Hospital

  I wanted to get out. I wanted to scream too. But I couldn’t. My mouth couldn’t open so, of course, no voice or sound could come out. I cried though, that was one of the things I was able to do. My tears tasted funny, salty but weird. I got tired of crying after a while and then I just feel asleep. When I woke up, some doctor was poking at the machine that was connected to my body. He didn’t even look at me, as if I wasn’t there. He just wrote some things on a note pad and then left, leaving me trying to ask what had happened.

Because, no matter how much I tried, there was no way I could remember what had happened. I was certain I had been sick for a couple of days at home, some kind of flu or maybe a virus inside the stomach. It was awful but not strange, nothing out of the ordinary. And suddenly, one day, I woke up in that hospital feeling as if I had been beating up by someone. From the first moment, I wasn’t able to speak and whatever the put in my veins was making me doubt every single thing that I thought when I was awake.

 My body always felt awful. I was hurting too much every day and it felt there was something strange. One would think I would feel better as the days went by but I didn’t. I was feeling just as bad on day one as on the other ones. I don’t even know how long I was there. One night though, I heard something odd. Someone was crying very loudly and then she began to scream. She screamed for a long while until the voice stopped. Somehow, hearing her had made me feel a bit better, as if I could finally step out of that bed.

 But I didn’t do that. I glanced at the machine that was connected to me and realized it was probably telling the people in that place how I was feeling and maybe even what I was doing. If I disconnected it, maybe they would notice it in a few minutes and I would be caught before I could imagine a plan to get out of that place. I had to be smarter than them; I had to really think of a good plan to run away, to escape what was most likely some kind of prison or mental hospital. An awful place in any case.

 They kept injecting me with the same drugs but, luckily, I realized they really didn’t work anymore. My sore legs and arms where fighting the poison they were pumping in my veins. I felt better by the hour and they had no idea. I was tempted to smile but I still couldn’t do that. For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to speak yet. I couldn’t make any sounds but I had grown accustomed to that. In my head, there was only the idea of escaping that place and talking had nothing to do with that. I had already come up with a plan and didn’t even care if it could be successful.

  That very night, I stood up for the first time in a long time and I grabbed the machine to avoid getting disconnected from it. I then peaked through the nearest window, which was almost impossible as it was a bit higher than me. I had to stand on the tip of my toes in order to look down at a large yard made of stone. It had been raining. There was no one outside and the place looked as if it wasn’t precisely populated by many people. By the look of the place, it seemed to be far away from any city or town.

I then walked to the down and realized it wasn’t locked. They didn’t have a reason to lock the doors as they kept me, and probably all other patients, too drugged up to even walk around the room. I have to confess that I wasn’t feeling perfect right then, but I had to do something soon because I didn’t know why they were keeping us there. Maybe the final step in their “care” for us was to kill us. So waiting forever was not really the best choice. I just had to do something, no matter the result.

 I opened the door a bit, enough to look outside. It was very dark and even colder than inside the room. I couldn’t hear any sound, not a voice or anything else. I closed the door and faced the biggest problem I had: the chord in the machine was not long enough for me to parade around the hallway outside without the nurses and doctors noticing I wasn’t in my bed anymore. So I had to make a choice. It didn’t took me very long to decide to rip off the thing that was loading drugs into my system.

 The moment I did it, my body felt a little bit weaker but I had to go out soon and run down the hallway, hoping the nurses and doctors were kept away from the rooms outside of their working hours. It seemed I was right, because I didn’t see any of them as I descended to the ground floor. It was only when I got to the yard I had seen from above, that I actually saw a group of them running up the stairs, probably going to my room. I hid in the shadows for a bit and then stepped outside, in order to find an exit.

 It seemed nature wanted me to be successful because a storm begin brewing in a few moments and then rain came down hard. The water and the mist caused by the cold was enough to hide my body from my captors. I stepped out into the garden and tried finding a way out. But there was a tall brick wall all around the compound. So I had to make an effort, I had to make myself feel like shit once again, swallow all the pain in order to finally escape. I jumped many times until I finally got a grip and then my muscles ached as I hoisted my body to the other side of the wall.

