So that’s it. No more nothing. The end. That scares me. I feel darkness under all the light and air turn to bricks that are impossible to breathe. Dr See is just sitting there. Why doesn’t he turn the lights out and go, so I can sleep? I look at a tube in my arm and wonder when it got there and who put it there; the next thing I see are horses. I’m standing with them in a green pasture, and the air is balmy but the sky is cloudy. I can smell the ocean even though I can’t see it. I follow the smell to the top of a hill, which turns to a cliff where the surf is crashing against the rocks below. A tall woman on a pretty silver horse is riding toward me. The horse stops abruptly, then picks up again with a gallop toward me. I step closer in its path rather than away from it. The long silver hairs of its mane brush my face, leaving the smell of an ocean breeze in my nostrils.
I know the horse is coming back for me without the woman.
“Why?”
Am I talking?
“It will be like . . . I don’t know, dying, the silver horse is death, don’t you think, Dr See?”
“Actually, that’s not what I think. But what do you think death will be like?”
“I think it will be gray and cold. I’m tired of talking about it.”
“Don’t you dare,” he says. “Every time I bring you out of the fog, you run right back in.”
“You think you control everything.” Mindfucker, I hate him, and I hate myself for sounding like a fucking kid talking to his daddy.
“What you’re doing is not control; it’s not even resistance, if you’re fooling yourself into thinking that. You’re not a child whose tantrums are going to get him what he wants. You’re an adult turning the key that’s going to lock you in.”
It’s the truth socking me in the jaw! I feel like I’ve been hit by lightning or found God. I sit up rigid with fear and a raggedy little piece of hope.
“So we need to talk.”
“About what?” I ask.
“Your mental state. Look, boy, I’m not angry at you or tired of you, though perhaps I should be or could be. I don’t know which. What I do know is this is about it for me and therefore in some ways about it for you unless I have something to put in my report on Friday.”
“Friday?”
“Friday is my last day.”
Last day? Last day? Day? I don’t even know what year this is, and he’s talking about day. I don’t say anything. My chest muscles tighten.
“Yes, I’ll be leaving to work for Big Pharma. I’ll be doing the same thing I do here—”
“Huh?”
“Run clinical trials—”
“Dope?”
“Director, medical director. I could never do that here.”
Here. He’s leaving? He can’t leave without telling me my name, how long I been here, why I’m here, how old I am. My mother, my dancing? He’s chitchatting like, like this isn’t my life, like he’s talking about his grocery list.
“You can’t leave without telling me who I am. I deserve to know why I was brought here. You can’t just lock people up for no reason and then say, ‘Friday is my last day’ and—”
“Well, let’s get one thing straight: You were locked up for a reason. And basically when you end up in the position you’re in, we can do whatever we think is necessary.”
“The man across the hall?”
“Nobody did anything to him. He did it to himself. But you’re right to ask, because that could have been you.”
“Isn’t this a hospital? Aren’t you supposed to help people?”
“Do you want help, Abdul?”
What the fuck, am I talking to the devil here? What’s going on? Weird, weird. I sink back down in the bed.
“Come on, sit back up, look alive, Abdul. We don’t have much time unless you want to stay here for a very long time.”
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“On Friday I will hand in an evaluation on our sessions together.”
“What sessions?”
“I will write up all those times you pulled the sheets over your head and turned your back on me and pretended you were asleep or bit yourself and spewed blood on the walls—”
“They got it off, all of—”
“Yes, they’re—we are, I guess you could say that, good at getting rid of things. As I was saying before you interrupted: Those sessions, that’s what I get paid for, I’m a psychopharmacologist.”
“I couldn’t talk on all that shit. Why—”
“Talk now. Talk now, Abdul. Talk.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Stop whining, Abdul. What’s on your mind? You can always start there.”
“How old am I? What’s my name? How long have I been here? Where, what, is this? Who am I?”
“You know, this is interesting, but to be honest with you, there are certain things I need to hear. That’s if you want to leave here. I can’t write a recommendation for you to leave here if you’re going to be running around telling people you don’t know your name. What is your name? Let’s start there. What is your name? I asked you a question, Abdul. Don’t you get it yet?”
“I’m not sure.” What’s with this guy?
“What is your name?”
“Abdul Jamal Louis Jones.”
“OK, that’s not exactly what I have written down here.”
“Yeah,” I say re-remembering. “That’s not exactly what I have ‘written down’ either.”
“So what exactly is your name?”
“Abdul Jones, period. I dropped the rest.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, it felt like dead weight. All I need is Abdul and Jones.”
I so don’t trust this guy. I thought he was different from Watkins and those niggers. Yeah he’s different, but the same. Or maybe he isn’t the same, maybe he is my friend.
