“They workshop it!” He slammed the front counter with his hands, gloved with frayed green fingerless cotton, “They’re there, I can hear them working on me!”
As he pleaded with the front clerk, Marcus had the police on the phone, “They’re five minutes away!” He hollered from the back room.
Martha was less than pleased with the third addict this week shambling in, asking for a fix and clean needles. By far, however, this poor man had to be the worst she’d seen. He strained and stretched as he talked, looking flustered and sweating, adding an extra layer of stink atop what she could only describe as ‘like a sewer.’
“Just, just, just--...” He groaned, careening his back as far towards his rear as he could manage whilst rolling his head, in his hands. As he came back around for a front pass his groaning turned into a screech, and he collapsed onto the ground, flailing.
Martha stood suddenly and gasped, running around the counter to kneel beside him, unsure of what to do. Marcus joined her within moments, kneeling on the other side of the man, instructing her to “Grab his arms!”
She tried her best, but struggled through timidity she simply couldn’t surpass, meeting a mental wall that precluded necessary fluidity that might’ve actually had an effect on keeping the fluttering addict still.
Marcus, on the other hand, gripped his left arm firmly, and spoke commandingly down upon him, “Stop! Calm down! Stop flailing!” And he continued, eventually losing vocal superiority under the crescendo of the addict’s howling.
Much to their luck, as Marcus grew ever more sore and frustrated, drained from the extent of weight and stress required to account for Martha’s failings, and as Martha found herself on the precipice of an anxious, panicked breakdown, the cops arrived.
In a row of three, cloaked in black and armour, they passed through the automatic, sliding glass doors and surrounded the addict. In unison they took the place of Marcus and Martha, and forced the poor man, now whining and gurgling, onto his stomach. There, they quickly cuffed him at the wrists and ankles, and haulled him out the way they’d come.
Relief, sighs, returning to work, paperwork, clerical matters of only some import, and the drained faces of three seen-it-all cops progressed through the usual drag. An hour passed before the addict was haulled off to an inpatient psychiatric ward at the local hospital, three miles from the clinic into which he came shambling, shaking, and delirious.
He was carted, strapped and bound, into a little eggshell white room with a corner window overlooking the hospital’s courtyard. Therein, one little tree held together four criss-crossing concrete pathways and intermixed patches of finely mown grass. A real nature scene if he’s ever seen one.
His eye spying a bird on a branch hanging low by the only bench in the courtyard was broken by the firm call-to-attention of Dr. Osborn. At six foot three the man boasted broad shoulders, hand-tuned musculature hidden by a stuffy white coat and a Glenurquhart check suit, and a set of daring, glaring icy blue eyes standing behind thin readers.
“So, I understand you to be Mr. Michaels, correct, Sir? If you would please join me at the table.” He gestured with left hand, free from the clipboard and pen that his right grasped, and stepped forward to seat himself in a silvery metal chair. Two chairs made a set with the table, all the same flat, cold, ascetic silvery metal.
“Them--it’s, it’s just… that well… yes, um, yes. My name is uh… Samson… Michaels… yes?” He sounded confused, almost, although more than likely jittery and disheveled, having only just moments prior stepped off of his bumpy cranial cart ride.
Whether having no patience or failing to recognise this, Dr. Osborn spat out a heavy sigh, drumming the table with his free hand whilst his right thumbed through Mr. Michael’s paperwork.
“What, uh, what do you have there?” His inquisition grew bolder as he finally sat down across from the Doctor who, in reply, ignored Mr. Michaels, affording him merely a cursory, disapproving glance.
“You’ve been here in my ward five times Mr. Michaels. What are we going to do about that?”
“I guess, I, um…” Mr. Michaels scratched roughly at the back of his neck, drawing in his legs to wrap them, comfortably, forming a bulwark against his chest, “I guess, um, you could renew my, um, medicine?”
“We could do that, Mr. Michaels, but would you take it? Or, as we have seen in the past with you, Sir, would you fall off of it, back onto the morphine, and ultimately back here, with me.”