 Everything hurt, but I knew I couldn’t just stay there complaining. I ran through some fields of wild flowers and then deeper into a forest. I had no idea where I was; I wasn’t able to recognize anything about my surroundings. But I was certain that no hospital of that kind could be too far away from some town or city. They probably needed a supermarket for groceries and pharmacies to get some of the drugs. At least I hoped that’s the way it all worked, because I had no other thing to do.

 The forest was rough and I had to stay there overnight. It was too dense and there was nothing I could grab to eat, but somehow I felt much better there than in the hospital. I felt all the drugs coming out of my body as I peed and sweated, feeling much better by the next morning. I walked even more that day and was lucky enough to find a small village. I got there walking by the road. I hoped not to look too scary, but there wasn’t a lot I could do related to that. I just needed to do something, to take the final risk.

 The first person that saw me was a little boy and that wasn’t probably the best thing ever. He got scared and called her mother, who came by very fast. I tried to talk again, but I couldn’t. She screamed and said things and I felt very dumb for not realizing that it would be very hard to communicate with others without being able to talk. So I just knelt in front of them and tried to show them how defenseless I was and how much in need of their help I was. I stayed like that for a while, until they left.

 I thought they had been scared and had just run away, but they did come back in a few minutes with a policeman. I was glad to see someone that could actually help me. I knelt again and put my hands together, trying to make him understand that I couldn’t talk. He apparently understood. He asked me to come with him and I nodded. He put me inside his car and we then rode for a while, until we got to the police station. There, some doctor checked on me, which made me feel awful but I knew it was necessary.

 Luckily, I still remembered how to write. My hands were not very ready to do it, but it was clear enough for the cops to understand. They sent patrol cars to the hospital and freed many people that were being submitted to experimental drugs of many kinds. None of them could talk either.

 I eventually realized I wasn’t in my own country.  I couldn’t remember everything from my past but it was clear I was completely out of my element. I had to learn to be unable to speak and it took me a while to get to the memories that would help me getting back home.

Stupidity

   The moment I came out of the water, I felt I was being allowed to live for some more time. It had been torture to swim to such depths in order to enter that cave, which acted as a secret hideout for those people. They appeared to have mastered the art of diving but I had no idea what was going to happen, so my reaction when we finally got there was entirely comprehensible. I think that even they thought so, because they let me cough and curse for a while, until everyone was inside the cave.

 Then, as before, they drew out their guns and pointed at me. They had kept them in tightly sealed bags and now they could use them again to threaten my life. The crazed man that had pushed into the water was the closest ones and water pressure had done nothing to eliminate the crazy face he was looking at me with. I knew he was just working for his boss, making sure everything happened according to plan. But I hated him nevertheless, for his weakness and his lack of interest for anything else than his boss.

 We started walking through the rock, the path illuminated with small lamps pierced into the cave itself. Someone had spent their time doing that, making the place seem like some sort of secret lair, which reminded me of movie villains, the kind that twist their moustaches and laugh in the most horrible and hilarious way. But this man was not one of those villains, he was much worse and he was capable of things no one would even imagine, things that no comic book villain would ever do.

 He had used the natural caves of that region of the Mexican coastline, to hide whenever someone came too close to his dealing and business. The amount of drugs he sent to every corner of the world was simply baffling. I had the chance of seeing some of the packages they were preparing and it was simply too much to send without the authorities noticing something strange. And yet, they managed to do it and sell millions and millions of dollars a year with such a rentable business. It was scary.

 And there I was, in the middle of all of it, just because of a mistake. Just because I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but also because I had allowed someone to take advantage of my stupidity. I promised never to fall for that again, but those kinds of promises are always empty and stupid, because most times people do not learn from their mistakes and I have no reason to be the exception to the rule. This wasn’t the first time I did something wrong, but it was the first time it had such serious consequences. It was obvious I could be killed at any moment and why I hadn’t was making me uncomfortable.

