Today will be spent inside, under florescent lights, watching a disorganized, delusional, paranoid psychotic man strapped down to a bed.  I sit here and watch as he sleeps and breathes heavily, shifting occasionally, making the leather and metal from the cuffs on his wrists and ankles clank against the plastic base of the bed.  This man is forty-eight years old, worn and weathered by time and hardship.  His red hair is long, coarse, curly and unwashed; his skin pale and freckled, still laden with the remnants of pepper spray six policemen used to take him down last week.  He remains as an unknown.  Without a cohesive narrative, this man’s background is ambiguous.  Originally detained for “illegal camping”, it was later discovered that the man had formerly been an illegal arms dealer known by at least five different aliases.  Now the FBI is on his case.  So I sit here, watch him breathe, rant, urinate, eat and sleep for the next twelve hours.

 I sit here in this 8x8 beige room, with restraints and other safety paraphernalia strewn about the concrete floor.  I am prepared, although sleep deprived; my contacts suction-cupped to my corneas, blood feeling like 50% caffeine, stomach insatiable, and guilt invading my thoughts every few minutes over the two-and-a-half Krispy Kreme doughnuts I have already consumed today.  The man is lying still, snoring quietly approximately fifteen feet to my right in an adjacent seclusion room while I proceed to watch back-to-back episodes of Weeds, read various novels, listen to Jay Reatard scream and croon, all the while documenting the man’s behavior every fifteen minutes.  I am compensated approximately $19.88 an hour to sit here, ask if he needs anything, and attempt to take his vital signs every four hours.  Of course this man wants absolutely nothing to do with me or any other living, breathing human being, and I him.  Thus, it works out perfectly for both of us.  Occasionally he’ll turn his head and look at me for a few seconds and I’ll look back.  We both say nothing.  We just stare.  We stare without expression, without gesture, without emotion.  He turns his head back to its default position and quietly falls back to sleep.

 However, there was one notable moment when he actually acknowledged my existence by shouting, “Soon all of the Northwest will be nuked!  Seattle, Bothell, Tacoma, Everett, Marysville… all of the cities, nuked! There will be nothing left but rubble.” He then turns his head slowly, as stoically as possible, points at me, makes the shape of pistols with his two gnarly bear-claw hands and yells, “Boom! Boom! Boom!” He shoots his finger pistols at me, “Boom! Boom!  You’re dead! You’re nuked!”

 Meanwhile out on the unit, a young woman of Amazonian stature is removing all of her clothing and fondling her breasts in front of the other patients who are merely attempting to watch Space Camp on the 24-inch television bolted to the wall.  She is no doubt escorted down to the second seclusion room and watched through a real-time feed running in our nurse’s station.  Merely an hour later I am beckoned to assist in a take-down of a young Borderline Personality Disordered seasoned veteran who is threatening to “beat the fucking shit out of” and “punch you in the fucking face, dickhead!”  She runs to the bathroom where she refuses to cooperate, forcing us to wrestle her to the soap-scum sheathed and mildewed tile floor in order to shackle her up.  She is angry and sweating, kicking and screaming.  We eventually strap her to a gurney in the shared day area because we have run out of seclusion rooms.

This is all in a day’s work.  I exit the building and a heavy, adrenaline-filled weight is lifted off of my shoulders.  That crisp autumn smell fills my lungs as I lean against a birch tree, its yellow leaves falling and dripping remnants of rainwater on my eyelashes.  A co-worker and now close friend of mine is disappointed in our belated departure because he has officially missed the time at which he typically reads his son bedtime stories.  A strange and somewhat morose thought runs through my head, and in my exhaustion I actually utter it out loud: “at least you have someone important in your life that you can disappoint.”  I immediately felt awkward, not realizing what I actually had articulated until a few moments later.  Was this my dejected subconscious showing?  I immediately apologized, and then realized that I in fact did mean what I said.

 It would be nice to have someone around that I would try my hardest not to disappoint.  Someone that would be waiting at my apartment, someone to tell this story to without the bleak ending attached.  I suppose that right now, that person is you.