Rhapsody on a Theme

by Matthew J. Metzger

  Darren heaved a deep sigh that rattled around the base of his lungs and let go. Jayden watched that exhausted, thin face worriedly, holding on to those wide shoulders. They were slack between his hands.

  “Come on,” Darren said, opening the door. “They’re waiting.”

  “DAN!”

  “Told you,” he said, and Rosie hit his knees. “All right, Jels?”

  “Up!” Rosie implored, but Jayden picked her up instead. “Nooo, want Dan cuddles!”

  “Remember Darren’s shoulder,” Jayden said, and she whined, twisting to reach anyway. She’d loved Darren’s cuddles from being a baby, always clamouring to be held by him, and Jayden suspected it was the heat Darren let off like an overactive radiator. Darren hugged them both as a compromise, squashing Rosie between them until she giggled and hit him.

  “Hello, darlings,” Mum said as they approached the table. She rose to hug both of them, and Dad grunted in their direction, scowling at the menu. “Pick anything you like, Colin’s paying,” she said cheerfully, and Jayden laughed.

  “It’s not our bloody anniversary,” Dad grumbled.

  “Bad luck,” Darren said, sitting down.

  “See the match last weekend?”

  “Wish I hadn’t,” Darren said sourly, and they were off. Mum rolled her eyes, coercing Rosie back up onto her restaurant-provided booster seat and pulling a face at Jayden.

  “How’s he doing?” she mouthed at Jayden, nodding her head towards Darren, and Jayden shrugged, waving a hand in a so-so motion.

  “How was the battleship, Dad?” he asked instead, trying to derail the football—or was it rugby? Might have been cricket, but Darren definitely hadn’t watched any cricket matches last weekend, he always ended up fighting with Rachel over the remote if he tried…

  “I missed my calling in life,” Dad proclaimed dramatically and squinted at the pair of them. “You two could do worse, you know.”

  “A ship full of blokes two hundred miles from shore for months on end?” Darren said, and Jayden pinched his arm.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “There’s lasses too,” Dad said with a gleam in his eye. Mum slapped his arm.

  “Colin!”

  “No,” Jayden said sternly, and Darren cracked a smile. Dad’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and Jayden scowled at him.

  But there he went. “Heard you’re on happy pills again,” he said, and Mum groaned.

  “Colin!”

  “Yeah,” Darren said unexpectedly. “Not much fu—er, happy about them, mind,” he amended hastily with a sideways glance at Rosie, who was busy making an origami…um…origami screwed-up-tissue out of a menu.

  “Knocking you for six, huh?” Dad said.

  “Yeah.”

  And then Jayden blinked, brought up short, when Dad simply shrugged and said, “Worth a shot. Whatever takes the crazy off.”

  “Colin,” Mum scolded. “Darren’s not crazy, for goodness’ sake…”

  “I dunno, I went pretty crazy on the citalopram,” Darren said, and Jayden began to relax. Dad and Darren were weird how they connected, how they communicated, and he hesitantly took Darren’s hand on the tabletop, but let the strange conversation run. Maybe…maybe it would help? Or at least…well…something. Darren never talked to people about this, he got defensive, so maybe this was a good thing?

  “You gonna go crazy again on this new crap?”

  “Fluoxetine,” Jayden supplied. “You know, Prozac,” he prompted when Dad frowned.

  “Maybe,” Darren said.

  “We’re watching him, me and Rach,” Jayden interjected as Dad began to scowl. “The doctor suggested a hospital, but…”

  “Hell no,” Dad interrupted and jabbed a stubby finger towards Darren’s face. “They get you in one of them places, kid, you ain’t coming out. They’ll have you in padded rooms for the rest of your damn life. Don’t get me wrong, s’good you’re trying, but if they ever make hospital noises, you ditch and run. Better off crazy—like you are, not proper crazy like schizos—or dead than in the loony bin.”

  “Colin, for God’s sake, this is macabre,” Mum snapped. “Darren’s not crazy and he’s not going to a hospital. And this isn’t the fifties, the NHS doesn’t have loony bins like the old asylums. Honestly! Now decide what you want for lunch and let’s talk about something else!”

