The Middle of the Day That Starts It All
Just Think Happy Thoughts
Gerard Way has a Very Catholic (™) family. He finds it ironic, considering his (real) dad is literally the god of death. He figures that’s what’s behind how hard his mom cries during intake. She’s crying harder than he is. He’s already way past the sobbing, body-wracking bawling his mother’s going through. The old alcohol in his system is keeping him far enough from it all he’s not even sure if he’s crying at all anymore. She’s muttering about exorcisms. She’s murmuring about God. He doesn’t have a god to pray to. All he has are the cold white walls of the ICU.
God can’t save Gerard. Gerard’s not sure if he wants to be saved. He feels empty. Everything hurting has decreased to a low buzz on his bloodstream. They wrapped him up in bandages the second they hit the waiting room. Superfluous. Gerard’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have died.
He thinks distantly of Mikey, at home, alone, unaware this is even happening yet. He lets his mother cry. They’re waiting for a doctor. They’ve been waiting for different types of doctors and nurses for the past hour and a half. Gerard feels like he’s on parade. He tunes it out. He stares at the blank white walls. He feels cold. His fingers are tingling and empty. It’s probably the blood loss, is what he thinks in a distant, clinically removed burst of lucidness.
He won’t remember what they ask him later, when the doctor comes in. They tell him because he’s a minor they can’t have this happening. They say he’ll get out earlier if he voluntarily admits himself. He doesn’t know what to expect. He says okay. Because what’s he supposed to say? He signs the papers.
They take urine samples and blood samples (why take more? He’s almost out, that’s why he’s lightheaded isn’t it?) and they take his clothes and make him put on a set of too-big burgundy scrubs. (Some vestige of anxiety tells him they’re going to turn up booze and weed in his blood.)
His mother leaves, then, still crying. Some disconnected part of Gerard still wants to go home with her. Then he reminds himself this was all to get away from her. To get away from his Very Catholic (™) life. To get away from his heartbeat. A nurse comes to take him to the psychiatric unit.
They’re underground working their way through the guts of the hospital then, cold and stinking of death and sick, intake has taken at least three hours, maybe four. Because everything about the ICU is waiting. Everything about a hospital is waiting.
Gerard dully wonders what time it is. It has to be past midnight. It has to be early tomorrow. He wonders if Mikey knows he’s gone yet. He wonders if Mikey will care. Mikey’s fourteen. Mikey doesn’t need to know about these things. Gerard’s pretty sure his mother will lie for him. Not to cover his ass, but to keep perfect little Mikey out of the trainwreck life Gerard has stumbled into. To preserve whatever tiny bit of her perfect Very Catholic (™) life she can.
He starts crying again sometime when they’re passing the maternity ward on the third floor, wrapping his arms around his waist and trying not to stumble forward.
The psychiatric wing is above the eating disorder ward. It’s the opposite from Gerard’s GP in the same hospital. He knows that much, but that’s all he knows about the psychiatric ward.
He begged his mother not to drag him here, on the way here. The rain was beating against the windows of their shitty little sedan. He was curled up in the passenger seat, bawling, watching the raindrops race each other up the windshield, letting the desperation fill his guts. Again and again ‘I’ll do anything please no please.’
She didn’t even care.
The nurse who’s leading him stops, and Gerard doesn’t realize he’d stopped walking until she does, and she rests her hand comfortingly against his shoulder, but Gerard gasps, and pulls up the scratchy fabric of the scrubs’ short sleeve and lets her see the shallow wounds underneath so he doesn’t have to explain.
She whispers an apology like he’s going to break if she talks to him in a full voice. He might.
The ward is quiet, dark. On the sixth floor, facing toward the rest of the hospital complex. Behind a big locked door which reads 'high elopement risk' in capital red letters. Gerard can hear crying somewhere. He shuts his mouth, makes sure his own tears are silent.
He sits on the single bed in the nurse’s room as the resident doctor looks over his arms, makes Gerard take his shirt off so he can check every corner of skin on his torso, so he can catalog every tiny wound. (The doctor’s counting by tally in the margin of his report, Gerard would find it comical if he weren’t so numb.) Then it’s his scrub bottoms and Gerard can put his shirt back on but he has to pull his boxers up one leg at a time so the doctor can check his thighs. The doctor has a single tattoo on his wrist. It says ‘just breathe’. Gerard tries. He can’t stop crying.
“Any piercings I should know about?” the doctor asks.
Gerard shakes his head.
“Tattoos?”
Gerard shakes his head.
“Any other injuries? Be honest.”
Again.
“Are you on any medication?”
Again.
“Are you under the influence of drugs or alcohol?’
Again, even though he’s lying. He’s too numb to give any tells.
“Have you attempted suicide before?”
Again.
“Have you ever been in the psychiatric wing of a hospital before?”
Again.
“Are you okay, Gerard?”
Again. He can’t hold back the little sound which wracks his throat. He buries his face in his hands.
“Have you hurt yourself before?” the doctor says it a little gentler.
This time Gerard nods, just once.
“Did you want to die?”
“I wanted her to listen to me,” Gerard manages after a few deep breaths, “I wanted everyone to stop ignoring me. It was just a fucking cry for attention. Can I go home now?” It’s what they want to hear isn’t it?
The doctor gives him a gentle, guarded look. His moustache twitches a tiny bit.
“You can’t ask for attention like this, Gerard,” the doctor’s eyes flick to Gerard’s name on his sheet again before saying his name, “We’re going to teach you to ask in other ways.”
Gerard is quiet. He nods and shakes to the rest. He feels miles away from everything.
After the questions are done he’s taken to his room. Most hospitals have two beds to a room. This one doesn’t. He’s not given an explanation as to why that is. He doesn’t mind that at first. (It’s only later he’ll realize it’s part of the long string of things they don’t tell you in a hospital.)
His room is a cold affair, a drunk square, one side bent out of shape to lead to a locked bathroom door. He’s told to get ‘his Staffer (™)’ to unlock it if he needs to use it. It has a door, but it’s flung open and Gerard has a feeling he won’t ever see it closed, if the other rooms along the hall, filled with sleeping bodies, and guarded (one at each open door) by “Staffer”(™)s, are anything to go by. He’s at the very end of the hall. Room 16, right before a set of metal double doors which are closed and barred, with a sign on each reading ‘smoke’.
There’s a stark bed, a set of shelves, a desk (with a chair which looks like it weighs about two tonnes, probably so no one can throw it), and a comically large bright yellow yoga ball. And next to the desk, with the shelves between the head of the bed and it, there’s a huge, fixed window taking up the entire upper half of the wall opposite the door, looking over more of the hospital campus.
Gerard feels exposed, like his insides have been opened up with his boxcutter and like everyone can see him crystal clear through his leaking veins. His blood tells his story plain and simple. He doesn’t like the window, he tells his Staffer(™) that (she’s an ancient grey haired black woman who Gerard can’t understand when she talks) and she points out the rows of switches on the inside next to the door.