 We finally got to a nice open gallery, where it was very cold and humid. The crazed man ordered me to stand still while some of the other men went ahead and checked if everything was fine. I just stood there, dripping wet still, trying to understand it all. Because it was obvious I should’ve been killed hours earlier but I hadn’t. Someone had prevented that from happening and I needed to know why. It was obvious their boss was the one who knew most, if not all, the answers and I had to speak to him.

 We were given clearance and moved ahead in moments. The next room was surprisingly lit by natural sunlight and had a pool of blue water in the middle. It was an outstanding view. So surprising in fact, that the crazy guy hit me with his gun because I had stopped to appreciate the space without his permission. He made my ribs feel broken, but I had to resist the pain and just walk on. We finally got to another illuminated room but this one was much larger and had no water in the middle. And he was there.

 Their boss was not the kind of man who I thought would be running an operation like that one. Maybe because the boss was not a man, but a woman. She had olive skin and curves that would have made her into a model in the eyes of any expert. However, she was delegating tasks and had a big gun strapped to her side. I also noticed a knife on her right sheen and a couple of scars all over her body. The woman had seen her fair share of battle and one would think that’s why she was fighting back.

 When she noticed me, she walked straight to the crazy eyed man and demanded her to tell him why they had taken so long. They started arguing about thing I did not understand, and I remembered I was in a place I didn’t fully comprehend.  I knew that they were dealing with drugs and that the man that had taken me there, to the coast, had been working with them, but that was it. It was not like he told me everything that was going on in his life. He had used deceit to take me there and I had fallen for it.

 She finally looked at me but didn’t say a word, she just smiled. Then, she ordered her men to bring a present she had prepared for me. I was very scared when I heard the word “present”. From someone like her, it was probably something not very pleasant and far from what a normal person would call “a present”. I stood frozen on the same spot, looking at her looking at me. It made me nervous but, somehow, it also disgusted me. It was as if I could feel what kind of person she was only by looking at her. And if my feeling were correct, she was simply the worst.

 Finally, the present was brought it. And it was none other than him, the man that had taken me with him to a luxurious vacation to the Mexican Riviera. I had been easy and stupid enough to accept, not seeing his probable true intentions. He was beaten up, his face all covered in bruises and cuts. But he was breathing and was apparently able to use his eyes because he stared at me and just said my name. He must have thought I was there to save him or something, as if I could do that.

 The woman came closer and explained that she knew everything that had happened. The man, a drug dealer, was her link to many mafias and other criminal organizations around the world. That’s why he travelled far and wide, making connections to strengthen their sales in other countries. He would often get men to help him, by making them think he was in love with them or at least very sexually attracted to him. And according to the woman, that ploy had worked surprising well for years.

 Apparently, many men had come before me, thinking they were there to enjoy the beach and the beauty of the region, only to realize that they were going to be used as drug mules or would be forced to work as dealers, under threat against themselves and their families. Some of those men were even closeted and that was another way to pressure them into doing whatever the organization wanted them to do. And others were just junkies, that would do anything in order to have at least some of the merchandise.

 He didn’t say a word after she finished talking about him and his men and his boys. He didn’t say a word. And he could’ve, even if it was hard to understand him. But he didn’t say a word. I had no idea what to do. I was trapped and would have to do whatever they wanted me to do know. They owned me because I hadn’t been strong enough to refuse his advances. I had been distracted by his looks and his charm. Stupidity runs wild in humans and especially in jaded men.

 She looked at me and, without saying one more word; she pulled out her gun and blew his head off in front of me. I gasped, but did not scream. His body fell lifeless on the floor, staining the beautiful clear rock with the darkness of the blood. The crazy eyed man grabbed the body and soon disappeared.

 The woman walked towards me and grabbed my face. She wanted to take a good look. For a moment, I thought I was dead, but then she called two men and told them to escort me to the airport. I would leave and never talk of anything I had seen there. She didn’t threaten me, she just knew I wouldn’t talk.

Early

   Gustav had been waking up early for year. Since he was a baby, he had a thing for waking up his parents very early in the y day and not been able to sleep until it was later in the day, so late that their whole morning routine was disturbed by his actions. They didn’t need a clockwork because his timing which was always perfect. Every single morning at nine o’clock he would start crying and would do it for about two hours until he stopped and resumed later that day, in the evenings.

