Chapter Text
Efnisien had forty four books in his plain grey melamine bookshelf. He used to have more, but Dr Gary found out that he’d bought some more true crime books during his bad patches, and encouraged him to throw them out. Efnisien placed them all in a metal bin in a shitty park and set them alight and someone called the police and Efnisien was sectioned against his will for forty eight hours for being resistant to arrest. Dr Gary vouched for him, got him out and threatened to remand him back to Hillview if he didn’t ‘pull it together.’
Now, he obsessed about buying true crime books, because he knew he shouldn’t.
‘It’s still a de-escalated obsession,’ Dr Gary said. ‘Obsessing about buying true crime books for an hour isn’t obsessing about killing someone. That’s progress, Efnisien.’
Dr Gary was about the only person in the planet who could say that, and Efnisien would only scoff at him fifty percent of the time.
That’s progress, Efnisien.
Progress to what?
Efnisien sat at the cheapest IKEA table he could afford and stared into a room that had no windows and a grey couch. Efnisien didn’t care about colours – except red, the best colour, and he wasn’t supposed to own anything coloured red, not even a fucking pen – and he didn’t care about furniture. His parents had left him a decent stipend and he’d never touched it except to pay bond on his shitty apartment.
He worked four hours six days a week watching surveillance videos streaming to his computer on behalf of a big data company and fifteen hours a week transcribing academic lectures and recordings for one Professor, one Associate Professor, and one PhD student who could afford his rates. Dr Gary had found him the Associate Professor, and the rest of the work had come by word of mouth.
He thought about hurting animals intentionally multiple times a day, but never for more than a couple of minutes. Sometimes only a few seconds. He thought about killing the people he worked for even less. He thought about burning down the apartment building often.
He ate five times a day - or was meant to - because his stomach couldn’t handle large meals anymore. He ate porridge cooked with water when he remembered. He was careful with too much raw fibre. He forgot to eat all the time. If he thought about why he had to eat five meals a day, which was most days, he thought about shoving his fingers into his entrails like he’d done in the hospital after he’d been stabbed, and he splayed his hands across his belly and wished he could do it again.
It had been so visceral and soft and squishy, and it had hurt so fucking much. It had been the brightest thing in his life at the time. Like a flashlight in his eyes, but it was coming from his guts instead.
The nurses thought he’d been killing himself, and maybe he had been, because he wouldn’t have cared if he died. But he just wanted to know what it felt like to feel the wounds Crielle had made, to press his fingers in along the path of the knife, to hear the wet squelch and he’d press his hand to his belly and realise his breathing was getting shaky and he was getting aroused.
Dr Gary didn’t have him logging his intrusive thoughts because he had them too often. But he was meant to log when he had intrusive thoughts about hurting himself, hurting other people or animals for longer than five minutes.
Monday was bad. Efnisien owned forty four books and on the whiteboard tally sheet for the day on his fridge, he was up to fifty vicious, short little lines. At least four point one hours spent thinking about hurting himself, hurting others, hurting animals. Four point one six six six six six six recurring.
Six, six, six, six, six, six, Efnisien thought, blinking at the tally marks on the whiteboard. Six, six, six, six, six, six. On and on forever. Six, six, six, six, six, six. That’s what recurring meant.
Recurring like his intrusive thoughts. Exploding out of him into infinity. Unravelling like a ball of string with no end.
He knew it was a bad night.
He had forty four books.
Gwyn was supposed to see him today.
He was supposed to have forty five.
*
He turned his phone in his hands. He had a few numbers now. Work numbers. Dr Gary’s number. Gwyn’s number. Some takeout numbers. The bank. Hillview. He had numbers. It was four in the morning and he was supposed to try and get eight hours of sleep a night because eight hours was the base requirement for someone with Pure O, even though he didn’t strictly meet the requirements of Pure O because he’d stopped being afraid of most of his intrusive thoughts as a child.
Thanks, Crielle!
‘Normally,’ Dr Gary had said, when Efnisien was still an inpatient and recovering from his gut wounds, ‘we would do standard ERP with you, but Exposure and Response Prevention therapy is largely designed for people who haven’t acted on their intrusive thoughts. You have.’
