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Authors: Lippe Simone
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byLippe Simone
Copyright
© 2014 Indefensible Publishing
Table of Contents
Contents
Before he knew who he was he knew that he had blood on his hands. The inevitable “who am I” and “where am I”
had yet to form but he was already sure that these were his hands and that this was probably not his blood. Then he knew that he was in a dark room and then, somehow, that he wasn’t alone.
He also knew that he was posed, probably awkwardly, on the floor of a clinical examination room. He had no recollection of ever before being in a clinical examination room but he innately recognized the reflective white tiles, examination table, hand sink and blade disposal as standard features of the venue, although there should probably have been less shattered glass and scattered instruments and splashed blood. The bewildered bear of an orderly standing over him with a generously endowed hypodermic in his hand didn’t look at all out of place.
The orderly was Leonard, if his name tag was to be believed, and the hypodermic in his hand was actually in his hand and coming out the other side just enough to look like it might hurt. But Leonard didn’t notice the needle or the man on the floor or much of anything, it seemed.
The man on the floor looked where his own name tag should be and found only torn hospital scrubs. The bloody tag was in his bloodier hand, as if he’d known that he was going to need to refer to it and, as it turned out, he did. Beneath the congealing blood his name was Ray. Ray Something, because this friendly, family environment apparently didn’t put last names on their tags. It was a start.
“Leonard? Did you do this?” He asked and then, looking at the orderly’s wounded paw, “Did I do that?”
Leonard looked at him now with a face that could never be imitated by a mind distracted by a single, solitary fact. Then he noticed his hand as though he’d forgotten he had one and presented it to Ray.
“You know what, Leonard? So far as I know right now that might be perfectly normal, so why don’t you just hang onto that.” Perhaps he and Leonard had fought and, unlikely as it seemed in light of Leonard’s circus-side-show size, he had won and had stuck him with a hypodermic that was even now responsible for the giant’s panda-bear docility.
But there was no blood on Leonard and Ray was in no position to start being exclusive about his circle of friends, so he climbed to his feet now quite certain that he’d been in a fight or, possibly, hit by a car, and examined the puncture.
“Now, just look at me.” said Ray and slid the needle out while Leonard was duly distracted. Leonard looked at the hypodermic and his hand as if unsure that they were meant to be parted. “Quid pro quo, Leonard. Now you do something for me and tell me who I am and where we are and, if you’re up to it, what the hell is going on.”
Leonard wasn’t up to it. He blinked with some limited expertise and looked carefully about without turning his head.
“Oh good.” said Ray, “You’re a turnip.” He dropped the hypodermic into the sink and began washing the blood off his hands but stopped when he noticed that he was at risk of smudging a note written in ballpoint on his left wrist “12-22-14”. A date, possibly. Possibly even today’s date and it may as well have been for all the answers it provided. He knew it wasn’t a phone number and he found himself wondering briefly how he knew even that much. He noticed that Leonard was now carefully examining his own arm for clues.
But neither Leonard’s arm nor anything else in the room yielded anything other than evidence of a scattered and clumsy battle which smashed vials and spilled tongue depressors and syringes and cost someone about two pints of blood. The door was partially open and providing the only light in the form of a yellow stripe dividing the room in half and making Leonard appear even larger and more ominous than he already was.
“Goodbye Leonard.” Ray said and pushed through the door with the sort of hopeful optimism attendant with knowing that things couldn’t get much worse.
He was in a hospital in still life. In an ill-green hallway nurses and orderlies and civilian visitors with flowers and magazines stood where the moment found them, doing whatever they’d been doing and going wherever they needed to go when they appeared to have simultaneously forgotten what and where. They shared the same blank, vaguely startled stare that Ray had most recently seen on Leonard. The semblance of perfect normalcy just slightly off-kilter was as dramatic as it would have been if the staff and visitors had all been doing a synchronized song and dance number.
Ray tried to cast his mind back to the last nightmare he’d had, by way of comparison, but the only solid memory he could form was of waking up to the sight of Leonard with a hypodermic needle through his hand. He was a full-on amnesiac with no idea who he was or where he was or how he got there and he was the most plugged-in person within screaming distance. But he had to try.
He chose a hefty older nurse with “Nancy” on her nametag and a selection of little cups on a tray for no better reason than that she was older and heftier and the little cups made her look responsible. Ray took her by both shoulders and looked her in the eyes.
“Nancy? You really need to snap out of it Nancy. If anyone needs a nurse right now it’s me.” Nothing. Nancy looked through him at some unseen horizon and he knew that there was absolutely nothing behind her big brown eyes. She held her tray of little cups because that’s all she’d ever done and it was as natural to her as horseback riding was to a statue of General Washington.
He interrogated other bystanders. “Tracy?” “Jeff?” “Toupée man?” More nothing. They looked at him with the same vacant respect you get when you raise string theory with a cocker spaniel.
Ray worked his way down the hall, judging the relative engagement of its population “turnip, turnip, potato, pumpkin, baked potato”. At the end of the hall Ray turned a corner to the relatively encouraging sight of a common area with large windows bathing an ugly open-concept lounge in natural light. The area was delineated by a drab carpet and a cement column in the center was festooned with the hand-made posters for reading circles and used children’s clothing that are taped to the walls of all institutions everywhere. The eclectic furnishings of plastic chairs and swivel chairs and deep armchairs had all been turned toward a large-screen television and every seat was occupied.
