Foreign Objects (MXM)

I have never understood stability.

People use the word with such casual confidence, as if it belongs to them by birth. Stable job. Stable home. Stable family. A stable mind. To me, stability was a metal rail slick with sea mist, my hands cold around it, the water below turning black between the streetlights. A rail was only stable until the wind arrived from the wrong direction. Then the whole body became negotiable.

I had never felt safe in any useful sense. Money came and vanished. Family meant being good enough for years and discovering, too late, that good behavior had no protective value. There was no locked door inside me. No room in my chest where I could put myself down and trust that I would still be there when morning came.

So what was the use?

I did not understand how people did it.

How did they wake up, wash their faces, answer messages, buy bread, miss trains, fall in love, travel, get married, have children, argue over dinner, complain about the price of fruit, schedule dental cleanings six months in advance?

How did they keep moving through the ridiculous machinery of a day? Did they know something I had failed to learn? Had everyone else been handed the secret of life in a sealed envelope while I was busy being born wrong?

“Hey, boy.”

The voice came from the promenade, roughened by age and fear.

“Get down from there. What are you doing?”

My thoughts broke apart so cleanly that, for a second, all I noticed was my own breathing inside my mouth. I turned my head slowly. Fast movement felt disrespectful to gravity.

The stranger stood several meters away, close enough to see me clearly, far enough to pretend he was giving me space. He looked to be in his sixties, maybe older, with a thin gray cardigan pulled crooked over his shoulders and one hand lifted, palm open. The gesture embarrassed me. People did that with frightened animals.

“Look,” he said, voice shaking around the edges, “I’m not going to do anything, okay? Let’s talk about it. Just talk.”

I hated him for seeing me.

Then I hated myself for hating him.

I had never wanted to become this image in another person’s life. A young man on a railing at night. Sea below him. Shoes balanced on metal. Face turned half away. I especially did not want to belong to an old stranger’s memory. He had probably come out for air, or cigarettes, or a walk his doctor told him to take for his blood pressure, and now I was standing there, asking him to carry me.

That felt indecent.

Whatever I had already ruined, I could at least spare him this. I could climb down. I could let him believe he had done something good.

Maybe, later, he would tell his wife, or his daughter, or the cashier at the corner shop that he saved a boy by the sea. Maybe he deserved that story more than he deserved the truth.

I could try again another night.

The thought came with the same dull practicality as remembering to buy toothpaste.

I lowered one foot from the rail, then the other. My legs were numb from the cold, and when my shoes hit the pavement, the shock traveled up through my knees. I kept one hand on the railing for a moment because the ground had become suspicious under me.

The stranger breathed out. I saw it happen in his shoulders before I heard it.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Why were you doing that?”

“Nothing,” I said.

My voice sounded ordinary. That offended me too.

“I wasn’t going to jump.”

He stared at me with the helpless politeness people use when they are being lied to and cannot afford to challenge it.

“Okay,” he said. “It was scary. Don’t do that.”

“Sorry, sir.”

I gave him the apology because he wanted one, and because I had already taken enough from him.

He nodded several times, then turned away. After a few steps, he pulled out his phone. He tried to be discreet about it, which was kind of him and useless.

By then he was probably calling the police.

I watched him lift the phone to his ear, watched the festival lights tremble in the wet pavement beyond him, watched my second chance begin to rot before I had even decided what to do with it.

“Oh, fuck,” I said.

In addition to everything else I hated about being alive, I had to wake up early because the rehabilitation center decided my wellbeing required administrative urgency.

They called it a check-in. I called it being summoned.

My mother had been called too, which made sense, I suppose. Protocol had a clean mouth. It said guardian contact, crisis escalation, risk assessment, family involvement.

It did not say humiliation, although that was clearly included in the package. I understood why they contacted her. I understood the file, the signatures, the obligation to record every ugly little incident until my life became a stack of paper with stamps on it.

I only hoped she would not mistake it for theater.

That was always the insult beneath the concern.

Attention.

A word people used when they could not imagine wanting absence more than oxygen. I did not want an audience. I did not want a rescue scene. I did not want my mother’s face, pale and stiff across a counseling office at eight in the morning, while some government-funded man with polished shoes tried to pull meaning out of me with a plastic spoon.

If attention had been the goal, I had chosen the wrong method. I wanted to disappear. Total. Unspectacular. The body gone, the room cleaned, the name spoken less and less until it became inconvenient to remember.

