My Name is Sheol by P. Julian
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Copyright © 2026 P. Julian
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ISBN: 9798268917185
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My Name is Sheol - Full Text Section 1
<note to readers>
This book deals with themes of mental illness and suicide.
Reader discretion is advised.
<dedication>
For Jo, Nigel & Brigitte
<epigraphs>
We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds. We are terrified of madness because the Western mind is a house of cards, and the people who built it know that -
Imagine if you were slightly odd and the solution was to take you and lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad. That would drive anyone mad. If you have ever been in a madhouse you know that it is an environment calculated to make you crazy and to keep you crazy.
Terence McKenna
If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldn’t you simply get static? But you don’t. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who's doing this? Who is it who is running around hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one?
Cormac McCarthy
Through me is the way to the city of woe.
Through me is the way to eternal pain.
Through me is the way to a lost people.
Dante
<Table of Contents>
Chapter 1 - Meet and Greet
Chapter 2 - What Dreams May Come
Chapter 3 - Taken
Chapter 4 - In the Belly of the Beast
Chapter 5 - The People You Meet in Hell
Chapter 6 - The Interview
Chapter 7 - Look Down, Look Down
Chapter 8 - Quizzing the Quizmaster
Chapter 9 - My Name is Sheol
Chapter 10 - Before My Body Was Born
Chapter 11 - Letter Better Unsent
<Full text of book begins here>
Chapter 1 - MEET AND GREET
1. His office looks exactly the way I have come to expect such offices to look. Piles of paper stacked within pale manila folders, just chaotic enough to tell me how busy this man is. The other status symbols they accumulate to themselves: expensive lamps on desks with leather inlay, curios and sculptural pieces made out of bronze and clay. Heavy-framed artwork that might well be original, with everything carefully curated to say: I am a man of substance. And more relevantly: I am a man of power, a man who wields power over you.
2. I sit quietly as my mother tells the doctor why we have come. I thought she might talk about my lucid dreaming because that is the thing she really hates, or perhaps my lack of appetite or the anxiety that paralyses me whenever I go to leave the house. It quickly becomes clear though that she is here to talk about herself. How worried she is and how hostile I have become, how she fears that she might lose me and how she couldn't possibly cope with that. I sit quietly but the whole time she is talking I feel my usual resentment welling up inside of me, and I also find myself calling her - inside my head of course - something that I have never called her before and that is: liar.
3. Her words speak of care and concern but she sounds mostly as though she has been inconvenienced. As though she is primarily concerned about her own comfort, or how she might be judged by other people. Even her express fear of losing me doesn’t sound sincere. I think she actually fears the guilt she would feel: how people would gossip about her, slandering her as a neglectful mother who did nothing to save her distressed child. She keeps on talking and I give up my efforts to reconcile the content of her words with the feelings that lie beneath them, I sit with the dissonance it brings and how dreamlike all of this feels. My mother’s heart and mouth moving in such contrary directions without skipping a beat, all of her mixed feelings that I can never comprehend.
4. We do get around to my dreams eventually. I was actually quite interested to get Doctor Samuels’ view on them and perhaps even some interpretation as to what they mean. However the moment I ask after these things the doctor visibly recoils. I presume that he must have misunderstood me - that I was describing delusional experiences and not just my dreams - but as I try to explain myself better his disdain becomes more and more apparent. My mother follows his lead, sighing and shaking her head at me, tutting as her hand presses down on my thigh, saying: Che please don't waste what little time we have. The doctor nods in agreement and in his best condescending therapeutic voice he says: I don't think the content of your dreams is relevant to our discussion today.
5. I try once more to explain how real these experiences feel. How I can’t understand why my dreams should be textured like reality but the doctor shakes his head and says: of course they feel real to you Che. It could hardly be otherwise. I tell him that I keep meeting one particular person in my dreams and how important this person is, how I never hear his name but I feel destined to meet him in person one day. I struggle bravely but the doctor and my mother give me no air at all. I feel their disapproval begin to shut me down and any lucid explanation I could provide quickly shuts down as well. Leaving me to plead repeatedly: this man is real, I know that he is real. You look at me like I’m crazy but if you could dream my dreams you would think it was reality too.
