Part 2
A sunbeam from the morning sky snuck in through my window and gently warmed me into consciousness like a breakfast burrito[18]. I sat up on the side of the bed and stretched; I felt good. For nearly as long as I could remember, I had dreamt terrible foreboding dreams every night, dreams which abruptly ended in a clammy early morning wakefulness. I had forgotten what it was like to just feel good, to have properly rested and be ready to face the day. Did my muscles really not ache from midnight tensing during paranoid dreams? Was my back really not sore? These are rhetorical questions; my muscles did not ache, and my back was not sore.
In the mirror, and in my head, my eyes were clear and free from encroaching red veins. For a moment, I thought I might be dreaming, but a quick look around the room revealed a distinct lack of malicious surveillance, so it seemed unlikely that it could be one of my dreams. A knock came at the door and for the first time since I had been in that room I didn’t briefly worry that perhaps this knock would be the one which heralded a gun held by red gloves, with the silenced barrel aimed at my actually quite delicate head. Gloves did come through the door, but they were white, and on the hands of a nurse bringing my breakfast.
“You’re up early,” she noted, and she was right; this was the first time I had been up before the breakfast knock, and always before it had woke me up tired and irritable since I hadn’t slept well the night before.
“I am,” I replied, accepting the tray from her and giving a smile in return, “Thank you.”
That’s what a normal exchange of words could be like. I didn’t have to accuse someone of poisoning my sausage and eggs at all, I could simply be polite and thankful for the food. What a relief that was. I ate my breakfast with relish, not once stopping to wonder whether the delicious flavor was a natural characteristic of the food, or something added to conceal the taste of the memory-wiping chemical. I spooned the last of the sawmill gravy into my mouth, and licked the spoon clean – what a rapturous feeling you could experience just from the combination of flour, milk, pepper, and animal fat. I felt a brief twinge of envy for all the people who lived every day of their life like this, but it went away quickly, because now I was living the same way, and if I was lucky I would be living every day like it from then on. Remembering that I was supposed to take two Psylocybin tablets in the morning with my breakfast as well as with dinner, I got two from the bottle and swallowed them down.
Once, Winslow had told me that he felt sorry for me, that he couldn’t imagine feeling restless, anxious, worried, mistrusting and unhappy – just to name a few – every day. When I asked him what made him feel good – because I had tried the usual things before and found that while they did remove the negative feelings, they didn’t replace them with anything, and I felt used up and empty afterwards – he said it wasn’t anything, that he just woke up and felt good every day. I couldn’t believe it, and I even felt a little angry with him for making jokes at my expense, but he said that a peaceful happiness or contentment was the normal way to be. Now I was feeling what he had meant.
I could be normal, I thought to myself, with no small amount of incredulity. I could experience joy, unfettered by worry or fear. In the past, even in times where most people experienced pure joy, such as in the moment of orgasm or when winning an instant-win prize from the inside of a candy bar wrapper[19], I was still trying to figure out what new angle the world had planned out to trap me. This was definitely a feeling I could get used to, and if I could feel it over breakfast and a back that didn’t ache, what might I feel over the things that normal people actually considered to be worthy of joy? I stretched out on the bed and contemplated the ceiling. Since the time when I had thought the walls and ceiling were about to collapse in on me, I hadn’t even been able to look up. I spent most of the time in my room looking towards the door, or with my face planted in a pillow. Now I was able to appreciate the molded decoration of the ceiling, how the light and shadows played at creating mountain peaks and valleys over my head, and I had no worries that those mountains would fall upon me.
Several anxiety-free hours later, Penelope knocked and entered my room. I sprang out of bed and encircled her in a hug. Her whole body tensed and she pressed her hands against me to push me away, but then she seemed to realize I wasn’t insane – or at least not the kind of insane that would eat you or squeeze you to death, which in my opinion are definitely probably two of the worst kinds – and she relaxed.
“Thank you, Penelope,” I said. “I feel great. I mean really, really great. I don’t even know what words to say. I feel good. I woke up and I didn’t hurt, I didn’t ache, I felt happy. For the first time I felt happy without anything even happening to make me feel that way. It feels like it was just my natural state, to wake up and feel good. Thank you, thank you for your help.” I felt the shoulder of her uniform blouse wet against my cheek, and when I lifted my head I realized I had been crying against her as I spoke. I apologized in a whisper and felt embarrassed, and it was my turn to try to pull away, but now her arms were around me too and she held me tight. She held me as I pressed my face into her and wept. It felt like each tear contained a fear, an anxiety, a mental torment, all held in until then, because I never realized that I could let them go, that they didn’t have to take over my life, and that they weren’t really even a part of me; nobody had ever told me that.
