Was this what our children were doing? Killing themselves before outside forces could erase them? And yet, if so, who was the enemy at the gates, and why couldn’t we see them too?
Simon
It’s in and out from there. Bits of memory, feelings, smell. Simon’s mind is blank. Was there a car ride? An elevator? He remembers a homeless man with his pants down, squatting by the side of the road. Before or after a freeway overpass passing overhead? The memories have the feeling of dream, a story told out of order. The stick of the first needle is lost to time, but there have been countless since. Clear fluids pressed through glass tubes into his veins. And then sleep. Or not sleep precisely, but empty waking. The void. Existence without identity. Fluorescent lighting, meals delivered in soft piles. Bars on the windows. When the dose runs out, clarity seeps in. His name. Simon. And Claire. He remembers Claire.
But then she is there. The face from his dreams, eyes full of teeth.
The Witch.
She comes with the needle, and Simon is underwater. How much times passes this way? A week? A month? He is in a house near a highway in a city. At night he can hear the radial whoosh and rumble. Time is a clock with no hands. This is the mental hospital reality he feared when his parents sent him to Float originally, back when he was having three or four panic attacks a day. Fourteen going on ninety. He envisioned men in white coats administering a Jack Nicholson lobotomy, the big Indian smothering him out. But that was then, before the hugs and the equine therapy of his expensive retreat, before Louise and the Prophet, before soft boundaries for rich kids.
Here he is suppressed. His riches don’t matter. His humanity doesn’t matter. He is a non-person, reduced to absence. A fifteen-year-old boy alone in a strange house with bars on the windows, locked down in an insane asylum for one. Outside the sun shines hard, baking the concrete, the sky a cloudless desert above. It’s a one-story house, surrounded on all sides by bleached stucco, set back off the street. The windows are shrouded with heavy fabric, but from time to time he manages to peer out. The front and back yards are paved, Mexico City style, dusty weeds growing up through ribbons and cracks. Could he be in Mexico? Sometimes he hears the oompah of Latin music pumping from bass speakers. Inside, the air-conditioning is set at maximum. He feels refrigerated, his body shivering so hard it feels his bones will break.
F is for frigid, they freeze him to death.
Not to mention, there is a smell in this place. A tenement stew. Cabbage boiled in salty water. The unspeakable parts of a pig. The smell from his dreams. At times he can hear her working in the kitchen, the Witch. The clatter of pots and knives. Cauldron, cauldron boil and bubble. Hands floating in broth. Was that a dream or a premonition? He has seen this woman before—the Witch—in succubus nightmare. She is a pale skeleton covered with a fine downy fur.
In moments when the Witch is absent, he is cared for by a middle-aged Filipina named Rose. It’s Rose who rolls him from room to room and wipes the sometimes drool from his chin. Behind her eyes is a human being controlled by fear, a woman who startles when she hears her name shouted from the darkness, who crosses herself when she thinks no one is looking.
He sleeps on a bare mattress in a corner. In moments where he feels capable of rational thought, he wonders if he’s being punished or if he’s being executed—slowly, deliberately erased. It matters not that erasure this way makes no rational sense, that if his father wants to disown him, there are simpler ways. No. Stuck in here, chemically negated, he remembers that old chestnut: the cruelty is the point. But then the needle comes again, erasing every thought. Sometimes in the night he wets himself, the drugs sabotaging control. In the morning, Rose will change his hospital scrubs, sponging him dry, and clucking.
At twilight the Witch sits in the shadows, just out of sight, and speaks to him in low, quavering tones.
“Little boy,” she says, “little boy.”
He stirs.
“You know who I am,” she says, “even if you don’t know my name.”
He peers into the darkness.
“Your mind has been warped to believe in lies. You need to wake up. Your father is a great man. How do we know? Because he is wealthy. If the poor were so smart, they wouldn’t be poor. Your father’s success is proof of his destiny, his superiority. Who are you to tear him down?”
As Simon drifts in and out of consciousness, she tells him all the old fairy tales from the point of view of the wolf. A lonely witch in a gingerbread house. A wee man enslaved by his own name. The point is not to see things from their point of view. She doesn’t try to justify their actions in some reverse moral paradox. Instead, she suggests that empathy itself is a lie. One is what one is. Wolves eat pigs. Witches eat children. Poor you, if you’re a child, but one can’t argue the natural order.