Ryan's Suffering

by Lloyd Paulson

  My mother stopped within two feet of us. I managed to be silent, mainly out of an instinct for self-preservation, tears coursing down my cheeks. I couldn’t control the trembling, though. I felt the tension in the air passing between my mother and father. I knew I was the source of it. I hated myself completely. I had caused this; I was being punished for it.

  My father looked down at me. "Jesus Christ, he fucking pissed himself." He threw me towards my mother, and I landed on the floor by her feet. My father backed away, staring down at me. "I guess I scared the ever lovin' piss out of him." He snickered, and sat back down.

  My mother reached for me, the anger still highly evident. I scrambled away, and she came after me and caught me. I struggled, kicking violently and shrieking like a banshee. I thought it was her turn to hurt me. I hit her with my fists, and I thrashed violently as she tried to hold me. I bit her arm as viscously as I could, and she let go, screaming as she fell backwards on her ass.

  I ran a few steps, and glanced back. My mother was staring back at me, hurt. I know now she was only trying to comfort me. This is what haunts me the most now: not the fear, not the anger. It was my mother’s hurt. She was trying to protect me, trying to help me, and I turned on her like a rabid dog. How does that make a mother feel?

  I didn’t know. How could I? I was five. There she sat, heartbroken, tears streaming down her face. However, my father had seen the whole thing, and my father stood, murderous violence etched on his face.

  My mother saw the look on my face as I scrambled backwards, and I saw the resigned determination on her face as she whirled and stood, defiant, to block him as I bolted to my room.

  "Leave him the fuck alone, he didn’t know any better, you bastard!"

  I slammed the door.

  The next morning, she had bandaged her arm where I had bit her. I felt horrible, and she would hardly look at me. It was my fault, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

  I hated myself for her other bruises, too. The ones that happened after I had shut my door.

  This was the first time I learned how to hate myself. It wouldn’t be my last lesson. Oh no. This was just simply the opening prelude. There's an entire fucking orchestra of machinations to come.

