by Forish, E.
He grunts louder. “Okay, fine.” The sergeant pulls a card from his breast pocket and reads the O.U.I.
[xci] Statutory Rights and Consent form in its entirety. “Do you understand your rights?” he concludes.
“No, I want my lawyer.”
“We can help explain it to you —” the trooper begins.
The sergeant interrupts the offer. “You need to sign this,” he says, waiving the piece of paper in front of my face.
I close my eyes and shake my head. “I’m not signing something I don’t understand.”
“Why won’t you just cooperate with us?”
“‘Cause I’m not consenting to something that I don’t understand. I don’t even get what’s goin’ on anymore. What the hell is an O.U.I. anyway?” Play dumb, I think. It’ll help you feign the pretense that you are just a naïve innocent.
The sergeant storms away into another room, and the trooper takes over the questioning.
“Is there anyone you can call to come pick you up?” he asks.
“I dunno. Maybe,” I answer, weakly.
“Okay, why don’t you take a minute to think about who you can call to come and pick you up, and then we’ll get you to a phone, okay?”
“Yup. Sure.”
I remain seated on the wooden bench with my hands still cuffed behind my back. My mind wanders away from the present situation as I absently absorb the mundane actions of the police officers – sipping coffee, typing information onto blue computer screens, and rifling through stacks of paperwork and manila folders. The pain of guilt, meanwhile, allows me to finally grasp the concept that I have abused the trust of those whom I love in order to fulfill some petty desire to murder my internal suffering with the aid of artificial alterations of consciousness, and now I am left to endure my fate alone, wondering who will fail to screen their calls and mistakenly answer my pleas for help and cries for rescue from this mental prison and tangible jail cell.
I finally return to the present moment, forcing myself to function under the general principle that destiny is a prewritten fate dealt unto the table by the powers of Universal Consciousness, in which case freewill can never affect the product of my personal choices, for, in a world of predetermined futures, all outcomes, regardless of labels such as guilt or remorse, remain beyond the scope of personal control.
The trooper who’s been dealing with me since I arrived at the Barracks dumps the possessions of my black purse onto the counter to take inventory. I notice my red leather wallet – which contains no actual cash but several hundred dollars in EE Series savings bonds as well as credit and debit cards – does not tumble out alongside the key rings, Ricola cough drops, black Bic lighters, pens, Sharpies, a pack of Camel Lights, and a small spiral-bound notebook.
Great, I think. The tow truck driver just got a bonus.
The sergeant reenters the booking room and takes a glance at the spilled contents of my purse.
“Cough drops. You want a cough drop?” he asks, staring directly at me.
“Well, yeah, kinda, I guess,” I respond with confusion.
My answer catalyzes a fit of laughter to escape from the sergeant’s gut.
“Whatever, man,” I mutter as he walks back into the side room.
The trooper looks up momentarily from taking inventory and the dumb look on his face transitions into an expression of sudden epiphany, illuminating his eyebrows and cheeks as though a cartoonist had jokingly sketched in a bright, yellow bulb above his head.
“Ready to make that phone call?” he asks.
The words I have been waiting to hear.
“Yup,” I answer quickly.
The trooper walks towards me, helps me stand, and guides me towards the desk. He unlocks the cuffs and passes me the receiver of a black office phone.
“Number?” he asks.
I automatically recite the ten-digit number of Blake’s cell phone. The phone goes to voicemail without ringing even once.
“Uh, hey, Blake? I need to be picked up from the Russell Barracks ‘cause I kinda got arrested. Again. Uh, I hope you get this —” My voice trails off into silence, and the trooper disconnects the call.
“Anyone else?” he asks, breaking the myth of a single phone call.
I think through the names of all the friends I have burnt through in the past several months and know that no one will come to bail me out.
“No.”
“Mom maybe?” After my earlier outburst he knows better than to suggest calling my father.
“Nope,” I quickly respond.
He exhales a heavy sigh. “Alright, well, if you have no one to bail you out, we’re going to have to keep you in a holding cell for the night.”
I, too, release a sigh of hot air. “Yup. Fine.”
The trooper escorts me to the first of four holding cells in a narrow hallway. He disappears for a moment and returns with an olive green blanket and my stuffed cat.
“Try to get some sleep, Kid.”
“What, no pillow?” I question with a hint of dry sarcasm.
“Use your cat,” he grumbles as he closes shut the cell door and walks back to the station lobby, leaving me trapped and alone between metal bars and cement bricks.
I lie down on the platform board chained in suspension to the wall and curl up inside the square of a blanket. I clutch Christmas
[xcii] tightly in my arms and place my head against the hard, flat surface of the bed. As I absorb the dismal surroundings and the behaviors that led me to this place, I come to understand that my own inability to weigh the moral rightness or wrongness of my actions has become inconsequential, for the external judgments of others remain not only beyond my control but also incomparable to my own internal verdict of personal responsibility and, subsequently, the burden of guilt.
