Channels: A Collection, page 3
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I screamed.
I felt frozen in place, unsure of what to do. A scream that came from the field is what finally seemed to unlock my muscles. I went running into the field to help whoever was screaming. The corn stalks cut at my arms and face as I ran through, using the rising smoke from the crash as a beacon.
I heard another scream and picked up my pace, ignoring the pain of the cuts the corn was inflicting on my skin. I tripped just before getting to the plane, landing flat on my face.
Picking myself up off the ground, I looked back to what had made me trip. It was a human leg.
Well, not a human leg, but I thought it was at first. Upon seeing the leg closer, I panicked and crouched down to see that there was a mannequin laying there.
“What the fuck?”
I turned back and walked over to the plane. The landing gear and one of the wings was missing. It sat cockeyed on the ground with smoke coming from the engine. I looked into the broken cockpit window to see two mannequins seated there. The one looked just like Greg, the other looked like the man I saw in the bathroom just a few minutes ago. Their heads were turned, as if they were facing me.
I stepped back from the plane and looked around. Mannequins lay strewn about on the ground surrounding me. My chest began to feel tight, and I was having trouble breathing. A panic attack was setting in. I tried making my way back to the hotel but collapsed somewhere along the way. I’m not sure how long I was out, but I was awakened by Greg shaking my shoulder.
I came to with a gasp, standing straight up.
“Are you okay, Paul?”
“The plane! There was a plane crash!”
“What are you talking about, Paul?”
“A plane just crashed out in the field. It should be just over the-”
I stopped mid-sentence when I looked around and realized that the smoke that had been rising from the plane was now gone. I stood there, more confused than I’d ever been in my life.
“There’s no plane crash, Paul. Are you on something?”
“No, I swear. I was standing on the patio smoking a cigarette and saw it crash. I heard a scream and ran out to see if someone was hurt. It was so weird. It was-”
I stopped myself before I got to the part about the mannequins, knowing how crazy it would sound.
“I got turned around and next thing I know, you were waking me up.”
Greg looked at me with a sympathetic smile. “Well, I don’t know what you saw, but there certainly isn’t a plane out there.”
I began crying as he continued, “There’s a nasty storm about to hit. Let’s get you inside.”
I nodded and let him lead me back into the hotel.
“Do you need me to help you up to your room?”
“No. I can get it.”
“Okay, just go up there and relax. I’ll have Laura bring you up some lunch. Okay?”
I nodded again and headed up to my room. It took everything I had to keep from breaking down. I had barely began to compose myself before I heard a knock at the door. I opened it to see Laura holding a bottle of water and a plate with a sandwich.
“May I come in?”
“Sure” I nodded.
Laura set the plate and bottle on the desk, looking at me with concern. “Greg told me what happened. Are you okay?”
“I guess… I think so… I don’t know. Everything has just been so weird the last two days. I should have just stayed home.”
I turned away from her, not wanting her to see me cry anymore. I looked out the window at the cornfield, seeing no evidence of anything having happened out there.
I turned back at the sound of Laura’s voice. “Oh, my.”
She was standing there holding a prescription bottle. “Did you forget to take this?”
“What? I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s Clozapine. That’s an antipsychotic, Paul. Your name is on the bottle.”
I swiped the bottle from her hand. There it was. A prescription for Clozapine with my name on the bottle.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“It was sitting on top of your bags.”
I about lost it. “This is not mine, and even if it was, it’s not okay for you to go through my things.”
“It was sitting right on top, Paul. It’s okay if you have to take medications. We all have to sometimes, but if you skip it, bad things can happen. This could explain why you thought you saw a plane crash.”
“Look, it’s not just the plane crash, okay. Weird shit just seems to keep happening. It started when I woke up in my car yesterday and hasn’t stopped since. I caught a guy spying on me in the bathroom at the truck stop, then again here last night and this morning while I was taking a shower. Not to mention the dream I had this morning.”
She looked down at the bottle in my hand, then back up at me with an accusatory glare. “So, you feel like people are watching you?”
“Don’t. Don’t do that. I’m not crazy.”
“I’m not saying you are, sweetie. Just-” she paused for a moment, as if figuring out what to say next. “Just get some rest. Maybe get cleaned up a bit. Don’t worry about dinner. I’ll bring some up for you, okay?”
I sat on the bed feeling defeated. “I think I should just go home.”
Just then, there was a loud thunderclap outside that startled both of us. I looked out the window to see a torrential downpour starting.
“I don’t think anyone is going anywhere in this storm. Just get some rest, okay. I’ll be up with dinner around 6.”
I nodded.
As she left the room, I lay back on the bed with the prescription bottle in my hand. I couldn’t stop staring at it. That label with my name on it.
Looking at the doctor’s name on the label had me baffled. Dan Shrader was my friend with the contracting company. It was his employees that often stayed in my rental units. The other name, Danielle, felt familiar to me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.
