Fake (A Pretty Pill) (3 page)

“Do you love me?” I croak.  I’ve never had to ask before.  She’s always repeated my declaration
with one of her own; although recently they’ve been a little delayed.

She nods.  No words.

“Can’t you tell me you love me too?” I make light of the situation with a slight chuckle, ducking my head to look into her line of sight, which has been explicably drawn to the departure gates.

“I’ve got to go.” She whispers.

“I love you Shae.” I repeat, holding her to me in order to gain her attention.

She simply l
ifts up and kisses me hard on the lips.  Not sensually, not with passion, just hard and clinical.  My heart slams into my feet and I step back as though she’s just assaulted me; dropping her arms in the process.

I can’t say anything, because my breathing is erratic and she’s just crushed my heart in her hands.  She
turns and walks to the gates, I think she is shivering, or she’s become emotional now too.  I watch her look over her shoulder at me as she walks down the corridor away from me… and I know.  I instinctually know that this is forever.  That she’s torn my heart out and stomped all over it with a cool efficiency that has nothing to do with the Shae I know and have loved since I was 14.  The Shae that I lost my virginity to at 16, and the Shae that gave me hers. That is not this Shae.  The Shae that sat with me through hospitalization, promised to love me forever and had begun to talk of our life together with 2 adopted kids is lost; because this Shae, in Shae’s skin and with her smell isn’t her.

But of course, she is her.  And my world has just been sent into a tailspin.  I need to get home, and I need to calm down and wait to hear from her before my
rapidly rising rage and upset becomes a real situation, and not just a fucked up dream.

I wander around the termina
l for a short time gathering stares from people as I stumble into things and attempt to get my head together.  I manage to get outside and I stand in line for a cab, but I’m annoying the person in front of me.  Perhaps I’m too close, or maybe my anxious tapping and movements has her lamenting the fact that she’s standing next to a psycho.  If she’s thinking that, then she doesn’t know how right she is.

Logan, the name I gave to my
auditory hallucination years ago has just now decided to break through my carefully designed barriers and begin throwing about his verbal diarrhea.  I’m tapping, jigging around on the spot and doing everything I can to stop hearing him.  I logically understand that he’s a hallucination and that nobody around me can hear him and that he’s not real.  But fucking damn it all to hell, I wish I couldn’t hear him too, because right now he’s bawling me out for the loser that I am.  He sounds fucking real to me.

I think it’s ab
out the time I start to whimper that the woman in front steps aside and offers me her cab.  I kind of don’t understand, because she could’ve just hopped on board and left me behind.  Perhaps she’s concerned for her fellow citizens.  Perhaps she should be concerned for them.

“Where to?” The driver asks.

I manage to give him my address details and then I resign myself to rocking in the back seat of his cab.  Rocking makes me feel better normally.  It’s soothing, and right now I need to get away from people and feel soothed.

‘
Admit it; you just want to reach through the plexi-glass and snap the guys’ neck for looking at you weirdly in the mirror.’

‘
Shut the fuck up Logan; I’m not like that.’

‘
They think you are.’

‘
No, I don’t believe you.’

‘
Shae thinks you’re capable of it.’

“S
HUT UP.”

“Sorry?” the cab driver
demands.

“Not you man, not you.
I… get me home quickly please, and I’ll give you a fifty as a tip.” I reason, pulling a wad of cash out of my pocket and holding up the offending bribe.

“You’re freaking me ou
t mumbling in the backseat to yourself like that.”

“I’m sorry.” I
growl an apology and then bite down on my tongue, literally, to stop myself from saying anything else.  I can taste the metallic tang of my blood.

“Well, I’ll get you home as fast as I can.”
He accepts my offer.

And h
e does, because the moment he stops talking to me he’s rapidly speeding up.

I’m rocking and keening in the back of his cab; and I know I am, but I can’t stop it.  I just know that I’m in two minds at the moment.  The one where I want to tear the world apart; f
or which Logan is currently the cheering squad; and the other that logically understands I’m scaring the hell out of this poor guy.  The issue right now is who’s going to win the fight for supremacy in my head.  Logical reasoning or rage.

SILAS.

It’s an out of body experience for me
once I ascend.  I’m not able to make sensible decisions.  I’m not able to properly care about the way my actions affect others.  I’m simply not able to see that I’m doing anything remotely wrong.  That is until I come back down and remember what I did and how I behaved

I’m in lockdown
now, and I have plenty of time right now to go back over the events that put me here, and analyze them correctly.

Logan was shouting at me to come to my senses.  He was indicating that I’m weak
and that I’m ugly, both on the inside and the outside; that nobody could love me because I’m a monster, a dangerous monster that needed to be tethered and locked up for good.  The goading did nothing to assist me to maintain my hold on sanity; and so I slipped over into my manic rage.

There’s a peaceful sweetness in slipping over to the unfettered state of mania.  I like the euphoric feelings I achieve in that state.  It’s like sex
, and like the being on a drug induced journey.  It’s addictive, and once you’re there, you never want to come back down.

At first t
he front door was in my way, but I managed to get inside the house using the insignificant piece of metal I had in my hand. 
Wow, that was weird, where did you come from?
I remember thinking about that twisted piece of metal I could no longer tear from the lock.  No matter, the door was open; I was inside.

A letter on the kitchen bench with my name on it
grabbed my attention. 

