Heartbeat

The first hour of skipping school is easy. My mother is bogged down with new fashions and new clothes and new shoes and new sunglasses so much that she’s completely oblivious to her son waking up a half-hour early to leave the house before anyone’s even woken up. I leave a note on the refrigerator telling her I needed to get to school early to work on a project. She’ll buy it. That’s how we work. My family doesn’t ever talk to each other verbally, face-to-face, so we leave notes for each other on napkins or sticky notes on the fridge. They write to us when to order pizza when they’ll get home too late to cook a real dinner. I write to them when I need new school supplies or a ride to school. I still can’t figure out why we haven’t disowned ourselves completely.

When I leave the house, the air is crystal cold, the kind of distinct cold that nips at your cheeks and ears like needles. I trudge out of my driveway, backpack over my shoulders. I make my way through the early morning dark until I’m at the end of the street at the bus stop. I sit on the bench and wait.

The bus comes half an hour later, to slide open its door and puke out two old, slouching men. I slip up onto the bus and welcome in the warmth of the heater. I dig two quarters out of my backpack and pay the driver. I find a seat somewhere in the back. The bus is filled a variety of different societal drones; a lady carrying a sleeping child, another old guy, a business-looking woman, and two thirteen-year-old-looking kids in the back thumb-wrestling.

I don’t know what my destination is, but whatever it is, it is not school.

Five minutes, two people get off, leaving the bus even more emptier. I look around and think of a place I can go. I think of nothing. I check my watch. Gerard is at my house by now, in his car, waiting for me to come outside and ride to school with him.

I look out the window and observe. We pass by gas stations, card stories, flower stores, a Payless, one Sears, and a mall somewhere in the background.

And then I see it, and the idea pops into my head, clean, clear, bright, and shining like tin foil.

The building is large and white, with a million windows and a small statue at the top.

My destination: Kirkbride Psychiatric Hospital.

I grab my backpack and exit faster than anything. The front of the building seems welcoming enough. Nicely cut grass, carefully arranged rock gardens. The building appears calm. The only thing you really have to do is ignore the fencing and bars over the windows.

I enter inside and nobody sees me. The building is warmer than I thought it would be. It looks formal, like a queen’s countryside mansion. Vanilla white marble floors with white walls. There are cushiony chairs everywhere, aligned, so it looks like the waiting room in a doctor’s office. A large window to another smaller room sits on the wall near me; a check-in booth. I move forward and nobody sees. The farther I get inside, the more people I see. Nurses in white outfits, muscular men in white pushing large wheeled baskets of laundry. A living room-kind of place with a TV and couch; patients sit around in sock, pajama pants, and a white shirts, watching the television or reading. I move up the stairs, past a man with graying hair who sits there stone-cold, staring at his feet, a catatonic state keeping him unanimated. I move up to the second floor. A nurse glances at me, but then assumes I must be visiting so she leaves me alone.

The second floor it the craziest one, almost. The psycho floor. The schizophrenic floor. The straight jacket and locked up in room with cushioned walls floor. Somebody is screaming. I can hear it. On the same floor, but on a totally different side of the hospital. I listen to his screaming, for a moment. Angry and sad at the same time. Begging to be let out or have something besides the padded cell and isolation. I bet he’s real pissed they’re keeping him alive.

The third floor is almost the same as the second. The criminally insane floor. The severely obsessive compulsive floor. Patients sit in cubicle cells and gaze out the tiny square windows at the top. Some see me and stare. I make eye contact with one of them and she burst away from the second she sees me seeing her. The atmosphere is somewhat quiet, except for one patient yelling at a nurse down the hall because she isn’t giving him any lithium. I think I’m safe, until I nurse comes up to me. She asks me if I’m family of any of the patients, and I’m visiting. She asks me if I’m checking myself in here, admitting myself into this place. I mutter something about having to call my father and belt away before she can ask me anything more.

