1

            What are you in for.

That’s the first thing anyone says to you here. The way conversations start, if that’s what you have instead of a fight. Like nothing else matters about you. Like your crime defines you.

            To a lot of people, it does. It defines you for the guards and deputies. So much that some of them call you by it. “You, ag robbery, kitchen duty.” “You, statutory, you want a work detail?” “Yo DV, get your thumb outta your a*s and mop the floor.” It defines you for the judge who sentences you. For the public defendant who doesn’t give a s**t about you since you’re too broke to afford a lawyer. Or maybe you just didn’t bother to get one cause you don’t much care if you’re in jail or out, since it all amounts to the same goddamn thing after a while anyway.

            I’ll be out next month. Dobson, the guy who spots me in the weight room, asked what I’m gonna do when I’m out. I told him I’m gonna put a bullet through my brain. Could take care of the job some other way in here, but the risk of failure is high. I’ve had enough of failure. I'll just wait till I get out, make it clean and simple. Hard to f**k that up. High rate of success.

            But he son of a b***h narc’d. Got me stuck on suicide watch in this piss-yellow jumpsuit, and I gotta talk to some shrink tomorrow who comes in from the hospitals and tries to pin down our demons, or whatever.

            I know how that’s gonna go.

 

            So now I’m in this little room. Waiting.

The floor used to be white. They left me in here and I heard them talking outside, arguing about whether they’d put me in a divider room or cuff me and leave me here. The tall fat one told the short old one that I wasn’t in for violent crime. The short old one said I might not’ve been busted for that but I’ve certainly displayed an aptitude for it in my time here. The tall fat one said he didn’t think it would be a problem. The short old one said he’d talk to the shrink. Then they went down the hall.

            The sound echos when I scrape the chair against the floor. Not much air to breathe in this ugly gray box, enough to keep you going and that’s it. I try to get a metal riff going in my head but that part of my brain’s been mostly dead for a while.

Who cares.

            I wait.

            So much waiting. You can sink down into it. Turn off your thoughts. Check out. I mostly stay checked out. It’s all right.

            Sometimes you can get the seconds to stretch out like taffy. You can do it if you pay attention to your heartbeat, but it’s easier if you can see the seconds on a clock. I hear one and look for it. It’s up high on the wall behind me. I turn the chair around and lean it back against the edge of the table so the door’s behind me, and look up at the clock. Black metal circle with a white face and the kind of second hand that twitches. Gray.

They have this lousy big one in mess with a red second hand that moves smooth, no twitching. That one goes too fast. Nothing to catch on to slow time down. This one, I look up at it, and I watch the twitch.

It’s pretty good. The way it jumps forward, then hitches back a fraction of an inch. Like it’s bouncing on the seconds. Like the seconds are a trampoline. The seconds unwind. No silence is louder than the one the seconds start sinking into. No seconds are longer than the ones filling the space between the twitches of the clock. Longer, longer.       Longer.

            I hear the door open behind me, in slow motion. Every hitch in the hinge snags on my eardrums so it’s not a creaking sound, it’s a string of separate metal grindings. The footstep over the sound of the door closing snaps the loose spool of seconds back together and time is time again.

            “Kevin,” a woman’s voice says behind me.

I don’t turn around. Her voice curves up at the end, in a businesslike way, a let’s deal with this and get on to the next broken loser way. She said it wrong. It’s a boomerang, whipping back on itself at the v. Erasing itself. I’m KEVin. I’m not kevIN?

I hear her pull the chair out and sit down.

            “No cuffs, huh?” I say, still looking up at the clock. Usually I can’t slow the seconds down when somebody’s trying to interact with me. But why not try again. Why not.

            “I told them it wouldn’t be necessary.”

            “What makes you sure?” A scratch mars the surface of the bottom edge of the black metal frame around the clock. Like it was dropped. I think I could reach the clock if I stood up. It’s pretty high, but I could just about get it.

            “Intuition,” her voice says behind me.

I snort. What the hell do they teach shrinks at shrink school, anyway? God almighty. I wonder how secure the clock is. If it’s screwed in place, or just hanging on a nail.

            “I’m here because you told another prisoner, Mr. Dobson, that you’re planning to kill yourself when you’re released,” the woman says. “I’m going to give you an assessment so we can figure out a plan for you.”

