Down

The holding room looked like a small dirty locker room without lockers. A long thin man with whiskers was twisted on a cot. There was no place for my friend. He was standing with his back to a thick wall with a high window, looking up and over his shoulder as if half-heartedly trying to believe in the sky and wondering why he called 911, why he didn’t know if he said he was concerned about hurting himself they could keep him in holding, arguably, forever. The twisted man spit and without sitting up reached to the floor for a cigarette, pushing aside brown-stained underwear. There were no matches, and, seeming to understand that, he licked the side of the cigarette and closed his eyes with some satisfaction. The room was unnaturally bright, as if the walls were yellow-glow painted, and the florescent lights hurt my friend's eyes; they had been on all night, and now the light seemed permanently on the inside of his lids. The effects of his new anti-depressant pill were wearing off, he felt more like himself, a little down but not suicidal; he’d rather hurt someone else now, the placid-faced aide looking in the glass on the door as if daring him and the twisted man to try something against the rules of the psych center. My friend scratched at his beard and wondered if it made him look crazy. It occurred to him that the aide wouldn’t think it was funny if he asked for a razor; there was no one here with a sense of irony. Irony, he thought, was most likely on their list of classic symptoms of self-destruction, along with poetry, high cholesterol, chopping wood, asking questions, opening your eyes too wide and shutting them too tight.