Last Night I Sang to the Monster (5 page)

“What picture?”

“The picture you’re staring at.”

I guess I
had
been staring at the picture. I didn’t know what to say. “They’re your sons,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So, well, I guess I see your sons.”

Adam, he doesn’t roll his eyes. He’s a real professional. But he does sometimes give people a snarky smile. That’s what he gave me. “But what does it make you think of?”

“I have a brother.”

“How old is he?”

“He’s three years older than me.”

“What’s his name?”

“His name’s Santiago.”

“Do you have a picture like that, of the both of you—when you were little?”

“Yeah. My mom had one in her room.”

“What’s going on in the photograph?”

“My brother is hugging me.”

“How old are you in the photograph?”

“Two.”

“Are you smiling?”

“Look, Adam, I don’t want to talk about the photograph. It’s just an old picture. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Okay. Listen, is it all right if I ask you a question, Zach?”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead.”

“Did you love your brother?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, Adam, I don’t.”

He knew I was lying. I guess I didn’t care. Look,
I don’t want to remember
should count as
I don’t remember.
That’s what I was thinking.

I have this idea stuck in my head that you have to be born
beautiful
in order to dream beautiful things. God didn’t write
beautiful
on my heart. I’m stuck with all my bad dreams. Bad dreams for bad boys. I guess that’s the way it is for me. Look, there’s nothing I can do about it.

I keep having this dream. It’s like being in hell. It’s like I’m being punished and I have to watch the same scary movie over and over. And even though I know the movie by heart, it still scares me because there’s always a monster lurking in the dark.

That monster wants me dead.

I wonder if I’m the only one who has a monster.

It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream.

I think I know why there are so many addicts in the world.

Running, that’s what I’m doing in the dream. I’m running through the streets and I’m barefoot. My feet are bleeding but I can’t stop and I’m trembling and scared, the storm inside me, strong as a tornado, twisting and twisting. All the pieces of paper I have on the floor of my brain are flying around like birds gone crazy and I’m torn up as hell and I’m running and running and it seems as though I’ll be running forever. It’s night and it’s cold and everything is dead and quiet and hollow and I can hear the echoes of my own breathing in the dark and empty streets. I can’t see where I’m going because the darkness stretches forever and the sweat is stinging my eyes. But that doesn’t stop my feet from running. It’s like my feet can tell my brain what to do. My feet, they’re always taking me places I don’t want to go—especially in my dreams. I’m scared. I hate that I’m so scared. It feels as if my heart if going to be torn out of my body. I don’t even know what I’m scared of.

The monster. I’m scared of the monster.

And all of a sudden I’m home. The lawn is soft as cotton and cool on my bloody feet and I think of my father who is the god of the lawn and I want to cry. I want the lawn to hold me but that’s a crazy thought because a lawn doesn’t have arms and hands and a heart and what good is it to have arms and a heart anyway because, hell, they’ve never done me any good.

When I go inside the house, it’s as empty as the streets. I start to realize that I’m dying of thirst so I try to get a glass of water from the faucet but nothing comes out. No water. I’m going to die, I’m going to die. I know that if I don’t drink
I really am going to die,
so finally I remember that the only thing left to drink in the house is my father’s bourbon. So I go looking in hiding places for his bottles and I find a pint and I drink it down. The whole bottle. And I feel a fire inside but that fire only makes me thirstier.

So now I’m even thirstier than before and I keep trying to get the faucets in the house to work but they just won’t give up any water and, god, I’m thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, and I know I have to drink something so I keep looking for bottles of bourbon and finding them all over the place and I keep drinking them down and as I drink there are explosions in my throat and in my stomach and I’m half on fire and I’m thinking I’m going to die because I keep getting thirstier and thirstier until I just can’t stand it and my feet are really bleeding.

I want to die. I begin to think that maybe the monster will come and I’ll let him take me.

And then my brother appears and he looks really mad and he’s coming at me. He’s screaming at me and calling me all kinds of names. I want to yell for help but nothing comes out and I know it wouldn’t do any good anyway because everyone in the whole world has gone away. I know they’ve gone away because of something I’ve done. My heart is beating so fast that I know it’s going to burst and I can’t stand the panic in my brain.

It would be so peaceful just to die.

That’s when I wake up.

This is not the only dream I have. There are more. How can there be so many dreams living inside me? How do they all fit? Since I’ve been here, it seems like I dream all the time. I almost don’t want to go to sleep—except that I’m so tired by the end of the day that I can’t keep my eyes open.

So I sleep. And I dream.

Sleep and dream.

Sleep and dream. Over and over. This is what my days are made of.

So this is where I live now, in the country of dreams.

Some nights, I wake up in the middle of the night. And I’m scared. Sometimes it’s as though I’ve been crying. The dreams make me tired and I hate myself. There’s blood in my dreams—in all of them. And there’s always something that wants to hurt me. I know it’s the monster. I never see the monster but I know he’s there.

I think the monster comes to me at night.

One of my roommates, Rafael, he’s an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.

One night, Rafael was sitting on my bed and shaking me. “It’s okay,” he was whispering. “It’s only a dream, Zach. It’s only a dream.” I must have been screaming or something. I could feel the beating of my heart. My heart that had the words
anxious
and
sad
and
scared
and
messed up
written on it.

“It’s okay,” Rafael said. “It was only a bad dream.”

I didn’t say anything. I waited until my heart stopped running. Sometimes, my heart ran faster than my bloody feet. When my heart relaxed and got quiet, I told Rafael I needed a cigarette.

“Just go back to sleep,” he said.

“Will you stay? Until I fall asleep again?”

He didn’t say anything. But he stayed.

