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Every morning was a little bit worse than the one that had come before it. Casey would watch Zeke as he got ready to go wherever he went. He would stare while Zeke made the breakfast that Casey could not eat. He would gnaw helplessly at his fingers as Zeke wrapped up the lunch that he would leave for Casey, the one Casey never ate but that Zeke made anyway. With every minute that went by, Casey would become more anxious until the worst moment came, when Zeke would say he had to leave and ask Casey to go in the bathroom. And although Casey trusted Zeke and knew Zeke meant him no harm, Casey never could go into the bathroom on his own, and every morning ended with Zeke hauling Casey bodily into the bathroom and then slamming the door shut before Casey could run. Then Zeke would padlock the door from the outside and promise Casey that he would be back soon. He would tell Casey that he should take it easy and eat his lunch and try to sleep. Casey would hear the worry in Zeke’s voice and he would know that Zeke didn’t want to do this and he would try to understand but he always ended the morning ritual kneeling on the bathroom floor with his hands around the doorknob, begging Zeke not to go until Casey’s words became garbled in such desperate entreaty that he could not even recognize his own voice. And yet every morning, Zeke would leave and Casey’s long day would begin.
_____
Today was going to be a bad day. Every day that he spent in the bathroom was bad, but sometimes Casey was able to sleep, if only from sheer exhaustion, as he slept so little at night. He was terrified by the street noises that endlessly drifted up to their room, a constant roar of shouting and music and car alarms and breaking glass that somehow seemed even louder at night than it did in the daytime. So, on good days, Casey was able to curl up with the pillow and blanket that Zeke left for him and sleep, at least for a few hours. Casey did not think he would sleep today.
Zeke had given Casey a watch so that Casey would know when Zeke was coming back. Six o’clock, he had said. I’ll be back every day by six o’clock. But Zeke left at eight o’clock, and every morning Casey would count the hours between eight and six and there were so many of them. Casey would then take off the watch and put it on the edge of the sink with the face pointing towards him so that he could look at it. And then he thought that time passed slower if the watch was on the edge of the sink so he would put it back on his wrist. This would go on for at least an hour and still he seemed no closer to six o’clock. Today, Casey was shaking so badly that he couldn’t undo the buckle on the watch and as he stared at it, the big hand didn’t seem to move at all and he knew that if he didn’t get it off his wrist, then time would somehow stop and Zeke would never come back. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whispered as he picked away at the buckle with the shredded nails of his trembling fingers. “Fuck, fuck, fuck !” he whimpered, tears stinging the corners of his eyes. Around ten o’clock he finally got the damn thing off and propped it reverently on the edge of the sink where the porcelain picked up and amplified the hollow ticking of its cheap mechanism. Casey scooted backwards on the checkerboard-tiled floor until his back bumped up against the bathtub and from there he could stare at the watch. And for a very little while he was almost satisfied but soon he realized that it was all wrong and within seconds he had scrambled to the sink and snatched the watch off the edge and was back to cursing desperately over the buckle as he refastened it to his wrist.
_____
Many times that morning, Casey crawled over to the door to check the knob and although the knob turned, the door only rattled against the lock on the other side.
In That Place, all of the doors locked from the outside. That was the first thing Casey learned, that day when he woke up in a bed that was not his own, a bed with metal rails on each side and stiff white sheets that smelled like disinfectant. Casey would come to learn how they used the rails in that type of hospital, but he wasn’t restrained, not that morning, not yet. He crawled out by the foot of the bed because he hadn’t been able to figure out how to put the rails down, and then he stood up, swaying with dizziness from whatever they had given him. The floor was hard linoleum and was cold under his bare feet and the cold helped to steady him.
The door was locked from the outside. Hey! Casey called, slapping his hand against the door. Hey! At first Casey heard nothing at all, which pissed him off, but then he heard footsteps coming down a hall on the other side of the door, coming towards the door, brisk, business-like footsteps and suddenly, an icy fear bloomed in Casey’s stomach. He backed away from the door and wished he’d never gotten out of bed, or called out, or attracted any attention to himself. That was the first time he was afraid in That Place, staring at what was only the first of a great many doors, all of them locked from the outside.
