Chapter 4 December

7:46 AM

One day, I was sitting behind my desk, busy in my thoughts, cataloging books, checking orders from bookstores, when a pile of thick volumes landed in front of me with a bang. I raised my eyes.

‘Is it all that you have?’ I heard a boy’s voice.

I saw the titles so familiar to me, The Treatment of Mental Diseases, Postnatal Depression, Psychiatry: The Introductory Course.

‘Any problems?’ I asked looking at the boy over the books.

‘Nah, I’m writing a school project. My grandfather died from depression. He killed himself when I was a little boy. I got interested in the subject and wanted to explore more.’

I don’t know why but I felt a sense of duty. I took him to less attended bookshelves to show him more than could be found on the catalog. I prolonged his card’s validity, I extended his limits of books borrowing. I noticed that he wasn’t much of a reader. For the next couple of days, he returned to learn more. I helped him. I helped Mathew Hugh in his school project. I checked his library card many times. I remembered his name.

I told him about these horrific methods they used on us. I told him about lobotomy and metal sticks stuck into our brains through the eye hole. I told him that some of us were turned into vegetables. I told him about cold showers, beating, closing in coffin-like cages. I explained how mentally ill children were deprived of their teeth when they bit another child. I described how easily you could be killed by another patient and gave examples of instances when your body could be discovered days after your death due to mental hospital’s overcrowding and the lack of staff. I told him about belts that fastened us to the bed, about straight jackets which deprived us of our dignity. I told him about hysteria in unmarried women and nuns treated with mysteriously sounding hysterical paroxysm, while doctors were touching their sexual organs to make them achieve orgasm and calm them down. I told him about the trepanning of the skull, drilling holes in the bone to release demons of the soul. I told him about the disastrous conditions of institutions, I showed him pictures of patients sitting on the floor, dirty, covered in their own excrement. I told him how we were scared and how inhumanely we were treated by others.

‘You know so much.’ he was listening to me with attention, ‘As if you had been there and seen it all.’

I smiled. I was there. I saw things which not all were willing to see.

‘And now?’

‘Now? You’re mostly on drugs. Aripiprazole, Asenapine, Brexpiprazole, Clozapine, Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, and many more. Of course, there are side effects. There are always side effects, unwanted symptoms, numbness, sleepiness, anxiety. There are alternative methods too. There’s meditation, rest, avoiding stress. Even simple holding of the thumb can help you with an anxiety attack.’

I told him everything I knew. I showed him pictures.

He came back a week later with a box of chocolates to thank me for help and boasted about being praised by his teacher. I didn’t know back then that I would miss his absence, that I would look for him intuitively among the bookshelves.

A month later, on my way home, I was passing the school’s yard and saw him. He was playing basketball with his mates. He was in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. I could see his muscles and hairy armpits. I watched him move.

He ran to me to say hello.

‘So this is your school.’

‘Yep. It’s not so bad. I don’t mind coming here.’

‘And how old are you?’

‘Fifteen.’

Fifteen was a little bit more than a child, even though he started resembling a grown man. Fifteen-year-old boys helped their fathers on the farm. Fifteen-year-old soldiers died on the battlefields. Fifteen-year-old girls were married off to older men for dowry money.

‘I’m thirty-three.’ I lied. I told him about the age of my transformation.

He smiled at me.

A week later, he came into the library with an excuse to borrow a book. I knew he wasn’t so much into books, he preferred sports. But he wanted me to explain to him everything that he should know about authors and advice him the best reads. I took him to the classics division. Funny enough, a lot of these books I read when they were published fresh from the publishing house, their authors still alive. I told him about Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Prus. I told him stories in sweet summaries of people’s fates, mistakes, passions, and sins. He started coming for more. I saw him twice a week. We talked about books. Then we started talking about films. I told him about the first cinematic productions, about the lack of voice and subtitles, about actors of previous decades. He smiled when he listened to me. He touched my hand when I was handing him the history of the movies.

Sometime later, he said that I was beautiful. I saw how he was looking at me, probably in the same way as Nick stared at his blond school teacher, prepared only for her classes, ignoring the rest of his schedule. I didn’t know what Mathew watched in his spare time. I only hoped these were not the same things Nick watched behind his closed doors.

A week later, his parents came to the library with threats.

‘This is sick! You are an adult woman. You’re in your thirties. Our boy is only fifteen. He talks only about you. This has to stop.’

I didn’t say a word. Not only was I way over thirty, but I was feeding on blood and from the start, it was all immoral. I was a fallen woman. Twice-widowed, having more sins on my conscience than all of them in their short lives were about to commit. They took matters into their hands. They decided to move to another city, Matthew changed schools. I missed his smile and the way he was looking at me. I woke up in the middle of the night desperately looking for someone lying next to me. Just to touch, just to hold on to. I knew it was personal. I felt that something was growing. A feeling.

Two weeks later, I saw him waiting for me at the entrance of the library.

‘I ran away. I have nowhere else to go.’

I took him to the asylum. When we were entering its gates my family didn’t say a word. I asked them not to feed on him. They sensed that this was serious.

‘There’s one more thing you need to know. I am a vampire.’

‘Like this shiny guy from Twilight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like in this animated film Hotel Transylvania?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like Dracula?’

‘Less spectacular. But yes.’

‘Cool.’

This is how my relationship with Mathew started. I took care of a fifteen-year-old boy. I ended up with a potential husband number three.