“The name I have is Abdul-Azi Ali. How old are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“Well, I don’t know how long I been here, how many years, or whatever.”
“How old were you when you came here?” Staring at me hard.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember coming here.”
“What do you remember, Abdul?”
“I don’t. I just woke up one day and I was here strapped down getting shot up.”
“You know you’re not delusional. Maybe you have some depression or posttraumatic stress, maybe. And that’s not so strange, considering what you’ve been through.”
Like he’s not part of what I’ve been through.
“Abdul, I don’t want this to become a battle of wills—”
“I’ll lose?”
“You already have, if you’re here. Like I said earlier, I’m leaving at the end of the week. You could wind up staying here for a long, long time, you know, doing, oh, say, testing meds for these people, locked down, strapped in. I’ve seen it happen before. Or we, they, I mean, damage people so badly they can’t let them out, and then they leave enough Velcro loose so they take care of themselves. I’ll ask you again: How old are you?”
“I told you I don’t know.”
“What is the last age you remember being?”
“Um, I think nineteen, twenty, maybe eighteen.”
“So what makes you think you’re not nineteen or eighteen anymore?”
“Well, that’s how old I was when I came here, but I’m older than that now by the years I’ve been in here.”
“Years?”
“Yeah.”
“How long do you think you’ve been here?”
“Shit, I don’t know, you know. Why don’t you tell me?”
“I will, Abdul. You’ve been here for twenty-one days, exactly to the day.”
“Twenty-one days? You mean, I . . .” What’s he talking about? I can’t—
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. We had to keep you—”
“Why?”
“Well, maybe how is more like it and or more usefu
l. You were incapacitated. They slapped a label on you as a threat to yourself and others, and if you were Abdul-Azi Ali like we thought you were, then it was not just a threat to others but a lot of others.
“So you just drag me here, lock me up in a room. Who? Who said you could do that? What did I do? I have rights? Why am I here?”
“Good question, Abdul. That’s one I’m going to ask you to answer, because I don’t know.”
“I had to have done something. I couldn’t just get locked up for nothing.”
“You never heard of people getting locked up for nothing?”
“Yeah, trash people, hoodies, and rapists and shit, or . . . or in China or someplace. This is America.”
“Where have you been, boy?”
I’m stunned. He’s Watkins in a jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a pipe. He needs a pipe and a fireplace. This is madness.
“Where have you been, boy? Where have you been?”
“I dunno.”
“You need to find out, you really do.”
“What if I can’t?”
“You could be here a long time, oh, declared this or that by the state, insane displaced person paranoid schizophrenic. They’ll come up with something, and you would end up fodder—”
“Fodder, dried hay for horses.”
“I’m not giving you a vocabulary quiz, Abdul. Don’t you understand what I’m talking about? Watkins, our minimum-wage sadist, every day, how’s that for a life? Not so nice, I think. Then wake up, kid, I asked you a question.”
“Honestly, after all that, I forgot what that question was.”
“You were going to tell me why you were here. What do you remember?”
J.J., when I first saw the devil it was an abyss, a straight drop into blackness. And, J.J., that’s when I understood Hopkins! That’s when I understood the great holy blinding light was the same as the devil’s dark, the very same, the exact very same.
“Abdul? Abdul? What’s going on in there?”
“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life.”
“Who taught you Shakespeare?”
“It’s not Shakespeare,” I say.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest. He observed a lot of natural phenomena—flowers, trees, rock formations. So my earth science teacher, Brother John, had us read his poems and memorize them. That’s one I memorized. When you said, ‘What do you remember?’ that’s what came out.”
“Sounds like you got it perfect there.”
“Not perfect. Why did I get shock treatment?”
“Good question, and we’ll come to that. But remember our focus is getting you out of here. If you get mad now, it won’t happen. So I need to assess your current state of mind—”
“Why?”
“Well, think of me, you’re doing me a favor. Suppose I authorize your release and you go kill somebody.”
Shit, he’s serious. If he’s not the devil, he’s a devil. Maybe I can talk to him.
“So what is it about the Jesuits?”
“Nothing really. I was thinking about how after that, when I was seventeen—” I say.
“What about it?” he interrupts.
“Well, nothing really, just hitting this guy.”
“Who?”
“Roman, a guy I know. It was funny. After I hit him, he was screeching on and on, but later he claimed I broke his jaw. How was his jaw broken if he kept talking?”
“Why did you hit him?”
“He was trying to stop me from going. I had come back to get some books, and he didn’t want me to go.”
“You were leaving what?”
“His house, I was living with him, since I was thirteen.”
“Was he a friend, a lover, a relative?”
