The sun brimmed hotly in the sky, and the rehab center seemed to melt in his vision. Yes, this was the one. The one where he would stop using his ketamine, the treatment that his parents thought would damage his brain. Depression was a bitch. But ketamine made things clearer, fuller, no longer gray and black.
Ravens wheeled the sky. They plucked worms from their beaks, they ate from the leftover cans of pop and food that were left, abandoned by the other teenagers that occupied this lone building in the middle of Montana. The mountains were claimed it would sober people up. The horseback riding would make people realize their drug use was simply escaping from a problem and only making yourself be dug into a deeper hole. No one welcomed him here. It was hot, and no one came.
The police officer opened the door for him. There was a clerk smiling wanly like a crescent moon, but she didn't really thought that this particular patient couldn't stand smiles. The walls were painted a deep, gashing red. Her smile bled in his vision. It was the one thing he couldn't take his eyes off.
"Welcome to Recovery Hills," she said, devoid of emotion. It all seemed as if his cause was hopeless, that his suggestion of coming to a place like this rather than stay in a hospital for suicide attempts was all fruitless and pointless. The woman took his suitcases, her grip shaking as if they were made of lead. He didn't see the other patients, possibly depressed teens who were drowning themselves in alcohol or using cocaine to escape. They told him it was full of other teens like him. Hopeless teens. Teens who prayed to a God and never got an answer. Teens who thought nothing was going to get better. In a way it was just like another mental hospital he visited nearly all his life. In a way, it wasn't.
"Sonic."
He looked at her, her lips waxy and fake in the light. Her nails looked to be the same material. Her eyes, too, were waxy, like candles, her irises the blue flames that ignited in the voluminous room.
"So you were just transferred from Montana State Psychiatric Hospital?"
A state psychiatric hospital. How humorous. He was basically considered a lunatic because he considered his life worthless and viable to be thrown away by his own hands.
His wrists, marked with brown, ugly scars, itched.
"Yeah, that's right." His voice was strangled, as if he was one of the schizophrenics in the hospital that could barely say a single sentence without feeling suffocated.
"What made you want to come in here today?"
Her voice sounded saccharine sweet, but he knew that sweetness wouldn't help him. If anything, it made him want to go outside and find his father's pistol and color the walls an even deeper shade of red.
The truth was that he wanted to escape the state hospital. It was too cold, too lonely, and after claiming he abused ketamine and marijuana (that he only smoked occasionally), he urged them to send him to a nice facility where he could get some mountain air and readjust his mind off the drugs. When the drugs were the only thing that kept him alive. They made him feel alive and not see anything in a vivid shade of blue, nearly black and ugly like a bruise. His parents were rich. They could afford facilities like this with no problem, and they were willing to try to help their son with anything. They even paid the state hospital in cash, even if Sonic wasn't happy there, with the other men who were child molesters and rapists and schizophrenics who talked to themselves and pissed the bed and threatened to set fire to the place.
They claimed it would help him. Sonic had stayed there for two years before he decided he needed to be somewhere nicer.
His parents ordered many things off Ikea catalogs. They went shopping at Pier One Imports daily, giving their rooms a nice sea green color, blue and green with many mechanical fish floating on the walls, while their son slept in a room that was completely bare, filled only with a few books and a little cup that reminded him to take his pills. He tried Prozac. He tried Effexor, Zoloft, Cymbalta, he tried nearly every antidepressant currently used for depression. They even had him on tricyclic antidepressants, with no effect. The father and mother, despite their love for their boy, often referred to him as a kind of phantom in the room. He just got up in the morning, ate breakfast, took his pills, then went back to bed. Then in the afternoon he would get up, read the newspaper, maybe a book, then get back to bed. At night, dinner, then maybe some night reading about people more depressed than him. Then back to bed. And the cycle continued. And when his parents offered him to stay over at his friend's from school, he would reply, "I have no friends", or if they offered him to go out on a trip he would say, "I don't want to go anywhere that has to involve you two". Mechanically. He was a machine that even one day no longer wanted to walk and only get on a conveyor belt just to get from place to place. Sometimes he even believed he was a machine and he couldn't feel human and animal happiness. He never said this to anyone in the hospital, however. He believed if he did, he would be put in the Disturbed ward and given heavy medicine to deal with his hallucinations and delusions. He often saw shades of gray and black in people's faces, in the blue leaves that serrated across the morning sky, in the building that was colored a harsh yellow against the blurry red sun, glowing as if he found Christ's promised land. The place he would go to escape everything. Even if the ketamine was the only thing that made him somewhat not suicidal. The pot made him mellow, but he had no desire to smoke it. He hadn't smoked it in the years following the state psychiatric hospitalization.
