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Jack turns over and squeezes his eyes shut.
Opening them means the harsh, cold, light of reality is going to slam into him. Opening them means being met with an onslaught of enough religious paraphernalia to open a dedicated museum and just the right shade of pink to make him gag. The dull, hollow pounding behind his eyes starts up again. He feels tears prick against his eyelids and wills his brain to make them stop. They don’t, and his brain only fuels the disgust he feels towards himself. He wants to step out of his skin. Nausea settles in a deep pit at the bottom of his stomach. He wonders if things will ever be okay again.
You’ve been bad, Jack.
Hell isn’t real, of course, but he wonders if he will end up there all the same. Though, at the point he’s reached, his life is as miserable as any Hell could be. There’s some deeply hidden, sick reassurance in that. Relief floods his system, momentarily replacing exhaustion and residual panic with a pleasant high.
One Hail Mary, two Lord’s Prayers and God will forgive you for being such a bad boy.
Pulse is quickening. The pounding in his head roars and crashing waves of ambient noise swish in his ears as he tries to take a deep breath. It’s a gasp, instead, light and airy and so soft that he feels the nausea crawling further up his throat. Don’t be sick. Don’t be sick. Consider the linens, he tells himself. His dead mother’s linens that probably haven’t been washed since before she died. Linens and lace duvet covers that smell disgustingly sweet, covered in the cloying, flowery, sickening perfume that Jack thinks all women must go out and purchase as soon as they turn 60. They smell like her. He hates it. It makes his nose run and his lungs seize up and a cold wave of panic crawl up his spine. But he can’t bring himself to wash them, can barely bring himself to get out of bed and go to work, or shower, or eat, or wear anything other than sweatpants and old, scratchy cardigans.
The sheets are an uncomfortable reminder of his mistakes. Countless fuck-ups throughout his life—being back in Toledo is just the most recent one.
You’ve been bad.
Miles would have known how to handle this. To handle him. As if he needs to be handled, like he’s some sort of invalid or basket case that can’t take care of himself.
He rolls over again.
Miles was good. How was he so good? How were the kids so good?
What went wrong in his head that he can’t be good anymore?
He can’t think of what did, what caused the downward spiral into the dark pit of his current living—he can barely call it that—situation.
Sometimes he thinks he died with his mother. That when she went, so went the last shred of humanity he had left. Is it macabre? Dramatic? Maybe. But it doesn’t change the way he feels.
Something tugs at the outskirts of his mind, and the urge to leave himself is back, even if it means clawing his way out. Wraps his arms tightly around himself, gripping his elbows tightly. Presses his just slightly overgrown nails into the skin, not hard enough to draw blood, but with enough pressure to leave small, dark half-moons imprinted.
The whirring of the outdated AC system is deafening. Something about the constant hum is pushing a scream up his throat, and his hands fly from his sides to his mouth just in time to stifle the strangled noise.
Once he starts screaming, he can’t stop. He feels like the sounds aren’t his own, the voice isn’t his own. He’s just a witness. Like he’s privy to someone else’s suffering.
His throat is raw.
Unfortunately, his brain and his mouth seem disconnected, and no matter how hard he wills himself to stop, to shut up, he can’t stop the cries from tearing out of his chest.
The burning in his eyes becomes unbearable and blinks quickly to stop the irritation. He feels the nearly imperceptible tug of his eyelashes as they untangle from each other, heavy and wet. His whole face feels wet.
The second he realizes his face is dripping with tears, the screams die in his throat, breaking down into smaller, more choked noises as he really starts to cry. Instinctively, his hands reach for his hair, to grasp and yank. But he can do damage there. Instead, he forces his arms back into position, encircling himself and rocking back and forth ever so slightly.
The cardigans will hide any irritated marks on his forearms from prying eyes.
He head still feels foggy. He’s sobbing, he can tell. Beneath the layer of emptiness he can feel the roiling guilt, the misery, the pain. His tight chest and shivering body. The way that the convulsive cries tear through him, leaving him breathless and lightheaded.
But even if he tries to focus on that pain, ground himself in this moment, he can’t seem to dispel the fog.
He takes a huge breath, shuddering through it embarrassingly slow. Pulling himself into a sitting position, still trembling, he opens his eyes. He feels high.