I wallow internally over the lapses of control throughout the past years of my existence as the officers buzz around the station like static energy. I absorb the onus of guilt into the core of my spirit, allowing myself to truly feel a genuine, human emotion for the first time in nearly six months, but before I fully permit that debilitating sensation to contaminate my entire being, I release it into the approaching dawn like chafe lost from the fields into a brisk, autumn wind, for perhaps no one possesses talent enough to rewrite the predestined truths of their lives.
“My life’s not sad,” I think. “My life’s not sad at all. Not dismal. Not tragic. Not pathetic, wrong, nor immoral. Not anything really accept how it’s been perceived and distorted by the outside world, and when have you, Alice, ever given a flying fuck about what they think anyways?”
Before closing my eyes, I notice a television mounted in the corner of the ceiling outside the row of cells. I recognize my reclined body in the black and white screen. The image is too small to see any features clearly, but the overall figure emanates the wreckage of a faded soul, but before my mind and body submits to a deep and drunken sleep, I think, too, that, perhaps it remains possible to still clutch onto the prospect of accepting one’s mistakes and crimes of the past, for such erroneous actions often catalyze even the strangest and most insane of one’s dreams and nightmares to achieve a wild and unimaginable new actuality. Although I faked my way through most of life, believing in the resilient person that I was not, the fact remains that others along the way saw something worth believing in me through all the bullshit.
And as I realized how transparent this false pretense of a self must have appeared to the outside world, these cautious-less others still managed to notice enough assets within my character to hold on to our friendships, even as I unraveled, dismantled, shredded, and tore at the convoluted ideal of maintaining healthy relationships; they witnessed some sort of kindness and intelligence and creativity that existed beneath the distorted convolutions of my parasitic behaviors and contaminated lifestyle -- a spark of something pure buried deep within the core of my leeching heart that remained permanently veiled to my own perception due to my maniacal and medicinal states of c
onsciousness.
A snide little smile manages to escape from my lips, for as long as I clutch onto even the slightest hint of faith regarding my esteem, then it remained possible to manufacture hope enough to persevere throughout these tremendous times, and my smile becomes ferocious, for it supersedes the potential to repair past transgressions and thrive upon the finite moments of the infinite future of possibilities.
“No, you’re life is not one giant, sad mistake at all,” I think. “Just misinterpreted.”
CHAPTER XII: MORNING TEMPERANCE
“Compassion is broken now. My will is eroded now. Desire: it is broken now, and it makes me feel ugly
[xciii] .”
AN UNFAMILIAR OFFICER WAKES ME AROUND 7:30 A.M. to inform me that my mother has arrived to bail me out of jail. Half asleep and still drunk, I don’t fully understand how she knows I was arrested, considering that I refused to call her.
I wipe the crust from my eyes as the trooper unlocks the cell and leads me into the main room, where my mother stands, waiting.
She stares at me in cold silence from across the room. I ignore her and address one of the troopers. “Do I need to sign anything or can I just leave?”
An officer hands me a modest stack of papers and says, “You’re free to go.”
I study the sheet of paper at the top of the pile. Once I’ve read through it, I say with a hint of sarcasm, “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll see you in court on Tuesday.”
I turn my back towards the officer and approach my mother. “C’mon, let’s go,” and we leave in silence.
* * *
I listen to the recording on Blake’s cell phone for the tenth time in a row.
“Fuck,” I mutter as I slam the phone onto the receiver without leaving a message.
My mother has been upstairs for nearly an hour now, for I am not yet willing to speak about the ordeal in a calm manner. I don’t know what she is doing, nor do I care as I blatantly smoke weed inside the living room of her house. I reach for the phone again and try a different number.
After two rings a familiar voice greets me at the other end.
“Hello?”
“Jay?”
“Yeah?”
“Jay, it’s me.” A moment of silence passes between us as I inhale another hit of weed. “Jay. I got arrested again,” and I exhale the smoke slowly.
“Oh, no. Alice, I’m so sorry,” he says sympathetically.
“Yeah. I dunno what to do. I dunno what to do at all. I dunno anything —”
A beep, signifying an incoming call, interrupts our conversation.
“I gotta go,” I say and click over to the other line.
“Alice?”
“Blake! Blake, I fuckin’ got arrested again. I dunno what —”
“I don’t care,” he says without a hint of emotion.
My heart drops. “What?”
“I don’t care,” he repeats.
His words echo inside my head like a reoccurring nightmare, and I come to the devastating realization that Blake never intended to save me from myself, for he lacks the major quality necessary to heal a damaged psyche: the capability to take another’s emotions into consideration. Although his brilliance may allow him to see into the minds and thought processes that power another’s basic survival and then misappropriate that knowledge to satisfy his own selfish desiderata, he fails to concern himself with intense sensations such as pain or love, for he could never imagine an individual, such as myself, dictating their life through such petty emotionality.
“Um, where are you anyways?” I question, stunned by his cold callousness.
“Northampton.”
I realize that, instead, Blake relies on the ability to devise rational calculations that facilitate his own advantageous outcomes, promising the financial and social gains that benefit solely himself and never another because, for him, there are no others. He will never hear the delicate whispers that reverberate through the passion of the heart nor feel the intimate vibrations that emanate from the wisdom of the soul, a deficiency that displays a disease within his own mind that stems from a hideous infection festering deeply within his wounded pneuma.
