That was when I made the acquaintance of the men in the white coats. Two of them. One white, one black, both big. They came around to the passenger door. Epstein leaned over and unlocked my handcuffs. It felt strange, having my hands free. The door opened. I unhooked my own seat belt, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the car. I think I must have been waiting for Epstein to say something. Nice meeting you, good luck, something like that. But he said nothing, just gave me a big phony wink. Then one of the orderlies, the white one, grabbed me by the arm, and yanked me roughly out of the car, sending me sprawling across the hard concrete.
I went absolutely apeshit, so apeshit I don’t know how long it lasted, or what happened in what order. My memory of that time is more like a shoe box full of random, black-and-white snapshots. Some are blurred and some are dark and some are shot from crazy angles. This one was taken from the ground, looking up, and that one from above, looking down. Another one’s kind of surreal. Is it a trench? Is it a…canyon? No, it’s an extreme close-up of the nose of the white man in the white coat, which was split wide open down the middle. Then there’s a picture, kind of streaky and overexposed around the edges like it’s from the end of the roll, of a hypodermic syringe sticking out of a blue-jeaned thigh. My blue-jeaned thigh.
And at the bottom of the imaginary shoe box there’s one last, dim snapshot of the traitor Epstein waving good-bye as they drag me away. On his face is a sickly grin; in his waving hand is a sheet of paper he had one of the whitecoats sign. It’s a receipt for the delivery of yours truly. A receipt he can bring back to show my grandparents in order to claim his thirty pieces of silver. A receipt that earns him a privileged spot on my all-time fantasy revenge list.
Oh, and one more thing. The date on the receipt? It would have been October 31, 1985. Halloween, of course.
CHAPTER NINE
1
Darkness. Dreams. Teddy, burning. Dusty, falling. Rudy, staring. A round bed afloat in a black sea, jagged flashes of lightning on the horizon. Big balloon faces, bending low to mine. Voices, inhuman voices like running water. And terrible creatures, obscene, impossible creatures, turkey vultures with human faces, humans with feathered arms and long curved talons instead of hands…
A windowless room. A nurse holding a syringe to the light, tapping it delicately a few times with her finger. We both watch the bubble rise to the light. “I want to go home now,” I whisper hoarsely, through dry, cracked lips.
“Sure thing,” she says. “Home you go.” A prick, a sting, a falling away…
Sometimes darkness and dreams, sometimes the windowless room. Sometimes a tray of food is in front of me, sometimes pills in a tiny paper cup. And sometimes a whitecoat with a bandage on his nose takes me into the bathroom and twists my arm behind my back and hurts me and I pray for the darkness to swallow me up again…
There comes a time when, instead of the whitecoat with the bandaged nose, it’s a whitecoat with a long scar down his nose who takes me into the bathroom and twists my arm behind my back and hurts me, but then one day another man in a longer white coat and one of those things with black tubing and a silver disk around his neck rushes in yelling at him to stop, and after that I never see either the man with the bandage or the man with the scar again…
Over time, the darkness and the dreams begin to fade, until one morning I awake to find myself in a new room, one with a window. And when I look out the window I can see a small garden with flowers, pink flowers and red flowers and yellow flowers, and sometimes I see a bird, one of those blue birds, the name is on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite remember it.
Slowly my world opens up. Now there are other rooms, other people. I learn to braid shiny plastic strands into something called a lanyard, I have no idea what it’s for. And sometimes a new, different whitecoat, a much nicer one, leads me out into a garden that I think is the same one I can see from my new window, and I see that blue bird flying by again, and I discover that I know its name now, it’s a jay. A
Not long after that, maybe even that same afternoon, I’m back in my room, washing up in the bathroom after using the toilet, when I notice an oddly familiar-looking fellow in the mirror over the sink. He has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, and a little brown mole next to his eye, just like me. But he also has hair on his face, like he’s growing a beard, which I’d never been old enough to do.
As we stare into each other’s eyes, a confused look comes over his face. He reaches up and rubs his chin wonderingly, with his fingertips, like he’s wondering why it’s all stubbly. And when I realize that I’m rubbing my chin, too, and feeling the stubble, the other man’s eyes fill with tears. “Luke,” he says, with the tears rolling down his cheeks now. “Your name is Luke.”
2
Chemical restraint. That’s the official term, in case you’re wondering. A marvelous thing, really, at least for jailers. Couple bucks a day worth of medications, sedatives, antipsychotics, combinations thereof, and lo and behold, there’s no need for bars, armed guards, straitjackets, or razor wire. Why, just think of all the money the state could save if only CR were adopted throughout the correctional system. No need for a supermax prison like Pelican Bay-a little chemical restraint and you could house them bad boys in pup tents and guard them with Cub Scouts.
But that’s never going to happen. Can you imagine the outcry? The lawyers, the ACLU, they’d be all over it like stink on shit. And why? Because it’s INHUMANE! It robs an individual of the very things our society claims to value: his personality, his individuality. His humanity, for God’s sake, his simple humanity.
Unless, like me, he’s been deemed mentally ill by a competent, or at least licensed, mental health professional. Then he can expect to spend the rest his life in darkness and dreams, serenaded by a babble of inhuman voices and visited by a bestiary of obscene, impossible creatures.
I was approaching my twenty-fifth birthday when the boy I had been looked in the bathroom mirror and saw the man I had become. While I’d like to say it was due to my willpower or strength of character that I was able to overcome the effects of the powerful drugs they had been pouring into me all those years, the truth, I suspect, is that I probably had something much simpler to thank: my weight.
I’d been around five-six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds when I entered Meadows Road, but after a late growth spurt I was closer to six feet tall, and weighed somewhere around one sixty-five, one seventy. They were probably still medicating me as if I were forty pounds lighter, though. And while my higher faculties were as yet nonexistent (I couldn’t have spelled
Whatever it was, it told me not to swallow the pills in the little white cup that the nurse brought me that night. Instead I stashed them between cheek and molar. I guess I’d been a good boy for so long that she didn’t bother, on that night or any other night, to make sure I’d swallowed them down. All I had to do was keep my head turned until she left, then spit them out and flush them down the toilet.
I suspect it was that long slow detox that saved me from going into withdrawal when I stopped taking my medications. But since the meds I was spurning also included a nightly sleeping pill, I found myself lying awake hour after hour, night after night, trying to force my poor, benumbed mind to think, to reason, and most agonizingly of all, to remember.
My childhood memories were still there. But they weren’t the problem. I could remember most of the stuff that had happened to me up until the day my father called from Marshall City to say the FBI had him surrounded.
