Schizo Read Free Page B

express, so it’s a pretty quick trip from Laurel Village, where Dr. Frankel’s office is located.
    I sit on the hard, plastic, orange-painted seat. Everything smells strongly of dried sweat and some kind of hard alcohol from the homeless guy sleeping on one of the front bench seats. He’s all sprawled out and drunk, which usually the bus drivers get pissed off about—though I guess they’re letting it slide today.
    The guy is wearing, like, five different jackets, and his sneakers are wrapped all the way up to his ankles with duct tape. He’s completely passed out, his mouth open.
    He could just be a regular drunk.
    Or even a junkie.
    But the chances are, I mean . . .
    The chances are . . .
    That someone like him . . . is someone like me.
    Sick. Schizo. And it really only feels like a matter of time before they find me like that—sleeping in rags, riding the bus all day long ’cause I got nowhere else to go.
    Just a matter of time.
    I stare out the clouded window at the low-hanging fog and gray sky. We pass the Coronet movie theater and then the Alexandria.
    My mom and I—we don’t have much to say to each other right now, but that’s one thing we still have in common.
    We both love movies.
    Old movies, new movies, anything, really.
    For that little bit of time, I don’t have to be in my head.
    The only problem is, as the movie’s winding down, I always get this feeling of intense sadness and dread, knowing I have to go back to my real life.
    I wonder if my mom feels the same way.
    In a perfect world I could just stay in bed and watch movies forever.
    But I guess in that same perfect world I wouldn’t have this goddamn disease in the first place.
    All the kids in school wouldn’t look at me like I might attack them with my pen or something—even now, two years later.
    Not that the episode at the beach that day was my only one.
    There was the time—a few months later—I thought Jane was trapped in the cushions of our couch. My parents walked in on me screaming and crying and tearing all the stuffing out trying to find her.
    And then, just three weeks after that, at school, no less, when the crows came back, I ran screaming out of algebra class—as they clawed and pecked and tore at the doors and windows.
    No one’s ever looked at me quite the same since then. Not even Preston and Jackie.
    People are scared, I guess.
    They’re scared of me.
    And at home it’s not much different.
    The bus lurches and comes hissing to a stop as me and these two old ladies with platinum hair, speaking loudly to each other in Russian, get off at the back.
    The wind is blowing strong now off the ocean, and the two old women lock arms like a married couple crossing the street together.
    I walk down the uneven sidewalk—the crows circling overhead as they always do.
    Whether they’re real or not—delusion or reality—I have no idea.
    I see them most days.
    In spite of the medication they are there, among the trees and crooked branches and all along the rooftops. They duck their heads, peering out from behind the sloping rain gutters, the tapestry of telephone wires and power lines and thick, heavy Internet cables and cords connecting satellite dishes.
    They live amongst the wires.
    The wires that are everywhere.
    Like the crows that are watching, spying, jerking their heads back, twitching, the wires are alive. Forever wrapping and tangling and tying.
    Forever transmitting.
    Forever receiving.
    Like the fire lighting up my brain.
    It is
all
schizo—the houses with their wires, the downloads and news feeds and pop-up windows.
    The crows picking through the discarded waste—tearing out what’s left of my, of all of our, humanity.
    Everybody on earth is connected to some electronic wireless device that does nothing but create advertising and waste time and make us all ADD and ADHD and manic-depressive, neurotic,