 After that, in preschool, he was considered a very different little boy. He woke up before his mother and his father and was able to serve himself a glass of orange juice which he drank as he waited for them to wake up. The bus picked him up at seven and he woke up at six every single day, no exception. As he got older, he was able to dress himself and work the shower in order to have the water in the right temperature, the one he preferred.

 In his preteens, he was teased by all the other kids because of such things. As per usual, they didn’t like him because he was so different. He wasn’t a genius or anything like that. His parents thought he would demonstrate at an early age his remarkable brain and that they would have to homeschool him because of how special he was going to be. But the truth was much different: he was only different because his eyes started to bother him from an early stage and glasses were needed sooner than expected.

 Gustav knew he needed the glasses but he was sure to take them out whenever he was able. He liked to take them off in the bus back home or in class when he was sleepy. Most adults didn’t like when he did that but the truth was he had never grown accustomed to sing them. Sometimes, on weekends, he wouldn0t use them at all, instead playing around the house like a normal kid having no problem with his vision.

 As a teenager he was still harassed by his classmates, pushed around occasionally, especially after gym class. It was the favorite moment of the week for jocks who were eager to prove themselves more important than everyone else. Even then, he was the first to arrive to school and that granted him with a special knowledge of everyone’s ways to do things.

 He realized the people that annoyed him had a really bad problem with sleeping so what he did was just avoid them in places they would never go on and if that wasn’t working, he would always know which classrooms were available to tell them in order for him to be released and them to have a nice nap or even for kissing their girlfriend. Whatever it was, Gustav knew it was useful information.

 Even in college, living away from his parents, he woke up very early in the morning to read the notes he had taken the way before. It was his technique for remembering stuff. The other good thing was that he always had a great seat in the earlier classes of the day and sometimes they did put up the most interesting ones very early.

 Different from high school, Gustav became one of those people that everyone knew in college. At first, he didn’t really have any friends but every single person knew who he was. He soon made real friends and in no time he was going to parties and drinking and smoking and doing every single thing teenagers do if they want to defy the authority out up to control them. After all, Gustav was only special in so many ways and, sadly, not really in a significant one that can save anyone from anything.

 Even after weekend long parties, he found himself waking up drunk or with a huge hangover very early in the morning. No one ever did that so that made him very notable in his group of people. It wasn’t that they made fun of him but rather that that they seem to be really captivated by how strange he was. And he knew they were all looking at him so he decided to be more interesting and started changing his clothes and doing more interesting things with that extra time he seemed to have every single day.

 He started to smuggle drugs into the campus the second year he attended college. Some guy he had met at a party told him about the huge amount of money he could get just buy passing the product from one person to the other, he didn’t really had to sell anything, he just had to help the product get to the real buyer. He never really knew who that person was, but he was very excited about being involved in such a thing.

As he woke up so early, he could easily grab the packages from one site and put it in the next without anyone saying anything. The only people that were awake so early were the members of the cleaning crew and many of them were also involved in the network of drug handlers. He was proud of himself because he had proven himself to be useful in some way. He had never felt that, not in his career and not before at home or elsewhere.

The smuggling business lasted for two whole years until some idiot was busted with a large pack of ecstasy pills in a park, at night. Apparently, she had the stupid idea of trying to rob one pill from the package and when she opened it every single pill jumped out of the small bag and fell into the grass in the middle of campus. The police was notified fast by some older woman and the girl was arrested and possibly sent to prison fro drug trafficking. The thrills ended for everyone that day.

 He knew he was lucky that he never got caught but, even so, Gustav was kind of sad that part of his life was over. Soon, he would graduate and he would have to confront the real world on his own. The truth was he didn’t feel ready to take on anything by himself. He used his morning time to walk around, to get to the roof of his dorm and lay down looking art the sky and watching the last stars of the night disappear. He thought of his decisions and his possibilities in a world that asked everyone to be exceptional, special in some way but no one really was.