They allowed cigarettes at least. It cuts an edge to his dismal mood. Whenever God felt like he needed a break.
"I'll show you to your room, Mr. Sonic. And then you can meet the other patients."
She covered her mouth, as if she was a child who said a "naughty" word. "I can't call them patients here, Sonic. The truth is, they can put that label on themselves. But if they don't think they're sick with a drug problem, then they aren't. They may have a physical anomaly that makes them that way. They consider that their hearts don't work right. That they were born with a tumor in their head and it was removed too late. They're in here, if they would like to be considered that way, with physical deformities. Drugs aren't the sole reason they're here. They consider themselves defected. Like broken toys that God no longer wants to play with."
It was strange, really, how she worded everything. That these drug addicts were defective and shattered and smashed apart. People didn't put the label of an "addict" on them. They just considered them as normal patients in a regular everyday hospital. The walls emanated warmness towards him, as the lights glowed a hue of honeyed yellow. He felt comfortable here. He had trouble sleeping for the past month or so, and he knew he would have no trouble sleeping here.
He could hear shouting in the thick vacuous distance of the rehab facility. Glass doors that didn't seem reinforced or locked opened the way for him and his guide. It was a nice change from the psychiatric hospital. The doors would always click and be locked once they were shut behind the staff. He couldn't run anywhere, and they considered a stay of at least six months was needed before an appeal of escaping from the virtual hellhole would be realized. Two years was too much of a long time he wasted being there for depression.
The clients were all either looking at a picture, or watching TV. The TV was a large flat screen, and they were watching soccer. The picture he wasn't exactly sure. It seemed like photos of someone's family, or a particular art piece, but when the rehab center was quiet with only yellowed wandering eyes gazing at the soccer players and the waxy ears hearing the announcer's foreign accent, they began calamitously shouting at the blue and yellow picture, saying that this was where Van Gogh shot himself. This was where he died.
His room was completely white, immaculate, and bare like his room. There was a lone trash can, a small bookshelf to store his books he could buy in the bookshop down the lane from the rehab facility, a bathroom with a toilet connected to many silver pipes hanging on the wall, and a shower that streamed from the ceiling, with a small cake of soap and some generic hospital-brand shampoo and conditioner. The bathroom was also white, pure, as if he would be cleaned and his sins would be washed away in the shower.
The rooms were disappointing, he felt. There was a white dresser along with a small desk that they said he could request a typewriter in case he wanted to write his feelings on a journal or write poetry or whatever mostly alcoholic writers did, but none of the clients here were gifted verbally or, honestly she said, anywhere else. They were just teens like him.
Terribly average, with a wealthy, well-to-do family, and terribly depressed.
They considered their hearts didn't tinker right. Their machine parts weren't covered in the warranty, so they were shipped back here. They had missing parts, particularly their tin brain.
His own kind. Here, at last.
He was patted down to make sure he had no weapons, no drugs brought in. There were none, and she was glad.
His only possessions were a couple of books he borrowed from the state psychiatric library (never returned), a plastic, gnarled toothbrush, half-full toothpaste, three black shirts, two black pants, a hairbrush with half of its bristles plucked out, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter with only a quarter of fluid left. They told him he was only allowed to have his lighter during cigarette breaks. He said he didn't mind, and they confiscated it with no issues and protests.
His books were from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Haruki Murakami, and Catcher in the Rye. He considered Catcher as his Bible, that Salinger knew what it was like being him. Being this defective machine.
She gave him his materials back, and he said thank you and tried to usher a smile. He failed, like this machine was always wonted to do.
He went back to the day room, where they continued to shout over the Van Gogh piece.
"Here! Here, you see that? This is where Van Gogh went and shot himself! This is where he died! The poor son-of-a-bitch."
"He was a rich son-of-a-bitch when he died, that's for sure. Goes to show that America only appreciates you when you're fucking dead."
"Why did this stupid bastard paint sunflowers all the time? Sunflowers are fucking gay, dude."
They were all juvenile delinquents, their vocabulary only consisting of vulgar words and the phrases "that's so gay" and "faggot", that Sonic thought he would hate being gay in a place like this.
One of the teenagers was a red echidna with dreadlocks, knuckles that protruded and nearly stabbed anyone with eyesight. He could tell, from just looking at him, that he once came from the Bronx and was abandoned by his parents and partook in a life of crime and drugs before the police caught him and told him to either go to a nice facility like this, or be sent to prison, tried as an adult.
