by Roman McClay
“This anti-pain-med campaign is nothing short of punitive; medieval; it is not medical. I remind you of your Hippocratic oath, and however much it abrades the conscience to give out pain meds to a wretch like me, to fail to do so would in fact do me great harm. Harm,” he repeated to highlight that word, that mot juste , of the Hippocratic oath.
“Well, that may be,” the DOC doctor said, “but there are competing harms Mr. MacLeod, and I have to take all health-related phenomena into mind.”
“Enumerate them,” the inmate said.
“I will; you know that narcotics can slow and even stop your respiratory function; that’s your breathing,” he added as if the man he was speaking to did not know the meaning of respiration ; as if he had no spirit at all.
“In 2034 e.v., the last year we have data,” the inmate interrupted and said, “4,690 people suffered respiratory failure due to legally prescribed narcotic analgesics, a full 190 more than died from bicycle accidents. It is not an epidemic. The entire AMA line is a lie; a con,” he then paused as he searched his mind for the right word. The doctor smiled as if in victory over, this smart-ass inmate.
His brief, but acute, infelicity with language was a turning of the tide , the jailhouse doctor felt as the inmate regained his thoughts and spoke, at first thinking he wanted the word, confabulation, but knew that was not right.
“…conflation, excuse me, a conflation of deaths, some 70,000 of them, from opioid street drugs and illegally obtained pain meds, and another 4,000 from combinatorial deaths e.g., alcohol or benzo-diazepams combined with the narcotic analgesic. So, you see, there is less risk of me dying fr om pain meds than getting into a bike accident if I have no booze or valium to wash it down with,” the inmate said.
“Well, I’m not sure your numbers are correct,” the doctor said.
“I have 23 hours a day to read. I have nothing else to do. My numbers are correct. I refer you to an article published in Science and Nature in May and July respectively of 2035 of the common era. The author is a physician trained at Johns Hopkins, a little place east of here. Dr. Josh Bloom and Dr. Henry I. Miller wrote the article. I had it sent over in the file; if you’ll check it you’ll see it in there with the MRI films et cetera ,” the inmate had just seen the doctor deflate a bit and knew he had scored the coup de grâce . He, however, did not spike the ball as the doc had done as he -the inmate- had scrambled to locate the word, conflate , in his quiver a few moment ago. No, he would not smirk now.
He was stoic because he needed to piss and his neck had begun to throb and he was tired from waking up three nights in a row. Isaiah had cut off his pain meds so if they pissed tested him he’d show the lack of the meds he desired.
“Well, I don’t have time to read it, what I will do is write you a prescription for 30 hydrocodone for the month and we can revisit it in 30 days,” the doctor said in negotiation.
“Doc, I took three a day when I was a civilian. 30 is 1/3rd my required dose. May I remind you that various factors including body weight and enzyme P430 production in the bacteriome of the viscera all contribute to efficacy of analgesics. I suggest that -in order to avoid any legal action by my attorney- we write the prescription for the same treatment level as I had been on for 12 years prior to my incarceration. No more, no less. Let’s not lay ourselves down on Damastes’ bed. One size does not fit all.”
“Ok, 90, but don’t come back here,” the doctor was not happy.
“Send a note to Doctor Doughi at ADX telling him not to send me; I’d be happy to oblige you, as long as he fills this script each 30 days. I came here because he refused to do his job, not because I like Denver,” the inmate said with a smile as if they were indeed friends; friends that could agree that they never wanted to see one another again.
The doctor wrote the script and emailed it to ADX and asked if there was anything else.
“I would be indebted to you if I could use your facilities,” he said, and the doc nodded across the hall and the guard opened the bathroom door as the inmate rose and strolled in with tiny steps due to the chains. He was told to leave the door ajar; a request with which he complied.
He speaks like that to manipulate , the doctor thought. It never occurred to him that polite and professional language was manipulative in or out of prison, it was only that inside prison -and used by inmates- did one notice its manipulative nature; or cared to notice it.
