The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

by Anna Ferrara

  Paul didn’t seem to suspect anything, although she did heave deeply as if a tad irritated and let go of my hand. She went ahead to Dr Clark’s briefcase without me, pulled out a laptop and brought it over to his body on the floor. As if he were just an object and not a dead human being, she picked up his pale, purple-tinged thumb and pressed it down against the laptop’s trackpad.

  Nothing happened. His finger was too dead, maybe?

  She covered his thumb with her hand, rubbed it vigorously like she were giving it a hand job then tried again. This time, the laptop whirred to a start. A pleasant musical tone sounded as its screen lit up. Paul typed a long line of text on the keyboard and pressed the ‘Enter’ button.

  A white document appeared on the big ass TV screen next to her. “Look,” she said to me.

  I saw a table with columns labelled ‘Room Number’, ‘Name’, ‘Illness’, ‘Delusion(s)’ and ‘Status’ on the TV screen.

  ‘P. Rafferty’ was the first on the list. ‘Room 1’. Illness: ‘Schizophrenia with Occasional Catatonia, Mental Retardation’. Delusion(s): ‘Telekinesis’. Status: ‘Escaped’.

  ‘B. Thompson’ was right at the bottom. ‘Room 20’. Illness: ‘Self-Mutilation, Depression, Suicidal Ideation, Identity Disorder’. Delusion(s): ‘Superhuman Regenerative Abilities’. Status: ‘Escaped’.

  Between the two names on the list were more female ones, most with schizophrenia listed as their primary illness and all with status listed as: ‘In Treatment’.

  The document didn’t say I had schizophrenia—Dr Clark had been wrong about that—but neither did it say my name was ‘L. Thompson’. What did that mean? Were Dr Clark’s last words to be trusted, or not?

  “Room 16. Cola Lam,” Paul said. “She’s the one who can read your past. She can give you the answers you seek.”

  ‘C. Lam’, the document read. Illness: ‘Schizophrenia’. Delusion(s): ‘Muscle Memory Reading’. Status: ‘In Treatment’.

  Paul dug out a stack of papers from her backpack and spread them out on the carpet for me to see.

  They were the same papers she had been drawing on the day before at the secret apartment. Now that she had them pointing towards me the right way up, I could see they weren’t random doodles of art at all. They were detailed blueprints. Of the ‘Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre, New York, USA’. Rooms were either labelled by number or by function. All exits, entrances, elevators, stairwells and security camera locations were clearly marked out. In one sheet, the one labelled ‘Level 16’ at the top of the page, I recognised the shape of the long corridor on it and the location of the nearest stairwell. It was the very corridor Paul and I had run along the day we escaped Wonderdrug. Paul put a dirt-filled fingernail over one of the boxes on that sheet—a box with the words ‘Room 16’ written within it.

  “That’s where she is. We’ll get her out first, then you open the doors towards the left while I get the doors on the right. After that, bring everyone to the middle of the corridor. We’ll take the lifts back down.”

  I stared at the pair of double lines with ‘X’s on both sides, labelled ‘Elevator A’ and ‘Elevator B’, and I found it much harder to breathe. “So... that’s who you’re intending to save? The patients at Wonderdrug?”

  “The curiosities trapped by CRO—yes. We need the numbers to survive. I realised that only after I lost you. Two of us alone, with only one place to live, that just doesn’t give us enough options.”

  I swallowed the clump of nerves in my throat and took in a long, deep, difficult breath. “It says illness and delusions, Paul. Right there. It says you have schizophrenia. It says I’m B. Thompson.”

  “They write in code, in case the files get out. ‘Delusions’ is code for ‘advantage’. ‘Illness’ is what they use to justify keeping you locked up. And they must have changed your name after they spoke with that movie star lover of yours. To keep the story consistent.”

  I nodded for a good minute as a whole new perspective of our situation began to sink in.

  “No,” Paul said abruptly, with a frown. “Look, I’m sorry there’s not more evidence but everything I’m telling you is the truth. We’re not mentally ill! Look!”

  She navigated the laptop back to its desktop and opened a file labelled ‘wd-former-patients.cls’—a file format I did not recognise.

  The new document also contained a table. It was almost similar to the one in the document before, except in the new table, the first column was labelled ‘Number’ instead of ‘Room Number’. The length of the table was also longer, going all the way to number ‘67’, and the status of every person listed on the new sheet was ‘Discharged’.

  “‘Discharged’ is code for deceased while captive,” Paul said. “See how many there are? They’ve been killing people like us for years. My mom’s number 55. There. Rose Rafferty.”

