The instinct to scream catches in my throat. I don’t want my family to find out what I’ve done. There has to be a way to stop this disaster myself.
I don’t know what to do, though. I should still be drunk, but I’m stone-cold sober and totally aware of what’s happening.
In a moment the first wave of terror subsides, and I run across the room to where the smoke is thinner. I take a deep breath and look back at the couch. The fire hasn’t spread yet, but any breeze will make it burst into a blaze I’d never be able to put out. Seconds, only seconds.
I race back and rip the cushions from the couch. The fire has burrowed deep inside, to the couch’s inner padding. There’s no chance of putting it out by beating the cushions.
I’m coughing so hard that I can barely breathe. I’m also scared out of my mind.
I look around the room for another answer and spot the bottle of vodka that I’d half emptied before falling asleep. I grab it and pour what’s left onto the cushions. The fire hisses loudly but doesn’t go out. Then I realize how crazy that was. Alcohol on a fire? The vodka could have ignited. I was stupid and lucky.
But the liquor is making things worse. It’s creating a terrifying amount of dense black smoke. My eyes are burning and watering so much I can hardly see. I’m coughing and gagging.
Get the fire out of the house.
Holding the burning cushions in front of me, I make a run for the back door. The thickest part of the smoke streams back directly into my face. I’m forced to inhale it before it has time to mix with the air outside. I’m suffocating now, and I can’t see where I’m going. The room is dense with smoke and the windows are all shut.
I feel my way to the far wall and fumble for the exit. My hand finds the dead bolt, but the old door is warped. The lock won’t turn unless the door is forced back into its frame.
Finally the door bursts open, and I charge outside and hurl the smoking cushions as far as I can into the backyard.
For the first time since I woke up, clean, fresh air pours into my lungs, but somehow that makes me cough even more.
When I can breathe again, I go back into the room to check for more fire. The smoke makes the search impossible, so I open the windows on two sides of the room. Cold air rushes in one side and sucks smoke out the other. At first I don’t know why the smoke detectors aren’t going off, but then I remember there aren’t any in the basement.
In a few minutes the room is nearly clear of smoke, and my knees feel too wobbly to hold me up. I make it back to the couch frame and collapse. My clothes, my skin, and the whole room reek of smoke. The basement has become freezing cold, but the worst is over. I hope, anyway.
There’s still no sound from upstairs. No one has awakened. They don’t have a clue how close they came to disaster, how close I came to killing everybody.
Alone in the eerily silent room, I close my eyes, not to sleep but to play back the movie that is my life, to see what is still worth saving inside of me. Amazingly somewhere I can sense hopefulness. It’s like the start of a gentle rain in a desert that’s been dry for years — since I was almost five, for God’s sake!
There’s anger, too, but not the kind that leads to my rage attacks. This is an anger that can be used and channeled.
The idea of fighting back comes with such urgency that I want to write it all down — so I can think about it when I wake up again.
I find a pencil and paper in the workroom and don’t finish until my muscles are cramped from sitting in the same position. As it starts to get light outside, I finally fall asleep on the remnants of the same couch that almost took away my family’s world and maybe my life.
My mother finds me in the morning, still asleep in the frozen room. The windows are wide open, the stinging smell of the burning couch still thick in the air. I’m on my back, stretched out full length. My arms are folded over my chest. Under them is a smudged yellow legal pad on which I have scrawled this letter to myself:
I was born with the worst disease.
My body wants me to suffer.
My whole life, I’ve been gasping for air.
The ground hasn’t ever been there.
I’ve been trying to fly when I can’t even breathe.
There’s been nothing to build on, not even a dream.
You probably can’t comprehend it. And I don’t blame you.
You’re only human and have only smelled the slightest micro-atom of what I breathe. My life has been the most disgusting and vile thing you could imagine. My body wants to hurt me. I can’t stop breaking myself down, physically and mentally.
I have severely damaged my teeth. Ticced so hard I’ve broken my ribs. My wrists scream with pain. My neck burns and aches.
I’m so tired, yet I still have to fight. I could explode. I want to go to war and kill bad shit.
Yet I am reminded that my life has been only that of prison and torturous pain.
My own body has betrayed me. I can’t feel safe with myself.
Right now I want to smash my head through the computer screen and explode myself with the sharp huge bang of a shrapnel bomb. Liquefy me and burn me to ash. Then dump water on my ashes and get RID of them.
My anxiety is so high I can’t even make sense of anything.
I’ve lost the world. I’ve lost the world.
I’m in myself and can’t get out.
The world’s joy makes me feel like an outcast.
I’m worn ragged, dirty, no good, hopeless, disgusting, insane.
But I am alive. I am alive.
I still have human feelings and needs.
I have dreams.