He messes with them. Two turn on different lights in the room, one drops blackout curtains on either side of the door, and the last drops a blackout curtain over the window.
Gerard likes that a bit better. He turns his lights off and tries to sleep on the tiny, papery bed.
He drifts in and out of consciousness. There are ghosts on his heels. He can’t stop imagining the different things his mother might say to Mikey. He wonders what her Very Catholic(™) explanation will be. He wonders if she’ll tell the truth. He wonders what Mikey will say if she does.
He only finds himself shallow sleep. He blinks awake the second he hears his name and feels like he hasn’t slept. He still has the pounding crying headache.
“Gerard,” a new Staffer(™), a young white chick with her bleach blonde hair tied back in a bun, says, “It’s time for breakfast.”
And like that, he’s sitting up, blinking blearily and then standing, putting on the stupid slippers they gave him. He doesn’t have anywhere else to be. He doesn’t have anything else to be, so he just gets up, he follows his Staffer(™) down to the cafeteria.
There's a rush of morbid anticipation which slides through Gerard's veins when he realizes that there are other people here; people he will likely meet. It's like the morbid curiosity of watching the previous person come out of the psychiatrist office before him. He tries to shake it away. Because there should be more important things on his mind but there aren't. He's alone in a pocket-sized urban wasteland. No one knows he's here. No one will ever know any different. This ward exists outside of reality and Gerard's having a hard time applying the laws of reality where appropriate.
The ward is shaped like a table if a table only had two perfectly straight and aligned legs. The tabletop is the hall of open doors to fun-sized containment units for the crazy, battered kids stuck there, the nurse's station, whatever that is, and their little locked room right next to it. The nurse's station has a counter in front of it, and a door behind it, the door leads to the rest of the world. It's always guarded. No escape.
The legs of the table are, respectively, a hall which contains offices, past the 'smoke' doors (which he'll learn, to his chagrin, don't lead to a smoking deck or anything of the sort, but the half of the ward devoted to kids under ten, it opposes the 'fire' door, right before the other hall; the doors divide the tabletop into three units, two for older kids for the younger kids' one), and a hall which leads to the cafeteria-therapy room, a meeting room on the right, and the rec room at the end of the hall.
The cafeteria is only half a cafeteria; three tables a little longer than Gerard's arm span, and a counter covered in orange trays, a refrigerator and some cupboards. The other half of the room is three sides of a square rendered in couches, gathered up around a whiteboard with names on it. There are half a dozen names on the board, followed by a 'staffer' box, and the name of, presumably, their staffer for the day. Gerard has one already; his name scrawled in red ink, 'Lily' in his staffer box. He'll forget her name by the time he looks away.
A girl with bright teal hair who can't be more than twelve sits at the table closest to the window, although at the farthest seat from it. She's picking through a pair of pancakes which look a bit more like couch foam than anything edible. She doesn't look up when Gerard comes in. His staffer tells him to sit down, she'll get him his tray, so Gerard sits across the table from the girl, at the end closest to the window. Far enough away she doesn't have to talk to him. He's not sure he wants to talk to her yet, for that matter.
He looks out the window. People go on with their lives beneath him. When his tray clatters down in front of him, the staffer asks him what his last name is. Gerard tells her, thoroughly confused until she holds up the slip of paper to his wristband to make sure he's right. Apparently their meals have to be identity checked. Gerard feels disgusting just looking at the fake-waffles and almost-bacon but as he's staring at it, the girl across and over from him talks.
"You have to eat it or they'll put you on calorie count," she says, helpfully. Gerard scans her arms. No bandages. He wonders what she's in for. No one has to wonder with him.
"Thanks, I guess," he says, he keeps his eyes down. He didn't realize how much actual energy talking takes him. He feels vulnerable after half a sentence.
"You're welcome. I'm Hayley, there's only one new name on the board so I'm guessing you're Gerard?" she's saying through a mouth full of couch cushion pancake, and he has to pace himself. He just nods at her, and he figures she's used to that because she just smiles at him and goes back to her food. They've got plenty of time. Indefinite time. The staff still haven't told him when he gets to leave.
Gerard's trying to work up the courage to ask Hayley why she's here when the girl walks into the room. She's sleep-haired and tired-eyed. Her eyes are darkened with the sleepless bags Gerard knows well. She's almost too-thin and dark haired and she's wearing blue scrubs instead of burgundy ones. She's twin red lines down her arms, no scabs. Young scars elbow to wrist. He wonders if his heart is going to leave his chest or just dash his ribs to bits.
She crosses to the counter, shadowed by her staffer. She owns the situation, he doesn't. Her staffer is a lion on a chain to her.
She drops her tray directly across from Gerard, and looks right into him when he meets her eyes. She looks empty, cold, her eyes are what echoes would look like if given to the visual medium.
"This is Lindsey," Hayley says, helpful, "She doesn't talk a lot either."
They don’t talk a lot at all. Hayley talks about being nervous about meeting with her therapist. Hayley talks about breathing techniques. Hayley talks about a lot of things that don’t mean anything to Gerard and that don’t give him any sort of idea of what to expect.
“Does it get better?” he asks, finally, after he’s managed to shove his way through most of his waffles.
“No,” Lindsey says, at the same time that Hayley’s opening her mouth to speak. Her eyes are level on Gerard, something about them is vaguely reminiscent of Mikey’s coolheaded air. She doesn’t smirk, even though he expects her to.
“It does, though,” Hayley argues, “You just have to give in and let them help you.”
“That just means you get out quicker,” Lindsey replies.
“Isn’t that better?” Gerard asks, without thinking, and then Lindsey’s eyes catch at spark. Something in his stomach turns in the best way when he sees how solid and stern they can be.
“No,” she says and that’s that. They’re quiet. Gerard keeps his head down. He ignores the other kids, none of them look as old as him, they all look more broken. He wonders why he’s here. He doesn’t want to be here. Some part of him just feels hollow. He’s giving up.
Or maybe he already has and this is just the purgatory that follows. He wonders if he’s dead. If this is the rest of eternity.
They do ‘morning check in.’ No one says why they’re there. Just that they are. They have to come up with goals for the day. Gerard’s is not to cry, and his Staffer (™) says that’s not a good goal so he says to not think about hurting himself and she says that’s not a good one either and that he should try to use ‘coping techniques’ when he thinks about hurting himself and Gerard wants to spit but he doesn’t. He curls his knees to his chest and nods.
He’s feeling ‘five out of ten’, he’s feeling ‘tired’, when they ask. He’s feeling ‘okay’. And ‘what does okay mean?’ isn’t something he can answer because he’s not okay. He’s pretending. They move on without much fuss. They have fifteen minutes of ‘free time’ and Gerard asks his Staffer (™) to unlock his bathroom and she makes him play marco polo with him so she knows he’s not trying to kill himself in there and he just stands and washes his face over and over and over.
He’s told he can make a call home if he wants. He doesn’t want to but he does it anyway.
