Untamed

Formal occasions always created a little bit of spite within me, and every occasion I attended only happened because someone diligently convinced me that my appearance there would be beneficial and good. “We’d love to see you there, you know how influential you can be, you hold a lot of power at times and there’s no better way to get our message across than through you,” they’d always tell me. Yeah, I was well aware that they were using me for the most part, treating me as their ticket to success. I had power, voice, and probably one of the finest abilities to be very convincing with the greatest of ease than anyone has ever known.

That and the fact everyone enjoys a highly successful writer.

Of course, I submit to their request and turn up every time that they ask me to, always wearing a dress that many women can do nothing more than envy and compliment me on, out of fear that I might dislike them. These women know when to keep their opinions to themselves, or at least, their husbands know how to keep these women in line. One wrong word to the right person and their husbands could be losing fortunes; wealth and self loathing wives never really did mix, especially at functions which mattered largely. Mind you, what those women could say about me would hardly be of a concern, especially considering that my means of income are, dare I say, more creative and justified than their own.

They are societies finest though and the idea that being lazy covers sitting at home daily whilst maids clean a house isn’t particularly in their field of knowledge. To them, anyone who isn’t married to a wealthy man and has no job is automatically lazy. Hand these women a mop, and they would ask you what it’s for and how to use it. Still, these functions made excellent means of obtaining copious amounts of wine, usually rather vintage drops, also. Who am I to turn down great wine and a bit of a laugh if all it asks of me is to talk about something I care little about, wear a beautiful gown and look like a high-society lady for one night?

‘Seems odd of you to be here,’ said a smooth voice, as I stared into the glass of wine, swirling it. I saw his reflection in the dark red liquid, and I looked up to see a well represented man dressed in the finest suit money could by, with his hair slicked back neatly. Regardless of whether this man earned a penny or not, he had the ability to make anyone believe he was worth billions, just by appearance alone. Usually I am one full of words, able to respond quickly to anything, but he left me breathless for a few moments. I bought some time by sipping on the wine, before finally replying, ‘Doesn’t seem that odd at all, I’m always at these stupid fucking places. Do you even know who I am?’

He nodded as smoothly as he spoke, as flawlessly as his appearance before he held out his hand, silently requesting a dance. ‘It seems odd of you to be here,’ he reiterated, ‘in that dress, with that hair and that overall look.’ He was right; the dress is uncharacteristic of me but necessary to fit in with the sea of women who think designer means power, knowledge, ability and status. We made our way to the centre of the room saying very little to each other, yet we held the other abnormally close, our hands seemed to do the talking. It felt as though everything that could ever be told about him could be read with his touch.

‘How about you? I hardly imagine you’re half of what that suit makes you appear to be. I can tell by your feet that you care for this dancing as little as I do,’ I said, ignoring the stares of many. He smiled and looked over his shoulder to a woman in a white dress, the kind that parted from her neck down to her navel to reveal the cleavage that she had – or didn’t have. Her arms were folded, an expression on her face that showed annoyance as her foot tapped in some ridiculous diamond-riddled high-heeled shoe. She didn’t seem too impressed that the attention wasn’t being showered on her.

He looked back at me, giving a gesture that said “that’s life for you” and with that, he left without even taking his impatient date with him. I watched as he left the front door into the car park, where he began fussing with his clothes and hair, which was curious all on its own. It seemed even odder that he made no real attempt to leave, or get his date to leave with him. I walked out the doors, alongside the white van parked beside his own car, and leaned against its rear doors, watching him silently as he continued to adjust his hair and outfit. Minutes passed as his sleek and neat appearance shifted to his casual and slightly scruffy appearance.

