Kowalski’s left eye snapped from gray to green, then flashed red. It was happening. “Jesus,” Dylan breathed and wondered how many hits were on that scrap of blue.
“Close your eyes,” the doctor crooned.
Dylan did, not because he was told to but to shut out the red eye and whatever else was to come. It didn’t help. The colors were in his mind.
“Go back.” Papers rustled like snakes uncoiling. One began to uncoil in Dylan’s skull. He didn’t see it; he felt it. Great scaling scales sliding over one another. Then he saw it: blue sparks in the black, sparks struck from the snake’s back as the huge metallic sheets of its skin slid over each other. He opened his eyes.
“Close,” Kowalski murmured.
“Fuck you.” The last letters of the word “you” trailed out of Dylan’s mouth in smoke rings and broke apart around the doctor’s face. Around the still-red left eye. Dylan closed his eyes. Better the snake within than the one without. Panic was growing inside him along with the snake. Eventually it would be too big for his cranium and the bones would shatter, splatter out.
“Good boy,” Kowalski said. More rustling. Then the doctor began to read from his notes. “You remember going to trial. Go there now. Go back to your trial. Are you there?”
“No.” Dylan forced his eyes open. Stared at the doctor’s eye. It cooled to gray. He was going to be alright.
Before the thought could stop the rising storm of panic, the psychiatrist’s face melted and reformed into that of the judge but wrong, pulpy; bits of it could fall off and drip onto the floor. “Shit,” Dylan whispered, then said, “I’m guilty,” because that was what he’d said when he was eleven.
Judge Kowalski smiled. The snake rustled and sparked. “Gooooo oooood,” the judge said with the o’s flowing out of his mouth in pinks and greens. “Go back to the night it happened.”
“Murder,” Dylan said. The word was red, blood red. It was such a cliché, he laughed. The wall behind Judge Kowalski, the one with the bad painting Dylan had grown familiar with during years on the couch, leaned in until it was almost touching Kowalski’s head. “Duck,” Dylan said.
“You’re seeing ducks?”
“I wasn’t.” But now two of them flitted past the corner of his eye.
“Forget the ducks.” The judge was annoyed. He looked around, maybe for a gavel. Grabbed up snake pages instead. They slithered through his hands, making blue sparks.
Spawn of the snake coiling in Dylan’s brain. The wall came closer. The door on the adjacent wall leaned in to meet it. Dylan put out his hands to hold them back.
“You had the flu the night before. Remember?” The judge sounded peevish, and the peeve scoured the judginess from Kowalski’s face. He was just Kowalski again.
“Goooooooood,” Dylan said and watched his own o’s flutter out and break like bubbles against the wall.
“Go back,” Kowalski intoned, remembering he was on television.
Dylan sank into the couch. The worn cushions rose up to embrace him, pushing his outstretched arms forward into the position of a man about to do a half gainer. “Diving in,” Dylan said and looked down. The floor rippled wetly. He wasn’t far gone enough to jump. “I don’t think I can fly yet,” he said seriously. To him this was a good sign.
“Go back,” the judge ordered. “Your mom put you to bed. She put you to bed. Can you see the bed?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dylan tried to explain. Acid wasn’t like that. It did what it did. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“Your mom put you to bed,” Judge Kowalski went on inexorably. “You had on”-rustle, spark, slither-“flannel pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them.”
Dylan remembered those pajamas. Really remembered them. He hadn’t thought about them, not ever, and now they were on him, soft, and warm, and smelling like home. Like soap and fresh air. Cowboys on horseback, little and perfect, galloped across his thighs and his chest. He didn’t so much see as feel them. Flannel and soft and purring. Ginger the cat, purring. She was on the bed. A ginger-colored cat, she purred like a machine gun rattling. He reached out and put his hand on her. No cat. Couch.
Rich started to laugh and Dylan turned, expecting to see him in the doorway pretending to die a million ways. The door pushed closer. The laughter was there, bubbling and going farther away. “Rich!” he shouted, wanting him to come back.
“Rich was there. Good.”
Dylan focused on the doctor. Colors were rampant, raging; he squinted through them. The doctor’s lips were moving as if he chewed the air. Words fell out in chunks. They didn’t make sense. Panic rushed into Dylan until he was so cold, he shook with it, his teeth banging together.
“Yergall ley wink ang deader mom.”
“Mom.” Dylan recognized that word. “Mom,” he said again with relief. “Momma.” The room filled with butterflies. Kowalski’s words turned from chunks to butterflies; the colors stopped attacking him and painted their wings. The cubical was filled with them. Dylan looked up. The stone ceiling thirty feet above was a swirl of beautiful butterflies; they lined the blackened rafters. Their wings left trails of faint color in the air.
Dylan laughed. “Momma,” he said again, and the word broke into more butterflies, and they smelled of warm cotton and cherries. “Momma!” he cried, and the butterflies came down and lit on his arms and his hands, his shoulders, his hair. Their wings brushed his forehead, warm butterfly kisses.
“What are you seeing?” The doctor’s words cut through the butterflies, killing those in their path.
“Butterflies. Don’t talk-killing them,” Dylan said.
“Killing? You are killing. Killing Mom?” the doctor demanded.
Dylan closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the saw-toothed words hack through the bloom of butterfly wings.
“The baby, you killed her first, didn’t you? She was trying to get to her mom, and you killed her. That was first, wasn’t it? That was it.”
Even with his eyes closed Dylan could see jaws of words chewing the lovely creatures from the air, spitting their still bodies onto the floor and the walls. He raised his hands to his eyes. He had forgotten he was covered with butterflies. They turned to paste under his palms, squished between his fingers. Their bodies ran warm and thick over his face and hands. “No!” he screamed and opened his eyes. His hands were red with blood. Blood covered his thighs and arms; his face was sticky with it, his hair stiff with blood. “It’s me! It’s me, I’m killing them,” he said, aghast.
“Killing your parents, your sister.” Kowalski’s words came into Dylan’s ears sharply, cutting their way in past eardrum to brain.