15
A roommate never arrived, and my concern over this diminished the longer I went without double occupancy. I have to admit, though, that every time I got my sandwich, often accompanied by a little water bottle, I thought it just might be a new inductee and my heart would be in my throat. As the heavy metal door opened, my sandwich was jettisoned from the outside world into mine. The heart in my throat would soon be replaced by the sandwich, stuck there as well.
The days passed more quickly than I would have ever thought. I would learn later that this was because my limited starvation from one crummy sandwich a day kept my chemistry in a sleepy mode. I passed from one day to the next, the only tick of a clock being the arrival of my cheese on rye.
So I knew the number of days, but not much else. I slept when I felt like it, sat when I felt like it, and slept again when I couldn’t do anything else I felt like doing. Options are limited in a dark furniture-less room.
Luckily I had found a trap door for bodily functions that first day before my new urges had forced repeat indiscretions. It was flush with the floor and could only be opened by fingering a ringed pull-handle. The mechanism, unfortunately, was not a mere shaft but a removable tray of some kind, apparently exchangeable from below. I wondered who was the lucky one to have that job, which was probably my only out-loud laugh the whole time.
It was too small for me to fit through, but I did try to use it to dump the gun. That didn’t work; my disposal was noticed, and my firearm—the very one which had shared an exit with my excrement, I was disgusted to learn—was returned to me in my sandwich bag.
After what had seemed like a month, I had tried it again to the same dutiful return. And then, about a week after that, someone screwed up big. Someone got confused and I got a second gun with a sandwich. (Could that have been dumped by someone else via his tray? I almost didn’t eat my sandwich that day. Almost.)
So, a second gun. That was almost as good as a second sandwich. This, I thought, might prove fortuitous.
All of this time I used for thinking. Life can be re-defined very drastically when you’re hopelessly incarcerated. I had wondered what had happened to my Abby, pregnant in this very same world I was in and not even knowing this. Oh, she probably knew there was a me of some sort here, but that guy was such a shit she’d have no inclination for a visit.
I wondered if she was still pregnant, or had the pressures of this senseless world finally convinced her that she make the unilateral choice to not raise a child in this world. And could one raise a normal child with real human ethics here, shielded from the blight of the senseless carryings-on around him? Or would the child ultimately, in spite of the best efforts of isolation, still be just like one of the “regular guys” here? That would be tragic to Abby. Could even she come to a different way of thinking about pregnancy termination here?
If she were pregnant, she should be due in just a couple of months or so, I figured, before a feeling welled up inside of me: her due date! Wasn’t that a thought! My child, our child. And us here. I suddenly cried out loud and cried hard until my sinuses took revenge on me.
Near the end of a month’s worth of depression I started fantasizing about suicide, not really intending, you understand; just imagining as a fictional exercise. I wondered if my pop-ups down the line were considering it or had even done it.
At first I tried to make the standard suicide fantasy sound useful—you know, really showing-everyone-and-then-they’d-be-sorry-type stuff—but that just wouldn’t work here. In fact, I’d be doing everyone a favor. They’d collect on the census while hiding my non-existence and not even supporting me, not that the daily piece of a cheese on rye and a squeeze bottle of water was crippling their economy. And of course the climate control of my cubicle certainly wasn’t expensive. You know, all of this complaining can certainly whip me up, I thought. It kind of made me want to go and kill somebody. Maybe myself for lack of a better victim.
To rest, to finally rest from all of this.
Surrender is the final self-indulgence, and the ill wind reached from its distant desolate point of origin to this layer. But it was beginning to make sense this far away from reason, from civilization, from people with human frailties and concerns. This far from the protective counter-wind of God’s life-giving breath—the raison d’être—there really seemed no reason to be at all anymore. Options are limited in a dark, armed, unfurnished room where there is no hope of ever getting out. Hopelessness hurts.
A lot of good I did with my life, what with my privileged “true existence.” My final output was zero. In this dark womb which was Observation my miserable gestation was over, and I was ready to be delivered stillborn into the world outside. To hell with everything, I thought, as I automatically lifted the gun toward my face. There seemed to be more rain in the world outside, for the drainpipes sounded slippery in the wall. I imagined it to be the blood of Blown Away, as much a cheap and inevitable run-off as funneled rainwater. Even here, I thought, God would never even notice—in my dark womb, in my moist tomb. I pulled the hammer back on the gun and then placed its barrel in my mouth. With it cocked in position, my finger tightening, I offered a chance for any last thoughts.