I admired his short and slightly spiked hair as a smile spread across my face. It wasn’t much longer before he finally noticed me standing there, and began acting as though he had been doing nothing the entire time. ‘Oh, shit, I was there watching the whole time,’ I said playfully as I approached him, my smile changing to a grin. ‘It could have been much worse,’ I continued, taking the last few steps before standing directly in front of him, ‘you could have been playing with your dick instead.’ A shade of red flushed through his face as he tried to hide his nervous smile, ‘Well…’

Without allowing another moment to pass, my hand grabbed him closer by the back of his head until our lips infused into an electrifying kiss. In all honesty, neither of us noticed that she had been standing there for quite a while, observing us in a fiery embrace, heat surging through our veins as hands became lost in the canvas of each others body. Soon her presence was too difficult to remain unnoticed, her pseudo attempts to clear her throat, her precious shoes stomping into the ground and our attention eventually turned to her, with small fits of giggling emitting from us both, whilst poorly acting as though nothing had happened.

‘I was just…’ I said, searching for a plausible excuse for being outside with a man I didn’t even know, yet possessed strange physical attraction. Nothing came to mind and the raised eyebrow on the impatient date’s face suggested that I shouldn’t even continue trying. Another laugh passed through him and me as we leaned against the car and looked at her. ‘She was just telling me about the new book that she’s writing,’ he, to my surprise, excused on my behalf as his gaze looked at me, smiling and trying desperately not to laugh.

‘I don’t care,’ she said, although we could tell she was clearly annoyed, ‘just take me home.’ She walked around to the other side of the car and opened the door, getting in and sitting silently inside the vehicle. I bit my lip softly as I looked at him, and he laughed slightly once more, knowing that life’s turn of events can be amusing. By now we had realised we weren’t so different from each other, that we were just as much outcasts to the level of society as one another. ‘I’ll…’ he said, letting his sentence trail off as his hand grabbed to door handle. ‘…find my number by calling my publisher, pretending to want more information on my writing,’ I said, finishing his sentence for him.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

My heart pounded, my head raced at a million miles an hour, my hands became sweaty as my ears ran hot. Every nerve within me was on high alert, more sensitive than they had ever been. Even normal breathing had to get in on the action and doubled itself, as if to compete with my heart’s persistent thumps against the cage of my chest. No other feeling ever felt quite the way this did, no other feeling was ever as irrational and uncontrollable as fear. Anyone can be so happy that they’ll cry, anyone can stop those tears and feel just as happy. Fear takes a hold of you by the throat and threatens to sever the vital connections that run along your spinal column and to your brain.

Nothing can ever happen fast enough when one is driven by fear – feet can never be fast enough, accurate enough and the mind simply forgets to send important signals to everywhere at once. “Run” is the command given, and only half executed. Yet there’s a weakness with fear, a weakness that fights a battle with curiosity and stubbornness. Unfortunately for fear, curiosity and stubbornness make an excellent fighting duo force and more often than not brings fear right back into my face, asking me to relive it “just once more.” Foolishly, I used to listen when it asked, pleaded and tempted me, but not anymore.

My senses are dead, disconnected not fear but by me. As I walk this lone path in a mountain of heavy trees, I am blank. The sound of gravel crunched beneath the rubber soles of my sneakers, the light struggled to make its way through the canopy of leaves. The wind was cold, and I hadn’t made any effort to bring a jumper – I wouldn’t need one where I was going. The option to turn back came and went many meters back; many footsteps have since been made, carrying me closer to what I had planned all along – a warm body, a cold grave. No thoughts crossed through my mind, and it felt as though bodily functions had disabled themselves already.

At last I came to a clearing where a part of the mountain became a small cliff dropping down to a pool of water. This place was familiar to me, I came here daily, and I saw a lot of things here that probably should never be seen and some things that I wished I hadn’t seen. So my feet stood on the edge, gripping onto the ground as much as I used to grip onto any reason for living that would pass my way. Wind screamed eerily through the narrow spaces between the land as my arms held themselves outwards, as though they were wings and I felt the rush of air flow through my hair and attempt to overpower my weight.

With a small twist of my foot, my weight shifted and I became unbalanced, descending downwards toward the water. Panic did not come, fear never set in, adrenaline was dead, excitement didn’t exist; nothing was there anymore, not even time, it seemed as my fall seemed to pass slowly. Calmness was all that stayed around for the show, as the number of meters that came and went started reaching the hundreds – I felt like a feather. I had listened to fear after all. Then finally: nothing.

