A Chapter From Something Long I am Working on: Fiction

It was a classic cheap low-end psychiatrist’s office.  Barely decorated, impersonal, and cold.  No rugs, just tile floor and some bland paintings that seemed to melt into the wall.  Dr. Blein was unmemorable.  Average height, pretty, 50, friendly and concise.  Within a few minutes Dylan began his dance with the nurse and psychiatrist bearing witness to his grace, his subtlety, his slow and practiced moves.  

“What brings you here today Dylan,” Blein opened with.  

“anxiety, depression, I feel like there is a hole in my chest”  Dylan began with.  

“Can you tell me more about this feeling?” Blein responded

“I can’t sleep.  It feels like something has been dug out of me, perhaps it never existed.  The hole feels about a foot around in circumference where my heart should be.   It’s more like a void than a hole, it isn’t fillable.  I used to have a friend who would tell me that everyone has this void, and that while others try to fill it with love, music, tv, drugs, or friends, he just liked to go outside and run as fast as he could and listen to it whistle.”

“How long have you felt like this?”

“As far back as I can remember, as far back as I have bit my nails, as far back as I have felt more island than archipelago, never a mainland.”

Dylan was putting on a show.  How he relished these moments.  Sitting in the hell that is the West Side Crisis Center, waiting in the rain with the homeless and broke clients, he had the psychiatrist and nurse on the edge of their seats as he leapt and spun on the head of the pin.

Dylan continued, “I awoke the other day to smoke.  I stood outside with all the cold humans in the fog of the outer sunset, and we kept ourselves warm with our cigarettes.  Inhaling poison and making a deal with death, one less day for a few more moments of rest.  I filled the air with American Spirit Blue’s in  sea of Camel smoke.  I am just bourgeois enough to smoke spirits instead of camels.  The fog was too thick to see the ocean from my house, 2 blocks away, so I walked to the dunes stretching to the lapping shorebreak.  I hate doing most things, nearly everything, including walking most of the time.  Anyways, I spent an hour chain smoking half my pack and deciding whether or not to walk out into the cold violent sea and give myself to it.  I am sick of taking care of myself, I am shit at it.”

“Thanks for sharing Dylan, that sounds really hard.  Do you have much support”

“I have a few friends, but I am mostly alone.”

a long pause:  Dylan could feel the power of the storyteller, the attention, the presence of his audience, holding their feelings and emotions in his hands.  It was a beautiful thing.  A lot of his anarchist friends think they can destitute power and Dylan spent most of his life afraid of his power.  He had once tried to murder a peer at 17, and had been scared of his own power since.  But in this moment, he was free to do what he does best, tell a story.  And he wove the web with the expertise that was so much more common before the written word took precedence centuries and centuries ago:

“ I fear being alone.  I keep people close who I feel little to no affinity for, and because of it I am more alone.  I fuck strangers and burn myself with my American Spirit blues repeatedly the moment they leave.  My mother was always there but never present.  My father angry and alone, never cut the psychic gap between us.  My siblings fell in line, I was alone, at war with myself, my peers, my family, my teachers, my society.”

Dylan’s execution was pristine.  He had the setup complete, and the best part of it was that it was all true and concurrently total fucking bullshit.  All the real, the material reality, had happened as he had said.  But, he was aware enough to have changed his relationship to these things, but had he?  So deep in the story of his own supposed tragedy that it became impossible for him to discern his own feelings as he moved through it, shared it, vivisected himself just enough for the psychiatrist and nurse to catch glimpses, but not enough for them to actually see.  

Dylan began to lose himself and with it the audience, caught up in his own reality or lack thereof.  He noticed it just in time and moved forward in his dance, his movement, the play he was putting on for a few handfuls of Klonepin.

“This isn’t my first time.  I have been other places like this before.  There is only one thing that has ever helped me, allowed me to work, to maintain friendships, to be a functional member of this society.  It was some pill they gave me before…”

Blein jumped in, “xanax”

“No, something else, that one doesn’t work”

“Lorazepam,” she stated

“that one has never helped.  It was ca, cla, clasernam.?”

“you mean klonepin?”

“yeah, that is it.  That is the only one that helped”

Blein responded slowly, “well, we try not to give out benzos(short for benzodiazepine), but…”

“But, it seems like they have helped you before and I trust you to be careful with them”

Dylan, ever the professional actor, “of course! I hate drugs! Most of them make me feel awful and I am scared of them.  I only use them in case of emergency, when I feel most scared of myself”

Blein took our her script and began writing a prescription for Klonopin.  Dylan felt relief and pride at having pulled off the delicate dance.  The nurse, who an hour previously had told Dylan that he would not be getting benzos today, shook his head in disgust.  He was no fool, and while Dylan may have captivated him for a while with his story, this young man was far too cynical and cared too much about people with supposed real  problems to be fooled by this privileged human in front of him.  

Blein handed the script across a big professional table and Dylan slowly took it, folded it, put it in his wallet and listened to a long lecture from Blein about safety, before quickly thanking her, taking joy in one final smug glance at the angry nurse, and slowly walking out of the building with the small sheet of paper that he had come here for.  Victory really can differ across what is commonly known as humanity.