Pants & Anxiety

Greg had lived outside until last week, when he’d walked right under a big net that fell on his head. He felt a little prick in his arm, fell asleep for a good long while, woke up in a big white room with a glass window, people behind it staring in at him. They’d planted a few fake trees in the cage, laid some fake grass, hung up some ropes and more nets from the ceiling, wanted to pretend it was a jungle. Greg wasn't fooled.

'He seems anxious,' one of the white coats said. Greg could barely hear them through the thick glass.

'I think I'm still coming down, is all,' Greg said, scratching his arm. They ignored him.

'He’s not the first one. We were talking about applying the DSM-V criteria for PTSD to him. Might give us a way to treat him, and the rest.’

‘Well, he’s had a traumatic event, he's avoiding the nets we put in for him to climb, he keeps waking up during observations—'

'Can we do that?' one of the white coats interrupted.

'No, you can’t!’ Greg pressed his hands against the windows. ‘I don’t want PTSD!’

'Well, he's got a hippocampus, so I don't see why not.'

'How are we going to check if he's re-experiencing?’

'Yeah, if you won't fucking listen to me!' He hit the window. The biggest white coat looked him up and down.

'Let's check with the board.'

* * *

The window had been empty for two full days, so he guessed it was Monday. Each morning he got a good two hours to stare at the ceiling before all the lights turned on. That morning he got three, but still groaned as the window filled up – four white coats this time. He stared into them, his focus shifting so he saw himself in the window. He didn’t look good. What did they want from him?

He picked up a rock, absently hit it against another rock. He hummed as he worked, started carving his initials in to it. Maybe this would help. A fifth white coat – a big one – moved into the middle of the glass, holding a clipboard and an expensive pen.

‘Science works fast here, huh? That’s my criteria you’ve got?’ one of the smaller white coats asked.

‘Our criteria, yes,’ the big one said, while running his pen up and down his piece of paper. ‘The only behavioural indicator we haven’t been able to directly observe is difficulty concentrating.’

Greg carved his rock a little quicker, hummed a little louder, tried to ignore the caustic smell in the air.

‘Am I correct that we haven’t given him any concentration tasks?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, drop it in.’

A hatch in the ceiling opened and a screen slid smoothly down. A second hatch opened, dropping a wooden box that shattered on the floor about ten metres from where Greg sat. He screamed, backed away, caught himself when he saw the big white coat make a mark on his sheet. He tried to look curious rather than alarmed as he took in the painted wooden blocks that had flown out of the broken box.

He waited, looked from the blocks to the white coats. Back again. When the big one made another mark on his checklist, Greg decided to move closer and examine them.

He found twenty of the blocks scattered on the floor in five different shapes, and a wooden grid with twenty squares. He looked over at the window, tidied the blocks up, made a neat pile of circles, triangles, hexagons, octagons, and rectangles. As he worked, he tried to figure out what to do with the grid.

The screen flickered on and showed a picture of his grid, with one of his wooden blocks in each of its squares. The image stayed for a couple of seconds, then disappeared.

‘Oh, sorry, am I meant to do that with this thing?’ He held up his real-life grid to the window. ‘Can I see it again? I only got the first couple. There was a blue circle, and a red triangle, and then I think a blue triangle on the top—’

A different picture appeared on the screen.

‘Oh, fuck, OK, hang on!’

Greg stared intently at the screen, mumbling under his breath. Maybe this was it. Maybe getting this right would sort them out, sort him out. When the image faded, he quickly matched the picture in his mind with the blocks in front of him. He got the first row of five.

‘That pretty good though, isn’t it?’ he asked the window, smiling a little. ‘Pretty happy with that to be honest!’

The white coats watched silently as another image appeared on the screen. For the next hour, he worked through dozens of these tasks. He got better, matched more, smirked at the challenge, lost himself in it a little, even forgot where he was for a moment. Then, slowly, he started getting worse. He confused this bunch of blocks with that, put blue where there was red, squares where there were triangles. By the end, he was exhausted.

Eventually though, the images stopped coming and there was a shuffling behind the window. The big white coat mumbled something to the others, but Greg didn’t catch it. They laughed as they filed out.

‘Wait, hang on, do I have it?’ Greg raised his voice from where he sat as the exit door closed behind them. ‘Do I have a PTSD?’

* * *

They moved him to another cage. Greg wasn’t sure why, but they did it while he was asleep. He kept his eyes closed as they placed in a big straw bed. This cage had others like him, and he watched one of them sleep through thinly slitted eyes until the morning.

He’d felt a little embarrassed of his body around the others, so he was grateful to find that the white coats had snuck him a pair of navy tracksuit pants. Once he had them on, he circled the new cage, which turned out to be much larger than his old one. It had the same fake trees, the ropes, and the nets, but the air was even more stale.

