Read Against Medical Advice Online
Authors: James Patterson
Against Medical Advice (13 page)
Rock Bottom
I TAKE ANOTHER MOUTHFUL OF VODKA and feel a warm wave spreading through my body. The serenity that liquor brings is better than any medicine I’ve ever taken and is the only way I get relief from my restless body. I’m not worried about the consequences of liquor anymore. I know they can’t be any worse than the consequences I experience every day without it.
Lying on the basement couch, I think about where I’ve ended up. My junior year of high school continues to be more of a disaster than the end of my sophomore year. I’m not going to school much because I’m unable to sit still or concentrate on what my teachers are saying. My obsessive need for nicotine makes it worse. Noises are constantly coming out of my mouth that no one can deal with. My friends call only when they want something, and my compulsions are making me hurt myself again. I have scars and bruises everywhere.
Tonight I need to feel better any way I can, and I’m finally drifting off into a deep, drunken sleep.
Somewhere around three or four in the morning, I’m aware of having a hard time breathing. I start coughing but not enough to wake up completely. When the coughing becomes almost continuous, I can feel my lungs burning, which eventually forces me out of my stupor.
My eyes open to a room thick with a new and unusual haze. When I look for the source, I see smoke coming from the couch cushion beneath me. Maybe the entire couch. There’s a glowing red circle two feet in diameter that slowly spreads as I watch. The edge of the fire is only an inch from my arm. In the middle of the circle are the charred remains of a cigarette filter that had dropped away from my mouth when I fell asleep.
I’m setting the whole house on fire!
I LEAP OFF THE BURNING COUCH, afraid that at any second the whole thing will burst into flames and set fire to the walls of our house. My mind fills with horrifying images. The fire will become an inferno that will break through the ceiling and blaze up the first-floor stairs. My sister will be asleep in her room when the smoke and flames pour in too fast, and she will be unable to get up and run. The fire will then rip across the hall to my parents’ room.
The instinct to scream catches in my throat. I don’t want my family to find out what I’ve done. There has to be a way to stop this disaster myself.
I don’t know what to do, though. I should still be drunk, but I’m stone-cold sober and totally aware of what’s happening.
In a moment the first wave of terror subsides, and I run across the room to where the smoke is thinner. I take a deep breath and look back at the couch. The fire hasn’t spread yet, but any breeze will make it burst into a blaze I’d never be able to put out.
Seconds, only seconds.
I race back and rip the cushions from the couch. The fire has burrowed deep inside, to the couch’s inner padding. There’s no chance of putting it out by beating the cushions.
I’m coughing so hard that I can barely breathe. I’m also scared out of my mind.
I look around the room for another answer and spot the bottle of vodka that I’d half emptied before falling asleep. I grab it and pour what’s left onto the cushions. The fire hisses loudly but doesn’t go out. Then I realize how crazy that was.
Alcohol on a fire?
The vodka could have ignited. I was stupid and lucky.
But the liquor
is
making things worse. It’s creating a terrifying amount of dense black smoke. My eyes are burning and watering so much I can hardly see. I’m coughing and gagging.
Get the fire out of the house.
Holding the burning cushions in front of me, I make a run for the back door. The thickest part of the smoke streams back directly into my face. I’m forced to inhale it before it has time to mix with the air outside. I’m suffocating now, and I can’t see where I’m going. The room is dense with smoke and the windows are all shut.
I feel my way to the far wall and fumble for the exit. My hand finds the dead bolt, but the old door is warped. The lock won’t turn unless the door is forced back into its frame.
Finally the door bursts open, and I charge outside and hurl the smoking cushions as far as I can into the backyard.
For the first time since I woke up, clean, fresh air pours into my lungs, but somehow that makes me cough even more.
When I can breathe again, I go back into the room to check for more fire. The smoke makes the search impossible, so I open the windows on two sides of the room. Cold air rushes in one side and sucks smoke out the other. At first I don’t know why the smoke detectors aren’t going off, but then I remember there aren’t any in the basement.
