From a young age I've known the design of a good alley.
Dirty, busted pavement. Tall and narrow like a gorge. Too cramped to drive a car through. The windows barred or boarded up. Fire escapes rusted out, looking like no one’s stepped foot on them in years. Dumpsters overflowing with trash, no longer in service. Alleys like this you can disappear into, even during the day.
The judge gave me a month to choose my sentence. While I considered, I was put on temporary parole. A little black bead known as the Regulator Lite was installed into my spinal column to keep me sober and track my movements. A bulky parole drone paid me a visit once a week to draw blood and take hair samples, check my system for drugs the bead couldn’t detect.
I was staying with my mother. Never in her life had she seen me so calm. I sat before her like a Buddha, my head empty, my body free of tension. I watched her wring her hands across the kitchen table, mornings before she went off to work. Not even the wreckage of multiple back surgeries could break through the wall of calm enforced by this bead. I still felt the pain, but it meant nothing, less than the flies buzzing around the room.
My mother couldn’t wrap her head around the magic of this bead, how it could’ve transformed me. To her it seemed like I was drugged, or that they’d messed with my brain in some back room when I was locked up in county. She knew as much as I did about the Regulator Lite. The web of little wires, like roots sprouting from a seed, snaked their way into the folds of my brain. Monitoring, processing, correcting. But still... how could such a small thing take away the disease that ruined our lives? What exactly was it adding or taking away to manifest this kind of discipline within me? How had it managed to quench the thirst I’d had my whole life for perpetual destruction?
For the first time I could see what I had destroyed. My mother kept a clean house, but it was small, remortgaged twice over. She never wanted a big house, just enough space to live in, to decorate and show off to a few guests. My antics, my crimes, never allowed for such a luxury.
More than that though, my mother wanted safety. She’d always talked about living somewhere better. Somewhere that claps in the distance didn’t mean gunshots or rumbles overhead didn’t mean helicopters were searching for somebody on the run. Where we were she wouldn’t walk alone in the dark and she wouldn’t dare walk a back alley or park ever unless I was there.
Her kitchen was the most pleasant room in the house. Morning light filtered in through gauzy drapes and colored the scoured kitchen table gold. For stretches of time, I could pretend a different reality; one where we had that nicer house in that nicer neighborhood, one where I hadn’t been in and out of trouble with the law since age ten.
The hum of aerial police drones vibrated through the cracked window. Mother always jumped a little at this sound. One had busted through that very opening in pursuit of me, years before.
We hadn’t talked much since I’d got out. If I said anything, I had to shout. Her hearing was bad and she refused to pay the steep price for decent hearing aides. I had noticed her hair turning white and stringy over the past couple years. A murkiness had settled over her eyes. Perhaps it was the start of cataracts or some type of affliction mothers of sons like me got in their old age. A resignation to how life would be. Stuck in a small house, in a bad neighborhood, with a son who could never figure things out. The lengths she’d gone, the debts she’d taken to try to make me right would guarantee she’d stay here. Anybody could tell you she only had a few years left. So this was it. All this.
For a while I’d sensed she wanted me dead. Not consciously, of course. But deep down. Viscerally. If I’d managed to overdose or cross the wrong person. All her problems would go away. She could grieve and stop worrying. Finally she’d get a clean moment to think about herself. What she wanted.
Even as a baby I was a miserable son. My older sister liked to remind me I never slept unless I was held. My constant wailings made my mother sick and put her on the brink of a nervous breakdown. She would send my sister in to pick me up, handle me when she couldn’t stand or speak anymore. My sister would shut the door to my room and turn on a fan, let me cry for hours. Later she’d find my feet bloody from writhing and digging into the crib. She said she eventually trained me to sleep alone by pinching my side anytime I cried. She dug her nails into my skin until I stopped. When I didn’t she kept pinching until I bled. That was how they were able to sleep again.
My choice was life in prison or to serve a decade with the Regulator Max, in which I was to become a soldier for the state. If I survived my sentence, the Max would be exchanged for the Lite again, and we’d all live happily ever after.
The Regulator Max, as I understood it, turned you into a puppet. Complete obedience no matter the act. You could be running down the street naked singing a song, or breaking into a school and cutting down schoolchildren with a butterknife. You watched it all play out like a show. Some ex-Maxxers offed themselves after they’d finished their sentence. Others learned to live with the memory of their atrocities, somehow able to convince themselves they weren’t responsible.