6. The doctor shifts in his chair and my mother’s look grows darker and darker until all explanations fail me and the doctor cuts me off. Che, he says. I think this is a complete distraction, what you are talking about now. I understand how you feel about your dreams but you must see: we are not here to talk about your subjective experience. We are here to examine your real life, your actual life outside of these dreams. How you have been faring in the real world, what we can do to improve your functioning and restore you to some quality of life
How do you know, I ask.
How do I know what?
How do you know this is the real world?
I can see by the pained smile he gives to my mother that this is exactly the wrong thing to say.
7. Doctor Samuels is not exactly unfriendly but his words sound clipped and they carry an unpleasant feeling towards me. He makes me feel small and boxed in as he says: I have years of experience in these matters Che. Along with training that most would struggle to commence. All of that tells me that the texture of these experiences has no bearing on your treatment. I am here to evaluate you as a whole person, not to address the minutiae of your felt experience. And this question you ask about what is real? Philosophically this is a bottomless question. You could argue that none of us are really here, that we are all encased within our own sensory hallucination but how is that going to help you Che? How will that put your distress behind you and get your life back on track? I ask him how he knows my life is off track and he says: from every bit of collateral I have. And even that you would challenge me with these questions, Che. In the end you have no other option than to let me do my job.
8. The doctor does not seem nasty and there is some genuine feeling in his voice when he reaches towards me in this way. His subsequent questions do have some flavour of real interest about them, for example when he asks: is there anyone in your life who believes in these experiences?
I don't tell anyone, I say.
There’s nobody who knows.
He holds out his hands to me and says: well there you are Che. That’s your answer right there. That reluctance to tell people about your experiences always speaks volumes. We don't live in a demon-haunted world anymore and most people are quite glad of it. If I were to ask your mother for example what she thinks when she hears you say these things, how it makes her feel. My mother turns to look at me the way she always does when someone is watching and she says in her best loving-mother tone: I know these things seem real to you Che darling but that does not make them real.
9. Doctor Samuels indulges me for another minute or so as I talk about my dreams but he doesn't write anything on his notepad. He taps his pen against the top of his desk while I am talking and I know he thinks I’m crazy. Even I understand that these things are edging me towards something very dark, some borderland between psychosis and whatever the opposite of that is. Clarity, I suppose. Perhaps even certainty. My speech tails off for the last time as I see that the doctor will never be enticed towards taking an interest in my dreams. I stop talking in the hope that this will bring our meeting to an end but the doctor politely asks my mother to leave the room and the consult continues long after I feel that any point to it has been exhausted.
10. As he asks further questions Doctor Samuels stares at me with a strange kind of grin that occasionally morphs into a leer. Every time I tell him something that he seems gratified to hear, as he nods in approval when I relate facts agreeing with the textbooks and statistical manuals that live rent-free inside his head. There are some things that fall dead in the space between us while others arouse his interest, causing that leery grin to lift again, raising his greying eyebrows as he looks at me with interest.
Could you tell me a bit more about that?
Nodding as if to say: of course, of course.
A horse is a horse.
If it quacks like a duck.
Of course.
11. You can skip the rest of this account if you want to. If you have been in my place you’ll understand the scene well enough by now, and if you have not sat in the same chair in a similar room then you are unlikely to understand. You may even accuse me: this does sound a bit paranoid, Che, all these accusations against a man who is just doing his job. And of course you would be absolutely correct. This man is just doing the job he has been given to do - at around a million dollars a year - to tag people who sit outside the range of normal functioning and medicate them back into line. He might even numb some of their pain as he does so, or provide a few lucky patients with some serious relief from their suffering. He is certainly not paid to indulge foolish girls like me who have retreated into a romantic dreamworld, he is not here to prop up my dream-led delusions about finding myself in love.
