1 Silent treatments

1

Everything comes back in flashbacks, like a movie's trailer

It starts with the sound of the turning off a medical monitor, an envelope of sugar. The white colour that flooded all the scenes, there was white on the fingers, on the clothes, in nature, in life. 

And talking. 

There was constant talk. Which couldn’t be differentiated, people shouting, muttering lies and telling truths. It was a headache, of several scenes that I couldn’t comprehend and remember. I was drowning in the small moments, and what remained was an echo. 

The name, his name, Thaddeus.

That was the anchor in this story, he was everywhere and nowhere. The trigger for where I was standing at the moment. 

Outside.

I had been given a slapped on the back, a bag of pills and a goodbye. Without explanations or rules to follow. 

I had been standing outside for ten minutes, the doors behind me closed and with an explosion of colours in my eyes. 

I could see my parents in the car waiting; the impatient hands of my mother and the fixing of her glasses. My father with the constant checking of his watch and their discomfort of the matter. They hadn’t left the car, didn’t want any attention or to leave evidence of the events of the last year and this day. 

With my hood up and my fingers playing with a blue envelope of sugar, I headed towards them and we left. Through the back streets and the route, seven hours of travel to reach three towns away from where we left.

We entered the house in silence and lunch was with the typical repetitions of: 

"Pass me the salt, please" 

"Nice food"

And, my personal favourite 

"Bon appetit" 

From there each of us went to their corner of the house.

I stayed in my room that seemed caught in time. With the photos cut and burned, paint against the wall and dust on every part of it. 

I lay down to see the roof,  the green, red, black and brown. It was bathed in colours and I wondered if I knew. 

If I knew where I was going, of the white I still saw when I closed my eyes, the one in my clothes and on the walls. Of the colour that drowned me. 

And my hand pressed the sugar envelope harder and the name Thaddeus came back to my mind.

"He is refusing to eat again"

They were the first words I heard when I entered the whiteness of the building. My parents had left in a hurry with only a pat on the back and a kiss on the forehead. 

“How many days have passed?”

I was waiting in front of the reception, having ringed.

“Fifteen”

The nurse appeared quickly and with a smile attached to her face, with empty eyes and long fingers. 

She had a white uniform with the red of her hair being the first colour of other than white upon entering. 

By the time she let me go I only got the chance to catch the end of my previous eavesdropping: 

“If by tomorrow he continues like this, we will have to take extreme measures. I suppose we are talking about Baraviera?” 

It was followed by a yes and then they were walking away.

I had fallen asleep in the armchairs. 

It was already three in the morning and the only noise in the house was that of the refrigerator. I had a Ginsberg book resting on my chest when I woke up with a sharp pain in my back.

The movement of the arms hurt as breathing felt an effort that I did not intend to win. Hunched over and with the fear of my petrification, I felt the sticky cold in the back of my head and neck.

And I remembered the running of hurried steps, the signs on the walls, the sunken eyes and the muted laughter with the chairs that were pushed harder and faster. Trees that were almost touched, and we were so close. 

In my mouth, I had the taste of a nightmare. 

I opened all the windows on the first floor because I could not breathe. The nightmare repeated in my brain and the air did not enter my lungs. My skin pressed my muscles, organs, the air and oxygen did not reach my brain anymore. 

I didn’t feel the beat of my heart, my lips were dry and the word help was locked on my lips. I was frightened with trembling in the knees yet the cold wind of the night brought back memories of young and pure nights.

(It had been luck.)

On the third night of nightmares, uncomfortable beds and screams from my neighbours, I took a walk.

Exhausted I walked through the empty tables with the chairs occupied by three people. I went through the corridors that had no doors and for those who did, they were open doors without occupants. 

Most of the closed doors were silent and with a small window in the middle. Yet there were a few that trembled. That voices were heard behind them, with the steps of coming and going in a space too small and the creaking of an old bed.

In a moment of looking at the feet, of avoiding the Bang, Bang, Bang of a door. I got distracted and I found myself at the last door of the stairs. Three floors above where I was, and I wanted to try, wanted the cold air.

Yet in a plot twist, it gave with a single push and there it was. 

The open sky, dancing lights in the blue sea and a single lonely moon to the left of me. And it was beautiful, it was colours, it was life. 

I kept walking until I sat down, without preamble and grace. I watched the stars that shine and illuminated my eyes. The blue that woke my brain asleep in the white they had given me about three hours ago, and in watching, I saw him.

Sitting, ten steps ahead of me, back against the edge, head resting on the wall facing the stars.

"Ah, I didn't know there was someone else here”

The nights were passing by in the sea of whiteness and the constant questions. They were an echo that kept me awake.

Between three in the morning and at half-past ten of the night, regardless of the weather and schedule, the boy would be on the roof. In the same position, the only change being the closing or opening of his grey eyes. 