 When he received his diploma, he came back home for some time. It was nice to see his parents again and feeling they were as proud of him then as they had been years before, when he thought he was the most special little boy to live in the planet. They were really nice people, honest and full of good principles that they had tried to put into his son. But they had failed and that’s why he couldn’t be in their presence for long. It could get very exhausting.

 Soon, he got a job in the city so he moved to a small place and started making a life for himself. He was lucky enough to land a job that required him to be very early every day so he didn’t really mind. He was a cameraman in a morning show and that always happened very early. His coworkers were always very tired in the morning, having to drink two or even three cups of coffee to actually work. He didn’t need that.

 His superiors realized that and decided to assign him to a reporter that was in charge of all the “night stories”. He went all over the city in the darkest hours to report on what was happening like road accidents, cases of violence, curious occurrences and all types of things that happened really late or early in the day. Gustav felt he was in the perfect place, being able to do his work in the best way possible.

 After his first six months, his boss was so impressed with his work that he decided to assign him the job of reporter after the one they had decided to drop out because of the “difficult job schedule”. Gustav was very thankful because he had never thought of being in front of the camera instead of behind it. He got some classes on how to speak properly and he documented himself on the city. By the time he started, every person looking just fell in love with him.

 For that work, he received a lot of praise including several awards that made him kind of a famous personality in TV. He eventually got married and received many other proposals for similar jobs and he would consider them all because he had finally understood he did have something that made him special. It was just it wasn’t the most amazing thing ever.

I did it

    I did it. I have to acknowledge, after long hours of thinking and deciding was it’s best, that I do have to consider what I have done and said. The fact that now I present myself as a guilty man, does not mean that I think that everything that happened that night and the following years, was all under my control. As you know, things can happen and we just can’t control ourselves, we are driven by something else, some other version of us that is more primal and simpler or more sophisticated and brilliant. No, I’m not trying to excuse myself but I am trying to explain what I think that has to be explained. After all, many of you would be reading this wondering how I ended up here.

 They have labeled me as someone with privilege and I have to accept that my life has been much richer in objects and shallow things that most people’s. I had the chance of having been born into a family that was able to provide with many things, many which were useful like education and others that could have gotten me away from this mess. I don’t blame, at all, my parents or anyone else for what happened. I know that it was me, and me only, who caused so much pain and misery. But I cannot talk about all of this and ignore the fact that I was able to spend money when others weren’t able to do it. Yes, I was privileged but in no way have I ever been rich, loaded with some many things I couldn’t remember all of them. That’s not my life, don’t believe that from them.

 I started writing this letter because my therapist thought it would be easier for me to talk about all of this in this form. I have never really been one to write or to ever think much about anything. But this trial, this process, it has taken over seven years of my life. I was another person when I did it. I do not mean that I am less guilty because of that but I think it’s important you understand every single aspect of this situation from my point of view. After all, al of this time you have seen me as an evil character, someone worst than the devil, like a serial killer or something. And that’s not me. I do have a soul and I do have a brain and feelings.

 The hardest part of this whole process has been having my parents live it with me. They didn’t deserve to be drawn into this vortex of media frenzy, hate from every corner and suppositions and insults and so many other things that have made this time a living hell. I don’t say I don’t deserve it but they are innocent in all of this. My upbringing had nothing to do with why I did it, they didn’t have anything to do with it because they were great parents, they were great people who I actually pushed away in that moment and I do believe that if I had being closer to them, if I had been a good son, maybe I wouldn’t be writing this letter from a rusty table in a very small cell of a major prison.

 About life in jail, I do not want to talk about. It is well known that I have avoided death several times here. They think I’m far worse than them and I honestly don’t know if that’s true. But if I have to remain here for the rest of my life, I want to live as long as they do, as comfortably as they do, because they do have many things here, like outside. The men that have tried to hurt me are the ones that handle a small black market that trades every single thing you can imagine, even those razors they have tried to use to kill me. But I have to say here, without any modesty, that they have nothing to do with me in a fight. They might be big and tough and now the drug world and the hard life but my life had rough patches too and during many of those times I learned a couple of things.

