my brother what he’s learned, or what he felt, and he tells me about how each time the increasing doses send him into deeper worlds within himself. He speaks of floating in outer space, looking down at everyone he’s ever known from a God-like vantage point. Not with power, but with mercy and grace. He tells me about forgiving his past mistakes, of deciding that life is about love and being loved, and not much more.

I hear Robbie’s voice echo in my head. All the research says it’s actually really good for mental health. I can feel the difference ketamine is having on my brother; I think Robbie must be right. But it’s likely the controlled environment—the doctor’s supervision, the accompanying talk therapy, the measured doses—that keep my brother tethered while his mental health improves.

In contrast, Robbie’s unbridled obsession has demonstrated just how addictive ketamine can be. He underestimates how much I know about his problem. But having an alcoholic parent has made me watchful, attuned to everybody’s actions—no matter how subtle. I know he keeps the baggies in his wallet, and it’s obvious why he takes his wallet to the bathroom when we go on dates to restaurants. When he’s gone, he’s gone for a long time, and I find myself staring at the empty place where his wallet was on the table. How can something that heals one person destroy another?

*

The first time I take the elevator up to the eleventh floor of the Country Club Towers, where Robbie lives, I have a memory. It’s from a night long before I met him, when I was on my sister’s patio. The Country Club Towers loomed one block away. They were uncharacteristic of the neighborhood, the tallest buildings outside of downtown, and nobody who lived in them knew that in the early evenings they blocked out the descending sun for the whole neighborhood. Five square blocks of brick bungalows and slouching oaks prematurely robbed of light. From her shadow-drenched patio my sister and I looked up at the luxury apartments, eager to catch a figure moving inside. We made up stories about the people who lived there, but really, we were searching for signs of life, for proof they had anything in common with us or where we came from.

Now, up in the towers looking down, I think about how all I have in common with Robbie and the other people who live here is that my body, too, would cast a shadow in waning light. The eleventh floor is high enough to see for a hundred miles, all the way to Pike’s Peak on a clear day. The south-facing wall of his place is made entirely of windows, and it’s noon, so the light streaming in feeds his leafy palms, fiddle figs, and San Pedro cacti. Not a single brown spot or wilted leaf. The plants inside and the treetops outside give a sense of being in a jungle, lost, and I long to be back down below in the shade.

Robbie catches me admiring the view and brings me a cup of coffee. “I wanted to live in the trees. Paid extra for this exact unit.”

“It’s really nice.” I’ve come to understand he gets everything he wants.

“You wanna go for that hike today?”

I turn from the window toward him. “Yeah, that sounds great.”

Robbie moves over to the island. “We can leave in a few.” He takes out a baggie of ketamine. “You want some?”

I shake my head. “I’m good.”

“Why not?” he asks plainly, like I’ve refused a slice of pizza.

I shrug. “I don’t know how I’ll react. I’ve never done it.”

He rolls his eyes. “You know it’s non-addictive, right? Like, I can stop anytime I want to.”

I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince.

He arranges the powder with a razor blade on the counter. “What are you really afraid of?”

It’s a good question. I don’t want to be scared. I want to be expansive and different than I was before, open to the world of psychedelics and self-improvement. There’s so much research on these new treatments, from mushrooms to LSD, and everyone says they can bring you joy, that a deep trip can help you transcend the tragedies binding you to suffering. I’ve also been doing my research. A few weeks ago, I read that ketamine is a dissociative drug. I took the word disassociate to mean disconnect, as in, from yourself. If you wound up in k-hole, I thought, you could float in black space forever, untethered from your life. I feared getting lost there, never finding my way back to myself.

I know Robbie will dismiss my fear as paranoid if I tell him, so I don’t.

Instead, I say, “I dunno,” and it’s far enough from a no that he accepts it.

“Okay, then. Rock n’ roll.” He curls up a twenty-dollar bill into a germy cylinder, snorts his own dose, and tips it towards me.

“Okay,” I nod. “I’ll try it.”

Robbie smiles. It gives me a certain sense of pride to please him. The granules turn to a fiery mucus in the back of my throat. I wonder if Robbie came into my life because he’s a doorway into the world my brother goes to when he’s high. If I can go meet my brother in that far-off dimension, perhaps I can bring him back to earth with me.

