Have you ever confused a dream with real life?

Or stolen something when you have the cash?

Have you ever been blue?

Or thought your train moving while sitting still?

Maybe I was just crazy.

Maybe it was the 60's

Or maybe I was just a boy…

Interrupted.

CHAPTER ONE

"PROVENANCE"

"Give him five milligrams of Vallium, IV"

I woke up to the doctors pumping my stomach. They took a long tube and put it slowly down the back of my throat. That was like being choked to death. Then they began to pump. That was like having blood drawn on a massive scale – the suction, the sense of tissue collapsing and touching itself in a way it shouldn't, the nausea as all that was inside was pulled out. The doctor had to remove the tube as I started to puke.

"Turn his head so he doesn't aspirate."

"There you go"

"Aspirin fragments and vodka, I think"

"Don't tell me what you think, take it to the lab."

From the angle they had turned my head to, I could see Mr. Crowley watching me from behind the ER doors. He looked like someone who had just run over a deer that insisted on standing in the middle of the road. The metaphor did not suit the situation, though. Unlike the clueless deer, I knew my body could be wrenched by a ton of metal at any time; but the intense brightness that preceded the blow was just too overwhelming to be given up on.

I couldn't say if he was disgusted with me or with himself. Maybe both.

"You should check my hand. There's no bones in it." I managed to blab, turning my head away from the accusatory look.

"A wrist banger. Is that why you did that?"

"And other things."

"His relatives are on the way"

"Sometimes it's hard… for me to stay in one… place."

—

"Castiel… If you had no bones in your hand; how did you pick up the aspirin?"

The doctor I was pressed to get a consultation with after the aspirin incident kept asking me questions I did not want to answer. I looked through the window to the sight of a respectable suburban neighborhood, noticing my uncle Michael taking a suitcase out of the trunk of his car. I tilted my head as I tried to put together the pieces of what had been a very stressful morning.

"What is my uncle doing?"

"Would you answer my question, please? How did you pick up the aspirin, if you had no bones in your hand?"

"By then they'd come back."

"Oh. I see."

"No. You don't." I replied under my breath, as I lit a cigarette, hoping to erase the unusual scent of anemone that impregnated the room.

"Well… indulge me, then. Explain it to me."

"Explain what? Explain to a doctor, that the laws of physics can be suspended? That what goes up may not come down?"

A phone rang, and I was again distracted. I turned my head and saw a little girl playing on the floor of an adjacent room. There was a dog barking somewhere on the back of the house.

"Explain that time can move backwards and forwards and from now to then and back again and you can't control it?"

The dog's barks became more and more loud.

"Why can't you control it?"

The noise wouldn't stop, and I could feel it piercing through my skull.

"What?"

"Why can't you control time?"

—

Luke was barking when I got home. Since there was a party going on and the new family dog wasn't very fond of strangers, the noise did not surprise me.

"Luke… shhh. Where were you?" My aunt Anna asked, as she spotted me staring at her. Her red hair was up in a high hairstyle and she had a party dress on. There was a birthday cake on the table reading Happy Birthday Michael. "Everyone is here. Come on." I was dragged to the dining room, where all the unknown family friends were drinking brandy and having small talk. "Mary, you remember Castiel."

"Yes, I do." The elder lady smiled at me. I smiled back.

I was taken to the living room, where there was even more small talk on the background. "So this is what you're wearing?" She looked down at my worn out trench coat with a disapproving yet tender grin.

"I didn't know it was so early. I would have changed."

She turned to the small crowd with her best smile. "Hey everybody, look who is here!"

Most of the people shouted back a "hi", along with a couple waves.

"Happy birthday, uncle Michael."

"Thanks, boy."

I tried to excuse myself to my room, but my aunt catched me and twisted me around, until I was faced with a middle-aged woman who kept saying my name. I heard a whisper in my left ear "Professor's Crowley wife."

"Hi, Lilith Crowley, do you remember me? Rubby's mum, I'm Rubby's mum."

"Yeah." I managed to look into the woman's eyes. She didn't look like she was about to have a meltdown. That was good.

"Your eyes are so beautiful. Now Rubby was in your lit class, wasn't she?"

"Yeah. How – how is she doing?"

"She just got accepted to Radcliff. Oh, what a conundrum. I'm a Welsley girl myself, but I think young woman should just make up their mind, don't you think so?

—-

I turned my head to face him; I had been staring at the little girl the whole time.

"Are you stoned? Did you smoke pot? Took LSD? No drugs?" I gave a dismissive head nod. "What do you feel right now?"

