Pinch Point

The chair screeches on the hard floor and clatters over backwards as he reaches over the metal table and takes hold of my throat. I start at the instant flood of adrenaline the sudden sound provokes but it takes a moment or two longer to realise what’s going on: that he’s intending to throttle me.

I stare at him, wide eyed. I’d already noted, during the early parts of the interview, his bald head, the ring in one ear, the subtle sneer curled into the thin upper lip, the tattoo of a knife on his neck, and I’d thought how silly to put a tattoo where, if you ever didn’t want it, it couldn’t be hidden unless behind a scarf or something, but that would be impractical in summer, and I was bored, another psychopath facing another charge, and now I see his grey eyes through round rims I didn’t seem to notice before, cold eyes but eyes that nevertheless needed help. I feel stupid. I could never have trusted him, would never, but I think I would have wanted to like him. Not as much as I wanted him to like me though. I always thought, being an expert in humility, there was safety in subservience. I feel my eyebrows rise, as if with indignity - what a way to repay my efforts to assist him! My mouth starts to open, as if to give voice to my rushing thoughts: “Fool! You’ll never get away with this. Treating a professional in such a a way. Just who d’you think you are?” But I can no longer hold his dispassionate gaze. I can no longer stare at him, for it’s the same as staring at death. It hurts my eyes … like trying to look at the sun. 

Look inwards then! Think man!! What was I taught in mandatory health and safety training? Adopt a conciliatory approach. Maintain an open posture. Do not hesitate to call for assistance if you feel threatened in any way. Okidoki: call for assistance: but it’s a tiny gasp, a croak as the last of the air in my pharynx gurgles to the back of my mouth. Pathetic. That may no longer be an issue, however, as I can hear anxious shouts outside the cell. Maybe things are going to be alright. Yeah, of course they’re going to be alright. It’s unconscionable that anything could happen to me. 

My distended eyes swivel slightly towards the cell door, as if to cry “hurry up, bloody dozy screws.” He seems to have caught me near the bottom of a breath. Maybe it was at the end of a long sentence. I admit I tend to use long sentences. People glaze over half way through them. But none of them have ever been as long as the one he’s facing now. I want so much to take a breath, a big, deep, satisfying breath. But I can’t. My chest, hungry for air, starts to expand and contract with respiratory effort, like a fish gulping on a quay. It momentarily occurs to me that I’ve taken breathing for granted: all those precious breaths, so easy when I could. Maybe I’ve taken everything for granted. Turn back … please.

Involuntary survival mechanisms kick in. Although aware it will waste the last vestiges of oxygen in the system, I can’t help the panic and I succumb to it and start thrashing around with my arms and legs. I sense I make a connection with something. Maybe his knee? He clambers onto the table and kneels on it without loosening his grip on my throat. The computer I was using to make my notes crashes to the floor, dragging the keyboard with it. The fear intensifies and I frantically flail my arms, slapping up towards his face until I imagine his glasses are comically hanging from one ear. At the same time I try to dig my heels into the floor but it’s slippery and I have no purchase to thrust myself back and away from him. From somewhere inside my head I hear more shouting and keys jangling, but it feels unreal, as if from another world that I no longer inhabit. I gawp at his blue tee shirt, standard issue on the remand wing, and notice hair sticking out of its neck. Funny peculiar he should have hair there and not on his head. At the moment it’s all I can see. Tunnel vision, yes, vaguely recall that can happen in conditions of stress … stupid little word.

My eyes and tongue are trying to come out of me: everything is bulging, extruding, herniating into tiny holes and tubes that aren’t nearly big enough. I have a fleeting image of a homunculus, a tiny man with lips and eyes and tongue grotesquely enlarged to reflect the amount of cerebral cortex assigned to them. Dying cortex. Dying? This isn’t happening. It’s happening. His thumbs press on my cricoid. They feel experienced. He did it. He must have. Pity’s sake, he was perfectly fit to plead. I had a plan, seems like hours ago, to use my arms and legs to push him away, but everything’s exhausted and I have to stop, stay still, let my arms hang down somewhere by my sides. The pressure inside my head is unbearable, like being stuck in the neck of an hourglass, my distorted face pressed up against the inside of the bubble, unable to draw breath, choking. Vision is dimming and for a moment I think I can see two green lit emergency exit signs drifting apart, then they’re gone. There’s a buzzer alarm sounding, and more shouting, and clanking of metal and echoing squeaks of trainers on the floor, far away, like squash courts at school. I’m here but not here, being me no longer distinguishable from not being me. There’s music somewhere … everybody’s got to learn some time … dancing at dawn on a library podium, in love with a stranger; pipe organs and nursery rhymes; a sitar meandering across orangey glints of holy water; sound baths and songs that I held close to me, songs that said I wasn’t alone, that I was never alone.

