*
They came for me, not in the night under cover of darkness as you might expect, but during the day, and very politely. I was handcuffed and led to the back of a van, where they took of my handcuffs and seated me on a comfortable seat with two men in uniform – my liberators – on either side of me.
My jailing had served its purpose. They wanted to scare me; they wanted me to know that they had the power to manipulate the justice system and imprison me. Now that I had received the message, they were taking me to the courthouse, where the prosecution would have misplaced the names and addresses of all the witnesses, or some evidence would have been stolen, or the jury was tampered with. The judge would declare a mistrial, issue a summary judgment of twenty days incarceration – already served, of course – and then the prosecution would object for the sake of appearances, but the judge would overrule them and order my immediate release.
Already I had a plan for what I would do once I was free again. I had to go back to Jack’s Grocery Mart and confront the Ron who had stolen my orange juice. He had been the most brazen, committing the act right in front of me as he looked into my eyes, daring me to do something about it. At least he was probably looking into my eyes; his dark glasses had made it hard to tell. He would have answers, and I would demand them from him. I didn’t feel quite sure what I’d do if he said no; I’m not a very persuasive man.
I was so busy planning what I would say to him that I didn’t notice we had passed the road to the city courthouse until I looked out the window some time later and saw that all the scenery was unfamiliar. The van’s engine strained as it climbed up a steep hill, through an area wooded with maple trees and into a clearing filled with large, boxy buildings made of stone, which stood in front of a mountainous ridge. The buildings had an aged look to them, with vines growing up their sides to dark windows, which made it all look quite ominous; my muscles tensed, but then a sign at the entrance said No Parking, which seemed safe enough, so I relaxed my grip on the seat. Then another, larger sign said Welcome to Maple Ridge Psychiatric Hospital, and I knew the first sign had only been a trick to lull me into a false sense of security.
I shifted my eyes to the left and right, checking on the men who I now recognized as my captors instead of my liberators, and saw that they were staring absent-mindedly out the windows. Seizing the opportunity, I jumped up, but to my surprise found myself pulled back down and pinned to the seat by the strong grips of my captors. Their absent-minded stares, too, had been a trick, and I had been well and truly lulled.
They tried to calm me down, but I ignored them and raged about the injustice of their deceit. I had trusted them as my friends and they had betrayed me. Were they in league with the dark group that had taken such pains to slowly and slightly ruin my life? With all my strength, I broke free of their grips and leapt for the door. Somehow, (perhaps by using the handle, but my recollection is hazy) I managed to open the door and get out of the van, and I ran back down the road towards freedom, towards my appointment at the courthouse.
I looked over my shoulder just in time to see that one of the men had caught up with me. He leapt to tackle me, and I spun around and pushed my legs up under him so he was unbalanced and his momentum carried him up and over me as we rolled on the ground.
To my surprise, I ended up on top of him. I felt myself possessed of an unusual strength that allowed me to hold him so that he could not throw me off. Even though I felt strong enough to hold him down, when I tried to hit him my arms felt as heavy as lead and moved slowly, like I was punching through molasses. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t make him understand, I couldn’t make him leave me alone, and I couldn’t even hurt him because my arms were so heavy, slow, and weak.
With a slowness that would have been comical in any other situation, my fist pressed against his nose and a dark red liquid squirted out, which I recognized as the same liquid from the head of the man in the gray pinstripe suit. I knew it was another trick; I wasn’t able to hit him hard enough to hurt him or make him bleed, my arms moved wildly and ineffectually like the arms of a newborn, and the cries I heard matched.
The flesh around one of his eyes began to swell and I was amazed; how had they managed to fake that? My eyes flowed with hot tears. If I couldn’t even stop this one man, how would I have any hope of stopping an entire gang of powerful, crafty men who operated always in the shadows? Here I had one of their agents in my grip and could do nothing, how much less would I do when I couldn’t even see them or grasp them? Because my tears blurred my vision, the man’s face looked to me like a mass of red and purple.
Strong arms reached around me and pulled me back, the other man from the van had finally reached us. What had taken him so long? It felt like I had been holding his partner on the ground for several minutes. Perhaps he had been standing and watching me, laughing at the silly way I tried to hit the man on the ground, and only came to intervene when he saw that I was crying, like a parent whose children are playing at fighting and have taken it too far.