The fourth floor is not as bad. A lot quieter. The clinically depressed floor. The bipolar floor. The catatonic floor. I pass by nurses wheeling along statue-still patients in wheelchairs. When people walk around, they walk real slow, each step just oozing by. Everybody looks tired and nobody has a smile on their face. I watch the living room a bit. Catatonics sit real still on the chairs and gaze at the television. The clinically depressed play cards in silence, and two patients just doze off on the couch.

This floor is the best floor. Everything is quiet. Nobody is screaming. I look around and it is perfect. Nobody talks to anybody else. Nobody speaks. Nobody yells at anybody. Patients sit around and read books and watch TV and eat snacks occasionally and don’t say a word. This whole place is perfect, not just this floor, but everywhere. I could connect with these people, as bizarre as that sounds. I want to be one of these people. They’d give me a nice, warm bed to sleep in every night and I could just walk around in socks and pajamas all day, reading, watching TV and doing nothing. Relaxing. Nobody would tell me what to say, what to do, how to do it, how I did it wrong. They’d numb me up on pills and I wouldn’t have to feel a hit or a whop or a whack ever again. I wouldn’t feel anything at all. I bet their food’s better, too, than the school’s, at least. I could sleep in and take warm baths whenever I want have a nurse cater to me. I could even find that kid who’s screaming and I could lock myself up in that padded room with him and we could scream for hours.

I could live here forever.

A nurse strolls by with a wheeling rack of patient’s clothes. When she steps away from the rack to unlock a patient’s room, I grab a pair of pajamas off the rack and flee. Down the hall, almost all of the patient’s rooms are empty. Either, they are waiting to be occupied and filled, or the patients are just not in their right now. I find a room at the end of the hall and lock the door.

The inside of it makes me almost smile. It’s perfect. Simple and nice. A mere bed with nice, soft blankets, and a comfy-looking pillow. A bedside table sits next to it, with a small journal and pen neatly arranged on top. A chair sits in the corner. It looks like a nice touch at first, but then you notice after a while, that’s it’s nailed to the floor. The window would look more attractive if there were not bars over it. The room is comfortable and welcoming, but built to slaughter any chance of escape.

I almost smile.

My bag gets dumped on the floor as I strip down to my underwear. I stand there for a moment, exposed and half-naked. There is no mirror in the room, or anything else that could be smashed and used to slit wrists. I pull on the pajama pants and the white shirt and crawl into the bed and indulge.

It is comfier than my bed. The blankets are warm and welcoming, like the open arms of a big hug. I slide down underneath the covers and rest my head on the pillow. I breathe in deep and look up at all the white silence. I could fall asleep here. This would be a nice place to die, all of this calm, white, quiet surrounding me. My parents think that their vacations to Cancun are relaxing. My sister thinks her boyfriend’s room is relaxing. I haven’t thought of them much until now, but now I see how wrong they are. This is most relaxing place I’ve ever been to. Surrounded in a nice, calm quiet, warm in your pajamas, and just laying around sleeping and knowing that you are in a place where people are just as messed up as you are so they can accept you for that, that is relaxation.

I almost think about taking a nap. The nurses wouldn’t find me, I’ve locked the door. It would be cool to sleep here. It’s quiet and calm and the atmosphere is perfect. I can’t sleep at home. I can’t sleep in school. I can’t sleep at Gerard’s house because he doesn’t give me the chance to take even a tiny nap. It’s getting harder to sleep at all. There are patients here who can’t sleep ever because of night terrors and they get so scared they go crazy. I could stay here. I could be like that. I belong here.

And then I don’t.

Outside the room, I can hear walking by, chattering about the patients and medication. Through the floor, I can hear that kid start screaming again. And I listen to it, really listen to it, and for a moment, if you listen hard enough, you can tell exactly what he’s screaming about.

No more hope.