Adam Fogg’s office had three chairs, a desk, two dead plants, and a framed certificate mounted slightly crooked on the wall. The air smelled of printer heat, stale coffee, and lemon disinfectant. There was a box of tissues on the desk placed within perfect reach, which made me want to set fire to it on principle.

My mother sat beside me with her bag on her lap, both hands folded over the clasp. She had dressed for work afterward. Pale blouse. Navy skirt. Sensible shoes. Teacher clothes. Clothes for standing in front of a classroom and explaining grammar to children while your own son turned life into a repeated failed exit.

Adam opened my file.

Paper rasped against paper.

“This is the fourth time, Connor,” Adam said.

I looked at his hands. He had trimmed nails, a wedding ring, and a tiny coffee stain near the cuff of his shirt. His lower incisors were crowded. The right one overlapped its neighbor, slight enough that most people would never notice. I noticed. I had wasted two years learning how to notice mouths.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “You told us you were going to do better.”

“Maybe I meant better at the attempts.”

Silence entered the office and took the spare chair.

My mother turned toward me. Her eyes opened too wide, exposing the fragile red at the rims. For a second she resembled the version of herself from years ago, the one who still reacted before exhaustion could translate everything into restraint.

Adam did not move. His pen remained above the page.

“That isn’t funny, Connor.”

“I wasn’t laughing.”

“You shouldn’t make insensitive jokes about this. Think about your mother.”

The words did something unpleasant to my chest. A small, mean twist.

“Insensitive to whom?” I asked. “I’m the subject matter, aren’t I?”

My mother made a sound under her breath. It had no shape, which was worse than crying.

Adam lowered the pen. “Listen to me. We are seeing a pattern, and it is extremely concerning. We discussed your file this morning. At this stage, there are two options.”

I leaned back in the chair. The vinyl stuck to the damp skin at the back of my neck.

“Either you are admitted for inpatient care, or you attend mandatory sessions with a psychiatrist appointed through the mental health facility.”

“No,” my mother said at once. “He’ll see the psychiatrist.”

I turned to her. “Am I allowed to make my own decisions, or was that also misplaced in the file?”

Her mouth pulled into a thin line. She did that when she was trying to keep herself from shouting. When we were children, Callum and I used to watch for it at dinner. It was the early warning system before a storm.

“You lost that privilege,” she said. “Do you want to be locked inside a mental health institution?”

“I love how everyone keeps phrasing care with locks in it.”

“Connor.”

Adam cut in before my mother could continue. “We are trying to get you the help you need. Four attempts is too many. We have duties as well. You could become a danger to yourself and, potentially, to others.”

I looked down at my hands.

There was a half-moon of grime under one thumbnail, probably from the railing. My fingers smelled of rust, cigarette smoke, and the soap from the center bathroom, that cheap pink liquid that always left skin feeling coated. I flexed them once and felt nothing worth reporting.

“You shouldn’t have saved me then,” I said.

My mother went still beside me. There was a terrible little intake of breath. I wanted to take the sentence back, mostly because it had landed where I had aimed it.

“He’ll go,” she said, her voice scraped raw. “He’ll go to the psychiatrist, Mr. Fogg.”

Adam wrote something in the file. The pen moved in efficient strokes. My life reduced itself to ink again.

Then he opened a drawer and took out a folded flyer and a small white card. He slid both across the desk.

My mother reached for them before I could. Her fingers shook, although she pressed the paper flat against her palm, trying to discipline her own body into obedience.

“Your sessions begin in two days,” Adam said. “Dr. Magdalena is excellent. She has experience with complex cases.”

“Fantastic. I love being complex. Makes me sound artisanal.”

“Connor,” my mother warned.

Adam’s expression did not change. “I hope this becomes useful to you. Truly.”

There it was. Professional mercy. Warm enough to pass inspection, contained enough to survive paperwork.

“I wish you a smooth recovery,” he added.

Smooth recovery. It sounded like a road sign in a country nobody had visited.

I stood up.

The chair legs dragged against the floor, too loud for the office. My mother rose after me, clutching the flyer and card. I left before Adam could say anything else. The hallway smelled worse than the office, heavier with bleach and damp coats and vending-machine sugar. A woman in reception looked up at me with concern she tried to disguise by staring at her computer.

Outside, the morning had no respect for the occasion.

Cygna was already awake. Scooters cut through the road in shrill bursts. A bakery across the street had its shutters half open, and the smell of warm bread came out onto the pavement with criminal optimism. Sunlight hit the windows of the facility, turning them flat and white. Somewhere above us, laundry snapped on a balcony line.