“What relative would act like that?”
“It’s not so uncommon.”
“I mean normal relative.”
“So go on, why was he so upset? Why did you feel you had to hit him?”
“He’s such a faker, I don’t know, but I guess he was in love with me.” I’m not lying, I realize. I didn’t know shit about him, really.
“Were you in love with him?”
“No. I was thirteen. I needed a place to stay. He took me in, trained me as a dancer—took care of me. In love? I didn’t even like him, but—”
“But what?”
“But I admired him in a way.”
“How so?”
“His skill, the guy was a virtuoso. He said he would teach me everything he knew, and he did but—”
“You hear the back story yourself, don’t you, Abdul? ‘But.’ But what?”
“But I wasn’t gay. But it felt good getting my dick sucked. I felt like he had me in a cage lined with money. I couldn’t get out even though the door was open. That made me feel even more trapped, because it was like I was choosing to stay. I didn’t know what to do. I felt polluted, yeah, polluted. I didn’t think I could get a girl and be normal, because I wasn’t.”
“Did he force you?”
“No, it was that to get what I wanted, I knew what I had to do. I felt like I had no choice. Of course I did: be homeless, go to a group home jail where I’d probably really have gotten fucked.”
“Say what?”
“Roman, all he wanted to do was blow me. It was not like he ever even tried to fuck me; it just wasn’t part of his program. But . . . but I hated the feeling, like now. I feel it now, like I don’t have any rights or choice—you got all the power. Do I have any rights?”
“Did you?”
“No, do I?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do I have to do this shit, talk to you?”
“No, you don’t have to do anything. But I suggest you choose to. Think of this as getting your ‘rights,’ as you call them, back. So finish telling me about this guy. It sounds like he played the role of parent and teacher even while sexually exploiting you.”
“He didn’t see it that way, as exploitation. He saw me as his ‘boy,’ like a husband or some shit.”
“So you’re angry, understandably, at being used. What most kids get for free, you had to pay for—”
“Exactly! And later I find out this faggot is whaling on me and he got HIV!”
“When did you find that out?”
“The day I was leaving.”
“So today do you have anyone, a boyfriend or girlfriend?”
“I got a girl. Or did have.”
“Did? What happened?”
“You tell me, you’re the one knows why I’m here.”
“Is this your first girlfriend?”
“I never had one before. I used to look at pictures and stuff.”
“And stuff?”
“You know, jack off.”
“What kind of pictures?”
What a fucking creep, why am I talking? “Britney, Lil’ Kim, mostly Britney but—”
“But?”
“But when I finally hook up with a Britney bitch, I couldn’t do nothing.” I’m still embarrassed.
“That’s called performance anxiety.”
“I thought it was the brothers at St Ailanthus fixing me. Like what happened to my grandmother in Mississippi. Someone fixed her and she was never happy again. Roman said I was more of a pussy than the ones I be sniffing after.”
“Did you like relating sexually to guys?”
“If they paid me. Anyway, that’s all I knew before My Lai.”
“My Lai?”
“My girl.” I’m surprised at the pride in my voice. What do I have to be proud about?
“Did you initiate sex with men?”
“No, but, I mean . . . I mean, I didn’t have to,
they came to me. But—”
“But?”
“I did with the kids.”
“How old were they?”
I think of Richie Jackson. “Um, six, seven.” Actually, he was five.
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Little girls?”
“There was never any of them around.”
“Did you ever think of why you did that?”
“It felt good.”
“Better than Roman and—”
“I was in control and having fun with the little kids.”
“Fun? What about them?”
“They were having fun too. They loved it!”
“Are you sure?”
He’s getting on my nerves. “Yeah, they loved it, and me. They loved me. I was like a . . . a father.”
“The girl you’re with now? Is she a ‘Britney bitch’?”
“My Lai, hell no. She’s a . . . a woman. She’s real. She’s the first person I was ever real with. She’s no picture. She farts. We get down together. I’m her man.” Yeah, I remind myself, I’m a man.
“Did you ever hit her?”
“It never crossed my mind.”
“You were telling me about this guy.”
“Who?” I ask.
“The guy at the motel.”
“I already told you.”
“Tell me some more, Abdul.”
“I want to go back to sleep.” All of a sudden I’m in a funk.
“Abdul, I told you we don’t have time for that. Wake up, Abdul.”
“In the dream she asks me to kill him.”
“Who asks you to kill whom?” He’s leaning forward now, interested, real interested.
“In the dream My Lai wanted me to kill her father. All this time I thought she, maybe, really just loved me, but she wanted me to do that shit. She’s no different from anybody else out there.”
I turn away from Dr See. Fuck him. I can, and am, going to sleep.