Day 300 - Perfectly Executed. - Chapter 2.1 (1009 Words)

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PERFECTLY EXECUTED

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 2.1

The table in the prison visitors area was dappled with light from a high window, barred and crisscrossed with wire far beyond the reach and capability of those inside the room. The ceiling was taller and further away than anyone could reach and the walls were smooth and featureless, no purchase for climbing or leverage.

The artificial lighting was fighting sunlight, and losing the battle for effectiveness and appeal. Warm, bright and powerful against cold, diffuse, and wan; it was no contest in the minds of the visitors or the inmates.

The man that Stuart had come to see was fascinated by the interplay between the artificial and the natural. His hands and fingers flickered absently in and out of the shadows and the light, a battle between good and evil playing out in his mind. Each side fighting, losing, winning and moving on in each exchange. The lingering touch of heat on his skin, not in any danger of burning, the only threat being the addiction of the sensation, when not presented with the chance for sunlight too often.

He was a prisoner, an inmate and a patient all equally true states for him, but in his mind he was a victim. He was unclear to what he was a victim of exactly, and his ability to process his own thoughts was severely compromised by the drugs and treatments they provided him. It was not a battle, to keep a grip on his sanity, it was a sloping hillside, where he never fell all the way to the bottom. Every time he clawed his way back to this sense of rightness and righteousness, then the handholds and steps that he braced on, melted away and the gentle and graceful slide began again.

So he stopped climbing and forgot what it was he had ever been climbing towards. Now he spent his days walking, from side to side in his room, from perimeter to perimeter in his exercise period and from dosage to dosage three times a day. He had highs and lows in between the effective periods of his medication, and he no longer felt any urge to hide or avoid taking his pills.

The temptations were gone, along with the compulsions and the commands, and what was left was bland, unexciting and blissful. His highs were bumps in the road, and the lows, merely potholes. Such metaphors were beyond his self-understanding these days, the aggrandizements of old, the growing sense of entitlement and purpose were all gone, smoothed out into a constant hum of existence.

He was happy. Happier at least, if not truly content with incarceration for actions that were committed in the darkened tunnel of his previous self, the one where he was not who he thought he was now. That person was a stranger to him, a third party and he the casual observer.

Maybe not casual, the memory caused him some approximation of pain, a feeling he knew he should feel, regardless of what was really happening inside.

Over the past eighteen months he had been watching the stranger that was his history, come alive in hearings, trials and therapy sessions. Group was an odd thing, they only did that once a week, to work on his social skills, how to find them and fake them.

Fake it till you make it, which was the mantra he had learned and taken on. He started pretending, finding ways to fit in until he began to feel it a habit.   

Samuel Reid, a madman he did not recognize or understand. He could not begin to do so, not from close up, but from a distance it was another story.

A story was how he could see and communicate with Samuel Reid, they shared a name and a body but that was it. With time the acceptance of who he was and what he had done, that Samuel Reid the murdering madman and Samuel Reid, the uncomprehending observer, were not as far apart as they wanted to be, that day would come.

For now he told stories, not made up but he thought of them as writing the story of Samuel’s life, a biographer of his delusions, and a touchstone to his thoughts and feelings, a way that people, including the new and smoothed out Samuel Reid, could better understand Samuel Reid.

He was capable of much, and driven by so little. There was nothing in his way, and there were things to be balanced in the ledger.

God’s Ledger.

“What was the first time Samuel spoke back to the voices?” the researcher was young, and working to a script that Edward had provided, anonymously through the intermediary persona of the author seeking knowledge.

The researcher’s name was Donnie March, and he was barely in his third decade of life, but was so full of himself and his purpose, like Samuel Reid had been. He came looking for notoriety and knowledge, but only walked away each day with one of those things.

It was not glamorous and exciting, there was no threat and no squalor in the Looney Bin for the criminally insane, there were broken people and destructive thoughts that no one should have to bear. He had wanted to show himself capable, but instead he became a locus for the equation that added up to zero.

“You’d have to ask him.” Said Samuel and not for the first time had he deferred to a non-existent version of himself, one it was impossible to connect with.

“What do you remember of what Mr. Reid was doing at that time?” Donnie changed tack, knowing that there was something being kept from him, something unfair and something giving them an advantage.

“When was that?” Samuel was no longer paying attention to the younger man, the one with the questions and the clipboard. The pocket digital recorder was on the table and getting it all, it did not matter as much that he could get all the answers he was looking form, he needed to keep Samuel talking.