It was hard to distinguish between patients and orderlies because they all had the same hospital gear and name tags and sported some combination of Los Angeles Dodgers paraphernalia. There were Dodgers shirts and caps and some of the audience of about twenty, all men, were holding pennants. Bowls of baseball snacks of peanuts and chips and popcorn remained untouched. All eyes were glued to the TV, which was showing a test pattern.
Ray knew then that he was going to have to take his business elsewhere. He moved past the lounge because the only other direction led back to the ill-green corridor. The windows continued down one side of another hallway of treatment rooms, not unlike the examination room in which Ray had most recently been reborn but larger and with more light and less blood. He checked the rooms as he passed them and found no further cause for hope.
In one room two men in emergency response uniforms were standing over a bony young man on a stretcher. One of the men was repeatedly and automatically defibulating the obviously dead body. He wasn’t looking for signs of life or even looking, he was just pressing the paddles against the naked ribby chest long enough for the body to leap from the gurney like popped corn, and then doing it again, with the same devotion to duty that Nancy brought to her tray of little cups.
In the next room a technician stood blinking at an X-ray machine as it buzzed and pumped radiation into the eyes of an oblivious old man in a leather apron and corduroy slippers. Directly across the hall, on the other side of the glass, a window washer looked blankly in from his suspended platform with a squeegee in his hand. Ray looked back at him and wondered what floor he was on.
Past the treatment rooms a yellow arrow on the green wall pointed finally toward “Reception” and Ray quickened his pace. He passed the solid glass wall of an observation room with a population of what would be most efficiently generalized as junkies. There were a dozen of them on display, mostly men and a few women and all skinny and pale and exhibiting varying severities of homelessness. The observation room was enclosed behind thick glass and had no television, just a worn carpet and abused living room furniture that looked like it had been donated with no regrets by the seventies. With no baseball or test patterns to keep them occupied the indigenous of the region had turned to the matter of self-preservation and were trying to eat plastic plants and wax fruit. Ray noticed with some irony that the observation room was next to the cafeteria.
Ray was struck by what appeared to be a disturbing degree of purpose among the junkies. Whatever they’d been doing whenever everyone else on the floor had gone blank in a docile state had left them in what amounted to a slow-motion frenzy. They ambled about like chickens in a wartime barnyard picking at anything that resembled food before letting the plastic grapes and cotton leaves fall from their mouths and moving on. Ray tapped on the glass with a clinical curiosity to test the consciousness of the junkies and they stopped their foraging and looked at him as a group. Then they attacked with the full force of a mindless juggernaut unaware of the principal properties of two-inch glass.
Anemic blood popped in little explosions on the glass as the junkies broke their noses and cheeks and fingers before bouncing to the floor with a new hard-earned awareness of their surroundings. Some of them armed themselves and began hacking at the window with artificial bananas and grapefruit. Given a few weeks of bloody trial and error, Ray reasoned, they might get through that glass. He decided not to wait.
After the cafeteria the corridor widened to a minimalist reception area with a nurses’ station that had lost all its nurses. The reception seemed to span the entire floor with a bank of plastic chairs on one end and a green, under-maintained fish tank with two slimy goldfish at the other. Ray remembered, or at any rate knew, that they somehow managed to live rich and full lives hampered by a memory span of three seconds but he couldn’t bring himself to find any solace in the point.
Behind the fish tank was a floor-to-ceiling mirror with a mottled effect to make it look as much like marble as a mirror can, which isn’t very much. Ray saw himself for the first time and hoped that he at least had a nice personality.
He was average build and height and in only that regard unremarkable. Gaunt, possibly about thirty-five years old and perhaps good looking in his high school graduation picture, now his eyes were tiny bloodshot marbles at the bottom of inky wells of subcutaneous bleeding, like a meth-addict aggressively dedicated to his calling. His skin was the bloodless pallor of an arctic recluse and his lips were a worryingly natural shade of blue. In addition to the mysterious note from beyond memory on his left arm, the three main veins of both forearms were emphatically punctuated with needle marks. His brown hair looked as though he’d cut it himself with pliers and a carpet knife and where it wasn’t short it was missing altogether to accommodate circular bruises or burns above his temples and on top of his head. He searched his face for some reference to normal and found only the certainty that this wasn’t it, like the goldfish in the moldy tank who recognize food and their goldfish friends when and only when they see them.
Beyond the nurses’ station and next to the waiting area was another ill-green hallway but that held no interest for Ray. He wanted to leave. Facing the nurses’ station were double doors of reinforced glass and beyond the doors were elevators and a stairway and freedom. And the doors were firmly locked from the outside.
There’d be a key in the nurses’ station. He’d find the key and let himself out and be sure to lock up afterward. The station was a tidy surface of clipboards and newspapers, someone’s lunch and a computer with a spreadsheet of patients’ names and room numbers and attending physicians. He was tempted to look for his own name, hoping that it might appear in the doctor column, but instead he concentrated on the hundred drawers and the abandoned purse and pigeon holes full of every manner of hospital ephemera with the exception of keys.
Frustrated in his search, Ray finally turned his attention to the spreadsheet open on the computer but saw only the little blue property sticker on top of the screen which said “psychiatric ward”. Then the screen went blank, the air conditioning sighed to an expansive silence, and the lights went out.