_____
Around noon, according to the watch that had returned to the edge of the sink, Casey remembered the lunch that Zeke had left for him. He did not remember it because he was hungry. Casey was never hungry on those days when Zeke left him alone; his stomach was already so full of fear and anxiety that the very thought of eating made him shudder. But years of school and the endless time in the hospital had taught Casey that twelve o’clock meant “lunch” whether he was hungry or not.
Zeke had wrapped up Casey’s lunch in a plastic Key Food bag. Casey took everything out of the bag and spread it out on the floor in front of his knees. A sandwich on white bread in plastic wrap. A bottle of Diet Sprite. A snack-sized bag of potato chips. A container of applesauce with a peel-off lid. A plastic spoon. Casey sat and stared at his lunch.
“Sandwich, soda, chips, sauce,” he muttered. Casey thought about Zeke wrapping this up for him and a queasy wave of self-disgust washed over him. In a little corner of his brain, the real Casey, the old Casey still lived, the bright student who had loved computers and books and photography. Though few people had known it, the old Casey had also possessed a fine, dry sense of humor, the sort that might one day have endeared him to some pretty girl on the ivy-covered campus of an eastern university. It had withered in these past years to little more than bitter irony, and as Casey stared at his lunch on the cracked bathroom floor of a rented room in New York City, he wondered if Zeke Tyler had ever in his worst nightmares imagined that his post-high school career would involve making bag-lunches for a retard who couldn’t even be trusted with a metal spoon.
Then, as it so often did, an uncontrollable fury seized Casey, anger colored with fear, hatred and sorrow. Before he could stop himself, he had begun to smash his lunch into the floor with both fists.
"Sandwichsodachipssauce, you fuckers! You fucking motherfuckers! " he screamed until his voice broke, and it would have been almost funny if only it wasn't so awful.
Casey finally stopped when his own hysteria and the smell of the ruined food made him retch. He came back to himself a little and realized what he had done and put his hands over his eyes. He would have to clean it up but he couldn’t figure out how, not right now. He took a towel from the hook on the back of the door and covered up the mess as well as he could and then he crawled into the farthest corner of the room and curled up there, sobbing.
In the hospital, Casey decided he wouldn’t eat anymore. It wasn’t anything so dramatic as a hunger strike, it was that there simply seemed to be no point. He wasn’t hungry, nothing they gave him was particularly appetizing and what did it matter if he ate or not, anyway? He knew he wasn’t going to get out of there alive, so why keep up the ridiculous game of putting food into his body, chewing it, digesting it, crapping it out? Casey supposed his shrink (or was it “shrinks?” -- sometimes he couldn’t remember and there did seem to be so many of them) would have called it his second suicide attempt. Casey didn’t really give a shit what she would have called it.
After three days of returning his trays untouched except for the juice, Casey felt wonderful. Floating in the fog that now always seemed to fill his mind, Casey saw himself slowly fading away until he just dissolved into atoms and drifted out through the gap under the door. He looked at his fingers and smiled as he imagined them growing more transparent by the day.
On the fourth day the shrink (shrinks?) came and talked to him.
Casey, the shrink said. If you don’t start eating, we’ll have to feed you ourselves. It’s for your own good, but I don’t think you’ll like it very much. You don’t want that, do you?
Lying on his side with his back to the shrink, Casey smiled over the idea that what he wanted mattered to these people. He reached over his shoulder and flipped the shrink off with his ectoplasmic finger. Eat this, he thought and went back to dreams in which he slowly melted into Casey-vapor.
They must have gotten to him not long after that, but they were quick with their little injections and Casey wasn’t quite sure when it had happened. All he knew was that he woke up with the too-familiar grogginess of heavy sedation and his wrists were strapped to the bed-rails and a tube was threaded through his nose and down his throat and he could feel it, could feel it in his nose and on the raw place in his throat where it must have scraped him upon insertion. Casey began to shake. Somehow, in some way, this was the worst yet of all the things that had been done to him in That Place. They had knocked him out and shoved a feeding tube into him and Casey understood now, completely, that they were in charge, that they would decide everything for him up until the last minute of his life, whether he ate or starved, slept or woke, was sane or crazy, lived or died.
When the shrink came in, Casey was crying, and even through his tears and his despair, Casey could see that the shrink looked pleased.
If we take it out, you have to eat. Will you eat, Casey? the shrink asked, and Casey nodded, shattered and obedient.