  Number 55: ‘R. Rafferty’. Illness: ‘Schizophrenia with Occasional Catatonia, Mental Retardation, PTSD’. Delusion(s): ‘Unspecified’. Status: ‘Discharged’.

  Status: Discharged.

  Discharged.

  Dis-charged.

  My heart began to run again, this time at the speed of a moving train. I didn’t know what to say. I knew exactly what I would think of the D-word but I didn’t dare actually think it lest my thoughts made my face change again. I decided it was best to focus on what Paul just said... There’s my mom, Rose Rafferty. There’s my mom, Rose Rafferty. There’s my mom, Rose Rafferty. Rose Rafferty, Rose Rafferty, Rose Rafferty, Rose Rafferty... That was the only way I could keep my own thoughts away from my mind.

  “Lane, look at me. Just look at me! Look at me!” Paul put her hands on my cheeks and wrenched my head up towards her eyes when I didn’t comply.

  I did look at her eventually because I got the feeling she might just kill me if I didn’t.

  Her eyes were anxious in a way I had never seen them anxious before. “Lane, my mother is dead. That is the truth. And all those other women on the list are too. Wonderdrug lies because they believe sacrificing us for the betterment of mankind, for the betterment of their company’s coffers, is what’s right. But it’s not. We deserve proper lives and happiness. You deserve a proper life and you deserve to know the truth.”

  I nodded again. The goldfish splashed around its bowl; the washing machine kept on grinding; the dead body wouldn’t stop looking at me; the red on the carpet looked darker. I thought of nothing but the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth...

  Paul watched me for the longest time but eventually sighed, lowered her head like a plant that had wilted and let go of my cheeks. “Get two spoons and a chopper,” she said and got up to go to Dr Clark’s briefcase again.

  “Why?”

  She pulled a plastic box out of the briefcase and held it up for me to see.

  It was Dr Clark’s multi-compartment pill box—the one with a different compartment for every different colour of pill; the one which contained the cotton candy pink pills I now wanted desperately to eat.

  “We need to grind the pink ones to remove their time-release properties,” she said. Matter-of-factly. “And we need Mr Anderson’s right wrist.”

  Okay. I nodded like a good employee would, took the plastic box from Paul and headed towards the kitchen with it.

  When my back was completely turned and I was far enough away from her, I shoved four pink pills into my mouth and swallowed.

  Chapter 23

  Date Unknown

  The four pink pills didn’t change a thing. I woke up anxious in a self-driving taxi in the dark of night, with Paul next to my side, and remembered everything.

  Every microsecond before the gun fired, I remembered. Every twitch of fear in Dr Clark’s huge blue eyes, I remembered. Every dead stare. Every difficult breath of mine. The red on the white carpet. The way Dr Clark’s wrist split from his body when the chopper I found came down on it, I remembered.

  But I didn’t know what to do next. I saw us already in
the heart of the Financial District, right in front of the boxy, good-quality twenty storey building which had the words ‘Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre’ plastered above glass doors on its front.

  The words were made of a shiny metal, backlit with a bright white light. They seemed to shine like gaps of daylight amidst the darkness of the night around them.

  Shit. What did I last remember?

  I remembered sinking down into Dr Clark’s white sofa—which looked a little like a fluffy white cloud to me at that point—with spoons still in my hands. I remembered feeling heavy and dazed and seeing my eyelids droop like curtains over my eyes.

  What day was it? The same day? Or a different day?

  Paul didn’t say. She fed cash into the self-driving taxi’s payment machine and dragged me out without caring whether or not I actually wanted to be out.

  Instead of going right in and asking for help like any sane, logical person would, she had us crouch behind the row of bushes in front of the entrance while she observed the situation inside and checked the time on her watch.

  The LED signboard on the wall next to the glass doors in front of us had big red letters that said the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre was ‘CLOSED’. The reception counter beyond the glass doors—a classy white marble centrepiece that matched the white marble floor and white marble walls around it—was empty. There was a lone security guard strolling the lobby aimlessly but he went behind a white marble wall and didn’t emerge again after that.

  “Now,” Paul said and dragged me by the arm again.

  I stood my ground and shook her hand off this time. “I don’t want to do this,” I said. Firmly. I really didn’t. My fingers were still trembling from the shock of Dr Clark’s murder and my thighs remained wobbly. I felt as if I had only just made it out of the most horrifying haunted funhouse by the hair and would vomit if I had to do anything thrill-related again anytime soon.

  “I need your help,” Paul replied. Equally firmly.

  “No you don’t. You said I wasn’t ready for this and you know what, you were right before. I can’t handle this. I’m sorry. You’re better off on your own.” And I’ll be better off back in the care of the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre, never having to see you again.

