Elephants, Butterflies and Defibrillators

“Hey man, check this out!”

It was as simple as that. One sentence that started the whole, horrible event. I was seventeen. It was October 1987, and although I do not know the exact date, the first guard to enter my cell that night repeated it to me years later, saying it was a date that he would never forget. A day that he still had dreams about.

Darryl held out his hand and showed me the pills – big brown beasts – and then reached into his left pocket to bring out yet another handful. “I have no idea what they are, but they have to be something, right?” he continued.

“Fuck yeah man! I’d say they are something alright! How many do you have?” I asked.

“One hundred and four! The cabinet was unlocked V! I only had a minute, but I got what I could.”

Darryl was standing in the doorway of my cell, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, clearly anxious though I couldn’t be sure if he was actually excited, as I was, or just nervous. We had done some stupid things together which had managed to get us confined to our respective units for quite a stretch, once the correctional center staff became suspicious. After the last foiled plan, which had included taking a hostage in a rather ridiculous escape plot, we had talked a lot about suicide. Both of us had stated that if the opportunity arose, we would very likely take advantage of it, and to me this looked like just that kind of opportunity. Go to sleep and not wake up.

I smiled at Darryl. “Give me half man!”

He counted out the pills, his hands shaking so badly I was afraid he would lose them all over the floor. Then he stood, quietly for a moment, looking at the remaining pills in his hand. “This is my ticket out of here,” I said, throwing my half, fifty-two large pills, into my mouth, a dozen or so at a time. I pushed the cold-water button on the sink beside me, filling a cup, twice, three times, and quickly washing them down. “See you on the other side man!” I said.

Darryl looked at his pills, then looked at me. Then he repeated the process, the pills laying in a mound in his hand, which could barely hold them all. He saw Jacko approaching but didn’t hide the pills. “What’s happening ladies?” Jacko asked.

“Here Jacko, take half of these.” Darryl said, and quickly counted out half of the remaining pills.

“What are they?” Jacko asked calmly, accepting the pills and picking one up to examine it closer.

“We don’t know,” I told him, “but I figure they must be anti-depressants or something. I just took fifty two of the fuckers man!”

“Cool. Give me some water you dumb fucking qallunaat. If you’re going, I coming with you.” Jacko grinned. I did as he asked, passing him some water and he washed down the pills.

“Yeah well, I guess I’m in too you fucking nutbars!” Darryl said.

Soon recreation time was over and everyone had to return to their own units. I decided to play some cards and wait to see what was going to happen. Everyone on my unit knew what I had done and I very firmly warned that if anyone ratted me out I would kill them. No one did.

Eventually I began to get very tired and decided I couldn’t play cards any longer. I said good night and good bye to the guys at the table, repeating my threat, and stumbled into my cell. I don’t remember falling asleep. Don’t even remember going into my cell. I don’t remember much of anything for the next week or so…

The guards watched, laughing, as Jacko repeatedly tried to pick up his black, plastic hair comb off of the floor. He was focused intently on the task, and didn’t realize people were watching him, or that he had been trying to pick up that comb for some five minutes now, without success.

The guards called in others from the control room to come watch the show. Jacko, oblivious, continued with his quest to pick up his comb, seeming to not quite be able to reach it, glaring at it intently through eyes that just didn’t seem to be working very well.

Eventually they decided that Jacko was in poor enough shape to warrant a trip to the hospital. Before they got him there however, they found Darryl sleeping in someone else’s cell. When they woke him, he didn’t seem to know where he was, and could not talk clearly. That made two inmates that they had to take to the hospital.

“Okay, if these two are wasted, where is Veinotte?” one guard asked, knowing the three of us were close. “We had better find him.”

One guard went to my until. Upon entering he shouted “Where’s Veinotte?”

Apparently, his question was ignored.

He proceeded to my cell, where he found me in a state that would be described in his report later as “comatose”.

“I need help in here!” he screamed from my cell where I lay in my bed, unwakeable. I had urinated on myself, was unresponsive, and his efforts to revive me failed. I was stripped and dragged off the unit by my arms, feet trailing behind me, naked, with a pulse but not much else. Someone decided that there was no time for an ambulance, and they loaded me into the pen van, racing me to the hospital some five or six kilometers away.

“It was fucking wild man!” Jacko told me excitedly. The three of us had been in ICU together: They were high as kites but awake while I was not. I was on a ventilator with ‘tubes and wires running everywhere’, oblivious to the fact that I was knocking on death’s door.

“I was watching your monitor.” he continued, “It would be going all kinda normal, and then it would start going crazy.” The word ‘crazy’ was emphasized by his arm pumping up and down, his finger making jagged electrocardiogram waves in the air. “Then the alarms would go off and it would just be this straight line! They would all come running into the room, jumping on you and pumping on your chest. Then they would jump start you and your heart would start beating again! I don’t know how many fucking times it happened man, but you kept fucking dying!”