I struggled to free myself at first, but my whole body felt weak and shaky as the adrenaline drained out of me, and I had to stop. I saw that the red liquid from his face stained my hands; my fists were red, like in the dream when I had slept in the bushes. I was carried backwards up the stairs to the main building. The other orderly still lay on the ground, resting after the joke he had played on me.
I felt so weary that when they placed me into a wheelchair my body slumped forward and my head hung down. For a long time while they pushed me down the corridor, I could only stare at my knees and the floor, until they strapped me upright.
I looked into the open doors we passed. Here there was a man sitting and staring at the wall but his face held an expression as of one staring out an open window at a beautiful landscape. A woman stood in a doorway, moaning and looking outwards at us. In another room with a larger doorway I saw two orderlies holding a man down by his shoulders and thighs while a doctor prepared a syringe; as I passed by I saw the doctor’s nametag and what I read on it shocked me, making all of my muscles pull taut so that my body stiffened and the wheelchair jumped out of the hands of the man pushing it. The doctor’s name was Ron!
Then I looked again, and saw that it was only a trick of the light and my excited blood; the nametag read ‘Dr. Roy’. I relaxed again and my eye’s met the doctor’s; he held my gaze for a moment as he slid his needle into the arm of the struggling man, who immediately became the non-struggling man.
The doctor’s eyes were still watching me as I rolled past the doorway in my wheelchair. It was like a bizarre amusement park ride (‘step right up to The Asylum, you’d have to be crazy not to’) one where the cart moved past animatronic patients with inhuman faces, and every person in uniform slowly turned on its creaking base and looked at me. The ride stopped at a room with the number 20 above the door, and a nearby orderly joined the one who had been pushing me in unstrapping me and guiding me to the bed. They left the room, closing the door behind them, and I heard the bolt of the lock snap into place. My thoughts turned to how I could escape, but the mattress was soft and the sunlight shining through the slats in the metal window blinds had warmed the covers, and so I soon fell asleep; it was my worst escape attempt ever.
Cold fingers touched me and turned my head from side to side. I was afraid what I might see if I opened my eyes. I felt a tapping on my skull and heard a voice saying, “Here.” Another voice responded, but it was muted, like the whole conversation was from another room, and I could not make out the words. Then I tried to open my eyes, but I could not; they were taped shut. When I tried to move my wrists I found that thick leather straps restrained them, and my feet were likewise restrained. I heard the high-pitched, mechanical whine of a saw and the clattering of tools. With great effort, I forced my eyes open and broke the tape with my eyelashes, and I was awake. There was a film of cool sweat on my brow. A woman was in my room, carrying a tray with food and a cup that clattered. I recognize
d her as the nurse who had visited me in the jail after the men in suits, and from the nametag she was wearing this time I saw that her name was Penelope.
“Good morning,” she said. “Have you had a good rest?”
I blinked at her in lieu of a response. I wasn’t quite sure if I’d had a good rest, because since the sunlight from the window looked the same as when I had first arrived, it could have been only several minutes that I’d been asleep or it could be that I had slept many hours and it was already the next day. That seemed like a lot to say though, and most people are only making conversation when they ask if you’ve slept well, they don’t really want to know[7], and I also wanted to make a good impression on her now that I was no longer in prison and had more capacity to flirt, so I finally just answered, “Yes.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Oscar. Here’s your breakfast,” (I must have slept the whole day, then) “and I’ll be back in a few hours to check on you again.” She set the tray down on the bedside table and left the room. I heard the bolt slide home like before; I was apparently to be locked in this room at all times. I got up and looked out the window through the metal blinds, but the early morning sunlight was too bright for me to see anything. I paced my room out and found that it was perfectly square: six paces by six paces. I paced more. I read once that prisoners and others confined to small spaces soon learn to pace in a certain method, turning opposite ways at each end of the room so that they don’t get dizzy. Left at the window, right at the door, that kind of thing. I’m not one to be taken in by just anything I read, though, so I paced in one direction.
