by Beth Harden
My newly diagnosed symptoms of OCD evolved into a singular determination to sort through the myriad of clues and find what was missing. Like elderly folks that sit in front of one thousand tiny cut-out shapes and spend precious days of their waning lives looking for that one lone piece that will lock the border into a straight edge, I searched and discarded. This was no longer child’s play; I was up against a monumental challenge. The vast majority of jagged clues were entirely black so I had to work by instinct rather than sight. Piece by tedious piece, I gathered up interlocking clues and slowly snapped the perimeter into place. The final answer was trapped among the incongruous empty space in the middle. .
The final tag was tacked on almost as an afterthought. Seizure disorder, announced the expert out of Johns Hopkins whose one-hour consultation fee cost more than the Hertz sedan and the gasoline to run it down to Baltimore and back. I now had four diagnoses and eight medications, but even I knew that healing would only come when I stopped searching for answers to old questions and began asking new ones.
#
My clothes were laid out on the guest bed the night before like a chalk outline of a body on sidewalk. The button-down shirt, cotton cardigan, painter’s pants, and low-top sneakers all placed in ready position for the morning drill. The physical therapist had instructed my caregivers not to assist me no matter how much time it took. The trial and error repetitions would increase my dexterity and eye-hand coordination by degrees; but more importantly, this perseverance quotient was designed to have significant therapeutic value in strengthening my ability to stay on task and not give up.
The process was going smoothly. I had already mastered the zipper and blouse buttons with minimal delay. At this rate, I’d make it to the breakfast table in less than thirty minutes. I bent down to once again tackle the shoelaces that kept slithering through my fingers like thin grass snakes. I made a second attempt and then another. Suddenly the gravity caused my eyes to rhythmically throb and a dark halo rimmed the upper quadrant of both pupils. I immediately straightened up and grasped the corner of the desk for support. Fragments of colors spun by like shattered stained glass. Gradually, the visual horizon brightened in intense bands of color like the Aurora Borealis that shimmers in atmospheric prisms of raging light. Maybe it was just another optical migraine coming on. My hands became fumbling mitts and a sweep of heat broiled underneath my cheeks.
“Goddamn it! You mother-fucker!” I shouted.
“Lissa! Careful now! Your brothers are downstairs” said my father. “Now, try again.” The top button had come loose; the middle one was altogether unfastened. “Start with the bottom first then work your way up like they showed you.”
“I can’t do this shit!” I cried, exasperated. Using my teeth to grip the cuff, I peeled the cabled sleeve off my arm and let the sweater fly. Foul language was a symptom of a tic, the uninhibited sounds of a brain abnormality, not unlike Tourette’s syndrome; but in a family of church-goers, the new vocabulary was a harsh reminder that the sweet chorus girl had been abducted by demons.
“Give it a rest. We’ll practice again later,” Dad said.
“This is kid crap. I’m not retarded if that’s what everyone thinks!” I yelled. “I know what the story is. It’s a set-up for failure. That way, you can all feel better about putting me in the nursing home for good!”
“No. No, Lissa. That’s wrong. We are all committed to your success,” said my Dad, shaking his head at each irrational outcry. “Listen to me! You can’t trust your instincts here. Not yet. You aren’t able to see this from an objective point of view. Part of your brain is firing off on impulse, not rational thought. You know that’s what is happening here, right?” I struggled briefly against his grip on my upper arm, then tears started up and the energy left me.
“Sit, sit,” my father said as he patted the edge of the mattress and helped me lower by degrees to a seated position on the bed. It was not the first time this had happened, this display of polar moods; it was becoming a pattern. First a righteous red flare, followed by a spontaneous tantrum and then a flood of instant fatigue that operated independently of my wishes, especially the tears that were foreign and frustratingly frequent. But the tears served a purpose; they were what brought the rest of the world running to forgive the flawed young woman who kept fucking up through no fault of her own.
