FILE:PSYCOR/STONEJL/EVAL/BA/031-099/003
DATE:13.08.2013
SUBJECT: Solomon III, Zebediah Isaac
RK/ID:JU-031-099
DESIGNATION:Zyso
PURPOSE: Psych. Eval. / Former Substance Abuse

[FINDINGS: No evidence of continued abuse of prescription medications. Further inquiries recommended regarding apparent history of demonology, re Wicker, “devil speech”, exorcisms. Promotion approved. Approved re assignment Ten-Fists Sword.]

[Narrative edit – J. Stone, PsyCor, EX-027-108, on 14.08.2013]

“Yes, ma’am. The formalities: Zebediah Isaac Solomon III, Swords designation Zyso. Rank Judge, 031-099.

“I couldn’t imagine anything I’d like more at the moment. Do you happen to have any bourbon? Slim chance at best, I reckon. Scotch then, something from Islay if you have it. Neat. Thanks.

“I’m curious: what do you have in that file of yours? Every time I’m in for a behavioral eval one of you guys asks me how I’m sleeping. Like most people, I’d guess. Sometimes on my back, sometimes on my side. No? Not even a grin? Tough audience.

“We can talk about the drug use. I don’t have any secrets anymore, not that I could keep them from the Templars. I habitually abused prescription meds for about—what?—a decade, now that I think about it. I don’t know how well I can recall the specifics, but I’ll give it a shot. Mind if I have another?

“No, the insomnia started well before Shizuoka, back when I was a teenager. Any drugs were forbidden in the Solomon household, of course. We were the model family. Brother Solomon and his little missus and his little spitting image lead his flock by example. Not that he didn’t dip into a bottle of Beam at nights in his study. There was no mentioning of that to the friends, of course. Not that I was allowed to have any friends outside of my father’s congregation. Warm milk and enough bedside prayer to cause calluses thick as pennies on your kneecaps was all I had for the endless blackness of the early morning hours.

“I wasn’t on any medication until after my first tour in China. I was with the Rangers then, Bravo unit out of Fort Bragg. The Army shrinks gave me Zoloft after I had an episode in bunk. I spent much of the next eight years riding the Z train. They just kept upping the dosage. It didn’t help with the insomnia, but at least it stopped the night terrors. I never questioned the pills or why they didn’t discharge me. Maybe they just liked my service record? But I popped them like candy. Nothing quite like a zero-hour infiltration flying on the Z wings.

“After Japan, the shrinks prescribed Xanax for the PTSD—for my legs—and something called Lethene for the habitual insomnia. I was back stateside at this time, cooped up in my mother’s house. Anybody who’d ever been to the flat scrublands west of Black Creek, Texas, would never think you’d need something to calm you down. The entire town sleepwalks every day right there among the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. The Xanax fuzzed over the stifling August afternoons nicely. I sat in my chair on the front porch of my mother’s empty bed and breakfast and watched the weeks drift by. Sometimes I’d roll over the fire ants like an uncaring god.

“What I really needed was something to make that smoking husk of Peartree stop trying to spit words from a fleshless mouth. Yes, that’s Corporal Partridge, ma’am, my spotter. We’d been together in the Rangers since Fort Hood. I wouldn’t call it a hallucination no. I could smell him, hear him. I could feel him when he was there. The Lethene did nothing. Pez would have helped more.

“I don’t mind talking about it all, ma’am. We were northeast of Shizuoka, outside of a little fishing village called Kokuhyou. We had eyes on target, an Orochi scientist named Hapsburg, with orders to eliminate with extreme prejudice. We didn’t even see our shadow until they pegged us. I was hit in the T12 and L1 vertebrae. Immediate paralysis in both legs, loss of bladder and bowel control, what every good boy wants for Christmas. A round punched right through poor Peartree’s incendiary grenade. I couldn’t drag my legs over to him in time to do anything more than just listen to his breath rattling and that get that stink permanently painted on the walls of my nose.

“Some nights I could almost make out what he was saying, sitting there in the corner of my old room, always in the shadows, the hole of his mouth flapping. It was his intensity. He had something he needed to tell me but he couldn’t. And mom’s old Amy Grant records reverberating down the long hallways at all hours. The same record for days sometimes. ‘Walking in the Light,’ I remember that one. Funny how in retrospect you can find significance in the most insignificant occurrences.

“Apparently I failed the Army shrinks’ eval. I just remember bald heads and fat fingers holding expensive pens madly scribbling away on pads. Fissurol was next, something experimental I think. I was having trouble coping, apparently. They never used the term psychotic to my face. Over the next months I had a jeep pick me up for the long ride to Killeen every other Saturday morning. They gave me the sampler tray, Alprazoax and then Klonopin, a variety of doses. I just smiled and asked for more like a little boy at the dessert tray. The Lethene was swapped out for Benzos, Lunesta, Nebitol. Again, no effect at all.