Escape was out of the question; the door was always locked, the window blinds were made of metal and fixed to the frame, and everything else in the room was plastic, including the furniture. The bed was more comfortable, but was this any less a prison than the cell I had been in only the day before, and was I any less a prisoner? I continued pacing. I felt a little dizzy from the pacing, and sat down to think.
Something had gone wrong; this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I should have been freed already, and I should have been back at my house picking up my search where I left off. What had happened to the lost evidence, to the prosecutor who would object halfheartedly? Somehow, the nefarious men who arranged to have me framed and imprisoned had planned a further scheme and put me here, in this hospital for lunatics. The phone recording had made it obvious that they were involved in the operation of the prison, now it seemed they could also arrange to have someone put in a mental hospital; how far and how deeply did their tentacles penetrate, and why did they even have tentacles? Were they some race of winged octopus-men, risen from beneath the sea, from some lost sunken city, back to claim the dry land they lost many centuries ago? I slapped myself to clear my head of those thoughts; I knew that I had just imagined the word ‘tentacles’ in my silent monologue to give a more exciting picture to how their influence reached, but even with that knowledge I had moved off on an inner tangent about men who are also flying cephalopods. I found it difficult to concentrate in that insane asylum; it was difficult even to feel that I was still sane. Did sane people have thoughts like that? Do you?
Then I saw clearly why they had arranged to have me removed from prison and put in the mental hospital, when I thought of how people treat those who have been in hospitals for the mentally ill; as soon as I told someone about how I had been followed, harassed, framed, and inconvenienced within an inch of my life, they would pat me gently and condescendingly on the head while thinking to themselves, The poor fool, he’s been in Maple Ridge, and leave as quickly as possible after dropping a few coins at my feet. Now even if I were to find the heart of their organization, nobody would believe me. They had underestimated me though, because that would not stop me. I would still find them, and break them apart from the inside. There would be no glory in it for me because nobody would believe me, but I did not care about glory, I only wanted to be able to drink a glass of orange juice in peace. And even without glory I would have the quiet satisfaction of knowing that I had rid the world of this menace, and that nobody else would ever have to go through what I went through.
The door opened, and a doctor stepped through. He brought a plastic chair and a clipboard; he unfolded the chair, sat, and asked, “How are you feeling, Oscar?”
“I’m fine,” I answered flatly. I didn’t want to play any games or even answer questions, I just wanted to wait patiently until I was released, since I knew I wouldn’t be staying here very long once they found out I was perfectly sane. Then, realizing I should encourage that line of thought with this doctor, I added more cheerfully, “I’m sane.”
The doctor’s pen made a scratching noise on his clipboard of papers; he must have been making a check in the ‘Sane’ box, below the question ‘Is the patient sane or insane?’ This was encouragingly quick progress, I felt: one question in and I had already established my sanity.
“Oscar, how long have you had violent tendencies?” he asked.
I recognized this as a trick question in the same style as ‘When did you stop having sex with horses?’ It was the sort of question where they try to trick you into incriminating yourself because you can’t answer it directly or simply. Unless you actually have been having sex with horses, then you can give the approximate date you stopped, or if you never stopped then you can just say you’re still doing it. In my case, I had never done it, and could not directly answer the question. I didn’t blame him for trying, though, I knew all doctors like this had an insanity quota to meet; the more psychopaths he found, the sooner he’d be able to go home for the day. The hospital’s income from the state also depended on a steady flow of mentally ill patients, so he had plenty of incentive to find many people to be in need of mental care and treatment.
In any case, instead of falling for his trap, I answered, “I’ve never had violent tendencies, doctor. In fact, my friends used to say I wouldn’t hurt a fly. That’s actually an exaggeration – you know how friends are – because I’ve killed many flies, but at least I wouldn’t go out of my way to hurt a fly, it would have to come to me.” He didn’t say anything, and seemed to be expecting something more, so I leaned closer to say, “Sometimes they do come, you know. They’ve got a score to settle.”
As I spoke, the doctor took notes on his clipboard. Maybe to remind himself to check the story with my friends, or maybe to put up a sign outside my door warning staff to exercise caution because I was a homicidal maniac. Then, seeing that he wasn’t going to have an easy time of tricking me into a quick diagnosis, he changed his questions.
