Blackhatgk's Home

Walking through the door into the blue and white reception area wasn’t something I had ever figured on doing before. Here I am though at the Lincoln Park Sanitarium being checked in by two armed guards. The police had picked me up only six hours before from wife and mine’s house on a domestic violence charge. Apparently all the screaming and yelling had woken up the neighbors and the sight of crystal figures flying through the window that had already been broken by the vase was cause to call in emergency help.

Neither my wife nor I had hit each other. We never do. We had just thrown things at each other to get our points across. It was how we always fought, loud and with heavy flying objects. This time though it just scared the neighbors more than usual and the police had decided that I was a threat to society and myself. Hence the baker act form they slide across the desk to the receptionist.

“Have you ever been admitted by force or self to an institution before?”
“Not in my wildest dreams”
“It is interesting that you use the word ‘Dreams’. It is part of our procedures that new admittances go through a virtual re-enactment, which is almost dream like without consequences, of the event that got them here”.
“I hope there’s nothing fragile for me to throw”.

An hour has passed and I am now sitting in a small room. I had to change my clothes into a silvery metallic spandex like jumpsuit. Not only does the spandex make me self conscious of having my crotch thrust out for everyone but it has small wires weaved into it that weave in and out of all the most irritating spots. On the table in front of me is a silver helmet with more wires coming out of the top than underneath the hood of my car.
The technician sitting at the desk to my side is finishing up a questionnaire about the incident in his computer.

“So your wife is 5’3”?
“Yeah, but don’t tell her that. She insists on adding at least 2 to that number.”
“Ok and we are going to go to the point where things became abnormal for you two. How about we choose the spot where you flung the vase through the front window.”

The technician reached across the table grabbed the silver helmet and strapped it to my head. He then proceeded to make a few last minute adjustments on the top of it, and flipped down two spoon shaped devices over my eyes that were apparently cameras or projectors of some sort as the whole world faded to pink.

Slowly, as if it was seeping through the edges, the living room came into view. The house was a mess, the mail had been scattered across the floor and the beef stroganoff was shuffled off the dining room table onto the floor of the dining room and the adjacent wall. There she was, standing next to the broken window, crying and screaming, of course I was unable to make out a word she was saying over her tears but I could tell she was mad. My heart was pounding so fast and hard I could barely breathe as if my arteries were choking me. Then it hit me. A flying copy of Stewarts guide to decorating hit me squarely in the head. I didn’t even have time to realize how much it hurt before I grabbed the crystal figures on the table and through them, not at the wife for I knew that would hurt her more than was worth fighting over, but out the window, knowing full well that it would hurt her just as much emotionally to throw them at her and out the window as if I had actually hit her.

I ducked her next attack and screamed out, “That fucking hurt.”
She was puzzled, as if she didn’t expect to hit me with that last book. “Why is it that every time I say something you don’t agree with you have to make a fight out of it” she replied.
“Cause you have no reason for your objection. You just said it to be mean.”
“Of course, anything I say has to be unreasonable, with no logic or meaning behind it cause I’m a woman. Same excuse you give every time.”
“You deny it? You just let your emotions and whims get in the way, you aren’t capable of having a reasonable conversation.”
“And you are? Throwing the vase your sister gave us through the window.”
“Don’t you see? I do this because of you…. For you.”
This is when the virtual reality simulation started to differ from real life as this is where the cops showed up. But in the simulation there were no cops so I turned around and grabbed the knife off of the kitchen counter. Ashleigh hit the ground crying when she saw the knife. I had no intention of hurting her though, I just wanted to show her how serious I was so I slid the knife across my stomach, slowly cutting away the flesh and opening the pocket beneath it. Finally the pain of the book hitting me in the head caught up and I had an immense headache. Good thing my pain response was 45 seconds behind reality or else I wouldn’t have been able to reach inside and pull out my entrails to put on display.
“This is what I do for you. I sacrifice myself every day in and out so you can be happy. I cut at my self and pull all that I am out for you to see so that you know that I did everything… Just to make you happy.”