“It’s all right,” she whispered to me, “Everybody hurts. Everybody worries.”
I knew it was true. Everybody worries. Even Winslow worried about me, but he didn’t let his worry define him, he’s able to let it go. As each vexatious thing came into my head, I recognized it and turned it over in my mind before releasing it. I let go my fears that one day I would be walking down the street and a windowless van would pull up, the door would slide open, and they would pull me inside to torture me by the slow drip of a leaky tap in the next room until I broke down and told them what they wanted. I let go my feeling that every person in the world was set against me. I cried for a long time with Penelope, but I let every single thing go, I released them all, no matter how truly frightening or how completely absurd, and then there were no more tears. When I stopped crying, she loosed her arms from around me, and I sat back down on the bed, mentally and physically exhausted but elated because I finally felt free.
“For the first time this morning, when the other nurse knocked——” I began, wanting her to understand why I had cried, what it all meant, but she stopped me.
“I know how you felt. For the first time, you didn’t worry who or what might be on the other side of the door, because you finally realized why wouldn’t it just be your breakfast being brought to you at the regular breakfast time? I had the same experience when I started using Psylocybin. Even when I’m not paranoid I’m still very shy, but that first night on the medicine I gathered up the courage to order a pizza, and when the delivery guy brought it, I didn’t look through the peephole to check; I didn’t even ask who it was. I paid for my pizza, and when I set the box on the table I no longer felt like I needed to slowly open the box just in case, as I had always done before. Just in case of what? I remember thinking to myself. Just in case of pizza? I ate the pizza, and it was the most delicious pizza I had ever tasted.” She had closed her eyes while she related her story to me; when she opened them she indicated the bottle on the table and continued, “That was when I realized how completely I had been changed by those little pills, just like you’ve realized about yourself this morning.”
I asked how long it would be until I’d be able to leave the hospital now that I was feeling better, and she said that the doctor would like to keep me under observation for two weeks just to be sure that it was working and that there were no especially bad side effects (as with most medicines there were rare side effects like kidney failure, heart attack, and hair loss, plus the common and benign ones like sweaty palms), but if everything looked good after that time then I’d be able to return to my home with a clean bill of mental
health.
Most of the next two weeks passed quickly and pleasantly, with two Psylocybin in the morning and two in the evening. Any time a cloud of worry passed over me, it was always blown away by the fresh, clean winds of optimism and rationality. I did develop the side effect of occasional sweaty palms, but it was nothing compared to before when I would often wake up at night in the middle of a horrible paranoid nightmare, drenched in sweat.
Dr. Boggs visited me once more in my room. I told him about my sweaty palms, and he said that was easily taken care of; all I had to do was carry a discreet cloth with me at all times so I could wipe my palms before I shook someone’s hand, or touched a doorknob, or stroked a baby’s tiny sweat-free face. At first I protested about the inconvenience of carrying a cloth with me everywhere I went, but I soon agreed with him when he said that compared to a life of living in fear every day that the mailman (or my cat[20]) may be bringing a bomb to me, carrying a cloth for my newly sweaty palms was a small cross to bear indeed.
He asked me questions about how I had been feeling since I started taking the Psylocybin regularly, and I was amazed by how different this conversation felt when I thought back to conversations I’d had with him in the previous weeks. Without realizing it, I had been cagey and reserved in my answers to even the simplest of questions before, worried that I might give too much away, that he might be in league with the mysterious powers who wanted me to have a proper diagnosis along with state-of-the-art medical treatment and he might pass my answers on to them. Now my answers flowed easily, because I felt like we were partners on my journey back to mental health, and I knew he wanted me to be better just as much as I wanted it.
“Oscar, in a few days you’ll be out of here and on your own,” he said. “You’ll be on your own in a way you never have before, because you’re not going to have a lot of phantoms and shadows tagging along in your mind. It’s a lot quieter in the real world without them, and that’s something you’re not used to, so if you need someone to talk to you can always come back here,” he paused in mid-sentence to adjust his glasses, then continued, “for a counseling session with me. Really, if there’s anything you need to talk about at all, if you have any concerns or worries of any nature, no matter how insignificant they seem, you can come to me.”
“What do you mean by insignificant?” I asked.
“Well, everybody has worries, and even many normal people sometimes experience a little bit of what we would call paranoid delusion. For example, if most people went to the shop, paid for something that cost one dollar with a ten dollar bill, and the clerk only gave them four dollars in change, they might have a tendency to think that the clerk intentionally kept five dollars for himself, when in nearly all cases it’s just an honest mistake and the clerk mistook a ten dollar bill for a five dollar bill. They might get hostile, they might call him a thief, and they might cause a big scene, demand to see the manager, call the police, leap over the counter and smash the cash register, that kind of thing.”
