I recall the period of time that followed not in terms of days or months—for I had no conception of such units—but rather as one long stretch of… heaviness. The drugs they pushed into me kept me in a permanent sedation and many times I could not move at all. My arms and legs would become as heavy as sandbags, dead weights that anchored me to the thin mattress and made me feel like I was lying at the bottom of the ocean with billions of gallons of water crushing down upon my chest. When I screamed the sound was muffled and dull.
I found myself grossly overweight, then sickly thin. Bed sores appeared, then disappeared. In some ways I was thankful for these afflictions because their comings and goings at least proved to me that time was actually passing. But given these bodily changes could occur seemingly overnight I could not gauge the time interval accurately. It wasn't until they began to shave my face at regular intervals that I understood a few years had passed.
To be clear, I still had my wits about me. I could think logically. I could reason well. I just no longer knew what was real and what was unreal.
One day, for instance, my stepmother came by demanding that I sign a document and when I refused she offered to have sex with me. "Whatever you want, babe. I'll do it." But when I took (all right, grabbed) the pen I couldn't remember my name, much less how to write it.
Another day, I was sitting in the prison lunchroom and when I bit into my sandwich a billion ants sprayed down my chin, onto the table, and all over the floor. Paul started beating me but then my handcuff chain broke and I was bashing his head into the concrete wall, over and over until his face became a sloppy pulp. Once I'd opened up a hole in the wall, I jumped out into a forest where a big black bird chased me for perhaps three days; I can still hear the crunch of my rib cage in its shiny beak, still see my insides spilling out like a bloody egg yoke.
Lying in my cell one night, I began to hear a scratching sound.
"Scratching?" spat the one-eyed man, when I brought it up at the next group therapy session. "Oh great. So we've got fucking rats now, do we?"
"No," said Doctor Wheeler. "There are no rats."
"Ask me," said Raven, "it makes sense the little jew boy's little friends would try and visit him."
"Shut up, Raven!" I snapped, and nobody was more surprised than me.
The Professor said it reminded him of the Roman emperor, Titus. One day he came to make war with a certain land and upon alighting his ship, a gnat entered his nostril and picked at his brain. For seven years Titus suffered greatly until one day he was passing a blacksmith's shop and the gnat ceased to move. Immediately, Titus employed the blacksmith and others to continually hammer an anvil before the royal throne. But the remedy was short lived because after thirty days the gnat became accustomed to the hammering and once again began to pick away at the emperor's brain. When Titus died, they split open his head and found that the gnat had grown to the size of a sparrow.
Anvils, you might be interested to know, are remarkably rare to hand in criminal psychiatric asylums, and so I took to clapping my hands as loud as possible in lieu. It proved effective until they put me into a straitjacket.
Thus did I rot away, for time unknown, in the fourth cell of the high security ward.
Until one night, when I awoke to find a woman standing over me.
"Bon soir."
"Who the hell are you?"
She wore a blood red trench coat and blood red lipstick. "Je m'appelle Desiree."
I sat up on my mattress, which wasn't easy given the straitjacket. The woman called Desiree cast her eyes over my cell and sniffed. "Charming…"
"Least it's not covered in my own feaces yet."
She raised an eyebrow. "It's something you are considering?"
There was a kind of dark playfulness to her voice. I didn't like it. "What the hell do you want?"
She smiled and crooked a finger at me. "Come, mon chérie. It's about time we talked."
Why exactly I should have opened up to this stranger, this Desiree as she called herself, I didn't know, but I told her the whole damn plot, everything that had led up to this point, and she listened carefully, every now and then inserting a question before settling back into the chair behind Doctor Wheeler's desk, her long fiery hair falling wildly about her shoulders, her milky white skin glistening in the moonlight coming through the small office window. Certainly the wicked curl of her red lips had something to do with my growing trepidation; and in hindsight, a clear foreboding that she was to be both the pretty and ugly one in this relationship. When I had finished, she shook her head and gave a heavy sigh. "Awful, mon chérie. A tragic story."
"It isn't a story—" I began to protest before a sharp pain ripped up my shoulder. "Damn!"
Desiree gestured at the straitjacket lying on the floor. "If it's more comfortable…?"
I gave her a bit of a look.