_____
Three o’clock found Casey still in the corner, although he had scrambled back to the sink once for his watch. There was no window in the bathroom, and so he had no way of telling what time it was without the watch, and if he didn’t know the time, how would he ever know when (if?) Zeke was coming back?
This was always the worst part of the day for Casey, when so much time had passed since Zeke had left and yet so much time remained before his promised return. Casey held the watch up close to his eyes so that the only thing in his field of vision was the second-hand stuttering its way around the dial. Time was a problematic concept for Casey; months might pass that he could not recollect, while on days like these, every second ballooned out to featureless years without beginning or end. Casey put his forehead on his knees and pressed the watch to his ear and listened to it count off fragments of time that meant nothing to him at all.
Casey measured his time in That Place by his mother’s visits. His father stopped coming after Casey cut his wrists, but his mother still came, once a week. She always brought gifts and at first they had been things like books and magazines but as time wore on they became increasingly infantile, a paint-by-numbers set, a box of crayons, a teddy bear. In the part of his mind that was still whole, Casey always planned to talk to his mother, to tell her everything that was happening and beg her to believe him. But they always doped him up before his mother’s weekly visits and then he couldn’t reach that part of his mind, he could only see it and long for it from a hazy distance, like a castaway spotting a ship far out to sea. When Casey opened his mouth, all that ever came out was, Mom, please help me, please, Mom, please. His mother would look at him pityingly and comb his hair and unwrap his gifts and say, I am helping you, Casey. Everyone here is helping you.
And yet Casey looked forward to his mother’s visits; they were an anchor for him, a way to count time. But after a while time began to blur into a shapeless mass for Casey and he stopped understanding what a “week” meant. Sometimes it seemed that months went by without a visit from his mother and at other times it seemed that only a few hours had passed since she had last been there with her childish presents and her comb, her forced cheer and pity. By then Casey couldn’t find the whole part of his mind anymore, and though he still knew who his mother was he couldn’t remember what it was that he had once needed from her so badly. When he looked at her he could only think, Mom, Mom, Mom, like the senseless ticking of a clock.
_____
At four o’clock, Casey thought he heard something on the other side of the bathroom door but no Zeke appeared to release him. Frightened, he crawled into the bathtub. On bad days, it was by this time in the afternoon that Casey began to wonder if Zeke was real, or if Casey had only invented him in the depths of his mind. Someone had brought him here, someone had given him the watch, but if Zeke was real, then where was he? Casey felt panic begin to bubble up inside his chest and he stuck the bottom knuckle of his thumb in his mouth and began to chew at it savagely. The pain and the taste of his own blood grounded him, reminded him that he, at least, was real.
Sometimes the things they gave him made him sick. They would load him up and ask their questions and then dump him back in bed and he would lie there for hours, holding onto the edge of the mattress and riding wave after wave of nausea with his jaw clenched shut.
He was almost always alone but one day a young woman came who said her name was Nancy. She was a nurse or maybe a doctor, but as Casey gazed at her from the trench of his sick misery he thought, Nurse Nancy, and liked the sound of it. Nurse Nancy put her hand on his face and looked at him with a concern he had never seen in That Place and then she left and came back with ginger ale in a plastic cup with a plastic straw and it was the best, coolest, sweetest thing Casey had ever tasted. She asked him some questions but he couldn’t answer because he knew that if he opened his mouth enough to talk he’d be sick all over Nurse Nancy who was so nice. Nurse Nancy looked at his chart and frowned and looked at him and frowned some more and then she left.
Nurse Nancy came the next day, when Casey was sick again, and she looked at Casey with the same concern and frowned over his chart. Then it was later, or maybe another day altogether, and Nurse Nancy was there again but so was that shrink, the one who asked so many questions and always told Casey he was wrong, no matter what he said. Only now it was Nurse Nancy asking the shrink questions and in a rolling fog of nausea Casey heard her say, This patient’s med schedule makes no sense and Casey thought, Oh don’t do that, Nurse Nancy, they won’t like it. And sure enough that was the last Casey ever saw of Nurse Nancy.
