Dark Heights - A Serial Novel with Music
  • Home
  • Part Two
    • 2,1 - Jason
  • About Dark Heights
  • Author's Notes
  • The Music
  • Charlie Mill's Map
  • Synopsis, Part One
  • Nightfall

1,8 - kevin

     Something strange is going on at the Wellness Centre.  It’s not a normal place, not at all—for starters there’s the sinister British spelling of the word Centre—but something else is happening, something beyond the everyday weirdness you get accustomed to if you spend some time here, which, if you do, it means you’re not so normal yourself.  For example, I go to the Centre four times a week: twice for my transcendental meditation class; twice for therapy.  That’s right, there’s actually an array of legitimate doctors and psychiatrists that co-exist here alongside the Eastern, Holistic, Alternative, and straight-up Bonkers health practitioners that compose the whole of the Wellness Centre.  And I can say “bonkers” with some love.  I’ve tried a lot of things to manage my depression.  I should capitalize that.  Depression.  The big D.  Flanked by its small-d minions, my low-grade disorders—anxiety of course, and there’s a brief catalog of compulsions that come and go as they please through my head.  I’ve run through the available roster of treatments both traditional and esoteric, most of it useless for me, until I hit on my current mix-tape of meditation and psychiatry, which works, or it mostly works, or it works for now.
     The disorders are what I inherited from my father, who had an OCD army of them, was more or less ruled by them, until he died.  The depression, well in a way I got that from him too; at least, I’ve been diagnosed with it since he killed himself when I was Fifteen.
     The Wellness Centre occupies a surprisingly large complex right at the base of Park Heights where Beech Boulevard terminates at the extreme western end of Sunset Boulevard.  I’m not sure if the Centre is actually still in the municipality of Park Heights or is technically in the sprawl of L.A. or Santa Monica or whatever.  There’s a concrete wall around the grounds and there’s a gatehouse: both are neglected, disused.  The gatehouse has a lifted barricade that looks like it will never swing down again and blacked-out windows behind which someone might have been watching, decades ago.  Here and there, rebar juts out from the low cement wall like exposed bone and there’s graffiti over a lot of it—I think I saw a Class of ‘77 tag once when I was walking around out there, smoking a cigarette.
     The whole place used to be a movie studio lot, a long time ago.  My history of it isn’t great, I think this was in the silent film era—a producer and millionaire, Sangster Quence, built up the grounds, yes I remember now—it was called Quenceland—there’s some photos of it in a display case by the front reception desk.  Then Sangster Quence disappeared or something, his empire fell apart, and the buildings remained derelict for a few decades until the California Department of Public Health bought it and converted it into some kind of asylum—yeah, creepy, I know—which didn’t last that long either, I heard there were deaths and abuses, though who knows what’s urban myth and what’s not.  Then the private holistic health consortium that now runs the Wellness Centre bought the place and the weird practices moved in and that’s where we are now.      Why did I start to realize that something troubling was occurring at the Centre?  It was because of Tess’s mom, Barbara.  I saw her going out the door at the back of D Wing—that’s the main building across from the parking lot, where the doctors’ offices and x-ray rooms and blood labs are situated—and out of curiosity, I followed her to the door and watched her through the window in it.  She hurried across the strip of brown and yellow dead grass that separates D Wing from a long, single-story outlying building I had never been inside or ever thought much about.  Right before she entered that long, low building, she turned and glanced around furtively, as if she was hoping no-one was watching, though in fact I was watching.
     At that moment I didn’t particularly care.  I had just come out of an appointment with Dr. Carey, my shrink, and I was in a peculiar headspace of my own.  It was just chance: Tess’s mom went right past me without really seeing me, opened the back door and slipped through it and went out to the other building.
     A few weeks later I was at the reception desk talking to Nasrin about my appointment schedule with Dr. Carey.  Nasrin is the well-loved main receptionist of the Wellness Centre.  She uncomplainingly does the work of three or four people, I think they’re always trying to hire additional receptionists and they never work out, and it kind of seems like Nasrin has always been there and always will be.  She’s a master of the art of putting you in your place with a sweetness that makes you thank her for the verbal slap in the face.
     “Love your hijab today,” I said to her.  She was hearing a sky-blue headscarf with a repeated pattern of iridescent butterflies that, frankly, hurt the eyes to look at. 
     “Instead of fake flattery,” she said, “you could just tell me what you need,” not looking up from her desktop PC where I’ll bet there were multiple open files she had to complete a few hours’ work on in the next ten minutes.