What the fuck is going on here?
My stomach churned, and I knew what was coming. Grabbing the bottle, I made a run for the bathroom. I headed straight for the first toilet and dropped to my knees in front of it. Tears formed in my eyes as I threw up the remaining contents of my stomach.
I stayed knelt there, staring down at the bowl as I caught my breath. I lifted the bottle of pills I had in my hand and unscrewed the cap. Taking a deep breath, I dumped the pills into the toilet. I grabbed the lever and pulled, flushing the toilet. The pills swirled around in my stomach acid and vomit before being sucked into the drain.
I screamed, throwing the empty prescription bottle against the wall in front of me. It bounced off and landed on the floor somewhere behind me. I turned to pick it up, not wanting to leave it just laying around, and heard the sound of one of the showers running.
“Goddamnit!” I screamed, “Am I not allowed to have a single private moment in a bathroom this weekend?”
I expected a response from whoever was in the shower, but there was only the sound of running water. I looked up to see the same man from the night before. He was lathering himself up, completely oblivious to my presence.
Something in me snapped. I stood up and made my way over to him. Standing in front of the man, I waved my arms back and forth.
“Hello!”
No response at all. I reached out to touch him, but before my hand could make contact, he was gone.
I stood there, dumbfounded as the water ran over my hand.
Am I going crazy? Were those pills actually mine? Is all this weird shit a side effect of not taking them?
I looked over at the toilet, half wishing I hadn’t flushed those pills. Wondering if taking them would make things feel normal again.
I didn’t know what was even real anymore. I felt defeated.
I began heading back toward the hallway, determined to pack my things and just leave. Go home. Maybe my life would get back to some semblance of normalcy. I could put this trip behind me and move on with my life. But something in my gut told me that wasn’t right either. I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that something bad happened at home; that whatever happened was probably the reason I was here.
Was I running from something?
Stepping out into the hallway, the racing thoughts in my mind came to a screeching halt.
“What the fuck?” I said out loud.
Looking around, the hallway I had stepped into was not the same hallway I’d become familiar with over the last two days. It was the dimly lit hospital hallway from my dream. The only difference was that, this time, every door in sight was wide open. I began walking.
Every door I passed looked into an empty room, devoid of any furniture or décor. I quickened my pace with each room I passed, hoping to find a way out. But the further I ran, the longer the hall seemed to be. It was as though it was endless.
Finally, I saw someone ahead in the distance. It was the man from the shower. Much like the previous two times I had seen him, he was just standing there, fully nude. However, this time, he was looking right at me, shaking his head. There was a baseball bat in his hands.
I made an attempt to stop dead in my tracks but tripped; my forward momentum causing me to fall forward. My head hit the solid floor with a loud thud, and everything around me went black.
I was suddenly back at home, sitting in my office. My desktop computer was on, the monitor screen the only light in the room. My pants were down around my ankles and my right hand was stroking my erection while my left hand held the mouse.
My vision was fuzzy at first, but as it cleared, I could see a video playing on the screen. It was the man from the shower. He was standing in the shower of one of my rental units. This feed was from one of the spy cams I had set up in the units. I had a hard drive full of videos like this, and I watched them regularly.
I suddenly noticed a shadow reflected on the monitor screen. I turned to see the man standing behind me, holding a baseball bat.
“You sick fuck!”
Before I could respond or react, he swung the bat. It struck me directly in the head, and that’s the last thing I remember before everything around me faded away.
I woke to the sound of beeping. I knew without looking that I was in a hospital. My head was pounding, and from how bad the pain was, I could tell that man took a few more swings after he knocked me out.
Fuck, I thought. Who found me.
I looked around the empty, sterile room. How long have I been here?
I looked down to see the bed remote at my side. Grabbing it, I pushed the nurse call button. Within a few moments, a nurse entered the room, a police officer just behind her.
Busted.
A Widower's Apathy
There’s no way to tell your mother-in-law that you’re glad her son died, is there? There’s no way polite way of saying it. There’s no greeting card for an occasion like this. Not that it would be appropriate to do so, but still.
So, what do you do? You keep it to yourself. You do your best to act as though you’re grieving. You know, put on a sad façade; maybe throw in a few tears for safe measure. Then, when you get home, you let out the real emotions. You let out a scream of relief that you no longer have to put up with his shit. You pick up a photo of him from the shelf and scream expletives at it. You put on one of your favorite songs and dance around, basking in the happiness you haven’t felt in years. At least that’s what I did.
I’m not a cold, callous person, if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t wondered if I had become such a person. The truth is, when you spend seven years with an abusive narcissist who’s also an addict, you eventually reach a point where your only option is to shut your heart off completely. You just have to make sure you don’t shut it off to everyone.
