I LEAN AGAINST the front door and eat teriyaki chicken, which came with rice and some steamed-to-death green stuff they called vegetables. I used to have cable, but three months into the service something broke and the screen would display only an error message. I called the company, which walked me through four different troubleshooting solutions (none of which worked) before they came to the conclusion that I would need a service call. No, thank you. I told them to disconnect the service. Television took time away from camming anyway. As far as Internet goes, Mike logged into my system remotely and set it up so I could steal Internet from my three closest neighbors. I normally use the Internet from “Team Bradley,” which is the apartment to the right of me: it has the fastest connection. But in the rare instances it is offline, disconnected, or running slowly, I use one of the other two wireless networks available, courtesy of my favorite horny hacker.
With no cable, my biggest form of entertainment is eavesdropping on my neighbors. I lean back, listening to dead silence on the other side of the metal door. Surely someone will be in the hall soon. I hope for the bodybuilder down the hall with the bleach-blonde girlfriend. They always have drama-filled conversations. There is a noise and then the slam of a door. I can tell by the sound that the door bounces a bit, not quite shutting, but the footsteps continue, and by the shuffle of them and the speed at which they are by my door, I know that it is Simon. When his feet are flush with my door, I speak. Loudly, so he can hear me.
“Your door’s not shut.”
His footsteps stop, and I can tell from the light underneath my door that he has turned to face me. I also know, without getting up, that he is looking in my peephole, though he knows from every other experience that he can’t see anything inside.
“You freak me out when you do that.” His words are muffled, almost too quiet, but my one sensitive ear easily picks up the phrase.
“You’d hate it even more if someone went in and stole all of your crap.”
“Yeah.” He turns, his footsteps retreating, and I hear the final click of his door being pulled tight. Then he’s back, and I can tell from his pace that he’s about to ask me something. “When are you…uh…getting…”
“On the first. You know that. My order always comes on the first.”
“Okay. I’m just a little low.”
“Ration.”
He pauses and then starts to move again.
“Simon.”
“Yeah?”
“You were late last night.”
“Yeah, I had, uh…some things—”
“Simon…” I speak slowly and clearly, so there is no room for him to misunderstand. “If you are late again, I will stop the orders.”
“Yeah, yeah. I won’t be. I promise. You know I won’t. Promise.”
He waits for a moment, and I don’t respond, spooning a forkful of rice into my mouth. Then he moves, and I hear the plastic swoosh of my garbage as he picks up the bag and moves down the hall. Along with locking me in at night, Simon carries my trash and any outgoing mail downstairs. I leave it outside the door, and he takes it to the dumpster out back. I hear him at the elevator, hear the car as it starts upward toward him. Past the elevator, I can’t hear much of anything. As strong as my hearing is in my left ear, it doesn’t make up for the inability of my other. I am hard of hearing in my right ear. It is not a condition I was born with, but rather the sole result of an accident that happened several years ago. I’ve never told anyone about the defect, as it doesn’t seem to affect my daily life and certainly doesn’t seem worth a doctor’s visit or surgery to fix it. I almost like the additional quiet. It is another layer between the outside world and me.
In the outside world, there is an entire community devoted to people like me. Not online prostitutes who fantasize about death, but those who want to kill, those who obsess over gore and screams. When I was in community college I found their forums, joined their Twitter groups, signed up for their creepy monthly newsletter. I quit that community pretty quickly. I had hoped for an AA-type group, one that would allow members to support one another in their dark moments, help them keep one another off the streets and safe from others. Instead, they fed off one another, sharing fantasies and realities, discussing along the open lines of the Internet how to properly slice a throat, fashion a garrote, or know if you have choked someone to death or just to the point of passing out. That’s something you never learn from the movies. That when someone is strangled, the eyes-closing, body-slumping image that you see in the movies—they aren’t dead. They are passing out from asphyxiation. In order to kill them, you need to keep squeezing, wait a good minute longer. Then they will be dead.
Being on those forums, peeking into the minds of those even more depraved than me…it wasn’t good for my urges. Gave them too many ideas, gave them too much to feed off of. I closed my forum accounts, unsubscribed from the newsletter, got the hell off of Twitter. I switched to plan B: slowly starving my urges to death, cutting them off from contact with the outside world, refusing to give them food and nourishment in the form of indulgent fantasies. While Dr. Derek doesn’t necessarily believe in plan B, he does approves of it, though he is quick to point out that it hasn’t accomplished much in the last three years.
Dr. Derek wants a more proactive approach, thinks that the only way to cure me is medication. He thinks if I take the medicine regularly, popping the proper dosage each morning with a plastic cup of water, I could rejoin society. Live a normal life. But that isn’t a cure, only a Band-Aid. I’ve taken those drugs, and I don’t want the life they would bring. To have a free body but a caged mind? To stumble through the world in a zombielike state, never feeling anything, never conscious enough to really know anyone? I’d rather live my life as it is. Where I experience everything, even the horrific fantasies of my psychotic mind.
I discard the second half of my TV dinner and check my watch. Time to get back online.