     “Right,” I said, “you’re right, I do need to make a change to next week’s Friday with Dr. Carey.”
     She sighed but she looked up at me with a worn, wan smile that still had warmth in it.  “Let me guess, you’ve got a show that night.”  This was almost always my reason to change appointments: I do the sound for the band White Mask, and yes they had a show at the Zenith, the club in L.A. where they often play.
     “Yeah,” I said, “I gotta be out at the club in the afternoon to check the levels, but I could do a morning appointment no problem.”
     It was then that someone else who worked at the Wellness Centre, I don’t know her name, an older lady who sometimes fills in for Nasrin at reception, appeared next to me, clutching a yellow, legal-sized piece of carbon copy, which she slammed down onto the reception desk, then whirled away and went at full speed back down the hall from where she had materialized.  Nasrin looked at the carbon copy as if it was a poisonous spider.
     “What’s that?” I said.
     Nasrin’s scowl was profound.  “It’s another request from 101 Wing.”
     “Where’s 101 Wing?”
     Nasrin gestured vaguely to her right.  “Over there.  It’s the building across the dead grass.”
     I recalled that I had seen Tess’s mom more or less sneaking over to that building.  “What do they want?”
     “There’s a Men’s Health Group that uses the gym in 101 Wing,” Nasrin said, “for drumming sessions and tribal dances and that kind of thing.  But the Circle keeps requesting that we relocate the Men’s Group into the gym in the Youth Wing.  And management keeps telling them no and the Circle keeps on re-filing the request.”
     “Sounds annoying.  What’s the Circle?”
     “They’ve pretty much taken over 101 Wing, except for this feud with the Men’s Group.”
     “But what is it, the Circle?”
     Nasrin looked up again from the screen of her computer.  “I don’t know, actually.  I assume it’s some healing or recovery group.”
     On Tuesdays my appointments with Dr. Carey end about an hour before my meditation classes begin, giving me some time to kill.  Usually I walk around the Wellness Centre complex, sometimes lighting up a forbidden cigarette out behind one of the buildings or out where the crumbling wall continues to lose its war against encroaching weeds the size of small children.  Maybe I was bored.  I found myself around the back of the 101 Wing building.  I must have been thinking of my conversation with Nasrin as I went to the door that I’d seen Tess’s mom going into.  I pulled on the handles.  It was locked.  I looked through the window in the door.  It was lined with the criss-crossing wire mesh you find on the windows in the doors of all institutions—schools, hospitals, police stations—to reinforce an idea of security or privacy.  All I could see through this window was a dimly-lit, empty hallway inside the building, closed doors staggered down either side of it.
     I went around to the front of the building.  The doors here were the same as all of the front entrances in the Centre complex, a set of double doors with a push-bar set at the height of your elbows.  I pushed on the door to the right but the bar didn’t budge.
Picture

     Then I saw there was a piece of white paper taped up to the glass inside the left-hand door.  On the paper, in thick black Sharpie, someone had drawn a perfectly-round letter O in what looked like the exact center of the paper.
     O.  The Circle.
     “Hi,” a voice said from behind me.  I’ll admit that I jumped about three feet in the air.  When my heart-rate slowed to a non-lethal pace, I turned and saw there was a girl, maybe eleven or twelve years old, standing there, looking at me impassively.  Her dark hair was dyed with two bright blue streaks in it, running from either temple back into a blue-black pony tail.
     “Uh, hello?” I said.
     She laughed a little.  “I think I scared you, sorry.”
     “That’s okay.”
     “Are you going in?” she asked.
     “Maybe,” I said.
     “Oh,” she said.  “I was wondering because it doesn’t look like you’re ready.”  She went past me suddenly and pushed on the bar in the left-side door, which opened.  She went into the gap between the edge of the door and its frame and turned to regard me.  She bit her lip.  “Yeah I’m pretty sure you’re not ready yet.”
     “What are you talking about?”
     “For the Circle.”
     “I’m not ready for it?”
     “Probably not.”
     “In what way would I not be ready for the Circle?”
     She laughed, covering her mouth with one hand, as if I had told an incredibly inappropriate joke.  “Exactly,” she said after recovering from her giggles.  “That’s exactly what I mean.  Okay I’m going to lock this behind me now.”  She disappeared into the building and the door clicked shut behind her.
     I stood outside for a moment or two.  I was experiencing a powerful, uncanny feeling that it was better to walk away from this, forget about 101 Wing altogether, just leave it alone.  
