get the spirit off my back

When he shuts his eyes there’s nothing to impede his brain from cycling through the same horrors over and over, like an interminable slideshow in a too-hot little basement room — each atrocity clicking past with a rhythm that turns fresh horror into dull disgust. Sleep edges in, there at the corners of his eyes — but it can’t do more than threaten him when every nerve in his body is jangling and Will knows down in the marrow of his bones that sleep means death for him now, that to give in to the opiate pull of unconsciousness will mean never waking up again. He may be walking and talking and moving around but none of it feels real. Even pain can’t anchor it.

The memory contorts itself in his mind, twisting like a cottonmouth, taking on a new dimension. Lecter’s body covering his own, the comforting weight, the smell of blood and skin — Will cannot feel where the knife pierces him but when his core muscles tighten he can feel the metal of the blade flexing in his gut, threatening to break. He’s so tired already, so lulled by the warm muffling richness of Dr. Lecter’s home and all its rooms — easy to stop moving and let the heaviness at the corners of his vision carry him off into the dark. Easy to go where all the others have gone, where every living thing will go, into oblivion. This moment is everything now — awake there in bed when he feels the weight of Molly’s sleeping body and listens to the regularity of her breathing, Lecter is with them too.

Lecter is with him in the psych ward too, where they’ve taken away Will’s shoes and the air conditioning is always on full blast — exhaustion is a nice way of calling what’s happening to him now. The alternative to a voluntary stay is the Bureau making it an involuntary one. He takes the medication he’s given without complaint, and it turns what’s dogging him into something else.

Fight it. Stay moving, stay upright, do anything but surrender. Resist or be eaten. Will’s too tired to fight it any more, too tired and too sore to stay upright. Another shutter-click and his memory reveals a new angle on the crime scene — there on the floor, fixed like a bug on flypaper in the split second before he can defend himself, but the blade has been withdrawn and the blood is all rushing out of him with nothing to stop it up. Dr. Lecter’s voice is still seductively insistent in his ear, but the man’s fingers are finding the long valley of the wound and pressing inside. Through the pain, Will can feel Lecter moving inside him, finding the punctured small intestine and feeling out the damage. He’s gone and spoiled the meat.

When Will wakes up the institutional room is awash in light and he can do nothing but sob, raw breathless sobs that tear his stitches and scrape his throat bloody.