People said he was shy. Others said cryptically that his shoelaces were tied together. At six years old he would already move without moving, breathe with contrition, sip air guiltily instead of drinking it down. But the few astute ones saw a void– and voids in human beings had to be filled with something. Love came hard to certain people; hate came easily to everyone.
What did six year olds feel? No longer the breasts of their mother or the warmth of their bassinet, nor the numb of bodily unawareness. They felt asphalt underfoot – the schoolyard’s vast expanse. Tanbark in their shoes, sand between their fingers, the perfume of patrolling teachers, the din of other bodies, alluring areas called ‘out of bounds’, loose change rattling in their pockets, the grey-lead pencil’s many different sides. All felt the immensity of age but not its ties with death – who among them didn’t want to be a hundred years old, huger than mountains and invincible?
Sedate him! Sedate him! A long needle hit the buttock and drained its contents and soon he was staggered and impotent. Then he was strapped limb-by-limb to a bed with leather buckles and wheeled out of emergency. The father followed him. The father was crying and choking like an infant who had forgotten to breathe. Three code blues had sounded in those thirty minutes, when he had threatened the nurses with rape, unspeakable torture, and murder. As security forced him down, two teenagers lost their lives. Trailing his bed now along a corridor with white walls and chrome trolleys, the father felt vertigo and swayed, as though he too had been anaesthetised.
He awoke in a harshly lit room with no shoes or belt. The mattress he lay on was narrow, threadbare and directly opposite a lidless chrome toilet. His mobile phone was gone and he had no memory of the intervening hours between his first beer and opening his eyes to that strangeness. There was a small round window at the top of the door but it was thick and waxy; the face looking in at him was illegible, a blur. People were screaming. The back of his throat felt cracked, his mouth tasted of chemicals. And inside his head was a brain that, it seemed to him, had been placed in a giant mortar and pestle, ground down like a peppercorn, and then put back in pieces the wrong way around.
He attempted to prop up and saw that one of his arms was covered in thick gauze and a black splint ran the length of the underside. A throbbing pain then commenced almost immediately. It throbbed and pulsed so intensely that he thought blood must have been spurting out. But after thirty pulses, the gauze was still white. An image shot to his mind of hunting knives and horrible laughter. A migraine started to emerge from the shroud of grogginess hiding it.
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