DEADITE PRESS
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PORTLAND, OR 97211
www.DEADITEPRESS.com
AN ERASERHEAD PRESS COMPANY
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ISBN: 1-936383-67-5
Copyright 2014 © by Wrath James White
Cover art copyright © 2014 Suzzan Blac
www.suzzanb.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Printed in the USA.
“Nothing begins and nothing ends
that is not paid in moan;
For we are born in other’s pain,
and perish in our own.”
—Francis Thompson, “Daisy”
Something ripped as Melanie contracted both her abdominal and kegel muscles and pushed with all she was worth. The infant split open her sex as its body progressed through her cervix, dilating it as if she were being raped by an elephant. Seven pounds, eight ounces, nineteen inches, tore slowly through an opening that had previously admitted nothing larger than eight inches.
“Aaaaaeeeiiii! Oh God! I can’t take it! Aaaaaarrgh!”
“The head is crowning! I can see it. Keep pushing!”
The doctor held up a mirror so she could see her vagina tear wide and disgorge the mewling parasite she’d carried within her for nine months. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she let out another terse scream as she squeezed out the child’s head and shoulders.
“AAAAAaaaaah! AAAAAaaaaah!”
“That’s it! That’s it! It’s coming!”
A few more agonizing contractions and Jason slid out into the doctor’s arms followed immediately by the chunky red afterbirth.
“It’s a boy!” the doctor announced gleefully. He tied off the umbilical chord and snipped it and the baby shrieked like a scalded cat.
His entire body twisted and convulsed as the shrill cry tore from Jason’s tiny lungs. The piercing scream emptying the small child of all vitality. He shook spasmodically, frothing at the mouth, his eyes rolling up into his head. Then he lay still, dangling lifelessly in the doctor’s arms.
“Is that normal? Is he okay? What’s wrong with our baby?” Edward asked frantically.
The doctor stood holding the little boy’s limp body, looking from nurse to nurse in shock, like a child who’d accidentally broken something valuable and knew he’d be blamed for it.
“He’s not breathing. Bring the crash cart over STAT!”
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong with my baby?”
Melanie was panicking now too. She sat up in bed with her legs still in the stirrups and her face imploring the doctor for answers. She was spent and fatigued, but she could not let herself sleep until she knew her child was okay.
Melanie reached out for her husband and they hugged each other for comfort, watching as their newborn baby disappeared into a throng of nurses and doctors urgently working to save the child’s life.
Their baby was whisked away to an emergency room and Melanie was led into a nearby recovery room with Edward still at her side trying to comfort her.
“These doctors are professionals. I’m sure they deal with this kind of thing every day. I know our baby will be fine. God looks out for the little ones.”
But Melanie could see his own worry and stress behind his optimistic façade. When he began to pray, rather than console her as it was meant to, it only increased her concern.
Four hours went by before the doctor returned with news of their son’s health.
“We’re not sure what’s wrong with him. All of his vitals seem normal. His heart, lungs, liver, and kidney are well-developed and strong. We did a CAT scan that confirmed normal brain function although there was some elevated activity in the Thalamus that we have a Neurologist looking at now. His blood-pressure is also rather elevated and he’s pumping adrenaline like a prizefighter. He—he appears to be in pain, a lot of pain. We just can’t identify the source.”
***
The first year of Jason’s life was spent screaming in mind-numbing anguish as his parents held him, rocked him, and sang to him. Their soft cooing voices lanced through his eardrums and rattled in his skull. The press of their flesh against his, the heat of their bodies, the swaying motion as they walked with him in their arms felt like he was in a car wreck being tossed around as the vehicle tumbled down an embankment and burned.
“He screams every time I touch him, every time I speak to him. From the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep he just screams and cries! He even cries when I try to feed him. He doesn’t love me. He- he hates me!” His mother cried to one specialist after another as they examined her tortured child with looks of utter perplexity on their faces.
Everything hurt. The feel of the blankets abrading his delicate skin, the scalding heat of daylight searing through the chips in the black paint that coated the windows, the smell of human sweat, breath, excrement, deodorant, and hair products, the jangling cacophony of the human voice, his own included. The feel of polluted oxygen raking its way down his throat into his lungs felt to him like breathing teargas. The expanding of his lungs felt as if his chest were being torn open. Every sound, every taste, every scent, every sensation his body absorbed hit him like an assault. At times the beating of his own heart made him want to scream.
It took several examinations and innumerable tedious and excruciating tests before all the specialists reached a probable diagnosis.
“Your child has Acute Hypersensitivity. It’s a rare form of a very rare disorder, a type of Thalamic Syndrome or Central Pain Disorder. Usually it’s caused by damage to the Thalamus, the part of your brain where sensory information is processed, but your son seems to have been born with it. To put it simply, his nervous system is wired up improperly sending an overload of signals to the pain centers of his brain. Every sensation he feels registers in his brain as physical distress. It’s highly unlikely that he’ll live more than a few years and he’ll probably spend all of that time in agony. We can give him pain-killers and keep increasing the dosages and switching medications as he builds up tolerances, but eventually we will run out of drugs powerful enough to help. By that time he’ll also be hopelessly addicted.”
