*
From the outside of Jim’s house, it appeared that nobody was home. According to the tall grass and the weeds encroaching on everything, nobody had been home for quite some time. A lesser man may have lost hope right then and dejectedly dragged himself to the headquarters of GP&A in order to throw himself upon their mercy. I was not that man, though, and I went right up and rang the doorbell.
After a minute or so, I heard a stumbling about inside the house. The door opened, and a man who was like Jim but was not quite Jim answered the door. He was unshaved and appeared to have just woken up, but he still looked much better than I did.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for Jim.”
Not-Jim rubbed his eyes. “I’m not Jim,” he said.
“Yes, I can see that. Is Jim home?”
He squinted in the bright sun and looked at me. Then he looked down at my bare legs and asked, “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“It’s about eleven in the morning. Most people are awake at this time. I’m Oscar, by the way. I’m a friend of Jim’s.”
He looked at me reproachfully, and seemed to be considering me for a very long time.
“Jim isn’t here, anyway,” he said at last, and shut the door without offering his name in return for mine. Sadly for my foot, one of the immutable laws of physics states that two objects cannot occupy the same space, and the law-abiding door did not quite close all the way. He grudgingly opened it partly again, and looked at me with half asleep eyes.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” I asked.
“You’ll have to ask Dr. Boggs about that, man.”
“What?” The anger must have shown in my face, because he took a step back into the house. “Where has Dr. Boggs taken him?”
“Whoa man, relax.” He held up his hands. “Dr. Boggs hasn’t taken him anywhere. Jim checked himself into the hospital; he’s been there for months now. Boggs is just the head doctor there.”
So Jim hadn’t been released from the hospital after all. He was due to come out just a few days after I did, but he was still in, weeks later. He was definitely still alive, though; his brother would have been notified if he’d been successful at another suicide attempt. I had nothing else to ask, so I decided to let him get back to his mid-day nap. I moved my foot out of the way, and Jim’s brother closed the door.
I sat down on the curb and held my injured foot in my hands. Now what? I had nobody to turn to. I couldn’t go back to my house. Even though I had destroyed the cameras, those who watched the cameras knew everything now. All my money and my cards were there, so I couldn’t get a hotel room or anything. Sitting on the curb wasn’t getting me anywhere though, so I stood up.
I looked back at Jim’s house, hoping perhaps to catch the sympathetic eye of his brother, and saw that at one window the curtains weren’t fully drawn. There was a large glass tank sitting inside the window, and a small animal lying on its back in the sun. I walked closer, and saw its pink underside and four tiny legs pointed up at the ceiling. I walked until I was standing right next to the window. I knew I was looking at Mr. Hodge, the hedgehog that Jim had developed an attachment to and had given a person’s name, the hedgehog that had won him a free extended vacation at luxurious Maple Ridge.
Because I had no other options, a wild plan formed in my mind as I stood there looking at the little brown and pink mammal sunning itself. Without any great hope, I wrapped my shirt around my forearm, and smashed it against the window. To my surprise, the window shattered into several large shards of glass. I felt exultant with this result after the terribly disappointing times I’d had trying to break into various doors and windows recently. I reached in through the opening, into the tank, and grasped the hedgehog around his belly.
“What are you doing, man?” Jim’s brother shouted when he came into the room and saw me attempting the hedgehog heist. “That’s my hedgehog!”
“It’s Jim’s hedgehog,” I said, through the broken window. “I’m taking him back.” And then, realizing that perhaps there should be more explanation, I added, “To Jim!”
Jim’s brother seemed to be considering whether he should shoot me or call the police. I deduced that because he was holding a gun in one hand and a phone in the other. Then he tossed them both onto a couch. He reached down, out of sight below the hedgehog’s tank, and I heard him opening a drawer. When his hand returned, he was holding a bag of hedgehog food.
“He sleeps ten hours a day,” he said, handing the bag to me. “And he likes to be fed every two hours when he’s awake. Just put his nose in the bag, he’ll stop when he’s full. Good luck. Jim needs him.” Then he closed the blinds.
I held Mr. Hodge up to my face. He made an unimpressed puffing sound and then scooted around in my hand so he was turned away from me. I put him in my shirt pocket and walked away from Jim’s house.
When I was a safe distance away, I decided to try it. I went behind a tree and took Mr. Hodge out of my pocket. I held him up so I could talk to him directly.