            The seconds slow down maybe five percent while I build a picture of her in my mind from the sound of her voice. Short. Older. Blondish hair dyed so many times it looks like it’s made of plastic. Maybe glasses on one of those little beaded chain thingies around her neck.

Wonder if that’d hold you if you hung by it. What are those things made of? Fishing line? Elastic?

The seconds slow a little more while she waits for me to speak. Tick. Tick.   Tick.    Tick.     Tick.

            I feel her eyes on the back of my head. I tilt my head up, to the ceiling, higher, higher, back and back till I can barely see the top of her head upside-down. Dark brown hair. Wrong about that. I flip my head back up and watch the clock again. 

            “The questions I’m going to ask you will help me get a picture of your mental health,” she says. “I’d like you to answer yes or no, and if you have anything to add, you can say that too. Okay?”   

            Tick. Tick.  Tick.   Tick. A smearing feeling in my head, then I’m at a conversation I had when I first got here, while I was cleaning the floors in mess. Some guy thought he’d show me the ropes. Some guys like to do that. Pretend they know so much. “Psych Services upstairs, man, you wanna do whatever you can to stay outta there. You go up there and you’re bunking with the s**t-slingers. Crazy sick sons of b*****s up there. They eat their own feces.”

Smear again. Tick.     Tick.

            “Fine,” I say.

            “Thank you, Kevin,” she says.

            I hear it erase itself as it comes out her mouth. Got it right this time. Good girl.

They say your name for different reasons. Some of them say it to calm you down when you’re cranked. Some of them say it like it’s a piece of s**t they’re scraping off the bottom of their shoe. Some of them say it to get you to look them in the eye.

            “Can you turn around and look at me while we talk?” she asks.

            I watch the clock. It’s unwinding. Seconds slicing the thin empty air, bouncestill. Bouncestill. They make a snick sound. I try it under my breath: “Snick. Snick.” Can’t quite get it right.

            “All right. I’ll get started. Sometimes people feel like their moods change all the time, like they’re on a roller coaster. Never knowing what’s coming next, if they’re going to fly or crash. Does that sound like you?”

            The air in the room tightens, the seconds cranking back up. “No.” Maybe they teach that at shrink school, how to tell if some dipshit inmate is lying.

            “Does it bother you when people you know talk about their problems? Do people ever tell you that you’re not listening to their problems?”

            “No.” Tick. Tick.    Tick.       Tick.

            “Have you ever felt like you were numb inside, or that you were cut off from the people around you or the place you were in?” Her words slur. Time is slower. It’s working.

            My heart pulses in my wrists. It’s faster than the seconds. “No.” The ticking of the clock moves farther away, the spaces between the snicks distant and present at the same time.

            “Do you ever feel so angry that you shout at people or start fights?”

            “No.” I curl my fingers down and press them to my mouth. I can smell jail in them. Jail is an assault on the nose. It gets easier after a while, you get numb to it, but it never goes away. It sinks way into your skin, and if you catch a whiff of yourself over the stink of everyone else, you can smell it on you.

            “Do you feel interested in projects or ideas at first and then get into trouble with people because you don’t follow through?”

            “No.”

            “Do you hold grudges? Do you give people the silent treatment for long periods of time?”

            “No.” I touch my thumb to my first finger, then my third, then my second, then fourth. Over and over. Then with both hands.

            “Do you ever try hard not to think about something terrible that you saw or that happened to you?”

            “No.” I reverse the pattern my fingers make. Line it up with the sound of the ticking clock.

            “Have you ever had a time in your life when you felt depressed most of the day for at least two weeks?”

            “No.” Pattern reversed again. Tick.    Tick.

            “Is that true?”

            “No.” I tap the wrong finger to my thumb.

Caught.

Get with the program. The program is, avoid bunking with the s**t-slingers.

            I can hear her writing. I picture her clipboard. The paper sandwiched between the tip of her pen and the brown… whatever the f**k clipboards are made of. Pinned down and marked up.

            “Do you ever have trouble with thoughts or feelings you can’t seem to get out of your head, or nightmares about something you saw or that happened to you?”