‘Which means I don’t have what you think I have, shithead.’
Dr Gary stood up and Efnisien opened his mouth to apologise and then bit down on his tongue as Dr Gary placed a second tick next to Efnisien’s name. He didn’t really want to apologise. He just didn’t want the fucking punishment.
‘You get to verbally abuse me three times per session, before you’ve violated the agreed upon boundary between us. Today is the second violation and the fifth incident of verbal abuse. Do you want to talk about it?’
Shithead fuckface piece of shit asshole shit-stain faggot wanker.
Dr Gary sighed, and Efnisien stared ahead and knew one of his books would be taken from him. It wouldn’t be for long, and he could always choose which one, but he failed to see the importance of these petty games. For a moment, he imagined having Dr Gary bound in front of him, and then he imagined Dr Gary’s wrists and ankles chafing from ropes tied too tight, and he imagined picking a book and tearing out the pages slowly and stuffing them down Dr Gary’s throat as he choked, as he aspirated on his own fucking saliva, and one by one, Efnisien would just push pages down into his wet, dark-red gullet. One by one by one by one.
God.
‘This is the book I picked for you, Doc,’ Efnisien would say as the paper crinkled in his fist, as he lovingly placed it into Dr Gary’s mouth, packing down the other wadded pages. ‘Did I make a good choice?’
‘Are you having intrusive thoughts now, Efnisien?’ Dr Gary said.
Efnisien stared at him, feeling glassy and unafraid, which was how he knew he didn’t have the stupid disorder that Dr Gary thought he had. He knew because he’d looked up Pure O. He was supposed to be afraid of his intrusive thoughts, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t ever afraid of them. God he wanted it so badly. Dr Gary would probably be hot suffocating, drowning on the book he was going to force Efnisien to withhold from himself.
‘Efnisien, can you give me a number between one and ten?’
‘Eight,’ Efnisien choked out.
‘That’s good,’ Dr Gary said. ‘About you, me, or someone else?’
‘You.’
‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Dr Gary said. ‘You don’t like talking about this subject. Are you having the intrusive thought still?’
Efnisien nodded.
‘Okay, I’m not going to talk to you more today about why I think you have Pure O, since you’re quite sensitive to that discussion. And we can talk about the content of your intrusive thought in a moment. Let’s see. Where were we before that? Can I talk to you about the medications I want to trial you on?’
Efnisien thought about pills and he thought about Crielle breaking them open into Gwyn’s food and he thought about shared smiles and feeling warm inside and was suddenly so fucking tired.
‘Yeah, Doc,’ Efnisien said closing his eyes. ‘It’s your session.’
Three years had passed since then. Three years, and now Efnisien saw Dr Gary as an outpatient in his way nicer offices in the rich part of town like he didn’t slum it with the broken kids on a regular basis. Dr Gary one day said Efnisien was well enough to be discharged and Efnisien had actually asked him to not do that. And then they’d needed months of dealing with the fact that Efnisien didn’t want to leave the centre. It took a whole month of Efnisien threatening to kill someone so he could go to jail and Dr Gary just calmly staring at him before they actually made any progress on it.
And then Dr Gary turfed him into the real world and hooked him up with a transcription job and saw him once a week. Sometimes twice a week. In a much nicer office. Dr Gary didn’t even turn down the photo of his pet dog anymore when Efnisien was in the room. God. Fucking idiot.
Efnisien turned his phone in his hands and tried to remind himself what he was supposed to do when he was having a bad day.
Eight hours of sleep? Fail.
Stay hydrated? Who fucking cared about that? But whatever, he’d had water.
Had all his meals? Sure had. Stupid small meals that his guts still struggled with, he should’ve at least gotten one finger into an intestine if he’d had the chance to make all of this worth it. The pain was distracting at the time. But not that distracting. Fucking nurse. He could’ve killed her for stopping him. He wanted to.
Meditation? It made everything worse.
