*
My new room was like the Waldorf-Astoria compared to my previous room, which had been like a hole in the ground with only an empty turnip can for company, except without the turnip can because the sharp edges at the top might have been dangerous.
Some furniture in the room actually had pointed edges, and I saw that a few things around the room were made of metal instead of safe plastic or rubber. It felt good to be trusted around mildly dangerous things and it was a validation of my progress so far that my nurses and doctors thought I’d be unlikely to either kill myself or kill someone else using common household objects. I tapped the window to check: it was glass; and through the potentially dangerous glass I could see everything; grass, trees, the sun, a bird in a tree. It was actually good that the window in my previous room was frosted – if I’d seen that bird before Psylocybin was fixing my brain, I’d have worried that it was actually a hidden camera spying on me and I’d have been unable to look out the window anyway.
On the bedside table (wood, pointed edges) was a stack of neatly folded clothes and various accoutrements that looked very familiar, which made sense when I recognized that they were my own possessions which had been taken from me when I was put in jail weeks before. My shoes were there as well, and they had the laces in them still, which I counted as high praise for my mental state. I shrugged my hospital gown forward over my shoulders, letting it pile up on the floor, and stood naked in front of the mirror. I hadn’t been taking Psylocybin for more than two weeks at that point, but I could already see a change in my body. My eyes were clear and bright, like in the third section of the NorCorp Psylocybin pamphlet. The patch of missing hair on my head had taken a few short steps towards regrowth. My face had taken on an intense hue and the flesh had filled out around my previously sunken cheekbones and eyes. My body was still thin, but I looked less like someone who was kept up every night by eyes that refused to shut and skipped potentially-tampered-with meals until the gnawing ache of hunger grew unbearable and forced him to grudgingly accept the risk of some small sustenance. I dressed in my old clothes, and put on my old shoes and watch; in the mirror, I looked at me, but instead of me from a few weeks past I could have been looking at myself ten years before, looking healthy and happy.
The door had clicked shut when the nurse left, but the handle turned easily; it was unlocked. I opened it a little and peered out into the hallway; even though I knew I was trusted now, I still felt like opening the door was something I wouldn't be allowed to do. No alarm went off though, so I stepped out beyond the threshold. No burly orderlies came running, so my other foot came to join the more adventurous one. I walked down the hallway, noting that some of the other doors were open, so I knew I must be in a section of the hospital where, like me, everyone was mostly recovered.
Through some of the open doors, I saw people lying on their beds reading books, writing letters at their desks, and talking with one another. Even though I knew I was still in a mental hospital, it was impossible to tell from that section; everyone seemed normal enough, and they were doing normal, everyday things that anyone might do in their own home. I followed the hallway to the end and found myself in a communal area, with couches, chairs, tables, bookshelves, and other patients gathered around those things. I sat down at a nearly full table that had a single empty chair left, and listened in to their conversation. I soon learned that the people I was sitting with had also been recently moved to this area of the hospital and had just met each other that day, and it made me feel like less of a stranger to know that we were all strangers to each other. The conversation naturally drifted to the reasons each of us were there.
“Well, that’s just the thing,” one of my tablemates was saying, in response to a question from another, “the supermarket called in animal control because of the bags with holes gnawed in them, but when they followed the trail of dropped Cheese Snax to the maintenance closet they found only me, and I got passed from organization to institution until I ended up here. They said I had attachment disorder, but all I knew is that even after I lost my job there, the supermarket had seemed like the best place for me, and it felt impossible for me to leave.”
The man who had asked the question nodded and said, “I understand what you mean, Dave. I had attachment disorder, but of a different kind, and I think mixed with some other kind of disorder, but I’ve tried to distance myself from it now that I’m getting better, so I don’t even recall everything the doctor said. There was this hedgehog I found in the city—— ”
“In the city?” Dave interrupted, “But don’t they need hedges?”
“You’d think so,” the other man said, paused for a second and then changed his mind about further discussion on what habitats a hedgehog may or may not require, “but, look, I’m not a zoologist, I’m just saying I found this hedgehog. It’s integral to the story, ok?” Dave nodded his assent, and the other man continued. “So I found the hedgehog, and over time I came to feel that the hedgehog was a good friend. Eventually, I came to feel that the hedgehog was my best friend. (It didn’t go any farther than that because the hedgehog didn’t find me attractive.) I took the hedgehog into my house, it lived with me, and it went with me everywhere. It rode on my shoulder on the bus, that kind of thing. After many months an unusual connection developed between me and the hedgehog, and it whispered things – or, I guess I should say now, I thought it whispered things – to me, sort of giving me advice, you know?”