Casey screwed up his courage some time later and asked the shrink what had happened to her. Of course, she said that there had never been any Nurse Nancy. Casey had only hallucinated her, as he had hallucinated Marybeth and the men who asked him questions and so many other things. Casey had known she would say that, but he knew Nurse Nancy had been real and her comforting hand had been real and the ginger ale had been real. Before the shrink could react, Casey threw himself on top of her and knocked her out of her chair. He wrapped his hands around her throat and screamed that she was lying to him and that he was going to make her tell the goddamned truth if he had to choke it out of her.
Casey never got the truth out of the shrink, but he did get dragged out of her office and down the hall, still screaming and fighting with all of his adrenaline-fueled outrage. It was a long hallway, with dark green tiles on the floor and lighter green tiles on the walls. The last thing Casey saw that day was a stark rectangle of white winter sunlight on the green wall, crosshatched by the wire on the window. Then he didn’t see anything for a long time.
_____
Now it was five o’clock and Casey had drawn the shower curtain because he was afraid. The pain in his hand reminded him that he was real and the watch reminded him that Zeke was real, but if both of them were real then the others might be real too, and they might be able to get at him and the only thing that protected him was that thin film of moldy plastic on its cracked rings.
Casey never talked about the other people because he knew they couldn’t be real, and yet he wasn’t sure. After all, in That Place there were so many people that Casey thought were real but everyone said he only imagined them, people like the men in suits and Nurse Nancy. If those people weren’t real, then maybe the people Casey was sure weren’t real, really were. But that would be terrible.
Sometimes it was Mr. Furlong with his fingers all stumps. Sometimes Principal Drake came and sat in the corner and stared at him, silently, accusingly, and there was a hole in her forehead and her eyes were flat and lifeless. But the worst was when Marybeth came because Casey knew what she was. She sat on the edge of the bed and touched him with wet fingers that sometimes weren’t fingers at all and Casey would try to run but he was tied to the bed-rails and he would twist and struggle until the restraints left friction burns and bloody sores on his wrists. And when she still wouldn’t go away, he would shriek and beg until someone finally came and gave him a pill or an injection and then he would mercifully sink down into blackness. And only sometimes did those specters follow him there.
_____
By six o’clock Casey had stopped looking at the watch. Anyone seeing him huddled in the bathtub might have thought he was asleep, but he had only fallen so deeply into himself that he was almost unconscious, and yet his heart hammered in his chest with such fear-driven force that his eyeballs ached.
The last time the men in suits came, there were two of them and they were asking him questions, as always, but Casey couldn’t understand what they wanted and he didn’t even think they were real. Maybe if he ignored them they would go away. One of them kept tapping his pencil on the table, and the sound of it made Casey’s head ache. He was confused. He wanted to hide under the table. He wanted to go back to bed. He began to chew his fingers anxiously.
This is a fucking waste of time, one of the men said. He snapped his fingers in Casey’s face and Casey cowered. Look at him, he’s a frigging vegetable.
I’ll wake him up, the other man said. He opened his briefcase and took out a black box. Casey stared at it, mystified. When he saw the needle, he understood. He was used to this.
Casey felt a sting in the side of his neck. He was used to that, too. But then something different happened. For a moment, all his confusion was cleared away, like tatters of fog lifting. Cleared away his confusion, isn’t that what Stokely said Marybeth had told her? Maybe Marybeth had sent these men. Casey sat upright. He felt more alert than he ever had in his life. The men were real. He was real. He remembered everything. He . . .
It started with his heart racing, not the way it raced with fear or from exertion, but wildly, out of control. Casey could feel it skipping beats. He had a moment to think, almost comically, That can’t be good, and then he couldn’t breathe. His throat closed and he couldn’t take a breath, and then his hands tingled and went numb. He made a choking sound and grabbed at the sleeve of the man nearest to him. The man pulled his arm back, as if Casey had burned him.
Casey tried to stand up. He fell over and stared at the men from the floor, clutching at his chest to hold his staggering heart together. He heard the men’s chairs scrape backwards on the linoleum. Oh God, don’t leave! he thought, terrified. Please help me!
Casey heard, What the fuck! and then, What the fuck did you give him? A face peered into his own. Fuck! . . . go get the doctor!
Casey knew it was too late. They had killed him after all, by stupid accident. Then he seemed to be falling down a long, dark well, and the men and the hospital and the pain and everything were far above him, receding. Good, good, good, Casey thought, and let himself go.
