The Passion of Jazz and Other Short Stories

click and thud made by a deputy opening the rectangular pass-through on my door. He slid through a lunch tray, with a chicken patty, broccoli, salad, spice cake, and milk. I enjoyed the food, and I felt glad to have something to do besides sleep.

  Soon after, a man dressed in a sweater with a badge that said, “Dr. Bui, psychiatrist,” knelt with his face in front of my pass-through. I knelt down too and looked at him. He asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling okay. Are the demons gone?” I asked, thinking he might have some kind of authority on the matter. “Did I save the church?”

  “You burnt down the church.”

  “I destroyed the church?” I asked, just beginning to comprehend I had done actual damage in the real world, not just to demons or spirits.

  “Did I hurt anybody?”

  “No, no one was hurt.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I know you feel bad about what you did. Are you still having hallucinations? Seeing things?”

  “How do you know, and why do you care?”

  “I’m here to help you, we need to manage your symptoms.”

  “I’m not having ‘symptoms,’ I’m communicating with the devil,” I said, unsure whether I could trust him and how much to tell him.

  “Okay. I’m going to put you on Geodon, an antipsychotic. Its name means ‘bringing you down to earth.’”

  “So it will keep my soul from floating away and being stolen?” I misinterpreted his words, as though he was really giving me the medication to battle evil.

  “No, it will stop your delusions and hallucinations. In the meantime, I’m having you moved to the psych unit.”

  Dr. Bui stood up and walked away. In a few minutes, two deputies came and took me to a cell in the psych unit. In my new cell, I hoped things would move along more quickly. I hoped I could find out the devil’s status by talking to inmates or staff. I also wished I had worked harder at my high school education so I could have had more of an interest in reading. But there were no books to read anyway. In fact, the psych unit had even less to do than the regular cell population. There was no TV. There was no dayroom outside my cell, just a hallway. The cell doors did not have cracks, so it was almost impossible to talk to other inmates.

  I sat down and considered my situation for about forty-five minutes: a square room with naked white brick walls, a bed and thin mattress, a toilet and sink, a small mirror, and a cardboard property box containing only my paper with my charge on it. Not much for mental stimulation. Not much even to pass the time. And not much to know whether my scary delusions were real or not. The dots on the walls still appeared to shape into various devil’s threats. This gave me no peace, so sometime late afternoon I just laid down on my bed and went to sleep.

  I awoke that evening to the thud of the pass-through opening. I rolled out of bed just in time to take the dinner tray from the deputy. I ate on my bed, since my cell did not have a desk.

  After dinner, a medication nurse came by with a cart of pills. She gave me the Geodon, a small round white pill, and I looked at it, thinking it would bring me down from my battles with the devil. I asked the nurse, “Is the devil afraid of these pills? Because I’m not.”

  She said, “This pill will help you.”

  I swallowed the pill, thinking I was full of courage. The nurse left and I did not feel any different. I had nothing else to do, so I laid back down on my bed. I pulled the thin gray blanket over my body as best I could, since it was rather small. I bunched my two white sheets up under my head for a pillow. I fell asleep on the thin, hard mattress probably around six, earlier than I had ever slept.

  The next morning, I woke up around sunrise. When I woke up early at my house, I would usually have plenty of chores to do before going to work. But here in jail, I just had the same empty cell with no work to do, no entertainment, no activities of any kind. Even first thing in the morning, I already felt like my mind, my body, my life was slowly going to rot. To avoid thinking this, I just closed my eyes and tried to sleep more until breakfast. I could not sleep. But breakfast did arrive in about a half hour.

  After breakfast, a deputy asked me if I wanted dayroom, and I said yes. He had me put my hands behind my back and escorted me to a room twice as big as my cell. It contained a TV, telephone, table, and shower.

  I showered quickly and tried to think who I could call for help. My parents were both dead, and I did not have the numbers of other relatives or friends memorized, they were all just in my cell phone’s memory. No one even knew I was here, much less that I thought the devil and God themselves were doing battle over me.