Robbie and I ride the elevator down into the windowless parking garage, climb into his truck, and get on the highway. I’m miles above the spinning wheels but every aspen tree oozes gold, waving in the wind as we pass. The blue in the sky starts to bend.

In Robbie’s apartment, there’s a handwritten calendar pinned to the fridge. Beneath the magnet he’s drawn thirty squares, one for every day of the month, and within each block he’s listed healthy ambitions: drink more water, go to CrossFit, wake up at five. When he’s not home one day, I fold up the top page to see what his goals were last month, and the month before: no coke, no coke, no coke.

“I used to have a problem,” he told me once.

But the calendar and the ketamine reveal a different story: His problem has not disappeared. It has simply shifted.

That same week, I wake up at his apartment and I’m already sweating in the September sun blazing through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s a cloudless day, the highest UV Denver can get, and I can see Pike’s Peak looming out beyond the city limits.

“Can I take a shower?” I ask.

“Probably better if you don’t,” he says.

“I just want a rinse.”

“Sorry, you can’t.”

Over the next few weeks, I drop the sort of hints that might prompt the person you’re sleeping with to say, here, take a shower!

He never takes the bait.

One day I lock myself in the bathroom, turn on the fan, and peel back the curtain so slow he can’t hear the rings sliding across the metal rod. The tub is coated in a thick layer of grime. Not the average soap scum we all have from time to time, but a deathly, grayish black. So dirty you’d have to draw a line with your fingernail to see the white porcelain underneath. What kind of person neglects something so obviously in need of attention? I let the curtain fall closed, careful not to make a sound. Every time I brushed my teeth or combed on mascara in this bathroom, Robbie’s secret was right there, just behind the veil.

*

My brother starts sleeping in my sister’s extra bedroom. One night, we meet at her house to walk to an Italian restaurant. Nobody is hungry, but we never know how to spend our time together. We plan to get desserts, maybe a cocktail.

On the walk there, my brother won’t stop talking. He’s jumping around the sidewalk, laughing at himself.

I touch his shoulder. “Kevin, stop, what are you talking about?” He keeps talking and walking. It’s that time of the day, just after dusk, when the low brick houses are sulking in the shadows of the towers.

“What’s his deal?” I ask my sister.

She gestures toward him, talking animatedly to himself three paces ahead. “I dunno, he’s just like that sometimes. Maybe he’s drunk?”

It wouldn't be the first time he sneaked whiskey behind a closed door and got himself wasted before anyone could notice. But something feels different about him; a state I don’t recognize. I’m frustrated at his lack of progress. I thought he was getting better. Isn’t he better?

At the restaurant, we sit in a row at the bar. My sister and I order chocolate chip cannolis to share. My brother orders an aperitif against my urging him not to, and our food takes longer than it should to arrive. He nods off at the bar—chin folded downward, neck slack, body loose.

“Kevin!” I seethe.

My sister shakes his shoulders. “Wake up, we’re in public,” she whispers.

“What? Oh.” His eyes don’t open past halfway, and they slide up and down in slow-motion like heavy, electronic shades.

I decide to order him some fried ravioli, to soak up whatever’s causing him to nod off. He looks too drunk. He looks like my father, four in the morning, passed out at the table with a bottle of rum in his hand. I try to remember why all the people who expected my brother to turn out the same as my father are wrong. I cling to the moments that make him different, like the time Kevin took turns rubbing everyone’s feet, listening as my mom and my sister and me cried. How later that night, he scooped vanilla ice cream from a grocery store pint and brought it to each of us, one by one by one. The tender Kevin, the Kevin I love. I know he’s still here, somewhere.

I text my sister, though she’s sitting beside me. We should go.

She doesn’t reply. I think she’s afraid to accuse our brother of his state, of stirring his agitation. I’m afraid to make her afraid.

We stay an hour longer, waking him every time the bartender comes around, so we don’t get kicked out. The raviolis come; he eats half.

He’s been doing well in Colorado until now. Or at least he’s done a great job convincing us he’s well, on the path to recovery. That all changed two weeks ago, when he left and went back home to Asheville to spend a few days with his wife, who was worn out in his absence. He’s been different since he got back. Worse.