“I understand that you have a prescription of Psylocybin for paranoid schizophrenia. Is that correct, Oscar?”
“Yes, I take them regularly,” I said, nodding.
“Is this your pill bottle?” He took a bottle of pills from his pocket and placed them on the bedside table. The name on the label read ‘WELL, O.R.,’ which was the same name it had on it when I got them from the pharmacy several months before. “Are you sure you take them regularly?” he asked.
I could see the incongruity between me taking them regularly and me not having them with me in order to take them. More importantly, though, this confirmed a corrupt link between the jail and the hospital; the guard at the hospital did not have a headache after all, he must have tricked Winslow into giving him the pills for use as evidence against me. I decided not to tell the doctor that, because I wasn’t yet sure where he stood in the grand conspiracy of things.
“Alright, I haven’t taken them in a while,” I said. “But they’re not good for me. I can’t think clearly with them. Without the pills, I can see things as they really are. Since I’ve stopped taking them, I nearly…” I stopped when I saw that his eyebrows were raised in the style of Winslow. He saw that I was looking at them, and slowly lowered them back down to a reasonable altitude. “If only you could see the evidence I’d accumulated, you’d understand. I’ve got it all on the wall in my house. It’s like the sort of wall a detecti
ve or a really dedicated person would have, not like a serial killer would have. They changed my keys and they took my juice, that’s in your report isn’t it, all the terrible things they’ve done to me?”
“Oscar,” the doctor replied, adjusting his glasses, “let’s put aside the juice for a minute, and let me ask you about a few other things in this report.” He had avoided my question, but I dutifully put aside the cup of juice I had been drinking and feigned interest in what he had to say.
He produced a stack of photographs and laid them on the bedside table next to the bottle of pills. “Do you recognize this man?” he asked. I did recognize the man as I looked through several of the pictures; he was the man in the gray pinstripe suit, the man in the cat’s paw print pajamas, and in the heavy coat. In these pictures he was the man in jeans and a t-shirt at an outdoor party with friends, and my interest was no longer feigned.
“Doctor, this is proof! Incontrovertible proof, proof they’ll never be able to deny. This is the man they say I’ve killed, the man they put me in jail for, probably the reason they were able to put me in this… this…” I realized I was about to go too far, and chose my words carefully, “…in this fine medical establishment, which so far I’m enjoying very much and have been treated very well by all the staff. And that’s what I’ll say, that’s what I’ll tell them, there won’t be any trouble for you or the nurses or anyone, I swear. Just let me have the pictures, or come with me and we’ll show them to the judge back at the courthouse, and I can be free again.” Breathing hadn’t been a priority as I said all that, and now I was panting for breath and my heart was racing; I shook with excitement because of how close I was to exposing the whole conspiracy.
The doctor was shaking his head; my fingers tightened on the bed sheets and my jaw shifted. He was in on it. Even now, seeing that the man who they had said I killed was actually alive, he wasn’t going to help me. Then he spoke.
“Oscar, these pictures were taken three weeks ago, at a community barbecue,” he said. Removing the last few photos from the stack and fanning them out so I could see, he continued, “These are the most recent pictures of him, taken at different times over the past two weeks as the investigation progressed.” In these pictures, he was the man on the cold, metal table; the man in the body bag; the man with blood pooled on the ground under him – or rather, I reminded myself, a clever facsimile of a man with blood pooled on the ground under him, since I knew it was not blood at all. It looked very realistic, and I wondered how they had done it. Perhaps sugar water at just the right consistency, mixed with red dye. In these pictures, and to the casual observer, the man did look very dead. His eyes had the sort of blank stare you might expect from eyes that no longer had any consciousness behind them, and his skin was an incredible shade of white.
“Dr. Boggs, please,” I said, addressing him by the name on his tag, “you don’t really believe this, do you?” His expression told me that he did. “Well, at least you don’t expect me to believe it, do you?” His expression stayed the same. “Of course the pictures look real, but that’s not the point; I didn’t kill him, they just arranged the whole thing to make it look like I killed him. I pushed him, but he fell back on purpose and made sure that his head struck at just the right angle, loud enough for the people across the street to hear, but not enough to hurt. Then all he had to do was lie still with a blank look long enough to horrify all onlookers and be zipped up in a body bag. A child could have engineered it just the same – not that I would surprise a child outside of his own home and push him into a wall.”
