Tear Down This Wall

I’m pinned to my bed by a nail through my stomach, no control of my arms or my legs or my hands, just sitting there, watching my door, waiting for it all to end. My windows to the outside world, my eyes and ears, are the only things letting me know I’m still alive. How I wish I wasn’t.

With a laugh, someone opens my door. Ronald Reagan. Again. All he ever does is talk at me–and leave the fucking door wide open. He points at me, asking me questions which make no sense, telling me to tear down the wall, because he was the one who paid for the microphones, or something or other. His voice is enough to make me feel like I’m going insane. He takes my remote from off the bedside table. 

This hasn’t happened before. I still can’t do anything about it. 

He pushes the power button and one of his movies comes on, the one with the monkey. It’s playing at twelve times the speed and is over in about a minute before playing again. Reagan’s voice becomes white noise at this point, a long, slow outpouring of syllables that have no earthly place being next to one another, sounds no human mouth should be able to produce. I look out the window for salvation, wanting to lose myself in the blizzard which raged silently against my single-room apartment. I could float out there right now, float straight through the wall and be happy, but this nail keeps me fixed to my mattress. I try to move again. Usually after a little while I can. I can’t. 

Ronald snaps his fingers, he must have noticed my eyes drifting off, yelling at me in his special language before seemingly being satisfied. A new movie is playing, I don’t recognize this one. All the characters are moving so fast, they’re blending into one another, blending into some big mush of color and motion and it’s making me nauseous. The movement is starting to make my head hurt, not helped by Reagan’s constant rambling. Still can’t move.

Reagan turns off the TV. At least, I think he does. The remote is still by my side. He gets blissfully silent for a sweet few seconds, offset by his death-stare directly into the deepest pits of my soul. In the darkness left by the TV I can’t tell the color of his eyes, but I know they’re blue, and I know he’s looming over me right now. I used to break a sweat when this happened, but right now, all I’m focused on is the snow outside. 

Reagan takes my bedside table and lifts it above his head with great effort. He tries to walk with it but has to put it down after a few shuffled steps, breathing heavily, still not saying a word. After a couple more times trying to bring it wherever it is that he’s taking it–and failing–he resorts to dragging it along the ground. The legs creak and scrape against my wood floor, one leg falls off in the process. Eventually, he reaches my window, snowstorm still thundering outside without a sound, and through it goes the three-legged table. Cold air rushes in, wind blowing my sheets and swaying my curtains, knocking over whatever isn’t pinned down. Unfortunate for me, because I still am.

He turns towards me, yelling again, screaming at me, his voice reaching its breaking point, straining and cracking with effort, brimming with anger. I can make out two or three words for every hundred that he hurls at me, all the while snow is hurtling into the room and piling on the windowsill, falling all around Ronald Reagan’s feet. Spit flies at me from Reagan’s mouth and I can feel it rolling down the side of my face as he paces back and forth. He looms for a while, yells for a while, then looms some more, his old, crooked finger hanging just inches above my nose. His face is sagging with age, loose skin and poor lighting creating a hellish abomination no one would dare call a human. I still can’t move.

After an eternity he leaves my bedside, and out of the corner of my eyes I see him standing by the broken window. He begins slamming his bare fists on the wall, shaking everything in my room with each strike. First the wallpaper rips apart, coming off in streaks to give way to the wall beneath it, which shatters over the course of several minutes. Blood covers the floor, spilling down from his fists as he carves a way out of my home. More snow comes through the Reagan-sized hole in my wall, as he falls down, down all the seven stories of my apartment building. But he’ll be back. I know he will. 

I can move again.