She shook her head. "You shoot me daggers, mon chérie, but the truth is that people prefer restriction. In fact, they take great comfort in it. Like ze baby who is swaddled."
I snarled. "Look, just what the hell is this? Are you taking over from Doctor Wheeler or something?"
"Ah, well, zat will be up to you, mon chérie. Though I'm sure you will find my counsel quite to your taste." Her trench coat ended at the knees and I could see under the table that her lithe bare legs spilled out into a pair of ruby red heels.
"Let's talk about your stepmother," she said. "You honestly believe she could so conspire against you?"
"Yes. She's a bitch."
"Ah, but an attractive bitch, n'est-ce pas?"
"What?"
"Attractive. You know, sexually, I mean."
"What kind of question is that?" (I had left out the accusations of underwear stealing and shower spying.)
Desiree clicked her tongue. "Come now, mon chérie. It's quite natural. Like with me."
"I'm sorry?"
"But of course. You want to see me naked."
I started. "I beg your pardon!"
"Well you do keep staring at my legs…"
I floundered. "No I—well yes, okay, but only because…"
She smiled then and I saw she was playing with me. I gritted my teeth. "Eh bien," she said at length. "Let's suppose now that you were out there. Suppose I release you. What would you do?"
"Are you going to release me?"
She shrugged. "Zat depends. I would need some assurances."
"I'm paying my stepmother a visit," I said. "You can be assured of that." An impulsive answer, I grant you, but far from the expected reaction, Desiree's face wore a sort of satirical expression. The sort of smirk a parent might issue a child vying for their first sip of alcohol.
"What would you say Doctor Wheeler keeps in that closet?"
"What?"
She pointed to the door in the corner. "The closet. What do you think he keeps in there?"
I couldn't follow her. "What's that got to do with anything? What is this?"
My hands bunched into fists but the butterflies in my stomach were not the emotion I thought they were. I strode to the closet door, pulled on the handle, and noted two things:
First, that the Newton's Cradle was inside.
Second, that someone had used it to beat Doctor Wheeler's head into a bloody pulp.
I collapsed on to the floor, scuttling backwards from the sprawled corpse until I hit up against the side of the desk and my body began convulsing as though I was having some sort of epileptic fit. My eyelids fluttered like angry moths, my breath became ragged and sputtering.
"My God!" I managed at last.
"Non," said Desiree. "Just your doctor."
With supreme effort I tore my eyes from the bloody mess and jerked my head up at her. "What have you… what did you…." but the sharp pain ripped through my shoulder again and with it a disjointed montage of memory flashes. I scrambled for the wastepaper bin and threw up.
"Zat's it, mon chérie. Let it all out."
I heaved and wretched until finally, exhausted and panting, I once again stared up at Desiree.
She smiled and cupped my cheeks in her hands, gazing into my eyes with what I now saw were yellow irises. Had they always been yellow? I wondered. But then she kissed me, viciously; her red lipstick made sticky noises against my own, and then, suddenly, she pushed her small tongue into my mouth, rolling it around like a damp lizard's tail. When she finally let go of me (just at the point I was starting to kiss her back, that is), I flopped back to the ground, the corpse, and most none of my faculties.
Desiree licked her lips and swallowed loudly, grinning with satisfaction like a cat over an empty cream saucer. She picked up the desk telephone as swiftly as it began to ring. "Allo? Bureau de fou." Her voice was a gay singsong as she told whomever was on the line that Doctor Wheeler was indisposed at present. The caller in return shouted something to which Desiree but giggled and made eyes at me to the effect that I was somehow in on the joke. "Ah, you are coming now!" she told them. "But zat is quite short notice, hein?"
Line apparently cut, she put the receiver down and, clicking her red heels together, she stepped over me and strode for the door. "Come, mon chérie. It's about time we get back to ze cell."
"I'm not going anywhere with you," I said, clutching tightly the vomit filled bin.
"So you will keep ze Doctor's company? Bon chance!" The door closed on her red smile and I listened quite thankfully to her heels go clack-claking down the hall until her happy laughter suddenly resolved into the piercing blare of the prison siren.
It wasn't five seconds before the office door clattered open and four armed correctional guards burst inside, blackjacks at the ready.