“What kind of advice?” another man at the table asked. “What do hedgehogs know about? It’s not as if it could give you advice about what stocks to pick, Jim, or which coats will be slimming to your figure,” he said, giving Jim a friendly poke in the ribs. “Did you ask it for advice on which types of grass were the most delicious when on a long journey under the hedges?”
“Stanley, I’ve had enough of your friendly pokes,” Jim said, edging away from Stanley and rubbing his sore ribs. “You know as well as any of us how serious this kind of thing is, even if it does sound funny. As it happens, it did give me advice on stocks, and it was good advice, but in the interest of trading ethics I’m not going to tell you more on the topic of good stock tips, and that’s your own fault. More importantly, I started to feel like it was giving me advice on what streets to go down, who was a good person, who to avoid.”
“That hedgehog might have told you to sit on the other side of the table from Stanley,” Dave put in with a grin.
“What’s the deal with hedgehogs anyway?” Stanley asked. “Why don’t they just share the hedge?”
Jim’s face took on the look of a thin cardboard box left out in the rain. “Don’t make fun about it, please,” he said. “I know it sounds silly even when I try to talk about it seriously, and I know I’m better this way now, but I do miss Mr. Hodge, the hedgehog. He was a friend to me through all things. He was very different from any friend I’ve ever had before or since.” He looked back and forth between Stanley and Dave. “I guess that’s the difference, that’s why it was a crazy thing, because real friends aren’t like that, they can be selfish, or… mean… I, uh, I think I’d better go to my room,” he finished in a quiet voice and stood up from his chair.
“Now come on Jim, he didn’t mean anything by it,” Dave said, “sit back down, we’ll talk about something else, won’t we Stan?”
“Leave him be.” Stanley held his hand out towards Dave to stop him. “We all need time sometimes to be alone and think; let him go to his room if he needs to.”
I sat and listened to Dave and Stanley talk for a long while, but I wanted to hear more of Jim’s story, so I went to find him. The central communal room had several long hallways leading off from it, and I walked partly down one of them before realizing that it would take a long time to find Jim that way, because many of the doors were closed and there were no names on the doors to show whose was whose. I went back to the central room and asked another patient if he knew which room was Jim’s. He shrugged his shoulders, but when I said
I was looking for the hedgehog guy he pointed me down one of the hallways to room 12. I knocked on the door to room 12 but there was no answer.
“Jim?” I called out, but there was still no answer. I turned the handle and found it unlocked, so I went in to see if Jim was home. When I opened the door, I saw Jim leaning away from the wall with shoelaces tied around his neck at one end and around a coat hook at the other end. His eyes turned to me and his mouth opened and closed a little, but no sound came out. Later, when I thought back to it, it seemed to me that he’d had the expression of a fish out of water, and I recalled that his face had been the color of beetroot humous. Memory can be a funny thing, sometimes, with what it decides is worth keeping. There are other things I should have remembered.
I went over to him, supported his weight with one of my arms and loosened the knots in the shoelaces with my free hand. I leaned him back against the wall, and he slid down to the floor until he was sitting, like standing was something he had simply given up on. A man came to the open doorway and said a brief, “Hey Jim, do you think——” before I closed the door in the middle of his question, being considerate of the lace marks on Jim’s throat and the color of his face, things which most people would like to be kept private.
I didn’t know much about Jim, but I’d heard enough of the conversation at the table to know he was missing his good friend the hedgehog, who had probably been a better friend to him than I had ever had in my life. I didn’t try to help, because only time could help with a loss like that; I just sat on the bed next to him to keep him company as he sat on the floor staring ahead through the opposite wall. The color of his face returned to normal after a couple minutes, and the marks on his neck faded a little, but he still didn’t speak. I’m not sure exactly how long we sat like that, but after a while there was a knock at the door, and when I went to answer it, it was an orderly carrying two trays of food.
“One of the guys said you were in here too when I was bringing Jim’s lunch, so I brought another tray for you,” he said. He looked over my shoulder at Jim sat on the floor, but didn’t say anything about him. I thanked the orderly, for more than the lunch, and though I knew that neither of us was hungry I set the trays on Jim’s bedside table anyway. After a while, he did speak.