 No, I don’t really want to sound like a bad guy. Maybe I am but I do not want to sound like that. I just think I just should be given the same chances that everyone else has. But I know I am here and that I will possibly live here until I die so at least I want to make this work. Yes, that doesn’t make any sense but I don’t think it has to have any sense at all. I did something wrong, a bit drunk and high but I did it and now, I think I can take the punishment. Because I did it and I have to recognize that. I did do it and I am sorry.

 I know that, for many years during the trial and all of the process, my lawyer has insisted that I was so wasted, so consumed by marihuana and cocaine and booze that I had no idea about anything, that I couldn’t have done even if that had been my intention. The truth is I do remember some flashes, like fragments of my memory and I have to confess they are very confusing. I do not now if I remember those parts more because my brain was really fucked up or because I have chosen unconsciously to only remember bits and pieces.

 I do remember the party. Fuck, that was a huge party and the kind of party I had gone to many times without anything weird happening. I’m not proud of it, but back then I was just starting my career and I had so much going on. I was very popular in every sense possible and successful too, so people liked to make me feel special and tended to my every need as if I was an all powerful being that needed to be pampered every single second of his life. And I was. Many brought me alcohol, others brought me drugs and others brought themselves. And we would party all night.

 Another confession: I was in the closet during all those years. I had never dared to publicly tell anyone that I fucked men but people that knew me really well did know and I think some of them are responsible for what happened to Blake. I mean, I did it and I acknowledge that but they should be here too.

 After all one of them was his cousin. He brought me cocaine and other stuff that I would use in private with my lovers. Yes, because I had many. Back then, I had bought this nice apartment, nothing too fancy, and that was where everything happened. My business grew in there, all the parties and the craziness happened there and what happened and got me here also happened there. I wasn’t thinking, that is obvious. I wasn’t smart enough to know that many of those people that fed me all of those things I consumed were not my friends; they didn’t really want me as a significant part of their lives. They were just leeches, taking away things from me and I didn’t even saw it.  I actually think I didn’t want to see it because it would have been obvious otherwise.

  They did fake it for long and just like Robert, Blake’s cousin; they all brought me things that I would enjoy. He was the one who gave Blake to me as a present and I have to confess Blake didn’t know anything or at least he didn’t seem to know anything. I cannot say anything for sure and I wouldn’t be the kind of person to blame the victim. As I have said many times, it’s Roberts fault and mine, of course. He brought to my birthday party and just presented him as a friend. I did like him because he’s a beautiful guy but the party went on and I don’t remember launching myself at him from the first second.

 I was too busy getting high and performing that sick and stupid persona I had created for everyone else to see. It was such a fake, such a false representation of what I was. Or rather, what I had been. Because just a few years earlier, before money and false friends, I was a guy trying to live his life and even falling in love. I was normal and I was a human and I do believe I’m a human now, even if many of you don’t think so. I have feeling and I know that because I have barely endured all of these years trying not to be consumed by my own hatred, by guilt and so much pain. Because what I did not only affect one person. It also affected me. I know, I am not the victim but that’s how I feel.

 The fact is, however, that I vaguely remember finally speaking to him. I was drunk but I tried to make me look great in front of him. Then my memory goes very blurry, I think we did cocaine and he was wasted much faster than me. The next fragment I have in my head is him falling slowly on my bed, the sound of the music far away and me trying to take off his jeans. I remember him fighting, I do remember it… Oh my god, I remember. He was fighting, as much as he could and he couldn’t do much. The cocaine had gotten into him all right. Then, the next image is me forcing myself onto him and my hand feeling wet over his mouth.

 Then, I woke up the following morning, alone. And then the path to this cell started. I did rape him and I know that now, I accept it now, It is I fact and I am ashamed of it. I do blame drugs and alcohol and also Robert for having had the audacity to do that, almost setting a trap for me to fall into. But the fact remains that I did it, that I am guilty. And I would repeat this as many times as it’s necessary. Because I have come to the conclusion that I cannot live in this way any longer. I want peace. I did it.