There were five others. All of them seemed too busy to talk to him, and he didn’t want to interrupt. Instead, he watched from a distance as he paced. One of them on the far side stripped fibres from the hanging ropes, braided them, turned them into bracelets that he proudly displayed and shared with the others. Another wrote ferociously on a clipboard, scribbling back and forth, furrowing his brow. A third picked up an old rag and used it to spit shine the window, the one the white coats were watching them through.

‘Greg?’ one of them finally asked when he circled past them for the sixth time.

‘Yes?’

‘Christine. You slept next to me last night.’

‘Oh, yes, hi.’

‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Just looking at you.’

Greg glanced over at the window, shifted his focus again, and saw his body looking back at him. He didn’t recognise himself; not because he looked different than usual, but because he looked the same, but in pants.

‘We’ve been here a while,’ she said, smiling around at the others.

Greg tried to smile, tried to sit down to talk with her, but felt uncomfortable on the ground, uncomfortable in view of the window and the others who worked while they talked.

‘They’re just doctors, you know,’ she said, looking him over. ‘They’ve actually helped Barry over there out a lot.’ Barry waved from underneath a tree he was resting against, a piece of straw bedding dangling from his mouth, imagining he was a farmer. ‘They’ve helped me too. I think it would be good for everyone if we got to know you better, especially if you’re gonna be here with us for a while,’ she said.

‘Sounds good.’ He didn’t consider if it really did sound good, or even really think the words, but they came out anyway.

‘It’s Friday today, and we like to have big feasts at the end of the week. Kind of a celebration. So, when you get your lunch, save half of it. It’s Barry’s turn to host as well, so we’ll have dinner at his.’ She pointed at a spot only about five metres away, next to what must have been Barry’s straw bed. There was no table.

‘Can I bring anything else?’ Greg asked.

‘Do you have anything else?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

Greg kept more than half of his lunch aside. He checked his pants in the reflection of the window before heading to Barry’s, dusted off some straw bedding. His hands shook as he raised them to neaten his hair. The others pretended not to see him getting ready, even though his bed was also close to Barry’s.

‘Knock knock,’ he said as he approached. Christine hugged him and the others waved. Over the feast, the bracelet maker showed off new designs to the others who fawned over them and compared new to old. Later, one of the others waved the pages they had written on the clipboard in the air, as if they were a parliamentarian, with most nodding in agreement, other gasping and protesting. When the group had settled down, Barry played air guitar and sung for them.

Greg tried to love the bracelets, but he could only see ropes. He tried to read the pages, and found useless scribbles, couldn’t follow his words. He tried to love Barry’s song, but he couldn’t pretend to hear the guitar. He sat right next to the others, but they may as well have been behind the glass with the white coats.

* * *

As soon as he blinked awake, he realised they’d moved him back to his own cage last night. He felt a little pang and decided he would miss the others—or at least, he would miss Christine. Mostly, though, he was glad to be alone again.

He looked up at the white ceiling, breathed in the stale air and the smell of bleach. As he took in the familiar fake trees and the fake grass under him, he wondered why they didn’t paint the ceiling blue, maybe with some little clouds. Although they wouldn’t move, obviously, or change with the weather. Maybe that was why.

‘It took us a while to get approvals,’ the big white coat was saying, ‘but I’d told them Kyoto was on the verge of doing the same thing.’

‘Are they?’

‘How am I supposed to know?’

‘We’ve got the pills for him, either way,’ said the big one. ‘Oi! Oi Greg!’ He whistled.

Greg sat up. ‘Wait, you know my name?’

‘Of course!’ the big one shouted through the glass. ‘You’ll have to speak up though, we can barely hear you through this.’ He knocked on the glass.

‘What pills?’

‘Desipramine. It’s a tricyclic.’

‘A tricycle?’

One of the tiles that surrounded the window fell open, and the big one slid a small stainless steel tray through the opening. A white pill sat in the middle.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the big one, a little quieter. ‘But we’ve been making observations and we can see you’ve been suffering.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘This is going to help you. I can’t guarantee that you’ll never feel bad again, but it’s the best shot we have.’

For the first time, he looked right at Greg.

‘Please. We’re just trying to help.’

Greg looked back at the big white coat, held his breath for a moment. Eventually, he picked up the pill, swallowed, felt it scrape his dry throat on the way down.

‘Good. Come.’

The big white coat walked away from the window, the others following close behind.

* * *

Greg had got in the habit of counting weekends. Next to the initials carved in a rock, he’d made a bunch of tally marks. He counted three sets of five. Fifteen weekends. Fifteen weeks. Three and a half months. One-hundred and five of the little pills. And he had started to feel better, now that there was more going on in his cage. He had some games, new ones, fresh out of the box. Sometimes, if he rested his head against the wall at the right angle, he could see the security monitors in the window room and would watch them until his neck got sore. And he had a book too—Camus—which he’d pulled apart so he could make little hats for himself out of the pages inside.