Of course they weren’t but the mind is a tricky thing. The Regulator Max made it feel like you had pulled the trigger, and probably made some part of you want to.
That wasn’t so different from addiction. Often I looked back, thought of the countless times I burned a spoon or plunged a needle in my arm. There were two selves in me, waging a war. One was my disease, my hunger, which ached and pleaded and said it was never my fault. I was born this way, I was afflicted. The other said there was always a choice. A choice to walk away. A choice to think about the future. To think about my mother. My compulsions had always won. They shouted over the rational voice, they wore him down, they patronized him. Under the reins of the Regulator Max, nothing need be said. You merely acted. Obeyed like you wanted it all along.
The Regulator Lite had me reflecting. Going through old memories and recalling choices I’d made. At five, I set fire to the drapes in the kitchen while mother screamed at father upstairs. I remembered very clearly that it was wrong. I did it anyway. Fast-forward to my adolescence. I recalled that I was well aware I might kill my sister by pushing her down a steep ravine. I only pushed harder, savoring the physical strength I finally wielded over her. As a teen, one of my favorite hobbies was to drop rocks on cars from a nearby overpass. I'd caused a handful of wrecks. What I’d wanted were explosions, flying body parts, and sprays of blood.
I’ve killed my share of people. As an addict, it’s all too easy. You merely give your fellow users what they crave. During all this reflecting, the Regulator Lite kept me calm. But deep down, below the reach of the bead, I knew I’d been born with a wrongness. I gravitated towards destruction. No bead of any kind could erase the cruelty imprinted in my DNA.
I spent three weeks with my mother. The bead allowed a tenderness between us. Sometimes I would hold her hand as we sat in the kitchen. Her ever-present frown would soften, just a little. I’d see flickers of the woman before she’d been broken, of what she could’ve been had I never been born. That never lasted. It became clear she questioned whether the person who’d come home from county jail was really her son or some kind of manufactured put-on designed to guide criminals and their families towards the decade of servitude. Something like, if the Lite could be this good, how bad could the Max be?
At the start of my fourth week, I had my final check-up with the parole unit, scanning me from head to toe, taking its samples, reminding me I had six days to decide my future. When it had gone, I sent a warning to every dealer I knew, saying I planned to make life very hard for them unless I was compensated. The Regulator Lite seemed confused by this behavior, which wasn't strictly illegal, but was sending my cortisol levels through the roof. It kept me calm through most of it, which was the only reason I'd been able to pull it off.
I stood in my favorite alley, bathed in its shadows and nostalgia from the many chemical adventures I’d had there. Behind that overflowing dumpster. Up in that rickety fire escape. Upon the crumbling steps to an abandoned cellar.
A trickle of panic cut through the wall of calm maintained by the Regulator Lite. It was working so hard I could feel its heat on the back of my neck.
Eventually an unmarked van pulled up to the far side of the alley, blocking my view of the street. My shirt was soaked through. My legs were shaking beneath me.
Somehow I’d managed not to say good-bye to anyone, not even mother. She would’ve known what it meant. Just squeezing her hand before I left was risky.
The side door of the van opened. Out stepped a figure, clad in all black, face covered. They started walking towards me, slowly. Their hand reached into their jacket. Out came a weapon.
My chest tightened. My breathing turned rapid and shallow.
The Regulator Lite finally understood what was happening. It switched from calm to panic, firing impulses down my legs to get me to run. I let my knees buckle, bashing the cobblestones.
Next it switched to pain, thinking this would be a better strategy. Electric knives pierced my spine, molten lava burned the plates and screws of my pelvis. Welcome distractions. The bead seemed to not know my life had been nothing but pain.
Boots thudded on the pavement as I writhed in agony.
Then the pain disappeared. In its place throbbed that old friend, my hunger. How could I forget you? I scrabbled to my hands and knees and started begging for a fix. I told the guy it had all been a joke, just a put-on to get him here. All that calm, all those reflections, all that regret, right out the window. Who needs a Regulator to crack the whip when you’ve got this? This, bottom-of-the-soul craving so acute, so complete you’d cut off your arms and legs for a fix, just one more time, the last time, the final high.
The figure raised his weapon. Took aim.
My heart slowed. A calm washed over me.
For once I could picture my mother smiling.