“Alright,” I said, “let’s talk.”
He looked at me.
“I know you can talk. Jim told me all about you.”
I shook him slightly. He puffed at me again and rudely moved his spines forward over his forehead so they covered his face. When a hedgehog does that, it’s hard to tell which end you’re talking to. I reached for him to turn him over on his back so I could see his face while I talked, but when I got my hand close to him he started making a sound which I can only describe as malevolent purring. He was going to get turned over whether he liked it or not, though, and I moved my hand closer. Suddenly, he fluffed out his spines and prickled my hand with them. It startled me more than it hurt, but I decided it was best to leave his face hidden under his spines if that was what he wanted.
At least nobody had seen me talking to him. It was worth a try anyway, I thought, and put him back in my pocket. His tiny forelegs rested over the edge of the pocket and his delicate curved nose stuck out ahead as if he was a small adventurer eager to go on a journey, facing into the wind. Even if he couldn’t talk, I was still going to enjoy having him along.
As crazy as it sounds, I had hoped I could learn something from Mr. Hodge. I wasn’t crazy, though, I was just desperate – desperate enough to try having a conversation with a hedgehog. Now the only thing left was to try to find Jim at Maple Ridge. I didn’t know how I would do it; there were hundreds of rooms at the hospital and I had no way to find out which one he would be in. Maybe Mr. Hodge knew, but he wasn’t talking. They wouldn’t tell me at the front desk, because Maple Ridge wasn’t the sort of hospital that allowed visitors. If I somehow managed to get past the front desk and not be questioned by any doctors or nurses or other staff in the halls, I’d surely be stopped at any one of the security checkpoints between wings, put there to prevent the escape of dangerous patients. Since I had no medical ID or uniform and obviously wasn’t a patient, I’d be apprehended immediately by hospital security at the first checkpoint, and likely find myself once again as a patient in the secure wing.
If that happened, and I was forcibly checked in as a patient, Dr. Boggs would surely see to it that I was never considered for release again. I would be labeled a sadly unreformable criminal with an incurable mental illness, and for the good of society I would of course have to remain locked up forever. Sealed court orders would make it all official, and my family and friends legally wouldn’t even have to be notified of where I was, or why. The next time one of them went to my house after not hearing from me for days, they’d just see a foreclosure sign with no explanation from me, or maybe they’d all receive letters with my signature forged on them saying that I was leaving the country to pursue a life as a traveling minstrel. As important as saving Penelope was, it was just as important that I not end up locked away in an underground level of Maple Ridge forever.
Maple Ridge was thirty miles out of town, but I couldn’t use my car because I knew they’d be keeping a watch out
for it. Probably the police had already been alerted to the license plate number as belonging to a dangerous criminal. If it actually was a police surveillance van following me that morning, then they’d assume I was on the run and then they’d be even more convinced I was Penelope’s kidnapper.
Because I couldn’t use my car, I’d have to hitch a ride if I wanted to make it to the hospital anytime in the next several days and without blistered feet. I hiked a good distance out of town, staying on back roads and going into the woods whenever a vehicle went by. After several hours had gone by since I had passed any houses, I judged that I was far enough out from town so that there wouldn’t be a thick network of spies layered around, and I started looking at cars approaching to select a good candidate for carrying me to Maple Ridge. I stopped at the far side of a hairpin turn, which allowed me a long time to view approaching drivers as they slowed down to navigate the tight turn in the road.
I expected it to take a long time to find a suitable ride, but the first car that approached was a silver old-model Cadillac driven by an elderly woman who reminded me of my grandmother. She approached the other side of the turn and hardly had to slow down any, since she was already moving at a sedate pace. I moved to go out of the trees and flag the woman down, but Mr. Hodge, who had been resting contentedly in my pocket for hours, suddenly made a high-pitched squealing noise and I looked down at him, thinking perhaps I had been careless moving through the bushes and had got him caught on a thorn. His squealing was incredible, and my head ached when I heard it. There was something about my headaches that I had come to trust, as if they were warning me, and I stopped. Jim would certainly not be pleased if I allowed his dear friend to be injured. Mr. Hodge looked fine, but I pulled him out of my pocket anyway and turned him over, inspecting him. By the time I was finished and was satisfied that he was in perfect health, the car with the old woman had gone by. I called Mr. Hodge some unflattering names and stuffed him back in my pocket, resisting the urge to put him in headfirst. To be fair, she probably wouldn’t have given me a ride anyway, considering my lack of pants and general unkemptness.