  So I gave in and sat down to watch The Price Is Right on TV. I felt relaxed to escape to the world of the game show, people guessing prices of everyday items I would buy in the local store. If only I could return to that store, pick out bread and laundry detergent, stand in line to make a purchase. Such were my dreams as an inmate, dreams of having little freedoms again. At least I did not have any hallucinations about the show.

  The deputy came for me after only about twenty minutes. He led me back to my cell, hands behind my back. The cell’s emptiness felt even more oppressive after the momentary diversion of the dayroom.

  I spent the next week in the same way, having nothing to do and having my schizophrenia plague me if I was awake. So what could I do? I slept most of the days. When I say I slept, more accurately I mean I fell in and out of sleep, sometimes sleeping, other times just laying there with my eyes closed, trying to ignore my surroundings. I slept the morning hours, woke up for lunch, then laid back down and slept the five or so afternoon hours until dinner. I slept the evening away and surprisingly after sleeping all day, I also managed to sleep all night.

  The few times I was awake, contrary to its name Geodon did not bring my mental functioning back down to earth. Rather, my hallucinations and delusions worsened. One day, I met with my attorney, a public defender, and I thought the devil controlled him. I sat down in a jail conference room and shook his hand tightly, giving him a cold stare as if to say, “You cannot defeat me.” I then cocked my head to the side and breathed deeply, afraid he would poison the room. He asked me questions, and when I answered I refused to look in his eyes, for fear they might hurt me.

  “Why did you burn down the church?”

  “I thought your demons had possessed it.”

  “My demons?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know.” I gritted my teeth, still staring at the wall.

  “I and your psychiatrist feel you are having delusions. Are you aware of this?”

  “The devil cannot defeat me, cannot defeat God.”

  “Let’s go back to the days before the incident. Do you remember when you first had these beliefs?”

  “I was working in shipping and receiving in a warehouse and a coworker had a goatee. I thought he was sending me secret messages—you would know about that, though, wouldn’t you?”

  I later felt embarrassed about how I treated my public defender, pummeling him with delusional accusations. But at the time, I did not know reality. He just looked down and wrote some notes. In the end, though, my delusional behaviors helped me because he said, “I’m going to have you sent to McGeorge State Hospital for treatment. They can heal you there.”

  The hospital offered a hope of treatment and recovery which I could not receive at the jail. At the time, I still did not trust him though so I just stared at the wall and did not respond. He said, “Good luck, and I’ll talk to you soon, once you’re feeling better.”

  When I returned to the psych unit, a deputy told me I had to have a strip search after my “contact visit” with my attorney—in case I had tried to smuggle in weapons or drugs. I was not sure whether the deputy worked for good or evil, but even so I knew I could not disobey his directions. Right in the hall, he made me take off my shirt, pants, socks, and finally my underwear. I had to bend over, spread my butt cheeks, and c
ough. The deputy was satisfied, so I quickly dressed and went back to my cell.

  I hoped now that I had seen my attorney, even if he was controlled by the devil, things might move along and become busier. But instead, I just had my empty cell, twenty-four hours a day. My arraignment was cancelled, and instead I had a hearing in another two weeks for placement at McGeorge.

  I spent the two weeks sleeping. Sometimes I was not even sure if it was morning or night when I woke up, I just had a fluorescent light overhead and no windows. I sometimes had dreams though, dreams of moving about the world free, with no thought of incarceration. I met women, took plane flights, walked by the beach. I came to look forward to and hope I would have dreams­—they were my only escape, my only means of feeling alive and doing something amidst the monotony of my cell.

  In the same way, sleep also made the time go faster. Even if I did not dream, falling asleep could make an hour feel like a second. This helped me avoid awareness of the hopeless, desperate, long expanses of time with nothing to do.

  The times I was awake, my thoughts grew more frenetic. I started hearing more voices calling my name, “Jeff,” and insulting me, threatening me with bodily harm. I started having body aches I thought the voices or the devil had caused. Outside my cell, the clip-clop of the deputies’ feet I thought I heard tap out the words, “Cri-min-al Jeff, Cri-min-al