"I don't… I don't know what I'm feeling."

"You need a rest." He announced. I did need a rest, particularly since I'd gotten up early that morning in order to see this doctor, who lived out in the suburbs.

"Oh… I'll go home. Take a nap."

"No, no. You need to go somewhere, where you can get a genuine rest. And you're very lucky. The best place in the world for someone like you is less than a half an hour from here."

"You don't mean Provenance?"

"Castiel, four days ago, you chased a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka."

"I, uh, I had a headache."

"Castiel, your uncle is a friend of mine. He's a colleague. He asked me to see you, even though I don't do this anymore. You're hurting everyone around you. Now, Provenance is a top notch place. A lot of people go there. Even writers, like you."

He stood up and picked up his phone. Meanwhile, I took a look at a book that as lying on the coffe table "The Inner Working of The Mind". I turned it around and saw Doctor Zachariah's photo on the back cover.

I could hear him ordering a cab on the phone.

"My uncle is here."

"It'll be less emotional if we do it this way. Your family and I have talked about it."

We walked towards the cab as uncle Michael stared at me from his car across the street. There was pity in his eyes, but no complacence. I had no chance at escaping my stay at Provenance. The doctor opened the door and I got in, already finding my suitcase on the back seat.

"Now, make sure no stops." He said to the cab driver. He waved me goodbye.

The cab took off. I gave one last look through the back pane at my uncle's car. Petula Clark's "Downtown" was playing on the cab's radio as I lit another cigarette.

—

It was my uncle's birthday and I was hiding in my bedroom. I could've been outside, playing nice and getting along with people who didn't really care about me, and I would've been, if I Ms. Crowley hadn't cornered me early. I wondered if she knew that her husband was banging on my door while she was singing "For He's a Joly Good Fellow".

"Castiel. Castiel. Castiel. Castiel. Are you in there?"

I got off my bed and opened the door, but not letting my English teacher in.

"Hey. I wanna see you again." He looked appreciatively at my body and I became self-aware about the fact I was only in flannel pants and a loose t-shirt.

"Look. It was a one-time thing, okay?"

"Just come to my office, tonight."

He turned his head as he noticed aunt Anna's screams from downstairs.

"Sweetie. Where are you? We are opening the presents!"

He turned back at me "Tell them you're going to a friend's. Please?"

"Oh yeah? Who do you want me to tell it first? My parents, the department chairman or your wife?"

"Castiel"

"NO." I closed the door.

—-

"What did you do?"

"Excuse me?"

The cab driver looked at me through the rear-view mirror. "Well, you look normal."

"I'm sad." I stated. The cabbie laughed at me.

"Well, everyone's sad."

"Well I- I see things."

"You mean like, uh, tripping?"

"Kind of."

"Well, then they should put John Lennon away, huh?"

I looked at him –really looked at him- for the first time. He didn't look like he was joking. "I am not John Lennon." That earned me another laugh as the cab pulled besides a big red brick building, where a fat, bearded man awaited us.

"Don't get too comfortable."

I sat in a chair for fifteen minutes waiting to sign my freedom away. Several preconditions are necessary if you are going to do such a thing. The man that welcomed me to the hospital sat on a corner. As I wrote down my name on a dotted line, a thought occurred to me.

"Shouldn't my family…"

"You have to sign them, Mr. Novak. You're over eighteen, this is your decision." I agreed, and kept signing. I flipped through the pages of my admission papers. One read "…depressed – has attempted suicide…".

"Uhm…Uh, I, I didn't try to kill myself."

"That's the kind of thing you talk about in therapy, honey. Not here." Puzzled, I took a questioning look at the bearded man, whose smile served as some sort of comfort.

"Mr. Novak. You have the distinction of being the only senior at Spring Brook not going on to college." I gave my high school headmaster a weary but also dismissive look. "May I ask what you plan to do?"

"I plan to write."

"But what do you plan to do?" I lifted my head, looking her in the eyes as I repeated the speech I had already given my family a couple of times.

"Look, I'm not gonna become a communist or drop acid or go march on Washington. I just, I don't wanna end up like my father. He killed himself after his company broke. My mom didn't wait much to follow him. I don't want a 9-to-5 job that will make me miserable."

"Young people today have more choices than that."

"No they don't."

"And here." The secretary shows me where to sign. "You forgot one dear, here"

"Oh" I finished signing my admission papers.

"Well, speaking for Dr. Mosley and myself, welcome to Provenance, Castiel."