How to Disappear Completely (iv)

part four | tw: violent imagery, suicidal ideation

part one.

part two.

part iii.

iv.

Time stretches out in front of you like a yawning, impassable chasm.

You’ve been in this room for at least a month. An hour each day you are released into the corridor to take a shower, use the phone, and steel yourself for the twenty-three hours to come. Despite vague, bitter intentions to face this alone, to leave the people in your life who care about you to their recalcitrant optimism, to believing that no news is still good news, you spend most of your hour making collect calls to people who don’t answer long-distance calls from numbers they don’t recognize. Voicemails are not permitted. Five minutes rubbing various industrial sulfates into your scalp and skin under water that is alternatively freezing and scalding with zero middle ground leaves you with ten desperate minutes knocking on cell doors at random in search of novels, crossword puzzles, an old newspaper, anything that will keep you from being truly alone with yourself. You fear stimuli deprivation above all else, even the day come soon when you will have to face all of this without a little green pill—which, your neighbor warns you through the ventilation shaft (with just a hint of schadenfreude) is rapidly approaching.

Your lawyer, like the nurse, exhibits signs of lifelong functional alcoholism himself. Something in his placid, tired eyes hints at a sense of camaraderie, of the strange mirrors fate holds up for us to see at certain moments throughout our lives. He has advised you to remain silent. He says the victim’s blood alcohol level was at least three times what yours was, that the paramedics probably bought you enough time for your own to get down to where it needed to be to get you out of the woods regarding the possibility of much more serious charges. He says that but for the cocaine authorities discovered in what was left of your vehicle you probably would have been released on your own recognizance.

You were having trouble comprehending what all of this “victim” talk meant, that is until your attorney launched into a long, meandering soliloquy regarding the forensic nuances involved in obtaining toxicology reports from a subject whose own personal corpus, his various limbs and viscera, had in fact ended up in multiple concurring jurisdictions (”...you got local cops, plus the county, highway patrol, and as I’m sure you already know the Vee-Ay hospital is property of the United States government, so that’s the federales, but as for which federales, now, that appears to be a matter of dispute...’”). You were doing fine, breathing in reverse but steadily, until he broke out the photographs from the scene of the crash, at which point you promptly vomited in the corner of the attorney booth. Your court-appointed lawyer, sworn to zealously defend you against the adversarial machinations of the Assistant District Attorney (with whom he plays golf every Friday afternoon), asks if you are okay. You reply that you are “sort of okay,” which isn’t even remotely true.

Time trudges onward, like the scourging sun traversing the desert sky. They take you off the little green pills. It feels appropriate, like saying goodbye to a raucous high school friend at the end of a holiday trip home from college. They replace them with some newer, more refined acquaintances: a white, rectangular tablet thrice daily, and a red, oblong one at “bedtime,” which in the county jail (or “DETENTION CENTER,” as the block letters on the back of your jumpsuit proclaim) means half past six in the evening.

The medicine comes courtesy of the jail’s staff psychiatrist, a nervous, energetic woman with wild, frizzy hair who appears herself to be harboring any number of neuroses. You enjoy your sessions with this woman, who freely tells you of her bleak and unfulfilling personal life, of abortive office romances with the “mouth breathers” tasked with keeping inmates such as yourself from killing one another and/or themselves. You find it remarkable the way she can so organically open herself up to you, a complete stranger, a detainee, a patient.

She seems to be dimly aware of the irony; moments of self-doubt flicker across her brow, and she’ll ask you if these sessions are helping. You reply that they are “sort of helping,” which, strangely enough, they actually are.

With every session (your arrangement is that you are to file a grievance once per week demanding immediate psychiatric intervention) you feel a change blooming inside you. Your ego is diminishing. You nod and smile. You listen attentively and with genuine interest to your taxpayer-funded psychiatrist’s perpetually self-undermined quest for emotional fulfillment and self-actualization. You ask well-considered, open-ended questions. She smiles the fey smile of an intellectual companion with whom you have achieved some manner of philosophical breakthrough. Her smile knits together some abyssal void inside of you, some tangle of axons and neural pathways of course but it feels like something in the pit of your chest, literally visceral, coming together inside you, your own corpus being made whole, save for a little Lesotho-like knot of thorny, cancerous neurons you dare not disturb. Of all the rooms in your mental manor, this is the one forbidden, barred with Heathcliffian determination, from entry by even its master.