12. Most of the Doctor’s questions fail to make an impression on me. They seem obviously diagnostic, informed by his training and that peculiar rigidity of classical psychiatry that seems so disconnected from ordinary experience. And there are questions which feel informed by banal cliches about the nature of the world, a world free of strong emotion and populated with people who have lovely little sanitised souls.
Do you have thoughts of self-harm?
Do you ruminate on things?
Do you feel that life has no value?
These prompts suggest other questions that might have more value.
Do you feel as though you might disappear?
That would be a good one to ask.
If you disappeared would anyone notice?
Are you losing your place in the world?
Does your soul feel… thin?
Could I push through you even now?
I3. want the doctor to ask me other questions.
Are you alive?
How do you know?
These kinds of questions.
I can cope with these kinds of questions.
If you were not alive, Che.
How would you find out?
How would it feel?
And I suppose what might be the ultimate question.
Are you dead?
Is everyone around you dead?
14. When the Doctor invites my mother back into the room she sits there trying to compose herself. She is by nature a jealous person and I know that she resents being excluded from our private conversations. No matter how professional that brief time was, no matter how relaxed the Doctor looks as he jots down various findings on his notepad. She looks at me with what is supposed to be an encouraging smile but it is all teeth and sinew and I do not feel very encouraged. The best I can do is remind myself that none of this is really her fault, as much as I like to accuse her. It’s just that she never really liked me very much - right from the very beginning - and how can I blame her when I feel exactly the same way.
15. The doctor finishes his notes and looks up at us both. He flashes a broad smile of triumph over the chaos of my recent experience and the unpleasantness of my wayward life. He gets up and walks over to a cabinet and pulls out a couple of packets of pills after fishing around for a while. He calls them starter packs and my heart sinks when I hear those words, knowing this is the start of something that will never end. The doctor hands me the pills and says a few things about these being early days, promising that my illness will become clearer as time goes on. He says the word undiagnosed a few times although I don’t at any stage hear him offer an actual diagnosis. He does negate a few suggestions that my mother put to him including Tourette’s and some kind of multiple personality disorder. He mentions OCD and anxiety and cluster B symptoms but as he says to us more than once: diagnosis takes second place in modern psychiatry.
16. It sounds like I might have a whole swarm of mental conditions or possibly no condition at all. I can’t see how this is supposed to help me no matter how pleased my mother seems, how victorious the doctor’s smile. The one thing I can see though is that my fate has been decided. My future will be a medicalised future with my soul being chemically constrained, and my future prospects depend on whether I can learn to love my newly medicated self. And I suppose whether anyone else might learn to love me too. Would you just lay here with my synthetic soul? Could you just stay here now the pills are in control? Whether someone might find it in their metal heart to love me, just as that sad singer says.
17. Later I read the densely folded sheets stuffed into each packet of pills, warning of terrible side-effects and other hazards from taking the medication. Even the mild ones sound horrible and I can’t make it through the whole list. They include dry mouth, facial disfigurement, sexual dysfunction, anorgasmia, weight gain, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression, cataracts, skin disorders, tremor, and just about every other horrible malady that a person could suffer. What were once the misfortunes of the elderly now being visited upon the young, visited even upon children. When Doctor Samuels handed me the starter packs he mentioned some of these side-effects while laughing a jolly laugh and saying: there’s really no need to read the full list, Che, or to take any of it too seriously. If everybody read the full side-effect profile of these medications nobody would agree to take any psychiatric medication at all!
18. As the consult winds up my mother rushes to shake the doctor’s hand, saying in her best fawning voice: thank you so much Doctor Samuels. It’s just so nice to know. He nods sagely and tells her that insight is the major part of the battle, that when the patient develops good insight half the battle is won. But even as they shake hands on that I get a sharp stab of real insight, a voice that quietly tells me: he has no idea what's going on. Not even what medication to prescribe, not really, not even what dose I should start on. It feels strangely reassuring that his knowledge is so partial and preliminary, that there might be aspects of my current condition that this man with his primitive toolkit has no hope of comprehending.
