10. The Denial Twist
TEN
THE DENIAL TWIST
HARKINS
Iwatch her enter the doctor’s office this morning instead of group therapy with the rest of us.
Group therapy.
A fucking joke of an experiment, where they expect every traumatized soul to dump their horrors onto a listening audience. It only further damages the unprepared and leaves them scarred, less willing to reenter the volatile and scary world outside these walls.
I’m not expected to talk. It’s apparently a privilege I get to be around people after the behavior I’ve demonstrated.
They don’t want me here, that much is clear. If it weren’t for the risk I pose to myself, it’s likely the county jail is where I’d find the next bed I’d be strapped to. I’ll play nice for now, until I have her.
There’s no sense in burning the place to the ground when I don’t have a clue what’s going on.
Camila was afraid of me.
I hadn’t believed it when they told me she didn’t want to see me. I refused to accept what they’d said about me being “bad for her healing,” but seeing it with my own eyes, hearing with my own ears…
Go away.
I can protect her from a distance. I can give her the space she needs to mend.
I suck the stupid meal replacement shake through the plastic straw that fits between the metal bars of the mask I’m confined to wear all day and night.
I’m spaced out while some poor girl tells the story of how her sweet sixteen turned into a mafia shoot-out.
I stare through the glass walls of the common room while my eyes stay laser focused on Doctor Valerian’s office door.
“I’m glad you’re finally eating, Demetri.” The pompous piece of shit nurse barely looks up from her notes while singing her faux praises my way.
I don’t tell her it’s a means to an end, that I’m jumping through their hoops so I can see my girl. I keep my mouth shut about how I’m just playing their game, that I’ll smile and nod and do whatever it takes to hold her again.
Yet, in the back of my throat, another voice urges to scream.
Just slice their throats.
It would be easier.
I shove the thought into a metal box, locking it within the deepest confines of my mind.
There was a line, an unspoken code.
There were those who deserved to never see another day again and the innocent.
And then, Camila killed Naya.
Now, nothing makes sense, and I don’t know if it has anything to do with who’s alive and who’s gone. I just know it feels good to be in control. Except, without Camila around, there is no control.
There’s only chaos in the dark vacuum of my mind.
She has always been my lifeline, a blinding light in the deep black of the night.
No, that’s false.
I think I might be the light, and she is the void, absorbing all of me until there is only us left. Her darkness calls to me, whispering endlessly and beckoning me closer to ruin. Right now, I wish nothing more than to be devastated by her wreckage.
“Do you want to share today, Demetri?” Joy’s voice is muted in the background, but I pretend it’s further down, somewhere I can’t make out the words.
I don’t want to share ever again. I want her and only her. I want us, entwined and so deeply entangled together, that our thoughts and emotions only make sense to each other. I want her speech on my tongue, her saliva in my throat, her soul inside my chest.
I might be everything they’ve warned me I am for her.
Toxic.
Dangerously attached.
Codependent.
It doesn’t matter; as long as she accepts me at her side, it’s enough.
Doctor Valerian’s door opens, but only he steps out, murmuring something to the charge nurse at his door. It takes less than a minute for three orderlies to appear at her side, the last one pushing a gurney.
The sight of Camila’s limp body being hoisted over it and strapped down makes me come to a stand in the middle of group therapy.
“Sit down, Demetri,” Jean warns, her voice more stern than normal.
I don’t.
“What’s happening?” I ask instead.
“HIPAA prevents us from discussing treatment plans with other patients. You wouldn’t want everyone here to know your most intimate details, would you?” She dons that fake, overly cheery voice that’s supposed to be a ruse for kindness.
I see right through it.
My time in academia taught me to sniff out the kind of folks who take on positions of authority because they crave nothing more than to impose their power over someone smaller. Every single person who punches a clock here fills that part.
Here, we are all ants.
No patient is above another. There’s no hierarchy, no seniority between the lifers who stay long term and the ones who are in and out in a matter of days.
There are only the ones pretending to be sane and the ones who had it psychologically beat out of them by the hand meant to heal.
Nurse Jean is no better than the rest of the staff. Her little caring nurse act only goes as far as her ability to manipulate those around her, and I’m already sick of it.
I’ve had enough. “Where are they taking her?” I tower above her.