Wait one more minute, I considered. Could there be one shred of worthwhile meaning enough for me to call the whole thing off? No, I answered. Even if there were, it was just too much trouble to evaluate it now. And with the flimsiest of resolve, for that’s all it took, I pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing. Nothing except the drainpipes and the subliminal whistle from overhead. I screwed up. This was the accidental spare gun. Do you know never once did I check the number of bullets in it? I did so at this point. There were only three. This angered me to no end. I started cursing myself and my new world. I stood, I shouted. Damn if I wasn’t going to get noticed before I went! And damn if I wasn’t going to take an orderly or two with me!
“Hey,” I shouted, “I’m gonna do it! I’m gonna shoot myself, do you hear? Come on down you miserable soulless bastards! Come see the show! Come on! Projectile brains for you!”
My back rested against the door as I slid down, ignored, which didn’t exactly lift my suicidal spirits. I listened, but there was only silence from the corridor. Like the newspapers amassing on the driveway of the family out of town, I could envision sandwiches piling up after my death.
“What the hell,” I said out loud. “Let’s go again.” I lifted both guns, one to each side of my head, and once again I prepared to die. I ran through all of the preliminary misgivings of existence here that had prepared me so well just minutes earlier. The mood was right again.
That’s when I heard footsteps coming. Footsteps with keys. And it wasn’t even mealtime—I didn’t think, anyway. Had I eaten yet today? I wasn’t sure.
The keys addressed the lock on my door. Company! I readied to start firing, but then came the realization that I would be a killer, and I panicked in cowardice—not because of the consequences, but because of the suffering to come from my own self-evaluation. Suddenly no amount of evaluation of life and death was too much trouble. Company brought to me sobriety, and murder of my company would put me back online with reason, a conscience, and unbearable remorse.
Quickly I stuffed one of the guns—I didn’t know which—into my belt at my back, my soiled and by now rotting shirt hanging over it, covering it. If I were to regret my pacifist decision, I knew I could always murder later. Either someone else or myself.
The door swung glaringly wide, feeling like someone was ramming all of Alpha Centauri down my throat. I know my eyelids must have nearly healed shut right then and there, the light piercing my vision like nails. Before I could think, there were hands around my throat.
“Give me the gun before we go,” she said. That was Sister Chaz’s voice. I easily remembered it.
“Sure, sure, sure—” I gurgled, waiving my hand into open space with the gun in it. My forearm was karate chopped, forcing the gun to fall to the floor. She loosened her grip from around my neck, allowing in air. I never thought I’d say this, but I welcomed the famous shoulder grasp at the hands of Sister Chaz, since it replaced her throat grip. I was yanked out of my prison into the outside world, like a newborn being pulled rudely out of its mother by some forceful, abusive doctor.
Through squinted eye-lashed diffractions which streaked any images, I could see there were two or three males with her. I moved along, light on my feet thanks to the Chazhooks.
I was blind and daffy, my legs buckling flimsily under me, in spite of the fact that I was considerably lighter due to my miracle diet. The only vision I had was navigational, seeing only blurred objects in my path. The muscles in my legs were emaciated and poorly responsive to the messages delivered to them from my brain. It was as if these muscles had never been delivered a good thought from those nerves. I thought of Mr. Rubens.
I thought of Ava’s Les.
The good Sister had no difficulty bouncing my wispy, handicapped frame along by my shoulders, or when she did have difficulty she’d merely right my balance by a quick grasp of my clumped beard.
My escort ended when I was thrown into an office. I landed on a chair I had felt before. This was Landrum’s office. The air was so fresh I could smell myself in contrast. Sister Chaz stood at my side, one hand still on my left shoulder, my chair facing Landrum’s desk. The brightness of this normal light was still brilliant and painful. I continued to squint.
“What’s going on?” I asked, reminded of the second gun I still had because of its pressing in my back from the force with which Chaz held me against the chair.
“Quiet, murk,” she chided. Murk? I heard a man’s footsteps, then a desk chair seat being squashed by a behind that belonged to...