I could stay here. I could sleep and walk around and take their meds and no one would ever find out that I’m not really a patient. I don’t want to go back home, back to Gerard. I just want to sleep. I want a nice, warm bed, and I want all this thick, white, hushing quietness that tears my skin off and then wraps itself around and it feels like velvet, so soft and kind. I can’t hear the blood in my head anymore. It’s just silence. Pure, beautiful silence.

I check my watch. I would be in third block right now, trying to find a place to sit at lunch and getting an eraser thrown at the back of my head and getting pushed into lockets and getting my stuff shoved out of my arms and thrown to the floor in the hallways. Gerard would whack me upside the head and it would hurt worse than anything. It’ll repeat itself the next day. I’ve gotten whacked a total of twenty times this week. Somebody stuck a paper on my back that said ‘FAGGOT’ but I didn’t bother to take it off. I walked around all day with it on. Mikey called me and asked me if I wanted to come over and practice basketball shooting with him. I said no, I just…I can’t.

Outside, the snow is starting to thin. Less snowfalls, but it will still take forever for all the snow that has already came down, to thaw and disappear. The air smells like springtime, but doesn’t look or feel like it.

I dig underneath the covers deeper and rest my head on the pillow. My head sinks in on contact and it feels so comfortable, I could lay there forever. I close my eyes to sleep. I am almost close to getting to sleep, until I hear the jiggling of the door. There is a click and a red-haired head pops in and looks around. I keep still with my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep.

“Checks,” she says, and then closes the doors, locks it up again with he set of keys and walks off down the hall. I open my eyes. I don’t’ belong. I do, inside of my head, but I don’t.

I lay my head back down and let myself sleep that time. A dream about flying away with wings that are like dove wings now, white and huge and when I reach the cliff and feel the wind on my face when I take off it feels so nice and refreshing and I could fly away right to the moon and stay up there forever.

And then I’m falling. Plunging downwards towards dark waters and the moons whispers goodbye and slips between black clouds and when I smash into the water I can’t breathe and I only wake up once my head clunks on the floor after I fall right out of the bed. It almost feels like a whop or a smack, but not as bad.

The room is cold now. I think they’ve turned down the heater. I look around a bit. I don’t want to leave. But school is over now, when I check my watch. I strip down and pull my regular clothes back on, and compared to the pajamas, it feels like I’m slipping on a prison outfit and walking back to my prison cell. I grab my backpack and belt out of the place before any nurse can see me, and then slip back onto the bus and doze off all the way to my house. I come back to an empty home, my mother at work, and my father at work, and my sister wherever. I claw underneath the blankets of my own bed and hate it. I want to go back to the bed in the psyche ward. And I can’t stand my room. The room is a lie; bits and pieces of other people’s personalities mixed it to make my own plastic one. Posters of bands I don’t even listen to. Clothes I don’t even like wearing. The walls are not painted like Hannah’s, so they stay the plain fake-wood paneling style. I want to paint everything white. I could get rid of everything and just leave the bed. Make it like the room in the psyche ward. But my mother would never allow it.

Tomorrow I will have to go back to school. This must be my Hell level. Or maybe I’m not there yet. Maybe it’s being trapped in a school full of whining, sucking pancake-makeup-covered faces who whisper about each other for no reason and dump my crap on the floor and make me fee like a little kid in the locker room. Or maybe’s it’s my parents fighting each other in the never-ending competition to see who can be more boring. Or maybe it’s every whack and kick and hit and smack and fuck on a bed with my face in a pillow that smells like piss and raw sex and the scent of the Satan himself. Or maybe it’s waking up every morning, knowing you have to repeat all of that every single day, every single day, every single day like you did the day before and the day before like the guy who had to roll the boulder up the mountain, except you’d know that when you died there would be no relief, because you were already dead and this was what you won as a booby prize in the game of Eternal Soul Roulette.

I sometimes wonder what the devil will think of me. Maybe when I go to hell after I die, the devil will think I’m so pathetic that he’ll call me a pansy and kick me out and then I’ll get to go up to Heaven and the maybe things will be good.

But probably not.