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For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? Hebrews 2:3

Day 1 – Addiction is imprisonment from within; it is impossible to understand true despair without fully digesting that fact. When being myself is the source of pain, and the only balm is the poison that will kill me one day, it’s so much more hopeful to sail away at the end of a needle just once more than face the inevitability of my own mortality.

Everyone finds a method to get through the knowledge of impending death one day at a time. No one stops to think that enduring that day does nothing more than bring the inevitable termination closer.

Whatever gets you from sunup to sundown is your drug of choice.

Mine was heroin.

I wanted to get clean, but that meant peeling away the layers of falsehood that we build around ourselves and taking a horrifyingly deep look into the other side of the mirror. The day I was able to accomplish that feat was when I went to the Clinic.

The rooms around the edge of the building have no windows. We can only see inward, down at the Moreton Bay Fig Tree in the center. The thick, gnarled roots droop in striated lines from the edges of the trunk and clutch deep into the soil, intertwining life and earth in a bind that is both aggressive and seamless.

Dr. Ralph Emerall says that the arrangement is a metaphor for how we need to see and heal ourselves.

Dr. Ralph is an asshole.

Day 2 – Try holding your breath for as long as possible.

The world record is over twenty minutes. Most people can’t make it a tenth of that time. But weak or strong, each person is essentially the same:

Eventually, they will fail.

Addiction imprisons the mind in the same way. There will come a point where quitting is just too much. It’s not simply the nausea, pain, fatigue, and endless, endless cold sweats. The true pain comes from the fact that the mind cannot focus on music, sleep, fellow humans, anything. When the only concept that your brain can grasp is the need for another fix (“Just one more!” the mind tells itself), eventually all defense mechanisms will fail.

What’s the point of a life that is spent yearning for what’s irrevocably lost? The long march toward death loses the impetus for resistance in those moments.

I thought about this as I scratched a red patch on my arm.

I was walking down the hall, intent upon sneaking out the window and into a fix, when Dr. Ralph stepped in front of me.

“Where are you going?” His smile strung only malice across his face.

I’m good at lying. I have to be. I had opened my mouth to speak when Dr. Ralph silenced me.

“You’re bad at lying. Close your mouth and be silent.”

The chills had gripped me in a twenty-four hour embrace by this point, so the reactionary shivers that ran down my spine were so intense that I fell to my knees.

He rested his hand on my shoulder. His flesh was somehow hot and cold at the same time.

“A heroin high was the greatest experience of your life, and you’ll never feel it again. The key to long-term survival is giving up all hope.”

Day 3 – Dr. Ralph encourages us to sit in the central courtyard and write, because he says that we’re free when we’re outdoors. But he’s lying, because we’re not really outside when we’re trapped within the Clinic’s walls, and we’re not really free when we’re trapped inside our own minds. He says that he will show us the path to releasing our own imprisonment, and we have to obey his instructions.

He tells us that we should be angels and follow the rules. Funny, my mom would tell me the same thing when I acted up as a little kid. I believed in angels then, because having faith in the rules didn’t make sense unless you were superhuman.

There are five of us sitting by the tree and writing now, and we’re all miserable. Imagine dealing with an unscratchable itch that will never, ever, ever, ever stop. It burrows deep into the soft, yielding folds of the sensitive brain tissue that encapsulates everything we are, then radiates the perfect arrangement of atoms to prevent us from experiencing ‘normal’ humanity.

Fuck, we’re fragile.

I was glad to eat lunch. Not because I was hungry, though; transitioning activities simply provides a temporary distraction from being addicted, and I relish the momentary respite from being me.

I could have sworn that five of us had sat down amongst the tree’s roots, but I must have been mistaken. Only four stood up.

Day 4 – I don’t learn the names of the other patients here; we never have to say goodbye if we never care about anyone.

I wish I had some H. There is never a single minute that passes without the drug occupying my thoughts.

I would leave if I could.

“You’re broken,” Dr. Ralph tells me. “You’re all broken. Only I can fix you. Only I can set you free,” he says as he closes the door on me.

I never learned the name of the sandy blond kid in the room next to mine.

That made things so much easier when he cried and screamed as Dr. Ralph dragged him down the hall. The kid couldn’t fight back against the handcuffs or hopelessness.

“You’re not healing us!” he screamed at Dr. Ralph. “Just let me die! JUST LET ME DIE! It would be better than what you’re doing! PLEASE!”

Later that afternoon, orderlies cleared everything out of his room.

Dr. Ralph visited me then.

“What you saw must have been very traumatic,” he explained as his rubbed his thumbs back and forth, back and forth. He didn’t know that I was aware of how hard he was trying to hide his smile. “You need to know that it was all for the best. All for the best.”

I tried to avoid hyperventilating. I tried hard. “Why don’t you ever use my name?” I asked in a shaking voice.

He stopped trying to hide his smile. “You don’t have a name.” He stood. “It’s all for the greater good.”

His grin grew wider, then he turned to leave.

Before exiting my room and locking the door, he caressed the wooden frame with a long, wet, sensual lick.

Day 5 – They tell me I don’t know what’s real, but I know for sure that someone is hiding the truth.

“Do you think anyone will miss us when we’re gone?” asked the frail, dark-haired man next to me.

I didn’t look at him. That made things much easier. “Do you miss yourself, man?”

He didn’t respond.

I scratched the red patch on my arm. It bled. I didn’t stop scratching.

