haldol

The apocalyptic joke, the slapstick armageddon, this vaudeville doomsday in the lethal injection chamber. Worse than forced here, we were born here with syringes planted in us before we could speak and say "No thank you," before we could walk out of the hospital room. My executioner will give me a red lollipop that tastes like cough drops and tell me that I am a brave boy before placing the black kit of hypodermics upon the mirrored table. The old methods are messy, the politicians say. Not every child in this condition makes it through college, many are left simpering in dank bedrooms lit by video games. Others do the work themselves, like the young woman who took all her lithium and expired in a coma like a tub of yogurt with patches of live culture writhing inside.

I want to make a confession, I hear myself saying. I hated it, I continue. Hated every minute of it. Hated gazing at the lucent green leaves in reckless wonder while skipping to the conveinience store, hated drawing elegant pictures in English Composition books, hated feeling my heart flutter when I looked shyly at teenagecollege girls wearing certain kinds of glasses. The doctor is taken aback by this lie. Hated it? It's easier if he feels he is doing me a favor.

You've all seen the insides of a doctor's office, with the L-shaped hallways leading from low shelving in the receptionist area to the patient examination rooms adorned by floral print ceilings and tongue depressor jars. It's like that but without all the things to calm people with medical authority. Steel wool carpet and a doctor in a full black suit. It sounds almost unbelievable but I tell you, this is how it is.

His voice, liquor smooth: Oh, and how is your mother? He talks to her on the phone. Steven has not been taking his medicine, she tells him. My mother calls the drugs 'medicine.' As if cough and cold were being treated, as though wellness could possibly be achieved through a regimen of drugs. These are not antibiotics, these are drugs. And the injection is not just a drug, it is a rape.

He pulls a syringe out of the case. Your mother tells me, he begins, that she found your medication on the floor of your apartment. What's it doing there?

I can't even humanize this man, but I'll try for your sake. He's always on vacation. I never ask him where he goes since he never asks me where I go, which is nowhere. He knows this and cares. I should go to AA, he told me once. I don't know, I began. No, he broke in. You will go to AA.

The last thing I need is a social network after taking an injection designed to erase my identity. Would you buy a house without a driver's license? Could you sail around the world without a passport? Yes, without stopping. And I desperately want to be somewhere else without stopping.

But if I run out of the office, he will use the telephone. It sits on his desk, stupid and beige except for sometimes when the secretary will phone in to say something mysterious. I like to think she calls him with flight information for his next vacation. As soon as you inject the intramuscular Haldol, she might say, your shuttle from Virgin Airways is outside, so you might want to hurry up. Oh, and tell your patient not to make a scene.

I have to fight myself instead of fighting him. I imagine turning when he poises the needle over my lower back, grabbing the insides of his wrists with my thumbs like I learned in Tae Kwon Do, and relieving his hands of the syringe. Before he can stand up from his wheeled chair (he usually performs the injection sitting down) I jab him in the leg with the needle and plunge the full dosage into his thigh. Have a nice flight, I would say.

But I stand their quivering with my office shirt held above my belly button. Jab. Entry. Release of chemicals.

Maybe next time, he says, you'll take your medicine. If I could hit ten human beings without legal repercussions, I would hit him ten times and then go to jail for the eleventh.

I'm out. Partially. Just at the desk, making a new appointment for another month. The receptionist's hair looks untroubled, dense, as if formed by granite convictions instead of holding spray. I squeak a thank you.

At home I feel it working on me. I lay in bed with my face in the pillow at three in the afternoon. Tense, stupid, and tense. I have a feeling, than the feeling becomes an idea, then the idea an action. I lose a framed picture I took of Monet's Gardens to the edge of the kitchen counter. Since a coffee cup is filthy, I break it in the sink. The phone starts ringing during this and I pull the phone cord out of the wall jack with both hands. I go to the tan bookshelf and want to topple its five shelves upon me but thankfully this is desire and not a fact. I tell myself, this is a desire and not a fact. Myself, a desire. Haldol, a fact.