Chapter 15
The day after his torturous experience with spinal contortions and nihilistic premonitions, Jason awakened in a fog.
“It's time to eat,” said an orderly.
Jason slowly rose from his bed and walked toward the door with his body fully erect. The pain in his spinal column was gone.
After eating peach slices and drinking a small carton of milk, Jason entered the hallway, where he was met by an orderly behind the medicine cart. “It's time for your medicine,” said the orderly holding out a pill and a paper cup full of water.
Jason swallowed the pills and washed them down without hesitation. Then he meandered back to his bed where he curled up and closed his eyes.
Every day Jason slept as much as he could and he only got up when he was ordered to ingest medications or food.
After about a week, an orderly approached Jason and said, “You're going to court tomorrow. Better get cleaned up.”
“Why?” asked Jason.
“They're deciding whether you'll be discharged.”
The idea excited Jason. He longed to see the outside world and eat normal food again.
The next day Jason took a shower and put new pajamas on. Then he and some other patients followed a heavy set, middle aged male social worker out of the hospital. The social worker led them outside onto a basketball court.
Jason got startled, suspecting some kind of cruel joke, and asked, “Is this the court?”
“No,” said the social worker. “This is just a basketball court. We're going to the courthouse downtown.”
The drive to the courthouse made Jason anxious to be permanently discharged from the hospital. Everything he saw seemed so much livelier. He longed to walk around the neighborhood free again.
When they arrived at the courthouse, Jason met with a lawyer in an eerily empty courtroom. They sat at a desk on the opposite side of the room from the judge's vacant podium. Next to the podium were United States and Tennessee flags hanging limply from poles.
The lawyer put some documents in front of Jason and asked him to sign. Jason, in his eagerness, signed the documents without bothering to read them. Then it was over.
Relief lightened Jason's mood when he saw his mother and father waiting outside the courtroom. His father no longer looked stern or foreboding. Instead his father and his mother looked concerned.
“What did they do with my clothes?” asked Jason.
“We'll get you some new ones,” replied his father.
“Are you all right?” asked his mother.
“I am now.”
The moment Jason returned home, he went to his room and got out his Enochian encyclopedia. For the first time in his life he began writing an invocation. After everything that had happened to him, Jason felt it was worth a try to invoke occult protections.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yeah,” answered Jason.
His father opened the door and said, “I need you to mow the lawn.”
Jason put his things aside and went into the yard. While he was mowing the front lawn, a black car with tinted windows parked in the drive way next door. A creepy looking man got out and eyed Jason for a moment, before proceeding into the neighbors' house. The man didn't even bother knocking. He just entered like he owned the place now.
It wasn't long before Jason saw a strange metal wire poking out from among the grass in various places. He stopped the lawn mower and examined the wiring. It ran from a coil at one end to an electricity box nearby the house next door. The same house, which that creepy looking man had entered.
Jason went back indoors to his father and said, “There's a metal wire on the lawn blocking my way.”
“Well then move it.”
“It's hooked into an electricity box.”
“Use a stick or something.”
Jason sighed and proceeded to the garage where he picked up a rake. He began by prodding the wire a little. When he saw that it didn't seem to release any charge, he moved it with the rake over to the far side of the yard. Then he finished mowing the lawn.
Once Jason was back in his room, he felt an intense need to write and perform the Enochian invocation. The invocation called upon the governors of the Aethyrs to reign protections centered on a point in his heart, which would radiate outward with every heartbeat into a sphere, meant to restrict any action that might cause him discomfort. If someone did mean him harm, the governors were expected to restrict that person's movements to the utmost degree possible by bringing force outward from astral into the etherial of their bodies, reigning his will to be safe over their own will power.
Heavy metal music played on the stereo and Jason sat next to one of the stereo speakers while he recited the Enochian invocation in a low and careful voice. An imposing fear gripped him at the beginning of the invocation, threatening him with a mistrust of the fringe as well as the outer society's condemnation of such dangerous superstitions. With each word he spoke, an unknown force was attempting to intrude and force him to misspeak. As soon as the invocation was finished, Jason felt a strange sensation of light like force descending upon the crown of his head and penetrating down into his heart. Then the sensation was gone.
In bed that night a female voice said, “I miss you.” The voice sounded strangely familiar and Jason tried to ignore it. “It's Jessica and I miss you.” The voice did slightly resemble that of Jessica's, but there was a ragged twist to it that annoyed him. “Please don't ignore me. I need help. They're keeping me captive beneath the local police station. Please save me.” Tears sprang into Jason's eyes and he couldn't fall back to sleep. Instead he lay there crying and listening to the female voice begging to be saved. Eventually exhaustion overrode the torment and he slept.
The next morning, Jason awakened feeling lucid with no inner voices and he prepared for the day.
While Jason was preparing breakfast, his mother entered and asked, “Did you take your meds yet?”
“I was going to take them after I ate something.”
His mother reached into the cupboard and took out the two pill bottles. “Tell me when you're done eating. I want to see you take them.”
“Okay,” said Jason as his mother placed the two pill bottles in front of him.