“Nobody knows——” he started, but a cough stopped him. His voice was a dry whisper because of how the laces of his shoes had compressed his windpipe. He took a glass of water from one of the trays and drank. He coughed again and massaged his throat as the water moistened it, and then he started to speak once more.
“Nobody knows what it’s like. A lot of people in here have lost friends, but they’ve lost them because of their condition. Now that they’re better, they can get those friends back.”
Even though he didn’t know my circumstances, I felt guilty, because my lost friendships were ones I planned to be getting back as soon as I left the hospital.
“But for me,” he said, “my friend was my condition, and now that I’m better I’ve lost the best friend I ever had.” He continued talking but still sat looking straight ahead at the wall, or through the wall, like he’d be saying the same things even if I wasn’t there. “It’s a hard road for me to walk. Even though I know Mr. Hodge wasn’t real – and I do know it, really, thanks to my medication – a big part of me just wants him back. So what if he’s not real? They say that ignorance is bliss, and he made me happy. That was real happiness.”
Jim smiled the shadow of a smile, and reminisced, “He had this way of pressing his paws down on my shoulder to comfort me whenever I was feeling sad——”
I looked at him when he stopped, and saw that a silent grimace of grief contorted his face. He leaned his head back and thin streams of sadness trickled from the corners of his eyes. I knew he was missing his hedgehog very much then, and in that moment of sadness he needed his best friend to comfort him but he couldn’t have that ever again, and that knowledge was pure pain. His face and his voice were like those of mourners at a funeral, and his friend was just as dead as the ones they mourned, killed by the medicine he needed.
I didn’t know what to say, and I don’t think there was anything I could have said that would help. I didn’t know what he was feeling, and it would have been insulting to him and to the memory of Mr. Hodge if I’d tried. I stayed with him though, because just the presence of another being is enough to make you feel less lonely, even if it’s not the presence of the one you’re lonely for.
Jim’s tears stopped flowing, as tears do, and he looked ahead once more, with red-rimmed eyes.
“What am I going to do once I’m outside?” he asked. “I’m going back in a few days, and I’m going to my brother’s house where me and Mr. Hodge used to live together.” The sadness in his voice was gone, but nothing had replaced it, so his voice was empty. “It’s not that he’s gone; he’s still there. My brother’s been taking care of him while I’ve been in here, so he’ll be fine, but he’s just a hedgehog. He’ll probably put his little paws up against the glass and wiggle his nose at me, but he’s just a hedgehog. That’s what any animal would do with a human it recognized, one that brought it food and water and took it for walks; I won’t see his eyes light up now, it won’t be the recognition of a friend. He’s just a hedgehog.”
“You know,” he said, looking at me for the first time, “they say even if I stopped taking Psylocybin, other parts of my brain would have compensated by now and changed my neural network so most likely Mr. Hodge wouldn’t come back anyway; I’d just develop an attachment to something new, like a cat.” He spat the word ‘cat’ out like a mouthful of rancid grease.
“Lots of cat owners say cats can be good friends, and a cat can, but it’s nothing like a hedgehog. A cat is friendly in a hollow sort of way, like the way a prostitute is friendly.”
I nodded in agreement, although I’d never been quite that friendly with a cat (or a prostitute[21]).
Jim went on. “And there’s no guarantee it’d be a cat at all, there’s no way to tell; I could just as easily develop an attachment to a potato. I’d probably even be happy, being friends with a potato. Can you imagine it: me sitting with a potato in my lap, stroking it, talking to it, asking it about the news?”
I could imagine it, but it didn’t seem as funny as you might think. I didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t seem to have anything more to say, so we sat in silence. His sadness had leaked out of him through his tears and his words though, and after a few minutes I felt ok to leave him on his own.
“Jim,” I wished I had said to him, once I was gone, “I’m not going to pretend I know how you feel, because I haven’t lost a good friend like you have. What I’ve lost instead is my purpose in life. I’ve lost all my goals; almost everything I know about myself has changed, and now I’ve got to start over, just like you. We can help each other; I can try to be a friend, and you can try to help me with a purpose. We can move on together.” I hadn’t said it, though. I knew I was useless to him.