“Blake, I need your help,” I plead.
An unsettling silence passes between us as I finally recognize Blake’s inability to empathize with my own condition: the inability to separate my emotional reactions from rational behaviors. Over the course of our friendship, my rationality, or lack thereof, has repeatedly succumbed to the reactionary forces of overt emotionality, the instinctual forces that perpetually dictate the various decisions of my daily subsistence, and, in a desperate attempt to numb such electrified mechanisms of the mind, I incessantly bludgeon my central nervous system with chemical infiltrations to quiet the rumblings of an unstable anima. Yet, I merely exacerbate my inherent condition by simultaneously sabotaging any hope for resolve, for, despite the magnitude of my chemical forays, I still manage to think and I still manage to feel.
“Alice, do you know what happened to me last night? Do you even care?” Blake asks in the same emotionless tone.
And as I gauge the feelings of others against my own, I transform that knowledge into my own series of manipulations, and these exploitations generate a false sense of psychopathy to appear at the surface of my behaviors, but in reality I feel the emotions of others as well as those within my own heart and mind one-thousand times stronger than the average person could ever conceive possible. Due to this concurrent genius and absurdity of premonitory emotive perception, I identify and appreciate the emotions of others with a debilitating intensity. I know emotions, and I know empathy; I abuse both daily to my advantage, and that makes me no better than him.
“Well, you’re the one who got kicked outta the bar,” I counter in a subdued tone.
And within this moment of recognition, I, too, lose sight of empathy within an even greater epiphany: I cannot relate to Blake’s psychopathy, his inability to sympathize with others on the emotional level, for to drain the emotions of an individual with a heart as naïve as mine would render such a person void of the very intensity that fuels and ignites the core of her very essence. Such an intensity causes the polarization of hopeless despondency, sanguine ecstasy, and the entire emotional spectrum that falls between the two to achieve a mental balance through the counteractive nullification of their simultaneous presence.
“Yeah. ‘Cause I touched the beer tap,” he responds flatly.
Yet, through excessive drug use, my ultimate source of psychological escape, I manage to impair miniscule sense of balance, for the chemicals simply dissolve the awareness of the full range of human emotions, whether they belong to myself, Blake, or even just a random anonymous, making all feelings imperceptive, impervious, and obsolete and, thereby, also negating the capacity of my mind and my heart to maintain its inherent empathy. Perhaps I have never suffered from addictions or disorders at all; perhaps I am merely a psychopath from the get-go.
“I was at the bar right across the street. For hours,” Blake continues, “and when I finally gave up on you and decided to leave, I got robbed. Four-hundred bucks.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t even think, for I must instead concentrate all my energies on the attempt to eliminate the agonizing feeling of my inert heart as it plummets from my chest and crashes to the base of my uneven footing.
“I gotta go. Good luck with everything,” Blake says dryly, and, without granting me even a split second to mutter some pathetic form of pretext, he disconnects from the line, an action intended to sever our friendship forever.
The phone falls limply from my trembling hands and onto the couch cushions as maniacal sentiments race throughout my splintered psyche. I mechanically replace the phone back onto the receiver, and the action catalyzes an internal mental collapse to ensue with an immediate ferocity that strikes me like a grand piano free-falling from the sky, forcibly submerging my body below the earth’s surface and, thereby, skewing an already uncertain perception of
a disintegrating reality, for the loss of my friendship to Blake -- the one supposedly infallible crux within my life -- affects the simultaneous loss of the synthetic veil that normally obscures my inane instabilities from myself and others.
And as the mirage of intimacy between us withers like discarded snakeskin in the desert sun, the universe strips me of the psychological fluctuations that breed the lies and instigate the psychopathy, and the video monitor inside my head commences to reveal myélan vital as it variegates into broken shades of a decaying consciousness before a swift blaze of bleached light blisters away the blanket of blackened remembrances. The illumination eliminates all cognizantdeliberations, projecting the purity of a blank slate into my mind’s eye, and now the truth can finally be seen, for the self-inflicted lies the lies that always provided me with enough resolve to simply sustain and persevere and endure everyday existence dissolve like cancer slipping into remission. The static haze of deception that normally engulfs my chemically-saturated mind commences to transform into concentrated rays of impermeable energy that penetrate my psyche, annihilating my ability to think and to feel and to control my own delusions, for within this inundation of unbridled truth, I realize that I am nothing.
E. JAYNE FORISH
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, E. Jayne Forish was raised and socialized in the quiet hill-towns of Western Massachusetts, an area in which she remains today with her loving boyfriend and freshwater aquarium of pet fish. After graduating from Westfield State University in December 2008 with a Bachelor’s of Art in English, she has continued to pursue her passion for writing and other creative endeavors, including the visual arts and a love of music, as personal interests. She currently works in the food service industry to support herself and her lifestyle. She is a firm believer in the concept that facts are often much stranger than the dramatizations of fiction.