  This is the way of anger and violence; it isn’t pretty. I survived Hell itself, and this was just the beginning.

  ~~~~~~ *LP* ~~~~~~

  I had recurring nightmares as a child. I later learned that this is a symptom of "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder." Knowing the name of this fancy term wouldn’t have done jack shit, though. That’s the fun part about the DSM-VI. It’s a book full of labels, and outside of that, it’s mainly useful as a fucking paperweight to keep files from blowing away.

  There are clinical terms for just about anything that monkeys up the works inside your head. I prefer to be direct and blunt about my psychological problems; it’s my coping mechanism. It saves time. If you have a problem with that, you can a) piss off, and b) I don’t give a flying fuck.

  At first, it helps to have a label that identifies what is wrong with you. Saying that you suffer from "clinical depression", or you are "bipolar" or that you have "obsessive-compulsive tendencies" gives you a false sense of power. There’s something powerful and talismanic about a diagnosis. It’s as if you finally have a handle on the problem. There's finally something to latch onto. Once we know what is wrong, then we seem to think that the doctors with all the powers of medicine and science can do something about it. Magic potions that make it go away, like cream for a bad rash. Even doctors can fall victim, because at times they have an almost god-like power to heal. Nevertheless, there are limitations to what they can do, and that’s a terrible curse.

  Being mentally ill is not like catching a strep infection that requires antibiotics to knock the infection back. A diagnosis is just a fancy set of words that offers some ideas on which drugs might work and which therapies might help. They can help, true, but they can’t perform miracles. They key word is "might". In the end, you’re still loony-goddamned-toons, section-fucking-eight, got a few loose screws, not dealing with a full deck, fucked in the head; pick whatever colorful and/or derogatory metaphor is currently making the rounds in your social circles.

  To be painfully blunt, as a depressive, you’ll either successfully learn to manage the symptoms and adapt, or you won’t and you’ll be a tragic statistic whose brains will have to be scrubbed off the wall by some other poor schlock who got the short end of the stick that day when they were assigning work details. That’s only because you were having a worse day than he was, until his boss fucked him over with a bullshit assignment on brain detail. Those are the only prognoses. It’s Darwinian, and it’s brutal. Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet.

  Of course, the so-called sane bastards of the world think you can just knock it the fuck off, and get past it. Their false sympathy is annoying. "I felt depressed after my cat died, so I know how you feel. You just need to cheer the fuck up."

  I want to smack those fucksticks for their false but rather well intentioned sympathy. "Oh yeah? Unless you thought that sawing your fucking wrists open with a steak knife was a good way to cope with your dead fucking puddy-fucking-tat, you were just sad, you brain-dead fuckwit."

  In my personal experience, it’s very tough to "just shake-off" wanting to slice open your wrists, or to just "brush-off" wanting to perform impromptu brain surgery with double ought buckshot. Although, I always wondered what the splatter pattern would look like—in a different context would it qualify as modern art? Sick? Absolutely. But that's how the fucking mind works, you can't not think of this shit. It's like the loony-tune version of "The Game". For example, try not to think of a purple elephant with pink polka dots that's wearing an orange tutu while being jerked off by a clown. Yeah, you already have the image in your head. You lose. Everyone loses "The Game". At times, there's never a shortage of self-destructive thoughts that chase their tails merrily around inside my head.

  A simple night out on the town to "cut loose and relax" does not lead to the path of recovery. I've tried. Getting drunk when you’re feeling suicidal makes you a suicidal and/or psychopathic drunk. That’s not a good combination. Trust me. Been there, done that. Got the fucking t-shirt. That’s a good way to get tasered, stitches, and stuck on a suicide watch in special hospital ward with a fat bitch of a nurse named Susie with an attitude, although you have a solid shot at getting a plea bargain down to simple battery.

  Another common response is, "Well, you’re just being selfish."

  To which I say, "Yep. I’ve decided the most entertaining way to spend most of my mornings is trying to force my ass out of bed against my will. Once I have achieved an upright position, I can obsessively contemplate the finer points of combining sleeping pills with whiskey as the main enterprise of the day for the next two hours. That will be followed in the afternoon by several rounds of convincing myself not to hang myself with my belt from the ceiling fan while wondering if the fan will still have enough power to turn me around and around like a new car as a grand prize on a game show when they find my body…"