“Honey, remember what the doctors said? They distinctly told you that the fine motor skills are more challenging to master. It will take lots of practice. That’s why they want you to do it on your own without us jumping in to make it easier. Right?” he asked. I nodded in passive agreement. He kissed the top of my damp head.
“I’ll be back by week’s end. Want to have a rematch on some backgammon?” he asked.
“Yes. And I won’t cheat this time,” I confessed with a sudden grin.
“Deal! See ya, sweet girl.”
I heard him go down and then out through the kitchen, the hollow knob rattling as the draft automatically slammed the old door. I crossed to the window. Once outside, he hesitated for a moment on the brick walk, watching the younger boys kick up a sand fight out back by the pond. Then Russ stepped out into the tinsel shine of morning grass and carefully pressed down a piece of sod that had been gouged up in the run of summer play. He wasn’t the least bit worried about things. When he got home in five days’ time, that bare patch we were in might hardly be noticeable any more.
CHAPTER 7: LOSING GRIP
July 2014
Rev was an entitled kid. It’s obvious by the smug turn of his lips and his utter disregard of others. His presence is both ingratiating and dismissive at the same time. He acts as if he’s truly listening, but everyone knows there is only enough room in his brain for his own opinions. When someone else is talking, Rev’s just waiting for the right moment to insert himself into the conversation and from there, he takes over. There is no denying that he is smart and crafty with persuasion as most preachers are. The real problem with Rev is that he is an asshole but doesn’t know it. He doesn’t have to say anything to make others instantly defensive; although he never misses an opportunity to say more than anybody wants to hear. Speaking is his self-ordained gift, but the rest of the world can’t figure out who appointed him lord over others. Each time he steps into the classroom, he deliberately pauses in front of my desk waiting to be acknowledged.
It is twelve-forty when he finally arrives for group. We are already a good ten minutes into the discussion.. I nod in his direction but continue to focus my attention on Euclid who had suddenly found his voice and lost his inhibition about using it.
“Good afternoon, Counselor,” Rev announces loudly. I raise an open hand to indicate that he should put the brakes on his mouth but the pedal to his feet and take his seat. He doesn’t budge.
“It’s not my fault I’m tardy,” he says.
“Gotcha,” I whisper. But he still stands there, obstructing my view of the speaker. He clearly wants an acknowledgement like a salute, a bow or a round of applause but he gets what everyone else does, a plain old check mark in the attendance roster.
“So, you were saying… one of your daughters took her own life and you lost another child to violence. And then something snapped inside you,” I continue. Euclid’s blurting admission of personal history has been a long time coming, especially given the verbal warning shot he fired on the first day when he made it clear that I was to back off and give him space. With wild eyes rolling, he drew the battle lines and told me that there were going to be days when it was too much being cooped up in a room with all those questions, too many questions, and that he might have to just bolt and leave or God knows what would happen. I had asked him to tell me when he felt that anti-social vibe coming on, even though it was obvious by the way he skittered into the room, fingers tugging at his oily black curls. On those days, I was glad that he was seated in the corner seat by the empty file cabinet, as far away as he could be in linear feet. He’d fold his arms across his thin tee sh
irt that only partially masked the tribal tattoos underneath and fidget unbearably, run his frenzied hands up and down his nervous thighs to calm himself. On several occasions, I excused him from the class when I noticed his fungus-covered tongue foaming up like a dog with disease. It’s a calculated gamble any time a resident from the Mental Health unit is included on the attendance roster since they are often either so medicated or so agitated they can’t comprehend the material. Plus, the teacher must allow for the fact that a psychotic break might send the guy into four-point restraints. But despite all the inherent deficits, Euclid has hung in and is on the verge of self-discovery. I’d be damned if some egotist was going to taint that moment.
“So continue, please, “I repeat. “You were talking about your family.”