The phones are across from the nurse’s station, mounted on the wall in little boxes like what he’s seen in prison shows. The dialing sound is that old, hollow sound phones used to make.
He wants to scream when no one picks up. Instead he slams the receiver back onto the hook and sinks into sitting position under it. A nurse looks disapprovingly at him from over the desk.
He catches himself before he slams his head back into the wall. He holds himself still, breathes deep, tries hard not to cry and to get the dialing noise out of his head. Gerard keeps his eyes up, his breathing ragged.
And then she’s sliding down the wall beside him. Her echo eyes are full of something now, but it’s too heavily guarded for Gerard to tell just what. Lindsey doesn’t touch him, she doesn’t say anything. She sits next to him, and looks him in the eye, and for a moment her face softens and she nods. He starts crying. He can’t help it. His whole body feels like it’s shaking itself apart and he’s curling into his knees and Lindsey’s just watching him with that half-soft look, she’s steady beside him, her knees pulled
up to her chest, too. He watches her smooth her bed-messed hair while she calmly watches him watch her with his watery eyes. And she just stays. She stays until he’s done crying. And she stays past.
Some tiny part of Gerard tells him that as he’s following her to the rec room, all he’s ever wanted in the world was something like her. Another part of him hates himself for even thinking about it that way. Not the time. He’s not sure what the time is for, but it’s not that.
The rec room’s windows are too-big and brighten the whole room in a clinical way sunlight shouldn’t be able to achieve.
Gerard feels sick. Hayley ropes him into playing a cardgame, he hardly pays attention, just stares out the window over his hand, watching people walk six stories down. It occurs to him he can’t go outside. At all. It occurs to him he’s trapped. The air starts tasting stale.
Halfway through rec, he’s pulled aside by his Staffer (™) and given a note which looks a bit like the notes teachers gave him in school to go to the principal’s office. She points him to the offices. He matches the number on the note to the number on the office and he slides his fingers against the handle of the door. He blurs a little. His insides start to feel wobbly. Like jello shots.
Behind the door is a psychologist’s office which looks exactly like any other psychologist’s office. Throw rug, desk chair, desk, computer, square cushioned chairs. Wide windows with decorations sitting on the sill. Fake flowers. Monet’s water lilies and motivational posters.
The psychologist is young, a very thin man with spidered fingers and curling lips. He doesn’t even try to look sweet.
“Hello, Gerard,” he says upon entry and Gerard wants to turn tail immediately. He almost does.
“Hi,” he says, instead. He stands. He doesn’t want to sit in one of the chairs. That’s giving in. He doesn’t want to give in. He’s starting to feel nauseous with the anxiety and he shifts from one foot to the other.
“Sit down,” the shrink says and Gerard sits. He doesn’t stop shifting, uncomfortable and sick to his stomach.
“So,” the psychologist begins without bothering to wait for a response, “This is your first time inpatient, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen a psychologist before this? We don’t have any medical record for you seeking mental help.”
Gerard shakes his head.
“My family doesn’t believe in it. Mom only brought me because she’s sick of dealing with me,” Gerard says, he’s shrugging without thinking about it. He doesn’t stop feeling sick.
“Why is your family against it? Have you brought this up to them before?”
Gerard shrugs. “Some sort of God shit.”
“It says in your record you’re the child of Hades,” the psychologist says, then, his eyes are fixed on his computer screen, reading through Gerard’s file. They’re so blue. Cold. Icey, and his face is pale. Gerard thinks he looks a little more like what a person might think a person looks like than what one does. He looks just a little wrong.
“Do you have a good relationship with Hades? I hear he’s a busy man.”
Gerard shrugs. He doesn’t want to talk about his (real) dad. He doesn’t want to think about it.
“Do any demigods have a good relationship with their godparent?”
The cold blue eyes are on him, then, imploring and still.
“Yes,” is all the psychologist says, and then after a long pause, “I’m assuming you don’t.”
“My brother talks to him for me sometimes.”
“Your brother has a better relationship with him?” the eyes return to the file, skimming down, “Mikey, right? It says he’s adopted.”
“He’s not my mom’s. He’s Persephone and Hades’. He’s all god. They left him with us when he was only few days old. I guess they were too busy to take care of him, or something. They talk to him, though, all the time. Sometimes he spends winter break in the underworld. His mom visits in the summer, too. Dad likes him better,” Gerard says it all before he has a chance to stop it. It takes all his willpower not to push his fingers up over his mouth.
“Are you jealous of him?” Imploring eyes find him again, the pupils are tiny. The ridges in the pupils look vaguely like a melting snowflake. Gerard focuses on that instead of the growing knot in his stomach.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What about the rest of your family?”
“I’m not jealous of them, either. Bible thumpers aren’t really worth jealousy most of the time.”
The psychologist purses thin lips. Gerard hopes he offended the guy’s sensibilities.
“Tell me about life at home,” the psychologist says after a cold pause, he pulls out a yellow notepad and a blue pen. Gerard wishes he had a pen.
“It’s okay,” he says, a noncommittal shrug. He keeps his eyes on the paisley fabric visible in the corner of chair between his legs. He laces and unlaces his fingers.
“More, Gerard, are you happy? How do your parents treat you?”
Gerard looks him straight in the eye, then, deadpan. Because he’s confused as to why anyone would even ask a question like that.
“I’m obviously not fucking happy,” Gerard points to the bandages on his arms. They’re rusty red in spots, now. He didn’t even notice that he bled through, “If I were fucking happy I wouldn’t be in the fucking psych ward, would I?”
The psychologist meets his eyes, and doesn’t look at his bandages. Gerard’s reminded of that thing that if you don’t acknowledge a child’s wounds they think it’s fine. They don’t worry about it. He wonders if he’s using that technique.
“How do your parents treat you? You have a mother and a step-father, no?”
“Yeah,” Gerard says, and that’s all he says. He doesn’t want to give the psychologist the satisfaction. He’s the enemy.
“Tell me about them.”
“I don’t even know my step dad. He isn’t ever home.” Gerard refuses to lower his eyes. He clenches his hands together against one another until his palms start to tingle.
“And your mother?” The psychologist knows he’s hitting something here, he leans forward the tiniest bit, the tip of his tongue meets the corner of his mouth for half a second. Gerard can see him holding back the smile of finding the heart of things. Gerard’s confirmed it by dancing around the issue. Gerard’s backed himself into this corner. He shivers, hard, trying not to let the emotion touch him.
He takes a deep breath, looks up. Blinks. The sterile lights above do nothing to help him try not to tear up. He struggles against it, though. Manages to keep it to himself. This isn’t the place for confessionals. This isn’t the place to fall apart. It’s the place to put himself back together. That’s what he’s heard about these places anyway.
The psychologist is staring at him, unwavering and rigid. The light flickers and then glows again. Fluorescent slivers fracture against cones and rods. His eyes start to sting.
“She,” is all he gets out before he realizes how rough his voice is, he pauses, swallows, clears his throat.