“Connor.”

I kept walking.

“Connor.”

I stopped so abruptly my mother nearly collided with me. When I turned, anger had already reached my mouth.

“What?”

She stood on the steps, one hand gripping the strap of her bag. She looked older in daylight. I hated noticing that. I hated being given evidence against my own bitterness.

“Aren’t you tired?” she asked.

Her voice did not rise. That made it harder to ignore. “Because I am.”

For a moment, I saw it. The fatigue. The years. The classrooms, the unpaid bills, the betrayal she carried without ever naming it properly, the two sons she had loved and then somehow lost inside the same apartment.

Then I remembered that I was her son and she had left me alone inside it too.

“You should try therapy, Mom,” I said. “You need it.”

Her face closed around the sentence.

I took the flyer and card from her hand. She let me. That was our family’s talent. We surrendered objects when we could not surrender pride.

I left her there.

My shift at the amusement park did not start for another six hours, but returning to my apartment felt impossible. The place would still have my unwashed mug in the sink, the mattress with one corner of the fitted sheet pulled loose, the damp towel on the chair because I had lost the will to hang it properly. My apartment had begun to accuse me in domestic details.

Every object knew I was failing.

So I walked.

I lit a cigarette at the corner and tasted paper, tobacco, and the sourness of my own mouth. The smoke moved through me badly. It always did in the morning. My stomach hated it. My brain liked having a task, even a stupid one.

Walk. Inhale. Count the cracks in the pavement. Avoid the woman with the stroller. Step around the puddle shaped vaguely like Calderra if Calderra had been kicked in the ribs. Watch the wind work through the plane trees. Hear the leaves clicking together, dry little bones above the traffic.

Hear my shoes on concrete. Hear a delivery scooter cough at the red light. Hear a dog bark from an open window. Register the blue tarp over a fish stall, the man hosing old scales into the gutter, the pigeons negotiating breakfast with more purpose than I had ever brought to anything.

This was what my brain did after crisis. It catalogued the world.

The first attempt had been pills.

I was seventeen.

There were details from that day I could retrieve with disgusting clarity and others that remained unavailable, sealed behind static.

I remembered the bathroom tiles because one of them had a crack shaped like a bent finger. I remembered thinking I should have cleaned my room first, which was the most seventeen-year-old thought possible. I remembered the hospital lights. I remembered the bitter film in my mouth when I woke and the humiliation that followed, enormous and airless.

I did not wake grateful.

People expect that. They want survival to arrive with violins.

I woke up angry, sick, embarrassed, and still alive. Then everyone came to look at me with their own version of horror, and I had to watch them watching me.

My father beat me after.

It was not the worst beating in history. There. A fair statement. He did not break anything. He did not leave me bleeding on the floor. He struck me with the panicked stupidity of a man allergic to crisis, then stood there afterward breathing hard, looking at his own hand like it had embarrassed him.

It was the first time he had hit me.

Everyone said he was scared.

They said he froze. They said he did not know what to do. They always said that about him, turning incompetence into weather.

My father froze in every emergency and somehow came out of it pitied.

My mother moved. My mother called. My mother packed bags, signed forms, spoke to doctors, answered questions, washed vomit from towels, phoned the school, stood in fluorescent corridors with her hair falling out of its clip.

My father froze and got a sympathetic explanation.

I still do not understand how one person can fail at fatherhood three times.

Three.

Some people are poorly built for certain roles. They should respect the evidence. If the first child does not teach you gentleness, leave the second one alone. If two children make you crueler, do not go testing the universe again with a third.

At some point, stubbornness becomes a public hazard.

But I was trying to be fair, which was funny. Fairness had never done anything for me except make me easier to injure.

I reached the amusement park before the gates had fully opened to the public. In daylight, the place lost some of its vulgar magic. The ticket booths looked chipped and tired. The painted dolphins along the fence had sun-peeled smiles. A maintenance worker dragged a black trash bag across the pavement, leaving a wet line behind him.

Somewhere inside, a ride engine started and coughed twice before catching. Metal clanked. A radio played an old love song from a kiosk, the singer’s voice warped by distance and cheap speakers.

At night, people came here to be fooled.

In the morning, the park had the decency to look ashamed of itself.