At home—that is, in your eight-by-twelve cell—you wonder whether she is practicing some kind of newfangled, radical school of cognitive behavioral therapy, some sort of actual reverse psychology, or if you have stumbled upon a novel healing process that (dubious ethics aside) actually works by mere happy accident. You fantasize darkly about making bail and following her home, silencing her automatic objections as to the most fundamental tenet of professional ethics with just enough of the physical force she has proclaimed openly to you excites her, to make her think less about the hierarchy and more about needs. You pull back, shamefully aware of the possibility of delusion, of the consequences, of traumatizing the poor woman who may very well live in fear of such an extraclinical encounter with a schizoid ex-patient. The immediate aftermath of this thought is nausea, nausea and shame.

You wonder if she asks other men in orange jumpsuits to game the grievance system so as to meet with her on a weekly basis. You don’t know how many souls this facility holds, but it has an elevator with at least half a dozen buttons on the panel; such an arrangement would become untenable if it were commonplace. You lay on your bunk and think mostly warm, mostly chaste thoughts, as the red, oblong pill dissociates your mind from your body and you drift into a protracted, dream-filled sleep.

You don’t remember your dreams, but invariably you wake up believing you’re a hunted man, which you come to understand means the dream took place outside of these four walls. Your relief—relief!—at your incarceration is soon trampled by the herd of intrusive thoughts: you’ll never get out of here; you fucking killed a guy you piece of shit; that media waiver you signed the day you came in and how it meant everyone you ever loved now sees you for the thoughtless, dangerous fuckboy you are; you deserve to be in here; already killed one asshole why not rig up the bedsheet Epstein-style and make it two; your life is meaningless but is it less meaningless than anyone else’s meaningless lives?; you fucking killed a guy.

And still, your circadian rhythm adapts. The white pills take about six weeks to take effect, but when combined with weekly encounters with a woman who is frankly at least as badly in need of therapy as you are, plus ten hours a night of nearly lucid, sometimes pleasant, occasionally erotic dream-sleep—violently self-loathing interludes aside the overall effect is a sense of new beginnings, of self-actualization, the summit of ol’ Maslow’s hierarchy. What’s more, someone, somewhere, has figured out how to deposit money into your commissary account; you’re at last able to purchase some necessaries and start living like something resembling a human. Soap, toothpaste , a half a dozen yellow legal pads which were rejected by some retailer somewhere (their adhesive is defective, and the pages come unbound almost immediately upon handling), a handful of ballpoint pens that come in little flexible tubes so you can’t stab anyone with them, at least not effectively.

You fucking killed a guy.

A week later, another deposit, and you buy deodorant, white ankle socks, gray boxer briefs, a small hoard of potato chips and ramen noodle soups, plus a half- dozen giant dill pickles, which you learn to dice with a deodorant cap and use along with the seasoning packets from the ramen to make the tray food served through the slot in your door (what the other inmates call the “bean hole”) edible.

His name was Dick Washburn not Richard but Dick see Dick see Dick run in front of a car see Dick splatter like a sack of paintballs see car roll and roll and roll to stop see asshole entirely unscathed unconscious as the wheel see the wheels still spinning like the legs of a dying beetle see red see blue one fish two fish

You begin to pay attention, to be mindful of every action, however minute or mundane, you perform over the course of your otherwise identical passing days. You become efficient, even graceful, in your economy of movement. You ask Laura (as you now call her) to increase the dosage of your medications. She does, enthusiastically. She begins to ask you questions, which should feel like a return to normalcy in the doctor-patient relationship, but doesn’t. They mostly pertain to what your plans are when this ordeal is over with. You express your general sense of optimism, but concede you haven’t thought much of the specifics. She begins to speak of this place, not the jail but the city surrounding it and the painted desert surrounding the city in turn. She speaks of the place she lives in like an agent of the tourism bureau, and you feel a glimmer of fantasy, of desire for something you know to be impossible (or at least highly unethical). She appears nervous when she talks like this. She jiggles her legs, crossing and uncrossing them, sipping from an empty coffee mug. You ask her where the good bars and restaurants are, and she practically pounces on the opportunity to tell you her favorites, her routines, where she can be found any given Friday night. You smile, and say you’ll have to check these places out before you go home. Her smile remains, but her eyes seem to lose their depth. It was the correct and proper response, but you find yourself unnerved as to how it felt undeniably like the wrong thing to say. You don’t talk about how you fucking killed a guy. Ever. You just breathe in through your mouth, out through your mouth. You’re still doing it backwards. It doesn’t help at all.