19. I get one final urge to argue the point but that urge sinks beneath a wave of resignation and acceptance that the doctor must be calling insight. I see that things make no sense to me because I am genuinely crazy, that I should be humble about my psychiatric condition and bow to this man’s greater wisdom. I should take the pills he has prescribed and let them sink me down out of the delusional mess I have made of my life, towards some saner future that has been waiting for me. Or at least a less painful way to live just for a little while. There may even be some genuine healing in these pills, although my current distress makes it hard to imagine how that could be. I also see that the numbing effect of these drugs might be the deliverance I have been seeking, because to feel numb is to feel normal and I might even thrive in that steady sedated state. And let my anguished feelings fall away, if they will release me, to escape my suffering if it will let me be.
Chapter 2 - WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
20. It always begins with looking down at your hands. That is the way it is classically taught and the only way it can be done. At least at the very beginning, just while you learn, the distillation of true space out of dream space by your hands which draw the line.
21. For the first few moments my fingers and palms always look very faint, in that gulf of uncertainty where they could be other things. But if I maintain focus my hands will suddenly snap into sharp relief, before receding ever so slightly as their outline becomes crisp and alive. Looking as though they have been traced around with a fluorescent pen or something very bright and sharp, their edges marked out with brilliant distinction against the surrounding darkness. It is always about the edges, as any edge-runner will tell you, that line where your dreams commence and reality begins to give way.
22. My dream sight never makes it any further than this brilliant outline of my hands. Their edges glow and grow until I think I might finally be on the verge of entering a truly visual dream but suddenly all lights go out and my vision cuts to black. I have come to expect this transition but my sudden blindness is always disorienting. Like the little Hyacinth Girl who walks out of the Garden with her arms so full of flowers, only to lapse into a dead dream where she cannot speak and her eyes fail and she cannot remember whether she is living or dead. I want to scream or try to thrash my way out of the darkness but I lack the strength to do it and any direction would be a false direction anyway. My only option is to submit to these things, to fall back against the surrounding darkness and let it take me down.
23. As I surrender to the darkness my panic abates and in the cool void I remember that this is just another stage of my dreaming. That thought opens me to another realm that also denies me vision but this other realm is far from void. It is occupied by one singular inhabitant who has become very familiar to me, turning gently towards me as I enter his space until his body stands directly in front of my body. The space between us is bridged and we start to move towards one another and then against one another and you may also have had dreams of this kind. I am certain this person is a man and although he is far from old I feel he has stored up many things. He feels full of strange qualities that I struggle to describe - like reckless decency and infinite sorrow - and these things make me glad of my dream blindness because they would be hidden from me if I could see.
24. The place where I encounter this man has a definite subterranean feel. We are a long way underground where it feels calm and protected, the air is cool and we are hidden away from the sun. But all of these sensations fade from my consciousness as I begin to move against him. The pressure builds until I am bearing down hard against his body, knowing that I can press as forcefully as I like without causing him any harm. I cannot judge the height of this man but I can feel the breadth of him encompassing my body, and there are his tremendous depths that I can press against as well. He does not push back but neither does he recoil, he remains upright and calm as his strength calls to my strength and in a soft and laughing voice I can almost hear him say: go ahead and test me, Hyacinth Girl. Go ahead and test me for the strength of what I bring.
25. As I close on him completely I am also enclosed by the beautiful way he smells. Our age of compulsive hygiene holds no sway in this space and so he has a radically complete scent that is impossible to describe. I would speak of wet earth and limestone and a very faint hint of cypress, and then a sudden rush of sweet violets crushed between calloused hands. I would describe the dark wine my father used to drink - all blackstrap and brambles and eucalyptus - sometimes subsumed in the scent of red berries, sometimes in the smell of a summer garden after rain. I would also describe smells much less civilised: all kinds of sweet dense animal smells, merging with other deeper notes before they themselves submerge into one another. And many other hints that would offend against good taste if I were to set them down but if you must know these are the scents I most urgently seek. The way he smells of sex at the same time he smells of candy, without which the rest of his scent would amount to nothing at all.
