In. Out. In. Out. 

Traffic was going by, outside the window. Its noise was accented by the evening rain that had been falling steadily and monotonously for what seemed like days now. 

In. Out. In. Out.

David Fallon sat on the edge of his bed, in his one bedroom apartment in Corktown over the self storage units, not far from what was once old Tiger Stadium. Some nights he imagined he could still hear Ernie Harwell calling the game. Some nights. Not tonight.

In. Out. In. Out.

He didn’t react at all to the squeal and smash of some poor slob out on Michigan Avenue blowing a red light and t-boning some other poor slob. Sirens followed shortly, punctuated by some screaming and shouting. The lights of the Detroit police and emergency vehicles eventually lit up his room through the eerie filter of rain and dirty windows. Red, blue, yellow.

In. Out. In. Out. …

Out.

David set the custom Mossberg 590A1 tactical shotgun down on the bed beside him, the muzzle still glistening slightly with saliva and probably some snot. He took another hard pull from the bottle of Tullamore Dew whisky that had been sitting forlornly on the floor at his feet. Liquid courage. Forgetting lubricant. Except, David couldn’t forget. He couldn’t forget so many things. His brain cruelly replayed everything for him, every single night. The devil’s own soundtrack, on loop. He’d tried medications. The VA merrily supplied him with every drug in their formidable chemical arsenal. OxyCodone. Percocet. Citalopram. Xanax. 

His last visit to the VA was about six years ago. Two years after he came back from overseas. David had put it off for as long as he could but the specters and horror shows inside his head were persistent. He finally found his way over to the University District and the gaudy but state-of-the-art VA Hospital. The doctor at the John Dingell VA center was a swarthy 60-yr old Indian woman who barely spoke English. Her card declared she was a certified psychiatrist MD blah blah blah, the usual string of officious-sounding letters. David dutifully followed her to a pale yellow room decked out in the usual US Government haute couture - a cheap table and two cheap chairs made of aluminum and pressed faux wood.

The fluorescent light overhead certainly didn’t do anything to improve the mood.  The room itself was barely six by eight feet. The doctor took the chair nearest the door, putting David’s back to the wall. She smelled slightly musty and … curry-like … but not in any pleasant way. More like some back alley he half remembered, half imagined from some hellhole in some Southeast Asian backwater. He retched just a little, but didn’t show it.

The VA doctor snuffled a little into a tissue that seemed to be permanently attached to her hand, adjusted the Walgreen’s Drug Store reading glasses on her ruddy face, and began going over the government issue clipboard in her hand with a government issue pen clutched in her tissue hand. She hadn’t spoken a word to David yet.

David shifted in his chair, feeling somewhat uncomfortable and wondering if he should just walk out or not.

Next Chapter: Merde.