“I, um, I promi--.” The Doctor cut him off abruptly.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Michaels, I only have one choice, Sir. Indefinite commitment pending further psychiatric review.” And he drew up a stamp from his right pocket, officiating his decision with a single black mark on the still white pages of Mr. Michael’s file.
#
The following Wednesday, a cooler evening than the last, with the air wet from a soft, drizzling rainfall just hours earlier, the automatic, sliding glass doors of that very same clinic opened.
“Good evening, ma'am, how may we help you?” The clerk, a lad in his mid- to early-twenties, looked up at a woman, who wore a navy blue college hoodie, with his emerald orb. Its partner, equally as vibrantly leafy, disappeared on his seventeenth birthday following an unfortunate, untimely traffic accident that too claimed the life of his dithery Mother.
The memories there associated with, of course, were imperfect, faded, and jaded. Only the emotions associated therewith were, of course, as close to perfect as they could come, relative to their specific, detailed counterparts.
He blamed himself immediately for the death, and saw the scar, his loss of sight, and the unseemly blemish on his face, as a reminder of his insolence. If only he’d listened to his Father. It’s just a cold, it’s just the flu. But he insisted he see his Doctor, and she, in that great downpour, drove him there, and met face to face with a hydroplaning semi.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
“I’m here to see, um, I have an appointment with… damnit…” She cursed again and again, too quietly for the clerk to hear her, as she dug through her purse, looking for that little piece of paper.
“Dr. Lazerith… or perhaps, ah what’s his name now, Umar, Omar? Omar. Dr. Omar?” He was just trying to be helpful, of course, the reality was twelve different Doctors rotated throughout the clinic and, being so new, he knew of only three.
“Dr. Cadian.” She eventually affirmed, finding the crumpled, trivially torn piece of paper at the bottom of her purse, below her cellphone. It buzzed, a text, but she ignored it.
“Dr. Cadian, right, just head… err… are you alright, ma’am?” He stood up, legs kicking back his wheeled chair a foot, unintentionally, as he leaned just over the desk to get a better look.
She had collapsed, smacking the desk’s lip with her chin before hitting the floor. The blow had rendered her unconscious, unbeknownst to the clerk, who, in his panic, brushed the panic button and hurriedly sprinted around to tend to her.
He knelt on her left, back to the doors, and took her head in one hand, her wrist in the other, searching for a pulse. Assessing, he saw no blood, but the subtly abnormal movements in her jaw told him one thing: broken.
“Mom.” The verbalism almost tripped on its way out. She looked so similar to Mom. The way her long, black hair curved over her shoulders and petered off in both directions, forming a point. And the way her nose, petite, pointed, and asymmetrical with her eyes, biased to the left, gave a certain sense of gracelessness to her face.
“No, no, no… come back, come back!” The clerk started to cry, tears pouring forth, now beyond his control and as the world around him fell into a state of blur. Like a ring, the illusion wrapped the edges of his eyes and blinded him to everything but the object of his desires.
Many hands prodded and grabbed at him in his moment of disillusioned despair, but none could save him from the weight of the water. None could pull him back to the surface. The depths, in all their intrinsic darkness, were, to him, a comfort found to be comfortable by comparison and by necessity.
Ultimately, it was the strike of a baton, firmly, to the back of his skull, that broke him away from his fit of despondence. The cops, five this time, dragged his ragdolled body out of the clinic, and into the back of an ambulance.
The Head-of-Staff declared him to have suffered an episodic mental breakdown, ordering, imminently, his commitment for evaluation and treatment at the local inpatient psychiatric ward. It was, of course, the only way.
Four and a half miles, and a stop at the gas station mini-mart, brought the medics, and their drooling, lifeless patient to the ward. Lifeless, this is to say, in his lack of willed locomotion and unresponsiveness.