Don’t desert me any longer, common goodness. How can you? You’ve already committed the biggest sin imaginable. Taking a good-hearted, peaceful, intelligent person and making him come within a millimeter of taking his own life.
Am I insane? It would seem so. I can’t stop hurting myself.
My parents don’t know what I’ve gone through. If they did, they’d be saying every word to me as if it were their last.
I deserve the world.
And I am stronger than the worst things that happen to me.
I am not suicidal.
I will take control of my OCD.
I will fight and KILL my Tourette’s.
Rip them apart or be doomed.
I will own my own mind.
I will never give up.
Fuck you, OCD.
The war has NOW BEGUN.
And you’re already bleeding.
I will survive.
I will love life, if life will love me.
Part Four
THE INTERVENTION
Into the Wild
Chapter 54
DAY 1
The temperature is fifteen below zero. Trust me on that — it could be lower by now. There’s nothing between me and the snow except my sleeping bag and a four-foot-square tarp mounted on sticks over my head.
I’m a mile up in the mountains of Wyoming, a few hundred miles northeast of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, which have just started in Salt Lake City.
It’s my first morning at Roundtop Wilderness Camp for troubled teens.
The noise of an unseen, unidentified animal nearby in the woods wakes me from an uncomfortable sleep. When I try to open my eyes, I find they’re welded shut by a crust of ice. I pry the frozen stuff away, one small particle at a time. A few pieces come off with my eyelashes embedded in them.
I’m not here because of my doctors. None of them has ever advised that I do something this unusual, or this extreme.
After discovering the dangerous fire in the basement, my parents knew they had to intervene. They eventually came up with the idea of wilderness camp after hearing about a good experience some friends of theirs had had with their son. Shocked by my own actions that night, and realizing what could happen if I went on that way, I was ready to try anything.
Even this.
They call places like these camps, as though they’re an
outdoor adventure, like Outward Bound. Before I arrived, I actually thought this would be fun, but last night at my first campfire meeting, I found out the truth. This will not be fun. Maybe to read about but not to live through.
“Wilderness is for guys like you who have a lot of trouble making it on the outside,” the head counselor announced at the meeting.
He was around thirty, the oldest of the staff of four with our group. The others looked young enough to be in college, although I doubted they were.
“Most of you have been in trouble with the police, your families, or your schools. You’ve done violent things, used or sold drugs, stolen stuff or set fires.
“We’re here to help you fix your lives, but in the end it’s going to be you who have to do it.”
I looked around at the six other kids at the camp, most of whom were my age or younger. A few of them arrived here escorted, which is a nice way of saying that they were brought by law-enforcement officers because they wouldn’t come any other way. One of them arrived in handcuffs.
I’m different from the others, except for my addiction to alcohol and cigarettes. I’m not a bad kid. The closest I came to being in trouble was when I wrote that e-mail to Terry. And maybe almost burning down our house.
“The rules are simple,” the counselor went on. “You’ll be on this mountain for as long as it takes to work out your problems. No more, and no less. The time you’re here depends on your progress and your ability to work as part of a group. Some of you will be here for one cycle, others longer. That’s the deal, guys.”
I was stuck on one part of his speech: for as long as it takes to work out your problems. The threat that there was no telling how long I would have to be here was very frightening. Ricky, the kid sitting on the left, told me that he’d been on the mountain for three months and was doing this cycle over again.
Does that mean I could be here for months? Or a year? What’s to stop me from being here forever? I had to fight off a sudden wave of panic. And tics, of course.
“The conditions here are very basic,” the counselor continued. “We’ve brought enough food with us to get by, and we’ll use what we find in this terrain for shelter to survive the cold. We’ll teach you how to do this. This is a year-round program, but winter is the hardest. Your bad luck. If we work as a group, we make it. If we don’t, we all suffer. Everybody got that?”
No one responded. This wasn’t like a classroom back in school. These guys were a tough, hardened bunch. Maybe encounters with the police made them that way.
The silence made me really nervous and uncomfortable. I felt as if I had to say something to break the tension. But it was obvious that this would be a mistake.
“Don’t even think of trying to get away from here,” the head guy went on. “The closest human beings are twenty miles away on a military post. They know about this program and are on the alert for anyone who shows up in their area. That doesn’t really matter because even if you got away, you’d probably never make it there in this weather. But even if you did, you wouldn’t like what happened to you next.”
This last speech erased any doubt that any of us were going to escape from this place on our own.
Another, longer silence fell over the group. Reality was setting in for everybody. Wilderness camp. We got it now.
“Are there any questions so far?” the counselor asked when he was done spelling out the rules.
After a long wait with no one saying anything, my urge to do something inappropriate rose to the point where it was unstoppable, and at once I found myself shouting, “Run! Run!”