II. 2018 e.v.
He thought of Athena, in high school, way back in Mason, Ohio, and he remembered who he was back then as not incongruous with himself now. He had packed on muscle and knowledge, and all the pain that sherpas those two things, but he was -in his mind- a continuity of character .
He wondered if other people felt this way or if they felt truly reborn into new bodies and souls from time to time; maybe after epochs of natural boundaries like school or fatherhood or marriage or the death of a parent. He felt static in a way, despite all the ways in which he felt he had evolved. He remembered reading about moths in cocoons and how they are built from soup; that the caterpillar dissolves.
He thought these things as he watched the door across the street -across 6th avenue- and he watched for darkness to fall. He knew his enemies were inside, he knew they had no idea he was now in control of their lives.
His life seemed like one continuous thread from age four when he became conscious- his first memory was of England, the hail, the pain, the fear, the running, how far he ran. It was decades later, many remembrances, until he remembered how odd it was that at age four he had been allowed to run so far from the house; so far that it took him 20 or 30 minutes to return home in that hailstorm. He remembered expecting grown-ups to care, to save him, and when they did not he remembered merely taking note; thinking: oh, I’m on my own .
It baffled him now, but not then; autonomy was always expected by him; he assumed the world was his -the way animals do- even with his obvious limits and frailties. That hail had scared him like some Trobrian Islander , or some new creature on a new planet, he had no idea hail even existed, and the pain of it seemed to be increasing, and this made him assume the increase of pain would be infinite, and of course for being just four years old, he was pretty close to being right.
He had spoken to a girl, a friend of his once, who had said she knew wise things when she was that age too. He thought of how much wisdom is contained in the seed that the plant forgets; the boy that the man laments.
He always remembered his life, not as memory but as felt experience, like the way a memory of four seconds ago isn’t exactly a memory, but you, four seconds ago. He had no way to know that other people did not experience life this way; that their old selves were gone after a certain date; that the current man or woman could not -to that old self- relate. But, he saw the thread, and the one that was longest and most dark -and thus most seen in relief- was his feeling of moral indignation and the desire, the need, to figure out the right and wrong of life; and enact it however inexactly or hypocritically. He had always wanted revenge.
He remembered the same feeling, the exact same feeling from age four to 44: that things were not right, not in him, not in others, nowhere . And, he had felt he was able, eager even, if not consistent, but that when confronted with it -this injustice- he was able and would look at it; he would not turn away. He might not know how to fix it, he might not even know what it is, or was, but he would look. He had read Orwell -Animal Farm at age 10 and then later in an essay or something, in which Orwell had said his power, Orwell’s power, was in facing ; this power of facing .
It did not make Lyndon moral, or even good. It often made him bad, even worse. But he looked at it, the evil, whether in others, the world, or most likely, in himself. He would look, and he would eventually speak its name, while others, it was proven, looked away.
The world was a moral place, a domain of right and wrong, first and foremost, a place, a terrain of moral action, he had thought from his first moments awake; and he had no idea how controvers
ial this was as a starting place. He -even in his scientific rationalist phase from age 23 to 43- had never lived as if only matter -things- existed. He may have said all of life was merely the material, the rational, and even believed it in some surface way, but he lived as if morals were paramount, deeply imbued in the authentic life. He just assumed he had made that up, taken the Philosopher’s advice to invent his own values after the death of God.
He had no idea that the moral feeling was not just part of biological life, but an ancestor to that life; it was First Cause. His four-year-old body knew more than his 44-year-old mind, until one day, he learned about the fact that no man -nor animal- could even see without first a hierarchy of value, and that this was tantamount to morality per se .
He could laugh and tell you that nobody is more embarrassed nor grateful to find out that the Bible is right, than a committed atheist, an anti-theist like him. The Bible was right in the way children are right; unknowingly, almost innocently, but more right than anyone wants to admit.