I went in through the staff entrance and nodded to the guard without waiting for him to nod back. The corridor behind the public stalls smelled of fryer oil, wet cardboard, artificial strawberry syrup, and the sour foam inside mascot heads. That smell had become part of me. It lived in my hair after showers. It entered my clothes and my dreams. Children hugged the mascot and squealed into its belly, never knowing the creature was lined with sweat and another person’s despair.

The changing room was empty.

Small room. Lockers. A cracked mirror. A narrow bed shoved against the wall for breaks no one was supposed to take. The mascot’s head sat on the shelf, mouth open in permanent delight.

I stared at it for a second.

Then I lay down on the bed with my shoes still on.

I meant to close my eyes for a minute. My bones felt filled with damp sand. Sleep took me without permission.

–

There was heat.

A room with thin curtains moving at the window. A fan turning its tired face from one side to the other. Papers spread across a bed. Receipts. A notebook. A pen caught between my teeth because my hands were busy failing at basic arithmetic.

He was there.

Sitting cross-legged beside me in a sleeveless shirt, shoulders brown from the sun, hair messy from the fan. He held chopsticks in one hand and a takeaway container in the other, eating noodles.

“You added that wrong,” he said.

“I didn’t.”

“You absolutely did.”

I bent over the notebook, annoyed. “No, look. Twelve plus seven plus eighteen is thirty-nine.”

He stopped chewing.

I looked again.

The mistake revealed itself with the vulgar confidence of a naked man in a church.

“Oh.”

He grinned so broadly I wanted to throw the notebook at his face. “Future dentist. Pillar of society. Trusted with drills.”

“Shut up.”

“You were going to charge someone thirty-nine for thirty-seven worth of bills.”

“It was a hypothetical bill.”

“Fraud begins in the imagination, Connor.”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re always tired when numbers expose you.”

He put the container down and crawled closer before I could move away. The bed dipped under his weight. His knee knocked into my thigh. I tried to guard the notebook, which only made him more pleased with himself.

“Don’t,” I warned.

He raised both hands. “I’m only here to educate.”

“You’re here to eat my food and ruin my life.”

“Multitasking.”

Then his fingers were at my side, digging in, quick and merciless. I jerked so hard the pen fell from my mouth.

“Stop.”

“Apologize to mathematics.”

“Get off me.”

“Say, ‘I, Connor, betrayed the sacred order of addition.’”

“I’ll kill you.”

“You tried numbers first. They survived.”

I laughed. In the dream, I could laugh without feeling the cost of it. My body had a different history there. It knew how to twist away, how to grab his wrist, how to fight back without fear entering the room. He climbed halfway over me, warm and solid, trapping my hip under his knee while I shoved at his shoulder. His breath struck my neck. His hair brushed my cheek. The room smelled of noodles, sun-warmed cotton, and the cheap soap he used because he bought whatever was on sale.

“Say it,” he said.

“No.”

His fingers found the weak place under my ribs.

I made a sound I would have denied in court.

He laughed into my shoulder. “There it is.”

“Get off.”

“Apologize.”

“Never.”

I closed my eyes in the dream, which was a dangerous thing to do. Happiness sharpened when I stopped looking at it. His hand on my waist. The weight of him. The small catch in his breathing after laughing. The fan chopping the heat into pieces. His necklace touching my collarbone, cool for one second before my skin warmed it.

I tried to hold all of it without frightening it away.

“Connor,” he said.

His voice had changed.

“Wake up.”

I kept my eyes closed.

“Connor, wake up.”

The fan became an electrical rattle. The warm room thinned into the sour air of the changing room. His hand disappeared from my waist, leaving the shape of absence behind.

“Wake up, dummy. Time for work.”

–

I opened my eyes.

Nico stood over me with a paper cup in one hand and his brows raised in professional contempt. He had ink on the side of his thumb, probably from the caricature booth, and his hair was tied badly at the back of his head.

“You sleep like you got murdered,” he said.

“Romantic.”

“Disturbing. Get dressed before Mara starts yelling.”

He looked toward the mascot head, then back at me. “Also, you were smiling in your sleep. Deeply upsetting. Never do that again.”

“Thank you for your concern.”

“Anytime. I’m basically a saint with better cheekbones.”

He left before I could insult him properly.

The door swung shut. The room returned to its cheap fluorescent buzz.

I stayed on the bed.

For a moment, I could still feel the dream in my ribs. The laughter had left bruises no one else could see. My hand moved to my side before I could stop it, searching for fingers already gone.

I closed my eyes.

Please, I thought.

Please stop appearing in my dreams.

I am begging you for this last mercy.