“Si,” he says. “My mama no treat me nice. Say I’m too young to be raising babies. I don’t like the way it made me feel. She got in my face. Kept nagging. Too close. Do something fast, she tells me. Fix this.” He is wrestling around in his chair, then leans forwards with hands bouncing up and down on his knees, extends his legs and shakes out his arms, flicking his wrists as if the blood flow had been stopped and his extremities had gone to sleep. It makes me wonder about the blood flow to his head. He has old gashes on his arms and one horribly-disfigured lower leg that he drags a bit with a frightening patch of skin graft that is only visible at the ankle when he hikes up his pants. It is an injury he created with gasoline and a candle when he was much younger.
“And what did you do?” I ask.
“I stab her. Five times,” he adds, one eye straying wildly to the right and over my head.
“How old were you when this happened?”
“Twelve,” he answers. Horrific child abuse, premature fatherhood and paranoid schizophrenia had descended on this young man before he was even a true teenager.
“Was that when you were first institutionalized?” I ask gingerly. Each question is a risk, what might turn out to be the one-too-many that may push him over his limit.
“No, my mama not die. I come to America. She stay behind. I have big family here now. Twenty-seven kids,” he boasts. No one in the room says anything. This could just as easily be truth as a delusion. Nothing surprises me anymore.
“Good job, Mr. Euclid.”
“It’s good I come to this class. I am a very violent man,” he says. Whether this is a simple acknowledgement or an over-arching warning is unclear. What is obvious is the collective sigh of relief that is exhaled anytime we dismiss the group with Euclid smiling.
“Hey, Bud. Stick around for a minute. Will ya?” I say. Mr. Bowman comes to a halt. His feet stop moving and his long arms swing in suspension, eventually coming to rest at his side. I can imagine him in his natural element wearing Converse sneakers with no laces, long plaid shorts cuffed below the knee and a Cradle of Filth shirt with skulls scattered across it. He is always one of the last to shuffle slowly from the room. The rest of the guys have been dismissed and have already gone on ahead. This way he won’t feel singled out in public. Bowman drops his languid body into a chair and his chin in his hands, but does not look up.
“You said you wanted to ask me something. What is it?” I ask gently.
“Yeah, I wanted to know if I get in a fight with someone, will I lose all of my good time?”
“Well, you’ve just been sentenced so you’ve only earned three days so far. A ticket for fighting would cost you twenty. So if that should happen, you’d owe us days,” I answer. Bowman smirks and squints his eye. Some kind of calculating is going on inside his head.
“Might be worth it,” he mumbles.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask. He has uttered only a few sparse words in our time together. It’s not like there’s any history to build on here. “If you don’t feel comfortable talking to me, I can send you to someone else.”
“These Spanish people keep getting up in my face and chilling near my bunk, getting all loud and when I’m trying to sleep, they start pulling some sneaky shit on the low. I’m not here to get hassled. I’m not in the mood for their shit,” Bowman says. His forthrightness is surprising. I didn’t expect more than a grumble or a terse refusal.
“Not to change the subject, but I get the feeling you’re not too pleased about having to sit in my class. Maybe a little hostile even?”
“True,” he mumbles.
“You seem very uncomfortable in a group setting. Am I right?”
“Yeah,” he admits. “I guess so. Don’t see the point in listening to everyone else piss and moan. We all got our problems. Big deal!”
“So you don’t think that your contribution can help others or that the wisdom of other people’s experiences might benefit you?”
“Naw! Who the hell cares?” blurts Bowman, nearly snorting out his distaste for his fellow man.
“Any particular reason why you feel so strongly?” I persist. Bowman finally lifts his faded blue eyes to meet mine with a hollow stare. He is tolerating me out of some curt code of basic manners, but he is not at all pleased that I have pressed my thumb down hard on the snarl in his attitude.
“Just one. I hate people,” says our resident anti-socialite. “Plus this place really makes it worse. I can’t do anything I enjoy.”
“Is this a recent change?” I ask.
“No, I’ve pretty much hated everyone since I was ten,” he confesses.
“Did you just wake up one day feeling the disdain for others or was there an event of some significance in your childhood that made you distrust people?”