That Air Force base in Wethersfield, England, that he roamed like a feral wolf as the hail came, had been officially closed, but still staffed. The movie theater was 25 cents a show and the roads were often empty of cars. It was peopled, but they were quiet and reserved; the garish Americans toning it down whilst among the English off base. They had two cars, a dark green Jaguar, and a light green Mini. Dark and light green respectively.
He had watched as his mother talked to the neighbor one day, he had intimated that he needed to go inside, as they had just returned home from shopping. But his mother loved to chat and she refused to unlock the door, so since he had to defecate on a timeline of seconds now not minutes, he ran around back and shit on the fence as he watched the green English trees and shrubs of the line between their house’s yard and the fields that stretched on forever until they hit a parking lot for the one-ton trucks the Air Force used to move cargo and equipment and materiel.
He had had to use his hand to wipe and had gotten his first real look at what was inside of him; it had been beastly, and unsightly and unseemly but he had attributed it all, the whole mise-en-scène to his mother, and her ignoring of him and his needs.
It was this ignoring, and its opposite that set in him like a bone being moved back into place by a doctor; he took note of the two conditions, one discordant, one harmonious but arrived at not without considerable pain. He made no vows, nothing as dramatic as all that; he just took note of the ignoring and the shit on his hand and British cold on his four-year-old ass.
He returned to the house relieved and sullied and was taken in hand by his outraged mother of course, as if history had begun just then when she smelled shit. She may have been 34, but she was oblivious to her life prior to that moment it seemed. She had no part in it at all if one listened to her wailing and rebuking and cursing sotto voce; so the neighbors didn’t hear . Lyndon had felt not anger, but a proto-contempt, a kind of feeling a bit dog feels when it first learns in can in fact bite back. He had done the best he could, he could have shat on the porch in front of God and his angels -and more importantly to his mother, the neighbors- but he had least gone around back.
England was a time between three and five-years-of-age for him, and one winter he had had the chicken pox and not been allowed outside in the snow, his favorite weather condition. It would remain as his favorite for the duration. They -the other kids- had built snow forts out of buckets used as forms for the wet British snow. He had watched from the window with tears and the incipient rage of a babe with one pox on the bridge of his nose, and one on his cock that freaked him out even then. That piece of equipment seemed paramount for some reason that he could not explain, and the pox on his arms and legs and belly were annoying and itchy and all that, but he guarded his face and his genitals with more existential care than seemed appropriate to the ignorant adults. He had figured out the morality vis-à-vis the genitals early as well. He had not needed to be taught.
He got furious when anyone made fun of men for being men; or made mention of man parts in any way at all. He was the most prudish boy under 10 that one could invent or imagine. He would rage in tears and wails and then secret self-exiled bouts as his fists clinched and his lips slammed into a pout. And this happened over and over as his parents and their libertine friends made dirty jokes or sexual innuendos as if it was all so goddamn funny. And the weakness of men was considered the pièce de résistance for all adult humor, and he knew that he might not be a man, per se, not yet, but that one day he would be. And thus, he was willing and able to take offense for his future self, right fucking now. He was to be a man someday and thus today they were making fun of him - as it were- behind his back .
He hated those people and couldn’t believe their bravura . His parents would laugh and snicker and knowingly blush. It was all so tawdry and undignified and disloyal, yes, disloyal , he thought. That is what he felt. He used these disgusting people and their immoral language & ways to learn the topography of his inner feelings, to put names to places inside. Betrayal, disloyalty, man-hatred, disrespect, these feelings were his first, and most salient; he felt things in ways that which would take decades to form into words and ideas.
Boys and men were second class citizens in the argot of the times, and this was the late 70s and early 80s, and he saw it only get worse from there on. And this was in military households, conservative and Republican homes, he had no idea that most people were far more liberal and lax and immoral than this. His head would have cleaved in four pieces and fallen to the ground like a coconut hit with a machete if he had known how much more decent these people were -the ones he hated as vile pornographers and pimps- compared to most out there.