I felt like a little boy. Shit. But I couldn’t stop shaking. And I didn’t want Rafael to leave. I fell asleep listening to the sound of his breathing. In the morning, Rafael asked me about my dream. “I don’t remember,” I said.

“Try.”

“Why?”

“Because you won’t get better if you don’t.”

“Are you teaming up with Adam?”

Rafael shook his head and then just grinned. “Okay,” he said. “But, listen, Zach, I care about you. I care what happens to you.”

I mean the guy hardly knew me. But the thing was that, you know, I believed the guy. And he wasn’t scary or anything like that. And to tell you the truth I liked that he liked me. I guess I thought he would change his mind about me once he got to know me. Not that I planned on letting him get to know me.

“Did you hear me, Zach? I care about you.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s okay with me that you care about me. But can we please not talk about it? Would that be okay with you?”

“Yeah, that would be okay,” he said.

The thing I like about Rafael is that he’s a nice guy. For-real nice. Mr. Garcia-nice. On the first night he was in Cabin 9, I heard him crying. His crying was real soft and quiet and it made me sad. The thing is that Rafael and I, well, we have this dream thing going on and we’re both sad as hell. That makes us the same. Even though he’s fifty-something and I just turned eighteen, we’re both in the same boat. We’re in the middle of a flood, floating down a wild, untamable river. The real difference between me and Rafael is not our ages, but that he’s working hard to remember and I’m working hard to forget.

Another thing Rafael and I have in common—he hates himself. I hate myself too. But there’s another part of Rafael, I think, a part of him that just doesn’t want to hate himself anymore. He wants to be done with all that I-hate-myself shit.

Look, this dream thing, I just don’t talk about my dreams to anyone. I don’t talk about them with Rafael. I don’t talk about them with any members of the group. And I don’t talk about them with Adam. Yeah, okay, I know my dreams are intrusive. That’s what they call them here. The psych doc, he asked me, “Do you have intrusive dreams?”

I looked at him and said, “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“Are your dreams so real that they intrude into your waking hours?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you want to tell me about them?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“It’s not good to keep all those things inside you.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

“It would be good if you talked about them with someone.”

“Who would it be good for?”

He was trying to ignore the fact that I was being non-compliant. Non-compliant is a therapy word they toss around this place. Non-compliant is a very nice way of saying I was being a jerk. He was a jerk too so it all evened out. Do
not
get me started on the psych doc. I
did not
like the psych doc.
No, I did not.

There are some things that I just don’t like talking about and that’s the way it is. I’ll give the psych doc credit. He knew enough to change the subject. But he wrote something down on his pad. I knew the score. Everything he wrote down on that pad was going to make its way to Adam. I knew that Adam would bring up the issue of my “intrusive dreams” sooner or later. Adam, he was pretty good at getting down to my issues when we talked. Or things he thought were my issues. He has theories about me. I’m more or less hoping he’ll keep those theories to himself.

Sometimes I think everything and everyone here is intrusive. My dreams don’t leave me alone, Adam doesn’t leave me alone, the other therapists don’t leave me alone. Not even my two roommates, Sharkey and Rafael—they don’t even leave me alone.

I’ve been here for three weeks. I know that I was at another place before coming here. That other place was a hospital. I don’t remember anything about it except that I was really sick. Sometimes I have dreams about that other place. Everyone’s dressed in white and all the walls are white and the bed sheets are white and I’m wearing white pajamas which is really weird because I don’t wear pajamas. Everything’s white and blinding and things seem like they’re always moving. I just want to shut my eyes. I’m really tired and everything is blurry and I hear voices calling my name.

And then one day, well, I woke up and I was lying in Bed 3. Bed 3, Cabin 9. I remember being interviewed by the psych doc. I remember talking to Adam. He was really nice to me and his voice was kind and I almost
wanted to cry. I mean, Adam is not a bad person. But the guy just won’t lay off. Always showing up, that guy. And what is it about remembering that really gets him going? What is that?

When I first got here, the staff showed me around the grounds. There were like fifteen cabins scattered around and a main building where we ate and sat around if we wanted to sit around. A lot of people hung out at the main building. I wasn’t one of those people. You know some people just didn’t know how to be alone. Me, I was all about being alone.

Adam says I isolate.

I have no comment about some of Adam’s observations. I did want to ask him if the word “isolate” was intended to be used as a verb. I wondered what Mr. Garcia would think about that.

If I want to hang out in Cabin 9,
what is so fucking bad about that?
It’s a perfectly good cabin.

They let us smoke. Not that the counselors encouraged that kind of addict behavior. But the thing is that most of us have bigger problems. Yeah, smoking is not healthy. Yeah. They offered a “Quit Smoking Class.” I was
not
interested in that subject.

There was a rule that we could only smoke in this one designated spot. Everyone called it the smoking pit even though it wasn’t a pit. I bought a couple of packs of cigarettes off Sharkey when he arrived. He got here ten days after me. I was fucking dying for a cigarette. Sharkey, he’s twenty-seven. He likes to talk a lot. Talk, talk, talk. Makes me fucking crazy.

The first few days I was in Cabin 9 alone. I liked that. I’d go to all the group sessions I was supposed to attend. You know, it was like school only you didn’t get grades. I didn’t mind listening to all the stuff the therapists had to say and what the screwed-up people had to say. I mean, the thing about screwed-up people is that they’re very interesting. Interesting in a very stun-the-hell-out-of-me kind of way. I mean people get upset and angry and emotional and all of that. That’s not really a big deal. Okay, so
I don’t join in on all the emoting. It’s bad enough that my dreams make me cry sometimes. I don’t mind listening. And if someone wants to put all his emotional stuff out in front of everyone, well, that doesn’t bother me. Well, it does bother me, but as long as there’s a therapist around, it doesn’t make me too anxious.