“I suppose so,” he says, still apparently unwilling to divulge more than a cryptic word or two. I stay silent. The space between us fills with an awkward pause. Bowman coughs tentatively, then clears his throat and finally stretches his fidgeting neck side to side. I don’t rescue him from his discomfort.
“Fine!” he blurts out as if I’ve got his arm twisted up behind him and am muscling the bloody truth out. “It’s pretty simple, okay? I don’t need a shrink to tell me what’s wrong, if that’s what you’re thinking. My parents were both killed in a car accident two minutes after dropping me off at a friend’s house. They were headed to work and a dump truck plowed them into a guardrail. I was an instant orphan. I spent the rest of my days in foster homes.”
“My, God! That is tragic. Have you gotten any professional help to deal with this loss?”
“They tried, but I hate therapists and shrinks even more.”
“Do you think you may need or want to talk to Mental Health?” I ask gingerly. “Maybe there’s a medication that might help with the depression.”
“I’ve already tried Remeron but I heard if you take it for too long, you can grow tits so I stopped.”
“Let me ask you. In your free time, is there anything you draw pleasure from?” My question is a welcome relief. Bowman perks up at the switch in subject.
“Music for one,” he replies. “And oh, video games, of course!” he adds. There isn’t much outlet for the young gamer in a house of corrections. Deprivation and disallowed are the verbs of choice in a discipline-driven environment. The Department of ‘Collections’ is quick to confiscate and discourage all the ingenious ways prisoners crafted pastimes out of unapproved materials, which were usually stripped away and thrown out.
“Do you play music or just like listening to it?” I ask.
“I play bass guitar,” says Bowman. He picks at a scab, stares down at the dirty tiles and scuffs his heel at a small shred of paper. I notice then the marks, silvery disfigurations on his lower arms. Old cuttings with a fresh gouge on his lower wrist that looks septic. This is worrisome.
“And what are you always scribbling on during our group? Artwork?” Bowman shakes his head and guiltily retrieves a creased piece of printer paper from his pants. It is folded over a dozen or more times. He painstakingly unwraps it into one contiguous piece without tearing the worn edges and spreads out in front of me. I examine the strange pattern of hieroglyphics and look up, puzzled.<
br />
“Dungeons and Dragons. This is our game board, so to speak, but it’s almost impossible to decipher now. I have a form from a catalog that we could use. I’ve asked the counselor in our block to make copies, but he’s a douche and won’t give me the time of day.”
“Who needs a game board to play Dungeons and Dragons in here? You’re living it every day. What’s that activity called, when people role play knights and minstrels and Renaissance type crap?” I ask.
“Larping,” he says, with a weird but real grin.
“Yeah, that’s it. That’s what’s I’m talking about. We’re all in one big interactive play here.” I take a closer look at the intricate design. It’s quite a piece of handiwork. “Do me a favor. On Tuesday, bring me the form you’re talking about and plan to stay after class for a few minutes.”
Bowman takes the mysterious score sheet and carefully folds it back into his waistband. He has brightened noticeably and when he walks out, I can see he is moving at a markedly faster pace.
#
Two days later, Bowman’s back and loiters around after class is dismissed. Once the other inmates are out of sight, he offers me the grid of elaborate mazes. He’s certifiably animated now and beams when I peer at the diagram, looking mighty confused. I’m in his territory now, a world of imagination where men and beasts devour and destroy one another, where death is distributed gleefully and liberally until finally game over and you start again. Pain is not permanent.
“It’s very complex. The average person wouldn’t understand,” he says proudly.
“That’s me,” I tease. “I will copy this for you as long as you can swear up and down that there is no cryptic gang code hidden in here.” Bowman nods enthusiastically indicating that he is on the up-and-up. The young man is virtually dancing in place. His imagination has just gotten a big assist from an old-school champion of board games like Clue and Chutes & Ladders, games that could also come in handy in prison with the advantage being on the subordinate’s side.