Michael’s shivering himself to pieces on the floor of some God-for-fucking-saken motel room in western Montana and wondering if this is how he dies. He’s cold on the outside and the inside, but he’s sweating. He would get up and do something about it, but he’s so tired it’s like there’s lead in his veins and weights tied to all his joints. Going to sleep is too much work but staying awake is painful.
He’s not even sad anymore, just sick. It’s like the world around him has finally slowed down enough to be tolerable. Or maybe he’s the one who’s sluggish. Earlier, before he locked himself in here, Gabriel asked him why he was talking so slow. It had taken Michael years of time and entirely too much energy to turn his head and look at him, and talking had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.
Every change grated at him. The movements of objects outside his body, beyond his control, were draining. Maybe he was becoming one with the universe. He’d heard of people like that, people who melted away until there was nothing left of them but everything, or there was nothing left of everything but them. Michael gets things backwards sometimes. Because he’s stupid. And slow, now, and so weak he swears he can feel his muscles atrophying.
It’s like those nightmares where you’re being chased, but you can’t work up the strength to stand up. Nothing you do is enough, and something is closing in on you.
Michael opens his eyes. He opens his eyes. He opens his eyes.
He wakes up on the floor of the bathroom. He wasn’t asleep, but he was… drifting. Away somewhere where all of this didn’t exist to bother him. He’s more tired than before, but he’s been getting more tired every day since he was six. He’s sixteen now. This has to stop some time, part of him thinks. No, the other part says. Sometimes, terrible things happen to people, and if they happen soon enough and often enough, they don’t even happen to good people. Just to people people, people like Michael.
He can move now, though, which is nice. He sits up and realizes he brought a bottle of Gatorade in here for some reason, which is nice. He drinks some of it, but the aftertaste is like vomit and he spits into the toilet. Staring into the white porcelain depths of the toilet bowl, he realizes he’s left the kids out there in the motel room all alone for (he checks his phone) four and a half hours. Lucifer is eleven, now, though, and an eleven year old should be well-equipped to take care of a nine year old and an eight year old. Right?
A memory comes unbidden into his mind of the time when he was ten years old and the state of Nebraska made his father surrender him for “psychological evaluation and placement.” He’d been in the emergency room and he’d been scared and confused and hurting and tired and he’d thrown up on a nurse’s shoes and hugged her and she’d said she had to make some calls.
He’d gone to see a psychiatrist who, looking back, must have been somehow affiliated with CPS. He must have forgotten how they’d gotten out of that one, but he didn’t forget what she’d said to him, or to the agent assigned to his case.
He hadn’t told her much, because what was he even supposed to say, but she must have heard enough, because she told him she was “very concerned for your future and the future of your younger siblings,” and “I always want you to feel like you have an adult you can go to for help.” Ha. Michael was the adult people went to for help. He was eighteen in three states and nineteen in seven, after all. She’d also said to the agent, when she thought Michael was asleep on the couch, “He displays symptoms of severe psychological distress, the kind we won’t be able to properly diagnose or treat until at least seventeen or eighteen.”
Now, he was sixteen and he knew the phrase “catatonic depression” from the medical journal he’d found in a library in California, and he knew that losing chunks of time and feeling exhausted and hopeless and out of control were symptoms of “severe psychological distress.” He was also wondering what the long-term repercussions of these catatonic episodes were going to be. He hoped they’d go away, of course.
Didn’t he?
After all, what’s to like about floating motionlessly in the abyss of your own mind, completely removed from any concept of pain or bliss or emotional turmoil? Nothing. Nothing at all.