Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,86
on the body. Take, for example, the term self-medication. With drugs and alcohol, people self-medicate to live in a state of euphoria, abusing the chemicals that force endorphins and serotonin to the brain. However, we aren’t supposed to be in this mental state all the time. And when the high is over, we come down and crash. This is why withdrawal plays a huge part in addicts never getting clean—they are running from the problems in their lives that make them sad or depressed. They are finding solace in substances. But the truth is, if they just dealt with their issues in the first place, then they wouldn’t need to self-medicate. Now, this is more applicable to anxiety and depression. When we get into more severe mental health issues such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, this is where doctors’ prescriptions really can help a patient. Due to my paranoia and disgust for ingesting pills, I never took the ones I should have. That not only kept Frank alive, but fueled the delusion I was living in.
How do you kill a man who only exists in your head? How do you kill a chemical deficiency in the brain?
Hundreds of Xanax, lithium, Seroquel, Lexapro, and Risperdal hit the floor. They bounced like Skittles some child dropped by mistake. All the afternoons at Mayberry, when Ann would hand me my pills, all those days, came pouring out onto the floor. And with that, in the blink of an eye, everything went from slow-motion to real time.
“Oh, shit!” Frank yelled as he began to slip, doing everything he could to catch his balance. The full force of the left side of his forehead smacked against the ground, making a noise I could only describe as slamming a raw piece of steak on a marble floor.
As he rolled over, pieces of his skull were exposed, crumbling into his mouth. I could see a small amount of brain matter coming out of his head. Then suddenly . . .
I was where he lay. I saw what he saw, I felt what he felt. Fading, he backed himself up against the shelf, propping his back against it like a pillow. Seeing from his eyes, from his point of view, I felt myself separating from his body. I began to stand, and as I did, I felt myself split in two.
Much like the night in my apartment, when I made Frank real to finish my book by any means necessary, I was splitting in two.
As I rose to my feet, I felt numb. I turned around and there was Frank on the floor. Gasping for air.
How do you kill a man who doesn’t exist?
It was the pills. The same pills I’d been stowing away in my pocket for the last two years. The pills that were meant to rid my brain of the chemical imbalance did just that, only from the outside. When Frank slipped and hit his head, I slipped and hit my head. The fall ended in extreme blunt trauma. It was such an enormous blow that the chemicals in my brain balanced out in real time. My whole perspective shifted. My vision crackled, shook, trembled. It then tunneled and finally locked into focus. I was then lifted up from out of my body. From high above I peered down onto my dying self. Suspended in time. At that moment, out of my body, I felt like I could see everything. Not just the entire store below me, but my entire life. The past, the present, the future. I felt embraced by a kind of tranquil serenity. Was this what death felt like? As soon as the moment came, it went, and I was shot back into my corporeal self. My entire frame was reanimated. I groggily lifted my head from the ground. I felt sublime, lucid, crystal clear. I felt terrified and torn. Happy and ecstatic. All at once.
A calm washed over me like I’d never felt before. A calm that made me feel whole again.
The pills did just what they were supposed to. Just not how they were supposed to.
Flicking the lid of the Zippo, I struck the wick to light a cigarette to no avail. “Flynn, you were doing so well,” Frank said, bubbles forming from the blood covering his lips, popping as he spoke. He began to evanesce, flickering in and out of sight.
“Mmmm-hmmm,” I muttered as I struck it again, this time igniting a cherry at the end of the cigarette.