Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“See?” Said Brandon. “He knows!”

For my cross-examination, I stood up and walked over to Kenny’s bed. I moved Brandon out of the way, turned off the TV, and bent my knees to face Kenny eye-to-eye.

“Kenny,” I asked, “Tell Brandon that cows can fly.”

“Cows can fly.”

I turned the TV back on and returned to the chair beside Brandon’s bed. “I wouldn’t count on what this guy says if I were you,” I said. “He’s not exactly the world’s most reliable witness.”

Lips pursed, Brandon groaned in frustration just like Allie groaned when Abby copped an attitude about her math homework and pretended she didn’t understand it. He came over and sat on the edge of his bed, head held in both hands. He groaned again. “Sucks,” he said. “Being retarded sucks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Can’t talk right. Can’t…” He straightened his spine and looked up at the ceiling as if asking God to give him the right word.

“ Explain ,” he said at last.

I laced my hands across my stomach.

“This my nightmare,” he said. “Not real.”

“That’s interesting, Brandon, because it’s my reality and I feel very, very real right now. I believe if you really examine this logically, you’re going to see a fundamental impossibility…”

“You real,” Brandon said, stabbing at me with his right index finger. “Nightmare for you, too.”

I closed my mouth and took a ki breath through my nose.

“I help you,” he said. “Help you get out.”

“Okay, enlighten me. Tell me how to get out of this nightmare.”

“Picture where you want be,” he said, tapping his oblong skull. “And go there.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “I just imagine it and I can punch out of here?”

He smiled, nodding excitedly. “Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless!”

I looked over his shoulder. There, above the television, hung another of the same motivational posters I saw in the lounge. The photo centered on the black background showed what appeared to be a man in a helmet and rock climbing gear scaling the face of a cliff. He had no legs. I squinted at the caption.

Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless .

No wonder Brandon persisted in delusional thinking. These people spent all day surrounded by absolute bullshit.

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw the clock on the wall and realized I had screwed around here for over an hour. What would have been a billable hour, now lost forever.

“I need to go back,” I said. “We’ll have to continue this later.”

Brandon nodded.

“Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless,” he said.

“Right. Bye, Brandon. Bye, Kenny.”

“Bye,” Brandon said, still smiling.

Kenny didn’t say anything. That didn’t surprise me.

But then he followed me, and that did surprise me. Briefcase in hand, I walked down the hall outside Brandon’s room and waved goodbye to a black woman on a computer on my way past the nurse’s station. When I reached the door to the lobby, I of course couldn’t get the door open—this was the lockdown hall—so I turned to ask the nurse to buzz me out.

And there was Kenny, right on my ass. Little head bobbing up and down in agreement with every word that had ever been said in human history.

“Him go away,” Kenny said. “Him disappear.”

I blinked. “No, Kenny,” I said. “He doesn’t.”

“Him disappear. Him go poof ! Him come back in morning. Scary. ”

He stood so close to me, I could smell the remains of lunch on his breath. Something with a lot of garlic. I tried to back away, but the door only let me go so far.

“You go poof too?”

“No,” I said. Suddenly, my mouth turned dry; when I swallowed, it was like choking on a tumbleweed. “I’m stuck here.”

“Him disappear. Him go poof !”

“That’s… uh… that’s great, man.”

“Kenny!” The woman at the computer called out. “Don’t you go around bothering people!”

Kenny grinned. I noticed then that he was missing about half his teeth. He turned around and hobbled back in the direction he’d come.

The door buzzed and I let myself out like the place was about to blow. And when I got to my car, I realized my hands were shaking.

Another dream. I knew this because I remembered taking an Ambien to help me get to sleep and lying down in my bed, but in my next conscious thought, I was in my basement. I couldn’t move. But I could see. And I could hear.

Flesh smacking flesh. Sick, stomach-twisting grunts. The rhythmic creak of the pool table groaning against itself at its joints.

A very, very, familiar woman’s voice, crying over and over again:

“Please don’t hurt my baby.”

There was someone

Abby

crying to my right, but I didn’t look there. I couldn’t look there, wouldn’t look there—because my eyes were transfixed on the man raping my wife on the pool table. I could see his calves, his legs, his hairy butt cheeks. The back of his head.

Bald.

“Say it,” he said breathlessly over the satanic percussion of hips slapping against buttocks and the backs of legs. “Say it!”

Head hung low over the green velvet, she didn’t say anything, and when she didn’t he thrust harder. She cried out in pain, a sound as sharp and thin as a razor blade yet somehow managing to concentrate all the agony, rage and shame of the moment on its filed edge. When he grunted again, his voice was barely human.

“Say it!”

“Kevin!” She screamed.

“Say it, bitch!”

“Kevin!”

And in that moment I jolted awake. A world away from the Hell of that basement, I opened my eyes first to nothingness, then to the lumps and shadows of the furniture in my master bedroom.

“Kevin, wake up!”

Allie’s hand on my shoulder. Not the green velvet covering of the pool table—my fish belly skin. My cold skin, cold even though my forehead ran with sweat. I shook my head and wiped my face with the edge of the sheet.

I gasped.

“Lay back down. Come on. It’s okay.”

And I did. I laid down and buried my face in her chest, and I stayed that way as my heart rate slowly returned to normal and the rest of my body woke up from the nightmare. Only then did I talk.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Bad dream.”

“I guess so.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Not really.”

Silence ensued. A click sounded from the thermostat in the hallway and brought the furnace to life to fill it.

The Bald Man. The Bald Man had been raping Allie in my dream.

Are you sure it’s a dream? Asked Dr. Koenig.

“You were getting raped again,” I said. “And all I could do was watch.”

She lay quiet for a moment. She ran the fingers of her left hand through my hair and let them stop at the back of my head. Her hand on my skull was gentle and comforting. The mindless terror of my dream withdrew towards the outer edges of the bedroom.

“I suppose it makes sense,” she said.

“What does?”

“Dreams like that. It’s your brain’s way of training itself to deal with the what ifs . An evolutionary was of preparing yourself to deal with all contingencies. That’s’ what nightmares are. Training sessions.”

“But this is ridiculous,” I said. “I mean, it’s done ! We won. Why do I have to keep… what… training for it?”

“Simple psychology,” she murmured.

I fell silent. I thought for a moment, debated keeping my next thought to myself, then decided against it.

“What if it’s not?” I asked.