Authors: Brandon Shire
When we finally stopped some hours later all three of us glanced up at a dingy brick facade, too high fences and barred windows. It was enough to undo me.
“Please, Mrs. Massey. Please don’t do this to me. I love him, you know I do. Please.” I couldn’t stop, the words welled up out of me like blood from an open wound. But they had no effect. Mrs. Massey wrenched her gaze from the building and stared forward, saying nothing.
Two huge white-clad orderlies came out of the main entrance and met us at the car. They each took an arm when I stepped out and half dragged me into the building as Jarrel and Mrs. Massey tagged along behind.
We went through a maze of hallways and locked doors until we were met by a silver haired man whose tufted eyebrows seemed interwoven with the hair on his head. He introduced himself as Dr. Barrow.
“Strip,” was the only thing he said to me, all else was directed at the emotionless faces of my two escorts.
I burned red. He pointed to a hospital bed and ran me through a complete and thorough physical as Jarrel and Mrs. Massey impassively looked on. He stopped only once to announce to them that I had been penetrated, which he dutifully put in his notes.
“This boy needs a bath,” he said to the orderlies.
“Any questions?” he asked Jarrel and Mrs. Massey as he removed his gloves and tossed them in the trash.
“I thought Dr. Minot would be greeting us,” Jarrel said.
Dr. Barrow shrugged. “He asked me to step in this morning, some official duty that couldn’t wait. But I’m sure he’ll be back by lunch if you care to wait.”
“No,” Mrs. Massey said immediately. “I have my own son to attend to.”
“Very well, let me call you an escort ,” Barrow offered as he picked up the phone.
I stood naked, humiliated and silent, staring at the floor as tears continued to chap my face. It was then that I came to the sudden realization that Charlotte’s enemies had somehow become mine. I looked up at the two of them. I didn’t know how I knew it, or what their reasons were, but I knew that I had just become the stick they were using to swing at Charlotte’s head. And they knew, I knew.
When their escort came, Dr Barrow politely saw them to the door then turned to me and gave my orderlies a dismissive wave, making it obvious that he had more important things to do.
I was lugged through another maze of hallways and locked doors and pushed into a rough cement square that had a rusted grate in the floor as its only decoration. One of the orderlies tossed me an old flaking bar of blue lye soap while the other unwound a hose and sprayed me down with cold water. They smoked and laughed while I danced to their directions and when they finally grew bored; the bigger one tossed me a scrim-thin towel and told me to dry off. I was then marched to a supply window where I was issued a paper jumpsuit and an old mildewed matt
r
ess so thin that the roaches made speed bumps in it when they raced underneath.
After yet another march, and at the end of another ill-lit hall, I was dumped into a small room with a cement block bed, a steel toilet, and a muted blur of light near the ceiling, which I assumed was a window. Terror and anguish were the only two things that I could claim as companions, and I clung to them fiercely. But that was before rage slowly began to fill the chasm that my tears and shame had left behind. The more I thought about what was being done to me, the more I thought about revenge.
Early on the third day the door to my cell opened in a furious commotion. It revealed a ferret faced man with brown marble-hard eyes and an almost hairless dome that seemed ridiculously large. This was Dr. Harold Minot.
Instinct instantly cautioned me to be wary. Here, it said, was a man of small and unpleasant tortures. He wouldn’t leave visible scars, only salt tracked on downied cheeks and gulches carved into the psyches of still-forming minds.
It did not take me long to find out how correct my intuition had been.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked.
I shook my head, no.
“This is Sanctuary. This is where we keep society’s adolescent degenerates,” he said as he took my file from under his arm and opened it slowly.
He looked at me over the top of the file, pulling reading glasses up from a chain hidden inside his coat. “Hmm. Queer, huh?”
“I want to go. Please,” I implored him.
He chuckled and tucked my file under his arm again. “This is your home, Charles. You’ve been thrown away, and I hate to say it, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone cares.”
He whipped out my file a second time. “Look at your name for instance, Charles. Do you have any idea where it came from? Why it’s different from your mothers?” he asked insistently.
I shook my head rapidly. I had wondered many times but had always been afraid to ask.
“I didn’t either, so I checked on it when I saw the commitment papers,” Minot said. “Charles Benedict: from the womb of Charlotte and the loins of a liar,” he explained. “Witty, isn’t it?” he asked as he wagged his eyebrows at me. “A perpetual reminder of how much your mother abhors you.”
I started screaming incoherently, a loud warbling nonsensical rush of despair and rage. My fear that Charlotte had never wanted me, never cared whether I lived or died, was finally realized in his explanation of my name. The feelings of recklessness, yearning, and ultimate abandonment were indescribable, immeasurable. Minot finally stepped up and walloped me hard across the face, drawing blood as he silenced me.
He grabbed my jaw between his fingers and tilted my face up to him as I looked at him in shock.
“You’re mine now, Charles. It’s just me and you, so you might as well forget about your mama and your little fag friend. This is home now, and you are going to be here for a good long time. You can make it hard, or you can make it easy. Your choice. But from now on, you’re mine.
“Fuck you,” I spat at the only available target for my rage.
