September 13, 2005
"In the Corners of His Mind"
The night wind begins to stir sending the tiny wildlife out of the grass and scurrying across the pavement. Sonny cringes at the rodents running for cover, but he sucks it all in and continues up the walk to find the door closed shut and locked. The panic comes on again and he turns back hoping her limo will show up in his hour of need.
"Come on Alexis. This is not funny anymore." He mutters as he jiggles the lock.
The frustration compounds so he takes his foot and drop kicks the door open. The darkness is so evident he can barely see his hand in front of his face. The smell is so decayed that he can barely breathe.
"I can't sleep in here tonight." He tries to think, but his senses overcome his brain functions and he focuses on his inability to cope. So he immediately goes back outside to the wrath of nature against him in the form of rain.
Thunder and lightening strike Alexis' window. She pulls herself tighter into her rest on the couch with nothing but thoughts of his shaky hands gripping tight onto the door and his eyes filled with tears reminiscent of a frightened little boy on his first day of school. Thunder rolls louder and jerks Alexis up from the couch to grabbing the keys from the table. She heads for the door but Lorenzo stops her before she can make it into the hall. He throws his hands over the doorframe and flashes his keen smile. He pulls himself upwards to create a barrier to her exit.
"Where you going Ms. Davis?" He teases.
She crosses her arms and meets his sarcastic air. "I thought you and Ric were having a slumber party over there? I heard the giggling."
"We were going over some files. But that doesn't explain why you have the keys to your limo in your hand."
Alexis furrows her brow and playfully pushes Lorenzo away from her door. He releases the frame and slams himself into his door across the hall.
"Why are you and Ric being so damn nosey? I am in need of some ice cream. Kristina cleaned me out."
Ric peaks his head out of Lorenzo's door filled with full-blown taunting. "But Ms. Davis since when did you learn to drive that long, big ole piece of machinery."
Lorenzo snatches the keys from her hand in keep away mode. "Cassadine princesses never touch the likes of a steering wheel. I think I see what's going on here. How about you Ric?"
Lorenzo throws the keys to Ric making the catch before Alexis can make the charge his way.
"Lorenzo is right. This tough love act is getting to you Ms. Davis. You can't stand to see Sonny all sopping wet from the rain."
Ric throws the keys back to Lorenzo while Alexis stands in the middle beaming red and refusing to play. She throws up her hands and turns back towards her apartment.
As she makes her way back inside, she yells at them. "You're both fired!"
"We're law partners Alexis! You can't fire us!" Lorenzo laughs and throws the keys back into her apartment before she can slam her door.
He comes across a tent disheveled and barely standing. The tall grass and the mud add to the discomfort of the situation, but the big Superman darting across the drenched shelter takes him back to the first night that momma and little Michael spent in there for a moment of liberation from that house.
"There's no telling what's running around in this mess." He tries to keep the memory from choking up in his throat.
Sonny finds a flashlight nestled under the shed. He turns it on with the light flickering to go out but giving enough gleam to find the various pieces of the tent. Piecing together what he could find, he slides inside his temporary home and zips it shut. The rain cascades harder onto the canvas, but Sonny couldn't be more relieved at that moment over standing in the doorway of that house.
He pulls the pad and pen dripping wet from his moist suit coat, but he suddenly realizes he's in a catch-22. Dropping the writing tools, he looks around himself surrounded by the small confined space. The flimsy walls of canvas become the solid white walls of his many nightmares.
"It's not the closet Sonny. Keep it together. You can do this. Better out here than in there." He places his head in his hands to take a moment to readjust his eyes to what's really in front of him. He looks around him again and realizes he's in the tent and not the closet, but the corners of his mind overtake his sanity.
"Just close your eyes and go to sleep Sonny." Alexis whispers to herself hoping her advice travels across the wind to his tent in the backyard. Staring at the ceiling, she tries not to imagine what effect the storm and that house of broken dreams might have on his already impotent soul. She sits up feeling queasy and unsure if she made the right decision to leave him flapping in the wind.
"I know what it feels like to be scared. You're afraid to close your eyes in the dark so you turn on every light." She tells herself hoping to sympathize.
"Some lights would be nice." He says to himself after his last deep breath before his next. "I just need to breath and uh…" He closes his eyes again and inhales the smell of the suffocating air.
Lorenzo and Ric walk in to her running around her living room with her nerves spinning in every direction.
Lorenzo crosses his arms and watches her unresponsive to their entrance. "This is driving you mad Natasha."
Ric slumps down in her recliner and sings. "She's a maniac, maniac on the floor."
"Why don't you just give in? It obviously distresses you to not help him." Lorenzo offers with a smirk.
Out of breath Alexis stops her racing to give them her attention. "I don't know. It's just that he's claustrophobic. He's borderline Schizophrenic…"
"…He is not!" Lorenzo exclaims.
"That was a falsified claim to keep him out of prison last time. Remember?" Ric smiles at her hoping to lighten the mood.
"Maybe I'm making excuses for wanting to help him. I just need to go to bed and forget about it."
He finally lies down with the storm, but the quiet toys with him even more. His head magnifies sounds barely there. His survival instincts run away from him so he retreats to the corner of the tent and tries to escape the figments of his mind.
He talks to himself. "Just breathe to know you're alive. You've seen worse Sonny. Remember that cave with Brenda. No. Don't remember that cave with Brenda. Ok. Remember something else. Ok. Uh…Remember that jail cell…No. You might vomit. Maybe you won't. At first Alexis was there. I could almost touch her. She kept talking about something. Something about ballets or…She kept getting smaller and smaller and I couldn't breathe. I don't understand why she was getting smaller. I could barely hear what she was saying. I wanted to hear and touch her, but she was too far away…"
His breathing tranquil; he thinks of Kristina immersed in sleep and free of all of those nightmares that typically plagues the infantile imagination. He imagines her mommy's smooth hand running up and down her back. Synchronizing himself with the baby, he's finally able to rest his impulsive mind.