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The Cookie Monster
00:00:00:03:06:24:57:09:22
Frances needed a drink.
Just one big god almighty swig of whiskey.
The thought delivered such a wallop of longing it was absurd.
Frances knew drinking was going to kill her. That's partly why she had quit. Partly. Actually, if we're going to be honest—totally and completely honest—her physical and mental health had very little to do with quitting. Indeed, improved health would be an added bonus, but to Frances it was a small part of the equation.
The way she had been drinking for quite some time came down to slow suicide. That wasn't a nice idea, but it was true. And that was why she had quit. She could accept being many things, but a suicide was not one of them.
Frances was at work. It was afternoon of payday Friday.
It was 1:49pm.
She was sitting at her desk and feeling deranged… feeling very small fighting that enormous craving. David and Goliath. Her thoughts spiraled round and round, gaining more tension and despair with each lap.
Why was she doing this to herself? This was utter madness.
She had to constantly remind herself why she was doing it.
She was off work in eleven minutes. Surely, she'd stop at the liquor store, buy a bottle, crack the seal and ahhhhhh.
Frances had been unable to get much work done today. Instead she sat at her desk staring down at her folded hands and thinking. She was well past curiosity or amusement with the train wreck she felt inside, the withdrawal. She had slept not a wink last night. Instead she had soaked the bed sheets with freezing sweat and felt bugs crawling all over her skin. The bugs were imaginary. She had flipped on the light enough times to know, checking herself, checking the bed. No bugs.
Now, all she could do at work was to force herself to be calm on the outside, and sit there weathering the turbulence of her current mentality.
Part of her felt wild, as though reality had become unglued. By now Frances was a qualified alcohol withdrawal scientist… only she was also the test subject. All the groups and doctors and counselors knew nothing. All they could tell you was to expect the cravings, the shakes, agitation, nervousness, insomnia, headaches, sweating, nausea. Oh and, should you have a seizure, call 911.
One swallow of the baffling liquid would send all the misery and mental weirdness back into the shadows completely. Yes, Frances knew very well. One good solid shot was the anecdote, replenishing her brain with the only thing in the world it required to return to some kind of normalcy.
Her mind clamored: yes, yes, booze monster thirsty, drink now, drink now. No! I have to quit or I'm going to kill m— booze monster thirsty, drink now! No! Yes! No! Yes!
Frances closed her eyes and rubbed them with shaky palms.
The monster inside her was dying of thirst. One of them was going to die anyway, she or it. It was sort of interesting, the irony. This monster would put up a hell of a fight before it rolled over and died.
The monster had first appeared in place of Frances’s brain around the twelfth hour of no alcohol. Now, in her third day—seventy-eight hours, to be exact—the twelfth hour seemed like an awfully long time ago.
She pictured the monster as identical to Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster—me love cookie!—tangled blue fur, crazy wobbly eyes, and the lower half of its face nothing but huge mouth. She tried to separate herself and observe the growing desperation of the Cookie Monster. She would take a mental step back and offer a few words to the monster. So, Cookie Monster, it's been seventy-eight hours now, how does that do ya? Feeling nervous yet? Got any agitation? By the way, how do you like these shakes and headaches?
Frances slowly folded her hands on her desk, willing herself to keep her shit together. Time had slowed from a river to a stream to a trickle. The Cookie Monster sat in the middle of her skull and behind this sweaty furry lunatic, in the very back of her mind, stood the Great Clock System. This was the world's most complex and intricate series of pendulums, gears, belts and cables all in impeccable synchronization. The time kept by the Clock System was not a timer but a stopwatch with the readout displayed just behind her eyelids when she closed them—a row of sharp red numbers displaying every increment of time from nanoseconds, tenths of seconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.
00:00:00:03:06:29:57:11:16
And counting. She had pressed the start button on this enormous mental stopwatch three nights before, as she drained every single last drop from her final bottle of Bushmills.