  Selfish? Absolutely. There’s nothing more selfish than suicide. That’s as selfish and as personal as it gets, isn’t it? The real question that’ll drive you absolutely and fanatically bug-shit in a suicidal state is this, though: Why don’t I get a choice to stop thinking these thoughts? That’s the real motherfucker of a problem, since everyone seems to think that’s the prime solution, the fucking golden ticket out of the maze—just stop fucking thinking about it. Why the fuck didn't I think of that first? Maybe these geniuses can solve world peace next with their awe-inspiring brainpower. Ban all weapons? Can I get a Halle-fucking-lujah? What's next, poverty? How should we fix that, smartass? Make everyone rich? Sigh.

  Labels mean nothing. I’m just plain loony tunes. Don't like my bluntness about it? Tough. Deal with it. Shut the fuck up, next. It’s not a mild case of diarrhea. It will not go away in a week or so. I cannot just try to think about unicorns ea
ting Skittles and farting rainbows, and that everything is going to be hunky-dory as soon as I cheer the fuck up. It doesn't fucking work that way, so despite everyone's best intentions, back the fuck off.

  On top of my other issues, knowing that my childhood rounds of sleep screaming were referred to as posttraumatic stress disorder probably wouldn’t have helped a goddamned thing at the time, but that was what it was. Labels just give a false sense of control to the newly diagnosed. Once the placebo effect wears off and reality sets back in, they’re usually back to square fucking one.

  This dream occurred about once a week for numerous years. It disrupted the household immensely. Shrieking like a banshee in the middle of the night tends to scare the fucking shit out of everyone in the household. After a while, it just pisses them off.

  Control is an illusion. Trust me, if I could have knocked it the fuck off, I would have. I did not enjoy having the shit scared out of me on a regular basis by a recurring nightmare. I did not want to share the wonder, to share the pure power and terror of the moment with everyone in the house at 3 AM.

  Trust me; it’s not conducive to winning friends and influencing people. You do not want to have many sleepovers with friends, either. It’s not the best way to fit in as a child. Every child wants desperately to fit in. No one gives a rat's ass about "four times four" or how well you can color between the lines; school’s real purpose is learning to get along in a social context, and my little shrieking episodes put the kibosh on any overnight bonding opportunities with your peers. No overnight scouting trips for me, that’s for damned sure.

  In these dreams, an adult would send me to the basement. I would protest, and refuse to go. I had a premonition that something bad would happen. The idea of going to the basement filled me with fear. The dreams had endless variations; it was like a cheap horror movie. Yes, the scenes were different, but they were predictable setups. Sometimes, it was my parents sending me down to our own basement. Other times, I might have been at a friend’s house. It didn’t matter, though. I would always end up going to the basement, against my better judgment.

  I would slowly descend the stairs, with my back against the wall. I would scan the gloom below, trying to find the reason for my fear. Every step down, I would be prepared to bolt back up the stairs towards safety. Each step intensified my fear. I could feel my heart pounding harder, every breath was harsher.

  I would feel a tremendous relief when I reached the basement floor, and I would feel better as I moved away from the stairway. Even when it was dark and gloomy in the basement, I felt safer as long as I wasn’t on the stairway.

  I knew I didn’t want to go back up the stairs. I would procrastinate, until I had no choice. Finally, someone would start yelling for me to get my butt back upstairs. I would go reluctantly.

  As I climbed the stairs, I could hear voices above me raised in an argument. As I reached the door at the top, but before I could open it, I would feel the iron grip of someone’s hand grasping my ankle. Looking down at the hand that had me in its icy grip, I would see nothing but blackness and an endless staircase. There would be no hand on my leg, despite the relentless grip. I would attempt to scream, but only a soft hiss would escape my throat. I could hear the yelling going on in the kitchen, beyond the closed door. They would be oblivious to my silent screams.

  Then the bodiless grip would drag me down into oblivion, as I would continue to try to scream.

  At that point, I would wake from the dream, and sit suddenly upright. At first, my mom would be running into my room. While I couldn’t scream in my dream, I apparently had a pair of healthy fucking lungs back in the real world.

  This sleep screaming in the middle of the night lasted for fucking years. Over time, my mother stopped coming to see if I was ok. When the answer is always a) yes, I'm fine, and b) there's not a goddamned thing she can do about it, getting up to check on me becomes a waste of fucking time. Despite disrupting the household, nobody ever talked about it. What would have been the point? Embarrass me, perhaps.

  The night terrors subsided when I finally learned to wake myself up. Some say you can’t force yourself awake during a dream, but I disagree. Once you recognize you are having a recurring nightmare, then you already know how it ends. Since I never figured out how to change a dream's course, I learned to force myself awake. It is a mighty shove towards consciousness. It takes a while to learn, but it works.

  Still, no one in the house said a word even when I learned to interrupt my nightmares.

