Dmitri finds himself on a deep south farmhouse tour. He’s not sure of how events have contrived to bring him there. The last thing he remembers is packing a bag, he was folding clothes and packing them, though he’d be at a loss to say where he was originally going or why. Outside the heat is murderous. While walking down a wide hall behind an oblivious but garrulous guide, Dmitri’s distracted by the virtuosity inherent in the hand that made a certain crown moulding, stops to admire it, fails to take his meds as he should every day at this time, and has an episode. He denounces Stalin, Jefferson Davis, and the mother of Jefferson Davis. He is incoherent and has to be restrained. In the ambulance he wets himself. Following a brief chat with a state psychiatrist, he receives a new prescription and is discharged. Once outside, he throws away the prescription, which the lady at the discharge desk pronounced per-skip-shin, and begins a slow walk to nowhere.
Dmitri is now at a Bob Seger show. Again with the uncertainty of being present at this kind of spectacle, but fuck it, it’s Seger, a musician of the people much like himself. After a few of the hits, he panics and flees the arena, perhaps due to the hostile nature of certain members of the Bullet Club, some of whom had arrived in a busted maroon Blazer with a vanity plate that read NITEMOVZ and were more than a little pushy. He’s picked up rambling in the parking lot and is admitted for the second time during his vacation. Being a generally nonviolent, humanity-loving kind of person, he’s released on a promise to stick with his regimen.
Following an interval of unknown measure, Dmitri awakes to the shock of cold water all around him. He’s chained himself to his rental bicycle and has ridden it into the river. As the bicycle’s frame is of an intermediate strength aluminum alloy, it doesn’t really sink the way a desperate type like Dmitri hopes it would sink. He flails among the seethe and gleam of passing ships that stalk through like bright white skyscrapers. He finds his way out, bicycle in tow, and collapses on the shoal.
He hasn’t been the same since his official denunciation, which sort of marked the beginning of this vacation, but he wants you to know that he’s here voluntarily, that he wasn’t dragged here by the authorities, he walked in here after drying off and losing the bicycle.
Here is a double-wide that the state calls an extension of the hospital. An annex of misery and Xanax.
After a few hours he’s familiar with his surroundings. He grabs a handful of riffled and soiled magazines from a small table and shuffles back to the bed, where he applies various fragrance samples to his wrists. He’s pissed because he doesn’t have his composition book nor his teddybear. “I’m righteously indignant and I deserve to be,” he says, rubbing a magazine on his arm.
Arms akimbo now, hands groping the flesh around his hips, muttering: “Doesn’t matter anymore, you made a horrible mistake. I made a mistake before I even knew what it was, okay? Rice-a-roni. That’s what was left of her leaving. I’m back. I have a son. All I know right now is, Al? I would certainly hope so. Get the fuck out of here. One two three really doesn’t work. Black rainbow phoenix.” He stops abruptly as his meandering jowls settle on a rice krispie treat.
He pads over to the sink and picks up a can of deodorant and begins to spray his underarms, a crystal mist clouding around him, the scent meant to approximate a fine shore breeze, aerosol misting through his spunlace shirt and clouding around him so that he appears to be a figure removed from some faraway moor, the can whistling until it’s empty and the entire room smells like a chemist’s idea of sunset on the beach. He sits on the bed.
“Topamax is what had me in the bed when I couldn’t get out the bed. I don’t know how to prove I’m not crazy. I been taking the goddamn shit they been giving me. I wasn’t acting manic, I was proving a point with the animal police. I’m even off food stamps, I’m copping food stamps from Sergei. I should go to film school. I know how to operate that equipment, I did that shit in high school. I happen to be very talented at film production. In the past two and a half years I can count on one hand the days I haven’t been locked up, creatively speaking. I can blame that on Andrei and on my denunciation. He started playing with cocaine. Feels like I got the whole world against me. But the world’s against everybody. It’s up to me to make it better for myself.”
The doctor nods rhythmically and turns up his hearing aid. “You’ll have to speak up, Dmitri. I didn’t get any of that. Did you mention a history of cocaine abuse, or something about when you first realized that you were Jesus Christ?”
The deaf doctor in a multicolor striped lamé shirt, black slacks and shoes, and beechwood cane whose handle is a sterling silver clenched fist and whose ferrule holds a needle containing an exquisite cocktail, a B-52, a mixture of Haldol, Ativan, and Benadryl intended for the rowdier customers. Dr. Halberd has only used this once, on a customer who had a history of practicing martial arts.
Dmitri jumps to his feet and says, “You don’t know a thing about me, and although I’m willing to play along, it seems you did not read the advance literature about me, you who compulsively laugh when you don’t understand, which makes me think there’s something now a little delusional about this whole thing, like when my holiday place setting is next to a relative my family is ashamed of. The whole time I’m glad that my blood is different, is the iron-rich coagulate I know it to be.”
Meanwhile Dr. Halberd is still nodding like a drinking bird, worrying a spot on the heel of the silver fist, drifting, and begins to analyze his own problems. He wonders if he’s fucked up anybody’s life, if he’s the one somebody blames their moods on, their anhedonic routines, their mistrust of strangers, their pessimism regarding romance. I don’t think I’ve fucked anyone up like that, but it’d be a sort of perverse honor if I did, he reasons to himself. Maybe a customer or a few of the nurses. He thinks about it and taps his cane twice on the floor, says, “Good, all very good, we’re just going to keep you here and monitor your progress. There’s rice krispie treats on the table.”
Dmitri, defeated, sinks back onto the bed and watches Dr. Halberd’s image recede from the room in the small mirror above the sink. He decides that he can safely say this is the worst vacation ever. Hands laced behind his head, he looks out the window at a distant office tower and hears a voice in his head, it’s Bob Seger’s voice, whispering:
“If I ever get out of here, I’m going to Katmandu.”
This piece originally appeared in Neutrons/Protons in 2014.