When it came time to take the pills, Jason put the pills in his mouth and swallowed some water, while his mother stared at him. He kept the pills lodged in the side of his mouth and headed toward his room.
“Did you swallow them?” asked his mother.
“Of course,” Jason blurted, trying to sound as natural as he could. Then he went into his bedroom and spit out the tablets into his hand. The acrid taste of the pills in his mouth caused his body to shiver. He put them into a drawer to flush later and returned to the kitchen for a soda to wash the taste from his mouth.
It was summertime and he was eager to be outside of the house for a while, so he called Toby.
“When did you get out?” asked Toby.
“Just yesterday,” replied Jason.
“What was it like?”
“Boring. I slept most of the time.”
“You wanna hang out?”
“That's why I called.”
“Come on over. We can smoke a little ganja and go get something to eat.”
As Jason walked down the street away from his parent's house, he saw a police car parked nearby.
After smoking marijuana at Toby's house, Jason, Toby, and two other boys went to a local Mexican fast food joint. Another police vehicle was parked outside.
“Surprised they're not parked outside the doughnut shop,” remarked Toby.
“Fucking pigs,” sneered one of the other boys.
“It's a doughy nut,” said a shrill male voice.
“That's my doughy nut in that thar toilet,” added a goofy male voice. “And you need to eat it pardner. I'm just a rootin tootin cowboy and I'm tootin up a storm.”
The goofy voice continued harassing Jason with coprophilia while he wai
ted in line and as he began eating his meal.
“We put the cop in coprophilia. You're gonna learn all about police and poopy. Oh will you ever!”
“You need to get angry with him talking like that while I'm trying to eat,” complained a shrill male voice.
Jason was eating his meal when two familiar faces entered, still wearing their scrubs. The two creepy doctors from that night approached the register and ordered food. After they had ordered their meals, they turned the corner into the dining area, both of them looking at him. The sloth like doctor gave him a questioning look before he sat down. The walrus like doctor gave him an accusatory stare and then sat down across from his colleague.
“You know those two?” asked Toby.
“They were at the hospital.”
“It's a small world,” said one of the other boys.
“Not that small,” said Jason.
“You're supposed to go with them,” said a shrill male voice in Jason's head.
“Do you think they're stalking you?” asked Toby.
“Don't know. Don't care.”
Later that evening, while Jason was returning home from Toby's place, a police car passed by him on a residential street. It continued for a little bit and then it did a U-turn and parked along the opposite side of the road in front of him. A sinister looking police officer with angular facial features rolled down the window and pointed a device, which resembled a radar gun, in his direction. Then Jason felt an electric sensation in his spinal column followed by an irrational sense of dread.
“You see,” said a shrill voice. “Our physical selves care about us doing this to you.” A slight weight pressed against Jason's brain as the voice commanded, “Now go with him.”
Jason did his best to behave normally as the police officer rolled up the window and drove away. It didn't make sense to feel such fear. He hadn't done anything wrong and he had no drugs or weapons on his person.
“Damn it, you spoiled rotten brat. Do you want us to get our big selves? You need to obey orders when we give them.”
“I feel sorry for him,” said the shrill female voice.
“How dare you get annoyed with her. We need to be the bad guys and she's the one you want to hear.”
Jason grimaced with disgust as an alien presence twisted into his mind with the impulse to obey the ludicrous order.
“I'm telling my daddy on you!”
Suddenly Jason's head convulsed with such violence that he had to stop moving for a moment, as a billowing male voice shouted, “YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO MAKE DISGUSTED FACES! YOU NEED TO VOCALIZE THAT DISGUST!”
“Yeah. We tell our daddies on you.”
A terrible force weighed down Jason's brain as the billowing voice said, “Okay! Listen up! Playtime is over! We know you're pretending to take the pills! You need to tell your parent's you're doing that!”
For the rest of the evening the voices incessantly harassed him about needing to tell his parents that he was refusing to take the medications. The idea of being stuck with voices in his head issuing orders to him every day disturbed Jason, but he refused to tell his parents about it, out of fear of being institutionalized again.
That night, it occurred to Jason that the medications were probably the thing responsible for the voices and the shocks. The spasms, which he'd gotten earlier on, were just a lesser form of the shocks and convulsions he was now receiving. He hadn't had any experiences with hearing voices or suffering shocks and convulsions until after he'd begun taking the psychiatric medications.
“You're not allowed to think that way about our meddy meds,” commanded a shrill male voice. The command was followed by a twisting of nerve pain and an alien force trying to erase the idea from Jason's mind, using its association with chronic nerve pain and physical pressure.
Jason refused to give up his realization. For the remainder of the night, Jason lay there suffering voices and nerve pain until he eventually drifted off to sleep.
The next day, Jason found a plain refrigerator magnet and some neodymium magnets. In the closet of his room, he placed some of the Doloft he'd collected onto a wooden board. Initially trying to lift up the Doloft tablets with the refrigerator magnet seemed fruitless, but one time, after holding the magnet to the pill for a while it looked like it may have begun to conduct a little. He held the magnet to the side and placed a Doloft tablet against it. The pill stuck. When he turned the magnet over, the pill dropped.