  If dreamland is where the subconscious mind goes to clean house, I have always wondered what the long-term effects of interrupting this process were. Would that have any bearing on what happened? Would I have ended up in the same mess? There is no way to know.

  My uncle told me a story that explains the recurring nightmare. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I asked my mom in a very vague and probing way about it, and she said she has no idea who told me that, it was just an accident. According to her, I fell down the stairs when I was a toddler, and gave myself a concussion. End of story. Not exactly an exciting explanation, but that may be all it was.

  Uncle Shane told me a different story, mid October, just before that fateful night eleven years ago, as he rolled a joint at the kitchen table up at his cabin up north not too far from Clare.

  "Your ma was over here a few months back, while you’s and your sister was away at some damned camp or another or some shit. We’d been drinkin’ heavily, bullshittin’ around the campfire outside. So she tells us this story. Said she ain’t never told no one about this." He paused, lighting the joint, inhaling deeply.

  My uncle exhaled the smoke in a cloud and then burped. "Anyway, your father was always the jealous type. Never really trusted your mother, you see. Fair enough, I ain’t never trusted that fucker myself, but that’s neither here nor there. Thought she was gonna run off with another man or some other bullshit. Lord knows she should’ve. But she was young, and she was faithful to him. Fuck if I know why, but you gotta give your ma that. For all your dad’s problems, she tried."

  He offered the joint, eyebrows raised, and I took it from him.

  "Don’t you be tellin’ your ma I let you hit that shit. She’ll be chasin’ me around here with a baseball bat back like when we was kids. Now give it back." I toked on the joint hard, and made him wait before he could take it back. I coughed savagely for several seconds, and he laughed at me, before resuming the story.

  "So he calls home from work one day, and some dude answers the phone. Fuckin’ idiot dialed the wrong goddamned number, prolly. So he goes off half-cocked, tearin’ off from work without even tellin’ the danged foreman where the fuck he’s going and heads straight home ready to open a can of whoop ass on someone."

  "When he gets home, he kicks in the front door, and starts yellin’ for her. Wants to know who the fuck that guy was that answered the phone, and if she’s been fuckin’ around on him while he’s at work. Of course, your ma is knee deep in smelly, nasty laundry down in the basement. You’d been throwin’ up all over the damned place all fuckin’ mornin’, and had done fuck’d up all the sheets and blankets in your crib. She had no fuckin’ idea what the fuck he was yammerin’ ‘bout."

  "During all that hollerin’ and screamin’, you wake up. You’s just a baby, you see. Your sister wasn’t even born yet. So your ma gets you out your playpen, while your dad’s followin’ her around, hollerin' and cussin’ and calling her a worthless fuckin' whore."

  "Anyway, you’re bawlin’ to beat hell, and he’s hollerin’ about how you ain’t even his kid, and other such bullshit. Your ma says she’s not puttin’ up with that horseshit, and grabs her purse and the diaper bag and goes to leave through the back door. Your dad finally loses it completely, and just as she starts to open the back door, he calls her a no good lyin' fuckin’ whore again and gives her a mighty shove. Well, the back door is right fuckin' next to the basement door, and that fucker goes flying open."

  "So down the steps sh
e goes, and you right with her. She stumbles, you go flyin’ off on your own, and she scrambles and tumbles and tries to keep hold of you, breakin’ her goddamned nose in the process tryin’ to keep you from getting hurt, while she’s sprayin’ blood all down the stairs. About halfway down, she loses grip, and you go tumblin’ down on your own as she scrambles after you."

  "Well, you was plenty hurt already from bouncin’ off the walls and railin’s, screamin’ bloody murder the whole goddamned way. She managed to catch up, and grabbed your leg just as your head smashed into the goddamned concrete floor at the bottom. Wham! Shut your ass right the fuck up, it did. Cut off your screams like a goddamned switch."

  "So your mom picks you up, thinkin’ you was stone cold dead or somethin’. She said the screamin’ and the tumblin’ was bad. The instant fuckin’ quiet after that gawd awful sick thud was worse. A screamin’ baby’s a live baby. You had hit that floor mighty hard, you did. Your dad walks calmly down the stairs like nothin’ fuckin’ happened, and crouches down on the floor where your ma was cradlin’ you. You was still breathin’, thank god. Just down for the count. Just knocked you the fuck out, stone cold."

  "So he crouches down in front of her, and reaches down and puts his hand under her chin and tilts her head up so she's lookin’ at him. Bloods just pourin’ out your ma’s nose. He tells her that she tripped goin’ down the stairs with you. Said if she told anyone a different story than that, he’d kill her. Then the fucker walked up the steps, out the back door, and went straight back to work. Didn’t even look at you or ask if you was ok."

  "So she drove you to the hospital, and told them that lame ass cockamamie story. You had one nasty ass concussion, but you’s was lucky. So was she, prolly. Said she almost left your dad that day. Didn’t, though. She figured he was serious about his threats or somethin’. It was a much different time back then, you gotta understand."