by Roger Bray
PSYCHOSIS
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Roger Bray
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ISBN 978-0-9953511-2-7 (E-Book)
Previously published as “Dreams of a Broken Man”
“It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”
— Philip K. Dick
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Other Books by Roger Bray
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Part One
Chapter One
He stepped through the door into the kitchen knowing that she’d be there. She was standing, as he expected, at the sink in front of the window that looked out onto the back patio.
The sun was breaking through the branches of the trees at the back of the yard and he caught the moment perfectly. As the sun came through the window, the small imperfection at the edge of the glass prismed the light into a little rainbow onto her arm as she stood looking outside.
Alex didn’t want to break the moment and stood in the doorway watching her.
He never got over the sight of Hazel. She was a beautiful person, inside and out, and he knew that he was lucky to be sharing her life. And the proof of his contentment and happiness was standing there, in front of him.
The rainbow moved up to her shoulder as the sun moved a few degrees through the branches and then began to break up as the sun was lost for a while as the tree branches fully blocked its direct light onto the window.
He couldn’t help but smile as he finally walked up behind her and gently wrapped his arms around her waist and softly kissed her neck.
She smiled, turned her head, and put her hand on the back of his head. He turned his face as she pulled his head toward her and kissed him. They kissed for a few moments before Alex stepped back and placed his hands around her shoulders, taking her into a hug.
“Good morning, my love,” he whispered into her ear.
Hazel drew back and smiled at him. The smile he loved that filled him with warmth and longing. She kissed him again then turned away to get coffee.
As the machine clicked on and began its cycle, he went to the big fridge to get the milk. He closed the door and turned to say something to her and she was … gone.
The scene faded quickly as Alex woke. Immediately. From a deep sleep as his eyes snapped open, and he found himself looking at the gray metal bottom of the bunk above him.
The moment hit him, as it always did, like a physical blow. A sickening depression that was always present in some form when he was awake and from which his only escape had been his dreams.
He was grateful though. At least he had been asleep and had been able to dream. Usually he had a restless few hours, trying to force himself asleep, which never worked. He often woke early and tried to sleep for a few extra minutes or an hour it didn’t matter. To sleep was to not have to face this reality. Once he woke he knew that his night was over and, having woken as abruptly as he had, he knew that there was no point in lying there any longer.
Each morning, the routine was the same; roll over and pull up the blankets or kick off the blankets depending on the time of year, but in the end, it didn’t matter a jot he always gave up and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the wall in front of him waiting for the thin sunlight to clear the outside wall. A big, yellow, mocking hello from the outside world.
The same sun from his dream broke into his reality. A reminder of how his life had been, now an insipid shadow of that life.
Within ten minutes, one way or the other, he knew the time by the shadow cast onto the wall by the part of the frame of the top bunk once the sun had crept up the outside wall far enough to clear the window sill and come through the dirty, reinforced glass bricks that pretended to be his window, letting light in but nothing else. At this time of day, the shadow was low, sharply outlined against the stark white wall above the right hand of the two, small book shelves permanently fixed in place above the similarly immovable desk and chair, like a primary school desk and bench all in one, but this one made of cold stainless-steel and not warm and worn timber.
He sat on his bunk, the bottom one. It had been his choice as he slept little and knew that his restlessness would disturb and incur the ire of any cell mate. The bunk frames didn’t move or make much sound, but the wrapped mattresses wheezed as the air was expelled or sucked back in as a body moved on and off. So, he chose the bottom bunk and often sat, immobile and emotionless as his life slowly drifted across the wall, day in and day out, in an arc of shadow and sunlight across the wall. With a sigh he closed his eyes, this time of day was almost relaxing and peaceful, the quiet prelude to the clanking, the banging reality of his life which would start soon enough. It never lasted.
The mattress above him squeaked and wheezed as his cell mate rolled over in his sleep. His cell mate of the past twelve months, Dolan Matthews, slept the sleep of the innocent which he wasn’t but since he had found God in a book rather than at the bottom of a bottle, he had justified his contrition by his belief in God’s forgiveness and he had at least twenty-five years to be contrite while praising the Lord. In Dolan’s case though, medical opinion doubted he would last half of that time as his liver had begun to harden ten years earlier and his heart was in the middle stages of giving up from all the abuse that it had sustained over Dolan’s fifty-seven years.