Casey woke up some endless time later with a respirator tube in his throat and an IV drip in his arm. He didn’t know what had happened to him, and he couldn’t hold onto any thought long enough for it to mean anything. He gagged when they took out the tube and then he did nothing.
One day a woman came and dressed him. A drifting memory told Casey that she was his mother. Then he was in a wheelchair and then he was outside. He blinked against the sunlight, which he had forgotten. There was a statue behind the wheel of a car, and the statue resolved itself into a man who looked like someone Casey remembered. The man never looked at him. Then he was in a new place and the woman (mother) said that it was his old room. Welcome home, she said. All Casey knew was that the sheets were soft and smelled nicer than they had in the other place, but whether any of it was real or unreal was nothing he could tell.
_____
It was after six but Casey didn’t need to know that to know that Zeke wasn’t coming back. Zeke couldn’t come back because Zeke wasn’t even real.
Casey had known in the beginning that Zeke wasn’t real, on those strange nights when he would lie wide-eyed in bed staring at the apparition that had come and taken him away from his room and his mother and the routine visits from the doctor who always terrified him although he hadn’t quite known why. Casey would sometimes reach out and touch the Zeke-hallucination with one finger, tentatively, and he certainly felt real enough, but Casey knew that didn’t mean anything.
One night Casey had felt bold and had put his whole hand on Zeke’s arm and found it warm and solid. This Zeke was a light sleeper and had woken up and rolled over and Casey had been able to see his eyes in the room’s dim light.
“For Christ’s sake, Casey, go to sleep,” Zeke had said, sounding exasperated but not angry.
Casey had not gone to sleep and he had not taken his hand from Zeke’s arm. He had continued to lie there staring at Zeke, trembling from fear and drug withdrawal and the wild hope that maybe Zeke, maybe all of this, was real, was really happening.
Zeke had opened his eyes again and sighed and then he had reached over and pulled Casey against him before Casey could shrink back. He had tucked Casey under his chin and wrapped his arms around him and said again, “Go to sleep, Casey.” And that night, listening to Zeke’s heart beating and the sound of Zeke’s breathing against his ear, Casey had begun to believe that Zeke was real, and he had begun to feel real again, for the first time in his battered memory.
Casey had known it in the beginning, but had forgotten it somehow and now he remembered. Zeke wasn’t real.
_____
Casey didn’t know what time it was but he heard something behind him and then the rattle of shower curtain rings and then hands under his arms, lifting him to a sitting position. He stiffened and tried to struggle but he had no fight in him so he whimpered and put his hands over his closed eyes.
“Take it easy, Casey, it’s just me. Come on.”
Casey opened his eyes. He blinked against the light and when his eyes focused he was squinting up at Zeke, who seemed very real for someone who did not exist.
“Zeke?” he said.
“Yeah, man, I know I’m late but . . .” He paused, catching sight of Casey’s bleeding hand. “Ah, shit,” he muttered under his breath.
Casey followed Zeke’s eyes and saw his raw knuckle. He couldn’t quite remember how it had gotten that way, but he felt a sudden overpowering guilt and he whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing, forget it,” Zeke said. “Let’s just get it cleaned up, okay?”
“Okay, ” Casey answered feebly.
Zeke helped Casey out of the tub and sat him down on the edge of the toilet. He washed out Casey’s hand and sprayed Bactine on it and bound a gauze pad around it.
“Did you eat anything at all today?” Zeke asked. He raised his eyebrows and added dryly, “I mean, besides this.”
Casey shook his head at first but then answered truthfully, “I don’t remember.”
“Looks like the floor ate most of it.”
“I wasn’t hungry,” Casey mumbled.
Zeke sighed. “I know. Only a little longer, Case. Then we’re outta here, ‘kay?”
Casey nodded. Zeke finished applying the gauze pad and asked, “How’s that? Good?”
Casey nodded again. Before Zeke could stand up Casey put his arms around Zeke’s neck and buried his forehead against his shoulder.
“Please be real, Zeke,” he whispered. “Be real, please be real.”
Casey felt Zeke’s arms around him and Zeke’s hands, strong and real, on his back. “It’s all right, Casey. I’m real. Don’t worry. Don’t be scared.”
Casey nodded against Zeke’s shoulder and held on all the tighter.