The other, a black and red hedgehog, mostly sat silently, waiting for them to stop gawking over the photo book of Van Gogh's paintings. It was his book. He thought of Van Gogh as one of his mentors in life. But they kept debating his history, even if the "poor fucking son-of-a-bitch" had autism.
"Nah, he was schizophrenic, dude. Like the rest of these artists who claim they're so fucking loony. Van Gogh saw things. The Starry Night was nothing but a hallucination. He saw those whirls in the sky, those glowing yellow stars, and he said, 'You know what? I'm going to draw me a bitchin' picture.' But even if it was one of the greatest pictures of all time, they never bought it until he shot himself. The only way you can tell people you're worth something is after you're dead and turns out you're an alcoholic or you're crazy. That's all people care about."
The echidna kept rambling about the picture, saying that truly, when you died, your value was more. Not when you were alive. And that was why he once was in a hospital after he tried to attempt suicide. After he got out, the doctors didn't give a damn about him.
"They just filled my little hobo cup full of Prozac and they said Sayonara kid, watch out for suicidal impulses and the fact that you want to cut yourself every two hours. Take a Xanax for that. Call the doctor if he's not on vacation. Moron."
The others peeped at the new patient, their prying eyes opening him up, revealing to them all his secrets. Sonic's hands were bruised, bloody underneath the gloves, and his scars itched again. He made sure not to make his wrist bleed.
"What're ya in 'ere for?" the weasel with one long, sleek fang inching across his face had asked.
Was this weasel depressed? Probably just went here to avoid jail time. He probably committed petty crimes just to get his heroin and not caring at all if he stole from his grandmother's Precious Moments figurines just to grab a few bucks to hook a needle into his arm intravenously as if he was sick and dying from cancer.
He said he was dying from cancer, and it was why he was here.
"I needed the drug, I needed the pot to get away from my pain. Chemo never 'eemed to melt the hair off my hide though. Only women 'perienced dat."
His wrists itched. He rubbed them against the tips of the table.
A red armadillo didn't have to relay his story, to know that he was a drunk who always drank his father's wine since he was five years old, his tongue not even primed enough to enjoy the taste of wine. His mother and father never seemed to care much for him. They let him drink, however much he wanted, always bought alcohol for themselves that he could steal without a word, and they never said anything about it until it started to inconvenience them. Namely, that the beer cans were dirtying up his room and his father was sick of having to buy alcohol every other day.
"They never cared. They just wanted to get drunk too. So I'm stuck here. I can leave whenever I want, but I'd rather be here than be with my parents. I can stay here for the rest of my life for all I care."
There was a woman in the group, wearing a hoodie that Sonic could barely catch a glimpse of her golden eyes. Her drug of choice, he could tell, was Xanax. And she always got it easily.
"I just come in, talk about how nervous I feel when talking about my family, they give me a good four week supply, and I down about twenty pills a day. I have to get a higher dose every day, because you get used to it, and you have to try to get higher every time. Which is why I also smoke crack sometimes, maybe drink a little vodka. Got stuck here because I ran away from home and the police found me and my parents told me to either go here or go to jail for drug possession. And what do you know?"
"As the Cheshire Cat would say, 'We're all addicts here'."
What the black and red hedgehog was addicted to, he couldn't tell. Maybe benzo's. It was all he could tell from his ability to read thoughts and the faces that glanced at him, disgruntled and in pain over being locked up in a red and gold cage for trying to escape from this reality.
"Party drugs," he said simply. It was all he could tell them. He didn't want them to go further, deeper into his life. Even if they were his people, he couldn't tell them about the inpatient stay at Montana State Psychiatric Hospital for two years. For depression.
"Party drugs? That's baby shit!" the woman said.
"People just take those for like weeks before they get to harder drugs, like heroin, crack, or meth. Be glad you're not taking that shit, because they'll tell you over and over it'll fuck you up."
He left it at that.
The lights oozed in his vision, when they left to go to the all-white cafeteria for their breakfast. The morning broke through the black veil of the night, the stars fading away like old scars, and the sun clamored over the Montana hills to be recognized, to be seen by billions of people all over the world.
The albicant part of the eggs tasted like clouds, the yolk tasted like the sun, and the rough steak tasted like the dirt they were all standing in.
The dirt that he would be a part of, very soon.
"What are those scars on your wrists for? Did you get into a fight with someone?"
A very oblivious, naive inmate had asked him this, and he briefly shut his eyes as he chewed his food, the steak chewy and not at all tender, burnt and nearly raw, and he soon glanced at the wrists again, which throbbed and itched as he rubbed them against the tips of the table.
"Yes."