When we get up to leave the Italian restaurant he stumbles to a stand, and it dawns on me that Jane wasn’t the only person he paid a visit to back home. But it’s not until much later that we understand the ketamine treatment requires consistency; taking a break in the middle of a treatment plan can prompt a surge of anxiety and depression, leading to relapse. One missed appointment: a pendulum swing. Kevin missing his ketamine treatment made him worse than ever.

A few days later, my siblings take an early morning drive out to the Gem Show, to look at rocks from exotic locations. She wants to find shimmering gems and rare cuts of stone for jewelry making, and he wants to find something sparkly to take back home to his wife. Their to-go cups are full of coffee, and he insists on driving, but on the potholed road leading out of town, his high fades and he slips into a trance. The car drifts over the center line into oncoming traffic.

If you’ve never seen a person passed out on opioids or heroin, they’re deadweight. Difficult to wake. My sister yelps and grabs the wheel. Not until she reaches across the car and jerks it back to the right side does Kevin wake and rub his eyes, asking, “What just happened?”

My sister doesn’t tell me this story until later. “Yeah, he almost killed us.” She says it like she’s talking about the weather; like it was something she expected. But this is what happens when a loved one cannot stop using—you begin to rehearse their death.

I catch myself imagining his funeral between Zoom meetings; practicing that moment at my bedside when the midnight call comes.

Foolish, I know, to think I could prepare for such a thing.

But how else will I survive if he doesn’t?

*

It’s ninety degrees and I’m pumping gas at a 7-11 on Colfax Avenue. A man walks up to me. He has a long beard, no shoes, and a stained t-shirt tied around the back of his neck to protect it from the heat. There are barely any trees here, on what Denverites proudly claim as the longest road in America. It’s also the loneliest road, a magnet for people who’ve had their houses taken and their dignity stripped, where the sun in the cloudless sky illuminates all suffering and melts the blacktop beneath your feet.

The dads who drive down this road on their way home from the organic grocery—I know they look at these weather-beaten faces and say to their kids, bad things happen to people who do drugs. They are simply echoing the ethos of our country, of Nixon’s America, of a war that will never end if people are shamed for having inherited a pain we don’t understand. Bad things do happen to people who do drugs. But it isn’t any less true that people do drugs because bad things happened to them.

I make sure to look the man at the gas station in the eyes when he approaches me, because I know nobody else does.

He shifts his weight from one bare foot to the other as he talks. “I just got clean, got nowhere to go. Living out behind the Ethiopian restaurant in a cardboard box. Just need some money for water. Just need some water, please.”

I look at his soiled clothes, the dirt caked up into his exposed toenails, and I think about the word, “clean.” How the kind of clean he means, means so much more than a shower.

I want to tell him about Kevin. I want to tell him I believe in him, that he can stay clean, that it’s worth it, and he deserves to be free. Would he believe me, if I said an entirely different life is just on the other side of this suffering?

Instead, I give him a $5 bill and say, “I wish I had more cash.”

“Thank you, God bless,” he says.

I know he means it.

After I finish pumping, I let myself drive past my destination, addled and aimless, a girl going nowhere on the loneliest road in America. Here, where all the forgotten people sleep on concrete, trying to make eye contact while the world looks past, trying to understand what happened while their families, years and miles away, sit down to another dinner without them.

*

I have a nightmare about my brother’s eyes drifting backwards in his skull. My dream self shakes him so hard his bones make a jangling sound inside his skin, but I still can’t rouse his laugh from that body. My dream sister takes him into her arms and carries the soulless heap down a narrow set of stairs into the dripping basement, where we say goodbye among the curling photographs and mildew.

*

Robbie has a bad day at work. We go out and he orders two drinks, and when we get back to his apartment, he makes two more.

He turns the music up and dances. I can tell he’s feeling loose. “I gotta feed my plants.”

I think it’s a positive trait, a sign he can care for something.

He fills a watering can and sets it on the counter. I think he’s done, but then he reaches under the cupboard and takes out a green bag of Miracle-Gro.

“You use that stuff?”

“Yeah, I do,” Robbie scoffs. “Works great.”

All this time I thought he was keeping his plants healthy through good watering habits and sunshine. He saunters around the apartment to each plant, cooing them as he waters their roots.