In a few minutes the room is nearly clear of smoke, and my knees feel too wobbly to hold me up. I make it back to the couch frame and collapse. My clothes, my skin, and the whole room reek of smoke. The basement has become freezing cold, but the worst is over. I hope, anyway.
There’s still no sound from upstairs. No one has awakened. They don’t have a clue how close they came to disaster, how close I came to killing everybody.
Alone in the eerily silent room, I close my eyes, not to sleep but to play back the movie that is my life, to see what is still worth saving inside of me. Amazingly somewhere I can sense hopefulness. It’s like the start of a gentle rain in a desert that’s been dry for years —
since I was almost five, for God’s sake!
There’s anger, too, but not the kind that leads to my rage attacks.
This is an anger that can be used and channeled.
The idea of fighting back comes with such urgency that I want to write it all down — so I can think about it when I wake up again.
I find a pencil and paper in the workroom and don’t finish until my muscles are cramped from sitting in the same position. As it starts to get light outside, I finally fall asleep on the remnants of the same couch that almost took away my family’s world and maybe my life.
My mother finds me in the morning, still asleep in the frozen room. The windows are wide open, the stinging smell of the burning couch still thick in the air. I’m on my back, stretched out full length. My arms are folded over my chest. Under them is a smudged yellow legal pad on which I have scrawled this letter to myself:
I was born with the worst disease.
My body wants me to suffer.
My whole life, I’ve been gasping for air.
The ground hasn’t ever been there.
I’ve been trying to fly when I can’t even breathe.
There’s been nothing to build on, not even a dream.
You probably can’t comprehend it. And I don’t blame you.
You’re only human and have only smelled the slightest micro-atom of what I breathe. My life has been the most disgusting and vile thing you could imagine. My body wants to hurt me. I can’t stop breaking myself down, physically and mentally.
I have severely damaged my teeth. Ticced so hard I’ve broken my ribs. My wrists scream with pain. My neck burns and aches.
I’m so tired, yet I still have to fight. I could explode. I want to go to war and kill bad shit.
Yet I am reminded that my life has been only that of prison and torturous pain.
My own body has betrayed me. I can’t feel safe with myself.
Right now I want to smash my head through the computer screen and explode myself with the sharp huge bang of a shrapnel bomb. Liquefy me and burn me to ash. Then dump water on my ashes and get RID of them.
My anxiety is so high I can’t even make sense of anything.
I’ve lost the world. I’ve lost the world.
I’m in myself and can’t get out.
The world’s joy makes me feel like an outcast.
I’m worn ragged, dirty, no good, hopeless, disgusting, insane.
But I am alive. I am alive.
I still have human feelings and needs.
I have dreams.
Don’t desert me any longer, common goodness. How can you? You’ve already committed the biggest sin imaginable. Taking a good-hearted, peaceful, intelligent person and making him come within a millimeter of taking his own life.
Am I insane? It would seem so. I can’t stop hurting myself.
My parents don’t know what I’ve gone through. If they did, they’d be saying every word to me as if it were their last.
I deserve the world.
And I am stronger than the worst things that happen to me.
I am not suicidal.
I will take control of my OCD.
I will fight and KILL my Tourette’s.
Rip them apart or be doomed.
I will own my own mind.
I will never give up.
Fuck you, OCD.
The war has NOW BEGUN.
And you’re already bleeding.
I will survive.
I will love life, if life will love me.
DAY 1
The temperature is fifteen below zero. Trust me on that — it could be lower by now. There’s nothing between me and the snow except my sleeping bag and a four-foot-square tarp mounted on sticks over my head.
I’m a mile up in the mountains of Wyoming, a few hundred miles northeast of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, which have just started in Salt Lake City.
It’s my first morning at Roundtop Wilderness Camp for troubled teens.