Then Jason cut the Doloft into smaller pieces with an X-Acto blade to make the cut surfaces smooth. He put the refrigerator magnet against the smooth inner surface of the pill and soon the magnet was lifting up the magnetized pill pieces.
After magnetizing the inner portion of the pill with a neodymium magnet Jason could get the pieces of Doloft to rock back and forth and move toward the magnet without touching them.
Just as he was about to start testing the Adilify, somebody knocked at his door. Jason swept the evidence to a corner of the closet and rose. “Yes,” he said.
His father opened the door and asked, “What are you doing?”
The sight of his father at the door frightened him. “I was organizing my closet.”
“Well, I need you to clean the kitchen for your mother before she gets home.”
“Okay.”
After he finished cleaning the kitchen, Jason tested the Adilify. It was less magnetizable than the Doloft, but he could still get smaller pieces to conduct when holding a magnet up to an inner portion with a smoothly cut surface.
After about a week without the medications, Jason noticed that the acne was leaving. This made him even more adamant about refusing to take them.
At his next appointment with Dr. Newland, she asked, “Have you done anything interesting lately?”
“I've been experimenting with magnetism.”
A strange smirk came across her features and her voice had a comical edge to it as she said, “We've got a magnet collar in the other room.” She raised her hands upward in an expressive gesture as she said, “You can feel the magnet all the way up to the top of your head.” Dr. Newland's body clicked with a slight spasm and the smirk and the comical tone disappeared. “We're about out of time. Do you need a prescription?”
“Yes, I do.”
Jason decided he wasn't going to tell Dr. Newland about the medications conducting magnetism. He left her office feeling disturbed. Her reference to a magnet collar made him think of a small corner room in the lobby.
There was a woman, who was very likely a trans-sexual, standing just down the hall for no apparent reason. She made a slight movement and then she stopped and stared at him. It was the first time he'd ever seen someone standing in that hallway after an appointment. When he entered the lobby, he turned to look at the room in question. It was a small square room with glass windows that always had the blinds and the door closed shut. This time the door was open. He shivered when he saw the chair and a torus shaped device on a table next to it. His pulse raced as he left the lobby and went downstairs to meet his mother. The idea of going back to that psychiatrist filled him with dread.
Jason lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, while the voices caused him insomnia as usual. A helicopter approached the house. The roaring of its rotor grew very loud as it passed overhead at a low altitude. Suddenly Jason received a massive shock to his head, which caused his entire body to convulse. The helicopter wasn't just passing by. It was circling. Over and over again he suffered electromagnetic shocks from near the center of his brain. It felt as if electric currents were being passed through a solid metal shell in his brain. After about a minute of repeated shocks, the helicopter flew away, leaving Jason in a stupefied daze.
The alien presence spread over his brain with the premonition of future helicopters passing over head and sending shocks, whenever the government wanted them sent. “You need to give up,” said a shrill pixy.
“I just want to die,” added another shrill pixy, weighing down Jason's brain beneath painful fee
lings of hopelessness.
During a dream that night Jason found himself in the passenger side of a car staring at a girl's gymnastics center. The body he was in just sat there staring. Then an older creepy looking police officer entered his view, standing just outside of the car. The police officer stared at Jason, sending terror throughout his entire body until he awakened, saying, “I just wanna die.”
The phrase wasn't his. Something else had spoken it through him. He immediately thought of the voices, which were harassing him.
A shock jolted Jason's brain. “YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO THINK THAT WAY ABOUT THAT! THAT'S YOU! NOW YOU DO WHAT I ORDER YOU TO DO! GO TAKE THE MEDS!”
Jason left into the bathroom to continue with his morning routine.
“YOU HEAR ME?!? You know who I am? I'm that police officer you saw in the dream and I'm here to take charge.”
Jason did his best to ignore the voice, but the shocks and the yelling impeded his ability to function.
In the afternoon Jason saw a note from his mother posted to the front door of his bedroom. His stomach growled with nauseating anxiousness as he read her words. She knew he wasn't taking his medications and she required his presence in the living room later that evening. Jason remembered the pills he'd left on the floor of his closet. He swiped the note from the door and rushed into his bedroom, swearing beneath his breath. The pills were no longer in the closet.
“God damn it!” exclaimed Jason. “That snooping bitch!”
Jason grabbed his backpack and put some clean clothes into it. He searched a hiding place for his remaining drug supply and the medications he'd been concealing as evidence and he put what he found into an inner sleeve of the back pack.
For a moment, he scanned the room, feeling light headed and disoriented. Then he set his eyes on the Enochian encyclopedia, remembering that sensation he'd gotten in his head and the strange behavior of others around him. He tucked the book in among his clothes.
“A lot of good that did,” said a shrill pixy.
“Why don't you tell your psychiatrist what you think that book did?”
“You aren't allowed to leave,” said the pixy from the dream. “You need to fess up to your mistake.”
Jason strapped on his backpack and climbed out the window.