            Throw a bone. Avoid the s**t-slingers without looking like you’re trying to avoid the s**t-slingers. “Yes.”

            “Have you ever been in a psychiatric hospital for any reason?”

            “No.” I try the pattern one way with my right hand and the other way with my left hand.

            “Have you ever felt like you had to stay on guard even though there was no reason to, or felt jumpy or easily startled?”

            “No.” I can’t do it. My fingers fall into the same pattern.

            “Kevin,” she says. Wrong. She’s manipulated her voice so that it sounds like a pillow now. “Will you please look at me?”

            I press my palms together and look back up at the clock. Then I stand up and reach up to it. I press the bottom edge of it with my fingertips. It moves as I press on it.

Stupid of them, to leave a clock where anyone could get it. I sit back down and watch the second hand.

            “Can you tell me if you’re thinking of hurting yourself now?”

            “F**k off,” I say.

            She sighs. I run the sound of F**k off through my head, then press it in between the ticking. I can get about three in per second. I stand up and reach for the clock again, see what I’m going to do with it before I do it.

            “So tell me,” she says. “Do you still play bass?”

            I drop my hand. Suck my breath in.

I turn.

            She’s sitting with her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, her pen tucked between her fingers.

Watching me. With those eyes.

The clock has unwound.

            “Oh Jesus Christ,” I say. “You.”

Reviews

[David Scott]

Where to start in this review?
First things first, amazing!
I could see a playwright here. So believable.
my favorite aspect was how you dealt with the obsession with time. The taffy analogy and the observation of the second hand on the clock. (I used to sit in school in the lower grades and watch those big clocks do just what you described, jumping forward and ticking back). Life is full of these little eddies that swirl back on themselves repeating the same path that was just completed. Oh I loved that!!!
Then you get to the interview... No, No, No, No, truth and lies and lies in truth, interrupted by a moment of empathy in, "yes", only to find ourselves at "f**k off" as soon as it tries to become real...

It worries me that I can see the mind of this person so well. I'll just assume it is because you wrote is with great expertise! Frighteningly good!

I almost forgot... I loved the way you explained the emphasis in pronouncing his name... "KEVin" and how the way we speak matters so very much.
Then you just blew my mind with this one line," “Thank you, Kevin,” she says. I hear it erase itself as it comes out her mouth. Got it right this time. Good girl."
How many time do we say things is a way that does simply erase the words as we speak them? Brilliant!
I'm not sure what is in the coffee this morning or if your really as good as it seems... Write more, PLEASE!

[J_Star]

Jeez, now you're making me blush! Thank you so much for the kind review. It made me really happy to read this. And it motivates me to get in gear on this project, which has been languishing on my hard drive for months.

Thanks again, David.

[KAOlmsted]

Holy cats.

This is even better than COL...wait...what?? I did NOT just say that...this is pretty f*****g amazeballs, though, J...you're so good with inner dialogue, every time I come away from one of your writes I feel the need to go back to my own work and do a massive edit, give our Nic some better thoughts ;-)

Only one thing that snared me, and it was right at the beginning. "The way conversations start, if that’s what you have instead of a fight." --I wonder if you meant "...if that's what you have in mind..."

Oh. Two things, actually...sorry...when the guy is showing Kevin the ropes and talking about the s**t-slingers, would he really say "feces"? Meh, who knows...it made me smile either way ;-)

I really want more of this, and I am going to bug you relentlessly until I get more ;-)

p.s. I turned the book off for a while because, all joking apart, I have been editing *laugh* and some of the things in the version you began reading will no longer be relevant, so I just unpublished until I can tweak 'em. Haven't seen you around much, though, so it's probably moot anyway, telling you, but just in case you find some time and get back on, I just wanted to let you know.

hanks for sharing this with us, J...it's going to be great, I just know it.

[KAOlmsted]

xD hanks...silly typo ;-) Of course I mean Thanks...a million times thanks!

[J_Star]

Hey lady. Thanks for reading this, and for the comments and compliments. Sorry I haven't been around much. I have no real excuse other than that life is damned busy as hell. I'm planning on coming back soon, promise! Can't wait to see what you have in store with Nic and Co.

[KAOlmsted]

Always my pleasure. See you soon. xoxo