How to Disappear Completely (iii)
part three
iii.
You’re in trouble.
You’ve come to in a concrete box, perhaps eight feet wide and twelve feet long. There is a sticky, navy blue mat on a sort of ledge above your head. Across from you is a stainless steel combination toilet-sink, replete with a thoughtful little nook where soap might be stored, and a couple of cylindrical push buttons you assume denote hot and cold water. It takes you a little while to figure out how to flush the unholy mess you or some- one before you left in the bowl; it turns out you have to press your thumb lightly against a little mirrored recession carved out of the brushed metal to the left of what (it it worked) would be the hot water button. Only a fraction of the contents of the bowl is actually flushed on the first go, however, which is how you learn that if you press your thumb on the recession more than three times within some arbitrary period of time, the entire apparatus will cease to operate for an equally arbitrary—though exponentially longer—length of time.
The door is locked, naturally. It is made of steel far thicker than what you imagine would suffice to the task, with a little mesh-reinforced rectangular window that looks out onto a long, narrow, uniform corridor lined with doors just like your own. You resume the position you came to in, seated on the hard concrete floor, propped up against the slab on which your mat is laid. You’re well-aware of the bare mat, of a mesh bag stuffed with paper-thin bedsheets and a blanket that appears to be made entirely of lint, but you dare not make the bed. That would be something someone would do if they intended to be here for an extended period of time; you are not at all ready to face that possibility.
Your mind races to retrieve the last cognizable memory you can assemble, but all you see in your mina’s eye is her smiling face behind spiderwebbed glass, your phone on the passenger’s seat of your car, the ringtone silenced or otherwise inaudible over the engine redlining—either stuck in low gear, the transmission all but forgotten, or going far, far too fast—then your phone’s lock screen. You physically swat at the air, trying to change the channel in your mind’s eye, in vain.
For the moment, this is your only total recall: Her face, behind broken glass.
Nothing.
Her face behind broken glass.
Nothing. Her face—
You hear keys, the alien chirps and chatter of government radio. You jump to your feet, your pulse racing. You swoon, goggle your eyes wide so as not to faint. You watch your shaking hands; you wonder how long it’s been since you’ve had a drink. Alcohol withdrawal is subject to a phenomenon unique in all of medicine known as “kindling,” in which with each cycle of habitual drinking and subsequent withdrawal the symptoms of withdrawal increase exponentially in intensity and onset.
Elder men in your family, before they to a man died screaming, could be sober at breakfast, drunk at lunch, and in full-on DTs by dinnertime. You’re still too young to be that far gone, but your brain is already squirming inside your skull loudly enough for you to know that the next few days are going to be very unpleasant, if not deadly.
The jangle of keys, the only sign of life in this place, comes closer. You see a stocky, dusky-haired woman in cargo pants and a collared shirt with a gold star on the left breast approach. With her is a lanky, grey- haired man wearing burgundy scrubs. They stop at your door.
“Hi,” you start. “Listen, I—”
“You see this?” The turnkey, her tag reads “DOMINGUEZ,” holds a large, rather menacing canister of what you assume to be some manner of chemical irritant permissible only via a loophole in the Geneva Convention (the loophole being it’s not a war crime if you use it against your own people).
You nod carefully.
She rolls her eyes, softens slightly. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” she says.” “Now, if I open the door and let Mr. Hoover take your vitals, are you going to do anything nasty?”
You shake your head no, aghast that she would expect anything “nasty” to come of an encounter with you. You rack your memory for an explanation, but all you get is the same smiling face behind broken glass, a busy signal from another room, static on the airwaves that sounds uncannily like a straight six running at seventy-four hundred revolutions per minute.
Dominguez instructs you to sit on your bunk. The orange jumpsuit you wear adheres to the sticky mattress like Velcro. The lock turns.
The nurse, Hoover, wheels a coatrack-type medical apparatus towards you. His breath, even from six feet away, smells of bourbon. The channel changes in your mind’s eye, a dim flurry of sensations, grasping at taut denim, the taste of beerspit, the smell of burnt hair, and then nothing, everything, everywhere, oblivion, floating forever in a galaxy of safety glass and debris.
Your heart starts to race again, and a cold sweat breaks out over your body.
Your hands shake as Hoover tries to put the cuff taut around your bicep. Dominguez sighs and pulls your wrist away from your body at such an angle that your arm feels fit to pop free of its socket. Beerspit, burnt hair, her mouth a yawning chasm. Hoover’s hands are at least as unsteady as your own, but the cuff goes on nice and tight. Dominguez lets go of your wrist. Hoover switches on the machine. The cuff hisses and clicks. It squeezes you tight, then incrementally loosens its grip. After a few decompressions, you can feel the blood pumping
through your muscles. It feels as tenuous as the numbers on the screen—triple digits, all of them—imply. Hoover hands you a little paper cup with two green capsules in it. You don’t have to ask; by this stage in life you know Librium when you see it. You take the pills, chase them with a sip of water from another clever little cup, and nod your appreciation. Dominguez looks somewhat relieved as she escorts Hoover from the cell and locks the door behind them.
You stand and survey your chambers. You spread one of the bedsheets over the sticky mattress, tying the corners together under each side of the mat so it will stay put. You can’t recall where you learned to do this; from childhood through every hill and valley of your adult life you’ve always had a fitted sheet roughly corresponding to the size of your mattress. The sheet is about two inches too small on all sides to be easily secured, and there is probably a more elegant way to fasten an unfitted sheet, but it’s halfway taut and will suffice for your purposes. You lay down and try to still your pulse; you take a deep breath of the fetid, damp recirculated air. You close your eyes, and exhale slowly through your nose. You’re doing it backwards, but it works nonetheless.
Only as the Librium begins to drag you downwards into a viscous well of unconsciousness does it occur to you that you forgot to ask your gaoler where you are, or—more to the point—what you have done to not be permitted to Leave.