In the central room, Stanley and Dave were laughing and talking as they ate their lunch, unaware of the pain they had caused Jim, who sat silently only a few doors away. They hadn’t meant to do it, but their callous, selfish behavior had done it anyway. My hands tightened and I discovered then that I was still holding Jim’s shoelaces, but I didn’t want to go back to his room because I still had nothing to say, so I just shoved them in my pocket. I started towards Stanley and Dave to say something about Jim, but I stopped and thought better of it; they must have had their own problems since they were in that place along with the rest of us; joking was just their way of dealing with whatever losses they had suffered. I asked one of the nurses to let Penelope know that I’d like to talk to her if she had time that day, and then I headed back to my room.
Back in my room, I looked through what I had. Everything I’d had with me when I’d been arrested was there. There was my bag, which I went through. I took out some papers and diagrams I’d drawn, things I’d written a
s I thought I was tracking down the men who were behind the man in the heavy coat, behind Ron at the post office and Ron at Jack’s Grocery Mart. Looking through the papers, I saw things I couldn’t even remember writing. I had written ‘Mom’ above that shadowy group of men. At least I had circled her name with a dotted line, indicating uncertainty; in the greatest depths of my paranoia I hadn’t even been sure who to be paranoid of, but that I had suspected my own mother meant that I was erring on the side of caution and simply being paranoid of everyone. I sighed and tore the papers in half, then in half again, and again – I didn’t want anyone to see this embarrassing evidence. When I had shredded them enough, I dropped them in the wastebasket. It wasn’t a perfect method of concealment – I could have eaten them, after all[22] – but it’d take quite an enthusiastic puzzler to put the hundreds of paper pieces back together, and in any case I wasn’t paranoid enough anymore to think that someone might want to piece together some torn up bits of paper with nothing on them but the insane musings of a reformed maniac.
Among other things in the bag, I found gloves and a ski mask, which I took out and dropped in the wastebasket on top of the shredded paper. I shook my head, because I could still hardly believe the way I had behaved, like a child playing secret agent, writing down gibberish and hiding behind bushes pretending I was spying on important and sinister men, ready with gloves and a mask to conceal my identity – but only until my mom called me in for dinner. Ah, my mother. What would she say about me? What would she say to me? After the way I had treated her, would she even want to speak to me again? In the middle of my feeling ridiculous about myself, there was a knock at the door.
“It’s unlocked, because I’m not crazy anymore,” I said to the door, and Penelope entered.
“How are you doing, Oscar? I heard from Jill that you’ve been around today, sitting and talking with some of the other guys. That sounds like good progress to me,” she said, smiling.
“It’s a lot better than hiding under the tablecloth, nervously listening in,” I agreed. “I feel almost like a different person because of how differently I react, how I perceive things. Instead of feeling threatened by people talking, I can join in and enjoy myself. I wanted to talk about how great things are and to thank you for your help, but actually I’m kind of having some doubts. I feel like a fraud.”
She raised her eyebrows slightly, questioningly, but didn’t ask any questions. I took that as my cue to explain.
“I was out there, listening, talking, and almost making friends, right? But it feels like that isn’t me. Jim was feeling down about his recovery, and I had no idea what to say to him. Who am I to help anyone with anything? I came back here and I found that,” I said, pointing to the gloves and mask I had thrown away on top of a pile of shredded paper. “That’s the kind of thing I do, sneaking around in the shadows and pretending I’m making some kind of a difference. I haven’t had any meaningful human contact for as long as I can remember, and trying to do it now makes me feel like a fake.”
Saying that made me feel a powerful yearning for my family and my friends, for those times so far past that they now seemed to exist only in my memory. That feeling struck me suddenly, like a punch in the stomach; I almost felt sick, but I only paused briefly and then continued. “It’s true that I don’t feel paranoid anymore, and that is a big difference, but can I really have changed enough where I can share a genuine relationship with another person, where we can have mutual understanding?”
Penelope sat down next to me on the bed and looked thoughtful for a little while. I looked over to her and she looked away, giving the impression that she had been looking at me shyly.
“Oscar,” she said, turning back and looking into my eyes, “look at me, and listen. It is a big difference. All the years you were away from your family and your good friends weren’t by your own choice, even though it might feel like you were choosing it. You were being kept away from them by your mental condition, but that wasn’t you. It’s hard to believe anyone else can know what you’re feeling, but I know. I felt the same things. Even after I was on Psylocybin, it was months before I was able to contact my family, partly out of the shame I knew I’d experience after facing them again – baseless shame, because it wasn’t my fault, but shame just the same – but mostly because I wondered even after that amount of time if I really had changed, or if perhaps I’d see them and just treat them with suspicion and coldness like I always had, when they’d never done anything to deserve it.”
