7
I never want to close my eyes again, because then I will lose him forever. They pump me full of drugs to make me forget, to make me sleep, but I can’t do either. Not when I remember seeing the ambulance come to take him away, seeing his corpse underneath the sheet and the neighbors all coming outside to see him.I can’t feel my arms anymore. They’ve atrophied underneath the stitches and gauze. It’s a wonder they didn’t just tear them off and replace them with something new and metal. That’s what they want me to do with him. Replace him with something sterile and safe.
They took away my glasses because they thought I could dismantle them and use them as a weapon. Now the world is a mass of blurs, blurs that are either doctors or nurses, rarely my parents. It’s “too hard” for them to see me like this. That, with the medicine, makes my whole world full of things that I can’t trust. I know the blur that is my bed, the blur that is the toilet, anything besides that and I crumple to the floor.
It’s too soon to talk to me, the doctors think. Too soon to dreg up what Bobby did to himself. What he felt he had to do when his parents locked him in his room and threw away the key. His mother still taught and told everyone that Bobby was sick. And then he was dead.
And I died too, but they couldn’t let me completely die, that would have been too kind.
I don’t know where I am. After the hospital where my parents signed me away there was only a large mass of blurs that filtered away to white. Nicotine withdrawal has turned me into a twitching mass of nerves. The drugs they give me, a mixture of tranquilizers, anti-depressants, and whatever else they can put into my bloodstream, keep me floating on a surface of dizziness and nausea.“Jay?” a female voice...I think. All I can see are some vague blurs that refuse to coalesce into anything that made sense. “The police want to talk to you.”
There is only so much pushing and prodding you can take before you break.
“Why? So they can tell me what a blessing life is?”
“No, so they can find out what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened. I don’t need to know what happened.”
She takes my arm gently and lifts me up, pulling me towards the door. “It’ll help you heal.” She hands me my glasses and I hold them like they’re gold. Without them I am nothing.
Voices in my head scream that I don’t want to heal, I just want to be picked up and thrown away.
“You loved him?” the officer asks, tapping his pencil on the table. There is a thin plexiglass window separating me and him. They can’t trust me with anything. I wonder what I did those first few days that changed me from a straight A student to someone who can only eat with spoons.“I understood him.” He has coffee from Starbucks that smells like shit. I have nothing.
“Do you know if his parents abused him?”
“I never saw that much of them.” He has cigarettes stuffed in his pants pocket. I can see them from here. “Can I have a smoke?”
“Sorry,” he smiles ruefully, “You’re not ready for that yet. Not after last time.”
I wish I could remember ‘last time’.
“Did they abuse him?”
“Locking him in his room? I think that’s abuse.”
“We already know that. Do you know anything else?”
My hands are itchy underneath the gauze, I need to rip them to pieces. Each piece of tape has at least three contact points where I can scratch and tear until the red comes out. The nurses hand stops me and she shakes her head. “He had bruises a few times.”
“Have you seen this?” A notebook is placed against the glass. Bobby’s handwriting. Something that mentions how cruel the world is, how he wishes that Fabio had left some poison for him, how he wishes I could take him away.
“That’s his. You’re not supposed to look at it.” I snarl. There needs to be some sacred things, even in death.
He chuckles, as if he’s already been through my room, tearing up the floorboards to look for all of the evidence that he needs. “He’s dead. You need to understand that. If you can prove to us that you can handle that, then you can go.” He sips from the cup. “Your parents miss you.”
Then I know that they don’t come because he tells them not to. Maybe he says that I’m too different, too crazed to see them anymore. “Let me see them.”
“I don’t think you’re ready.” The nurse puts her hand on my shoulder. “Why did you do that?” he gestures to the bandages that go all the way from my hands to my elbows.
“Because he was all I had to look forward to.”
“You had straight A’s. You could have gone to college, met some other nice kids. Why him?”
“Because he listened to me. Because he talked to me when no one else would.” My brain is turning into sludge here, all that I want to say about him has turned into cliches. “But you’ve made up your mind already.”
“We know you had sex.”
I want to throw things at him, to scream at the top of my lungs, to do anything else but sit there and start crying. When you start to cry they win. They know everything, they don’t need to listen to me. “Why does that even matter?” crawls up out of my diaphragm and rips through my throat.
He smiles like I am the scum of the earth and he’s a god. “That gives him reason to do what he did.” He takes a brief glance at his legal pad and then nods at the nurse. “Those are all the questions I have today.” I have the sense that he would have shaken my hand if the glass hadn’t been there. “Thanks for your help.”
