What the fuck happened? What did I do?
The nurse came in and gingerly gave me two injections through an IV, and before I could come up with an answer, I was off to a dreamless land that only made my memories more dampened. How was I supposed to remember anything when I was falling down a dark rabbit hole?
There was a nurse standing over me the next time I opened my eyes.
“I think I need to piss,” I whispered, my mouth still cotton-ball dry.
“You can go ahead,” he told me with a smirk. “You have a catheter in. Whizz away, wacko.”
I had no idea what a catheter was, but I wasn’t going to piss my pants. That was rude. And gross. But where was I? Why was this guy in white standing over me humming Seasons in the Sun and injecting things into a tube.
I slept on it, not caring anymore the second he pulled the needle free. I didn’t give a shit who he was, what he was doing, nor the propriety of peeing myself. I let my bladder go as I fell back into my dark state of nothingness.
“Are you there, Dillon?”
Slowly, I opened my eyes. I felt the voice call me out of the void I’d buried myself in. The room was too bright and I wanted to find my way back to the places where light couldn’t find me. The emptiness was nice, forgiving, and asked nothing of me. It was a place I could let go of every worry and fear, and accept contentment. How dare this person call me away from that to a place where the lights vibrated and tried to burrow their way into my head.
“Dillon,” he said again, and I knew the voice. It sounded like Dr Dressup. I squinted against the intrusive light, and found him sitting beside me again with his CAMH clipboard in hand, ready to take notes. “How are we doing today?”
“Tired,” I said with little emotion. “Can I go back to sleep, please?”
“I’ve been told you’ve been sleeping quite a bit, Dillon. Why don’t you stay with me for a while? We can talk and maybe we can get you up and about. I’d like to see you walking around. I want to help you.”
“Then let me sleep. It’s nice there. Quiet. Dark. Perfect. Just give me more of whatever you’re giving me and let me sleep.”
“I’d prefer to talk, Dillon. I think drugs can help, but right now we still don’t know what’s going on with you. We’re only giving you a common-enough mixture to help settle you down after what happened.”
“What happened?” I said. My words sounded lazy and slurred in my ears. “Was it the monsters again?”
“Monsters? What monsters, Dillon?”
“Monsters, demons, spirits…all of those damn things on this planet, the things that aren’t supposed to be here. The ones I’m here to hunt.”
The drugs were affecting me. I was spilling too much, telling this man of medicine and science things I normally wouldn’t, but I was barely there. I was still one foot in the subconscious, the land of slumber. If I’d had control, I would’ve kept my mouth shut and just let things get back to normal, pretended I was fine and mentally healthy. The drugs though, they weren’t reacting well with me. Not being completely human might’ve had something to do with it.
“You’re here to hunt monsters? In the hospital?”
“Not in the hospital, but everywhere else. They come through weak spots. They find their way here any way they can, and I have to find them and send them back to their worlds.”
“Is that what the knife is for?”
“My Tincher? Yeah. It works on almost all of them, but sometimes I have to go see Godfrey to get something better, more affective. Sometimes, these things are tricky little bastards.”
I looked over at the doctor and he was busy scribbling down words on his pad. At the time, I thought nothing of it. I wasn’t fully aware of what was coming out of my mouth. Apparently the mix of Clozapine and sedatives were acting like a Dillon the Monster Dick truth serum. I was on a roll and had no plans or sense to stop.
“Can other people see these monsters, Dillon, or do you have something that helps you see them?”
“People can see them, usually. They call me up and have me come to their homes or businesses to get rid of them. Sometimes, though, I have to let them stay. Sometimes, I feel so bad for them, the more helpless ones that only come here to get away from their terrible lives.”
“Okay, this is new, but it’s also progress, Dillon. Was it monsters you saw the day you left the lake and ended up here?”
“I don’t know, was it?” I asked, and rolled back through time. I still just wanted to sleep, but thought if I told Dr Dressup everything I could about whatever he wanted to know, I’d be able to close my eyes again. “I was at the lake, hoping Rouge was okay. I have to break up with her, or they’re going to take me away.”
“Who is?”
“Parks. The Collective sent him here because I broke the rules and started to date Rouge.”
“Why can’t you date her? Is this Collective like a religious group?”
“No. They’re more like universal police. They send us here to protect the Earth from beings that aren’t supposed to be here. And that’s what I was doing, but then I met Rouge and we started dating, and that’s a no-no. We’re not allowed to date humans.”
He went silent, scribbled some more and just sat there. I can only imagine how crazy I must’ve sounded to him.
“So, you’re not human?” he finally asked, after nearly five minutes of saying nothing. I’d started to drift off by then, but was jolted back into the overly-bright world.
“No, yes, and maybe. It’s hard to explain. This body is human. I’m not. I’m a Treemor. But you can’t tell anyone, okay? Ssshhhhh! It’s a secret. We’ve got that whole doctor and patient thing going on here, right?”
“Of course, but I would like to know more about what a Treemor is.”
“I am. The last of my kind, and that really sucks. And if I don’t break it off with Rouge and they send me away from here, I don’t really have anywhere to go. I have no home planet any more, no family, and no friends. Do you have any idea of how much that sucks? Makes me just want to jump ship and go underground.”