     I tried the door.  It was locked.
     I asked Dr. Carey about the Circle at my next appointment with her, but she didn’t know anything about it at all, had never even heard of it, and honestly I didn’t want to talk about it with her in case she decided I was lapsing into paranoid schizophrenia or something.  Though it might have made a welcome break from us talking about Frantz and why I was in denial about being in love with Frantz and did I love him as a friend or did I want him, body and soul, I don’t know.
     I was joking about the paranoid schizophrenia, however, I do have my obsessions.  Well technically, like I said before, they’re compulsions.  All of them tied into me not being able to cope with my anxiety, so I’m told.  One of them has really defined me, defined my life.  Melomania.  Even the word itself is musical.  I go through weeks where the only thing I do, the only thing I want to do, is listen to music.  And I listen to music at the exclusion of everything else, including sleeping and eating, so it’s not all that healthy for me.  The upside of it is that I’ve been able to channel this extreme focus into the beginnings of some kind of career in music.  Working with Frantz and his band, White Mask.  I’ve started working with a new dream pop duo, Tryst, they’re fine-tuning some songs and we’re going to record their first album soon. 
     That’s melomania, which I’ve got some kind of handle on.  Or I tell myself I do.  When I was younger I really struggled with two compulsions that made things difficult for me.  Haptemania.  Needing to be touched.  The only thing I could think about, until it actually happened, was physical contact with another person.  If someone reached out and put their hand on my arm, it was blissful—Tess would do this for me, a lot, later on—but until that happened I would have to bump into people, brush past them, fall against them.  And then there was the worst one.  Philematomania.  It hit me in between the rounds of haptemania.  I don’t even want to talk about what it is, it’s so ridiculous.  But I suffered from it.  It was real.  Philematomania: the compulsion to kiss.  It was at its worst during a conversation.  I would be talking to someone, anyone, and then I could no longer follow what was being said because it was suddenly a desperate thing not to lose control and zoom in at them, attempting to make out with them.  Even I can see the humor in it, now.  But it wasn’t funny at all when I was in junior high and high school.  No it wasn’t.
     It’s why transcendental meditation has worked so well for me.  There’s a freedom from being controlled by my thoughts that I only ever feel when I can achieve that state—through focus, through meditation—that deeper trance-state, where there’s nothing at all, where I’m not there.  It’s heaven.
     I found I couldn’t ignore the Circle.  I’m not sure if I wanted to see what was inside that building across the dead grass, or if I felt the not-rightness of it all, the something-wrong itch between the shoulder blades that wouldn’t go away.  I’m not usually curious.  I keep to myself.  My fleet of bizarre behaviors leads me to spend a lot of time in my bed, to be honest, with headphones on and the sound turned way, way up.
     What was going on in that building?  What was the Circle?
     I had to know.
     I planned my next approach to the back door of 101 Wing for the next spare hour that fell between Dr Carey and the meditation.  I figured it was usual for me to be out wandering the grounds of the Centre, at least I’d been doing it for months now and no-one had bothered me about it.  I wasn’t sure if there were cameras outside the buildings, nothing obvious anyway, but I had to dismiss that thought—not sure who would be watching me on camera, there was a security guard at the front reception on some days but he only ever seemed to leave his chair to go get Subway at noon.
     Tess’s mom was, by this point, sneaking into 101 Wing pretty regularly.  The back door that she used was locked before she used it, I checked, and locked afterward, which meant that someone inside was unlocking it at just the right time for her to have access. 
     I would follow her.  I’d put my foot in the door behind her, silently.  Slip in after her.  See what there was to see.
     Except it didn’t happen like that at all.  As I left Dr. Carey’s office, intending to shadow Tess’s mom from one building to the next—or no, I thought of something better, I would get out across the dead grass first, before she did, hide around the corner of the side of 101 Wing and wait for her—I quite literally ran right into Dr. Carey’s next appointment.  He was walking up the hall with his head down, reading a book—who does that anyway, reading while walking—and he didn’t see me at all.
     “Sorry,” I said as he said, “Hey watch it.”
     Did I know him?  He looked like someone else.
     “You’re Kevin Cho,” he said then.
      “I guess so,” I said.
     When he smiled I knew who it was.  The same lopsided, smug, know-it-all, smirking grin—it was almost shocking how much they looked like each other.  He held out his hand.  “I’m Will.  You got drunk with my sister Linna the other night.”
     We shook hands.  “Is she still hung over?” I said.
     Will laughed.  “Probably.”