“You mean he’s going to be addicted to narcotics for the rest of his life?”
“Either that or in constant agony.”
His parents did what they could. They had his room insulated against sound intrusion. They had the windows painted black to keep out the sun. They removed the light bulbs from the light fixture in the ceiling and padded the walls and floor with foam rubber.
His food had to be washed and boiled several times to render it tasteless enough for him to consume, then cooled to room temperature. The meat and vegetables were then sliced into pieces so small that he could swallow them without chewing. Everything he ate was chopped, minced, or pureed. The only liquid he could consume was purified water. Still, the act of eating was anathema to him. The entire digestive process was torturous and bowel movements of any kind felt to him as if he were being wrenched inside out.
The drugs helped some. By the age of seventeen he’d been on every narcotic from Codeine to Morphine. His father had even brought him Heroine once or twice when the screaming had become intolerable. Eventually the screaming stopped as Jason acquired a tolerance for the little pain they couldn’t protect him from.
“It’s cruel to keep him alive. Do you think we’re being selfish? Maybe we should just let him die?”
“We can’t! Are you crazy? He’s our child! Our little boy. We have to help him.”<
br />
“That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s all I ever try to do. But maybe we’re doing the wrong thing by him. Maybe the best thing we could do would be to end his suffering forever.”
Jason sat in his darkened room listening to his parents argue. He had heard this conversation many times over the years, when his parents thought he wasn’t listening. Sometimes they would forget to close his bedroom door. His father’s heartfelt pleas for his euthanasia made him love the old man. It was an emotion that fit uncomfortably in his heart. His mother’s insistence that he continue to live in agony made him hate the bitch.
“Here you go, honey.”
Jason winced. His eardrums felt like they’d been punctured with a sewing needle. His mother stood in the doorway to his bedroom holding a rubber cup filled with water. Rubber was the only substance that was not unbearable to him. Other textures felt like sandpaper across raw nerves. In her other hand she held his painkillers. Jason hated taking them. The dry chalky pills felt like battery acid as they burned their way down to his belly, but two or three Darvocets every couple of hours were the only things that kept him from chewing the veins out of his wrists. When the medication inevitably wore out it felt as if he were floating in a pool of fire ants.
“I wish you would put some clothes on. I know they hurt you, but you’re too old now to be sitting around the house naked all the time.”
Jason ignored her. He knew his stoic silence bothered her, but he was sick of the headaches the jarring vibration of his voice inevitably caused him. Even the Darvocet wasn’t enough to help him once the migraines came on. Only sensory deprivation would help then.
His parents had a sensory deprivation device built for him to help quite the noise of the world. It was a latex vacuum body-bag that hung from the ceiling on nylon ropes affixed to each corner. A zipper let him in and out and a tube that he placed in his mouth allowed him to breathe. Once the vacuum was turned on and all the air was sucked out of the bag, it would cling to him like a symbiote and nullify all sensation. Then he could sleep.
Jason took the pills from his mother, popped them into his mouth, and washed them down with the water. He then turned his back on her without saying a word and crawled slowly into the latex bag, wincing as his skin made contact with the cold metal zipper sending icy electric tingles of pain through his flesh. With another wince and a nauseous toss of the stomach, Jason recalled how he’d once fallen face first onto the floor trying to climb into the bag on his own before he got the hang of it. He laid there in mute agony for nearly an hour suppressing the urge to scream. Over the years he’d learned that his screams brought unwanted attention from his parents. His mother still had not learned not to touch or speak to him when he was in torment. Her maternal instincts would override all reason and she would run to him and try to hold him or talk to him, forgetting how much her voice and her touch serrated his nerve endings. Forgetting that the normal comforts a mother offered to her child were torture to him.
Balancing one foot on the floor while slipping the other leg into the bag, Jason eased himself into the soothing comfort of the vacuum bag. It was hooked to a wall vac and Jason had a remote control to start it up and suck out all the air once he was inside. He eased both arms into the bag while steadying his balance to keep the thing from rocking and then threw his other leg in as well. Last, he slipped his head inside and bit down on the rubber tube that would provide his only oxygen while he was mummified in the bag. He then slid the zipper shut from inside and hit the remote on the vacuum unit. The sound of the vacuum assailed his eardrums and Jason grit his teeth against the din, knowing that it would soon be over. Soon the bag was pressed tight against his skin as all the air was sucked out of it sealing him inside. Once all the air was gone the vacuum shut off on its own. Jason could not see, hear, taste, or smell anything, but the faint aroma of latex. He lay there cocooned in rubber, adjusting to the feeling of weightlessness, the absence of sensation, and the smell of the bag, until he was fast asleep.