“Okay. I think I get that.” He scribbled more stuff down on the pad before he turned back to me and smiled warmly. He seemed like such a nice guy. “Now, can we go back to the day you were at the lake and drove away, the day you came here? You said you were on your way to Godfrey’s. Did you ever make it there?”
Did I? I didn’t think I did. I went back through the waves of time. I could see myself sitting in the car again, watching as the wind drove the surf into the rocks and into the sand further along the shoreline. I’d been thinking about my life and how it all seemed to be going off the rails. There was Rouge, Parks, the earthbound monsters, the video up on YouTube, and the case in Niagara Falls. I couldn’t forget that, especially after what had happened in the LCBO. Those three with the melted faces, how they came at me; and there was the one who tried to touch me: there was no wiping that away from the old memory banks.
I put myself back there, in the middle of the store with them, their faces drooling black flesh that began to lose all solidity. I could hear the mucus-filled voices bubbling out incoherent words. And then the one closest touched me and got some of that muddy substance on me.
In the room with the doctor, I wasn’t only remembering it, I began to relive it. I could feel it all over again. The coldness of the shadow muck as it spread over my arm, trying to pull me down into the darkness where it had come from. I could feel the small, unseen legs of the bugs living in the black sludge and I had to look down at my arm to make sure it wasn’t actually there, that it was just a memory. Even though I couldn’t see it, and there was a part of me that knew it was only a memory I was experiencing, I began to scream and cry out for help. I sounded insane as I begged the doctor for my Tincher so I could cut it away from me.
The doctor stood up and backed away as the cold, deathly slime sp
read its invisible self up my arm towards my chest and face. He was no doubt glad I was still strapped down as he called out for a nurse to hurry over. I could only catch a bit of his voice over the terrible sounds coming from me. My voice didn’t even really sound like me, but I was the only one in the room other than the medical staff, so it had to be me, right? The doctor wasn’t screaming. I looked from my arm to him, the din deafening by that point, and he was talking to a male and female nurse, so it wasn’t them. It had to be me, but I wasn’t fully aware of trying to scream out. That was, until I looked down at my arm and once again felt the cold shadow on me. The feeling made me start to scream even louder until I heard my own cries, which led me to try and figure out who was making that terrible sound. I was in a loop of screaming, confusion, realization, and then right back to screaming. I thought it was never going to end. There was a calm voice in my head, which appeared out of nowhere, telling me that the feeling wasn’t real, to relax and take a deep breath before my howls ripped my throat apart and I drowned in my own blood. I was okay with that thought too, because then I wouldn’t feel the stuff that had fallen on me from the kid’s mouth. The rational part tried to explain that the muck was gone, the cold death feeling was all in my head, but its voice and my nerves were on two separate planets, speaking languages neither understood.
The screaming didn’t stop.
Well, not until the doctor was back beside me and one of the nurses had jammed a syringe into my IV. The doctor told me to calm down, relax, it would be fine. I wanted to, I really did. I even tried to tell him it was okay, I knew what was going on, but those words were lost in a mass exodus of AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!
I thought it would be the last scream before I either fainted or choked on my own blood, but then, there was the void of sleep. It whispered in my ear like a lover come back after a month-long trip. All I wanted to do was embrace it. The world around me had the volume turned down, and the director called for a fade to black. Who was I to argue?
One day turned into the next. Hours and minutes came and went and I had no idea if it was night, day, summer, fall, winter, or the end of times. Nor did I care. The doctor would stop by and sit with me, and I tried my best to talk to him, to work out things with my memory so that I wasn’t reduced to making the constant sound of a cat getting its tail stepped on. We’d start with my full name, what I did for a living, and then get to the LCBO; cue madness. It wasn’t that I was in terror of the moment; it was more having no control over my own thoughts and sanity because of the damn drugs. I’d never felt so out of control of my own emotions, and the drugs were my way to explain the abandonment of command I had over my own will.
I tried to explain it to him, begged him some days, or all in the same day to take me off them, but he said he was worried I would become violent and hurt someone. I guess the fact that I attacked three boys barely out of high school with a knife had them guessing I was a madman. The waking night terrors and screams probably hadn’t helped my case either.
Hours passed and days did as well. Or at least, I think they did. For all I knew, being locked in a room with no windows and only one solid door, it could’ve been all the same day. The only thing that ever changed during that time was the doctor’s shirt and the nurses who came to pump drugs into my IV. I assumed the doctor wasn’t changing his shirt over and over again just to make it appear as though time had passed.
Soon, my voice didn’t sound like my own. My throat became raw and sore from screaming in endless loops before I was drugged back down into my living coma. I was strapped down the entire time, and I’d given up asking to be freed long ago. They came and changed my piss bag, moved the pads they placed under me to catch my shit like I was a dog being housebroken. They gave me several sponge baths. I wasn’t even conscious during some, but woke up smelling of the weird soap they used. This had become my life. I had no strength to fight back, so I went along with it all; objections, and even the thought of complaining, melted from my mind.