I grinned at his use of the term ‘jump start’ when referring to defibrillation.

It actually happened six times that night. In Labrador West my mother’s friend went to the cabin to get her. There was a minister looking for her who had been in contact with the hospital in Goose Bay. They were trying to find my mother because my heart kept stopping and they said that I would not make it through the night.

“Get em man! Get em!” I exclaimed.

“Get who Veinotte?” the guard asked.

“The elephants man! They’re flying away with our garbage! Get em!” I tried to reach out, needing desperately to stop them as they flew off into the sky overhead, large black garbage bags dangling from their trunks, their ears acting as their wings. The handcuffs prevented me from lifting my arms. I stretched my hands out, straining against the steel of the handcuffs. I had to stop the elephants!

“Just try to calm down Veinotte. You’re going to be okay. Don’t worry about the elephants. They will go away.”

They didn’t. Not for a while, and when they did there were these enormous butterflies floating over me. They were beautiful, huge, with wings filled with every color imaginable. They hovered, then floated away only to come back and hover, wings flapping gracefully as I stared up at them, awed. The sky above them was bright with color. Pastels that melted into each other as far as I could see. It was a huge difference from the sky that the elephants had flown off into. That had been darker, with deep blues and grays and shades of black. This sky, and the butterflies that flew off into it, were calming.

I smiled staring up as the dance continued. The creatures brought such peace with them and I wanted to join them in the sky! I wanted to float up there with them in all that color.

Then a face appeared, peering around the wing of a butterfly as it hovered over me. The peaceful feelings suddenly vanished, and a cold dread filled me. The face was my friend. He had been dead for some time, and now he peeked around the butterfly, looking directly into my eyes, not speaking and not quite smiling. I tried to speak to him but couldn’t move my tongue. I tried to reach out to him, but the handcuffs held me firmly to the rails of the bed.

We had dreamt of starting a rock band. Even planned to die at the age of 27 like so many of our favorite artists had done and would dream of the most spectacular way to achieve our deaths, live, on stage. Instead he had died ten years earlier than planned and now peered down at me while I tried desperately to speak his name.

He slid out of view, back behind the butterfly whose wings kept it hanging in the air above me. Another face appeared. This was a guy who had also been my friend but who I thought was dead. I wasn’t certain, and I had played a part in his stabbing, even if it was indirectly. He had the same look on his face. Almost smiling. No hate in his eyes – more of a curiosity, almost as if he had a question he wanted to ask me.

He too slid behind the beautiful creature and I waited for the next face to appear. I don’t know if anyone else visited me or not, as all I remember from that point is darkness. Darkness for days.

“Who are you talking to Veinotte?”

I spun around, startled by the voice. “No one” I muttered. Then I turned back to the corner where the person had been. They were no longer there.

I looked around me, feeling as if I was waking from a long, deep dream. I was in a cell. I was cold and naked. I was in segregation.

I closed my eyes for a moment, then turned back to the corner of the cell, opening my eyes.

“I’m glad you’re back!” I said to the old man who had reappeared before me. “I was afraid we were not going to get to finish our conversation!”

Darkness. Nothing for a couple more days until I heard someone say “You know you are supposed to be dead, don’t you?”

I looked up at Dr. Playfair, then around me, trying to ascertain whether I was awake or dreaming or just where I was. “Yes. That was the plan.” I replied dryly.

“Well it almost worked. It should have worked, actually. You can thank the guards for your still being alive.” He said in his thick English accent. “Had they waited for an ambulance there is absolutely no way that we would be having this conversation now.”

“How long have I been here?”

“It’s been a week since you took the pills.”

A week, I thought. Wow. I knew almost nothing of an entire week, though I remembered butterflies and the elephants, and the catheter being pulled out of me at one point, which caused me to try to sit up and see what the hell was happening to me down there. A week…

“And… and Jacko and Darryl?” I asked, fear constricting my throat.

“They are fine. Both back on their units. You took them on quite the little trip, but they faired a lot better than you did. So why did you want to die?” He looked me in the eyes while he waited for an answer. I decided to return his gaze.

“Why are we speaking in past tense?” I asked. “You think anything has changed just because I failed?”

When the cell door closed again, I couldn’t help thinking that I needed to remember what the old man and I had been talking about. I knew he was gone now, but it seemed we had unfinished business. As I looked at the corner where we had talked, I tried to remember. Part of me knew it was nonsense – it was a drug induced hallucination. Still part of me fought hard to recall the words we spoke. It felt important.