All I saw last was the sky.

He liked to own a little part of me, he got a kick out of the idea that somewhere there was a piece of me with his name on it. It gave him a sense of superiority, control and status; it was something that usually went to his head and inflated his ego far too rapidly. Ash never was one to know when to pull the rip cord before it was too late and most of the time, he had let it get to him before he could manage it effectively. ‘Why is it that you think you know me?’ he asked, whilst I sat eating a bagel that I had diligently coated with cream with all the fat and high calories.

‘It isn’t think I think I know you, it’s that I can see certain things about you that give me an impression, a view, an opinion,’ I said, with my mouth full and chewing at the same time. It was true – I never thought that I knew Ash, despite that we talked often and our friendship had withstood many things, for years on end. He was an odd ball, one of those people that society wouldn’t cast a second look at because he would dance in the street in fluoro colours just to be different from everyone else. Maybe it was because he actually was different from everyone else, naturally.

Another bagel sat on my plate, free of any cream and not yet ready to be eaten. He took it upon himself to pick it up and take a healthy bite out of it, then smiling in the way that he does when he knows he owns that little part of me. He has me, and my bagel. ‘So how can you be certain that what you think and see is right?’ he asked, as I stared at him eating my now last bagel, and chewing on its remains. I knew where this was leading; it always ended up being a conversation that went back and forth between us, in a pointless manner.

We both enjoyed stirring the other and we took pleasure in doing so on a frequent basis, just for kicks. ‘I don’t know if I’m even right, but I only have whatever you show me before I can make any kind of evaluation. Why is it that we do this, every day?’ I asked, licking my fingers clean of any cream that I had accidentally gotten on them. He smiled even more, and reached a hand for my coffee, another sign that he could do what he pleased with me and anything that I had. I was fine with this little fact, oddly enough.

‘We do this because we can, because you and I both enjoy it,’ he responded before asking a question of his own, ‘Why do you do this with me?’ It was a question that was much easier to ask than it was to answer. He continued, ‘you said that you don’t care, so why do you do it, why do you ask the things that you ask?’ and I sat there, contemplating my response, calculating a move. With him, one has to calculate their responses, find some algorithm that works; one wrong move and it was check-mate, he’d have you in a position you could not get out of.

‘I’m purely curious, Ash, just wondering about it all, really. I don’t have to care about everything to at least have a slight amount of compassion and interest for you,’ I responded, hoping that would be sufficient enough. He rolled his eyes, a bastard kind of smile across a face that seemed tired and worn, ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ he said. With those words, he consumed the last of my coffee and stood up to leave, but not before I asked, ‘Why do you do this?’

‘I like the feeding the ego that is me,’ he said with a smug grin, and left without another word. There’s a bit of him in all of us.

It was still dark outside when I woke to the sound of uncooperative screaming, apparently from the vocal chords of a man who will be occupying the room next to my own. Fresh meat, I thought to myself as I heard the heavy metal door close and the softest of thuds beating against it by his fists. They always did make this place rather good at drowning out impatient, disbelieving thumps of plea and every single one of us did it at least once during our first week here. We’re all in denial. At least, that’s what we’re told. What felt like forty-five minutes later, and I had drifted off back to sleep.

Early morning wake-up calls bothered me, and had ever since I arrived here. As soon as the sun broke in through the room window, the door would be flung open and commands shouted at you to get up. Today was my first day to see some educated psychiatrist; apparently she wanted to talk to me, mostly about why I was here; they tell me that I’m one of the interesting ones. I never know exactly what to make of that, but it makes me feel nervous, paranoid and as though I’m test guinea pig number 4375. Finally the time had come and a big, African-American stood in the doorway, ‘Come on, Caufie, it’s time to go.’

The office made me feel as though I was being judged, put on trial and criticised for everything that ever escapes from my mouth, for every look my eyes ever make on anything. Perhaps I wasn’t all that far from the truth – this woman was a psychiatrist after all. There I was, standing in my white gown they had given me; the one that matched everyone else’s and made us all appear as though we’re some kind of faction. The kind of gown that warned everyone of who we were before they even came ten feet of us, not that they’d ever let us see anyone, even if we wanted to see them or they, us.

