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Next thing I knew, Gutierrez was in my face, ripping the pages from the table. "You're not fooling anybody. We don't need a confession: we got you, your prints, two victims, the motel room, the stolen vehicle, dozens of witnesses that place you at the club, and everywhere else you been for the last ten years! Ward of the state-that's you!" His hot, rancid breath made my stomach roll. I wished I had to burp or puke. I wanted to make him sick right back.
He still smoothed the paper back on the table and unlocked my right cuff.
"I'm left-handed." I waited until he put his keys away to say anything.
Gutierrez hesitated. Leland nodded and cursed while his partner did what he was supposed to-like a good little civil servant-and relocked the right cuff around my wrist before releasing my aching left. That skank at the finger-painting station twisted it behind my back.
I started doodling while Gutierrez pulled a small remote from his pocket, pointing it towards a video camera in the corner. I heard the thin buzz of the lens adjusting.
The pencil in my hand was long and thin. The tip was sort of sharp. Brittle. It made me wonder . . . what if . . .
Clutching the new pencil-I didn't even think about it, really. It wasn't something I could think about. I just raised my hand and thrust it down as hard as I could, feeling nothing as the wood and led skewered the flesh of my thigh.
The supposedly fierce Officer Gutierrez paled. That was enough for me; my sweet reward. My smile grew bigger than a crescent moon as Leland jumped from his chair and ran for the door, yelling.
I couldn't bring myself to remove the pencil, but I made a fist at Leland as he passed. It was another beat before both my hands were restrained once more.
Then, there was only pain. The chasm had opened again. It was sucking me in. I was drowning.
+++
When I opened my eyes, the interrogation room was gone. The new room was not white. The walls looked like exposed cinderblock. The only sound was that of metal. Clinking, clanking. Handcuffs thrashing against the metal frame of the bed.
Echoes in an empty room, I mused. How appropriate.
I was as good as dead-drowned inside the bottomless chasm-sinking in the emptiness, groping for a flotation device, wishing to make myself stop breathing. That was the worst part, knowing I could drown in the black feeling but couldn't stop breathing. I tried holding my breath, but that just made me pass-out and start again.
I kept my head on the pillow and waited for whatever shrink I knew was coming to appear and make a decree.
After a while, a small man came through the locked door and folded himself into a single chair against the far wall. His hair was gray like the walls with mismatched dark brown eyebrows.
"Do you know why you are here?" He asked.
Because they want to pin me with bullshit battery and homicide charges!
Because I'm a fucked up nut-case with mommy issues!
Because the world hates me and I hate the world right back!
I turned away and shut my eyes, barely enough energy to inform, "I'm not. Here. At all."
+ + +
46
-Angel
The three judges stare at me while I watch the mirrored wall, wondering over the blank faces behind it, the ears that must be listening. I don't feel much better, but a little more unfurled.
"Society wants us, as individuals, to think that we're so strong. But it's a lie. We're slaves to the physical elements of this world. We're impotent."
Taking a deep breath, I look at my own pathetic reflection in the mirrored glass. "Think about this: how much does it take to knock us from our towering achievements onto our knees? A breath from the earth would do it. The slightest shift in her axis and we're all done for."
More minutely, all it might take is a phone call. Like the one Jakes mother must have gotten. What happened to her when she heard the words, 'Jake's dead'?
A split-second decision to go instead of stay, to chance the yellow light, to ignore the little voice in your head that says this turn might not take you where you think.
A few words of judgment, the bang of a gavel, and just like that: instead of spending my eighteenth birthday on a California beach; I'm coming of age in lockup.
