Bathroom Monologue: Possible Origins For Him. 9.

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“Why are you this way?”

I wake up and can’t move. My forearms catch on something. I try to roll over, and that’s when I notice the straps. Leather restraints around my wrists and ankles, across my knees, chest and forehead.

I’m in a small room, empty. Three walls are white, one with a little window. The fourth wall is all Plexiglas. On the other side are three people in suits and white coats. One is a blonde, two are brunettes. The brunettes are men – that’s what you call a guy with brown hair, right? A brunette? A bruno?

“Why are you this way?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say. “Can you please come loosen this? I can’t feel my legs.”

They look at their palm pilots and clipboards. They look nervous, like I’ll bite them through the glass.

“How did you access the air conditioning system?”

“Where did you find that many amphetamines?”

“Why did you strangle that orderly to death with a rubber chicken?”

I don’t know what they’re talking about and they won’t listen. My legs tingle. I’m thirsty. There isn’t even a mirror – I don’t remember what I look like. I ask who I am and seconds later they shuffle away. They leave together, like just one of them doesn’t dare stand outside my cell on his own.

Across from my cell is another with a Plexiglas wall. Its inhabitant is a big man. Half of his face is scabs, like he’d laid down on a hot stove and stayed there. I don’t know if that’s true. He tears a button from his cot and keeps flipping it. His bad eye, the one without a lid, stares at me. He’s not restrained. I am. What did I do?

Security walks by often. There’s a camera with a steady red light in one of the corners of my ceiling. It’s not enough. At least one guy comes by ten times that day. Nine times to look. One time he has a newspaper. He presses the front page against my glass. The headline reads: “STATE SEEKS DEATH PENALTY AGAINST INSANE MAN.”

I can’t make out the photo. It looks like a cartoon face. The guard speaks through the glass to me.

“I hope they get you, you sick fuck.”

Night falls through my little window. I feel like I’m not alone and don’t realize for a while that I’m right. There’s a man in a black mask glaring through the pane. We’re however many stories up and he somehow got there. I call for help and nobody comes. I try to smile, to put on an unaggressive face, and he bares his teeth at me. If he could get through the glass I think he’d strangle me.

I blink and he’s gone.

I can’t get up to see if he was really there, and the people who work here won’t help me. It doesn’t matter what I yell. My fellow inmate, the scarred man, wakes up and stares at me with that eye. He calls me a clown and tells me to shut up or he’ll kill me. That’s the only response I get in this world.

Let’s say I’m not an amnesiac. That I just want to stop. To put down my knives and joy buzzers. But everything else is true: the shrinks are terrified of me, the law wishes I was dead, and there are masked faces following me around in the night. What are the choices? Play dead, or be “this way.”