Another day of his brain being picked apart by Dr. Sodhi; he imagined the gray matter in his brain melting through his ears and nostrils. From all this irritating nit-picking of his mind, she had ceased to be hot.
Funny how annoyance can be a detriment to a woman’s beauty
, he thought.
Dr. Sodhi opened his file and said nothing.
“What’s on the docket today doc?” Deni asked.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked casually.
“It’s your show; it always has been,” he replied.
She nodded, but said nothing.
“Is this silent treatment, some kind of test?” he asked.
She leaned forward and stared into Deni’s eyes. “Tell me something. Tell me a secret. Tell me a story.”
Deni leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “I don’t know much.” He looked up at her. “What’s happening in the world today?”
“The usual: tornados, hurricanes, mass shootings, corruption, poverty,” she said.
“Locusts and seven horsemen,” continued Deni.
“I don’t believe in the end of times,” she said. “Consciousness will always remain even when everything else is destroyed.”
Deni grinned. “Consciousness or conscience?”
“We can have consciousness without the conscience. Conscience is something not all humans have acquired,” she replied.
“You’re preaching to the choir, sister,” he said.
“So Deni, now that you recognize the difference between consciousness and conscience. Let’s talk about your conscience.”
Deni smirked and glanced away. “Is my conscience clean? Do I have regrets?” He arched his back against the chair and sighed. “I regret being in this hell hole. I regret not dying like my brother. I regret the fact I will never have sex with a woman again. There are many things I regret.”
“Prior to the incident here in the prison, did you ever think of suicide?” she asked.
He sat forward and looked into her eyes. “Did you ever wonder what the world would be like without you in it? Did you ever wonder if your existence was a mistake? In the big puzzle of life, your pieces just didn’t fit.”
“Is that a yes?” Dr. Sodhi asked.
“My life has been worthless, but perhaps in the end I could give it some meaning,” he replied.
“You think your life was worthless? How do you think your family and friends would respond to that comment? Do you think those who love you would think your life is worthless?”
Deni threw himself back against the chair, once again uncomfortable with the questioning. “I was lazy and good for nothing.”
“How would you come to believe that about yourself?” she pressed.
“You wouldn’t understand. Your life has worth. You’re a doctor; you help people…supposedly,” said Deni with a casual shrug.
“Not always. I was young once like you. Not everyone saw things through my perspective. My father wanted me to be a medical doctor and I don’t want to tell you his reaction when I told him I wanted to work as a prison psychologist and help inmates,” she said.
Deni laughed. “You wanted to work here?”
“I did. I love my job. It is the men inside this prison that need the most help, that need the most love. Something had bought them to this place, often something very terrible. If I could help alleviate that pain, then I have been a success.”
“My parents wanted me to be a doctor too,” he said.
“But you chose journalism as a major. Why didn’t you tell them?” she asked.
“How many mothers pride themselves on saying, my son the journalist? Besides, no lives were saved by a journalist,” Deni said.
“On the contrary, a good journalist can expose injustices and atrocities,” said Dr. Sodhi.
“Unless you believe people get what they deserve; some deserve the injustice and in that case reporting is just sensationalism,” replied Deni. He looked at Dr. Sodhi with a new perspective. She too had her purposes, her struggles that many would not understand. “For so long I tried to be a part of this world, but always felt a stranger, like an alien visitor watching and studying mankind.”
“It must have been hard to feel separated,” she said.
Deni nodded. “I tried my best to belong.”
“From what I heard from family and friends, you were successful,” replied Dr. Sodhi.
“Was I?”
“Deni, all of us, no matter our nationality, race or religion, had at one time or another felt separated. Everyone, Deni, feels disconnected from time to time. The best way to regain that connection with others is love, when you lose sight of love, you lose your connections to people and you feel separated. Trying to belong is not love, it is a physical act. You’re not loving; you’re faking and thus creating a great gap between you and others. I bet there were times in your life when you experienced love, whether it be with family, a friend or girlfriend, you didn’t feel so isolated. You didn’t have to try so hard.”
Feeling ashamed, Deni rocked on his chair. He didn’t say anything to Dr. Sodhi.
“Why did you feel you needed to try when it appears that many accepted you as you were?” she asked.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here now would I?” he replied.
Dr. Sodhi knew she was beginning to lose him again. She could get so far and then he would shut down. Reclining back in her chair, she stared down at the papers in his file. Somewhere in his record, interviews with family and friends and even her notes, the answer was there. She just needed to find the key to unlock the secret he was holding.
“I don’t see the purpose of all this prying. Why help when we’re all doomed?” Deni finally said.
“Who’s doomed, Deni? Who is we?” she asked.
Deni didn’t realize he used the word, we.
Was it a Freudian slip
? he thought. “I don’t know—me, you, all the prisoners in here, all of humanity.”
“The consciousness of we is what makes for a better world. The ease of any suffering, no matter a man’s circumstances, breathes light into this world. Easing your suffering can literally change this world. YOU are not an ill-fitting piece; you are very much connected to this world regardless of where you lie. Think of it like a bad electrical wire. One bad wire can break the whole circuit, but when all wires are aligned and positively connected, everything functions properly. It is no different with people,” she said.
Deni smiled and it was a genuine smile. Her words rang true to him and gave him some small sense of purpose despite his confinement.
“This isn’t over,” she reminded. “You and I still have a lot of work to do.”
“What else is there?” he asked.
“What you’re not divulging,” she said.