“She doesn’t like me.” And then Gerard is crying. He can’t help it. He can’t hold it back because the pain is pushing his ribs jagged into his chest and his heart is beating heavy and he feels like the burnt-out shell of an arsonist’s victim. He hardly registers the tears on his cheeks so much as the heat in his eyes.
Gerard thanks his lucky stars that the psychologist just passes him tissues and lets him cry until they run out of ‘rec’ time on the schedule and he has to go to group therapy.
As he leaves he vaguely wonders what would happen if the walls of that office could talk. He wonders if people have better sob stories than he does.
He numbly thinks that his sob story is pretty fucking lame.
“You look like you’ve seen the living dead,” Lindsey says in his ear, when he finds the ragtag group of half a dozen broken fucks wandering toward the cafeteria and therapy room again.
“I have,” he says, and he looks her straight in the eye, tries his best to quirk his horrid little smirk, “Just not recently.”
Something twitches around her mouth. He’s not sure it’s a smile, but some part of him hopes it is. Lindsey with her beautiful face and her beautiful skin, her young scars and younger veneer of indifference and pain, she’s someone Gerard wants smiling. His gut fills with a deep longing to hear her laugh, real and steady, in the sunlight, in the grass, in a coffee shop or anywhere but here.
(They’re in a snowglobe of a mental institution, on the inside looking out, waiting for someone to shake the orb like a broken lightbulb.)
Gerard wonders what Lindsey’s sob story is. Why she cut her arms wrist to elbow. Why she waited for her life to drain out. He wonders when it was she picked up her broken heart and shook it to see if the filaments were still in place. He doesn’t say that. They stay quiet, but sit side by side. Not touching. No touching.
Gerard wonders if he took touching for granted, as he sits on the bright color cushions and watches the younger bunch of kids led through the hall to the rec room. He vaguely thinks about what might get a kid so young as the smallest girl falling behind the rest (barely big enough to see through the window into the hall, and with tiny thin hands grasped around a grey elephant stuffed animal) stuck in a place like this. They shouldn’t yet be touched by things like pain and fear. (Gerard doesn’t know when he started feeling like living was a consolation prize to dying. He can’t remember a time when home felt like home. But he knows that’s no way for a kid to exist.)
Group therapy is more touchy feely than morning check in. A tiny boy with long hair and his knees tucked to his chest shivers in the corner and talks about how he can’t stop himself from hurting himself when he thinks about the fact that he’s being moved to a long term facility away from downtown.
Hayley talks about how she’s getting blue scrubs today if she’s good, how the meds she’s taking are helping, but they’ve been making her dizzy. How she needs more time to figure out the doses and then maybe they’ll be sent home.
A guy a thousand miles taller than Gerard, and wider by a fair margin speaks on his court dates, and Lindsey chuckles, shares some bit about how waiting for court dates suck, and the willowy girl with dyed black hair and a jagged grin, holes in her lips where they made her take out the piercings, bites out that they have no right to talk. They’re criminals. Court dates are worse when you’re testifying against.
The room goes quiet.
“Being prosecuted can be pretty bad,” Gerard says, in the silence, and all eyes are suddenly on him, “Still. Court sucks on any side. I haven’t been but it’s gotta be terrible.”
The willowy girl glares at him, a Staffer (™) gives him a curious look. Gerard feels dread knot against his intestine and tautness in his diaphragm.
He doesn’t know what to do or say. So he just looks at his hands, clasped against one another in his lap, and bites back a sorry.
He keeps his mouth clamped shut while people continue to go on. He doesn’t speak on his own circumstance and the puzzle pieces start to fall together on everyone else’s.
Lindsey and the big guy are here involuntarily, they both have court dates set, although Gerard’s not sure Lindsey’s is related to the reason she’s here. The willowy girl was pulled out by CPS and stuck here for ‘recovery’, she’s been inpatient six times before, three times in this hospital. The tiny boy is a CPS-capture, too, but voluntary admission. He’s set up for a lifetime in these places. Hayley is some strange mystery; she chatters on but says nothing that gives too much away. She talks most in group therapy. She talks most in general. She’s friendly and bright and Gerard wonders why she’s there at all.
Group therapy goes fast, for whatever reason
Gerard likes listening to other people spill their guts but he doesn’t like the feeling that he shouldn’t be there. He wasn’t in such a bad place they had to send CPS in. He didn’t want to kill anyone except himself. And even though he wanted to kill himself some deep part of him just wanted it all over. He wanted out of his head and his life and off the dead-end road he was flooring it down, 120 into a brick wall.
He just wants to be home, now, even if home isn’t home and even if these empty halls feel like more of a new start than he’s ever had. He knows the second he hits the ground floor he’ll be back to the booze, he’ll choose the same life over and over again. One day his vanity might break, all his flaws might come crashing down, but today’s not the day. This isn’t the thing which will sober him enough to break his habits. And he feels horrible for it.
Lunch is the recycled air of a hospital’s locked wards and a sandwich which tastes more stale than the air, then he’s ushered off by his Staffer (™) to have his blood pressure and temperature taken in the little nurse’s room, his cuts are re-bandaged in a stiff, uncaring way by a doctor Gerard doesn’t recognize. Then it’s ‘room time’.
Passing the other kids’ rooms in the daylight, they seem less empty; Hayley’s walls are covered in bright finger paintings, her desk scattered in washable markers, her set of shelves has clothes stacked there, even though she’s still wearing the red scrubs of a new intake (or one with few privileges). Her bed’s left unmade. The big guy’s yoga ball is on his bed, and there’s a huge stuffed dog under it, his shelves are full of thin, tall books. Lindsey’s room is the closest to Gerard’s in appearance; she has clothes, too, but fewer, darker, and some slip-on shoes, lined up neat against the shelves.
Gerard’s room is just blank, white grey and pale blue. He sits on the heavy chair by the window, the curtains still closed, the lights still off. He doesn’t let his muscles relax. The little kids parade past from the rec room, through the ‘smoke’ door. Gerard just watches, letting the lack of stimulus translate to numb. He needs it.
“Gerald?” his Staffer (™) calls into the room, peers around the doorframe, “What are you doing?”
“Breathing,” he lies, because that sounds like a thing someone usually does to ‘Cope(™)’, “It’s helping.”
“Good, I’m glad.” And she’s gone back to her chair just across the hall from his door, staring in.
He tries not to care that she doesn’t even care enough to know his name. All the staff seem exhausted, or indifferent, or just fed up. He wonders if this place will do that to him too.
He watches Lindsey cross to the nurse’s section, lean up against the desk and talk to one of the nurses. Gerard muses, distantly, about how normal everyone seems there. How all the kids just seem like beat up people from his high school with scars on their skin and bile in their throats.
He expected crazier people there. He expected muttering about the devil, or rocking back and forth. He expected someone to scream at him, or say things that didn’t make sense, but everyone there is just a person. And that’s almost worse, because he’s one of them. There isn’t a ‘him’ and ‘them’. There’s just an ‘Us (™)’. An existential collection of fucked up kids who don’t want to be there.