  Dad huffed and obeyed, and Jayden squeezed Darren’s fingers.

  When Darren squeezed back, and actually chose something off the lighter side of the menu to attempt and pick at, Jayden figured maybe Dad had worked his grumpy-old-bastard magic again.

  Even if he was so backwards about it, honestly.

  Chapter 14

  It was like suffocation.

  It was like…like Darren was fifteen again, and drugged up to the eyeballs in a hospital bed after being stabbed, with the world drunkenly drifting without him and even the slightest movement resulting in a dizzying whirl around his eyes. Like his brain had been scooped out of his head, wrapped in cotton wool, and put back in to ensure that nothing—nothing—would get through. An insulating layer, to keep him in and the universe out.

  It was far worse than any of his bad days had ever been, because not only was nothing getting through, Darren felt though he were actively sliding away. He slept purely to avoid the feeling of slipping, the feeling that when he lay in bed, his consciousness was slowly working its way loose of his body. A balloon on a fraying tether. What happened when it freed itself?

  He was paralysed with the fear of that coming loose effect, the terror drowning the rational part of him that said there was no such thing as a soul and no way that he could actually float out of his own skin. Rationality had no place at the table. He was afraid, afraid of the numbness and the distance and the deadening of every sense he had, and he was furious with himself for being afraid at all.

  At least, he was in the academic sense. In the pure, raw, emotional sense…he wasn’t even irritated. He was nothing at all. The cotton wool—the fluoxetine—crowded out even feeling, until there was nothing but a void in his head. Darren would have hated it if he’d been capable of dredging up the feeling at all. Perhaps that was the trick of it. How were you meant to feel sad, if you couldn’t feel at all?

  But that, to Darren, was even worse. This was an episode, but at an extreme, like he’d succeeded and was an inch from death and simply waiting now, and he was terrified. Trapped in himself, he was absolutely terrified. This was unabating, with no come-and-go like the usual shadows. This was a blacked-out room, with no doors and windows and no way of creating light.

  And he was trapped here too. Between Jayden and the doctor, he couldn’t stop taking the pills, couldn’t shake off the cloying decay, couldn’t punch through it, physically or otherwise. He was too exhausted to box, and when he tried, nothing happened. He was being smothered in clingfilm, and there was nothing that could be done to break through it, no way out. There were nights he lay awake just trying to breathe, just trying to feel the way his lungs expanded and collapsed, and had to assume he breathed because he hadn’t died. Nights he wanted to scream just to get some of the air in his lungs out, to get sound out, to get out.

  This was worse. This was so much worse than the bad days, and he wanted to lash out, to break through it, to something, to…to die, even, if that would let him out. To die, if it would break the film that had settled over him.

  When the saucer smashed on the kitchen floor, Darren snapped.

  * * * *

  In week six of the fluoxetine treatment, Darren shifted—and violently—away from the pattern that he’d followed on citalopram. On citalopram, he’d never come away from listless, apathetic, and depressed. And until week six of the fluoxetine, Jayden had watched the same symptoms unfold: the swinging between insomnia and narcoleptic-scale sleeping, the loss of appetite, the nausea, the loss of sex drive (and function), the jags of tears in the night, and the unwavering, unyielding, rock-solid depression.

  And the
n Darren exploded.

  Jayden had managed to work him out of bed on the Sunday and get him into the kitchen for lunch, purportedly to help, and in reality to try and get some actual food down him. The doctor had weighed him on their last appointment, and Darren had lost half a stone that he really, really couldn’t afford. It was becoming a permanent battle, and Jayden was beginning to hate mealtimes with a passion.

  Rachel was chattering away, tearing salad into a bowl and trying to keep the atmosphere out of the murky stillness into which it had descended when the pills had kicked in, and Jayden had set Darren on chopping carrots for a casserole that Jayden was preparing for the evening meal. He had learned that putting Darren to work was the only way to even be able to think about getting any substantive meal down him, and even then it was hit and miss. Mealtimes were terse. Rachel had typically started avoiding them, and her curries were a thing of the drug-free past.

  And then it happened—Darren’s elbow swung a little too far out to the left and pushed an empty saucer off the counter.