She shrinks at the commanding tone in my voice. “Mr. Harkins, sit down, please.”
I bend down, craning my neck until my face is directly in front of hers, separated only by the distance created from this mask they’ve forced on me. “Now, Jean.”
She swallows her nerves down so hard, I can hear it in her throat. She keeps her voice hushed and low so the others in group therapy can’t hear. “Camila is being prepped for a procedure this morning.”
“Procedure? What procedure?” I’m her emergency contact; I’m cleared for all communication between staff as well as updates on her treatment.
Never once have they mentioned what pills they’ve been feeding her, nor whatever procedures they’ve been doing.
Our time here is running out.
I’ve decided it.
“Electroconvulsive therapy.”
I don’t hear what comes out of her mouth next, every sound drowned out by the high-pitched whining in my brain. Camila is out of sight by the time I’m able to focus again. I rush to the hall, but the two orderlies the staff have chained to me block the way.
Pushing them over wouldn’t even require use of my weakened arm. It doesn’t matter that the stitches pull and itch, or that the scabbing has just started its healing process. I’d rip it back open if it meant shoving every single one of these fuckers out of the way to get to her.
I slam my chest against the first guy, but the one behind him is quick, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a black box. It’s on my neck before I can make sense of the situation, and I’m on the floor seizing before the acknowledgement hits that I’m being tased.
Every part of me urges to fight, to stand up and beat them to a bloody pulp, even if it’s with nothing but my skull.
But I don’t. I pant and lie there like a pathetic dog that’s been left out in the rain too long, tail tucked between my legs and my ears dropped to the side.
I have to play the smarter game.
I have to outlast them.
But it drives me insane to think they might be hurting her body or damaging her psyche.
I memorize the face of every single one of the assholes who stand in the way between me and my Darkling.
And I count their days.
I spend most of the afternoon pacing up and down the hall, my guard dog orderlies at my side complaining they’ve long met their step goals for the day. I’m allowed to walk, and so it’s the only thing I do until it begins to eat away at my own brain.
I don’t see Camila again until lights out.
She’s kept away from the common area, her food brought to her dormitory, where Nurse Joy promises she’s well and recovering from ECT.
Therapy.
They can drape that word over any form of torture and label it well-meaning as long as they’re wearing a white coat or a name badge.
I’ve memorized the nighttime routine like science now, and it helps that the idiots they’ve charged with the task of surveilling me share two or three brain cells between them.
I don’t take whatever bullshit they’re passing out like skittles at nighttime. Instead, I spit it back into my mask and head for the atrium with the orderlies, where they’ll force me to suffer through hotboxing their cigarettes with them.
I could pick up smoking here.
It’s the only thing that seems to pass the time, aside from the option of prayer.
They’re all obsessed with it.
“Can I get one of those?” I gesture with my head to the pack of cigarettes.
They have no reason to deny me; I’ve played nice with these two, not started anything or given them reason to suspect me more than they’ve been warned.
Patient 696 has a tendency for violence. Ferreira told them as they escorted me down from critical care into the ward.
They laughed, made jokes about how they could handle me.
I’ve let them think that.
“Thought you were a doctor?” the skinnier one of the two asks, sucking at something between his teeth.
He’s implying my degree should make me smart enough to not smoke.
I shake my head. “Not the medical kind.”
The other one—Mike—frowns, like he doesn’t understand what that means, but he sticks the cigarette through the bars of my mask and lights it for me.
“Give me the dignity of holding it myself?” I ask, knowing I’m pushing my luck, but my plan requires it.
They look between one another, knowing their responses could either challenge their own masculinity or challenge the rules they’ve been made to comply with. It’s the perfect conundrum.
If they deny me, they look weak, even if only to themselves and their own egos.
If they don’t, they risk something bigger.
The one named Dwight decides for them. “The right hand only.”
He knows it’s my injured side; he knows there’s less I can accomplish this way. Mike reaches for the strap looping at my back, pinning my arm in place. It takes him about a minute of fidgeting with it before he can get it undone.
Relief feels like burning agony all in one. My muscles scream, the lack of discomfort now so unfamiliar, my body no longer recognizes it as anything but the norm. I groan, uncaring what the two think as I roll my shoulder a few times and drop my head back in relief.