Thinking back to the ‘high elopement risk’ sign, red letter and capital on the locked door outside the ward, to the free people six stories down, going about their lives unaware of the locked unit hanging over their heads, he just wants to be out. He wonders how anyone stays sane in this place before he realizes that it doesn’t seem like anyone here is.
Lindsey returns to her room, Gerard keeps the lights off. He thinks about laying down. He feels like that would mean giving up. He’s picking his battles against this place.
Room time is short. Gerard is pretty sure it’s because none of them have anything to do. Nothing to do translates to self destruction. There’s more rec time. Gerard plays some kids’ video game with the willowy girl.
“You should give me your number,” she says, midway through a round, her eyes still on the screen and Gerard’s about to open his mouth to say he doesn’t have a phone when the girl’s staffer cuts in.
“No numbers. No contact information,” he barks, he glares at her and she grins, sticks her tongue out. She hides the fact her bottom lip quivers well.
And then they go back to playing.
Gerard gets pulled aside to have blood drawn again, and this time he’s less detached. He watches the needle slide in and feels the saliva flood his mouth before he vomits in the nurse’s lap. That’s a lowpoint. His stomach feels like lead as she calmly slides the needle out. He wretches again but doesn’t bring anything up. Then he’s ushered off to a shower, into new, clean scrubs which magically appear.
His Staffer (™) brings him back to the cafeteria without much explanation and gestures him inside.
There are worksheets laid out on the tables, and folders, washable markers, nothing remotely sharp. Gerard takes a seat by the window and tunes out most of the silly busywork involved in whatever acronym type of therapy they say they’re doing. He writes feelings and how to handle them as though it’s that easy in practice. He writes what they want to hear. He doesn’t talk to anyone after he’s yelled at for it.
He feels sick and ignores it. He’s pulled aside again close to the end and told that a psychiatrist wants to see him.
The psychiatrist meets with him in a cramped meeting room which looks identical to the cramped meeting rooms of school offices Gerard’s been in. He’s a bald man, with a stern face and no emotional tell whatshoever. Gerard tries not to listen as he explains that they want to put him on Prozac or Ritalin or Abilify or whatever drug he’s heard the name of but can’t put a finger on. One of the psychological ones. One of the ones that will make him chemically happy. One of the ones his mother abhors and his friends will always tease him for taking. The kind he’ll be dependent on for life.
He has no right to say no. If he says no they’ll keep him until he says yes. He just wants a cigarette. Nicotine is enough for him, ethanol and tetrahydrocannabinol are all he needs to make his brain slide into happy. Or at least slide away from sad. He signs the papers. He’s told he’ll be given meds with dinner. He accepts his fate.
By the time he’s finished dinner and rec time and he’s shuffling back to his room, Gerard has resigned himself to knowing that he will only ever get half-stories and half-explanations from the people around him. It’s playing a videogame with the fog of war covering half the screen. He’s got the wool pulled down over his eyes.
He can’t sleep for a long time, they put him to bed too early and the lights of the ward outside are too bright. His head is full of everything and nothing, static, a thousand tiny blips of thought and sound and sensation and nothing concrete. His heartbeat won’t quiet down enough to let him fall asleep and he raises the blackout curtains to watch the last quarter moon chase the tail of light away from the horizon and into the dark.
He tosses and turns until the moon hangs overhead, a brilliant half-teardrop holding the sky down like a pin.
Then he dreams of monsters with snowflakes for eyes and he dreams about Mikey curled up in the beanbag in the corner of the basement with the overhead light grabbing his glasses and turning them to light bulbs in front of his eyes. They flicker and go out and Mikey’s eyes are dark enough to see moons and stars and unimaginable void in the pupils.
Everything is vast, existential, and too vivid.
He wakes up at four in the morning and goes back to bed to dream of falling and the acrid taste of the coating of pills. He dreams of Lindsey’s pale skin and how it would look with her clothing free of it. Of girls at school, and the people he’s seen undressed. How they’re all just second place to the curve of her neck. He wakes up without having realized he’s woken up.
He stares at the open window where the sun has begun to come up, to take the sky between the towering hospital buildings around him. He blearily exists outside of reality for half a minute before his Staffer (™) comes to tell him he’s up too early and should go back to bed. He tries but he can’t. He sits up in bed for a long time, then moves himself to the window where he sits with his knees tucked to his chest and the hollow feeling of wanting caffeine and nicotine and feeling lost.
Some part of him wants to know what the kids at school think, now. Yesterday was a Thursday, he thinks. Yesterday was a bad day which has been struck from the calendar. Gerard wonders what his mother will tell the school. If he’s sick or a sinner, if he’s damned or just in the hospital for reasons untold. He presses his palm to the glass of the window and it’s cold enough to go opaque against his skin. When he pulls his hand away, its mark is left there, and without thinking Gerard leans forward to press his lips to the glass, breathes outward hot and wet, lets his lips leave marks to be left long after he’s gone. Or at least he hopes so.
Breakfast, then check in, then his vitals are checked. He’s assured he’ll have no more blood draws unless they’re worried he’s gotten his hands on substances or they’re worried he’s sick. Everyone seems tired. The ward is unnaturally quiet. He learns the willowy girl’s name (Katherine, which doesn’t fit her). He starts to feel like this is a reality he will have to learn to live in. He starts to accept it. Gerard hates every second he breathes and considers breaking the rec room windows to throw himself from them. He wonders how strong they are. He decides it’s a horrible idea to have a psychiatric ward for suicidal fucks on the sixth floor of a building.
No one picks up when he tries to phone home in the morning. Lindsey sits with him again when Gerard slides the receiver dully back to its hook. He doesn’t cry.
Where he was numb yesterday, despair and dread coil and uncoil in his intestines and rear venomous against his throat and do not bubble forth, he’s a statue of stone with vipers inside. He can hardly breathe. He talks to his staff, asks if he can lay down but he can’t express why and she seems so confused so he goes to group therapy instead.
When he’s asked how he feels he realizes something blocks his throat in a strictly metaphorical sense when he tries to speak on how he feels. His brain goes blank and the words evaporate before they hit his tongue. He can’t force out an explanation and trying seizes him with this heavy sense of guilt for having tried at all. He has no right to feel this way.
He did it to himself.
Gerard finds Lindsey’s company again during rec, they play the same video game Gerard and Katherine played last night. Gerard won’t remember which one that is once he’s gone. They don’t talk so much as give each other tiny half smiles and bumps. Little wars fought and won on both sides, peace treaties between the vagabond nations of him and her. They’re learning boundaries and ignoring the orderlies screaming at them that touch is an illegal drug. They’re black market smugglers. Kleptomaniacs stealing glances and using sleight of hand to touch each other’s fingertips just to feel anything at all. Despite the shiny packaging, Gerard feels no spark and burn when he touches her, it’s blanketed by the sour taste in his throat and the fear and nausea. The embers smother themselves beneath the ash.