“My grandpa had part ownership of a ranch when I was a kid.” I sniffed. “He showed me how they feed ground beef meal to the live cattle. I was so horrified that I sobbed and begged him to stop turning them into cannibals. He looked at me with quiet disappointment, and explained that it was for the greater good. I told him that he was wrong, that it was all wrong, and that we had to stop. He just paused again, then asked me if I was really going to fight the process, or if I would just accept it like everyone else. I told him that I would never accept it, Gramps quietly smiled in return, and I willingly had steak for dinner that night.”

I closed my journal and stood.

“A few years later, that process was responsible for the spread of mad cow disease.”

I walked away from the tree.

The sound of worms writhing through spaghetti froze me in place. I didn’t want to turn around when the man yelled, or when his yell cut out, or when the sound of snapping bones erupted behind me with all the aggression and speed of popping corn.

Pop, pop, pop.

Slowly, I forced myself to look back.

The roots of the Moreton Bay Fig were sliding like snakes and they enveloped the protruding hands and feet of my heretofore companion. His appendages were smashed together at the unholiest of angles; they only way his contortion could have been possible would have been by folding his body like cardboard.

The hands and feet disappeared between the roots and into the rich soil like the final morsel being guzzled down a hungry cannibal’s throat.

Slurp.

Day 6 – Dr. Ralph came for me today, I and knew that it was the end.

My arm had split open where the itching wouldn’t stop, and my blood oozed onto the floor in a steady drip, drip, drip.

I looked down at the little puddle of me and smiled.

Dr. Ralph turned the handle. I was sitting on the ground, pushing hard against his attempt to come inside.

He pushed harder. So did I.

And after fighting so hard to make me give up, he was totally unprepared for the moment when I stopped fighting.

He burst into the room, expecting resistance that he did not find, and pitched forward entirely off-balance.

Right into my pool of blood.

His legs betrayed him, and Dr. Ralph flew into the air. With a crack like a baseball bat, this skull hit the floor and he made his own contribution to my crimson puddle.

His suffering was my escape, and I was out the door before he could rise again.

I ran. Oxygen was in short supply and hope was even scarcer, but that moment was the freest I’d ever been.

I dreamed of getting out and getting high. I hated myself for the fact that I didn’t want to get clean anymore. But there’s no way to heal the terminal condition of being mortal, and I needed to surrender on my own hopeless terms.

Dr. Ralph was a faster runner.

I didn’t know the way out, but I did know the way in. I sprinted into the courtyard where the grimy, writhing tendrils of the Moreton Bay Fig hungered for life to squeeze from someone else.

I ran. I gasped. I strained.

Fifty feet away.

Dr. Ralph’s fingers swiped at my back.

Thirty feet away. Nineteen, thirteen…

I just had to trip him, and he’d fall into the roots-

He tackled my knees. I fell to the ground with a painful thud.

Ten feet from the nearest root.

I did not fight as Dr. Ralph climbed on top of me, pinned my arms to the side, and mounted my chest. He was panting and smiling.

I gave up hope. It was so much easier that way.

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast!

Dr. Ralph, now white as his lab coat, turned slowly around. He tried to swallow, but his throat seemed too dry. “Simon,” he eked out in a hoarse whisper.

“Ralph,” a man responded, casually approaching the place where the doctor sat atop me. He stopped right next to us.

Dr. Ralph struggled to maintain his shallow breathing. “It’s too late, Simon. You can’t stop me from succeeding.”

Simon stared, unblinking, at the doctor. For a tense moment, no one said anything. Dr. Ralph felt like he was sinking into me.

Finally, Simon broke the silence. “Ralph, you’ve already failed.” He sighed, then dropped his shoulders. “Did you fall on the ground? There seems to be a sizable cut on your head. Here, let me fix that for you.”

Simon reached into his waistband and produced an enormous pistol. Dr. Ralph had enough time for his eyes to grow wide before Simon pulled the trigger.

Movies show these moments with sterilized grandeur, but there’s nothing elegant about watching a man’s brain fly out of his skull in lifeless, dirty chunks. A weight was lifted from my shoulders as Dr. Ralph rolled off me. And just like that, his entire life’s story was written and ended.

Hope blossomed in my chest as Simon lifted me to my feet. I don’t remember when the crying started, but it just wouldn’t stop. I hugged him tightly as his soft shirt absorbed my tears and snot. He stood quietly and said nothing, a truly angelic presence in the darkest of places.

“I promise,” I mumbled incoherently, “I promise, I promise, I promise.”

Watching Dr. Ralph’s entire existence being reduced to cranial goop had rattled me deeply, and I knew immediately that I would never return to the way I had been.

“I promise,” I continued weakly, “that I’ll never touch heroin again.” I sniffed deeply. “I promise to live the life that I have.”

Simon hugged me tighter, lightly kissed my scalp, then nodded. Wordlessly, he turned around and led me back to my room.

“Wait here,” he explained after sitting me down on the bed. “You’re free now. Your fate will come to you.”

In that moment, I would have done anything he commanded of me.

So I stayed in place, because I was free.

Day 7 – The door is still locked.

Simon isn’t coming back.

But I’m not alone here. A slick, sick, writhing sound tells me that it’s waiting in the hall.

It wants to take me whole and flay the skin from my bones.

The roots of the fig tree first poked under the door twenty minutes ago.

Now they cover half of the room.

I had wanted to spend my last day on my own terms, but fate decided to deny me even that small luxury. Now I will write until the very last moment, because there is nothing else to occupy my mind as I finally end my run.

I’m so angry. It was always hopeless.

EVERGROVE POLICE DEPARTMENT

Evidence ID No. 10142019330

Reporting Officer: Detective Marlin Malevich

Notes:

There’s nothing to report, really. The building was completely empty except for a few miscellaneous items like this diary (Evidence ID No. 10142019330).

No bodies were recovered, and the tree in the central courtyard was dead.

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