Meds? He took his meds. He was a perfectionist with his meds. If he took them a few minutes late, it stressed him out. Hilariously, that was apparently a symptom.
He reminded himself that he hadn’t acted on the majority of his intrusive thoughts since he’d started treatment, and that he’d de-escalated many of them and that Dr Gary had called him responsive and Efnisien knew he wasn’t supposed to need reassurance, he really wasn’t, but Dr Gary had called him responsive to treatment.
It was okay to have reassurance that was realistic. No one could tell him that he wasn’t going to hurt or kill or harm anyone. But he could be told he was responsive to treatment.
‘I’m responsive to treatment,’ he said.
He thought about the tally marks on the whiteboard and about Gwyn’s text message saying that Augus was sick with the flu and he had to take care of him so he couldn’t come visit and he hated that it had been years since Gwyn had been a regular part of his life and sometimes it felt like Gwyn was the most intrusive thought of all.
He was supposed to have another book. That was all. Just one more book.
Dr Gary would say these days, his intrusive thoughts masked what he was really afraid of.
‘Shithead,’ Efnisien muttered, knees up to his chest and one arm wrapped around them as he turned his phone in his hand over and over again and scrolled between Dr Gary’s number and Gwyn’s.
Whatever.
Whatever.
He wondered where Crielle was and what she was doing. Probably killing people.
‘Lucky bitch,’ he muttered.
*
Morning, and Efnisien made porridge with water and waited for the microwave to beep and then ate it with a dull spoon, while standing. His eyes felt scratchy. His computer waited for him. He’d had a laptop at first, but then he’d saved up for a decent desktop with a good mechanical switch keyboard, and that had boosted his typing speed to nearly one hundred and seventy words per minute with a ninety nine percent accuracy and that meant he could charge more. Now he used the laptop or the desktop depending on his mood.
He had some games installed. Mostly things that allowed him to kill people and animals and sometimes even his own character. He didn’t care about the names or titles of the games, he looked for things that people wanted banned, he looked for the games that weren’t supposed to exist and he bought them.
Dr Gary said that was de-escalating too. Doing it on the screen, instead of hurting real people. But Dr Gary wanted him to de-escalate further. Efnisien was meant to find some games that didn’t primarily reward violence.
The overhead bare bulb turned everything stark, and hid the fact that it was morning and the light outside was probably soft. Efnisien tucked a lock of blond hair behind his ear and he thought maybe, for once, he should go outside when he didn’t have a medical appointment or desperately need to get toilet paper from the shops because he forgot to pay attention to what his apartment was supposed to have inside it.
Dr Gary would call it progress.
‘Dr Gary can suck my dick,’ Efnisien muttered as he ran water into the empty bowl. His guts churned. He imagined all the scar tissue in there, adhesions, and stared at the tally board. It was morning and he’d already wiped it fresh. He did not want to be putting a tally on there already. He hated it. The tallies made him feel like he was failing. He knew that was why Dr Gary made him put them up. Hooking into Efnisien’s perfectionism and need to have good grades, and using that against him.
Three years since the woman he loved stabbed him and the guy he loved went off with someone else to live some kind of happily ever after bullshit. Three years.
Shame they were both family members, but Efnisien figured if he was going to be a fuck up, he might as well add some incest in there too.
After a while he grabbed his apartment keys – key for the apartment, key for the door to the stairs, and that was it, because Efnisien didn’t drive, and no one else would trust him with a key – and pulled his shoes on and let himself out without trying to overthink it. He definitely wasn’t going to think about all the people he could kill and torture that he might see. God forbid he saw a cute Labrador puppy. Not that he’d done anything in years.
Three years. Dr Gary would call it progress.
Technically, he could have forty five books if he bought another one himself. That was allowed. Just because it felt like a rule that Gwyn had to buy them for him, as a sign Efnisien existed in someone’s life aside from Dr Gary’s, didn’t mean that Efnisien couldn’t buy one for himself.
He was right, the morning light was soft, and Efnisien stopped dead beneath the sky and thought, bewildered, that maybe he’d forgotten what morning felt like.