Deni nodded. He didn’t know the reasons for his isolation. He could tell her all the obvious ones: nationality, class and religion, but not one of them kept him from having friends. All his friends did accept him regardless. He could no longer stand behind the superficial walls he built. By now, even he wanted to find out what was really going on within.
Solitude was suggested to be the answer for anyone trying to find answers to their problems. It was really hard to do when there was so much noise; everyone else’s noise. He listened to friends commiserate failed relationships and other hardships; he watched and read the news seeing all the crap going on in the world. There was just so much spinning and spinning that it was hard to grasp one particular concept to think it through to its end.
Deni sat on his bed and glanced at the Quran.
Are my answers in there? Is this my Jihad to combat the enemy inside?
He couldn’t think sitting down, so he got up and walked around the room. “Once I free myself from my eternal demon, then no matter what, I will be free,” he said.
He pressed his back against the steel door, slid down and sat on the floor. His mind swirled through his past—the violence in Chechnya, the family history in Volgograd, the move to the United States, school, college and everything in between, and all the people that had come and gone. He closed his eyes.
Seven-year-old Deni peered out his American Uncle Boris’s living room window in an upscale suburb of Wilmington, Delaware. It was dark now, but from the little he could see, it was a vast difference from the farm in Volgograd. There were no tree lines, meadows and even wolves; there were streetlights, big houses, well-manicured lawns, and expensive cars. To Deni, it was as if the plane landed on a different planet.
With his face pressed against the glass window, he wondered why his parents bought them here.
What is so great about this place and when can I go home?
The immaculate nature of America unnerved him and he was only seven. Everyone seemed friendly—his aunt and uncle, his cousins, but there was something lacking; something he didn’t understand.
“What are you looking at?” asked Mikail from the pull-out-couch.
“I’m just looking,” responded Deni.
Mikail laughed. “You’re not going to see anything in the darkness.”
Deni turned away from the window. “I can see lots of things.” He jumped on the pull-out-couch alongside Mikail. “It’s very different here; they have lots of fancy stuff.”
“Yeah, ain’t it great?” Mikail played with the remote control of the large screen television. Flipping through channels, Mikail landed on a sexually explicit movie and then turned the volume way down. He grinned and reclined back on the bed. He noticed Deni staring at the television. “You’re not going to tell ma and pop are you?”
Deni numbly shook his head. He watched the television having no idea what it was, only that he was strangely pulled in. He was shocked and thought of his own small body compared to the man on the screen. “Do we have to watch this?”
Mikail stretched back on the sofa bed. “Yeah. You may learn something.”
Staring at the television, Deni tried to understand what it was he was supposed to learn and why.
Deni opened his eyes and swung his head back, hitting the steel door of his cell. “Ouch!” he exclaimed and then wondered why his mind traveled back to that incident. They only thing he could really recall was feeling uncomfortable and confused, but other than that, he was safe with his brother, Mik, so no harm could really come to him.
How could I feel comfortable and safe at the same time?
he thought.
It wasn’t the movie that had Deni so uncomfortable and confused, it was this new place. He didn’t know why they had to leave the farm in Volgograd. He loved it there, lounging in the tall grass, watching the wolves at a distance, hunting with his brother and father. Here in this new place, there were all sorts of rules, all sorts of crazy stimuli.
Deni didn’t remember much of his older cousin Victoria; he only met her a few times at family functions, but then the families never got together much after they moved to the United States. He recalled her tall, reddish brown hair, slender build and that she was a royal pain in the ass. The ten-year age gap between them didn’t help as she tried to control his every move whenever he was around her. He was seven and wanted nothing else than to be left alone.
Uncle Boris offered to buy new clothes for the newly arrived Daudov family. They all looked like a bunch of 1980s throw back vagabonds from the old country, and were a complete embarrassment for Uncle Boris’s stylish broods.
In the boy’s section of The Gap, Victoria tried to size up shirts on Deni. “This would look so cute on you,” she said.
Deni hung from the bars and rolled his eyes at Bashir.
Uncle Boris laughed. “You better get used to it son. There is always going to be a woman who wants to shop for you.”
“I can’t remember the last time I bought a shirt,” joked Bashir.
“Women, when they get their claws in you, they want you to look the way they want you to,” said Uncle Boris.
“Dad, you’re not helping,” said Victoria.
“Sweetheart, you’re not helping. This boy’s not impressed with anything you’re showing him,’ said Uncle Boris with a loud laugh.
“Pop, I wanna go home,” Deni said to Bashir in Russian.
“After we’re done shopping,” Bashir replied in Russian.
“I want to go home to the farm. I don’t like it here,” he responded in Russian and then held his weight on the clothing rack, nearly toppling it over. “People are strange here. I don’t like it. Why did we have to come here?”
Bashir lifted Deni from the rack to keep it from toppling over. He knelt before Deni and said in Russian, “Because it’s a good place, a very good place; it’s just different. You will like it; I promise.” Bashir hugged and kissed Deni on the cheek.
Uncle Boris kneeled next to Deni. “I’ll make you a deal. If you stop hanging on the bars and let your cousin pick you out some clothes, I’ll buy you a big dinner with dessert.”
Deni tugged at the shirt he had on. “I like my shirt.”
“Son, you can keep your shirt, but don’t you want a new one? You can have both shirts,” said Bashir.
Deni looked at the one in Victoria’s hand. “That one,” he said just to get the ordeal over with.