My bed has no sheets, they only let me have those at night when they can be sure that the drugs are working and my mind is quiet. When thoughts of destruction are furthest from my brain. They’ve had to tape up the gauze six times today. I forget that it’s there and scratch it until there’s nothing left. I haven’t seen my arms in weeks. They probably wouldn’t let me even if they could.My whole world is this blurry room and the toilet. Mornings I spend throwing up. The toilet is metal, its edges buffed and sanded so there are no sharp edges. The hinges are concealed beneath slick solid rectangles that my clipped short nails can’t break through. There is only a little bit of water at the bottom. They won’t let me wash myself, they have to come in and do it for me, once a day, maybe twice if I do something really messy. I remember those baths in half pictures, blurs spinning around me while they peel back the bandages and then there’s only black and red and harsh pink white dribbling into the water.
The side effects from the drugs they give me have turned me into little more than a lifeless body shuffling around the periphery of his room. The only thing they let me do for fun is draw pictures. I use the biggest crayons, the darkest colors, I can’t see anything else.
There is an outside. It’s behind glass and bars and wet. It rains often and dribbles in through the window. My fingers slip on the metal bars and then crumple into useless sticks. Outside is green and blue and dark and earthy. Outside is something they made up to offer me when they think I’m listening to them. Outside is freedom, they say, when you’re outside you can do whatever you want. I never ask them why they come here to work if outside is so great.
I remember outside. Bobby was alive outside.
They think I need to socialize more. They won’t let me have sharp things but I need to talk to people. They won’t let me see my parents, but strangers are okay.I think she has been here forever. She is young but her face is aged. Her eyes are dead hollow shells, the brown sunken into the bang covered darkness. A nurse must have applied the red lipstick that is scribbled all over her lips. But she is a blur, so I may be wrong. The red line is curved up. She is smiling.
“What’s your name?” she asks. I know she will forget it after I say it.
The nurse guides me to a moth-eaten chair and makes me sit down. Half of the stuffing has either been torn out or worn away. I stare at her until she finally looks up. “Jay.”
“I’m Monica.” she whispers. “Want to talk?”
“About what?”
“What happened. Here. Anything.” She shows no emotion.
“Let’s talk about the current political situation in Russia.” Instantly I find myself being herded back to my room, back to the four what I assume are grey walls.
The longer I stay here, the less I want to leave.
My parents call me, once. The nurse hands the phone out to me, I grab it and slide into the chair next to the desk. The phone cord bounces as I twirl it around my finger. It’s a red phone with a sticker on the handle that sticks to my fingers. The nurse goes into the room in back, I know she’s tape recording this.“Jay, how are you doing?” It’s mom. I think dad’s in the background, something’s jangling.
“When can I come home?” Straight to the point. Dagger in the heart.
She’s sobbing already. “Honey, you can’t, not until the doctor says it’s okay. I don’t want to lose you.”
I hand the phone back to the nurse and wait for her to escort me back to my room.
Maybe it makes sense to them. Maybe they think that I’ll get over it, that it was just a teenage romance gone sour. The product of various stressors at play, not true feelings. I need to be older, wiser, more mature to really love.Maybe it never occurs to them that I don’t think it was love.
Lunch is always sandwiches and lukewarm soup in my room. They take away the spoon after I’m done using it. The sandwich is always a piece of unidentifiable meat, a piece of wilted lettuce and some mustard. Soup is either chicken noodle or tomato. Depending on the kind of soup, I can make it last for an hour. If it’s tomato, sometimes I accidentally spill some onto my clothes and cry, wishing it was blood and I could finally rest.
It was a gun. He was facing my window and he blew his brains out. His head hit a picture of Fabio and it lay crushed under his dead body. His father had given Fabio the gun in hopes of making him ‘a real man’. Fabio had given it to Bobby. And Bobby had used it to escape.The ambulance dispatcher remembered how Bobby’s mom had sounded. As if this was nothing special. When the ambulance came they noticed how his parents were emotionless. Not in the normal, my son just killed himself way, but it was as if they didn’t care, as if this was just another nuisance. Their real grief had been for Fabio.
I don’t remember how I found out. I was at school, then I was home and locked in my room and I was so blind and self-centered that I never felt any pain. My dad broke open the door, my mom shrieked and then there was the ambulance, the hospital, the doctor talking in hushed whispers to them outside the door, the forms being signed.
Then here.
I lie on my bed and try to remember him. He was just a person, not even handsome, really. All we did was talk a few times, I think he needed me more than I needed him. All I needed was love, he needed parents. Parents who might just drift away and move on, forgetting their two children who wanted to escape so much that they did whatever they had to to get away.
END