Pandemonium

processors began to shut down in my brain, one by one, overwhelmed by alcohol and demons. Daisy, Daisy . . .

Then I remembered the chains. I couldn’t be wandering around like this. Had to get them chains.

I turned, unsure now which way led back to the elevators. The hallway stretched into the distance, door after door after door, the infinite regress of a mirrored mirror.

6

I woke up screaming, limbs paralyzed by restraints. This wasn’t unusual. Over the past few months, it had become routine. What was new was the intense light in my eyes, the number of people around me, and the particular quality of the pain. Someone just out of sight—a tall, blond nurse with blue eyes, I think—was scraping the skin off my hands with a carpenter’s file, or perhaps playing a butane torch over my knuckles. Another tall, blond person was working behind me. The holes in the top of my skull had already been drilled, and now she was inserting the tiny wires that would carry electricity into the folds of the angular gyrus. Other Scandinavians, dressed in brilliant white, moved in and out of the light, haloed and indistinct, murmuring in Swedish. However, when I shut my mouth and stopped screaming, a female voice said, “Thank you.” So at least one of them was bilingual.

The butane treatment went on for a long time. I waited for the electricity to travel down the wires into my gray matter and jolt me out of my body. I was looking forward to seeing what the room looked like from the ceiling: my body stretched out on a tasteful pine gurney by IKEA, the sensuous nurses bent over my empty tin can of a body, their crisp uniforms unbuttoned to expose milky white cleavage.