“Another one?” Dr. Volhair almost sounded surprised, and might’ve been interpreted to have been so if not for his dismissive composure. “We’re getting a little full, Bull, couldn’t you start, I don’t know… just getting rid of them?” He shot a thumb towards the door.
“You know the rules, Volhair, we have our orders and we bring them here. Get rid of the fuck yourself.”
The medics departed, turning on heel in unison, leaving a disrespected, irked Dr. Volhair to make haste of his attendants. This way and that, down these halls and those, to acquire a morphine drip and someone to look at that head wound of his.
The clerk didn’t die in that hospital. Of course, why would he? It’s a hospital, after all. Four months of heavily medicated, regimented treatment for a mental break of the fourth degree, and a serious head wound, and he was finally a free man.
Emaciated now, baggy eyed, dark eyed, on his lonesome, delirious, and itching. Itching, itching, itching. Scratching, pulling, peeling the skin and giving way to trickles of blood, staining his sleeves and leaving unnoticed marks on the pavement below.
“I just… I just…” He groaned and stuttered, jerking his head around the night streets, dimly illuminated, in search of a sign. A sign, of course, of a dealer. Too easy to spot after years of practice. The death of Mom left the pack aching. A point of the dragon’s nectar bought an evening of freedom from the tireless pursuit of the pack, eager to chomp and thrash.
“Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, my boy!” The ha-ha’s and ha-ho’s danced and graced their reunion. Supplier and buyer. But the dealer understood poor Johnny’s predicament.
“No cash, Johnny? Don’t worry, honey, drink, and you’ll forget all about it. Drink, and when you’ve found someplace to dough up your pockets you’ll come back, and we’ll work something out."
He led Johnny through a short maze of parcel estates to a corner concealed from the streets and street lights. There, he passed Johnny a crumpled square of tinfoil, and a spark of butane. Thus, the loop renewed.
Renewed, reignited, and re-energised. Johnny was flying, man! Higher than we’d ever seen him before. Flying with a wingspan, at least, fifty feet across. He flew from his runway off the balcony of 50th and Hatch, his Mom’s old place. Apparently, the key still worked.
I hear he’s up Park way these days. Lining his pockets and chasing the wyrm, Leo, who dances his way through the alleys and box estates up Park way. But that’s just what they say. Maybe we’ll go looking for him? Maybe not. Pass the blunt, would you?
#
The psychedelic jazz from Haerman’s sax and Tim’s keyboard and Joe’s upright bass boomed and bopped, rocked and tapped, shaking and spewing life into that little club on the corner of 50th and Hatch. Lightning Sun Moe’s, they call it. It’s the spot to be on Saturday night.
Booze of all degrees lined the shelves behind the bar. Red wines and clear liquors, blues from the south and maroons from the north. All manner of mixing material, fit for rocks and fit for composites.
It was the jumping joy of the town, that little town, Park way, they called it. Ever the joyous place to be, little Park way, pride of the Mayor’s restoration and his benefactor’s patronage.
These stores and those, flashy, bright, with looking-eyes and lookie-loos passing by at goodie-goodies they’ll never afford. Bejeweled this and encrusted that, every shade of silver, gold, and platinum you’ve ever seen. A sight to see if ever one Man-made deserved such wondrous reference.
It was from there that Johnny-boy rejoined the wee-morning hour streets. The Sunday crowd shuffled out, wailing for cabs and stumbling to cars parked further than remembered.
But for Johnny-boy the night couldn’t possibly end without his fix. No volume of alcohol could replace the pain that marred and mocked his delirious heart. It pumped, oh it pumped, but struggled and waned against the pain and ill function of its deep, irreparable scars.
He found that fix up Leo’s way. The drake’s flames spewed forth and took with them all in their path, scorching the earth and crop and building, all alike went up in flames and down in thick, black ash.
Johnny-boy’s sun was finally eclipsed, and relief became him as he became the streets. And the Moon the Earth. And the Galaxy the Universe. And again, Johnny-boy joined the Way, and found relief.