Every minute with no new alcohol the Clock System grew more complex, more intricate. More gears appeared, secondary pendulums.
She was only three days into this. Somewhere around day six or seven, the withdrawal would subside and she would begin to come back to herself as an ex-drinker. The lunatic Cookie Monster and hallucinatory Clock System would fade, fade, fade until both were as distant as the stars. Then one morning around the two week mark she would wake up and they'd be gone.
There was just one catch. Two weeks was an eternity away. Even day seven felt impossibly distant. If she caved in and went to the liquor store across the street, the madness would end sixty seconds after that first drink... and the cycle would begin all over again.
All it would take was one drink. That was the anecdote. One drink and the stopwatch would reset, the Clock System would shrink back to oblivion and the Cookie Monster, finally fed again, would go silently back to his hiding place. One drink seemed reasonable, right?
Here was another catch. That one drink never stood alone. The first blast of whiskey was inevitably followed by another, and another… until death do us part.
She forced her hands to remain folded on her desk.
It was 1:52pm.
Her shift ended in eight minutes. Her drive home would take her past eight different liquor stores. She knew them all, could see the shelves lined neatly with shiny bottles of all sizes, shapes and colors. She closed her eyes again. Her thoughts spiraled round and round.
Frances again reminded herself why she had quit... though any momentum had long since drained from the reminder. She had to force it. Was this dreadful feeling so bad? Was she perhaps making it worse than it had to be? After all, it's not like she was in screaming agony. Uncomfortable as hell and ruled by anxiety, yeah. And she would probably fail a sanity test at that moment. But it's not like she was on the verge of death. She simply craved something that she was trying to resist... had managed to resist the last three days. Seventy-eight hours, working towards day four. She had this.
Right?
But that was when the Cookie Monster changed his tune.
His fur was matted with sweat, eyeballs rolling crazily. He growled, You have a blood clot, Frances. It’s inching it’s way up your femoral artery this minute… but one shot of booze will thin your blood and dissolve the clot. Otherwise it’s headed to your brain, and, say, don’t you have a headache? Maybe the clot's moving faster than I thought….
Frances stood up from her desk, fast enough to send her chair rolling to the back wall of her cubicle. Standing, she was more aware of the crawling, tingling sensations on her legs, spine. Ants. Beetles. Sickening.
The monster had been right about one thing of course, she did have a headache. And she could imagine a blood clot all too easily.
Do you really think you can go without booze? It’s who you are.
She closed her eyes.
Do what you always do. You know you want to. You know you're going to.
Her hands shook.
Imagine that first shot spreading through your body, an expanding ripple of warmth and peace...
She sat back down in the chair, unsure why she had stood up. She licked her lips. Folded her hands again on the desk.
Stop at the liquor store, let yourself have what you want... dissolve the clot. I'm only trying to help, Frances...
And she sent a single word of surrender back at the Monster: Okay.
It was 1:56pm. It was time to close the book on the madness.
The passage of time was down to a mere trickle. Yet the Clock System beeped and counted time ever onward. As it rolled along it was taking on additional time displays, growing more complex as the withdrawal deepened. One new display was now showing the time in Roman Numerals. Large authoritative L's and V's and I's that she didn’t understand. She found this a little disturbing. Another new time display had appeared within the last ten minutes, showing the changing numbers in the form of increasingly complex geometric symbols which she also couldn't understand.... but almost could. And somehow this was even more disturbing.
It was 1:57pm.
She had cracked. She would be going to the liquor store after all. Whatever factors of this experience she felt she had a grip on even ten minutes ago were now just too overwhelming.
As a last resort she tried to recall alcohol binges from her past that had been terrible. At first she couldn't—they had all been epic adventures. But then she remembered the puking, the unbearable nausea, entire days lost to hangover.
