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jacksprostate · 4 days

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Part 4 (with links to the other parts)

The first thing I do is, I talk to the man who takes my sheets, with his scrapdog ears and eyebrows, and I tell him: address him properly.

The word spreads on its own. I remember, before I was used to it, that knowing lilt. Sir. It’s still present. Take your pills, sir. It’ll be alright, sir. Take your time recovering.

Mills starts cursing at the staff. We pass in the halls, he yells at me, tells me to stop them. He’s not their fucking leader. Call off my dogs.

I smile, too wide. They’ve never listened to me, not really. Especially not on this.

I can’t help you.

Naturally, he hates this.

The second thing I do is, I ask for photographs. News clippings. Marla’s dildo was large, questionable, encouraging of disorder, and a choking hazard. Slips of paper are much more tolerable contraband. I’m given free rein, like one of Zimbardo’s incentivized guards. It’s a psychology experiment in a psychology experiment, and my psychiatrist is playing Jane Goodall.

It’s arts and crafts, and all the attendees are either bruised or braindead. There is no one stopping me. I glue all my collected pieces together into the rough shape of a heart, like it’s Valentine’s Day, and I turn to Mills, trapped at the back of the room. He hasn’t seen a shred of what I’m up to.

Something to remember her by, I say. I don’t call him sir, because I never have. I wonder if he knows this.

I see him look, more instinct than anything from getting layers of paper shoved in his face, and I see how he clenches his teeth so hard his jaw creaks. He rips the collage of his wife out of my hands, and I can tell, he hates me. Real hate, like he wants death to fuck my body until it’s not even for the worms.

He can’t bear to destroy it, and now I know every time he looks at it in his room, he’ll be thinking of me. Funny how that works.

The thing is; Mills actually didn’t try to kill me this time, so I think I need to take it up a notch.

I cross the cafeteria just so I can spit in his food. I piss on his door and get the space monkey janitors to leave it for fifty-seven hours. In group therapy, I take a page from Chloe and monologue about how the last thing I’d like to do is get my rocks off chemically unhindered before the seizure medications they’ve got me on arrest all of my brain activity altogether. A nice nugget for Mills to report back to Somerset about my proposed psychosexual obsession. I segue into discussing how I met Tyler, on the nude beach, grit all across him as he hauled pilings and sat with his bare ass in the sand. It’s the most I’ve ever said about Tyler. The group minder scribbles on her sheet like mad as I describe Tyler’s wet, blond hair. His minute of perfection.

And he still doesn’t try to fight me. I know he wants to. He wants to shake me by my throat and rattle me and slam my head into the ground until it splits open like a rotten egg. But he doesn’t, and he looks torn. Like he’s guilty. Like Tyler could ever really feel guilt.

This is one of the things I want to complain about when Marla calls me.

She still does. More than when she was alive. But she says nothing, and I can’t break the silence. I sit there, orderlies watching as I say nothing, she says nothing, just a whole bunch of dead air between us.

Ghosts were always calling for Marla, at Paper Street.

Now I’ve got Marla’s ghost on the line and Tyler’s ghost in the flesh, and neither want to talk to me.

We get locked up in supervised one-on-one again, now with both of us chained and one twitch away from a new addiction.

I ask Mills, did you talk to her enough, that last week?

Do you think she knew you loved her?

Do you think she felt loved?

Mills asks for the sedation, this time. Polite about it, like he’s not seething. Like I can’t see how his eyes have been only half empty most of these days, since I’ve managed to fill him up with rage at me. Folie à deux, I want it so bad.

I am Jack’s crippling sense of rejection.

My stupid psychiatrist, he lets Mills amble out of the room and traps me in there.

I’m corralled. An angel on either shoulder. All the staff who aren’t from the Project have stopped laughing at my jokes. My antics have not gone unobserved. I’ve been given my time to rein as the world’s most entertaining lab rat, and now this localized god wants results.

“What’s your goal here?”

Isn’t it obvious?

“No. Tell me about what you’re thinking,” he says. I look at him, and I see him, for the first time. Not disillusioned, not holy. Just a sniveling doctor with a penchant for human experimentation and the funding to enable him.

How horribly average.

He says, “I understand this is difficult for you, but we really need to know what’s going on if you want to have continued support in this manner for your recovery.” Play nice, or you’ll lose your favorite toy.

I say, this has never been about recovery. It’s time we faced that, isn’t it?

This man, so used to my religious apathy, has never truly had a challenge. He looks pinched.

He says, “Of course I want you to recover.”

And I laugh, and I point out that we both know those outside these halls are more interested in what’s wrong with me than any semblance of fixing it.

You’re not getting paid to drain the swamp in my head. You’re here to keep it plugged up, decomposing. We both know this, I’m just acknowledging it. I laugh.

I tell this little god, he can write me up in all his little acclaimed journals.

But don’t come to me, saying I have to play your little games or you’ll take Mills away. We both know you won’t. The day I give up, the day I become a real vegetable is the day your cash cow keels over. You’re not going to punish me. Not really. You’ll take away my jello, my oats, you’ll put me on lithium and clozapine and valproic acid, but you don’t really want this to end. You don’t want me to get better. You want Tyler back just as much as I do. You can’t do shit to me. I have nothing to lose.

You have everything.

Tyler’s words, back home in my mouth. They’re mine now. I get up and the orderlies flanking me do nothing. I look down on this small, small man, and I think, he has never known a bigger fish. He doesn’t even know the hands that feed him.

I’ve hit bottom, I say, and it’s not you who holds the shovel. Be grateful I let you observe.

#next day reblog #watching an american werewolf in london tonight #i was Obsessed with werewolves as a kid to an unhealthy degree #maybe i should use that. after se7en crossover is done. hm

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