     “Well I should get going,” I said in a rush.
     “Hold on a second.  I wanted to ask you something.”
     “I don’t really have time at the moment.”  I got past him and was making my way toward the back of D Wing.  
     “About Tess.”  I stopped and turned back.  He said, “Linna told me you’re good friends with her.”
     “Sure,” I shrugged.  Will looked down at the floor for a split second—I think he was genuinely shy, gathering up some courage.  “Ask away,” I said.
     “Well she seems great.”  Will swallowed, tried different words.  “She’s beautiful.  I mean.  Wow.  I was just wondering if she’s single.”
     I shrugged.  “Yeah, I think so.”
     “Okay,” Will nodded.  “Okay.  Great.”
     “Are you headed in to see Dr. Carey?” I asked.
     “What?”
     “Dr. Carey, that’s her office.”
     “Oh, no.  Not like that.”  Will realized at once that I had just come out of her office.  He was quick.  “She’s not my doctor, I mean, if I had a doctor.  No, she’s on the planning committee for the Wellness Centre’s fundraising gala, which is at my house, and I have to get her to sign something, I don’t even know what it is, it’s really stupid that I have to do this actually.”  Will gazed around at the institutional pale green-brown colors of the walls of the Centre.  “I’ve never been in here before.  It’s kind of… unnerving.”
     “You get used to it,” I said.
     “I guess.”
     “I do have to get going though,” I said.
     “Of course.  Nice to meet you, Kevin,” he said courteously.
     “You too.”
     I moved as quickly as I could to the back door of D Wing.  Damn, I thought, no sign of Tess’s mom, she had probably already gone in to 101 Wing in the time I’d wasted talking to Will Severand.  Just in case I hadn’t missed her, I went over to 101 Wing myself, and looked in through the window in the locked door.
     This time, the hallway inside the building was full of people.  I saw Tess’s mom there among the others, all of them lined-up and waiting outside one of the doors down the hall.  As I watched, the door opened and one person went in, alone, and the queue of people shuffled forward.
     Then I saw Charlie Mill.
     He was there, in the line-up, with his Aunt.  His hands were resting on her shoulders; it looked like he was comforting her.  
     The front of his luchador mask, the holes for his eyes, turned slowly toward me.  He knew I was there at the window, watching.  
     He shook his head, deliberately, decisively, so that I would understand.
     Get away from here.


     Before I was friends with Tess I was friends with Charlie Mill.  My mom never really approved of our friendship but she tolerated it, mostly, I think, because she felt sorry for him.  I overheard her talking to my dad once—they were in the kitchen and I was playing video games on the TV in the living-room—about Charlie Mill, about his family, his Aunt and Uncle, how she didn’t want me going over to their house.
     We were Freshmen at Palisades Charter High, and we were Parkies, Charlie Mill and I and Tess and a few others.  Parkies were the lowest caste in a complex descending order of social hierarchy that started somewhere at the top with sons and daughters of famous people and trickled down through wealth, athletics, attractiveness, coolness, into the abject lack of all of those things, then into us—at the bottom, all of us from Park Heights.  Being a Parkie defeated all those other categories: for sure Tess could have checked a lot of the boxes I just mentioned except for the fact that she was one of us.
     Though she wasn’t, not really.  She was apart.  This was before we spent all our time together, before my father died, before Charlie Mill stopped coming to school.  All I knew about Tess at that time was that she took acting classes at the Arts Nexus in Park Heights, and sometimes at places in L.A.  Halfway through Sophomore year I saw her in a production of Twelfth Night that the drama kids put on.  She was amazing.
     Even though I was only Fourteen I had an after-school job that my mom had arranged for me with Gary Cooper at the Evergreen Motel, which was down the street from our house.  I did a lot of boring things for the motel, including being a bellhop if I was there and guests were checking in; I unloaded boxes from delivery vans; I kept the fireplaces in the rooms clean and the sticks of wood well-stocked on their ironwork racks.  I think Gary Cooper just created things for me to do and then paid me, probably out of fear of my mom—she has a way of getting what she wants without compromise.
     It was a day at school I wanted badly to forget about.  Charlie Mill and I biked back to Park Heights, me on my mountain bike and Charlie Mill on his kid’s BMX which he refused to give up.  We didn’t go right home.  I had a key to the rooms in the motel, and sometimes we slipped into one of them, if one of them was unoccupied, which was pretty much a guarantee.  It was easy to do.  Gary Cooper rarely left his office and his wife rarely left their house.  The maids knew me and didn’t care at all what I did as long as I stayed out of their way.