Whether it was the whiskey or the equally drunk and half-naked Thai hooker, who looked about twelve but was twenty-five, that had distracted him, no one could work out but while Dolan Matthews may have been able to sleep a sleep unencumbered by guilt, Alex doub
ted that the parents of the two kids he had killed when his Dodge had slammed into the side of their old Toyota and wrapped it around a power pole, had the same ability. Not guilt in their case but, probably, desperate grief and regret, while Dolan had managed to rationalize the event as bad luck.
Alex slept fitfully, always. He didn’t think he’d had a full night’s sleep for over three years. He found it hard to fall asleep and when he did it was light, and he was listless and quick to wake and, as happened every morning after he tossed and turned trying to catch another few minutes and failing, he would lie, eyes wide open, all thoughts of sleep gone, staring at the bottom of the bunk above him. And finally, like this morning, like every morning, he would swing his legs around and sit on the end of his bunk staring at the wall, in darkness or, dependent on the season, the inevitable light of a new day, slowly increasing in strength until it could cast the bunk leg shadow on the wall and Alex’s life wasted again in a slow progression.
He stared, as usual, hardly aware of his surroundings, and thought his thoughts of nothingness. A mind is rarely blank but in Alex’s case it was blank from weariness, with courts and appeals with the reality of the here and now, a reality that he could not have envisaged a few years ago and would not wish on his worst enemy, if he had any enemies—which he didn’t. He’d thought all the thoughts he could, and speculated and guessed, and revisited events over and over again. Through it all, he had come up with every outlandish and wild theory that he could, most of which he hadn’t shared as, even as he thought them, he knew how stupid it was even in his own mind, let alone trying to explain them to someone else. The thoughts grew less as his permanent situation developed and he began to visualize a large Monty Python-esque foot, from the opening credits of the old British comedy show that his dad had loved, would crush down even the smallest of thoughts until he knew that it was pointless. He had fought the fight and lost, actually and spiritually he was beaten, soundly beaten and thrown into a concrete box with a drunk driver who misquoted the Bible to him constantly in the mistaken belief he was in some way being spiritually uplifting.
No amount of spiritual uplifting could help. He would smile emptily at Dolan’s inept proselytizing for he knew if he denied him, it would get more intense. So, he would smile and nod with empty eyes and an empty heart and in the knowledge, that he was beaten, and he knew he couldn’t waste time thinking of anything positive, of solutions or scenarios; of release.
His reality was being stuck in here with this overweight, burping and farting God-botherer, and would continue to be until one them was either moved or died and, regardless of the age gap between them, and even with Dolan’s lifetime of abuse rapidly catching up with him, Alex wasn’t completely sure who might leave in the box first.
It would send him mad, this life, his reality would send him mad, it almost had until circumstances had driven him into himself. And now, now that he had switched off his mind and his emotions, he was finding that he didn’t care, he knew that this was his life from now on and he could live it by trying to ignore it. There was only one person remaining that he did care about and he couldn’t do anything to help her now, anyway. If he did have any coherent thoughts, it was how to release her from the bond that tied them together in this place.
Chapter Two
Four hours later and sixty-five miles south of Alex’s rudimentary sun dial, Alice Reed slowly looked around as she entered the busy little café in the Fifth Street Public Market in downtown Eugene. As she entered, she was reticent and hesitating, almost timid in her manner, although in reality, at least in the reality of a few years before, when she saw herself as bold and self-confident, gregarious and out-going. That had been a lifetime, a divorce, and a thousand setbacks ago.
She was a shadow of her former self, keeping to the edges and looking down, apologetically. A different person, wary and careful as she entered in case she saw someone she knew or, more importantly, if they saw her before she could safely back track and get out before she found herself accepting false platitudes and avoiding the inevitable questions, avoiding them before they could intrude on her misery.
Looking around, she saw a couple of people who she thought she may have known, vaguely if at all, she felt that she should have known their names but when she couldn’t put a name to either of them and then one turned and looked straight through her she knew, at least for the moment, she was safe and gratefully felt her anonymity close around her again.
She found it difficult to blend into the background though as she was tall and slim with a well-shaped, generous figure that male eyes were quickly attracted to. In her quest for anonymity, she tried to hide away behind shapeless clothes when she ventured out, however, today was a warm summer morning and the light dress she wore hid nothing.
