*
Tomorrow came, and with it came Penelope. And with Penelope came the two men from the day before, “just as a precaution; the doctor insisted.” One of the men (“Steven,” according to his nametag, which he wore but the other man did not, and which he himself had not worn the day before) produced a pair of handcuffs, which the doctor had also apparently insisted upon. I asked why, and Steven said it was because I was a flight risk so I was going to be handcuffed to him and I was going to like it, whereupon Penelope shushed him. I refused to be handcuffed to him, and sat back down on the bed, which is how I’ve seen small children behave when told they have to wear one of those child leash-harness things made to look like a monkey where the leash was an extremely long tail, but you’d have done the same if you saw this guy who I was supposed to be handcuffed to. You didn’t see him though, and so you’re probably judging me as petulant and sulky, but then you’ve probably never had to be handcuffed to Steven in a mental hospital, and if you have then just pretend you didn’t read the last couple of sentences because they’re not directed at you and I apologize.
At last, Penelope presented a compromise which I readily accepted, wherein she would handcuff me to herself instead of to Steven, and Steven and his colleague would flank us on either side. Steven grumbled to Penelope about it being against the rules, but she seemed to be in charge.
The handcuffs had a long chain between the cuffs to allow two people to be more comfortably cuffed together, but I wouldn’t have minded being cuffed a little closer to Penelope. I knew it was hopeless to think something like that; she was a nurse, and I was a patient; she was professional. Once we were attached, we left the room. The back of my head began to hurt and I felt compelled to look down the hallway behind us. When I looked, I saw a man in dirty workman’s overalls exiting a room just down from mine with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He glanced in my direction and hurriedly withdrew back into the room with his wheelbarrow when he saw me. I opened my mouth to say something to Penelope, but he was gone, and I wasn’t quite sure which room he had gone into. Had he been there at all? I decided to say nothing, but as we walked down the hallway in the opposite direction I furtively looked back and saw where dirt had fallen on the floor and been scattered as the man in the overalls reversed his wheelbarrow. I opened my mouth again to point out this evidence to Penelope, but a thought took hold of me, a little voice in my head saying what if, so I stuffed that thought back into my head before it got out. And besides, we were already most of the way down the corridor; could I really have clearly seen a few bits of dirt at this distance? I looked again, and I couldn’t see anything at all on the clean floor.
We got into the elevator, and it began its humming journey up to the next floor. I read once that the average time for a non-express elevator between floors was four seconds, with a further four seconds each for starting and stopping, so that to go from one floor directly to the next should take about twelve seconds. Like elsewhere I’d been in the hospital, there was no clock in the elevator, so I couldn’t be sure of the time, but I had at least enough time to count every one of the hairs in Steven’s left ear. I’m not going to tell you how many there were, because this story isn’t about the hair in Steven’s left ear (or his right, before you ask, you always trying to find out what’s happening before it happens) so I’m not going to waste valuable paper and ink going on and on telling you all the details about those hairs and perhaps giving each one a cute little name or arranging them on a color scale from dark to light shades – which I could do, because we were on the elevator long enough for it – but I can assure you that there were enough hairs so that it’d take a lot more than twelve seconds to count them all.
One hundred and thirty-three hairs, alright? That’s how many. And more, actually, but that’s all I counted up to before I couldn’t take the waiting anymore and I asked nobody in particular why the elevator was taking so long. Steven looked at me, with an expression that seemed to say, ‘I know you’ve been counting the hairs in my ear,’ then raised his hand and used his knuckles to tap a sign on the elevator wall behind me. This elevator travels slowly for your safety, the sign said, thank you for your patience. Steven went back to staring straight ahead. I thought about it, and figured that several centimeters per second was pretty safe. It was probably safer even than air travel, which I’ve heard is the safest way to travel.