“When I finally did go to meet them, the whole family was there, and it was like a dam broke inside me. All those years of emotion held back or distorted came pouring out; I nearly drowned in tears and happiness.” I was looking into her eyes as she spoke, and tears shimmered at the rim of her eyelids. “My family wasn’t judgmental or angry like I worried they’d be. They’d actually contacted the hospital while I was a patient here and found out about my condition, all the symptoms, how it made me behave, everything. When I got back they didn’t treat me like a freak, they treated me like you’d treat anyone who was ill but got better. It was as if I’d broken my leg – they didn’t blame me for not being able to walk on my own. Your mind was broken in the same way as mine, Oscar, and nobody blames you for not being able to mentally walk. The way you treat everyone now is up to you, but the way you acted before Psylocybin wasn’t your fault. It’s really not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
Hot tears spilled down my cheeks when she finished; I knew that my family would be the same, my mother and my father, my sisters and brothers would understand my painful past as well, and me thinking otherwise was just the weak parts of my mind manifesting their miserable power by making up excuses to avoid anything that might turn into an uncomfortable situation. Sometimes my whole mind seemed to be made of those weak parts due to a lifetime spent placating and soothing them, hiding from and avoiding actual life.
I was crying and couldn’t get my vocal cords to work properly, but, as always, Penelope seemed to know how I felt anyway. She put her arms around me and pulled me close, holding me until I was at last finished shedding my tears. I moved away and drew in a deep, shaky breath.
“Thank you,” I said, exhaling. “Thank you for everything. Thank you for coming here today to help me through this, I couldn’t have done it on my own.” My voice sounded nasally because I had been crying, and she handed me a tissue to blow my nose; I thanked her for that too. “I wouldn’t have taken Psylocybin if you hadn’t convinced me to. And if you hadn’t convinced me to, then I’d still be in the old room in the security wing feeling like everyone was against me. I could have spent my whole life that way, but instead I feel like you’ve saved my life, you’ve made me ‘me’ again.”
“You’ve helped me, and I’m going to try to do my part to pass that on and help someone else. Before the help and care I’ve received here, I was too caught up in my own problems to be of any use to anyone, but you’ve given me back my ability to help others.” I wasn’t totally sure if I should say what I said next, but I did say it. “Jim tried to kill himself. I went into his room and barely caught him in time.” I reached into my pocket and held up his shoelaces. “I probably shouldn’t have even left his room afterwards, but he talked to me for a while about how much he missed Mr. Hodge, and after that he seemed too physically and mentally drained to even have the will for trying it again, so it seemed alright. Plus, I’ve got his shoelaces.”
“Hang on,” Penelope said. “I’ll get one of the other nurses to check on him right now to be sure.” She pressed the nurse call button on my wall, and after only a few seconds another nurse came into the room. Penelope talked with her in low tones so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Soon the other nurse was gone, and Penelope resumed our conversation.
“Thanks for telling me, Oscar. Don’t feel bad about leaving him on his own; it was good of you to listen to him when he was feeling at his worst, and often that’s all anyone needs when they’re going through such a d
ark time, they just need someone to listen and understand.” That made me feel a little better. I didn’t feel like I had understood Jim’s feelings, but at least I had listened to them.
“He probably told you that he was supposed to go home soon,” she continued, “but he’ll need to stay here for a little longer now.” Some of my dismay must have shown on my face, because she smiled at me. “Don’t worry, he won’t be going back to the security wing. He’ll stay here, he’ll still be able to socialize and live normally. It’s for his own safety that he’ll need to stay longer, and probably not very long, maybe just a few more weeks. He’s not the first patient I’ve seen with attachment personality disorder, and people with his condition always have some of the hardest times adjusting to normal life after having experienced the security of such a preternatural bond to someone – or something. We’ll talk with him and work with him until he’s ready to handle being outside again and dealing with normal flawed human relationships.”