  The sound of smashing ceramic rang like a bell through the tiny kitchen.

  “Oh, hell,” Jayden muttered, bending to scoop up the pieces. Above him, Darren braced his arms against the counter, pushing slightly back from it, and dropped his head forward, taking long and shuddering breaths, as though he’d just run a marathon. “Hey, it’s all right, it’s just a saucer,” Jayden added as he threw the pieces away.

  Darren tipped his head back, the tendons in his neck straining. He was breathing through his nose, loud and stilted, and Jayden frowned anxiously as he dusted his fingers off. That wasn’t normal. At all.

  “Darren?”

  “Just…shut it,” Darren said harshly. His voice was tight, and he spoke through gritted teeth, jaw taut and locked. Jayden flinched back, startled, but Rachel scowled.

  “He’s just asking, Jesus.”

  “Just fucking shut it, both of you,” Darren snarled. His knuckles were white where they gripped the counter, and he was breathing too fast and too harsh. He was shaking. Even his hair was shivering slightly from the movement. “I just need a fucking minute, just…”

  “You’ve had six bloody weeks,” Rachel snapped, “and I’m sick of having to walk on eggshells if you’re in the house.”

  “Rachel…” Jayden warned, but the warning came too late. Darren lashed out, near-throwing the entire dishrack off the drainage board and onto the floor, backhanding it so hard that a bruise blossomed almost instantly on his skin. Every plate smashed into smithereens in a cacophany, shards skidding across the floor, and Pog—lurking under the table in hopes of scraps—yowled and shot out into the living room.

  “Darren, fuck’s sake!” Rachel yelled.

  “Fucking can it!” Darren shouted back, briefly fisting both hands in his hair with a painful ripping sound before violently striking out again, and flinging the casserole dish to the floor. It shattered, and the tile it hit cracked with a dull sound. “I can’t fucking breathe, I can’t motherFUCKING breathe!” he bellowed, and Jayden pulled Rachel back to the kitchen door as the outburst reached rampage levels, and everything was flung from the counter to the floor—cutlery, the salad bowl, tea-towels, the toaster—and Darren’s voice cracked and reached incoherent levels of volume. He simply screamed, tore the kettle and its plug free of the wall, and flung that too. The tiles were wet and cracked under the heavier items; the kettle flung an arc of recently boiled water up the back door, and Rachel shrieked when he kicked a chair over and it clattered loudly against the tiles.

  “Fucking SHUT IT!” Darren bellowed, but didn’t turn towards either of them to say it. He was pacing, almost, like a caged wild animal, eyes wild and breathing too shaky, too shallow, and far, far too fast. His hands rose and fell sporadically from his hair, the tips of his fingers bloody, and an angry fresh burn flowering on his palm. “I can’t,” he whispered frantically, every muscle in his neck twitching. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, Ican’tcan’tcan’tcantcantcant…”

  “Darren, stop it!” Jayden shouted, lunging and catching him from behind, locking his arms around Darren’s to pin him. For a brief second, Darren stilled, a deep inhalation punching against Jayden’s arms for a moment—and then he wrenched free effortlessly, still stronger than Jayden despite the depression and the illness and the weight loss and the inactivity. He tore free, hard enough that Jayden’s fingers dug grooves into Darren’s arms, and yet he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I need out,” he said brusquely and shouldered past Rachel.

  She clutched her cat to her chest and watched him wide-eyed as he slammed out of the house, the front door hitting the frame so hard that plaster dust floated free of the ceiling and the doorbell rang on the other side, jolted into life.

  “Oh my God,” Rachel said.

  “Shit.” Jayden ran both hands over his face. “Oh shit, that isn’t good.”

  “Um, Jayden?”

  “What?” he asked shortly, staring through his fingers at the destroyed kitchen. Darren had never done that before, not ever. He’d never so much as flung a cushion in anger, he’d never raised his voice to screaming levels, and Jayden realised with a vague sort of detachment that he was shaking. He had to call the doctor. That hadn’t been on the side-effects list, he was sure of it, it couldn’t have been, how the hell was that a stupid side effect…

  Rachel interrupted his spiralling thoughts. “That…does Darren have panic attacks?”