I'm beginning to feel detached. There’s a rushing sound, like a gust of wind rustling autumn leaves, and I am vaguely aware of grip going; I still can’t breathe, but with almost imperceptible surprise I discover I no longer want to, no longer need to. The fear is going. A sense of peace is here, longed for, longed for for far longer than can be retrieved. Things that mattered no longer seem to. Now watching from away, or above, maybe, four guards toppling the inmate from the table, but he's still gripping my neck with one hand, fingers and thumb occluding the carotid arteries, and everyone crashes silently to the floor, mouthing shouts and screams in the close distance, the serene violence framed in beams of occipital light, like cold sun flashing through pattering blinds into a disused room, dust dancing in shafts of exquisite clarity that see the Portable Appliance Test sticker on the side of the smashed computer is out of date by eleven months and four days; a patch of wetness osmosing across suit trousers at a rate of nine millimetres per minute; nicotine stains from fifteen point seven pack-years on one of the guard’s fingers; another’s nails bitten down to stubs with incipient paronychia in the distal phalanx of the left middle finger. A feeling of sorrow rises up in the fullness. Sorrow for him, the victim, but also for the attacker, for he is a victim too, and the guards, hurt as they must be, or will be, by their reluctant involvement in all of this. Grief unfolds for this melee of uncertainty, blame, horror and desperation; it is undignified: not commensurate at all with what they are capable of. One of the guards is giving the kiss of life but doesn’t have the neck extended enough and the tongue is in the way. He cannot be told. Another one pushes rhythmically on the chest, too slowly for maximum effect. The jerking body begins to leak smoke, faint blue plumes coming out of its fingers, wispy puffs, with each compression, from underneath the collar of the shirt, from between its buttons, winding their way around the crooked tie. 

And it is wondered, then, into the room: will this struggle go on until it is accepted that nothing between adults is ever one-sided? This man, with his glasses now flung aside and shattered against the grills, one of his arms bent at an unnatural angle, is he otherwise wounded? The opinion, a judgment: that he is a psychopath. How degrading, dehumanising, to objectify him like that, to reduce someone to a diagnosis, a problem that needs to be treated. It isn’t right. This attachment to categories, the imposing of structure to deal with deviancy, entitled privilege to prescribe an elite construct of what’s normal and what isn’t, what’s mad and what’s bad, as if these are manifestations of any goodness towards which consciousness could ever profitably evolve … yes, it’s not right; it needs to go … to be let go of. 

Gratitude now billows through dilating pupils into the space, replacing the sadness, the loss, grateful even, even to him, yes, maybe specially to him, and now there is not a shred of confusion, and slowly, gently, selfhood is encountered staring at a pale white sun, and a cawing emptiness is somewhere, like glimpsing, through a forest edge, the thick light of a gathering dusk that was never quite day and will never quite be night and, out of the corner of an all-seeing awareness, two guards are still on top of him, they are grappling with handcuffs and there is blood on his head and streaks of red mess on the formica, and it occurs as a notion, hurtling initially towards the prison block, then forcing itself into the confines of the cell itself, then ricocheting off the walls with a frantic intention to be found, that, if this continues, there will be no way back; that there is something else that needs to be understood, a truth that can only be seen through cracks in glasses: a truth that all beings inherit the consequence of all the thoughts and deeds that have gone before; that every atom of everyone and everything is stained with the energy of the past, continued into creation in ever-changing architectures of incarnation, and made manifest until every scintilla of existence awakens to its responsibility to everyone and everything for collectively healing the wounds; and the notion, luminous now in every shadow of the cell, is clamouring that such cause cannot be served by a disembodied consciousness floundering in a futile effort to reconcile this tapestry of consequence; a sad spirit craving to make amends for what has foregone with neither limbs nor mouth to enact it; a hungry ghost hopelessly ensnared in an interminable bardo of becoming.

The all-seeing awareness now watches, intently, as one of the guards cups his hand under the jaw, suddenly remembering to push it up, careful not to touch the bruised and swollen neck, and something that felt insurmountable a moment ago melts away, and I’m aware of a clock on the wall whose second hand seemed another moment ago to stop if I looked at it … flickering, and I hear the second hand moving, and feel myself spinning down, at first like a sycamore spreading its seed, then gathering speed, whirling towards the centre of a vortex, buffeted by an irresistible force-field that funnels me back towards the unfolding drama, and I perceive air being forced into a chest that is part of me, and I feel it crepitating with every inflation, and I hear moaning coming from somewhere other than me, and now also from me, I feel it in my throat, and grunting and moaning, and a two-tone alarm getting louder, and more shouts coming ever closer, the smell of faeces and sweat, nausea, shivering, a crippling pain in my ribs, a metallic taste of blood, and then a face appearing right above me with a hazy halo around it. The face is drawn with tension, consternation written deeply on its forehead, and there are fine hairs on its smooth chin, and something dripping from its nose, and it's breathless mouth is starting to open in exultant triumph. I see that it is silhouetted against the harsh glare of a strip light with wires dangling from one end of the fitting, and for a split second I wonder whether it’s all true, whether it’s real or unreal, whether I’m awake or dreaming, and then I suppose that none of these things really matter in the way in which I would once have conceived them, and I urge myself to remember, whatever happens, remember.