After the inevitable but surprisingly short wait at the counter while she ordered and received her coffee she looked around and walked over to a small table in a shadowed area near the rear of the café. A little happier and certainly a little calmer she sat at the table and idly stirred a second sugar into her coffee.
She was going to pass the café by. It was busier than she liked, at least now, in her new reality. A few years ago, the hustle and bustle would have attracted her, maybe she would bump into a friend and they could spend an hour chatting at the little table. But now as she walked in she was repulsed and worried and it was only through force of her willpower that she stayed. Trying to get some normalcy back into her life, Alice had forced herself to stay.
Alice had initially intended to order her usual cappuccino but the chalk board at the entrance had drawn her attention to a flat white, the new trendy coffee, apparently favored in Australia and now traveling the US as the hipster drink of choice until, in time, it would become too mainstream and they would drop it and move onto the next obscure thing. Many baristas were trying their hand at it and who was to know if they had got it right or not, Eugene wasn’t exactly awash with traveling Australians to critique their efforts. But it sounded somehow exotic, and she decided she needed something new and different in her life, so she ordered one.
This café served good coffee, and she was never disappointed whatever they called it. As usual, though, she was distracted, too distracted to pay any attention to her surroundings. Her main distraction was the constant feeling of disappointment, like a small rock in her stomach, that seemed to have become a permanent feature over the past few years in the face of the highs and lows, even though she couldn’t remember a high at all, just a series of bitter disappointments. The current disappointment being brought on as she tried to decide how best to break the news she had to give and trying to double guess what the reaction would be.
Actually, she already knew what the reaction would be: resignation and a quiet acceptance of life being wasted and as the words would sink in, she would see another grain of light slowly fade from her brother’s eyes. She didn’t know what was worse the inevitable bad news or his reaction, either one made her want to cry.
For nearly three years. Every week and at least once a week but usually twice, she had made the trip from her home in Eugene up to the Oregon State Penitentiary outside Salem. It was only an hour away, straight up Highway Five. It was such a short trip from the relative normalcy of her life to the everyday despair of his. At first, he’d had other visitors but as the months and appeals passed, that number dwindled down to just her. Their parents had died, together, in a car crash, ten years earlier, so had not been here to see this nor carry out the soul destroying drive each week.
She was his only visitor, even Alex’s legal team had dwindled to one and he no longer did more than make a phone call once every four to six weeks, although the last time they had spoken, Alex had told her that even those calls, from his remaining lawyer, seemed to be coming to an end.
At first, his mother-in-law had been up to see Alex as well, she was as convinced of his innocence as Alice was but as time had passed, she couldn’t seem to get past the guilty verdict
delivered by the jury, no matter how inconceivable it had seemed. She had tried but in the end her belief had failed her, and she had refused to visit anymore, and given the circumstances of his incarceration, Alice could hardly blame her.
Though she must have had a real doubt of his guilt at the start, a fact that Alice knew she had because she had told her but, as the trial came to an end and the appeals came and went, the doubts had faded and had been replaced by an inevitability that he had, as the prosecution had alleged and then, they said, proved, killed his wife, her daughter.
Murder in the second degree was a win as far as the politically minded prosecutor, Ted Scott, was concerned and he had been more than happy with that result.
Some small pieces of circumstantial evidence, no real evidence, no witnesses to anything at the time, a few to the months leading up to the night. Nothing that they could hang a case on, but apparently motive aplenty, more motive than the prosecutor knew what to do with, according to him for he sure played on it at the trial, pointing and shouting and cajoling the jury until they too believed that Alex had killed Hazel, his wife of eight years and friend for a lot longer.
No body, a bit of blood in a couple of different areas extrapolated out by the prosecution’s guile into a lot of blood, skillfully cleaned up by a guilty husband who had a lot of presumed motive and the opportunity and that, it seemed, was enough to convict and for someone to be sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.
Had the prosecutor been able to persuade the jury that there was any suggestion of aggravation in his evidence he would have pushed for the death penalty even though the governor’s moratorium would have prevented it any way.
Pushing for a none obtainable death penalty still looked good to his voting demographic but even being a death penalty zealot, the prosecutor couldn’t get passed the judge, Bertram Prindle, who wasn’t and who had doubts over the case when he said he couldn’t: