Fic: The Two of Us are Dying (17/21)
"The Two of Us are Dying"
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD
Pairings: None
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Dethklok, Crozier, Selatcia, Stampington
Summary: Charles Ofdensen has a lot of demons to deal with, both figurative and literal.
[ Start back at the beginning here]
Not driving a train, but high on cocaine...
Chapter 17
“How are you feeling?”
Charles didn’t bother to lie. “Like a complete failure.”
Dr. Bradley didn’t look surprised, but Charles couldn’t ever remember him being surprised. It was probably hard to surprise him. “About?”
Where to start? “Today is supposed to be the final day.”
“That’s your call, Charles.”
“What’s the average for patient stay?”
“I couldn’t say. A couple guys have been here since the facility opened, so that throws off the calculations somewhat. But the people who stay for five days are generally people who were stabilized for some time and then fell into a depression for one reason or another. Medication doesn’t always work the same way, people have other problems come up in their lives ... and they might go back to support systems. Friends and family. You said your sister is very supportive.”
“From afar. She would be, up close, if I moved in as the crazy uncle, I suppose. But I would never do that. She has her own life in California, and I have Dethklok. I can’t lean on her.” He didn’t even bring up friends, or actual band members, because there sure as fuck was no way he was going to tell anyone about this. “Just tell me what to do. You’re the doctor.”
“You should leave when you’re ready.” Dr. Bradley wasn’t going to make it easy on him. G-d damnit, that was what psychiatrists did. Waited years for patients to have their own revelations. “Why don’t we move on, and we can discuss it at the end of session?”
It was a good choice. Anything that put off the decision was a good choice. “So when I got out, the brass tried to pretend they didn’t know where I had been, and like they hadn’t been contacted by the Fuentes gang with ransom demands. But I knew differently.”
“Did you tell them?”
“I couldn’t speak. Like Peterson. I was stuck somewhere in my head. I eventually let them know what I thought of them, though. It turns out the ransom demands weren’t even that serious - cash and an agreement with a couple border guards. But that would mean the military admitting that not only had they sent six soldiers in, but they also lost one and had to get him back. Which I suppose for them was the point. Or maybe that whole ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ bullshit line. They negotiate with cartels all the time. They left me to fucking rot because they decided that was the best thing for them to do.”
*********************************************
Guatemala
1992
It was only a matter of time. He didn’t have any dogtags, any form of identification. Even most of his equipment was either South American in origin, or something Gautemalans regularly acquired from abroad for their own uses. But even if he wasn’t lily white (after they threw water on him), they would have known from the start that he was US military. Charles did not have all the special ops torture training he needed, the stuff he had only heard stories about. The only thing he had was an excellent understanding of Spanish and a high threshold for pain. That got him pretty far.
It was warm in the jungle and he was freezing. His bare feet sat in a bucket of cold water and another was regularly dumped on his head so his hair didn’t catch fire from the electric shocks. In the break times, he thought about dislocating his thumb to break out of the handcuffs, but where exactly would that get him? A few feet before he was caught, and the guards wouldn’t shoot him, because Diego Fuentes wanted him alive - at least for the time being. At least until he opened his mouth.
He didn’t know how long he had been in the chair, but he had started to doze again when an electric shock to his chest woke him. They might not be able to make him talk, but they could make him scream. That was well established.
“Is this all worth it, gringo?” the man, whose name Charles didn’t know and didn’t care to know, said. All he knew was the guy really liked car batteries, and always spoke to him in English. “Do you even have anything meaningful to say? We caught you so you must be someone they’re willing to throw away. That means they didn’t tell you anything important, did they?”
Charles didn’t shake his head, or give any indication that he was listening. Or, he tried not to.
“You’re going to talk. You’re going to sing like a songbird. Do you think this is the worse we can do to you? It’s only the least humiliating thing. Believe it or not, amigo, this is the easy way out.”
He held up for two days. Three, if he was being generous, because he really didn’t know.
*********************************************
“Do you know what drug lords do to prisoners? If they really want to fuck with them?”
Dr. Bradley shook his head. Maybe he was being polite and maybe he wasn’t, and he just didn’t know.
“They give you a ton of cocaine. Whether you want it or not. That may seem ideal, but not only will you do things you’ll regret, but they get you addicted. A ton of cocaine, every day. They can afford it. Then they take it away. You go through DT's, and if you make it out the other then, they give it back to you. I must have gone through the DT's maybe four or five times before they just got bored and stopped doing it. Maybe I had nothing left to say.”
*********************************************
His cell wasn’t one. It was a hole, not dug but found. The edge of the camp housed Mayan ruins, or maybe Toltec, or something like that. Some long-dead culture that had left stone memorials to its own permanence. All of the complex had collapsed except one entrance, where a hallway ran ten feet before a rockslide cut it short. Charles's captors hammered in a piece of sheet metal to serve as a door and threw him down, about five feet below current ground level. He wondered in his saner moments if he were living in a palace, or maybe a tomb to a great king. From the intricacies of the hieroglyphs on the walls, probably. The paint was faded except for some red splotches, but maybe that was blood. There were only a few hours a day where the sun would be at just right the angle to make it through the trees and the thin opening at the top of the door and give him some light. Otherwise, his only escape from the darkness was when they opened the bottom hatch and dropped food down into his tray. This was a mixed blessing, as everything was, because he had to stick his hands out to get the food, and they would grab his wrists and inject him, then leave him to go mad in the darkness.
There were no facilities, and the stone walls stood up to a lot more than he could offer as resistance. There were rats until he ate them, when the druggies forgot to feed him. He also discovered raw snake meat. It wasn’t healthy, but what was?
During DT's, he would say anything. Anything for more drugs. Sometimes, they pulled him out and listened, though he didn’t know what he was saying. Sometimes he just screamed and banged against the door until his hands were bruised. He also dislocated his shoulder a few times, but didn’t snap it back in because the pain made him feel like something was real when he didn’t know what reality was.
In high school, he’d been warned about bad trips. In Guatemala, every one of them was bad.
He did the voice. It was an invention of his school days, when his voice was higher than everyone else’s because he’d skipped two grades but not two years of puberty. It also seemed to make druggie soldiers laugh, and happy soldiers didn’t sodomize him with the barrel of a rifle; they gave him drugs to keep him going. Most of the time, they didn't do both.
At some point, the voice started talking back.
I’m your frieeeeennnddd, Charlie.
I’ll always be here for you. Isn’t that sad?
When he had a rare moment of riding a particularly good high, the skulls in the hieroglyphs, designed to remind Mayans of death or some nonsense, came alive and danced for him, like the dancers in costume he’d seen as a child on NOVA. Or was that Tibetans who did that?
There’s spiders, Charlie. They’re everywhere. Try ‘em - they might taste good!
Facebones, who didn’t have a name then and didn’t need one, always had terrible suggestions. And most of the spiders were in his mind, because he couldn’t find them, even after searching for hours in darkness.
The great thing was, he never had to talk back to the voice in his head, because it could hear him just fine, even when he didn’t speak, per se. “I’m not eating spiders.”
They taste awwwwwwweeeeeeeeeesssssooommmmeee!
“How do you know?”
Because I’ve been living on these walls FOREVER. Come and GET ME OUT.
Charles couldn’t make out the wall at the exact moment, or at least not its intricacies, because there was no light. His night vision was pretty good, but not good enough to inspect ancient art. He ran his fingers against the wall, tracing the five circles inside another circle, with the Mayan warrior king or whatever on top. The stone was worn and soft. It was cold to the touch, and even when he went straight from feverish, to shivering and clutching the disgusting blanket that served as a bed with all his might, he liked the feeling of smooth stone against his palms.
One day, they dragged him out in full daylight. He could stand on his own, but not well. He’d been in DT's for what he hoped was a week, but his ability to make consistent scratches on the wall every time he saw daylight wasn’t that good. When they made him stand, he had to hold up his pants, now that the waist was too big for him. And there was the small matter that he’d tried to eat his leather belt, and only succeeded in destroying it by biting it up into pieces.
The sun was blinding. Literally. It gave him an agonizing headache, but when he kept his eyes closed, someone struck him with the butt of a gun, hard enough for him to topple over, and the whole process began again.
“Your generals don’t want you,” Fuentes said, sitting on a wooden table and puffing a cheap cigar. “They won’t pay. They won’t negotiate. So what should I do?”
Kill me, he thought, but couldn’t find the words to say. Not because he was afraid, but because they were gone. Please, please kill me.
“I could sell you to someone,” he said, “but you are obviously damaged goods.”
Kill me kill me kill me -
“Maybe I won’t kill you,” Fuentes said, as if he were granting some boon, not doing the opposite of what Charles wanted. “You will live for now, because I may need you as an example.”
That was not what he wanted. He would have been dragged back to his stone cell kicking and screaming, but there were no sounds left in him. They did throw down a rope to help him hold up his pants, and made some jokes about his scrawny ass. They were in Spanish, and his ability to understand them was starting to deteriorate along with everything else.
He was rather violently ill, probably from the food. It was good in a way; it reminded him that he was alive, and could still feel one way or another (he decided he didn’t like puking) about the world around him as the world around him got increasingly small. He stopped ticking off the days when he saw that shaft of light. He’d never even counted them in the first place. He stopped believing in G-d, the inherent goodness of man, and that the world around him was anything but a dream before waking. The talking skull made up stories of a man, an ordinary man with a very big brain, who did well in school and ran track for a few years and had a sister and parents who loved him. This man was going to be someone. He was gifted. He was fated. This man lived far away, somewhere far beyond Charles’s reach.
He kept touching the wall, particularly the circle pattern he liked so much. He started dreaming about it. About planets he had never seen and wasn’t convinced existed, about dancing warriors making music and horrible sounds and feasting on the blood of their enemies. Human sacrifices and the gods drinking the blood to satisfy their never-ending thirst for it. Charles drank some of his own blood, but it was too metallic-tasting.
The next time he saw Diego Fuentes, he stood there blinking in the light and honestly did not know who he was, only that he should have known. The man spoke nonsense words to him. The skeleton in his head was much clearer. He did not want to listen to this man; he did not care if the other people beat him for no reason. He just wanted to get out of the light that hurt his eyes and the voices that confused him.
When one night, two unfamiliar items dropped into his food tray, he didn’t know what to do with either of them. One was a knife - a good one, not the sharpened dinner knife he used to cut himself and spread blood over his skin as protection from his dreams - and the other was a small saw.
You don’t know what to do? The skeleton-voice said. Kill EVVVVEEEEERRRRRYYYYOOOOONE!
He did just that.
*********************************************
“Facebones saved my life,” Charles said, looking down at his slippered feet. “I know that sounds fucked up, but he did. I have to give him credit for that. He deserves it.”
Dr. Bradley did not tell him he was wrong, and that Facebones was him, and there was no distinction between the two. There was no need to say the obvious.
“It was Crozier, too. He made a deal with one of Diego’s allies who didn’t want to continue being an ally, to go to the camp and smuggle in those items for me. It was the only way to get me out. After the Fuentes camp was dead, Crozier finally got a team together to move in. By then I had a gun, and gear, and I was in some soldier mode again, even if my head wasn’t on straight. I was going to shoot him. I had the laser pointed at his helmet, and his men were going to move in on me, but Crozier took off his helmet and talked me down. He talked me into dropping my weapon so they could get in close enough to toss the gas. Next thing I knew, I was in an infirmary in Panama.”
“This was when you weren’t speaking.”
“Yes. At first I didn’t want to, and then I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Not even in the Facebones voice. I would say the words but they wouldn’t come out. They wouldn’t go from my head to my throat.”
“Did you understand what had happened to you?”
“I picked it up. I had about every kind of disease you could pick up without having it kill you, so that slowed things down. And I was on intravenous feeding for awhile. When I showered, I saw myself. I was a skeleton. My face was just bones.” He added, “The name still came much later, though. Facebones didn’t get his name until I drew him for Dethklok’s promotional material.”
“Do you know how long you were there?”
“A couple weeks. They gave me a long recovery before shipping me back to the States because they wanted me to talk. They knew what happened, more or less, and what I’d said to the drug lord didn’t matter at this point, but they wanted to know my mental state, and if I would say anything when I got back. And Christ, I’d just killed a village. It was a camp, but there were civilians there. Wives, girlfriends, whores. Maybe a couple kids. I don’t know if I only saw them other times when I was up on the surface, or if they were there at the end ... I just don’t know. And I don’t want to know. Can we not figure that out? Can that not be part of our therapy?”
He didn’t realize until he’d said it that he was pleading. Dr. Bradley answered, “All things considering, the fact that there are lapses in your memory is not unexpected. Probing into them is not an exercise I would recommend.” In other words, no, he wouldn’t force Charles to remember if he’d killed any kids, and if he’d done it as awfully as he’d slaughtered the soldiers and the women around them. “You were discharged before you left Panama, correct?”
“They wanted this all cleared up before I returned to the States. I knew that. I could understand things pretty well at this point even if I was mute. They thought I was slow, but I wasn’t. In a way it was helpful, because they would talk about me around me as if I wasn’t there, and that’s how I learned it was General Cutter - at this time he was a Major General - who refused to pay my ransom, and it was Colonel Crozier who got me out, going against the wishes of his superiors. They didn’t seem overly thrilled I was alive, but I wasn’t really a threat if I was insane. Crozier knew I wasn’t. He looked at me one day, straight in the eyes, for much longer than I would have let him if I was responding to anything, and he said, ‘I know you’re in there.’ And then there was the hearing. Crozier did most of the talking, facing down all of his superiors. I was supposed to get an honorable discharge, a purple heart, and a transfer to a military institution. But that’s not what happened.”
“Why?”
“I was standing there, looking like an idiot I suppose, because I hadn’t said anything up to this point. I went up to the desk. Cutter was in the middle, and I said, ‘Someday, years from now, I’m going to kill you.’ And then there was the rush of people pulling me away from him, as if I was going to attack him right there and then, even though I wasn’t. They stripped everything from me and sent me to a shithole sanitarium in Louisiana. But I don’t regret it. It’s the only thing I’m sure I don’t regret.”
“General Cutter died a year ago,” Dr. Bradley said. “I don’t remember exactly when, but I knew him in passing, so I read about it. He died of a heart attack, I think?”
“Yes,” Charles said. “He was alone in his house and his Life Alert alarm failed to go off. Someone had replaced the batteries with dead ones.”
Dr. Bradley tensed. Charles didn’t answer the tension with a response. He just continued, “I was sent straight to Louisiana. Committed, as a danger to myself and others. There just wasn't any reason to talk at that point. As soon as I started speaking again, though, I called my sister and had her check me out. I wasn’t ready, but I wasn’t willing to stay there.”
“How do you feel now?”
To be honest ... he felt OK. Better than yesterday. He was calm. He was collected. And he was terrified of the nightmares this would bring, the calm before the storm. “I think I’m OK now, but I’m not.”
After session, he called Mordhaus and told his assistant he was extending his stay another two days. There were no disasters on her end that demanded his attention. Dr. Bradley didn’t ask him to stay. Charles was just afraid to be alone. He was afraid to bury it all again, and keep blacking out, and keep deteriorating. He had talked about it once, with Sarah, about a year after his return. He was high at the time, and he left out a lot of details, but he did go through it all once, sure that it was behind him. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
After his lunch meds, he went right to sleep. Even though he had the option of dimming them and closing the curtains, he went to sleep with the lights on the brightest possible settings. He felt like he could sleep forever - as long as the lights were on.
*********************************************
3201 was not exactly surprised when her boss called to say he was extending his “vacation” (he did not use those words). He didn’t say where he was, but didn’t pretend he was actually at a business meeting, either. Maybe he knew that she knew, or at least suspected. That was fine. The boss knew he was sick and he was getting help. Over the phone, he sounded a little torn about it, so much so that she could actually hear it in his voice beyond his nasal monotone. That in and of itself was a surreal experience.
“So the boys are, ah, doing well?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are they recording? Or doing anything that sounds like thinking about recording?”
“Lord Murderface had a meeting with Richard Knubbler in his office. I was not privy to the details.”
“Planet Piss, then,” Ofdensen said. “Probably something about merchandising, because they would have been at least on the couch in the studio if they were actually going so far as to contemplate recording. Unless Knubbler’s trying to put something together on his own ... check the tap on Knubbler’s phone.” This was a fairly regular order because the security cameras weren’t installed with sound. It didn’t mean the boss was being paranoid, just that he was being thorough. He made it obvious that he did not give a shit what Knubbler did in his spare time, as long as it made Dethklok money, or at least didn’t impede Dethklok’s profits. He also didn’t completely trust him, or Knubbler would be living in Mordhaus. “If it sounds legal, make notes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the alligator situation?”
“The habitat is coming along. The alligator was moved into a temporary space this morning. She was rather reluctant to leave the hot tub, which is currently being emptied and cleaned with bleach.”
“She?”
“Yes, sir. The zoologist informed us that Snackers is, um, a she. He assumed we knew.”
“The buyer didn’t mention it.” Somewhere in New York State, Charles Ofdensen was narrowing his eyes and plotting revenge. “Though I suppose if Nathan doesn’t mind, it doesn’t matter. And we need a designation for Snackers. AL-75.”
She wrote it down, because she wasn’t as skilled with numbers as him, but no one was. “Yes, sir.” She only learned later that Snackers had seventy-five teeth.
“Anything else before I go?”
“The ‘unimportant’ calls are starting to pile up a bit. Nothing serious. No venues. Mostly publicity requests and legal questions, and the usual paternity lawsuits and wrongful death lawsuits.”
“Stall everyone. I’ll be back soon,” he said, and she wasn’t sure whom he was reassuring. “Has 4178 had her baby yet?”
She was stunned that he remembered. “Yesterday. It’s a boy.”
“Send her my personal congratulations. All right, I’m getting the signal. Goodbye.”
And just like that he was out of her life again, and out of Dethklok’s life, for the time being. But he never really was - he remembered the little things and knew whether to care or discard them. And he would be back soon.
Hopefully.
*********************************************
Charles was woken in time for group, where it was his turn to speak. He didn’t know the doctor who led groups. Most of the psychiatrists were not full-time, and like Dr. Bradley, had office hours in private practices.
“My name is Charlie, and I’m ... not really in the mood for this.” It was not because he was tired so much as tired of talking, and, he supposed, visibly afraid of speaking to a group of people he didn’t know, and would never know well enough to say anything important in front of. But that was how they all felt, wasn’t it? Even if it was unwarranted. No one did this for fun.
“Why don’t you start with how you feel?” the therapist said, in an irritatingly calm voice.
“I feel like I’m OK,” he said. “I spoke to my doctor about why I’m here. What happened on my last mission that got me discharged and institutionalized. What happened to me was OK, even if it wasn’t. I’m angry but I have a right to be angry, but it was a long time ago. I just never took time to process it. At the time I couldn’t, and over the years I just busied myself with other things.” He wanted to laugh, but not in a good way. “This must be my first real vacation in maybe five years. That’s pretty fucking sad, isn’t it?”
“No, Charlie, it’s not,” the therapist said. There were looks of support, but Charles would have given his financial empire to open a portal to Hell beneath his feet and fall through it, disappearing into flames and chaos. “How you chose to cope with traumatic experiences is not sad. It just may not be healthy, if it’s not working for you now.”
“I think I know what I’m supposed to do, to get better. I’m supposed to talk about things, go through all of the stages of grieving, and move on knowing I’ll always be carrying a part of that with me. But I can’t make that happen. Not fast enough, anyway.”
“You’ve been here for five days!” It was not meant as an insult, coming from Brett. “Give yourself a break. I’ve been here for two months and I’m still afraid of what I might do if I leave. If I’m taken away from people who can control me.”
There were some nods. Mr. Peterson sat quietly. Charlie wondered why they even made him go. The overly-friendly therapist looked hopeful about everything, so maybe she was expecting a breakthrough.
Charles never thought about self-control. He just assumed he had it. Most of the time, he did. And when he didn’t ... he wound up wearing glorified scrubs and hand-me-downs in an asylum, even if they didn’t call it that anymore. He repeated some of this to the group, and that seemed to satisfy the counselor enough for her to move on to the next person. Charles looked at his feet for the rest of the session.
He didn’t say anything over dinner. It was a mental hospital; people expected erratic behavior. Instead of watching cartoons in the evening (as the news was blocked), he played chess with Peterson again. He’d always been good at chess - maybe could have been a prodigy, if he’d had time to put his back into it - but Peterson had a lot of experience. Their entire game was silent until Peterson took his second knight.
“If I don’t talk, it’ll happen again,” Charles said. “Maybe I said too much at once, maybe I am more stressed than I realize because I have so many tranquilizers in my bloodstream. But if I don’t keep babbling, I know what will happen to me.” He used a bishop to take out the offending queen. “Check. And thank you for listening.”
Peterson moved his remaining rook. Checkmate.
Onto the next chapter...
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD
Pairings: None
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Dethklok, Crozier, Selatcia, Stampington
Summary: Charles Ofdensen has a lot of demons to deal with, both figurative and literal.
[ Start back at the beginning here]
Not driving a train, but high on cocaine...
Chapter 17
“How are you feeling?”
Charles didn’t bother to lie. “Like a complete failure.”
Dr. Bradley didn’t look surprised, but Charles couldn’t ever remember him being surprised. It was probably hard to surprise him. “About?”
Where to start? “Today is supposed to be the final day.”
“That’s your call, Charles.”
“What’s the average for patient stay?”
“I couldn’t say. A couple guys have been here since the facility opened, so that throws off the calculations somewhat. But the people who stay for five days are generally people who were stabilized for some time and then fell into a depression for one reason or another. Medication doesn’t always work the same way, people have other problems come up in their lives ... and they might go back to support systems. Friends and family. You said your sister is very supportive.”
“From afar. She would be, up close, if I moved in as the crazy uncle, I suppose. But I would never do that. She has her own life in California, and I have Dethklok. I can’t lean on her.” He didn’t even bring up friends, or actual band members, because there sure as fuck was no way he was going to tell anyone about this. “Just tell me what to do. You’re the doctor.”
“You should leave when you’re ready.” Dr. Bradley wasn’t going to make it easy on him. G-d damnit, that was what psychiatrists did. Waited years for patients to have their own revelations. “Why don’t we move on, and we can discuss it at the end of session?”
It was a good choice. Anything that put off the decision was a good choice. “So when I got out, the brass tried to pretend they didn’t know where I had been, and like they hadn’t been contacted by the Fuentes gang with ransom demands. But I knew differently.”
“Did you tell them?”
“I couldn’t speak. Like Peterson. I was stuck somewhere in my head. I eventually let them know what I thought of them, though. It turns out the ransom demands weren’t even that serious - cash and an agreement with a couple border guards. But that would mean the military admitting that not only had they sent six soldiers in, but they also lost one and had to get him back. Which I suppose for them was the point. Or maybe that whole ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ bullshit line. They negotiate with cartels all the time. They left me to fucking rot because they decided that was the best thing for them to do.”
*********************************************
Guatemala
1992
It was only a matter of time. He didn’t have any dogtags, any form of identification. Even most of his equipment was either South American in origin, or something Gautemalans regularly acquired from abroad for their own uses. But even if he wasn’t lily white (after they threw water on him), they would have known from the start that he was US military. Charles did not have all the special ops torture training he needed, the stuff he had only heard stories about. The only thing he had was an excellent understanding of Spanish and a high threshold for pain. That got him pretty far.
It was warm in the jungle and he was freezing. His bare feet sat in a bucket of cold water and another was regularly dumped on his head so his hair didn’t catch fire from the electric shocks. In the break times, he thought about dislocating his thumb to break out of the handcuffs, but where exactly would that get him? A few feet before he was caught, and the guards wouldn’t shoot him, because Diego Fuentes wanted him alive - at least for the time being. At least until he opened his mouth.
He didn’t know how long he had been in the chair, but he had started to doze again when an electric shock to his chest woke him. They might not be able to make him talk, but they could make him scream. That was well established.
“Is this all worth it, gringo?” the man, whose name Charles didn’t know and didn’t care to know, said. All he knew was the guy really liked car batteries, and always spoke to him in English. “Do you even have anything meaningful to say? We caught you so you must be someone they’re willing to throw away. That means they didn’t tell you anything important, did they?”
Charles didn’t shake his head, or give any indication that he was listening. Or, he tried not to.
“You’re going to talk. You’re going to sing like a songbird. Do you think this is the worse we can do to you? It’s only the least humiliating thing. Believe it or not, amigo, this is the easy way out.”
He held up for two days. Three, if he was being generous, because he really didn’t know.
*********************************************
“Do you know what drug lords do to prisoners? If they really want to fuck with them?”
Dr. Bradley shook his head. Maybe he was being polite and maybe he wasn’t, and he just didn’t know.
“They give you a ton of cocaine. Whether you want it or not. That may seem ideal, but not only will you do things you’ll regret, but they get you addicted. A ton of cocaine, every day. They can afford it. Then they take it away. You go through DT's, and if you make it out the other then, they give it back to you. I must have gone through the DT's maybe four or five times before they just got bored and stopped doing it. Maybe I had nothing left to say.”
*********************************************
His cell wasn’t one. It was a hole, not dug but found. The edge of the camp housed Mayan ruins, or maybe Toltec, or something like that. Some long-dead culture that had left stone memorials to its own permanence. All of the complex had collapsed except one entrance, where a hallway ran ten feet before a rockslide cut it short. Charles's captors hammered in a piece of sheet metal to serve as a door and threw him down, about five feet below current ground level. He wondered in his saner moments if he were living in a palace, or maybe a tomb to a great king. From the intricacies of the hieroglyphs on the walls, probably. The paint was faded except for some red splotches, but maybe that was blood. There were only a few hours a day where the sun would be at just right the angle to make it through the trees and the thin opening at the top of the door and give him some light. Otherwise, his only escape from the darkness was when they opened the bottom hatch and dropped food down into his tray. This was a mixed blessing, as everything was, because he had to stick his hands out to get the food, and they would grab his wrists and inject him, then leave him to go mad in the darkness.
There were no facilities, and the stone walls stood up to a lot more than he could offer as resistance. There were rats until he ate them, when the druggies forgot to feed him. He also discovered raw snake meat. It wasn’t healthy, but what was?
During DT's, he would say anything. Anything for more drugs. Sometimes, they pulled him out and listened, though he didn’t know what he was saying. Sometimes he just screamed and banged against the door until his hands were bruised. He also dislocated his shoulder a few times, but didn’t snap it back in because the pain made him feel like something was real when he didn’t know what reality was.
In high school, he’d been warned about bad trips. In Guatemala, every one of them was bad.
He did the voice. It was an invention of his school days, when his voice was higher than everyone else’s because he’d skipped two grades but not two years of puberty. It also seemed to make druggie soldiers laugh, and happy soldiers didn’t sodomize him with the barrel of a rifle; they gave him drugs to keep him going. Most of the time, they didn't do both.
At some point, the voice started talking back.
I’m your frieeeeennnddd, Charlie.
I’ll always be here for you. Isn’t that sad?
When he had a rare moment of riding a particularly good high, the skulls in the hieroglyphs, designed to remind Mayans of death or some nonsense, came alive and danced for him, like the dancers in costume he’d seen as a child on NOVA. Or was that Tibetans who did that?
There’s spiders, Charlie. They’re everywhere. Try ‘em - they might taste good!
Facebones, who didn’t have a name then and didn’t need one, always had terrible suggestions. And most of the spiders were in his mind, because he couldn’t find them, even after searching for hours in darkness.
The great thing was, he never had to talk back to the voice in his head, because it could hear him just fine, even when he didn’t speak, per se. “I’m not eating spiders.”
They taste awwwwwwweeeeeeeeeesssssooommmmeee!
“How do you know?”
Because I’ve been living on these walls FOREVER. Come and GET ME OUT.
Charles couldn’t make out the wall at the exact moment, or at least not its intricacies, because there was no light. His night vision was pretty good, but not good enough to inspect ancient art. He ran his fingers against the wall, tracing the five circles inside another circle, with the Mayan warrior king or whatever on top. The stone was worn and soft. It was cold to the touch, and even when he went straight from feverish, to shivering and clutching the disgusting blanket that served as a bed with all his might, he liked the feeling of smooth stone against his palms.
One day, they dragged him out in full daylight. He could stand on his own, but not well. He’d been in DT's for what he hoped was a week, but his ability to make consistent scratches on the wall every time he saw daylight wasn’t that good. When they made him stand, he had to hold up his pants, now that the waist was too big for him. And there was the small matter that he’d tried to eat his leather belt, and only succeeded in destroying it by biting it up into pieces.
The sun was blinding. Literally. It gave him an agonizing headache, but when he kept his eyes closed, someone struck him with the butt of a gun, hard enough for him to topple over, and the whole process began again.
“Your generals don’t want you,” Fuentes said, sitting on a wooden table and puffing a cheap cigar. “They won’t pay. They won’t negotiate. So what should I do?”
Kill me, he thought, but couldn’t find the words to say. Not because he was afraid, but because they were gone. Please, please kill me.
“I could sell you to someone,” he said, “but you are obviously damaged goods.”
Kill me kill me kill me -
“Maybe I won’t kill you,” Fuentes said, as if he were granting some boon, not doing the opposite of what Charles wanted. “You will live for now, because I may need you as an example.”
That was not what he wanted. He would have been dragged back to his stone cell kicking and screaming, but there were no sounds left in him. They did throw down a rope to help him hold up his pants, and made some jokes about his scrawny ass. They were in Spanish, and his ability to understand them was starting to deteriorate along with everything else.
He was rather violently ill, probably from the food. It was good in a way; it reminded him that he was alive, and could still feel one way or another (he decided he didn’t like puking) about the world around him as the world around him got increasingly small. He stopped ticking off the days when he saw that shaft of light. He’d never even counted them in the first place. He stopped believing in G-d, the inherent goodness of man, and that the world around him was anything but a dream before waking. The talking skull made up stories of a man, an ordinary man with a very big brain, who did well in school and ran track for a few years and had a sister and parents who loved him. This man was going to be someone. He was gifted. He was fated. This man lived far away, somewhere far beyond Charles’s reach.
He kept touching the wall, particularly the circle pattern he liked so much. He started dreaming about it. About planets he had never seen and wasn’t convinced existed, about dancing warriors making music and horrible sounds and feasting on the blood of their enemies. Human sacrifices and the gods drinking the blood to satisfy their never-ending thirst for it. Charles drank some of his own blood, but it was too metallic-tasting.
The next time he saw Diego Fuentes, he stood there blinking in the light and honestly did not know who he was, only that he should have known. The man spoke nonsense words to him. The skeleton in his head was much clearer. He did not want to listen to this man; he did not care if the other people beat him for no reason. He just wanted to get out of the light that hurt his eyes and the voices that confused him.
When one night, two unfamiliar items dropped into his food tray, he didn’t know what to do with either of them. One was a knife - a good one, not the sharpened dinner knife he used to cut himself and spread blood over his skin as protection from his dreams - and the other was a small saw.
You don’t know what to do? The skeleton-voice said. Kill EVVVVEEEEERRRRRYYYYOOOOONE!
He did just that.
*********************************************
“Facebones saved my life,” Charles said, looking down at his slippered feet. “I know that sounds fucked up, but he did. I have to give him credit for that. He deserves it.”
Dr. Bradley did not tell him he was wrong, and that Facebones was him, and there was no distinction between the two. There was no need to say the obvious.
“It was Crozier, too. He made a deal with one of Diego’s allies who didn’t want to continue being an ally, to go to the camp and smuggle in those items for me. It was the only way to get me out. After the Fuentes camp was dead, Crozier finally got a team together to move in. By then I had a gun, and gear, and I was in some soldier mode again, even if my head wasn’t on straight. I was going to shoot him. I had the laser pointed at his helmet, and his men were going to move in on me, but Crozier took off his helmet and talked me down. He talked me into dropping my weapon so they could get in close enough to toss the gas. Next thing I knew, I was in an infirmary in Panama.”
“This was when you weren’t speaking.”
“Yes. At first I didn’t want to, and then I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Not even in the Facebones voice. I would say the words but they wouldn’t come out. They wouldn’t go from my head to my throat.”
“Did you understand what had happened to you?”
“I picked it up. I had about every kind of disease you could pick up without having it kill you, so that slowed things down. And I was on intravenous feeding for awhile. When I showered, I saw myself. I was a skeleton. My face was just bones.” He added, “The name still came much later, though. Facebones didn’t get his name until I drew him for Dethklok’s promotional material.”
“Do you know how long you were there?”
“A couple weeks. They gave me a long recovery before shipping me back to the States because they wanted me to talk. They knew what happened, more or less, and what I’d said to the drug lord didn’t matter at this point, but they wanted to know my mental state, and if I would say anything when I got back. And Christ, I’d just killed a village. It was a camp, but there were civilians there. Wives, girlfriends, whores. Maybe a couple kids. I don’t know if I only saw them other times when I was up on the surface, or if they were there at the end ... I just don’t know. And I don’t want to know. Can we not figure that out? Can that not be part of our therapy?”
He didn’t realize until he’d said it that he was pleading. Dr. Bradley answered, “All things considering, the fact that there are lapses in your memory is not unexpected. Probing into them is not an exercise I would recommend.” In other words, no, he wouldn’t force Charles to remember if he’d killed any kids, and if he’d done it as awfully as he’d slaughtered the soldiers and the women around them. “You were discharged before you left Panama, correct?”
“They wanted this all cleared up before I returned to the States. I knew that. I could understand things pretty well at this point even if I was mute. They thought I was slow, but I wasn’t. In a way it was helpful, because they would talk about me around me as if I wasn’t there, and that’s how I learned it was General Cutter - at this time he was a Major General - who refused to pay my ransom, and it was Colonel Crozier who got me out, going against the wishes of his superiors. They didn’t seem overly thrilled I was alive, but I wasn’t really a threat if I was insane. Crozier knew I wasn’t. He looked at me one day, straight in the eyes, for much longer than I would have let him if I was responding to anything, and he said, ‘I know you’re in there.’ And then there was the hearing. Crozier did most of the talking, facing down all of his superiors. I was supposed to get an honorable discharge, a purple heart, and a transfer to a military institution. But that’s not what happened.”
“Why?”
“I was standing there, looking like an idiot I suppose, because I hadn’t said anything up to this point. I went up to the desk. Cutter was in the middle, and I said, ‘Someday, years from now, I’m going to kill you.’ And then there was the rush of people pulling me away from him, as if I was going to attack him right there and then, even though I wasn’t. They stripped everything from me and sent me to a shithole sanitarium in Louisiana. But I don’t regret it. It’s the only thing I’m sure I don’t regret.”
“General Cutter died a year ago,” Dr. Bradley said. “I don’t remember exactly when, but I knew him in passing, so I read about it. He died of a heart attack, I think?”
“Yes,” Charles said. “He was alone in his house and his Life Alert alarm failed to go off. Someone had replaced the batteries with dead ones.”
Dr. Bradley tensed. Charles didn’t answer the tension with a response. He just continued, “I was sent straight to Louisiana. Committed, as a danger to myself and others. There just wasn't any reason to talk at that point. As soon as I started speaking again, though, I called my sister and had her check me out. I wasn’t ready, but I wasn’t willing to stay there.”
“How do you feel now?”
To be honest ... he felt OK. Better than yesterday. He was calm. He was collected. And he was terrified of the nightmares this would bring, the calm before the storm. “I think I’m OK now, but I’m not.”
After session, he called Mordhaus and told his assistant he was extending his stay another two days. There were no disasters on her end that demanded his attention. Dr. Bradley didn’t ask him to stay. Charles was just afraid to be alone. He was afraid to bury it all again, and keep blacking out, and keep deteriorating. He had talked about it once, with Sarah, about a year after his return. He was high at the time, and he left out a lot of details, but he did go through it all once, sure that it was behind him. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
After his lunch meds, he went right to sleep. Even though he had the option of dimming them and closing the curtains, he went to sleep with the lights on the brightest possible settings. He felt like he could sleep forever - as long as the lights were on.
*********************************************
3201 was not exactly surprised when her boss called to say he was extending his “vacation” (he did not use those words). He didn’t say where he was, but didn’t pretend he was actually at a business meeting, either. Maybe he knew that she knew, or at least suspected. That was fine. The boss knew he was sick and he was getting help. Over the phone, he sounded a little torn about it, so much so that she could actually hear it in his voice beyond his nasal monotone. That in and of itself was a surreal experience.
