I AM BROKEN.
That’s what they’ve been telling me for most of my life, anyways.
When you’re little—six, seven years old—fresh out of an abusive home, cute, terrified, easily manageable . . . that’s when they get the hooks in. Doctors sitting around, deciding how your brain went sideways from everybody else’s.
Oh no, Jimmy. You can’t feel that way. You can’t possibly understand. You’re not old enough to really get what’s going on with you. You’re just broken.
Broken. Wrong. And no damn good.
And Ma, in her abject terror and endless lazy guilt, she takes me to church. A bunch of churches.
She takes me to more doctors.
She reads all the books on how to fix a broken boy.
And then she leaves all that on the windowsill and goes out to find a new man to fix her own broken life.
New men.
And I sit, wondering.
What was the thing that knocked my brain astray?
How did I get this broken?
What is it about me that’s wrong?
“SO HOW ARE we feeling this week, James?” Doctor Rhodes sits in his same spot, legs crossed exactly the same, in the same grey trousers, with his same bald head, and the same long beard, only slightly whiter every year. Every week it’s the same thing. How are you feeling, James? Have you talked to your mother, James? Have you been taking your medication, James? And always, without fail, Have you been sleeping, James? Have you been dreaming?
He sits there in his grey trousers, stroking his beard and wondering if it’s time to send me away again. Am I feeling violent? Am I acting out and opposing authority? Am I using alcohol and illicit drugs to cope with my mental health issues?
Three times thus far. Three times good ol’ Doc Rhodes has had me committed for my own well-being. The first time I was all of fourteen years old.
Broken. Dangerous. No damn good.
How did I get this way? That’s what Doc Rhodes pretends he’s asking questions for. Really I think he just takes my money and waits for me to lose my shit again.
All I have for an answer is the dream. This dream and these bunches of words, almost a poem, but never all together. Half a poem and one faded dream. Like some half-torn picture of somebody else’s life.
“COME ON, FINN! Run with me!”
I’m standing in a room with no walls. White flows from the edges of this place, fluid, shifting. No walls, just movement. Like I’m standing behind the waterfall, looking out into a vast white nothing.
The little girl laughs. It echoes from the walls of this place. There are no walls. It echoes from nowhere.
“Emma!” I hear my mother calling from the end of a long hallway. Echoes with no walls. Echoes from nowhere.
I’m six years old. Running. Jumping. Spinning. Long white-blond hair flowing behind me as I spin. Me. That’s me. Jimmy Finn. I remember that boy. I remember him as if he was a cousin I met one sunny afternoon full of people I was supposed to remember, but never really knew. Ran athwart the gloom.
The little girl—little Emma with the dark hair and the green eyes—she spins too. Nothing else in this place but the feeling of the earth moving beneath us, the earth spinning, wild and out-of-control, and her green eyes. Dark, olive eyes. I remember all that. It’s the only thing I remember. The olive green eyes and the world spinning. The maidens of the moon.
Then comes the blood. Dressed of fur.
The teeth. The anger. Fierce of tooth.
Tearing, ripping, screaming.
The teeth, howling as the echoes close in.
The world turns backwards, white becomes black becomes red.
Blood red.
The waterfall has turned to blood.
And the echoes have turned to screams.
I remember all that. I know it. I breathe it. It’s at the very middle of my bones.
Little Jimmy. Little Emma.
The screaming teeth inside me.
Tearing, ripping.
Devouring me from the inside out.
Hunger, and blood.
So much blood. An ocean of blood. Rising and crashing. Pink foam cresting dark waves.
It’s just outside of where we hide.
Little Jimmy. Little Emma.
Inching ever closer with the tide.
And always my mother’s voice calling from a place without time. And never calling for me.
“Emma! Run! Run home and hide!”
And then comes the blood.
“HAVE YOU SPOKEN to your mother since our last session, James? We had discussed you being more open with her.”
“No.”
I want to explain how miserable that makes me. How guilty. That the one person I’m supposed to be able to count on is the last person I want to talk to. I can’t tell her anything. She judges, sermonizes, cries, and beats her hands against the phone like she’s at the Wailing Wall. She begs forgiveness of God, Jesus, Doctor Rhodes, her latest gentleman friend, the ghost of my father . . . anyone and everyone but me. That’s on a good day, when I don’t have much to say.
“How have you been handling your depression? We discussed you trying to be more social, now that we’re out of those winter doldrums, as it were.”
Rhodes thinks my issues are tied to a multitude of things. I think he just likes the technical, officious-sounding labels—Seasonal Affective Disorder, because I get miserable and tired in the winter, and crazy, horny, and violent in the spring; Oppositional Defiance Disorder, because I don’t handle demanding people very well. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, despite the fact that I am almost never hyper, and can’t focus because I’m in a constant state of sensory overload. Which brings us to Sensory Processing Disorder, on account of my supposedly delusional, though somehow real-enough-to-label overactive senses and the confusion they wreak with my mental state. My file is literally a foot thick. Any slight issue I’ve had since seven years old, diagnosed, pigeonholed, labelled, stamped, and recorded in triplicate, then added to the List of Me. Rhodes is organized, I’ll say that for him. And after twenty-some years, he’s about the only person I ever really talk to, whether I trust him or not.
I want to tell Rhodes about Devil. I want to talk about that bottle of whiskey that’s waiting for me. I want somebody to tell me I can say no, that I have something inside of me that is strong enough to persevere. I want someone to tell me I’m okay, or at least tell me that other people are as fucked up as I am. I want to tell him that I could smell the coffee and day-old doughnuts in his waiting room before I got off the elevator.
He’d just smile knowingly under that beard, fingers working the scent of pastrami and pickles into the white tuft under his chin. Then he’d write some notes on his clipboard, tap the pen against his temple, and ask me, “What do you think about all of this, James?” Round and round and round we go, until he can pick out the right label and slap it on the file, then tuck it away in the archives of Jimmy Finn.
Instead, I swallow a lump of skin inside my throat, grin like an idiot, and bow slightly as I fumble for the doorknob on my way out.