It’s late evening and room time and Lindsey’s leaned against Gerard’s door, holding a tiny battery charged radio with the antenna removed. She’s explaining that if he wants one he can get one from the nurse’s station if the music helps him sleep but god, he forgets about the longing for sound and song as soon as her body’s pressing up against his doorframe, soft and hard all at once, that smile she’s started smiling only for him the same.
Gerard tries not to fool himself into thinking that it means anything more than a smile, that secrets are anything more than things passed between friends. He tries to believe the human condition and all interactions within are chaotic and meaningless, and the part of him which spins metaphors and meanings to each anxiety which burbles in his throat protests.
Lindsey doesn’t want anything more than to have someone as numb as her to understand the numbness with. They’re trainwrecks passing on the tracks, limping along trying to pretend they’re fine and lying to someone else who will pretend to believe you makes it so much easier to lie to yourself.
Once she’s gone, Gerard does go asking for a radio.
Gerard has two options; pop or country, he chooses pop because country’s too sad and being in a somber place calls for lines he can sing along with by halfway through the song and catchy tunes which can fill his head instead of the incessantly pounding heartbeat and the unfortunate curling of nightmares and shadows.
Gerard dreams about dying a thousand deaths and living in a thousand hells. He wakes up to tinny love songs ripping the cones in the tiny speakers. The sound of ruined speakers and candy pop makes Gerard feel, just for the moment he’s blinking his eyes open, like he’s at a terrible house party with college kids again, like he’s got an ice cold beer in one hand and a handful of bad intentions in the other.
It’s hard to convince himself to stay awake when the feelings keep pushing at him. When sleeping hasn’t made them go away once he wakes up.
Lindsey isn’t at breakfast. Hayley talks to him about the cat she has at home that she misses. Gerard just chews the couch cushion waffles until they’re cut into his saliva thin enough to choke them down. He has to force himself not to puke when they hit the part of his stomach that the anxiety and self loathing have started pooling in like rainwater not willing to evaporate.
His goal for today is to get in touch with his family and to track what the meds (Prozac is what they’re trying, it comes in these tiny little blue pills Gerard swallows dry with dinner, much to his Staffer (™)’s chagrin.) are doing to him. They don’t seem to be doing a lot. His Staffer(™) seems to think this is a better goal than his usual first suggestion, so she allows it.
Lindsey doesn’t show up for morning check-in either, and then Gerard is calling his house again, and finally, finally.
“Hello? Uh, we’ve already converted to Jesus and all that, trust me, I get dragged to church every--”
“Mikey! Motherfucker…” Gerard’s voice cracks and everything under the hard veneer immediately seeps out through the hairline fractures spreading across his surface at just his brother’s voice. A nurse shoots him a disapproving look and points to the ‘clean language = clean mind’ sign on their bulletin. Gerard tries and fails not to roll his eyes.
“Gerard?” Mikey sounds confused. He doesn’t know. If he does, he doesn’t know the whole story.
“Yeah.”
“Are you in jail?” Mikey asks, not in the joking way his voice lilts up into sometimes, but a cautious, almost-scared-to-ask-one, and then he’s burbling a little, because he’s nervous. Mikey doesn’t like showing fear. Not now.
“Mom said you’re going to a Christian retreat to work some things out or something but I don’t believe her for a second. She’s so dumb. She told me not to answer any numbers I don’t recognize right after like she didn’t want me to take a call you had from there. It’s fishy. I don’t like it. Where are you really?”
Gerard is quiet for a minute. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to say the truth if he does want to. So he swallows. He tries not to cry. He closes his eyes because Mikey can’t see him.
“The hospital downtown, the one where we go to the doctor,” he says, and he’s waivering but he’s not lying.
“Holy shit, Gee,” Mikey’s saying on the other line, and Gerard’s ready for the next question, “Why are you there? What happened?”
“I’m in the psych ward.”
“Fuck.”
They’re both quiet. Gerard can see the gears turning in Mikey’s head even though he can’t see him.
“When are you coming home?”
Gerard tries not to feel the cesspool of empty, sad feeling that gathers just above his diaphragm at his answer,
“I don’t know,” he says to Mikey, quiet, and then he’s crying, and Mikey’s not even saying anything, he’s just shushing and murmuring and offering whatever soft voices he can.
In some world between the phones, Gerard can imagine himself leaning his head heavy into Mikey’s chest, letting Mikey play with his hair.
The nurses force Gerard off the phone not long after that. (Mikey only gets to ask if he’s okay, and Gerard answers honestly; he’s not.) Going to group therapy, he wonders if the real world ever smelled like anything but the sterile smell of recycled hospital air or if his nose was just fooling him and now he’s woken up to the real smell of the world. He’s forgetting what the real world smelled like and it’s only been three days. He what unabashed touching felt like. He wonders what it felt like to have Mikey’s hands in his hair. He wonders how Mikey would feel about Lindsey. She’s beautiful.
Gerard has heard a thousand times that you’re supposed to love yourself before you love anyone else because no one can love you unless you love yourself. And it’s unfair to love someone who won’t love you back. You’ll hurt them if they care about you.
Gerard just doesn’t understand how he’ll ever learn to love himself. It’s something his psychologist talks about that day. How he’s been waiting for his mother’s approval for seventeen years just to know that someone else loves him but no one will until he loves himself.
The thing about Gerard loving himself is that loving Gerard Way is like loving a thunderstorm. Innocently hiding behind steely-grey clouds he’s a natural disaster waiting to happen, when the floodgates open they open and his lightning lights every tree in miles with a thousand tiny fires that light them up like christmas trees. He throws everything around inside himself and makes no effort to ever pick it up. He ragequits his own life as often as possible and waits for it to figure itself out rather than offering any assistance.
Gerard Way is a typhoon, a trainwreck. Loving him is loving a car crash waiting to happen. A problem which cannot be fixed needing to be fixed before it’s even broken.
He thinks loving himself might save everyone else from doing it, but by the same token, if he doesn’t love himself, no one else can, right? He wages wars against himself before he falls asleep and doesn’t break the skin. They’re play fights with toy soldiers. Building him up just to break him down like children’s blocks. He’s trying to learn it all from scratch. His psychologist asks him to write a list of things which he likes about himself.
All he has on his paper? A single, half-questioning and all confused and empty
‘one:’
(?™)
Lindsey comes to dinner with new bandages on her arms and the old look on her face. Gerard sits next to her and says nothing about the bandages. Hayley does.
“What’d you get into? Are they going to put you on sharps again? Did your discharge get pushed back? Where did you find something sharp enough?” she’s asking all at once and Lindsey doesn’t even look at her. Her tired eyes are on her food.
Gerard, instead, glares at Hayley in the politest way he can manage.
“Lay off it,” he says, quiet, and that’s the end of it.
Almost everyone has visitors that day. Lindsey has a brother or a boyfriend or a cousin or something visit. Hayley’s parents come. Gerard sits alone in his room watching people file in and out with the assistance of the key card doors and the keyholding staff. He entertains the thought of staging an escape but it isn’t worth it. This isn’t like in the movies.