I didn’t remember even coming down an elevator the first day I was here, but I was pretty upset that day so I thought maybe I’d just forgotten it, or maybe they had moved me using the elevator while I was asleep. I realized then how easy it would be for them to do whatever they wanted with me; how they could use me as their guinea pig[9] for whatever bizarre psychological experiments they wished. While I was asleep they could have moved me to any other part of the hospital, or even to another building entirely. They could put me on the moon in a place with artificial gravity. As long as the room and the few people I interacted with looked the same then I wouldn’t know at all. My room could be like a movie set, and if I looked behind some of the other doors in the hallway I’d just find bare wood frames and makeup artists putting foundation on Steven to cover up a mole, which they haven’t done very well because I could still see a large mole just to the left of his mouth. They could put me underground and leave the artificial lights on all the time and tell me it was the sun, just to find out what happens to a human when it thinks the earth’s rotation has messed up so that it orbits the sun with the same side always facing it and the other side is in never-ending darkness. I turned to ask Penelope if I had ever been moved to another room without being told and also if the man without the nametag was named Ron, but just then the elevator jerked to a sudden halt and I lost my balance, knocking my head against the this elevator travels slowly for your safety sign. The elevator doors opened with a ding, and we stepped off.
Steven led the way past a security checkpoint where a guard waved us through, down another hallway, and towards double doors beyond which I could see the outside. He pushed the doors open and we walked through, into the cool, fresh air. I was free, out in nature on a warm summer day with a beautiful companion. Does it get any better? Well, perhaps without the handcuffs and the guards it might have been better, and if my beautiful companion had not been a nurse watching over my mental health. But who can say for sure?
“Oscar,” Penelope asked, after we had been outside for a while, “do you see now? We’re still here in the same place; you’re not being kept in some underground dungeon.” Her expression changed, like she’d thought of something new, and she said, “Come with me.” We walked around the side of the building, with Steven and his nameless friend following, and the ground sloped away, to reveal another floor below the first floor – the hospital was built into a hill at the front. She led me by the cuffed hand to a window that was low to the ground, and she bent at the waist in front of me to reach it, and tapped her fingers on the window. “This is your room right here,” she said. “This is your window. When you see light through your window, it’s just the sun shining in.”
When she straightened up, she lost her balance and bumped into me. Her soft body pressed against mine, and I put my hands on her shoulders to steady her. I apologized for being in her way; she assured me that it wasn’t a problem. I felt conscious that we were standing close together, close enough that I could hear her breathing, and I stepped away a little bit so as not to make her uncomfortable.
I looked at the window. Since it was made of frosted glass, which keeps people from looking in (and also works just as well to keep people from looking out, although that fact is only incidental), I couldn’t see what the room was like inside. The window did seem the same though, and it seemed about the right position in the building to be my room. It didn’t seem impossible that I really could just be in a mental hospital, staying there in that room. If I thought about it logically, it felt like a mental hospital was a good place to be, because sometimes it actually felt like I
was losing my mind. I sighed inwardly; maybe that was it, maybe I was just going crazy. It wouldn’t hurt to let them try; the worst that could happen is I’d still feel crazy. Maybe they could help, though, and maybe they’d get me to a point where I could get through a day without thinking the stockboy at the grocery store was out to get me, or feeling worried about talking on the phone to my mother about how her garden was doing because they might have the line tapped. Feeling like the earth was going to collapse on me the day before was terrifying, and I didn’t want to have to go through that kind of thing again.
I looked out on the forest of maples and made a decision.
“Ok, you win,” I said to her. “You might be right; I’ll cooperate with treatment. I think there might be something wrong with me, maybe you guys can fix it. Or maybe not, but I’m going to let you try. I’m tired of looking over my shoulder because I think I’m being followed, and I’m tired of feeling like I have to follow the people who are following me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being unable to make friends with guys named Ron.”
“Why guys named Ron?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, and smiled. “Maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow night, over some psychiatric checklists and a bottle of pills.”
“It’s a date,” she replied. She probably had occasion later to worry that using language like ‘it’s a date’ was giving me the wrong idea. It wasn’t giving me the wrong idea though, I’m not socially inept. I’ve taken girls on dates before; only a few have brought psychiatric checklists, and never on the first date.
We stayed outside for a while, making conversation about my family and my past. There were no ‘were you jealous of your mother’s love for your siblings’ types of questions, so it didn’t feel like treatment, and it was just good to be outside in the sun and in the fresh air, after being inside for so long. I still wasn’t sure how long I’d actually been inside, but I didn’t want to spoil my time outside by asking questions which might make it seem like I wasn’t seriously on board with accepting treatment, or like I was faking it. It was a pleasant afternoon.