Ushered to the seat that sat in front of her desk which held a name plaque of ‘Dr. Roxell’ she began asking me the formalities, the things she already knew but asked anyway. My name, age, how long I had been here, what my hobbies were, what habits I had and then finally she asked why I was here. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure where ‘here’ was or what I was doing here, and so my story began spilling from my lips, starting back exactly one week and one day ago, in my home near the woods. The house was bought purely on impulse, to be honest; there was something alluring about the thick tangle woods that loomed around the home and spreading so far that it began to fall pitch black within meters.

On that day I had slept in far later than I usually would have and yet the usual rush of panic that would flood over me and control my nerves when I was late wasn’t present this time. That day was different from all the others, in more ways than I could have imagined it to be at the time; I had quit my job the day before, out of some impulse and uneasiness. Each day that passed in my dismal job had grinded at my temper more and more, until eventually there was going to be a time where I would snap. The psychiatrist nodded and encouraged me to continue with my story, to tell her of the every little detail in my life, the shopping for groceries that I did, the wish for a child to call my own – a little odd for a man to want a family, but I yearned for it nonetheless.

Next was the topic of my ex-wife; a woman who would have been the starter of my family if it weren’t for the drunk driver who ran off the road in a state of blindness and pegged her between a tree and the front of the vehicle. She died instantly – a painless death, I hear but the pain she didn’t feel was transferred to me instead. God, I miss her more than I can begin to describe and there isn’t a night that passed in my life since then that I didn’t pray to have her back, to see her one last time. My hands began to rub at each other, wringing themselves at the fingers in a nervous manner; it had been ages since I’ve had to talk about my wife. I still wear the wedding ring she gave me, and I refuse to take it off.

Though that week and one day ago, God must have answered my prayers. On that day, I wasted away the daylight and allowed to the darkness of the night to spread over like a sickness. The woods surrounding my home presenting an even more foreboding aura than they normally do, but that was were I saw her. She looked just as I remembered: beautiful hair, a face made for angels, a wonderful smile and those eyes that would make my knees weak just by looking at them. She beckoned me toward her, urging me to follow her through the woods as she took me by the hand, giggling. The only thing different about her was the flowing white gown that she wore and she only laughed when I asked about it.

She told me not to worry about the gown; she told me that she had something amazing to show me, something that I’d never believe. ‘Go on, Mr. Caufie, what happened then?’ Roxell asked, taking notes down as I continued, hesitantly explaining the run through the woods until finally the area cleared and there was only a driveway, with a large white building at the end. My wife looked over her shoulder at me with a smile, I felt her hand grip mine harder and pull me towards the foundations of the place. This was it, she told me, this was the place that she wanted to show me; the place that she said I needed to be, if I wanted to continue being with her, ‘I’m not dead, Marcus.’

Dr. Roxell looked at me through her glasses, although slightly downward as if to take a closer examination of me on the surface. I never really understood what people thought when they did that, as though skin and outside appearance really ever validated a story just by looking harder at somebody. A look of puzzlement resided on her face before she paused in thought for a moment, and then finally she spoke, ‘but Mr. Caufie, the administration reports show that you were alone when you came here. Your wife was not with you, and no one was to be seen anywhere near you at the time.’ I shook my head in disbelief; I raised my voice, insisting my wife was here and that she brought me here.

‘She led me by her fucking hand! I felt her, I saw her, and I heard her!’ I protested wildly, almost about to stand up and flip the chair over that was under me. Though as soon as I said those words, a file was placed in front of me on the desk – commitment forms that all had my handwriting and signatures. ‘No, Mr. Caufie, you admitted yourself,’ she stated firmly before continuing, ‘your wife is dead and has been for years. You have been here for six years, and we go through this every time we have our meetings.’

‘We thought that by repeating the same process, you may begin to understand and realise this yourself, Mr. Caufie.’