ODE TO SLEEP

「002. who is he?」

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       "YOU learn quickly,"

Maddox smiled down at me, placing his hand on the top of my head as he walked past. I held the staff tighter, watching him as he scanned through the rest of the crowd. I was an ant compared to the rest of them. Then again, I was half of their age. But it never stopped me.

I spent my first three months learning English. When I was seven, I could speak in broken sentences. By the time I turned nine, I could fluently speak both Japanese and English. I still said a few phrases differently or got my adjectives mixed up, but other than that, I was doing good. A few of the other occupants of Maddox's estate would sometimes laugh at me because I wasn't all that sure about sarcasm and figurative language. They would say an idiom; like it was raining cats and dogs. I didn't understand that that phrase meant it was raining really hard. I thought it was actually raining cats and dogs. Like there were literal animals falling from the sky.

I eventually got the hang of it, but not without some teasing and taunting over it. By the time I was ten, Maddox started letting me tag along with him outside. I was fascinated by the people in the masks, and I think he knew that.

I felt like I was attached to them in some way. Just the way they practiced and moved seemed so...familiar to me. Even their masks seemed proverbial. I regained my first memory by seeing them. Maybe the rest of my memories would come to me if I stuck around them long enough.

Maddox didn't seem to mind me coming along with him. At first, I would just sit off to the side on one of the many benches, watching their fluid-like movements. Then I started sitting in the garden. Then, I stuck around Maddox's hip. All of them joked and called me his shadow. That was another idiom that took me a second to understand.

Soon enough, Maddox had asked if I wanted to join in on their practices. I was hesitant at first, but the other encouraged me to try it, just once. So I took one of the bamboo staffs and I followed them out into the field. I already knew everything; I'd been watching them for years. However, doing and watching were two different things.

I sometimes dropped the staff or lost my footing. I'd trip over my own shoelaces, leading me to do practices barefoot. My hands got sweaty and the staff would slip from my hand and land under someone's feet, causing them to slip and fall. I got scolded a few times. And it seemed like I messed up every time I did something.

I threw the staff down in frustration, exclaiming to Maddox that I was going to quit. I couldn't do any of it right, no matter how hard I tried. I practiced and practiced but nothing was working. I just wasn't cut out for it. I couldn't do it.

"Isaiah," He said gently, kneeling in front of me as he placed his hand on my shoulder. "Instead of saying I can't do it, say how can I do it? If you continue to tell yourself that you can't do it, there's no way in Hell you're going to be able to do it. In order to change your ways, you need to change your attitude and how you see things."

So I did. I asked myself how could I do it. I asked one of the other trainees to help me. She showed me exactly what I was doing wrong and helped me practice in the early morning. Three days later, I was doing everything perfectly.

"Practice makes perfect," She smiled, patting me on the top of my head. "You learn fast, kiddo."

It wasn't much later that Maddox appeared in the doorway to my bedroom, knocking on the wooden door. He crossed his arms and leaned against the frame, grinning down at me.

"You're quickly excelling. Why don't you start training with me, Isaiah?"

From then on, I would be with Maddox almost every hour of the day. He taught me how to actually fight, how to correctly hold my stance and make a fist so that I wouldn't break my fingers when I hit something hard, and how to hurt someone. I didn't know right from wrong about what he was teaching me. What else was I supposed to believe? I was ten years old with no recollection of my life prior to Maddox.

People whispered and said that he treated me differently. He called everyone his children, but people started to speculate that I was a blood relative. I knew that I wasn't. I was sure that if I was, I would have remembered something—anything about him. But I didn't. So I never listened to them when they would say it.

I started having nightmares again at eleven. They'd gone away for a bit, but after starting training, they returned, hot and heavy. I woke up in panic attacks, screaming to the point where I felt like my throat would bleed. I would be covered in sweat, my whole body writhing in pain from phantom wounds. I would thrash around in my bed, my head feeling like it would split open at any point from the faces that would flash in my mind in a blurry haze.

Maddox would always shove all the other people away from my door and sweep me up out of the sheets, shaking me out of my daze. One night was bad; I couldn't catch my breath, I was so afraid, shaking and sobbing. I couldn't speak—my throat was closed, and I couldn't even form words.

"Isaiah, it's alright," Maddox cupped my face in his hands, wiping the tears away from my cheeks. "You're safe. It's safe here. He's not coming to get you. He's not here. He won't hurt you."

He? Who was he? Was he the one who made me have nightmares? Was he the cause of this pain?

It got so bad that Maddox took me to the hospital. I remember sitting in the plush chair, looking at him helplessly as he explained to the doctor about my actions. First, it was PTSD. I got some sleeping medicine and some pills that would "calm me down". Then it was Acute Stress Disorder. Next, it was a panic disorder. Then it was OCD. The list goes on and on. By the time Maddox was done dragging me to specialists and doctors, I had a small pharmacy going on in my room.

"Isaiah, don't forget to take your medicine."

"Did you take your pills, Isaiah?"

"Take your meds before you have dinner."

"This one is to help you sleep, so take it right before you go to bed."

"Don't ever skip out on your medicine. This is to help you get better."

"It'll take time for it to work. Just be patient."

I didn't want to wait. I wanted it to work now. I couldn't keep having these dreams. I couldn't keep seeing this face. I couldn't keep dreaming about my own abuse.

Maddox resorted to giving me a sketchbook and a pencil with the simple command of: "Draw what you dream."

And I did.

Countless nights I spent stumbling out of my bed, tangled in my blankets as I tried to get to my desk. I'd flip open the sketchbook and start scribbling the face in my head before it went away. I started remembering. This man...my abuser...

...was my own father?

The woman must have been my mother. She was always there. I could hear her crying in the back of my mind. I heard her whispering a name as she clutched me, but I never heard the name.

"It'll come back to you one day," Maddox assured, his chair creaking as he leaned back. "Just don't stress yourself to death trying to figure it out. For now, you have other things to focus on."

I didn't want to focus on other things. I wanted to focus on this. I wanted to know who I was. But what Maddox said wasn't up for debate.

So, I focused on other things.

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