Lucas’s entry into recovery

Lucas’s entry into recovery begins not with confidence but with a crisis in midair: violently sick on a turbulent flight, he recognizes that he no longer wants to die. Enrolling in a twelve-step programme after returning to the United States marks the first, unsteady movement away from self-destruction; the weeks after the September 11 attacks later help him sustain it.

Causes and Background

The turn follows a day of grief and excess. By the time Lucas boards his flight back to New York, he is very drunk, his suit stained mostly with egg and smoked-salmon canapés. The funeral champagne and the white powder he has taken belong to the same unraveling: what he paid for as a pure class-A narcotic was more likely speed cut with talcum powder. The journey home carries the consequences of that binge into a confined, uncontrollable setting.

The Turning Point

During horrendous turbulence, Lucas is violently sick in the plane’s tiny toilet cubicle, thirty thousand feet above sea level. As he vomits again, a blinding realization interrupts the pattern of self-destruction: he is no longer having any fun trying to kill himself, and he does not want to die. The recognition is starkly physical as well as moral. At the point when his body is overwhelmed, the wish to survive becomes newly explicit.

Beginning Recovery

Back in the United States, Lucas enrolls himself in a twelve-step programme. His progress towards cleaning himself up is described as very wobbly, not as a sudden or complete cure. He repeatedly comes close to calling his dealer and to buying a bottle of vodka. Those near-relapses show how precarious the first stage of recovery remains even after his decision to live.

September 11 and the Work of Staying Sober

Lucas watches the World Trade Center Twin Towers collapse from the window of his own high-rise apartment block. The sight is unbelievable and sickening; he sinks to his knees and weeps. Yet the weeks that follow become important to his recovery. Seeing others pick themselves up, and a city begin to heal, hardens his resolve to keep himself clean. The external catastrophe does not erase his vulnerability, but it gives his effort a sustaining example: survival, for Lucas, becomes something that must be chosen and continued.