Vengeance

This story contains graphic imagery in order to convey the sense of terror I felt nine years ago.  Looking back on these memories is challenging and frightening for me, for it recalls a time when I was capable of hallucination.  Although I held on to these memories as fact for many years, I know now that the man in my room was a figment of my imagination.

It is November of 2005.  I am in tenth grade, sitting in English class in a public high school.  School is not something I enjoy, but this class isn’t bad.  Every day, at the beginning of this particular class, our teacher gives us a prompt and five minutes to write about whatever comes to mind.  Then he will call on volunteers to read what they have written.  I love that part.  I volunteer a lot.  I like reading things I have written, especially the dark stuff.  As I said in Zero Hour, I got off on others’ fear.  It is part of the more animalistic side of my nature.  One time, in response to the prompt, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning…” I described the effects of a napalm burn in graphic detail.  The teacher had to cut me off part way through when enough of the class was revolted by it.  I had a good time with that one.

On this particular day, with this prompt, I will not share it with the class.  This one hits too hard, and is more disgusting than the effects of a napalm burn.  The prompt goes as follows:  If you could take a measure of revenge against one person, who would it be, what would you do, and why?

I don’t think our teacher really thought that one through.  We’re in high school.  We’re young and impulsive.  We are bound to respond to this prompt like the kids that we are.  My guess is that because we were reading Othello at the time, we might find the subject of vengeance interesting and relevant to the class work.  He may have been right for most of the students.  To be fair, it’s an interesting question, but most high school kids do not have the emotional scarring nor the imagination to come up with a revenge scheme as twisted as mine is.

It doesn’t take me long to come up with my response, because I think about it a lot.  One person, one act, one reason.  I put my pencil to paper and come up with something along the following lines:

The target of my revenge would be the social work intern at my previous school.  It was a private school that supposedly had an excellent emotional support staff.  This intern was not among them.  He was terrible and I felt he deserved an act of vengeance, which I will get to momentarily.

My revenge fantasy, played out countless times in my head, formed words in front of me.  I would bind him tightly so he could not resist.  Then I would drill a hole in his chest deep enough to touch the heart but not so deep as to damage it.  The hole would also have to be wide enough to fit my penis.  Then I would fuck his heart until it stopped beating.

As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t just deserve it, but he is in fact its architect.  He sent me to hell.  By that I mean he condemned me to a week in a psychiatric ward, which for all intents and purposes is an inferno out of Alighieri’s nightmares.  It was in that ward that the most hellish aspects of my nature began to manifest themselves in my head.  My vengeance would be the return on his investment in my insanity.

When the time came to read our responses, the teacher looked at me first, expecting my hand to shoot up as it usually did.  I met his eyes with a stare full of hatred and sadness.  I would not read today.  He should know better, after the napalm description incident.  So instead I got to hear a few catty high school girls talk about whatever nonsense was bothering them that week, and how they would most likely steal something of little importance as their act of revenge.  Pathetic stuff.

Fast forward a bit.

I am sitting on the floor of my room, doing homework.  This is one of my least favorite activities.  I hear something move behind me, and I turn to look.  What I see next I will remember until the day I die.

Standing in front of me, silent but for the sound of dripping blood, is the intern.  A hole has been bored in his chest, and I can see a crushed heart.  I shut my eyes.  I wanted vengeance, and now my dream has caught up to me.  An eye for an eye.  Here stands a man destroyed in every way I had imagined.  I keep my eyes closed for a long time.  I am waiting to feel him attack me, to kill me, as I am certain he will.  He’s a vengeful demon, here to claim his pound of flesh.  I wait, but after what feels like three minutes, I have felt nothing.  So I open my eyes.

He’s gone.  I stand in silence for a moment, then run screaming from my room.  My family tries to comfort me, but I cannot be comforted.  I am torn between fear and anger.  Part of me knows I have just survived a brush with death and should be thanking whatever gods may or may not exist for my continued life, but I feel an overpowering need to find this man.  I need to finish what he started.  I need to send him to hell.

I now know that this man was never in my room, and I do not feel any more need for revenge.  I have forgiven him for any slights he may have caused me, and I recognize that my hospitalization was far more my own doing than his.  For several years after this event I felt as though his appearance was real and it has been difficult to find the truth when my senses deceive me. I have since come to the understanding that this hallucination was simply a product of my illness.

Zero Hour

Thank you to everyone who read the story I posted last week.  The positive responses I received have given me the courage to continue with my project.  It felt good to have people accept aspects of my history that I had previously hidden.  Here is another story, and I hope you will take the time to read it.

I’m left handed.  As a bar mitzvah gift, I received a few things related to this fact, including a very nice Swiss army knife for lefties.  I hope it’s sharp.  It’s brand new.  I was bar mitzvah’d yesterday.  The knife is sitting on my desk.  I turn to look at it.  “I’m going to kill myself.”  So it begins.

Before I know what’s happening I’m sitting shotgun in my father’s car on the way to an emergency room.  The knife is still sitting on my desk, unopened.

The intake process at the emergency room is mercifully brief.  In less than an hour I am sitting on a hospital bed in a blank room.  The bed is not comfortable.  I don’t think it’s meant to be slept in, not that I could sleep right now even if I tried.  The foundations that hold up my mind are too busy crumbling down for me to get any sleep.

I feel like a rabid and primal animal, something out of lion’s nightmares.  I have two desires.  I want to fuck something and I want to kill something.  I don’t care who or what.  I am becoming something monstrous, something demonic.  I close my eyes and I see blood and fire.  When I open them I see nothing but four walls, the bed, a door, and the other person on the bed.