26. My waking self would be happy to hold him and caress him but my dream self is much more direct. I always drag him in far more sensual directions and the more often I dream of him the more immediately I do it. He does not move in any perceptible way but I am completely shameless - pressing harder against him as he stands his ground - and no matter how wantonly I move against him he never, ever recoils. I push against him harder and harder until his restraint buckles and even then I do not take a backward step. My body pleads with his body and even begins to beg, until his shackles suddenly rupture and he surges powerfully towards me.
27. These events always unfold in the same way but I never get used to that shift, from him pressing gently against me to him surging suddenly within me. His presence builds so subtly that I don't recognise it until I am completely subsumed by it, feeling his intimate presence encompassing every part of me at once. He comes at me from every imaginable angle and some angles impossible to triangulate and this is how loving a man feels in the grip of a lucid dream. Full of every kind of tenderness but also a strange absence of care, a careless abandon that comes to absolve me and if you could feel it then you would give anything to have such absolution too. The core of me tightens as I bear down against him, I want to say yes but I keep saying no because I know where we are headed. If we keep building and lifting up over the crest of this wave, if I let my desire build to a point where I cannot keep him with me.
28. forget how short these dreams are until the horizon of the morning comes. I go to protest against the ending of the dream but nothing can suppress the sharp rising feeling that comes to heave me back up out of sleep. I try to plunge back down towards my dream lover but he surrounds me on every side, pushing me back up with his overwhelming strength. I try to bargain by saying please and please just and just let me even though I know that this must happen if my soul is to remain in the world. With a single gigantic thrust he dislodges me from death’s permanent hold and I am jolted straight up out of sleep. Leaving me stranded and heaving and pressing against my bed, coming but also keening for having lost my dream lover again.
29. Whether I have had this dream a hundred times or a thousand times I cannot say. But it seems important to tell you: there are many dream times when I do nothing but lose him, again and again, forever denied his singular presence that has become all things to me. And every time I do find him our encounter feels newly textured, as though we had been apart from one another for a very long time. These dream encounters have stacked up against one another until I have become wholly and completely his and you can see why I struggle to explain this to people in the outside world. What began as a guilty pleasure - going in his direction knowing that I really shouldn't, telling myself it could not do any harm - has escalated to the point where I find myself unable to think of anything but his touch, wishing that I could genuinely die to this world and join him forever in the next.
30. Can you be in love with a person you have never met? A man you have never seen although you are so familiar with his body? I know the sane answer to these questions but that does not prevent them from ruling the course of my life. I need no reminding that he only lives in my dreams but he is so much more real to me than anyone else in the world and I don't know what to do. The medication might block my way to him but I swear: if the pills do that I will choose his presence every single time, if the pills try to disorient me or send him back into the darkness. I know that the contact I have with him is in his best and most pressing interests, as strange as that sounds to say. The fact that he has given me no confirmation of this does not stop it from being absolutely true.
31. So be careful what you dream of. Especially if you dream of love that you are lacking in the real world. Because the moment you are ejected from your dreams there will be no fulfilment for you and no peace, just that contingent realm you will always pine for and a lover who only comes while you sleep. With no motive to seek relief from your dreaming even when it is crushing your life, denying yourself to any other embrace that you might find in the waking world. All the elements of life that cannot be dreamed, the shaped clay and the brilliant sun, the dexterity of your living flesh and the heat of your intangible blood. All of it denied by your most dangerous delusion: that your dream lover must be an actual man of flesh and blood, a man you could drag back into your waking life if you could only find a way.