After that, no other cars seemed good for hitching a ride. Something about the color of their paint, or the way the driver was holding the wheel would set my suspicions going, and I would hang back in the woods.
Several large canvas-covered black trucks, of the kind you’d expect military personnel to be riding in the back of, drove by in the other direction, towards town. I wondered what their business was, but only a little – getting Jim’s help was the most important thing, and there wasn’t room in my mind for much else.
I didn’t keep count of all the vehicles passing, but probably a hundred had gone by and I still hadn’t felt good about any of them. I supposed that maybe Dr. Boggs & Co. might have had hundreds of cars patrolling those roads, and it did seem busier than usual, especially for that time of day. It was so hard to tell for sure, though. Months before, I had felt sure of every thought I had, and I never questioned them. Then, while I was using Psylocybin, it had been the opposite; even though I had no paranoid thoughts, to the point that I let my enemies set up a surveillance system in my home and then handed my girlfriend over to them to be kidnapped, I had still mentally derided and ridiculed myself for even the smallest paranoid inkling, such as ‘what if the mailman rubs his genitals on my door before he knocks?’ He does it sometimes, I’m sure of it.
In either state of mind, confidently paranoid or hopelessly naïve, I had felt more or less happy, sure that my thoughts were the right ones, even if they were wrong. I was having paranoid thoughts again but wasn’t sure at all whether I should trust any of them. Part of me wanted to get in the first car I saw, and I nearly had, while the other part of me wanted to get in no car ever, which was useless. I stayed in the woods nearly until night fell, paralyzed by the two competing parts of my mind. Eventually, as I paced, a tractor carrying a low trailer of hay bales passed by, and I took the chance to run out and leap onto it when the truck rounded the curve. I crouched down behind several bales of hay so that the driver wouldn’t see me if he looked back. Mr. Hodge climbed out of my shirt pocket and onto my shoulder, resting his warm body against my bare neck. After a while, he seemed to go to sleep and began to whistle quietly as he breathed.
I tried to formulate a plan while we rode along, but I wasn’t able to get much farther than ‘get to Jim.’ I didn’t know how I was going to get to Jim, and I didn’t really know what to do if I was actually able to get to him. I needed someone who could help me figure out what had happened to Penelope, and Jim was the only person I knew who could listen to my explanation of what was going on without trying to medicate me and put me in a straitjacket, if only because people were also trying to medicate him and put him in a straitjacket. He would understand. I couldn’t do it on my own; I felt so tired already and I didn’t even have a place to sleep now that my house was off-limits to me, nevermind a place to think.
A bump in the road jolted me awake some time later, and I opened my eyes. I didn’t know how long I had slept, but it didn’t feel very long. It was surprising that I had been able to sleep at all, with the scratchy hay against my bare legs. The road around me looked familiar, and I realized that we were only a few miles from Maple Ridge. I didn’t want to get off the trailer in sight of the hospital in case there was anyone watching, so I gently picked up the sleeping Mr. Hodge from my shoulder and slid him back into my shirt pocket, then jumped out onto the road. I pumped my legs as I hit the ground, and since the tractor wasn’t going very fast I was able to stay upright with not very much flailing about.
I walked until I reached Maple Ridge Road, which led off the main road and into Maple Ridge. Trees surrounded the hospital on all sides, and that little road was the only way in or out unless you wanted to walk through miles of forest. I stayed in the woods as I walked along the side of the entrance road, still wary of any patrolling cars.
It was late at night by the time I passed the Maple Ridge Mental Hospital sign and approached the parking lot beyond. There were very few cars left at this time of day; there was only a small medical team at night because most of the patients would be asleep. The security team was the same size at any time of day, though, because many of the patients could be dangerous without regard to the rotation of the earth relative to the sun. One of the cars was a silver old-model Cadillac. The car that had passed me on the road with the grandmotherly woman driving it was now here in the parking lot at Maple Ridge; she must have been one of the staff there. Mr. Hodge seemed to have seen it at the same time, because he puffed at me. If I believed a hedgehog to be capable of condescension, I might have been offended by Mr. Hodge. As it was, though, I did not consider a hedgehog capable of such a thing, so I was not affected. I remained above it; I patted him on the head – rather roughly, an observer might say – and continued on.