The doctor reached into his bag and pulled out several more photographs. Numbers written on the photos in black marker showed that they had been taken earlier that morning. “Could a child have engineered this as well?” he asked. The pictures showed a man’s face; it was a misshapen mass of swollen flesh, purple bruises, and split skin. The eyebrows and upper cheeks had swollen in around the eyes to close them. The lips were swollen to almost comical proportions. Dr. Boggs said, “This is the man you attacked outside yesterday, after he brought you here. He’s in a coma now.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt confused, because the man from yesterday was fine when we had left him. He had been lying peacefully on the ground, resting, looking up at the clouds. I told the doctor that the bruised and battered creature in those pictures must be someone else.
“It’s not uncommon for someone in your state of mind to not want to accept responsibility when you’ve done something terrible, Oscar. We’ll work on that, but first you must at least admit it to yourself.” He held up one of the pictures in front of me. “Why did you do this?”
“Stop it,” I said, covering my ears. I knew then that he was one of them; he wanted to trick me into thinking I had beaten the man in the picture nearly to death and that I had killed another man. They’d get me to sign a confession, they’d put me in chains, and they’d leave me in here forever, pretending to be ‘treating’ me, but really just keeping me out of the way so they could go on inconveniencing everyone with impunity. I wouldn’t play their games though; I wouldn’t give them what they wanted. I snatched the picture from his hand, and before he could protest I had torn it up and thrown the pieces onto his clipboard. “Get these pictures away from me; I don’t want to see any more.”
“Oscar,” he said, in a soothing voice, “let’s talk about this some more.” As he spoke, I got up, moved to the other side of the bed and faced away from him. He tried again. “You don’t have to look at any more pictures; I’d just like to talk to you.” His entreaties were useless, and I did not respond. Already I had probably said too much, given him too much information to use against me. Eventually he gave up, saying we would talk about it later. I knew he had left when I heard the door close and the bolt click.
I lay in bed, staring at the wall. Several hours later, I heard him come back into my room. “I already told you, I’m not going to answer your questions,” I said. “Go away.”
A woman’s voice said, “Alright, but I was just going to ask if you might have a chocolate allergy or if this cake with your lunch would be ok.”
I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was Penelope, the nurse from earlier. Not having made many friends in the hospital so far, I decided it was best not to make an enemy out of her.
“Sorry, I thought you were the doctor,” I said. She still had an expectant look on her face, and I remembered the cake. “Also, I’m not allergic to chocolate. I’m not allergic to anything.”
“What happened with Dr. Boggs?” she asked in a low voice, while she removed the empty breakfast tray and replaced it with the lunch tray.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I replied. I was wary, because so far, nearly everyone had turned out to be one of them. It was hard for me to believe, but maybe even Winslow was in on it. When I spoke to him about it weeks ago – could it really have been weeks already that I had been imprisoned? – he seemed simply not to believe me, but he could have been putting on a one-man production of Good Ol’ Winslow and playing all the parts beautifully. Yes, I saw it now. They expected me at the house of the man in the cats’ paw print pajamas, it fit that Winslow had tipped them off when I told him that I was onto them, giving them time to prepare the elaborate sham of murder and insanity that had ended up with me in a mental hospital, unable to stop them or even reach them. I could see now that Ron at the post office had not tried to hide himself when I followed him, and the newspaper was intentionally left at the bus stop so I would know I was on the right trail. Then they had me right where they wanted: just a little knock of a head against the wall followed by a pool of fake blood and I’d be out of the way for weeks or months – maybe forever. When I was released – or if I was not to be released, when I escaped – I would start with Winslow.
I was surprised to hear the bolt exclaiming loudly that it had slid into the locked position; while I had been piecing together the puzzle of Winslow, Penelope had left the room without me notic
ing. She was apparently not interested in asking me any further questions, and had known to leave me alone with the cake. I liked her.