“And if that’s a very occasional incident, with someone who doesn’t have a history of paranoia,” he adjusted his glasses again as they slipped down his nose very slightly, “then there wouldn’t be any issue, they’d just get a refund and later feel like a bit of an ass for their behavior. However, for someone like you, Oscar, who has a history of paranoia and is on medication, it could indicate a problem with the dosage or even the beginnings of a relapse into full-blown paranoia. It could be just nothing, and at this point I feel confident that you’re perfectly capable of responding in a normal way to a thing like that without getting carried away, but all the same I’d like you to come and discuss that sort of thing with me until we’re sure you’re in the clear.”
“Since you’ve made such good progress,” he continued, “we’re going to move you to a different room for the rest of your time here. I know it’s not pleasant in this room with the door locked and a window that you can’t see out of. It’s been for your protection though, as well as the protection of our staff, because for a while we weren’t sure of what your condition was exactly or how you would react to medication. Your positive reaction was quite a relief to me.”
“How else could I react?” I said. “It’s a great feeling. I feel like I have my life back now, thanks to you.”
He hesitated, and pushed his glasses up before they had even slipped down. I didn’t think he was going to continue, but then he said, “A very small number of patients have reacted violently to even the suggestion that they take Psylocybin. For the ones who arrived here under the same dark circumstances you did, they’ve had to be moved to psychiatric hospitals for the criminally insane, where they’ll likely spend the rest of their lives unless we can help them understand the benefits of treatment, because their paranoia makes them a danger to society, as you no doubt remember.”
I lowered my eyes and looked away from him, ashamed, recalling the photographs of a bloody face and bruised body he had shown me weeks before when I first came to the hospital – blood and bruises that I had caused – but he held up his hand to stop me.
“I’m not blaming you for your past behavior, Oscar,” he said, “any more than I would blame a kleptomaniac for stealing or someone with summer allergies for sneezing when a breeze blows a cloud of pollen at them. The amygdala is a primitive but powerful part of the brain that is almost impossible to resist, especially when it reaches the size we find in most patients who suffer from your condition. In fact, it’s powerful enough that you have to take Psylocybin willingly, with full understanding and consent, or your body will reject it; it will have no effect on your brain at all. I’m telling you this because you’ve thanked me, but it was really Nurse Penelope who was most instrumental in your recovery. She helped convince you to accept Psylocybin, and she was the best equipped to do it because of her own unfortunate experiences in the grip of paranoia. Without her daily help you’d still be cowering in the corner here, flinching away at every sound from the hallway and every shadow under the door.” He stood up, clapped me on the shoulder, and finished with, “In any case, you’re doing very well now; a nurse will be along shortly to show you to your new room.”
After he was gone, I thought about the things he had said. He was right; I did owe a lot to Penelope. It didn’t seem that I would have agreed to take the medication on my own without her help. The experiences she had that she told me about were so similar to my own that I’d easily seen myself following her actions exactly, taking the Psylocybin and then being able to lead a normal life just as she was doing. I shook my head, almost in disbelief that she was all that had stood between me and confinement in a maximum-security insanity prison. And the whole time I would still have just felt like it was all a trap designed to keep me locked up and unable to investigate the shady goings-on of I-couldn’t-even-remember-who at that point, because I felt like I was doing the right thing and I didn’t feel insane, not even right up to the moment of the first Psylocybin pill sliding down my throat.
I guess nobody truly insane ever does feel that they’re actually insane though, they feel like the way they feel is the right way to feel and everyone else is insane; that’s how I’d felt before my first willing and proper dose of Psylocybin. Normal people probably feel a little crazy sometimes though, but then they calm down after rationally considering the consequences of eating the face off the bus driver for being rude, or they get help. It felt so strange to me that a part of my brain so small and evolutionarily primitive could have such a big effect on my life; it had made me insane and at the same time made me think I was the only normal one among millions of lunatics who just couldn’t see the truth.
The nurse came to get me, as foretold by Dr. Boggs, and she asked if there was anything I needed to bring with me. I duly looked the room over, even though I had nothing there. I was leaving behind only a part of my past in that room, like a skin I had shed and crawled out of to emerge clean and new and slightly moist with mucous. I answered that there was nothing –
nothing but my paranoid past, which I didn’t say out loud – and she led me away. As we walked away, I looked back for the penultimate time at room 21, and for a moment it seemed to me like it wasn’t actually my room, like room 20 was the room they had put me in when I first came to the hospital. That thought only stayed in my head briefly, though; as we walked away from the room which had been my home for weeks, I put the thought and the room out of my mind.