Think of your heart like a breaker box. You open it up, and there’s a series of breakers there, each designated to a person, place, or thing. In a situation like this, or one where it’s necessary to let go of a friendship you hold dear, you have to make sure you just shut off the one switch in your heart and not the main breaker.
Now, before you point it out, I realize that the better solution to my problem would have been to leave him. I knew that then, and I know that now. What most people don’t realize though is that an abusive relationship can often mentally trap you. It’s like a form of Stockholm Syndrome. You want to leave, but you feel trapped. You’re afraid to leave, because that person has made you center so much of your life around them that you’re not sure how to function without them. You’ve lost yourself completely. You’ve gotten to a point where you hardly know who you are anymore because you’ve had to focus so much on keeping them happy. On the rare occasion you get time out with friends, you almost don’t know how to act anymore.
That’s where I had been for years by the time Colin died. I’d be out with some friends, something that rarely happened, and I’d just feel awkward. I had forgotten who I was before I met him. I had lost touch with the person I used to be, like he was locked away in a cellar in my mind. So, instead of enjoying my time away from Colin, I’d spend most of the time zigzagging back and forth between feeling awkward, and wondering when the inevitable text or phone call would come in that would end up in a fight.
It never failed. Any time I was anywhere without him, it was like he couldn’t stand the thought of me doing something other than devoting all of my time to him, and rather than letting me have peace, he would call or text. Sometimes it would be to bitch and complain about something miniscule that could have waited until I got home. Other times it would be an inquisition as to why I hadn’t come home yet, which was usually followed up with an accusation of cheating on him.
While this would all happen while I was with family as well, it was more frequent when I was out with friends. I think a big factor in that was his jealousy in my ability to not only make friends easily, but my ability to keep them. In the time that we were together, I had seen his existing friends, along with his newfound friends slowly disappear one by one. He was just one of those people who could turn on the charm when you were new in his life, but once he got comfortable, he’d let his guard down and the real him would come out. His selfish attitude, his wanting you to be there for him whenever he needed something, but never bothering to return the favor… Hell, there was a laundry list of standards that he held the people in his life to but couldn’t live up to himself.
This is why I’ve felt so much confidence in labeling him a narcissist. I’m not just throwing out an armchair diagnosis when I say that. I would bet my life that any psychiatrist would have come to the same conclusion about him. That is, if they got deep enough to see the real Colin.
I just wish I had known the real Colin from the start, but that’s the other way an abusive person keeps you trapped. The version of them that you initially met, the one you fell in love with, is around less and less. Instead, you’re stuck with the real version of them; the version they keep out of the public eye. You want to leave, but you miss the person they used to be. You’re still in love with that person, and hope they’ll come back to the surface. The sad reality is that they only come to the surface often enough to keep their hold on you. Like glimpses of the past when times were good.
Colin and I dated for about six months before I moved in with him. Looking back, there were small signs of the abuse that lay ahead back then, but I didn’t pick up on them at the time. Rose tinted glasses and all.
The real control and abuse began a few months after I moved in and increased in frequency over time. They were accelerated even more after he hurt his back in a car accident and slowly became addicted to painkillers and benzodiazepines.
As if all of that wasn’t enough to stress out even the most chill person on the planet, this addiction, along with his injury also eventually led to him not working for the last few years before he died. This wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the fact that on top of not working, he refused to take any steps to get on disability.
It was always one excuse after the other. For a while, it was because we couldn’t afford to go to the doctors necessary to get the paperwork filled out without insurance. Then, when Obamacare became a thing, he refused because of some conspiracy nonsense that the government was putting microchips in people who used that insurance. Then, finally, once we were legally able to be married and I was able to put him on my insurance, he insisted that it was a pointless battle because of lawyer fees and how hard it is to get approved for disability on a back injury.
So that left me to be the sole provider. The sole income for two people. The person who had to work as much overtime as was allowed just to keep us afloat. Not only was I working all those hours, but I also had to take care of everything at home. Meanwhile he spent twenty-four hours a day on the couch doing nothing and still had the nerve to bitch and complain about everything I did.
It went on and on like a vicious cycle that slowly got worse as it went on. It eventually got to the point where a third version of him came into play; the version that was so doped up on prescription drugs that I practically had to babysit him.
I’d come home from work to find him sitting on the couch, barely able to keep his eyes open, yet he would refuse to lay down to sleep. He would fight sleep and talk gibberish, asking me nonsensical questions. As annoying as this was, I was afraid to go to sleep or leave him alone in these times because it could turn out dangerous.
I woke one day to find him face down on the kitchen table, passed out while a coffee percolator burned on the stove. By the time I woke up, not only had the water all burned off, but the percolator was half melted onto the stove. It’s a wonder the house wasn’t set on fire.
There were also a few mornings where I would wake up to find him sitting in the car, sound asleep, with the engine running. There were even a few times where he drove to a store for something in this state, which eventually led to him wrecking his car and getting a DUI, as the cops could clearly see he was high as a kite.
