The Law of Nines

Alex realized that it had to be deliberate. She didn’t want to betray that she recognized him. As drugged as she was, she was trying to protect him by not acknowledging that she knew him.

“Well,” Henry said, “looks like she isn’t interested in a date.” He nudged Alex with an elbow as he leaned a little closer. “Maybe she’d like a date with me later tonight after lights-out. What do you think, Alex? Think she might like that?”

Through the unfeeling haze, Alex knew that Jax was in great peril. He again felt the shadowy presence of anger, but this time it was closer, darker, stronger, even if he couldn’t reach it, couldn’t connect with it.

He managed to muster deception. “Maybe.”

Henry chuckled. “Maybe she’d like you to tell us all about the gateway. Think so, Alex? Think she would be relieved if you did what we want?”

“I suppose,” Alex said in a flat, distant tone, deliberately playing dumb. It wasn’t at all difficult.

Henry turned him and shoved him, getting him moving. As he shuffled away, Alex glanced back over his shoulder. Jax’s head didn’t move. Her hands stayed limp at her sides.

But her eyes followed him.

He knew the private, lonely hell she was in. He knew because he felt the same way.

If Alex was in a daze before, he was even more dazed as they made their way back across the ninth floor to the men’s wing, to his room. He was beginning to remember pieces.

He recognized, if distantly, that he had to do something.

He knew that no one was going to show up to save him.

He knew that he had to help himself or things were only going to get worse. Henry had made that clear enough. His mother was going to suffer, but the worst of it would be reserved for Jax.

If Alex wanted to prevent that, he had to do something.

“Here we go,” Henry said as they finally made their way across to the men’s sunroom. “You should sit here and enjoy the sunshine while you think things over.”

“All right,” Alex said.

The orderly guided him over to the couches against the wall. Alex sat without protest. On the other side of the room men stared at the television. Alex stared at the floor.

When he heard squeaking he looked over and saw that the squeak was coming from shiny black shoes. “Snack time, folks,” the overweight orderly said as he pushed the cart into the room.

“You should have yourself a sandwich, Alex,” Henry said.

Alex merely nodded.

“And in the meantime, you think about things. You think real hard on the answers we want because we’re running out of patience. Do you understand?”

Alex nodded again without looking up.

Henry handed him a paper plate with a whole-wheat sandwich on it and a plastic glass of orange drink from the cart. “We’ll talk later.”

Alex nodded again without looking up. As he watched Henry walking away, he took a sip of orange juice, holding the cool liquid in his mouth under his tongue as his mind frantically tried to summon action. It was like trying to push the dead weight of a mountain.

He ate a few bites of the tasteless sandwich to the sounds of contestants in a game show giving answers to questions. Frequently the television audience broke out in laughter. The men watching didn’t react.

Alex needed answers.

Not at all hungry, he set down the plate with the sandwich. He sat for a time staring at nothing, his mind hopelessly blank, feeling overwhelmed with frustration at his inability to think.

The only thing that he seemed able to keep in focus was the image of Jax. The emotion connected to that image was buried somewhere deep within him.

He finally got up and began making his way back toward his room, the whole way struggling to reason out what he could do. But under the dampening fog of Thorazine, his thoughts would not crystallize. Shuffling his way down the hall, he knew that the drugs were preventing him from thinking of a way to fight back.

From somewhere, realization suddenly seemed to be there. Being able to think was not the immediate solution, it was the problem. He’d been focusing on the problem, rather than the solution. The real solution was to eliminate what was preventing him from thinking: the drugs.

In his room, he sat in the chair. Light coming in the frosted window behind slowly faded away to blackness. After a time he smelled food and heard the dinner cart being wheeled down the hall to the sunroom, where they fed the patients. When one of the women from the cafeteria stuck her head in to remind him that it was dinnertime, Alex only nodded. He wasn’t hungry.

As he sat listening to the buzz of the overhead lights, he held tight to the core of the real solution: getting off the drugs so that he could think. He worked at that notion like a mental worry stone. He grasped that if he was to solve anything, he first had to find a way not to take the drugs they gave him. After that, his mind would work.

He didn’t know how he could manage such a thing. They made him take his medication. They waited and made sure he took it. If he didn’t, they would force him. He couldn’t fight them off.