E.R. Frank

Ici, tu as intérêt à faire attention quand tu parles : tout ce que tu dis a un sens, et il y a toujours quelqu'un pour te l'expliquer.

Tout allait bien, puis ils m'ont apporté des carottes. Je m'en suis débarrassé de toutes les manières possibles. J'en ai balancé des tas par la fenêtre et dans le broyeur. J'en ai jeté des brassées dans le vide-ordures et dans l'incinérateur. J'en ai vidé des cageots dans les bacs de compost et dans la benne à ordures, derrière.
- Tu sais qui balances les carottes , me demande le chef.
- Non.
Il revient avec un cageot :
- épluche-moi ces carottes. Tu en râperas la moitié pour la salade de ce soir et tu mettras l'autre dans le sauté de veau.
- Ouais.
J'attends qu'il parte, mais il reste planté là.
- Qu'est-ce que vous foutez ?
- Pardon ?
- Qu'est-ce que vous faites, man ?
- Je te regarde.
- Cassez-vous.
- Je veux te voir éplucher les carottes.
- Vous avez perdu la boule ?
- Je rentre chez moi tous les soirs, gamin. C'est pas moi qui ai perdu la boule.
- J'aime pas les carottes.
- C'est bien ce que je pensais.

I don't know too much else about it, though, because there's this thing you can do. You can make yourself fly up past the ceiling. You can make yourself stay up there, high and far away from everything. You can go right to Mount Everest, where the clouds and the snow look so much the same, you don't know where the clouds start or the snow ends. You can feel small and big and close and far all at the same time. You can feel dizzy and safe, both. You have to be careful not to look down and see what all's going on, because that's worse than anything and can make an avalanche crush you, but if you stay flying high looking up and out, you can freeze yourself and glide all the way through until the cold gets so cold, you just go numb all over, and it's like you're the last drip of an icicle that never got to drop but just froze instead. Every time you fly up high, past the ceiling all the way to Mount Everest, a little chip of yourself gets lost up there in all that cold, but you don't much care because it's better to lose a little piece of yourself than to let Browning find you and maybe make something dirty feel good.

Now sometimes when we're playing, and I'm about to start floating with those flashes sliding through, I want to tell him some. Then I get scared. Then I get mad because I don't know what all I'm so scared of. Then I get more mad because he already knows I'm scared. Then I feel like a pussy and I hate my sorry-ass self. Then I still want to tell him.

I'm scared shitless. I'm afraid to sleep because of the dreams, and I'm afraid to be awake because all these flashes keep squeezing through and I can't stuff them back the way I used to. I'm afraid of never being able to get back up there to Everest, and I'm afraid that if I get back up there, I'll never come down, and I'm afraid of Dr. B. because he sees me and he knows things and when they see you and know things they mess up everything up, and I'm afraid I'll be stuck in this place forever, and I'm afraid I won't, and I'm the biggest sorriest-ass pussy there ever was, and I'm just plain old fucking afraid.

You have to get away somehow. You can choose beers, or you can choose Everest, or you can choose the fountain at five o'clock in the fucking A.M. You have to find where it's going to be peaceful. You have to find where it's going to be safe. Maybe you don't get to stay too long and then you have to choose someplace else all over again. But you always have to choose.

Quoi que tu fasses, t'es perdant. Si tu joues à la bataille, tu planes et des souvenirs te reviennent pas flashes.

"It's called dissociation". He's getting on my nerves, bad. "A lot of people do it when something's happening in the here and now that's upsetting to them. A lot of people find a way to go outside of themselves. They use their minds to take themselves away because it feels safer that way".

I am found.