“So the boys are, ah, doing well?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are they recording? Or doing anything that sounds like thinking about recording?”
“Lord Murderface had a meeting with Richard Knubbler in his office. I was not privy to the details.”
“Planet Piss, then,” Ofdensen said. “Probably something about merchandising, because they would have been at least on the couch in the studio if they were actually going so far as to contemplate recording. Unless Knubbler’s trying to put something together on his own ... check the tap on Knubbler’s phone.” This was a fairly regular order because the security cameras weren’t installed with sound. It didn’t mean the boss was being paranoid, just that he was being thorough. He made it obvious that he did not give a shit what Knubbler did in his spare time, as long as it made Dethklok money, or at least didn’t impede Dethklok’s profits. He also didn’t completely trust him, or Knubbler would be living in Mordhaus. “If it sounds legal, make notes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the alligator situation?”
“The habitat is coming along. The alligator was moved into a temporary space this morning. She was rather reluctant to leave the hot tub, which is currently being emptied and cleaned with bleach.”
“She?”
“Yes, sir. The zoologist informed us that Snackers is, um, a she. He assumed we knew.”
“The buyer didn’t mention it.” Somewhere in New York State, Charles Ofdensen was narrowing his eyes and plotting revenge. “Though I suppose if Nathan doesn’t mind, it doesn’t matter. And we need a designation for Snackers. AL-75.”
She wrote it down, because she wasn’t as skilled with numbers as him, but no one was. “Yes, sir.” She only learned later that Snackers had seventy-five teeth.
“Anything else before I go?”
“The ‘unimportant’ calls are starting to pile up a bit. Nothing serious. No venues. Mostly publicity requests and legal questions, and the usual paternity lawsuits and wrongful death lawsuits.”
“Stall everyone. I’ll be back soon,” he said, and she wasn’t sure whom he was reassuring. “Has 4178 had her baby yet?”
She was stunned that he remembered. “Yesterday. It’s a boy.”
“Send her my personal congratulations. All right, I’m getting the signal. Goodbye.”
And just like that he was out of her life again, and out of Dethklok’s life, for the time being. But he never really was - he remembered the little things and knew whether to care or discard them. And he would be back soon.
Hopefully.
*********************************************
Charles was woken in time for group, where it was his turn to speak. He didn’t know the doctor who led groups. Most of the psychiatrists were not full-time, and like Dr. Bradley, had office hours in private practices.
“My name is Charlie, and I’m ... not really in the mood for this.” It was not because he was tired so much as tired of talking, and, he supposed, visibly afraid of speaking to a group of people he didn’t know, and would never know well enough to say anything important in front of. But that was how they all felt, wasn’t it? Even if it was unwarranted. No one did this for fun.
“Why don’t you start with how you feel?” the therapist said, in an irritatingly calm voice.
“I feel like I’m OK,” he said. “I spoke to my doctor about why I’m here. What happened on my last mission that got me discharged and institutionalized. What happened to me was OK, even if it wasn’t. I’m angry but I have a right to be angry, but it was a long time ago. I just never took time to process it. At the time I couldn’t, and over the years I just busied myself with other things.” He wanted to laugh, but not in a good way. “This must be my first real vacation in maybe five years. That’s pretty fucking sad, isn’t it?”
“No, Charlie, it’s not,” the therapist said. There were looks of support, but Charles would have given his financial empire to open a portal to Hell beneath his feet and fall through it, disappearing into flames and chaos. “How you chose to cope with traumatic experiences is not sad. It just may not be healthy, if it’s not working for you now.”
“I think I know what I’m supposed to do, to get better. I’m supposed to talk about things, go through all of the stages of grieving, and move on knowing I’ll always be carrying a part of that with me. But I can’t make that happen. Not fast enough, anyway.”
“You’ve been here for five days!” It was not meant as an insult, coming from Brett. “Give yourself a break. I’ve been here for two months and I’m still afraid of what I might do if I leave. If I’m taken away from people who can control me.”
There were some nods. Mr. Peterson sat quietly. Charlie wondered why they even made him go. The overly-friendly therapist looked hopeful about everything, so maybe she was expecting a breakthrough.
Charles never thought about self-control. He just assumed he had it. Most of the time, he did. And when he didn’t ... he wound up wearing glorified scrubs and hand-me-downs in an asylum, even if they didn’t call it that anymore. He repeated some of this to the group, and that seemed to satisfy the counselor enough for her to move on to the next person. Charles looked at his feet for the rest of the session.
He didn’t say anything over dinner. It was a mental hospital; people expected erratic behavior. Instead of watching cartoons in the evening (as the news was blocked), he played chess with Peterson again. He’d always been good at chess - maybe could have been a prodigy, if he’d had time to put his back into it - but Peterson had a lot of experience. Their entire game was silent until Peterson took his second knight.
“If I don’t talk, it’ll happen again,” Charles said. “Maybe I said too much at once, maybe I am more stressed than I realize because I have so many tranquilizers in my bloodstream. But if I don’t keep babbling, I know what will happen to me.” He used a bishop to take out the offending queen. “Check. And thank you for listening.”
Peterson moved his remaining rook. Checkmate.
Onto the next chapter...