My unbelievably disrespectful and rebellious command shattered the stillness of the deadly serious moment. I couldn’t believe I’d said it any more than the rest of the group could. At first, everyone stared at me, openmouthed. I didn’t know how to explain what made me do it. I wondered if the word compulsion meant anything to them.
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .” was all I could get out before the two junior counselors were on either side of me.
“Take off your boots, wise guy,” the bigger of the two said to me. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Chapter 55
DAY 3
My sleeping bag is covered by a good half foot of snow, which has been falling steadily throughout the night. It’s wet on the inside from ice that I must have brought in on my coat before passing out from exhaustion.
In my hurry to get out of the cold, I also left the bottom of the bag open to the wind, and now I can’t feel my right foot. I wonder if it’s been asleep too long to ever come back to normal.
If I had my boots on, I’d stand and jump up and down to try to get some feeling back in my foot, but they take away our boots at night in case anyone is still thinking about escaping — like they took mine that first night. I’m cold to the bone and hungry. If I’d known what it was going to be like here, I would have probably needed one of those escorts to get me to the camp.
What they said the first night has turned out to be absolutely true. The idea of this place is very simple: force troubled kids to cooperate in order to survive, and get us through the withdrawal period of our addictions by having us focus instead on more immediate issues — like eating, going to the bathroom in the woods, and not freezing to death.
I’m not the first person who’s come here with an alcohol addiction, but I’m the first with that plus Tourette’s and OCD.
Before I came up on the mountain, the people who run the place said they didn’t know if I could make it, but they were willing to give it a try. My main worry is that sometimes my tics are so bad I can hurt myself and then I can’t move without excruciating pain. If that happens, I won’t be able to keep up and they’ll send me home. The more I’m up here, the more tempted I am to fake my tics for just that reason, but I’ve promised myself I won’t do that.
If I go back home the way that I came, there’s nothing in my old life to help me.
So every time one of my tics makes me think of giving up, I tell myself that I’m not going to let it beat me. I can’t. This is life-and-death for me, and not just because of the temperature and the amazing amount of snow.
Chapter 56
DAY 5
A terrible thought has begun to take over my mind. It’s been in the back of my head since the second day, but now it’s risen to the surface and I can’t think of anything else. My father has been killed in a plane crash on his way home from the wilderness camp. Or he and my mother both died after he got home.
There is no other explanation for why my parents haven’t contacted me. In my whole life, I’ve never been away from them for this long. They’ve never even had a vacation away from me. The idea that they wouldn’t even try to see how I’m doing in this dangerous place is impossible — unless something bad has happened to them.
The counselors haven’t brought it up either, and I think it’s because they must know something and are hiding it. I’m so preoccupied with this fear that it’s begun to slow me down from doing the normal chores required as part of group survival.
Finally the thought makes me so frantic that in the middle of a task I break the rule about leaving my area and force a conversation with Kevin, the head counselor.
“I’m scared that something has happened to my parents,” I say without wasting time. “I’m not kidding, I’m serious.”
“It’s possible,” he answers casually. “I don’t know.”
His calmness shocks me. “I have to find out. I need to know. I have a bad feeling.”
He shakes his head. “You’re here and you have to make it work on your own, no matter what. I think I explained all that the first night.”
I can’t believe he’s not trying to talk me out of my fear, to reason with me like all my other doctors have. He’s not nasty or mean, just firm and very clear.
On one level I understand why he is acting this way, and that it doesn’t mean he knows something. But on the way back to my work area, I’m st
ill terrified about my parents, and now there’s nothing I can do about it. Obviously, he’s right. I am on my own in every way up here, and the fact that I don’t know for how long makes things a hundred times worse for someone like me. It’s a perfect formula for the panic that bubbles near the surface all the time.
I’m cold, exhausted, and always hungry, and I miss home so much I sometimes want to cry, but I won’t let myself. Kevin has forced me to recognize I have only two choices: throw myself on the ground and give up and let them send me home, or fight off the bad thoughts as best I can and do what I have to do to survive.
Trying to analyze my situation a little, I realize that I haven’t needed a drink or a cigarette almost the whole time I’ve been here. As hard as this experience has been, maybe I’m really starting to do something for myself. With everything I’ve always needed suddenly taken away from me, hey, I’m still alive.
And that’s when, for the first time, I start thinking about something really impossible.
As bad as it is, this is good.
Chapter 57
DAY 7
As dawn breaks, the others around me are already out of their sleeping bags.
We’ve all spent the night close enough to be in touch in case of a storm but far enough apart so there’s no verbal contact. The guys are all busy trying to light a fire but not with matches. For whatever reason, we have to do it the way the Indians did, rubbing a stick between our hands into a groove in a piece of wood until it smolders into an ember, then quickly putting some dried grass on it and blowing to get a flame.
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