Of course, he learned that soon enough as he went into the civilian world -at age 13- as the father had retired from the Air Force and they had moved to Ohio and a civilian school instead of DoD schools with all military kids. He was shocked by the impertinence, the lack of decorum, the filthy girls and boys lacking all self-respect. The teachers had lupine faces and gave unethical howling speeches ready to confront all manner of things he did not yet understand.
But, the one thing he knew was that nobody was concerned with justice, that was certain, but worse than that, they had no desire to uphold the concept of man . The Man , that which was elucidated by a phrase of The Author that he would later read, that as joint stock companies, as nations, men might seem detestable; that knaves, fools and murderers there may be, that men may have mean and meager faces, but Man, in the ideal was so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him, all his fellows should rush to throw their costliest robes.
That insight mirroring his own would come later, for now he must feel his own face without benefit of reflecting glass, and for now he felt the egg about the eyes; he felt the impious ends and means of his classmates and teachers and all of mankind. Although, it was tough for his metaphorized mind to extrapolate beyond his immediate milieu . He had traveled, lived on three continents by age five, but still, he was just a boy and his mind was hemmed in by its own skull and the provinces, and shallowness, of his family and the epoch in time.
Plus, he was a bad kid. He liked to transgress and throw down and fight and make jokes at the expense of someone -anyone- he hated. He liked to talk back and kick up dirt and look down on both the stupid and the smart-alecky jerks .
But, there was this chivalry to him that revolved around this odd and precocious sexual gallantry. He didn’t tell dick jokes and he didn’t let girls be made fun of for being unfortunate looking and he kept his anarchy to realms that made sense to him: one could make fun of the stupid and the arrogant, and anyone bigger than him, one could break things that were easily paid for, one could disobey orders that could not be articulated in 10 words or less, and one could test out new boundaries of the unfriendly and mischievous as long as one came back if it all went too goddamn far.
And he would know if it went too far,
for his conscience was a tight tether, he thought; and he calibrated it all by his endogenous and earnest deference to girls -fat or ugly ones especially- and to the rubric of men, not as people but as a concept: Man!
He knight erranted the world, on mission from God, to restore woman’s purity and the honor once belonging to men, but lost somewhere out in the forest of life. He held hands with a girl in second grade, lights off as the class watched some movie of some kind; her name was Starr Carr, and this girl, this singularity, illuminated his insides as his eyes adjusted to the dark of the room. He knew he was destined to love a woman but speak rarely and modestly and let all involved keep their honor. He wished he would never move away from his Starr.
And he knew that the world was full of good girls, of which there must be millions by now , he figured, as he had saved so many of them from dragons and black knights, although the worst knights were the ones not in black armor, the kind her preferred, but in that garish and overt chrome bullshit . He was on to that nonsense. He had protected Donna Ladd at age nine, as a gaggle of geese in the shape of older boys had surrounded her and made fun of her fat and then her emulsified tears. His tongue lashing for their lack of gallantry had not muted their mouths, so he shoved two or three to the ground and somewhat inartfully, but effectively, slapped them around.
Donna had loved him from then on out, well until he was a grown man and his good side was eclipsed by the dark side of the moon. She had run home and told her mom, something he was incredulous about, for he never told anyone when he was picked on or made fun of or abused. Jesus, that is like half the injury, he thought, the worst part of suffering abuse is for others to know! But girls were different in more than one way he was beginning to notice, and they had different rules for life and so he was informed by his mother that Mrs. Ladd, Donna’s mother, would like to come over and talk to him.
It was all very adultish and odd and made him feel uncomfortable, but apparently he had done something good for once; although he saw all his actions as noble at ten times the rate these people noticed them. So, he was half offended -as usual- that they acted like it was so anomalous. But, Donna had left out the part where he got violent and she thus told a softer, more typically female, version of the story where Lyndon had just told those mean boys off ; as if that would ever have sufficed. Ha, not in this world , the wised-up 9-year-old said to himself.