He released my chin with a look of surprise and stepped back, a grin breaking across his face. He bobbed his head at me, taken up by the only challenge I had ever voiced in my life. “Good. I like that, Charles. I like it very much.”
Minot turned his head slightly, without taking his eyes from me, and spoke over his shoulder at someone outside the door. “Mr. Robbins, escort our young friend down to the white room. I’ll be there momentarily, and Charles can see just how much I enjoy his little challenges.” He looked at me a moment longer and walked out without another word.
One of the orderlies from the day of my admission side-stepped into the room with a leer after Minot had passed him. He bent close to my ear and groped my ass with a large rough hand. “We’ll get acquainted later queer boy, count on it.”
*****
The white room was just that, white. Hardened like a carapace for insanity, its tiles echoed the muffled screams of the abused and bounced them back ten decibels higher. It was a cold stiff room that waited with an unquenchable thirst for the arrival of the undead so that it could steal away their innocence while they convulsed in agony.
In the center of this white mosaic of madness was the machine that provided many of Minot’s miracles, and ultimately led to his downfall. It was his baby, his birth child. Smuggled in from a defunct asylum, the Lightening Bug, as it was affectionately known by the wards of Sanctuary, was liberally used to dose us with the nostrum of Benjamin Franklin.
I backpedaled immediately. I knew an electric chair when I saw one. Robbins laughed and tightened his grip. “It won’t hurt you, queer boy, it’ll help you. Ask Dr. Minot.” He howled with laughter, ripped my paper jumpsuit off with his free hand, and strapped me in, leaving me to be electrically lobotomized into submission.
My first screams for mercy went unheard, as did my tenth. Only Minot could decipher when his wards had learned their lessons, and he was not one for easy lessons, particularly with me. It seemed that I was a special project of his; a private commitment versus the state ordered adolescents I was boarded with. That license gave him free reign to experiment in my social regeneration, without all those pesky petty bureaucrats looking over his shoulder. I learned quickly that his dislike of children bordered on pathologic, so much so, that he probably would have exterminated all his wards had it not been for the paperwork involved.
That first time, I awoke from the ministrations of the Bug the same way that I would awake from it many, many times afterwards; my heart trying to pound through my ribs, my body covered in sweat, my mouth filled with the metallic taste of terror. Minot was there, as he always would be, standing over me with his fingers running lightly across my chest or clasped tightly under his arms in annoyance.
He never took any sexual liberties with me, though there were those such as Robbins who were not so conscionable about such things.
“When are you going to stop this nonsense, Charles?” he asked me. “Don’t you see where this is leading?”
Invariably, my reply was to either swear an oath of future good behavior, or simply tell him to go fuck himself.
Minot’s response was always one of disappointment. “You’re going to be a man of tics, Charles. A man of tics.”
It became his credo.
I did try to escape, many times. But I was never successful. I was hunted down, popped with Valium and Thorazine, and from there, straight-jacketed or body bagged before being dumped in a padded room. When my fury had wrung me dry, and the drugs had taken complete effect, I was stripped and cuffed to a bed in two or four point restraints and left alone until I was docile enough that the sound of my pleas bordered on obscene. And, of course, the escape attempt earned me another appointment with the Bug.
The rest of the names and faces are a blur. Between the haze of drugs, the Bug, and the mental self-deletion of Robbins’s actions, only the stark desperation of the place remains firmly fixed in my mind.
That, and the death of Bruce Livermore, the boy who precipitated my exit from Sanctuary.
Charlotte is still breathing and the house is quiet except for the clatter of a distant train in the snowy fog.
I’m sitting on the windowsill watching Charlotte and wondering if she’s ever sat here during her illness and felt the complete emotional vacuity that surrounds her. Has she ever understood that her room was never anything but a precise reflection; that while her flesh pulsated, the rest of her existence was dead? She had made it so that no one cared, ever.
Is that living?
I turned back to the darkness outside and let the timbre of the train take me with it. Could these snowflakes catch all these mixed emotions and carry them in their contours until the spring thaw? Could we really start over again? It seemed unlikely, especially when the doorknob turned and Jarrel’s form became shadowed in the back light.
My uncle is a hulking man with red hair and thick, heavy hands. His face is lined and demarked by obvious feelings of raw inferiority and anger, though I should note that I have seen his eyes carry warmth, but strictly for people outside the family.
His chest heaved as if he was about to begin a long oratory, but he fumbled, biting at his lip, and began searching for the light switch instead.
I watched him grope the wall and felt a sting as light flooded the room and soaked up our emptiness. His eyes fell on me heavily, but not without some reluctance, as he rested his bulk awkwardly against the doorjamb. “Charlotte needs her medication,” he said, his expression not quite as pinched and determined as Penny’s had been.
“Fuck you, and her,” I told him.
His mouth puckered into a displeased little knot, but he said nothing. He’d been sent on a mission that he obviously hadn’t wanted and seemed ashamed of being here. Most likely because he had astutely avoided my eyes when I first came in, and only his loyalty to Penny had allowed him to be prompted into acknowledging me now.
Unable to speak, he spread his hands apart as if asking for a break.
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, watching him in unforgiving silence.
His eyes dove to the floor with a frown as his hands came together and began to twist around one another.
“Not so easy to disguise anymore, is it Jarrel?”