Three Christmases ago she had awoken with a god awful spinning hangover, icicles of alcohol ache lodged in her brain, her stomach full of molten lava. Never had she felt so dreadful, so poisoned. She had taken another drink first thing, Merry Christmas, me. And not long after, she had taken another. It was her first multi-day binge, and she could recall nothing from it once she had recovered. Three days lost to the big black hole.
She thought about that now. She thought about the times she had driven drunk. Never because there was an emergency or anything like that, but she had simply run out of booze too soon. Needed a fresh bottle. Or a bag of tacos.
It was 1:58pm.
She sat at her desk, shaking to her bones.
Cookie Monster want, Cookie Monster need, ahhhh, feed, feed, ahhhh.
If she were to take a big swig of Bushmills now after seventy-eight unbelievably long hours, what would that be like? Would it be the greatest relief of her life?
Frances kept her hands folded on the desk, and closed her eyes once more.
Her hands wanted to move, wanted to shake. They wanted to tap pens on the desk like drumsticks. She let her left hand come up and hoist an imaginary glass to her mouth. Swallowed an imaginary gulp of whiskey. This only teased the Cookie Monster and made the feed! now! demand grow a little louder.
She checked the Clock System. Seventy-eight hours and thirty-three minutes into this. Each hour had been overload beyond telling, a novel, a study. Each hour had it’s own sick, out of tune soundtrack. Her whole body a swamp of nightmarish crawling sensations. Ants and beetles crawled up the back of her neck—feed me!—perhaps a beetle would find its way inside her ear...
Frances conceded that single word again: Okay.
It was 1:59pm.
She stood up, gently pushed the chair up to the desk. She picked up her purse. The purse with the wallet inside. The wallet with the cash inside. The cash paper she would trade for the liquid gold. She was one giant craving, and she had cracked. Minutes away from yet another regret-filled relapse, she quietly left work.
Once outside, she made the sidewalk in the direction of the liquor store just across the street. She could already taste the whiskey, could feel the Cookie Monster jumping for joy in her skull. The Clock System was beeping louder, almost frantically, as though it was now counting down instead of up. As it neared some final inextricable number sequence in time, it seemed to Frances that parts of the massive clock’s inner workings were shooting steam and smoke, approaching the red area of the gauges.
She walked faster.
She understood she had lost the ability to think about what she was doing. Why am I walking rather than driving? My car is right back there.
On autopilot she crossed the parking lot of the liquor store in this never ending seventy-eighth hour.
She swung the glass door open and an overhead bell jingled to welcome her. She hurried up to the counter.
“Fifth of Bushmills, please.”
She was unable to make eye contact with the man behind the counter. He went to get Frances her booze. She held out her shaky ID, paid, and went outside. She clasped the brown paper bag tightly in both hands. She could imagine all too well the bag slipping through her shaking hands, the bottle exploding on the pavement.
Arriving back to the parking lot of her work building, she got into her car and keyed the ignition. Instead of driving home—driving home would take too long—she went around the corner to a neighborhood park.
Frances parked on the shoulder next to the park. She took the bottle and walked into a small strand of redwood trees along the north end of the park. She stopped under the redwoods and looked at the bottle. Bushmills was the oldest licensed whiskey distillery in the world. It said so on every bottle. Just one good swig would banish the lunatic Cookie Monster and the Clock System in a matter of seconds.
She was aware of sunshine slanting through the branches overhead and birds chirping. She closed her eyes and focused on the birdsong. Sounded like a few different species. A breeze wafted through the branches and the birds fell silent.
She was also aware that she was hesitating.
She cracked the seal of the Bushmills.
The Clock System teetered on annihilation.
Cookie Monster: now, right now!
She sent this thought up to the highest branches of the redwoods: if the birds do not chirp once in the next minute, I will pour every last drop of this golden liquid into the dirt and I will resume the seventy-eighth hour.
Frances began to count to sixty.
The Cookie Monster waited.
All of existence waited.
Frances waited, too.
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