The noise of an unseen, unidentified animal nearby in the woods wakes me from an uncomfortable sleep. When I try to open my eyes, I find they’re welded shut by a crust of ice. I pry the frozen stuff away, one small particle at a time. A few pieces come off with my eyelashes embedded in them.
I’m not here because of my doctors. None of them has ever advised that I do something this unusual, or this extreme.
After discovering the dangerous fire in the basement, my parents knew they had to intervene. They eventually came up with the idea of wilderness camp after hearing about a good experience some friends of theirs had had with their son. Shocked by my own actions that night, and realizing what could happen if I went on that way, I was ready to try anything.
Even this.
They call places like these
camps,
as though they’re an outdoor adventure, like Outward Bound. Before I arrived, I actually thought this would be fun, but last night at my first campfire meeting, I found out the truth. This will
not
be fun. Maybe to
read
about but not to live through.
“Wilderness is for guys like you who have a lot of trouble making it on the outside,” the head counselor announced at the meeting.
He was around thirty, the oldest of the staff of four with our group. The others looked young enough to be in college, although I doubted they were.
“Most of you have been in trouble with the police, your families, or your schools. You’ve done violent things, used or sold drugs, stolen stuff or set fires.
“We’re here to help you fix your lives, but in the end it’s going to be you who have to do it.”
I looked around at the six other kids at the camp, most of whom were my age or younger. A few of them arrived here
escorted,
which is a nice way of saying that they were brought by law-enforcement officers because they wouldn’t come any other way. One of them arrived in handcuffs.
I’m different from the others, except for my addiction to alcohol and cigarettes. I’m not a bad kid. The closest I came to being in trouble was when I wrote that e-mail to Terry. And maybe almost burning down our house.
“The rules are simple,” the counselor went on. “You’ll be on this mountain for as long as it takes to work out your problems. No more, and no less. The time you’re here depends on your progress and your ability to work as part of a group. Some of you will be here for one cycle, others longer. That’s the deal, guys.”
I was stuck on one part of his speech:
for as long as it takes to work out your problems.
The threat that there was no telling how long I would have to be here was very frightening. Ricky, the kid sitting on the left, told me that he’d been on the mountain for three months and was doing this cycle over again.
Does that mean I could be here for months? Or a year? What’s to stop me from being here forever?
I had to fight off a sudden wave of panic. And tics, of course.
“The conditions here are very basic,” the counselor continued. “We’ve brought enough food with us to get by, and we’ll use what we find in this terrain for shelter to survive the cold. We’ll teach you how to do this. This is a year-round program, but winter is the hardest. Your bad luck. If we work as a group, we make it. If we don’t, we all suffer. Everybody got that?”
No one responded. This wasn’t like a classroom back in school. These guys were a tough, hardened bunch. Maybe encounters with the police made them that way.
The silence made me really nervous and uncomfortable. I felt as if I had to say something to break the tension. But it was obvious that this would be a mistake.
“Don’t even think of trying to get away from here,” the head guy went on. “The closest human beings are twenty miles away on a military post. They know about this program and are on the alert for anyone who shows up in their area. That doesn’t really matter because even if you got away, you’d probably never make it there in this weather. But even if you did, you wouldn’t like what happened to you next.”
This last speech erased any doubt that any of us were going to escape from this place on our own.
Another, longer silence fell over the group. Reality was setting in for everybody.
Wilderness camp.
We got it now.
“Are there any questions so far?” the counselor asked when he was done spelling out the rules.
After a long wait with no one saying anything, my urge to do something inappropriate rose to the point where it was unstoppable, and at once I found myself shouting, “Run! Run!”
My unbelievably disrespectful and rebellious command shattered the stillness of the deadly serious moment. I couldn’t believe I’d said it any more than the rest of the group could. At first, everyone stared at me, openmouthed. I didn’t know how to explain what made me do it. I wondered if the word
compulsion
meant anything to them.
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .” was all I could get out before the two junior counselors were on either side of me.
“Take off your boots, wise guy,” the bigger of the two said to me. “You’re not going anywhere.”