Gerard feels some volatile mix of hollow and alone. He wants a drink. He wants a cigarette.
It takes a long time to fall asleep and when he does there are things in his dreams he can’t make out the whole way. He’s in an underwater city struggling to breathe while people and unidentifiable things stroll and swim past him in his periphery. They’re all breathing fine while he’s drowning and not a single one of them can hear him screaming.
He can hear himself, though, when he wakes himself up with the whimpering on his lips and his muscles curled tight around one another. His body is a fist clenched against the bed, picking fights with the sheets wrapped tight around his ankles now.
The sun’s still hiding behind the horizon like the day is too big and the earth is too overwhelming. Gerard can’t convince himself to try to fall back asleep.
The day feels ingrown the second it starts, like an abscess robbing his breath. It’s sick like a cigarette the first second it touches his lungs and even though Gerard isn’t drowning he can’t convince himself he’s really breathing either.
He asks his Staffer(™) if he can get Ray Toro, best friend extraordinaire, added to his call list and is told no.
Breakfast is (literally) moldy cereal and almost-off milk.
Gerard starts to feel dizzy mid-day and is introduced to art therapy.
Gerard hasn’t ever enjoyed an art class. He’s enjoyed doing art in that way that he enjoys doing most things; privately and with guilt when confronted about it. He’s mostly kept it to himself and Mikey. Because Mikey mostly just feels like the only part of Gerard that Gerard will ever love. He’s like that dip in Gerard’s left thumb. The part that is both so familiar and personal that it must be him, while simultaneously being foreign enough to him to be beautiful.
The art therapist is a redheaded woman of forty to fifty who must be four foot. She carries her weight in her thighs and wears too-tight blouses with black slacks. She doesn’t smile, she doesn’t write on the whiteboard behind her when they meet in the cafeterium.
She prompts them to draw a map of what brought them here. Gerard’s no good at maps and doesn’t like prompts. He ignores it and gets points taken for disobedience. He’s told by his psychologist he’ll stay in burgundy scrubs forever if he doesn’t pay more attention to what is asked of him. Gerard Way has only ever done what’s asked of him when someone actually puts anything behind their words.
No one really cares if he makes it out of this hell hole alive.
Gerard starts to have bad, bad pangs of missing people that night. Ray, mostly, the guy Gerard met in freshman year when Ray was a sophomore and knew way more about surviving in Catholic school without being Catholic(™) than Gee ever will, and Mikey, moreso, because Mikey has a way of making everything better.
He misses the graveyard across the street from their house and the alpenglow on tombstones. He misses being able to ignore the hard shell he puts around his feelings. He misses not knowing how horrible he is at getting them out.
(‘one: I’ve never been scared of death, just dying.’)
Most, maybe, he misses having a degree of separation between him and himself. He misses being able to hide from himself and lie to himself. And with Lindsey saying no words and his mother giving no contact and his psychologist and psychiatrist giving no estimate on his expiration date, everything is living in the present. Everything is watching himself. That’s probably the point. It’s driving him insane.
He feels dizzier after he takes the Prozac. It’s not making anything better. He knows that much, it’s mostly making him sick.
He just hopes the nurses don't’ have to draw blood because of the meds making him feel this bad. Gerard worries himself to sleep about diseases and side effects and dependency and dreams a dream so realistic he can’t tell he’s been asleep when he wakes up about his mother and all the awful things she’ll say.
Gerard says less and less to the staff. He closes down and closes in on himself. He begins to refuse to play the game they want him to. He and Lindsey talk about it when they can.
They’re both stuck in burgundy scrubs and bandages. They’re both fighting themselves with everything they can. Gerard notices that the bags under her eyes are growing and in the shiny metal not-mirror in his bathroom, Gerard sees the same changes in himself. It’s been five days and he can’t have lost weight but he looks to be carrying it like he’s begun starving.
The nights are getting longer and harder to sleep in and he still can’t talk about his feelings. He can’t talk about his mother more than just to say she hates him and always has.
He doesn’t know how to properly translate the feeling and pull in his brain onto the page when he does check in or feelings worksheets.
It’s like homework for a class in his chest and it’s menial, it’s making him more frustrated than anything and the food is doing no wonders and Katherine gets discharged that morning. She leaves with a huge smile on her face and blows a kiss to Gerard and Gerard pretends to smile back as best he can.
Lindsey grimaces next to him, leaning against the wall by the phone across from the nurses’ station.
“How many have you seen leave before you?” Gerard asks, not looking at her but at the closing ‘high elopement risk’ door behind the prisoner let free.
“Six and counting,” Lindsey says. She’s the one to look at him. Gerard’s chest pounds.
“How long--”
“Don’t ask,” she looks away, forward, steady, “I don’t wanna crush whatever bit of hope you’ve still got in that chest, Gerard. It’s not worth it.”
“Oh,” is all Gerard says, and he turns tail to pump the pop music in his speakers up and try to forget. He wants a cigarette.
Gerard despises everything about art therapy, from the therapist’s pinched lips to the smell of the washable markers, the only medium he’s permitted since he’s still in burgundy scrubs and ‘high risk’.
They’re told to draw a self portrait, the first concept which comes to mind, on the day that Katherine leaves and Gerard draws himself in a superhero mask, bright yellow, blood smeared across one side of the mask and his face. He draws himself with empty white eyes and no expression, a gaping wound on the underside of his chin where it meets his neck.
The therapist, apparently, passes it along to his psychologist.
“Why did you draw yourself dead, Gerard?” he asks, and his fingers are steepled like spines from his knuckles. His brain scrambles to find a good reason to avoid the truth.
“I don’t know,” he says. Because he’s not sure if there’s a verbal explanation. It’s a feeling.
“Yes you do.”
Gerard looks at his almost-unfeeling winter eyes and wonders why all the people in this place stopped caring. All he’s been doing since he got here is wondering and he doesn’t have any answers.
“It’s not because I want to be dead. It’s because,” Gerard pauses, shrugs, “I dunno, I just feel sick inside. Not everything’s wired right. It feels wrong. It feels like dying. And everyone’s dying so I think that might be normal and for some reason I can’t say exactly what’s wrong with me and I think maybe no one can. I think everyone feels like they’re not breathing while everyone else is doing it fine sometimes. I don’t think I’m special like that.”
And it hits him, how even despite the stupid prompt and the stupid therapist and the stupid art therapy thing, Gerard managed to put something in words.
(‘two: I do art sometimes.’)
For some reason, Gerard can’t manage to stop thinking about Sue Storm’s transition to Malice as he falls asleep. He can’t stop thinking about being helpless but only making it that way by believing it.
He doesn’t know if that applies to him. He falls asleep imagining what Lindsey might think of superheroes and villains, and of Lindsey in black leather and a cape, spikes crowning her head like a poisonous plant.
(Somewhere in the place between full sleep and full wakefulness, Gerard remembers the long conversation he and Mikey had about Malice not two days before all of this.)