“Peartree was a friend, don’t get me wrong. Not that he was bothering me those nights. As strange it seems, he was always good company. He just reminded me of her. She’s in your notes? Sure, I don’t mind. I saw worse than Peartree with the old man when he was dragging me across the Southwest in that white church van. I just remember the heat, for some reason—no air conditioning, saves on gas; Sycoil was pumping up the prices back then—but we were on the road all the livelong year. Peartree’s charred corpse was a pristine morning sunrise compared to little Charlotte Simmons. That put the fear of the devil in me. Exorcisms in the Black Creek Apocalyptic Baptist Church could’ve landed Brother Sol in a small concrete suite in Hunstville correctional for a very long time. What would they have done to me, I wonder? To a scrawny teenager forced to perform the rites of exorcism? Probably nothing, true. But even if it involved rattlesnakes and holy water and a leather riding crop?

“Jesus wept on the cross. Not little Charlotte Simmons tied to that bed spread-eagled with leather horse ties. Charlotte just laughed and bit her lip and whispered to me that she wanted to do things to me that I had just come to understand. I can remember her words down to the syllable. I call her little, I know, but she was just a year younger than me, thirteen, a pretty girl. Then she chewed off her own tongue and spat it at me. Or whatever was inside her did. And then she growled in what my grandfather called the devil speech in his journal. Little Charlotte Simmons got purification by fire. I started…well…it worked. Brother Sol’s little miracle maker never lost a soul. She haunted my sleep after that. Horrible, beautiful dreams. That’s when the insomnia started. How did I get back to that? I’d love another, thanks.

“I told the Army shrinks about Charlotte and they put me on Abitol. Now that was sinking under the surface of things. That may have very well been an animal tranquilizer. They gave up on the insomnia meds. I sat in my room in a barbiturate fog and sang dirges with Peartree. What was there to do? I was a broken tool cast into the farthest corner of the tool shed. Useless, gathering rust.

“I was almost a year out when the boys in white knocked on mom’s door. Their tags were trimmed in blue, or green, the color of the shallow Gulf of Mexico waters when you can still see the sandy ocean floor. I know what the sentiment is around here, and I know the unholy hell I’ve seen and what I’ve done, but Orochi did all right by me. They laid the cards out on the table, face side up, right there on my mom’s checkerboard kitchen tablecloth next to the bluebonnets and the Bible with the plastic cover. They paralyzed me, they said, first thing. He looked me in the eye and said that. But they wanted to give me my legs back. They could give me back my legs. Of course there was a price, isn’t there always? A nice job doing what I do best, pay I never thought possible, and the sweetest tech I’d ever put my hands on. Then they said that a tool needs to be used, that without a purpose a tool is just scrap. But sometimes a tool is so broken that it needs to be reforged. No more Texas, no more family, no more Army shrinks. And, as part of the package, a nicely orchestrated suicide. Completely plausible, of course: self-immolation in the backyard. I just wonder whose body that was sitting in my wheelchair next to my father’s grave? Peartree, well, he just couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. At least I think he was laughing. Maybe we was screaming? It was always hard to tell.

“So, that was it for the prescription meds. Eight years, now that I think about it. After that, it wasn’t prescription anymore. Orochi had me on an IV for three months until after my surgery, and then I was on two feet again. After the IV were the pills. No name this time, just a designation: EGT410-A. Black capsules that tasted like licorice, three a day. They clarified things. No more Peartree. No more dreams about Charlotte Simmons. I’m not an idiot; I was aware that I was being conditioned, but it didn’t seem to have the same effect on me as my squad mates in Manticore. Three years with Orochi on those pills. But I wouldn’t consider that abuse, would you? God, I hate the taste of licorice.

“After the episode in Egypt, I played dead a second time, made my way to Alexandria and hopped a freighter. I ended up in Texas again, back with mom. By this time her dementia had consumed her. She didn’t recognize me from Adam. The caretaker my sister hired took care of the B&B, not that there were any visitors, of course. The Orochi benefits paid out nicely, and she was in good hands. The caretaker put me up in my old room. I stayed one sleepless night. I’m not sure what made me want to leave, seeing my mother like that or listening to the same damn Amy Grant song over and over again or that the caretaker had found my stash of pills behind the vent and tossed them.

“Well, I eventually ended up in a low-rent apartment in London, shopping myself out as an enforcer for some local syndicates. Still on the pills, whatever the pimply pusher on the corner snatched from his sources’ medicine cabinets—two or three at a time, with bourbon, lots of bourbon. Little Charlotte started visiting my dreams again, looking up at me with those pleading eyes and growling in that guttural, tongueless voice. I knew Peartree was going to come a-knocking soon, I could feel it. But then I swallowed a bee. Of all things. No licorice flavor this time, just the sweetest honey, but with a greasy aftertaste, like the taste of gun oil. You know the story after that, don’t you? I set my curtains or fire and did a little wrecking ball redecorating, and then I opened my door to a beautiful woman who showed me to the Templars. You have given me all of the purpose that I could ever want, that I need. You showed me a whole world that needs fixing, and I’m just the tool. I feel like I was born for it.

“Did I drink all of your scotch? I tell you what, I’ll pick you up a nice decanter. Rumor has it that I’ll be heading to Eastern Europe soon. I hear that they have nice hand-blown crystal. Rumors? Did I say that? I meant whispers from the darkened corners of The Horned God. I’ll get you a case of bourbon, too, good Tennessee whiskey, and you can ask me anything you want. That bee was the last pill I swallowed, and I’ll be riding that high until the end of time.”