Chapter 3 - TAKEN
32. When my mother yelled up the stairs that day I knew what was going to happen. I had actually expected it for a few weeks and there was something very particular about the way she called out my name, some hint of artifice or deception that telegraphed what was about to occur. I had a few thoughts about hiding myself or pretending that I had gone out for the day, perhaps even climbing out of my upstairs window if I could find a safe way down. But I knew these options would only provide a temporary escape and so I walked slowly down the stairs to confront what was waiting for me.
33. You probably already know: it could happen to you. If you have an intense inner life that plays out into the world, if you have caused enough concern by your resulting behaviour. If you insist on talking about things that your family won’t talk about, if you get frustrated with them and yell and storm out of the room. If you restrict your diet in pursuit of purity and begin to lose weight, if you end up passed out on the street one night without anyone knowing where you are. If you are so repulsed by the cruelty of the world that you start to break things in protest, if you raise your voice at them every time they raise theirs, if you start to cut yourself so you can recover the power to feel: you might find out very quickly that it can happen to you.
34. The only thing that really surprised me was how much muscle they brought. For me there were two large paramedics in blue jumpsuits tucked down into lace-up leather boots, looking more like paratroopers than first responders, like people trained to take lives rather than to save them. There were four uniformed police officers decked out in full array, their webbing belts slung with tasers and pistols and extendable steel batons. I had just woken out of a wretched sleep and I felt like I had brought part of my nightmares into the room with me. I tried to dislodge these dream visions by shaking my head but nothing in the room changed. There were still those six officers standing in a loose ring between me and the front door, all pulling on blue latex gloves as I came down into the living room.
35. As I reached the bottom of the stairs one female police officer stepped forward and introduced herself. Her name was Officer Gaby and although her name seems unimportant now it definitely mattered that she introduced herself to me. She had an air of kindness along with her trappings of force, she told me that people were very concerned about me and that an assessment order had been made. She said that an ambulance was waiting outside to take me to the hospital, where I would meet with a psychiatrist who could figure out what was going on.
I have a psychiatrist, I said.
Gaby nodded.
They will have his notes, she said.
But things have escalated, Che.
The doctors at the hospital will take care of you from here.
36. Officer Gaby told me that although the order was temporary at this stage it was still an involuntary order and I would be required to comply with it.
Do you understand that? she asked.
That you need to come with us?
I nodded before asking the obvious question.
What happens, I asked.
If I refuse to come with you?
She said: Che you have to come with us.
You don’t have any choice about that.
It doesn’t have to be difficult.
You can just get some things and we’ll take you directly there.
37. had been sleeping very poorly and my mind was in pieces but I swear there was something weird about those officers who came to my house. Even Officer Gaby who spoke to me so kindly would not look me in the eye. She spoke as though she were reading her lines from a script, as though she would tell me more about what was happening if she were permitted to do so. I also had the distinct impression that despite their guns and batons they would not - as long as I stayed peaceful - put their hands on me or coerce me in any way. Even if I shouted, even if I jumped up and down. I knew this was from their training and the fact that I am small and female but for a moment it felt as though they were not really present in the world, or that they stood at an odd angle to some private world of mine that was only tangentially connected to reality.
38. I decided to go through the motions and resist for as long as I could. I knew what they wanted and where I was destined to go but I needed to buy myself some time. I thought of a few questions and I asked some of them, such as how long I might have to stay at the hospital, whether my medication would be changed. Officer Gaby remained very calm although she did begin to clear her throat before she answered my rapid-fire questions. It all depends on what the doctors think, Che. They might decide you need a little bit of extra medication, they might think that all of this can be sorted out at home. They might decide that you would benefit from a short stay as an inpatient. It all depends on their assessment.
Will I get to come home again?
Of course, she said.
It’s not like that anymore Che.
They don’t just lock people away.
You won’t be there for very long.
39. I asked again what kind of medication might be prescribed and Gaby remained perfectly calm. That’s way outside my area, Che. But I can tell you some things I have seen. I have seen people discharged with a little bit of Valium and some cognitive therapy to continue at home. Some people might need a bit more help than that and they stay in hospital for a while. But they can't keep you there for long. Beds are scarce and it is horribly expensive. Even if you do stay for a little while they will treat you assertively in order to get you a little bit better and then they have to send you home.