But mostly, he felt better because he had someone to talk to. One of the white coats, the littlest one, came in to meet with him every Friday. She was the one who brought the games, brought the books, brought leaflets for him to fill out, brought the smell of a perfume trying to be flowers. When they talked, she would ask him things like, ‘what happens to you physically when you feel like this?’ and, ‘what do you think we could do instead when we feel that way?’ and, ‘how have you worked through this type of problem in the past?’

His answers had got a little more sophisticated over the three months. When she asked him what he felt, he didn’t just say ‘shit’ anymore. He pointed to his chest, made sad faces, told her what it reminded him of. Even when he did just feel shit, he still had a good answer most of the time. This made her feel a little better, which of course made him feel a little better.

‘Can you think of a time when you hadn’t experienced these difficulties before?’

Yes, before I woke up here.

‘Yes, when I was much younger.’

‘And what do you think was different at that time?’

I wasn’t in this cage.

‘I hadn’t really, like, established these… you know, like negative thought patterns?’

‘Yes, exactly. So how can we interrupt these thought patterns?’

Maybe booze?

‘Well, what I’ve started to do is, like, what was on those work sheets, just kind of… acknowledging that my thoughts, like, are just thoughts?’

‘Yes, a lot of us can find that sort of thing very helpful.’

‘Yeah, so then I can spend more time sort of focussing on what I need to do instead of the thoughts.’

‘Excellent. It sounds like you’re really starting to create space for your thoughts without really dwelling on them, which is perfect.’

Still, when she wasn’t there, he mostly stared. It seemed the glass window followed his line of sight now; it stood between him and everything, not just the white coats. Then, eventually, she stopped coming. Then the pills stopped coming, too. Without them, Greg had to learn to be careful moving his head; too fast and his mind would blur. He started to feel hungry but with no appetite. He stopped counting the weekends.

* * *

Greg was lying on the grass holding a miniscule, plastic, and water-logged ring toss game in front of his face. Once, he’d managed to get all the rings on the four little pegs; this time, he was trying to get them in colour order.

It wasn’t going well. He could feel his jaw and his grip tightening. He puffed air out of his nose every time the red ring found the green peg, or a blue found the yellow. His grip got stronger, until he heard a little crack, and water started dripping on his hand. He felt hot. Couldn’t he have this one thing?

‘This is—!’ He rolled over, stood up, and threw the game at the white coats’ window. ‘I don’t even want to be here!’

‘What did you say?’ said the big white coat, looking at Greg over his glasses. He pushed a button, and a green light turned on under the speaker above the glass window.

They’d had a microphone this whole time?

‘Did you say you don’t want to be here?’ the big white coat asked.

‘Obviously not! Let me out!’

‘Hang on.’

He picked up a folding chair and walked through a door that joined the cage and the room behind the glass. He walked right up to Greg, gave him a little smile, opened the chair, and sat down with a groan.

‘So, you don’t want to be here?’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean by here? Are you having thoughts of self-harm?’

‘What? No, I mean I don’t want to be here, in this cage.’

‘Do you really think things will change if you just… give up?’

‘Give up on what?’

‘On all of this,’ said the big one, gesturing vaguely. ‘You’ve put in a lot of work to get this far.’

Greg looked at his rock. Too many tallies to count in one glance, obviously a lot of work. ‘Yes, I want to give it up.’

‘Do you remember how to get your own food, even? You remember that it doesn’t normally fall from the sky for you.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘And you might never get another chance to talk through your problems like you’ve been able to here, getting a little toolkit so you feel better.’

‘Yes, I get it. I know.’ Greg’s heart was fluttering. The big one looked him square in the eye, for only the second time, and sighed. He flicked over to a new page on his clipboard, handed it over to Greg with his expensive pen. ‘Sign here.’

The page heading read Declaration for Running Away. It was all there, what he agreed to by leaving; but would they really let him? After all of this? He signed roughly on the bottom, before he had a chance to change his mind.

‘You’ll take the pants, of course,’ the big one said. ‘You can keep the pen as well.’ He paused, catching the meaning in Greg’s expression. ‘You know, you could have left at any time.’

‘I never asked really, did I?’

‘No.’

A door at the back of the cage—opposite the window—slid open. It revealed a long corridor with stark gunmetal grey walls, but Greg could smell fresh air. He slid the pen into his pants pocket and headed for the door. He turned to look back, expecting to see a crestfallen, or frustrated, or curious big white coat. Instead, the big white coat picked at some pilling on his coat, raised a hand, and said, ‘goodbye, Greg.’ The other white coats behind the glass watched security cameras, made notes, or spoke on phones.

Greg turned back to the exit and walked towards the fresh air. As he hiked down the long corridor, he began to hear rain outside, growing heavier, the smell of earth rising from the ground to meet him. When the door at the end of the long corridor slid open, he emerged at the top of a barren cliff overlooking water and saw dark grey clouds streaming rapidly across the sky. He inhaled, then swallowed the lump in his throat.