If somebody told him he wasn’t actually here, that his brain was being held in some convoluted government laboratory, and that this was all just a computer experiment, he might even believe them.
The world feels out of focus.
Robotically, he forces a hand to the side table, feeling around before grabbing a small mint in a plastic wrapper. He watches his fingers unwrap the chemical-filled candy and place it in his mouth like he would watch a movie. It sticks to his tongue, rough and sticky with dehydration, for a second before the saliva starts flowing again.
He can’t remember the last time he ate anything at all, let alone a full meal. Like everything else, hunger is masked by a layer of unfeeling indifference. Even when he can feel the familiar, gnawing pain growing sharper, it feels so distant that he has no motivation to do anything about it. Usually, the discomfort passes after an hour or so, and he’s able to ignore his body’s cues once again.
Jack, bad boys need to be punished.
He’s bad. He doesn’t deserve to be happy. Miles lost his job because of him. The kids are missing out on an education that could further their future because of him. His mother died alone because of him.
Guilt disguised as bile crawls up his throat and he scrambles out of bed in what feels like slow motion. His knees hit the floor in front of the toilet as he gags, spits out the half-dissolved mint and tries to control his breathing.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, to nobody in particular. The way that his voice crackles is raw and rough, explodes through the silence, cuts momentarily through the haze in his brain.
He doesn’t feel any different. The phrase seems as empty as him. Did saying it mean anything at all? Was he worth anything at all? What did he have to show for himself? A low-paying job at a subpar public high school in Toledo, Ohio. An apartment that belonged to his dead mother. A feud with the only person who
ever really cared about him. A class of students that he was letting down every second he spent in the classroom.
The numbness spreads back into his head. He’s nothing, he thinks. Nothing at all. Being worthless is worse than being bad. But he’s both. The thought sends him back over the toilet bowl, gagging pathetically. There isn’t even anything to bring up, but he can’t stop the heaving. He doesn’t feel human, feels deeply disconnected with his body. Feels like his head is floating, turbulent and far away. He feels like a robot, a ghost, a plane on autopilot. He feels so wrong, like something in him is switched off. This can’t be normal.
Prickly, hot anxiety burns in his chest as his considers the possibility of living the rest of his life like this.
He reaches up weakly to flush the toilet, closes the lid and curls up on the cold tile lining the floor of his dead mother’s bathroom. Shutting his eyes, he feels the swishing in his ears again. He swallows, pulls down the sleeves of his cardigan to cover his arms, and tries to take deep breaths.
Is feeling nothing worse than feeling miserable?
He isn’t sure.
The emptiness is horrible in its own right. Nothing feels real anymore. He can barely remember what he did yesterday, and last week seems like another lifetime. Time means nothing and everything. Beneath it all he just feels guilty. He’s wasting away, a shadow of who he used to be. Mourning the loss of the old Jack, the Jack he can never be again. Mourning the years willfully lost with his mother.
His apologies would fall on deaf ears.
The watch on his wrist suddenly feels tight and unbearable. He glances down at it.
7:49 a.m.
Enough time to lay here for a little while longer. The imminent threat of having to face another day presses against his shield of emptiness. He doesn’t have enough in his head to make up a plan that he can put the students up to today. Maybe he’ll give up entirely and try to teach them something. He doubts it though, he isn’t sure he can even stand up long enough to get to the classroom. To get to the car. To get to the shower.
He’s already wearing his daily uniform—old sweatpants, gray cardigan.
They
don’t really fit. He’s lost weight, he knows. Notices in the harsh planes
and angles of his cheeks, the way his clothes swallow him up. He’s just so
tired.
His body
doesn’t feel
like it fits, either. It’s all off-balance. His limbs are so heavy. Everything takes so much effort.
He scrubs a hand over his face. Pushes to stand.
Sees himself run a toothbrush haphazardly over his teeth. Pull on his shoes, built for comfort rather than style. Shrug on his coat, ignoring how it hangs loose around his slim shoulders.
Should he be driving? He’s not sure, but he’s behind the wheel, then he’s in the parking lot, then he’s walking.
Jack’s body is on autopilot as he mechanically turns the knob and stalks into the classroom. Pastes a manic half-smile on his face. They don’t need to see him, he thinks. Even though they will, they always do.
“Start to shut up, everyone.”