Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

No tears left to cry

I shook my head and followed him, thinking he was perhaps in the mood to enjoy this patch of greenery now that he had more than just pale neon lights over his head. But of course I was dead wrong.

"Probably," I replied, playing along with him. "If it annoys me, I'll kick it out with a shovel."
"Really?", he froze, somewhat worried, and I immediately rectified:
"Of course not."
So he laughed lightly.
"You're my favorite human, you know that?"
"Oh, yeah? It's not David Bowie anymore?"

He knelt down next to a condemned gutter, replaced by a more modern one further on. There, he removed the grate that blocked the drain, and stuck his whole arm inside, while looking up at me.

"No, he fell somewhere down on the tier-list."

I noticed that his hands weren't trembling, which was really rare. It was somewhat painful for me to see that rehab was doing his body some good, even if it was eroding his soul, apart from the lack of sleep. Today, I know that what Klaus did to himself year after year was only sustainable because his power was keeping him alive, as if by a thin thread, the whole time. And yet, he was eroding himself. And at twenty he was worn out already.

He smiled broadly as he reached for what he'd come for, and pulled out of his cunning stash a small, transparent ziploc bag, filled with his treasure. Some weed, rolling paper, a lighter, a small bag of meth, thirty dollars... and some LifeSavers candies.

"Klaus, you hid dope in the wall of the rehab building?"
While checking if everything was there, he smiled beamingly at me.
"That's the last place anyone would check. Am I not splendidly clever?"
I knew he wouldn't make it through the evening without taking a fix. But this was so massive that I giggled:
"Milligan would go ballistic."

As I mentioned, I've always thought that Dr. Milligan did 'the best she could' with Klaus, which doesn't mean she didn't make mistakes. If there's anything I've come to understand, it's that it's very difficult to want to help Klaus without failing at some point.

Even if Milligan knew who he was and still had some form of memory of the Umbrella Academy's mediatized days, I don't think she ever had the capacity to distinguish between what was related to his power, his life trajectory and his addictions. Because it was inextricable, actually. And the option she chose was unfortunately to pretend that the ghosts didn't exist. In order to hold on to the therapeutic approaches she was familiar with, no doubt. To Milligan's credit, she realized over the years that she would see him come back again and again. That he would always take a step forward without wanting to, only to relapse relentlessly. She ended up simply trying to give him a space to breathe, over the years, without really trying to 'wean' him off for good. I think that from 2017 onwards, even though he was always happy to get out, Klaus was no longer reluctant to go to rehab. Milligan helped him to cope with this 'formality' as best he could, and condoned the fact that he was managing to stay off his meds.

"There's something more, come have a look," he said, stuffing the ziploc bag into his pocket, then standing up. Then he trotted over to the level of a bush, under one of the barred windows.
"I've been saving those for us to share, look at that loot."

There, behind the bush, was a small stack of Twinkies, neatly wrapped, which he must have dropped out of the window in order to capitalize on them, day after day.

"You really made the most of your month".
"I've also read Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness', and all the Sponge Bob comics".
As he extracted a crumpled plastic bag from his pocket and gathered his haul, I asked him more seriously:
"How did you handle the situation this time?"

I was well aware that his seemingly radiant attitude of the moment was possibly in no way representative of the way he had lived his 'stay'. At the half-way appointment and diagnosis, he'd literally been a rumpled old rag. He wouldn't talk about himself. But I knew that - if I asked - he'd share it with me. He shook his head, looking down at his Twinkies, his smile just fading.