A Montage of Shame

Andreas Fleps

It’s 2010. I’m nineteen on a late evening in mid-October during my freshman year of college.

Outside, clouds have woven a dense veil the moonlight can’t pierce, and a wintry mix is continuing its second-guessing. 

Cut to: In my dorm room, I’m pouring vodka into empty water bottles I will share with two other guys in the parking lot before we head into the club. 

Cut to: We’re giddy and walk in laughing. My bladder’s bursting. All the jagged edges of the world are softening. The night seems charged with possibility.

Cut to: I’m being manhandled by a security guard down a flight of stairs to the diminishing boom, boom, boom of the club’s speakers. His face is a smeared painting. He tosses me onto the cold, wet sidewalk, scratching up both of my palms. The two guys I’m with fall next to me with a gravelly thud.

Cut to: I’m scared. I’ve never been this drunk before. I don’t want to get into trouble. I need to get to get back to the dorms. I can make it. 

Cut to: We all get in my car and put our seatbelts on out of habit. Click. Click. Click.

Cut to: I don’t know it, but I turn into the wrong lane of traffic. 

Cut to: I’m hurtling towards a wall of light like a wrecking ball. 

Cut to: Screech! Boom! Crunch! Shatter! I don’t feel the impact, but I hear its immensity for a brief second before the silence rushes in.

Cut to: I come to. I’m groaning, but it’s muffled. My ears are ringing. In my blurry vision, police lights are flashing across the puddled pavement. Red, blue. Red, blue. 

Cut to: I come around again. Glaring white lights hover above me, which make me wince. I’m in a hospital. A nurse, maybe in her 40s with dark brown hair put up in a bun, leans in close and whispers, “My dad was killed by a drunk driver.” She moves down the side of the bed. I notice I’m naked from the waist down. She jams a catheter into my penis so hard that I gasp, making a face like a person in the movies after being stabbed. My hand’s jerk at the pain, but only one moves. I’m handcuffed to the bed. 

Cut to: I’m weeping and whimpering. “Is there any way I can call my mom?” I ask the nurse, slurring my words. 

“Please shut up,” she tells me, shaking her head.

“I’m having trouble breathing,” I say. 

 “Your sternum’s cracked from top to bottom,” she says.

Cut to: I’m in a cell at the police station, back in the grey V-neck and dark blue jeans I’d been wearing. I reek of puke. There’s no part of me that isn’t throbbing; I’m surrounded by my pulse. Panic is shaking me between its sharp teeth like a dog toy. 

Cut to: I’m becoming more lucid. I pound on the cell door with my busted hands. Bang! Bang! I’m screaming one question over and over, begging for an answer. “Did I kill anyone?” Bang! Bang!

Cut to: A police officer with a pudgy face and bald head finally appears in the scratched and smudged square window of the cell’s door. “Quiet down!” he shouts. “Yes,” he says, lowering his voice, “two people,” and walks away. 

Cut to: At that moment, I bury two bodies inside my own; I’m a cemetery now. 

Cut to: I lie on the icy metal frame of the bed that doesn’t have a mattress. I’m shivering. My mind chews on the word murderer and swallows. I scramble to the toilet to vomit, but nothing’s left in my stomach.

Cut to: Hours are passing; I can’t say how many. 

Cut to: After my parents pay my bail, I’m sitting with my head in my hands in an office area. The bald cop, now wearing black-rimmed rectangular reading glasses, is filling out my discharge papers. He looks up at me. “Listen, you didn’t kill anyone, kid. I just told you that to really teach you a lesson. You were the most seriously injured. You got lucky,” he says.

I should feel relief and be thankful, but I just stare straight ahead and nod my foggy, concussed head.

Cut to: The officer is taking my mug shots. He asks me to turn, and turn again, like a guilty two-step. 

Cut to: I gingerly shuffle out of the station, and my mom wraps her arms around me like a garden. “One day at a time,” she tells me, “you will bloom beyond your failings.”

Cut to: Since shame can’t speak, it uses my mouth.

Cut to: I turned two cars into an accordion and played a song I can’t stop hearing. It’s on repeat. 

Cut to: I don’t want this mistake to define me, yet it’s forever a part of the definition of myself. One-time trips into for all time.

Cut to: The problem is I dug the graves for those invisible corpses too close to my heart; my blood’s a polluted river.

Cut to: I learned my lesson. I’ve also learned that what didn’t happen can go on just as long as what did.

Cut to: Self-forgiveness feels like holding out hands of glass to catch a waterfall.