  “What? No,” Jayden said bewildered.

  Rachel chewed her lip. “I don’t know, that just really kind of…sounded like one,” she said awkwardly after a minute, and sighed, putting her startled and affronted cat on the piano seat. “I’ll…I’ll clean up.”

  “Rach…”

  “You need to call the quack, and then you need to go find him,” she said shortly. “Maybe not even in that order.”

  “You’re the one with a car.”

  She sighed, running her hands through her hair, and Jayden felt sharply sorry for her, being caught up in this mess. She was pale. He felt pale himself, almost frightened. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll go and see if I can’t pick him up. And if I can’t in half an hour, I’ll come back and clean, and you go and find him. You’ll know where he might go better than me anyway.”

  Jayden hoped he knew and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said and abandoned the remains of the kitchen for the cordless phone. And this time, he wasn’t going to be taking ‘normal side-effect’ for an answer.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t working. He had beaten his hands bloody, but it wasn’t working: the fog was still there, clinging around his mind and his senses, and it wasn’t being shaken off. With a lack of anything else to do, he tried harder and harder, but nothing happened. He could see the blood, could see the swelling, but nothing was getting through, it wasn’t working…

  “Darren.”

  He stepped back from the bag, exhausted and shaking, ribs heaving, and stopped. Jayden was standing in the bag-room doorway, face white and pinched, arms folded across his chest.

  “Are you feeling…better?” Jayden asked slowly.

  Darren clenched his jaw against the threat of tears. He wanted to cry. He desperately wanted to cry, but there’d be no emotional release from it. He’d been crying for nights upon nights now, but there was no sense of relief, of having shifted this. What was the use in giving in? What was the point of explaining when it wouldn’t help?

  What was the use of any of this?

  “No,” he croaked.

  Jayden stepped delicately across the foam mats.

  “Darren…” he murmured and caught at Darren’s elbows. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m suffocating,” he said flatly. “I’m being wrapped in clingfilm or something. I can’t breathe, and I can’t think, and I can’t get out like I can with the moods because they don’t stop, and you and the quack and Rach are pinning me in here and…”

  Jayden’s face crumpl
ed. “It’s for your own good,” he pleaded, his hands squeezing at Darren’s arms almost desperately. “It’s supposed to make you a bit better. I…you know I wouldn’t make you do this if…”

  “This isn’t better,” Darren hissed. “This isn’t good for me. I feel like I can’t breathe, Jayden. I wake up in the night feeling like I’m choking, and I don’t want to leave the house because of the fucking depression but if I stay in the house I’m suffocating and…I’m going fucking mental, Jayden. I just trashed a kitchen because I broke a saucer, and I’m going fucking mad. I’m losing it. I’m losing my fucking mind.”

  His voice broke, and then he lost the war anyway, the tears boiling over and trailing down his face. Jayden made a pained noise and hugged him tightly, pressing a hand into his hair and murmuring. Darren clutched, shuddering, and ground his teeth against the fury. Fury at Jayden, fury at the doctor, fury at himself.

  “I can’t do this,” he whispered pathetically. Stupid fucking useless waste of space that you are, you can’t even do this one thing for him, or any of them. You couldn’t do it last time, what chance do you think you have now? “I can’t do it, Jayden, I can’t, I’m going to hurt myself or hurt you or Rach, I’m going to do something really fucking bad if I can’t stop this…”

  Jayden began to rock him, a little side-to-side motion intended to soothe but that really just made Darren feel dizzy and like he was being teased loose again. He clung hard, and whispered a plea to stop through a rising sob, and Jayden stopped. “I called the doctor,” he whispered. “He’s agreed to see us on Tuesday morning, first thing. He said it sounds like a bad reaction, so maybe he’ll take you off it, but…”

  “No buts,” Darren whispered weakly. “I can’t do it, Jayden. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t, I can’t.”

  Jayden squeezed tightly. “You’ve been trying so hard,” he whispered fervently into Darren’s hair, and Darren desperately wanted to believe him. “You’ve been trying so hard, and please don’t let this set you back, please, Darren. I know it’s not easy but you tried, you’ve been trying so hard, and…”