My name was written in block letters,
and it just looked so damned funny to see it there like that, that I laughed uproariously.  Nothing else was on the bench, just the letter.  I looked around to see which of my demons placed it there; but nobody materialized to claim responsibility.  I practically tore my gift open, hang on; I did tear it open.  I tore it in half and had to try to piece it together in order to read it.

I remember blaming the table for not letting me place the pieces
back together properly.  I remember picking up the edge of the table and throwing it out of my way.  Of course I had to move the chairs as well, so I could crouch down on the floor and put this puzzle that was mine back together.  I threw one over the breakfast bench and laughed at the sounds it made when it crashed through the mirrored tiles along the wall above the bench and below the overhanging cupboards.  There was a tinkling sound like bells as the pieces fell to the granite top bench.  I did it again, but the second chair wasn’t as effective.  That made me annoyed, so I grabbed the third chair and threw it into the lounge area.  It had a nice sound too; a shattering tinkling sound.  Glass windows have the most amazing sound when they shatter.

I
then grabbed the fourth chair and ran to the entrance, where I used it to smash out the window paneling beside the front door.  The tinkling on the tiles was beautiful.  I threw the chair through the open door and managed to get it clear across the front yard and onto the verge.  What a fun game, I remember thinking.  Logan was laughing now and telling me I was a legend and we were on a roll.  I ran back into the dining area to grab another chair but there wasn’t one, which made me angry.  I remember growling, or perhaps it was a roar.  I remember seeing the stools under the breakfast bench and thinking that they’d do nicely, but then I trod on my present and I began to chastise myself.

Fuck, don’t wreck your present; someone took time out of their day to get that for you.  Someone went to a lot of t
rouble; in fact it looks home made.

I bent down and got onto my hands and knees to analyze the gift.  It was a letter, not exactly a gift.  Perhaps it was
actually a poem; that would make it a gift right?

I toyed with the idea of taping it back together
; but then I saw the word ‘sorry’ and everything stopped dead still.  Logan shut up, my heart stopped beating and my breathing ceased to continue.  I read the words on the paper.  None of them made any real sense.

‘I love you.’

‘I can’t be with you.’

‘I want you.’

‘I’m confused.’

‘I’m leaving.’

‘I won’t be returning.’

‘I’m sorry.
So, so sorry.’

“Gutless fucking bitch.” I screamed at that point.  I ran to the phone.  I dialed the country code, the area code and the number for Shae’s parents.

“Hello.” A groggy male voice answered.

“Where the fuck is Shae.”

“Silas, calm down.  Have you put her on her flight?”

“Where the fuck is she?”

“Silas… this is Terry.  Did you take Shae to the airport?”

“She’s there; I know she’s there.  Where the fuck is she?” I screamed.

“Silas
.” Terry firmly stated down the line.  “Did you put Shae on her flight?  Did you take her to the airport?”

“Of course, why would I be phoning you if she was still here?” I argue
d.  I mean come on; I had dropped her off there that morning.  She was bound to be there by now.

“She won’t be home for another 20 hours then.” he sigh
ed.

“Don’t lie to me.  She’s broken up with me.  She wrote to me that she’s broken up with me.”

“I know its hard Silas, but it’s the best thing for her and you would be happy with that if you really loved her.”

“What the fuck?” I scream
ed down the line and then I was smashing the phone down repeatedly, until it was just a bunch of shattered plastic and wires.

And then I
was crying.  The pain was excruciating.

Anything that was
n’t bolted down was now flying through the air.  I didn’t discriminate, I didn’t care about the size; I just tossed it all.  I stomped on it too; I stomped, kicked, punched and threw out the pieces of our life together.

I
was screaming so loudly and roaring that I couldn’t hear myself anymore. I’d either become immune to the sound or my voice had broken and could no longer speak, despite going through the physical act of drawing breath and forcing it out in a wail.

The pain in my heart was
complete. 

And then
I had an idea.

I walked
back into the kitchen, pulled a knife from the magnetic strip above the preparation area and walked over to the sink at the breakfast bench.

I was going to cut out my heart and mail it to her.  It couldn’t hurt any more than I was already hurting.  I turned the blade towards me and went to plunge it in.

“Put the knife down, NOW.” A man screamed in front of me.  It was confusing to hear someone at such close range, so I baulked and looked up.

I remember seeing three police officers, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what they looked
like, because at that moment I felt an excruciating pain in my left shoulder and then immediately after that, another on my right pectoral.

The next thing I remember wa
s a tussle on the floor of the kitchen, but I wasn’t quite up to their force since they’d tasered me twice.  Then paramedics were discussing something about a section 5150, while I was being injected in the thigh and sedated, before being strapped to a stretcher and being muscled into the back of an ambulance.

And now I’m here at Gateways in the middle of June, when I should be outside enjoying the Californian sunshine with my girl.  The same girl that abandoned me, with the obvious approval of her parents.

I wonder how much they influenced her decision;
I remember she never could say no to them.

I
nstead, I’m in an acute mental health ward being stabilized and treated.  I’m hostile to the staff and I’m aggressive whenever I can be, despite the repercussions.  I’m also embarrassed, which of course makes me angry and perpetuates my dismal behavior.

***

“Silas?” Ben’s voice breaks through the mundane chatter inside my skull.  I hate Logan.  He’s fucked up my life completely now.  I’m never listening to him again.  But I’m surprised to hear Ben’s voice channeling its way into my head.