Then, one day I woke up and I was sitting in wheelchair by a window. I was wearing a Disney nightgown, and had knitted slippers on my feet. I lifted my hands up and looked at them and they didn’t seem real, as though I’d never seen them before. I blinked, wondered if it was all a dream, or maybe they’d changed my medication and I was finally being pushed out of the warm blanket of dreamless darkness I’d used as a security blanket for so long.
I looked up again, out the window, and saw the sun high in the sky. Trees rained leaves, and a strong wind blew. Normally, the leaves in the fall are vibrant reds, yellows, and oranges, but these seemed dull, as though the saturation on them had been turned down. They were still those colours, only less intense. I wondered if it was the drugs causing that, too. If so, I needed to get them to stop giving them to me, but I wasn’t sure they’d listen any more than they already had.
“How’s it going, buddy?” someone asked to my right. I turned my head as fast as I could to see who it was, but it felt like everything moved in slow motion. The sensation was similar to trying to run underwater.
When I finally managed to turn and look at him, I saw it was a guy with crazy hair and a shaggy beard sitting on a chair in a robe just like mine. Mickey and Donald danced around on the cartoon print with Minnie and Daisy, stars and rainbows taking up the empty space. They seemed just perfect for the setting.
“You okay, buddy?” the patient asked, and started to chew on the sides of his fingers. I tried to say yes, but my mouth was still very dry and my throat hurt, so I nodded slowly instead. “They got you pretty loaded up. You the guy who’s been screaming over in Isolation?” Again I nodded, guessing it had to be me. “You sound nuts, you know that? It’s hard to sleep here as it is, without you howling like a wolf.”
He threw his head back and made a wolf howl, but it was short-lived, as one of the nurses came over.
“That’s enough of that, Harrison. You start anything and you’ll be back in your room before lunchtime.”
“But it’s pudding day,” he said, looking terrified.
“Then you better behave. Don’t be giving Dillon here a hard time.”
And with that, the nurse left us alone again.
“He’s mean, that one. We have to be good and quiet all the time or he gets all bossy and takes away our pudding or TV privileges. He’s not as bad as that woman in the Cuckoo Nest movie, but he’s still mean. You ever see that movie?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure at the moment, and I didn’t want to think about it.
“Well, they play it once a week in the TV room. Weird movie to show us, but it’s the only one they put on. So, your name’s Dillon? Mine’s Harrison.” He held out his hand and I looked at it as though it was a foreign object. I knew what he wanted to do, but there was no way I could figure out how to get my hand from my lap to his outstretched one. He laughed, nodded and pulled his hand back. “By the way, you’re drooling all over yourself.”
So I was.
I ate.
I slept.
I sat in the recreation room.
I sat in the TV room.
I met with Dr Marshall, Dr Dressup’s real name.
I listened to Harrison talk.
I used the bathroom.
And between it all I took the pills they dished out to me. Swallowed them dry and then had my mouth inspected to ensure they were gone. My dignity became a thing of the past, but the field where I grow the fucks I give had stopped growing the day I came here, so I couldn’t have cared less. My life was a haze and a daze, and I didn’t think of anything other than what was right in front of me. Even Dr Marshall had started to get frustrated, as he wanted me to delve into my past, my delusions of being a monster hunter, and the attack at the LCBO. But I didn’t want to talk about any of that. I just stared at him blankly, hoped he’d take the hint that my brain wasn’t working right with the drugs he was giving me. And it wasn’t. I try to recall
Rouge’s face, bits and pieces of my life, but like the colours in the leaves, and the Jell-O they loved to feed us, it all appeared desaturated of life and vibrancy. I didn’t know what to tell him, because I just didn’t know much of anything anymore.
Most of my time was spent in the recreation area where other patients coloured in giant colouring books. Others played checkers, while some put together puzzles. It smelled of old feet and medical rubs, with a hint of piss everywhere. Whenever I was there, Harrison was close by talking to me, telling me stories and asking me questions I couldn’t answer.
“You ever play World of Warcraft? I love it. But there are people out there, real sickos who use the game to hurt people. One time, I had fallen asleep eating Beefaroni—you like those, they’re the best thing in the world—and this guy found my game on from inside the game, and he came through it, into my house. He must’ve been a level fifty-one wizard at least. It takes someone that good to make a portal. Well, he comes in, steals my bones right out of my body and puts them up for auction on eBay. Can you believe that?”
No, I didn’t believe that, but shrugged to avoid him trying to convince me of his story.
“Yeah, well, I had to buy them back, but I couldn’t get them in my body right, so I had to change bodies again. I do that every so often, you know. I’ve been alive for three hundred years, and every now and then I have to upgrade my form to stay alive. If not, I die in this body and that would suck, I mean, look at me. I have the body of a God, sure, but that God is Buddha.”
In my normal life, I might’ve laughed at that, but my normality had been upended and I’d turned into a walking vegetable. I opened my mouth to try and say something to Harrison as he began to dig up his nose in search of some lost treasure, but when I blinked, he was gone and I was sitting in a room with Dr Marshall. He wore another of his sweater-and-plaid-shirt combos, but I could barely tell what the colours were they were so muted. The doctor leaned back in his chair, looking at me with concern as he chewed his pen.
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