A lot of it is up to you, Che.
If you can stay calm and work with the doctors.
If you can do what you need to do to get yourself well.
40. Officer Gaby stopped talking and I asked her whether she knew how it felt. She asked what I meant by that and I said: to have your home invaded by people you don’t know. To be taken by police and whatever these other people are to somewhere you don't want to go.
I won't lie to you Che, she said.
I have not had that experience.
It's not something I would like to experience.
But we are not here to hurt you or punish you. We are just here to make sure you get to where you need to go. All of this is about you, Che, you must understand that. Your wellness, your welfare. That’s the best way I can put it. We are part of a healthcare system designed to get you well.
And if I disagree?
You can do that, she said.
You can say anything you like to the doctor, once we get you there.
41. Officer Gaby asked me whether I wanted to grab some things. I was about to run upstairs to pack a bag when my mother lifted one of her smaller suitcases on to the kitchen bench. This is everything Che will need, she said. I looked at her feeling surprised and then quite badly betrayed but she just walked over to me and hoisted the bag into my arms, immediately letting go of it so I had to grab hold.
But Mum…
You need to go with them.
But I don't want to…
42. I saw anger flare in her then, along with the spite she had been trying to suppress for so long. She hissed at me and said: this is not the time Che. Stop being so bloody selfish. These people are here to help you and make you better and there's nothing either of us can do about it. If you could just see how much we all love you - how we are just trying to help - you might be able to think about easing our burden and getting yourself well.
I am well, I said.
Her tone turned saccharine as she said: Oh Che.
That you could even say that to me?
In light of all that’s happened.
It just shows how unwell you have become.
43. I turned back towards Officer Gaby, who suddenly seemed to be my only ally in the room. I wanted to ask her more stalling questions but every single question I could think of had been answered and there was just one forlorn query I could think to make even though I knew how she would reply.
Is there anything I can do?
About what Che?
To stop this happening to me?
No, she said.
Nothing?
Nothing.
44. Gaby seemed genuinely motivated to keep me calm and she kept volunteering positive ways of looking at what was happening. As she spoke a faint tunnel seemed to form between us to amplify and isolate our communication, so that the rest of the room faded slightly and had its volume turned down. Her words now reached me like some kind of secret speech as I heard her say: things are in train, Che. You have to believe that this is for the best. You will not understand, not yet, but you will look back and understand why we had to come for you. It will not be an easy road but things were never going to be easy, making the decisions that you have, to live your life in a courageous way. This is how things happen for good people, Che, the light sometimes reads like the darkness. And there is always some light in what happens no matter how little shines through.
45. In the end it wasn’t all that traumatic. It almost felt like relief, to be honest, the relief of giving in when you know you have lost the fight, the relief of coasting down a hill you have spent so much energy climbing up. To escape those officers would have been impossible but to just go in their direction and let them take me was the easiest thing in the world. It felt strangely pleasant to have my choices taken away from me, with nothing to do but walk down the front path with them surrounding me. To get in by the side door of the ambulance and follow their directions to lie down, to let them belt me in with their nylon restraining belts, slotting home the heavy plastic clips with a very definite click. To let them ratchet me down until my limbs were tightly pinned and my body was held still. To lie there and breathe quietly while the ambulance threaded its way past the parked cars on our little street, out onto the congested roads leading towards the hospital.
46. Officer Gaby rode beside me the whole way. She did not look at me or speak to me but she did rest her hand on the front of my right shoulder, her touch very heavy and definite. I know I was unwell and probably in a bit of shock but it honestly felt as though there was some other power pressing down on me through her hand, something grave and powerful but lacking any sinister intent. Pushing down to comfort me and render me into a state of submission, like the Forefinger of Allah in those graphic novels although this power seemed much more feminine. Pressing down to hold me steady and also to instruct me: Che stand down. For the moment there was just that clear commandment: Che you will stand down.
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