He dreams of drowning while everything else breathes and laughs again. This time the underwater street is the one he grew up on. Mikey’s sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette that releases bubbles rather than smoke. He doesn’t acknowledge Gerard’s approach, but when Gerard reaches out for a bubble and brings it to his mouth in gently clasped hands, Mikey looks up with eyes full of void and says only,
“Don’t.” His mouth hardly moves.
Gerard wakes shivering and rolls over.
There’s art therapy again two days from then and Gerard goes with a bit more in him. He likes it a little. The thought of getting the things locked in his chest onto paper seems perfect.
Lindsey sits across from him, they’re maintaining the ‘two foot distance rule’ they’ve had imposed on both of them. Gerard’s decided to be compliant today. He’s going to try to be honest with himself. He talked to Hayley last night before she discharged. She said that was best and he likes to try to take good peoples’ advice to heart if he’s never going to see them again.
“I hear they’re going to put you in blue soon,” she says, offhand. Like this isn’t big news. How the fuck she plays the hospital staff so well for info is unknown to Gerard, but she tends to give him more answers than the staff ever does.
(Some part of him thinks that being the daughter of Deimos gives her a leg up on intimidating people into doing what she wants.)
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, I’m scheduled for tomorrow if I’m on good behavior. You wanna partake in 48 hours of solidarity in bullshit?” she asks, while they’re handed a stack of paper to share.
The tight-faced therapist passes out markers, and then oil pastels in little boxes. Gerard tries not to smile at the prospect of touching art supplies which don’t bleed ink which turns sickly colors in the shower on his fingers. Something real. It feels like his first breath of fresh air.
“Yeah, of course,” he’s smiling at her when the therapist decides to start.
The therapist tells them to draw the worst feeling that they’ve had today and Gerard stares at the paper for fifteen minutes before she comes over.
“Is something wrong, Gerald?” Gerard winces at the misnomer.
“No,” he says with a shrug, he meets her eyes.
“Why aren’t you drawing?” the edge in her voice is stern, annoyed.
“The worst thing I’ve felt today is nothing.”
“Then draw what nothing feels like,” her eyebrows are creeping together.
“But that’s the point. Not drawing is the point of it.”
“You’re being difficult, difficult enough to lose privileges.”
Gerard shakes his head, and sighs, and slides the oil pastels toward him. He starts drawing monsters with the silhouettes of beautiful women in their shadows. He tries to ignore her eyes on him the rest of the day.
That night, Mikey visits. Alone. He brings lemon cookies and, more importantly, a cup of coffee and is waiting for Gerard in his room when he gets back from dinner. He’s got his own staff shadow, the two of them stand at the door while Gerard freezes, then rushes forward, not to hug Mikey first, but to secure the coffee in an upright position on the bookshelf. Then he collapses in Mikey’s lap, tearing up and Mikey’s hands find his hair and he just strokes his fingers through over and over.
“Mom doesn’t know I’m here,” he says, once Gerard pulls himself together enough to say hello and retrieve the coffee. He’s never been so happy to be holding a styrofoam cup.
“Good,” Gerard says, he doesn’t want to think about her, he wants to throw his legs over Mikey’s lap and lean against the bookcase and listen to him talk.
“What came out this week? Did you finish that write-up about Sue Storm’s Malice? Have you been sleeping okay?” Gerard’s asking all at once.
Mikey talks for the full fifteen minutes they’re allowed and the Staffer(™)s drag him away through the ‘high elopement risk’ doors, back into the real world.
(‘three; I can make Mikey laugh.’)
Gerard starts losing track of how many days he’s spent in the ward. He gets blue scrubs. He does his best. He gets no answers.
No indication of his discharge comes, except perhaps the change in burgundy scrubs to blue, from a restriction on plasticware to none. His psychiatrist talks about getting him used to the medication, about how even with dizziness and nausea and lack of appetite they’ll continue administration. This is normal. It’s a good sacrifice for his mental wellbeing. Gerard neglects to point out that it’s not, because it’s honestly kind of fucking upsetting. He keeps his mouth shut.
Gerard watches the sun rise and set out of bedroom and rec room windows like a horse with blinders on. He sees neither horizon for the buildings around him and it starts to feel like the whole city is a mouth of crooked teeth, opening and closing over the light in the sky. He forgets what school looks like. Forgets what air tastes like and what the old him felt like. Maybe that’s the point. It’s a second baptism.
Gerard does not find God in the white halls of a hospital. Nor does he find any sort of faith. He doesn’t feel cleansed but stagnated and removed.
Gerard’s psychologist talks about his mother and his brother and ceaselessly about his family. Gerard starts wondering if his ingrown life isn’t because of them at all just to have something to talk about rather than agreeing that yes, his family hates him, yes his family has never shown affection, yes his mother probably is the reason he’s like this, yes his mother needs to be forgotten, yes he needs to build his own life. He just wants something to conquer so he knows he’s going somewhere.
Gerard makes friends with everyone he can. He starts getting the new kids to talk, he gets the grudgingness out of the patients who complain about art therapy. He pops from one social group to another within the dozen patients on the ward. Once he’s in blue they let him talk to the little kids, too, during rec. In the way that the older kids being just normal kids seemed scary, it’s heartrendingly sad in the younger ones.
It’s the day that Lindsey leaves that Gerard finally figures out how long he’s been there. Fourteen days. Two weeks, zero days, fifteen hours. She returns the comic she borrowed from him as she’s walking down the hall to leave with an older guy who’s too young to be her dad. She doesn’t say ‘good luck’ but the determination in her eyes makes it so she doesn’t have to. She smiles when she kisses him on the cheek and hands it back, and she’s got something brighter about her when he sees her walking through the courtyard below from the rec room window ten minutes later. Her strides are wider and lighter. Gerard puts the comic on his shelf without another thought.
He feels nothing.
When he’s discharged three days from then, it's unexpected and he got no previous indication of it, he doesn’t speak to his mother, and she doesn’t speak to him. They won’t speak for another month. She blames him.
Being discharged means nothing. The air is brisk that day, and thin, like true mountain air. It doesn’t come with a rush of relief. It comes with the hollowed out shell of Gerard trying to figure out how to function.
He doesn’t. He probably never will.
The first thing he does after he gets out is track down a cigarette. The second, a bottle of jack.
It will be six months after that when he flips through the comic on Ray Toro’s bed and will find, in scratchy print on the inside of the back cover, a phone number, and a tiny note, signed ‘Lyn-Z’.
He won’t call it. When they see each other again in a coffee shop on the first day of his first gap year she’ll ask why he never bothered and he’ll draw her a picture of a huge blinking eye taking over the entire sky (night and day, open and wide), he’ll give it to her and tell her he doesn’t know why.
She’ll ask if he’s still sad.
“Of course I’m still fucking sad,” he’ll say. And she’ll smile a secret kind of smile.
“Me too,” she’ll say, “I think everyone is.”
(‘four: sometimes, if I'm lucky, I don't feel like a burnt out lightbulb.)