She moved closer to me on the bed. “I’d really like to talk about you, though,” she said. “That’s why I came here. Today is your last day in the hospital, and I think you’re ready for it to be the last. Don’t let it worry you having doubts like you’ve had today about how you handled the situation with Jim; it’s normal for most people to have occasional struggles with self-confidence, and you’re normal, so you’re going to have those same struggles too. What’s also normal is to pick up your bruised emotions after you’ve dropped them, and then hold them up high again. But if you feel like those feelings are too heavy to hold up on your own and you worry you might be crushed underneath them, don’t forget you can come here and speak to Dr. Boggs, he can help you through it. Or…” she broke eye contact and looked down for a moment before continuing, “You could always call me, too. I know what it’s like for you, and I think I could help. Maybe we could help each other, since you’re not technically my patient anymore. We could, you know.” She moved to pass her contact card to me, but clumsily dropped it into my lap and then promptly stood up. She smoothed out her skirt, curtly said, “Good luck, Mr. Well,” and then left my room after stumbling over my shoes.
I picked up the card and looked at it. My fingertips stroked the raised texture of the name ‘Penelope Hope’ in curly script, and I saw that her phone number was also printed on the card. What had she meant, that we could help each other? I thought that maybe she was flirting with me, but it was very difficult for me to tell things like that. I hadn’t had a lot of experience with flirting, and my own attempts at it usually left me embarrassed and fleeing the room with a red face and a stuttered goodbye excuse, probably after stumbling over something. My girlfriends had always been of the type who were very forward themselves to make up for my lack of skill at courtship; someone’s hand in your pants leaves no room for doubt.[23] It seemed unlikely as I thought about it more; after all, she had given me her number in case I needed help with my mental condition, not just to chat or arrange a dinner date, and, “Hi, I’m having an attack of paranoia and I’m not able to leave the bathroom because of it,” isn’t the best of ways to start a conversation with a girl. I reminded myself again that she was a professional, but as I went to sleep that night, I allowed myself to hope, for Penelope Hope.
The next day, after taking my morning dose of Psylocybin, I packed my things into two bags and made ready to leave the Maple Ridge part of my life behind. The only person besides Penelope I knew well enough to want to say goodbye to was Jim, so I went to find him instead. He was in his room still; in fact, he didn’t appear to have left it since the day before. Everything was still the same in his room, except his shoes had been exchanged for the slip-on kind with no laces.
“Well, Jim, this is it for me,” I said to him. “I’m leaving in a few hours, so I’ve just come to say goodbye.”
“Good luck on the outside, Oscar,” he said, looking down at his shoes for a moment. “I’ve got to stay a few more weeks; I guess they found out about what happened yesterday.” There was no edge to his voice or accusation in his eyes as he said it. He knew, but he wasn’t angry, and that was a relief to me. “Thank you. For listening yesterday, I mean. And thank you for telling the nurses, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here right now. I do feel a little better today, and… that’s something,” he said, lifting the sadness from his face to reveal a small smile.
“I’ll still be out pretty soon, they tell me; just a week or two maybe, that’s not so long. Why don’t you come around to my brother’s place when I’m out? You know,” he said, “my brother is the only one who ever really believed me about Mr. Hodge. Not that he has a mental disorder himself, because he hasn’t; he just always believes me and trusts me. If I said it, he’d just say, ‘Alright, Jim,’ and that was that. Anyway, come by sometime when I’m out. It’d be good for us to be able to talk to each other, to talk to someone with shared experiences. Maybe we could help each other.” He gave me his address and I wrote it down on a piece of paper which I put in my pocket. I was happy he had said he’d like us to get together on the outside and that we could help each other, because it was what I wished I’d said to him before. Maybe I wasn’t as useless as I thought. When I got home, though, the paper with his address went into a drawer in the kitchen, along with the shoelaces I had taken from him the day before. The usual detritus of everyday life accumulated in the drawer after I’d been back at home for a few days, and the paper got pushed further back in the drawer. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, though; we’ll come back to that drawer and the note in it.
They escorted me out of Maple Ridge later that morning in a van – probably the same van that had brought me there months before. I sat sideways in my seat and looked out the rear windows as Maple Ridge Psychiatric Hospital shrank in the distance. Within seconds, the forest of maples had closed in around it, and all that was visible of the hospital was the road leading up to it.
The van reached my house, and the orderly who had ridden along in the van courteously carried my bag to the door for me. I thanked him for his help, and he handed me the bag. He said, “Goodbye, Mr. Well,” and then I was alone with the sounds of the van fading in the distance.