making of a monster

The bureaucracy is not a thing you can see, not like a wall you might climb or a river you might swim. It is a atmosphere, a gray and all-enveloping humidity that settles into the lungs and the soul, until a man forgets what it was to breathe clean air. I had problems, yes. The sort of problems that require a man to stand before his fellows and ask for grace. But they were not in the business of grace. They were in the business of filing, and I was a variable that would not fit the requisite column.

They did not listen. To listen is to take on the burden of another man’s truth, and they had burdens enough of their own, mostly the burden of maintaining the smooth, indifferent machinery of the institution. I spoke of pain, of the need for the medicine that might quiet the rattling in my mind. They heard only noise. They heard an interruption to the afternoon's schedule.

When I pressed my case, when the desperation rose in me like floodwater, they found the solution not in compassion, but in definition. They redefined my need as aggression. They called my plea for salvation an act of abuse against the very structure meant to save. It is a terrible thing when the word for your suffering is twisted into the accusation of your guilt.

It was then they decide I was the problem. Not the sickness, not the lack of care, but me—the breathing, suffering entity before them. They moved with the terrifying, efficient collective will of men who have absolute authority and zero responsibility.

The spit hood came down. It is a sudden, stinking eclipse. You are alone then, truly alone, sealed inside the hot, damp tomb of your own breath. The world becomes a shadow play seen through a mesh screen, and your voice, which once sought understanding, now only echo back to you, muffled and wet.

Then the straps. The heavy canvas and iron necessity that binds a man down, not just physically, but morally. To be strapped to a gurney is to be reduced to the status of meat. It is the ritual of stripping a man of his final property: his dignity. They tightened the buckles with an easy, practiced contempt, the sort of contempt a man has for a tool that won't work or a beast that won't drive.

They denied me the medicine. They buried me in the paperwork of my own incarceration. I lay there in the sterile glare of the fluorescent lights, listening to the Scratch of their pens on clipboards, which was the sound of my doom being finalized. They had won. The system had won. It had protected itself from the inconvenient truth of my need by making me a monster.