“Dr. Landrick,” Sister Chaz announced.
“Where is her chart?” Landrick asked me.
“Whose chart?” I asked back.
“Abby’s,” he answered. “Your bitch’s.”
“Yea,” agreed Chaz, “the bitch’s.”
“I know you have ripped it off, you mote-eating roach,” Landrick continued.
Sure, I thought, a long time ago, many layers ago when I was with Ava. Before I was a mote-eating roach. But just what was the big deal here? Just what the hell did my pop-up do here regarding that chart? Had he blown the whistle on the fraud of census card-shuffling?
“Is that why I was brought here?” I asked angrily. I got a pop in the back of my head from the good Sister.
“Cinch up, murk, you have no voice,” she said with scorn.
“That’s alright, Sister Chaz, I think he’s entitled to some answers to add to his dust.” And then to me, “Answers? Is that why you were admitted to Blown Away, or why you were invited to my office,” he offered, the choice being mine.
“Both,” I said. He was lucky he was being so conciliatory, because I was ready to start brandishing my gun. He looked at me, expressionless. I could tell, even with my squinting eyes.
“You were brought to Blown Away Memorial for observation. It was felt that you were the catalyst for Abby’s illness. This is well catalogued from her first admission from her aunt’s house.”
“Her first admission? You mean she’s had more admissions?”
“Oh,” he said, smiling mischievously, “just the one today.”
“Today!” I was stunned.
“Yes, that’s why you’ve been brought to my office, drib. She snivelled to us you had ripped off her chart.”
How could she have known that? I asked myself. “The chart’s at Ava’s house,” I offered, knowing this was no help.
“Who’s she, drib?” he asked. I became irritated with the strange name-calling, derogatory parlance here.
“A friend,” I answered sarcastically. There was silence, as if he were in thought, a silence I ultimately broke. “Well, well, Dr. Landrick,” I asked, “what were the results of your observation of me? Did you get a lot of good information? Did you diagnose my problem? Are you able to help roaches, murks, and dribs? Did you help me?”
“Actually,” he said non-apologetically, “we hadn’t really gotten around to you yet.”
I went for his throat, acting with such impulsive rage that I didn’t think to use my gun. Sister Chaz acted immediately to cock my neck and head against my frail body.
“Break your neck or sit you down, take your pick,” she commanded.
“I pick sitting down,” I gasped in my struggle against her grip. She was a woman of many grips and grasps. And she had great big muscles to apply them with. At least she wasn’t naked and on the make. I sank back into my chair, happy with my choice. The gun? No, not yet, I thought. I dared to speak again.
“Where’s Abby now?” I asked, wondering what psychiatric ward she was holed up in.
“In labor, Mr. Ebe,” Landrick responded. “She’s going to have your baby. Even though she’s single, thanks to you, and broke, thanks to you, and mentally ill, thanks to you. And she’s going through with it, thanks to you, even though she’s six weeks early.”
It sure is hard to let crazy people bawl you out for being crazy. I sat. I took it. I waited. All like the drib I was.
“I’d like to see her, please,” I said.
“Oh, she doesn’t want to see you,” he reported. “You’ve done some pretty nasty things to her, I understand.” Now he was talking about my pop-up, I thought to myself. “But I’m going to bring you to see her anyway,” he claimed. “She needs to see the man of her life. Maybe you can coach her through her Lamaze. Maybe she’ll have a little roach like you.”
I was ready to see her. I was ready to welcome my child, no matter how anyone else would consider him or her. Roach, indeed! This was the indictment of Landrick’s society: a drib’s child is an insect; abortion of a drib’s child is insecticide; insecticide is useful when there’s a pest problem.
I had everything to live for. I thought I had been out of my mind to want to kill myself. (Was that myself? I’d have to think about that later. No time for that now. I was ready.) Sister Chaz gave me the thump signal to leave. I arose and left with her.
“Er, Mr. Ebe, remember, you’re still under arrest until that chart business gets straightened out,” Dr. Landrick said with a hint of blackmail.
“Yes, sir,” I said back, my back to him as I exited. Then he threw a heavy glass ashtray at me. It hurt bad; it fell to shatter into a million pieces.
I rubbed the small of my back the whole way to Maternity, being careful not to dislodge the gun from my belt.