But by then it had already become a routine. 

There were times I tried to start a conversation. In telling the lies I heard from people and the truths of my neighbours. In explaining the death of a star and the colour blue.

There were other times where we were silent. Looking at the stars, thinking we knew the constellations and listening to the noise of the night. The cars did not pass at that time, but the bugs lived, the wind ran through the trees and the night was the salvation of every day.

There were two nights in which I didn't go, believing that I would not make a change. On a whim. 

Anger that never I came to understand, as well as wanting to prove a theory that had not been developed.

I spent sixteen hours of those days watching the movement of the shadows in my room. And two hours hidden in the sheets by the constant knocking on the door of someone who never answered.

"Why are you here?"

The voice was hoarse, broken and worn. You had to doubt when you heard it and check the movement of his lips. 

It was the sound of old age, of the hidden in his voice, there was a sadness, a despair. 

I stood stargazing by the door believing that I had imagined it until I felt his eyes on me.

"Depression, you?"

I sat down in front of him, at a distance of five steps, he kept watching me and I was looking forward to the answer. 

Knowing that my theory was wrong and that the past two nights had made a change, I was waiting to see the lips move again and listen to the breaking of a glass.

However, he shrugged and looked at the stars. Yet, I wanted, needed, to know more because he had become more than an obsession and a distraction. 

He was the boy with whom I could be in peace, that I could breathe. 

That night we stayed until the first rays of the sun until we could feel the heat entering our bones. 

And without realizing it, I had ended up accompanying him to his room. Where he looked at me, waved at me and closed the door in my face.

"What are you doing?”

I had Koi by my side.

(The street dog I had adopted a year and a half ago. Who in an attempt of bribe from my parents was still in the house. 

Although he could only be in my room or in the corners of the park, and never where my parents were)

My mother was sitting in the armchair of her study, with some papers on her legs and her glasses resting in her hair. She was looking at me surely calculating the risk of the keys and the strap in my hands.

"Taking Koi for a walk"

I had trained the dog to behave in the presence of my parents. And that was why he was sitting at my left waiting with me for my mother to make a decision regarding what she believed was correct. 

I heard the tick-tock and my father swimming in the pool, she turned the page, put on the glasses.

“Well, but come back in an hour”

We ended up in the square. Fifteen blocks from my house, the one of the tall trees, grass with wildflowers and the marked paths. 

In a corner, in a circle of trees is where we were, somewhat rusty, faded and there were only three that could still be of use. 

I let Koi run free and sat in one of them. I began to sway gently, with the tips of my feet raising the dust and keeping my eyes on the sky. 

I listened to the barking of the dogs, the cars passing by and the sound of the leaves. I began to go faster, pushing with my whole body and stretching my legs. Wanting to reach the treetops. Laughing freely, with every peak that I conquered.

I was the only one in them and I listened to the cracking of my weight in them. I was going faster, with a vacuum in my stomach, and the wind in my ears. My feet touched the branches that stretched from the trees, and I flew.

I flew between the white and fluffy clouds, in the blue sky of midday and the green branches of summer. And I felt the salty tears on my lips, the sting of sadness in my eyes, and suddenly, I was down. 

With the chair moving, but my head in my hands, my body shaking.

We still met at night although we hadn’t talked again. We kept the same routine of the stars and the night. 

The change came fifteen days later by arriving earlier one night to find the door close. And when I  came back later the door was open and he was sitting down. I was going to ask but he had his eyes closed and it was peaceful to see him, with his mouth slightly open, his chest moving and his hands resting on his stretched legs. 

So I kept quiet, watching the stars, watching him. 

I woke him after the first ray of sun, he moved away from my touch with fear in his eyes.

It wasn't until we were on the floor of his room that he stopped.

"What is your name?"

Old and cracked voice, which lacked water. He had his head down and hands in his white pants pockets.

"Lucas, you?"

I waited, even as he walked away and it wasn't that I expected a response but I didn't expect silence either. 

I turned my back on him,  I had decided to stop waiting:

“Sebastian”

The next morning I met Giselle, a young woman who was doing her internship in that God-forsaken place. 

She was a freshman in psychology and was one of the few who sat down to socialize with us without wanting an answer to questions we didn’t understand. She was the girl in charge of distributing medicine to those who did not leave their room.

I was listening to the conversation that two boys in their thirties were having in front of me when I was once more a witness to a peculiar conversation.

We were heading to the garden door in the east wing that in turn faced Sebastian's door, and I found Giselle inside. She was leaving the pills on the table while sitting next to him.

"Today is a beautiful day, don't you want to go out?"

He looked out the window. My friends were walking away and I was following them when I caught a few lost words.

“Today we talk about you with Thaddeus”