She’s very pretty.  She looks calm.  I don’t like this.  I want her to be afraid.  As I was being ushered through the halls of the emergency room, I saw some people who looked at me in fear.  This turned me on.  I think that if she was truly afraid of me, I would probably get hard.  She’s that pretty, and I’m that fucked up.  My sense of self control is completely gone.  So I decide now would be as good a time as any to try to get my game on.

I take the elastic out of my ponytail and shake my head like a wet dog would.  Then I turn to look at her.  God, she’s so pretty.  I put the elastic around my wrist.  I twist it two times to make it as tight as possible.  “How long do you think I’d have to leave it like this before my hand falls off?”  At this question, she finally shows a little shock, or at least what I think is shock.

“I imagine you would have to leave it on for quite a while.”  I like the way her mouth moves when she talks.  I can’t tell if I want to kiss her or kill her.  I decide to take neither route.  I am feeling unreasonably confident, and so I continue to press my flirtation.

“I bet you see guys like me all the time.  Teen suicide cases, I mean.”  I smile.  I want to see her talk some more.  I want to see that mouth move.  She responds that I am actually her first one.  I can feel my heart beating faster.  The edges of my vision start to blur.  All I can see is that mouth.

The door opens.  My parents and a doctor enter the room, and I manage to drag my focus away from the woman.  The rest of the evening is mostly a blur.  People talk to me and about me for hours.  The pretty woman leaves.  She’s not the only one leaving me.  My mind, which has been clinging on for dear life for hours, finally lets go, and I am lost.

Riot

I am sitting on a bench in the rec room of an adolescent psych ward.  Outside of the room, there is chaos.  Most of the patients are rioting, but I’m not.  All of the nurses and EMT’s have been called to the ward.  There is physical conflict everywhere, as the adults attempt to subdue the kids, which is proving difficult for them.  The patients outnumber the adults at least two to one.  Of course, the kids are just that.  They’re kids, and they’re fighting adults.  Inevitably they will lose, but most are too psychotic to realize that.  They just want to leave the ward, without thought as to where they would go even if they could get past the nurses and other adults.  To a casual observer, it would almost be funny if people were not getting hurt.  For some reason, I have found that most people enjoy watching those with less healthy brains do stupid shit, unless the unhealthy person is retarded.  Even then, some people seem to find this amusing.  I don’t think it’s amusing at all.

Sitting on a bench across from me is another patient.  He’s younger than me by a year, and smaller, which is saying something.  I hate him.  Everyone hates him.  He’s one of the more annoying people I’ve ever encountered.  He’s delusional.  He thinks he’s smarter than everyone on the ward, doctors included.  He’s wrong.  I mean, he’s really wrong.  He’s not even the smartest patient.  I’m fairly sure that I am, but I’m not the only one whose intelligence outstrips his by quite some distance, but this kid makes a big deal of proving his mental superiority at every opportunity.  That’s why everyone hates him.  Personally, I get the feeling he’s also a racist, but that’s neither here nor there.

We are the only two people in the rec room.  We sit in complete silence, while outside a battle rages.  I’m just waiting for it to be over.  I get out tomorrow, and I don’t want to do anything that will mess that up.  The kid across from me doesn’t know when he’s getting out, but he has proudly proclaimed that when he does, he will report the hospital to the Better Business Bureau.  I have made one decision about what I’m doing when I leave, but I keep that to myself.

Another patient enters the rec room.  He’s my age, and taller, but really skinny.  I could probably take him in a fight, but at the time, I don’t want to find out.  Years later, I will wish that I did.  He approaches the kid sitting across from me and tosses him to the floor like a rag doll, then proceeds to punch the little guy in the face.  I sit and watch as the attacker breaks the annoying kid’s nose, then knocks out three of his teeth.

Finally, I rise from the bench and walk towards the beating.  The attacking kid is running out of energy, he’s been swinging so hard.  I’m about three quarters of the way across the room when a big nurse enters.  When I say big, I mean about six feet two inches, maybe two hundred and twenty pounds.  He’s scary.  He unceremoniously lifts the attacker into the air and relocates him to outside of the rec room.  I reach the annoying kid and look down at his face.  It’s barely recognizable.  He’s whimpering softly.  Honestly, I don’t understand how he’s not screaming in pain.  He took a lot of punishment.  The blood mixes with the tears on his face and runs down in rivulets onto the floor.

The big nurse appears in the doorway and I turn to look at him.  He points at me and says, “Get away from him.”  He looks like he means business, so I step away in a hurry.  I walk back to my bench, but I don’t sit down.  Crayons and markers are strewn around the floor from when the fighting started.  Yes, they treat us like five year olds, but I guess it’s helpful to some.  I lean down and start picking them up and putting them in their box.  I feel a strong hand grab my shoulder.  It’s the nurse.  He tells me to put the box down.  I inform him that I am trying to help clean up.  I don’t think he cares.  He tells me to get back to my room, and do it fast.  I’m not about to argue with this guy, so I go.  As I head down the hallway, I see the attacking boy getting dragged into a straightjacket room.  I can’t say he doesn’t deserve it, but it always is scary watching someone going into that room.  Once you’re put in a straightjacket, you don’t get out.  They move you from the ward, and you don’t come back.  I reach my room and close the door behind me.  My roommates haven’t arrived yet.  I do fifty pushups, because this is something I can do at this particular point in my life.  Then I hop onto my bed and start reading the only book I have, which is Murder On The Orient Express, not a great book, but not a bad one either.  I get bored after a few pages, put it down, and try to get some sleep.