***
Melanie stared at her son’s locked bedroom door and felt a tug at her heart. What a cruel joke. After years of expensive fertility drugs, hormones, embarrassing exercises and sexual positions, she and her husband Edward had finally conceived a child. Then, after her son is born, she finds out that the child she’d carried for nine-months, the one she dreamed of having since she was a little girl, the one that was supposed to give her the love her own parents and even her husband had been unable to give her, that eternal unconditional love a boy has for his mother, abhors her touch. Her love could only bring him misery.
Tears dripped from Melanie’s eyes as she recalled how hard she’d tried to deny the truth. Even after the doctors told her about Jason’s condition she’d still tried to hold him and sing to him.
What child doesn’t like to be rocked in his mother’s arms? What child doesn’t like to be sang to sleep while snuggled against his mother’s breast? Why can’t I have a normal son!
She’d even continued trying to breast feed him. More than once she’d grown so frustrated when he’d spit her nipple out and scream that she’d slapped him. Both times he fainted and went into convulsions. When the convulsions finally ceased he would lie there barely breathing in short shallow breaths with his temperature dropping dangerously low and his heartbeat faint and slow. Melanie prayed he would survive but was afraid to take him to the hospital for fear she’d be arrested for child-abuse.
“I’m so sorry, baby. Oh, Jason, don’t die. Mommy’s so sorry. Don’t die, please. Mommy didn’t mean to hurt you. Oh, God don’t let my baby die!”
When his pulse rate returned to normal she would stick him back in the little plastic bubble they had made for him and seal it up tight. Then she’d stare at him and cry, pitying herself far more than her traumatized infant.
Melanie took some steak out of the freezer to thaw. Somehow she thought that the right diet would one day cure him. She would make him a hearty steak and potatoes man like her father.
Growing impatient, she ran hot water over the steak to speed up the thawing process then peeled it off of the little Styrofoam tray it was frozen to and tossed the whole thing into a pot of boiling water along with some potatoes. She cast another glance at her son’s hermetically sealed door and let out a sigh as that familiar distress and longing lanced through her heart before returning to prepare her meal. She took two more pieces of steak out of the refrigerator. These however, were seasoned with cracked pepper and onions and placed in the oven for her and her husband.
At first Melanie and her husband had tried to eat like their son out of sympathy for him or perhaps even as self-punishment. More than once Edward had commented that he didn’t think it was fair that they should be happy while their son suffered. They had even stopped having sex. Edward didn’t want to risk having another defective offspring, and felt guilty over the pleasure she brought him. Their son would never know such joy.
After a few years they went back to their old habits. They began seasoning their food again, though not as flavorfully as before. The overwhelming smell of the spices made Jason’s stomach uneasy and sometimes caused him to regurgitate. They didn’t fry their food anymore either, but at least they no longer boiled everything and occasionally they even ordered take-out. They were already sacrificing enough for their son. No need to make even their meals a misery.
Their sex life returned in a way. Only now it was accompanied by latex and estrogen pills. Sometimes her husband cried during sex. Sometimes she did as well. They couldn’t help but to remember when the act was filled with love and anticipation. When they would imagine that each seed had the possibility of conceiving a bundle of joy to complete their family. Now their bundle of joy lay in the room across the hall mummified in latex in fear that someone or something might touch him and make him scream.
Melanie turned on the T.V. She flipped to one of her favorite talk shows and watched as the well-built and clean-shaven black host leaned in close as if capti
vated by the words of his guest, a diminutive Asian man in an orange robe. Melanie had always had a thing for black men. At one time she’d dated them almost exclusively. That was just one of the many secrets she’d never shared with Edward. He had enough burdens to carry than to worry about how he stacked up next to the black stallions that had mounted her in the past, especially now that their sex-life had been reduced to a cold sterile bodily function like urinating or taking a shit. Merely a necessity to relieve the pressure of the sex-drive rather than something done from genuine passion or desire.
Melanie turned up the sound.
“…Yes, this is true. The pain was excruciating, but I was able to block it out through meditation, creative visualization, and proper breathing techniques. I survived being trapped beneath an avalanche for six days with two broken legs and a broken arm. The mud-slide knocked me right off my bike and smashed me into every rock and boulder on the mountain. I also had broken ribs, three broken fingers, and a deep laceration across my forehead. I was dizzy, in terrific pain, and freezing to death beneath the mud. I finally dug my way out using my one good arm, set the bones in my legs and arm myself and splinted them with tree branches and shoe laces, then crawled back up the mountain to the road. I tried to keep my mind focused outside myself. I imagined that I was the birds overhead or the rodents and insects burrowing through the soil. But I couldn’t just envision it like a child playing make-believe. I had to believe it in my soul. I had to try to transport myself into their bodies and outside my own. It’s what they teach you to do at the temple but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t escape my own broken flesh. So, instead of fleeing from myself I went deeper into myself. I dove into the pain, accepted and embraced it. I took away its power by welcoming it and making peace with it. Soon it held no more fear for me than the splash of a raindrop or the chill of the morning breeze. I had conquered it completely.
His Pain Page 1