     We had an old Playstation stashed in the woods outside the motel, wrapped in more than one garbage bag, and we collected it before going into the room.  Sometimes we had bags of chips or licorice; sometimes we had Super Big Gulps; on this day we had Junior Mints.  We plugged the console into the out-of-date TV, pressed the Start button, and the rest of the world receded, for a time.  For both of us, I think, having a room to ourselves was like having a fort in the trees or an attic space in a house.  It was ours.  It was great.  We played through Final Fantasy VII so many times I could quote you lines of dialog from the game.
     Charlie Mill and I didn’t talk about what had happened at school.  I was on the floor next to the Playstation and he was stretched-out on the bed, scratching with a pencil in his book of graph paper, where he made maps.  He never stopped drawing maps of imaginary places.  I thought it might have been a compulsion for him like my needing to be touched—but we didn’t talk about the things we did or how we were weird or why.
     What had happened at school had happened after Gym class, in the locker room.  Typical, but there you go, sometimes things happen exactly the way you expect them to.  Some of the guys, I won’t bother to say their names, always called me Choke.  “Hey Choke,” they might say, “I heard your Dad crashed his car again, fucking Chinese drivers.”  “Hey Choke, how many GIs did your Dad kill in ‘Nam?”  
     You know what’s weird, after my dad died all their talk turned toward my mom.  “Hey Choke, how much is your mom going for these days, I heard she love you longtime, fifteen dollar, me so horny, too beacoup.”  Such idiots.
     Well the inevitable finally happened.  The head dickwad of the crew that always called me Choke had decided to push me around a little.  It was something that felt like a ritual, like his heart wasn’t in it but he had to do it and I had to just take it and soon it would be over and we’d forget it ever happened.  Except that, right in the middle of it, right after he had placed his hand on my chest and shoved me back into the lockers, as soon as he took the hand away—I kissed him.
     So now I had bruises all over my stomach and back and abdomen from being pummeled.  There were tears in my eyes.  I was riding a Chocobo through North Corel on the TV in the hotel room as the Playstation whirred at my feet, the controller in my hands.  Charlie Mill showed me the map of Gaia, the world of Final Fantasy VII, that he had just finished drafting.  It looked awesome.
     We heard his Uncle’s voice outside the room.  “Where is he?  In here?”  Then the door flew open.
     Charlie Mill and I didn’t talk about it, but when he was little, his mom had been a single parent and had been into drugs, or so I had pieced together from what I had heard about it.  And then she was suddenly gone and she’d left him to her own mom and dad, who were old and who didn’t want him, and so his mom’s sister took custody, Charlie Mill’s Aunt.  She was a nervous lady who had married young and her husband never left the house.  My mom had said he was probably an alcoholic and finally I was not allowed to go there, though the few times I had been over there I hadn’t even seen him, and Charlie Mill’s Aunt was sweet and pretty, I thought, and she’d made us sandwiches.
     Charlie’s Uncle stood in the doorway.  He looked at us.  His red face was damp with sweat.
     “I fucking knew it,” he said softly.
Then he came into the room and hit Charlie across the face with the back of his hand.  Gary Cooper was right behind him, in the doorway.  “Terry, Jesus,” he said to Charlie’s Uncle, “what are you doing!”
     “Did you know your little Chinaman worker was a ladyboy?” he snarled back at Gary Cooper.  “Come on, you,” he barked at Charlie.
     He grabbed Charlie’s arm and dragged him off the bed.  It took a few steps before Charlie found his footing—his shoes scuffed the rug as his feet tripped and stumbled, his arm in his Uncle’s grip pulled out straight at a bad angle.  Charlie made little sounds, little whimpers of pain.
     And they were gone.  Gary Cooper stood there, blinking, speechless.
     Charlie’s book of graph paper had fallen off the bed and lay open on the floor next to me, where I still sat with a Playstation controller in one hand.  I looked into the book.  He had drawn a map of one of his fantasy worlds, a world that didn’t exist, that he’d made up out of nothing.  I saw that he had written, beneath the drawing of a castle, a few words.
     Distant Kingdom.  At peace, at last, after many years of bloodshed, violence, and suffering.


                                                                                                                             © 2016 by C.D. Miller
read the next chapter
leave a comment
Picture
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Part Two
    • 2,1 - Jason
  • About Dark Heights
  • Author's Notes
  • The Music
  • Charlie Mill's Map
  • Synopsis, Part One
  • Nightfall