It does work, I think, still unable to find any wilting leaves throughout his vast collection of flora. But I also remember that Miracle-Gro is synthetic: it can make plants vibrant and lush, but only to an extent. The seemingly good effects of Miracle-Gro can turn deadly, scorching a plant’s roots or leaves the second you use too much.

After the plants are watered, Robbie takes out his box of pills and powders. “Now, for the best part of the day.”

We both snort a line of ketamine off a magazine on the kitchen island, and I go to sit on the couch to let it sink in. It feels alright—at least my constant backache is gone. But I know I don’t want more.

Robbie takes his second dose in the kitchen, then glances into the living room toward me. “Another?” As a near-daily user, his tolerance is significantly higher.

“I—I’m okay.” The first dose makes it hard to shape my mouth around the word no.

He advances toward the couch where I’m sitting, holding the magazine, a second line of ketamine sifted into a neat pile on top.

I think I said no, didn’t I say no?

The reflection of his body moves across the tall windows, and I wish to be down on ground level, pressing my toes into the concrete of my sister’s patio with the purple night wrapped around me. Now he’s by my side, kneeling and expectant, rolled dollar bill tipped inches from my nose. The whites of his eyes have a wolfish, convincing quality. He stares, unblinking. It’s not that he misunderstands societal expectations; it’s that he enjoys defying them. He wants to witness my discomfort, watch me squirm where I sit. This is how he reminds himself: He’s the one in control, the one who makes me second-guess myself.

Maybe I can get past my anxiety about it, I think. What if he’s right, and it’s good for me?

No, says my inner voice.

But here he is, waiting.

I push aside my conscience to take the second hit.

How many times can you reject your better judgment before it stops calling?

The muscles in my body dissolve. I feel nothing of my skin or bones. I’m both a frozen cube of ice and a weightless balloon. I try to lift my arm. Nothing. I send all the messages I can. Hand. Up. Legs. Move. But nothing will go. I can’t stand, can’t escape this apartment in the sky even if I wanted to. Robbie’s gone into his room to lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. I’m alone in my numbness. I blink, look around the room—at the television, the plants, the lights of the city shimmering down below.

I think back to a Ketamine study I read about, and a sentence flashes in my mind: The sheep lost all ability to move except blinking their eyes.

I am nothing more than a sheep—a complacent follower who can’t act on her own free will. How did this happen?

I could say I got here because it’s familiar, because Robbie fits into a well-worn groove where my father once was—my father, who loved me only when I was meek and silent, who deemed me worthy only when I abided by his beliefs, rather than my own. Or, I could say I wound up here because I feel guilty that I escaped. Kevin was the youngest, so while I went to college and discovered a different path, he was stuck, ebbing between the kingdom of my father’s ego and the dominion of a perpetual high. I wasn’t there to save him from himself. Yet the very fact of my liberation, my status as a witness of addiction rather than a victim of it, negates every excuse. My own free will was always there, guiding me toward my truth.

When I wake early the next morning, it’s still dark. I slip out of Robbie’s bed while he’s snoring and gather my clothes, trying to tamp down the restlessness frothing in my stomach. In the apartment hallway I press my finger into the down button on the elevator. My car is parked five blocks away and from the window the streets look blue, cloaked in frost for the first time this year.

Like the fold between night and day, or the turn between summer and fall, I too, am at a juncture. The first option is to continue on the lonely road of self-abandonment, where I ask for love from a person who doesn’t know how to love themselves. In that world, I am forever rousing my brother from an unconscious brume, longing for the men I’ve loved and lost. But I’m tired of the stories that say I will marry a man like my father; that I will see no other kind of love or prosperity beyond what existed in my youth.

The neighborhood floods with pale morning light and I finally understand. I’ll never have an answer to any of it because an answer doesn’t exist. Instead, I must write a new story while making peace with what is. I must embrace all the truths of my life, feel them like I do the sun now rising in the sky.

-Michelle Polizzi

Michelle Polizzi is an essayist and storyteller. Her writing on society and health has appeared in Bitch, Real Simple, Health, Insider, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. She was the recipient of a 2022 Emerging Writers Fellowship from Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and she was named a runner up in the 2022 Florida Review Editors Prize in nonfiction. She holds an MA in creative nonfiction from Wilkes University, and she's currently writing a memoir about the search for home in working-class America. An Upstate New York native, she now lives in Denver.