  Paul frowned at me and curled her hands around my arm like an eagle might do with its talons. “You need to see this,” she said in a low, dangerous voice. “You need to know that everything I’ve been telling you about Wonderdrug is real.”

  “No, I don’t.” What I truly needed was medicine, a doctor and... protection from Paul, or Paula, I thought. Wonderdrug is real, Wonderdrug is real, Wonderdrug is real, Wonderdrug is real...

  She rolled her eyes, sighed then pushed something hard and cold into my lower back. Dr Clark’s gun, I realised soon after. The very gun she killed him with. “Come with me, help me open half the doors on the sixteenth floor, or I will shoot you.” She sounded perfectly serious; there was no hesitation or self-doubt in her voice at all.

  In that moment, it became painfully clear to me how much I didn’t want to die. I thought about all the things I hadn’t yet tried—the better job, the further education, the better housing, the places I hadn’t yet seen, the things I hadn’t yet done—and realised Dr Clark had been so wrong when he said I had suicidal tendencies. The news article and my former colleagues had all been wrong. I didn’t want to die. Not at all. I wanted to live!

  I was not suicidal at all. Not in the least!

  “People don’t always say or know the truth about things, Lane. The ones who lie lie because they want you to behave in ways that will benefit them. The ones who believe the ones who lie don’t know any better. You need to make your own conclusions, Lane. You need to see Wonderdrug for what it really is, with your very own eyes. Come with me and let me show you what’s really going on.”

  She shoved the gun deeper into my lower back after that so I agreed immediately.

  The security office of the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre was located on the third floor. To get there after hours, you needed an employee pass to open the glass doors at the main entrance, a registered retina to open the ten foot chrome barricades behind the reception counter at the lobby and an approved wrist chip to get the elevator moving. None of those were a problem for Paul who had come well-prepared with Dr Clark’s arsenal of belongings, bodily or otherwise.

  All I could do was pray we would be caught by the ten or so black-globed cameras on the ceiling of the lobby and stopped by whoever happened to be watching.

  “Not going to happen, Lane. The cameras switch off for five minutes during the security reboot that happens at 3am every second Sunday of the month. Guess what day and time it is?”

  Wait a minute... Hadn’t Paul said a Wonderdrug security reboot was a rare occurrence?

  Paul stopped in front of the tall chrome barricades with Dr Clark’s eyeball in a Ziploc bag and turned to me. “Fine, I lied. Sorry,” she said, without much expression.

  She shoved the gun into the back of her pants so that she could dig into the Ziploc bag and take the eyeball—washed, so it was now white with grey streaks, with a blue circle in the middle—between two fingers. She held it up to the retinal-scanning device in front of us and the tall chrome barricades opened immediately.

  Paul lied. Paul lies, I realised as I made my way past the barricades. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…

  The black door labelled ‘Security Office’ opened all by itself the moment Paul and I stepped close to it. I suspected a chip in the dismembered hand Paul had in her backpack might have activated a sensor of sorts but she, as usual, smiled so proudly when the door opened, it looked almost as if she was trying to tell me the opening of the door had been her doing.

  The room we stepped into was almost pitch-black, lit only by the blue specks of light blinking on the towers of humming data processors near the door and the white light coming from the thirty screens above a state-of-the-art control panel at the other end of the room. It was cosy and quiet the way a night out under the stars with cicadas buzzing incessantly in the background might be considered cosy and quiet, and it was unbearably cold. There were two security guards seated at the control panel, with their backs to us, staring at the thirty screens in front of them.

  “Reboot done,” the security guard on the left—a middle-aged African-American woman with long copper-coloured hair bound in a tight plait—said as all thirty screens abruptly turned black. She pushed a few buttons on the control panel then added, “All systems back to normal.”

  Black and white footage showing various areas of the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre began appearing on all screens. Twenty-four of those screens never changed: they showed a fish-eye, overhead view of the twenty floors above ground and the four underground. The remaining six screens changed every minute or so and showed various stairwells, elevator interiors, storage rooms and toilets.

  In one of those six screens, I spotted the guard we had seen at the lobby washing his hands in a toilet. When the screen changed, I saw a roomful of nurses seated at desks, in front of laptops. On the screen next to it, there were a couple of guards, with rifles in hand, strolling about corridors that looked similar to the one we had run along the night we escaped.

  “Awesome,” the guard seated on the right of the control panel—middle-aged, Hispanic and male, in the early stages of losing his hair—said without much enthusiasm. He leaned back in his chair and stretched.

  Neither of them noticed us sneaking closer to the middle of the room. We used the towers of data processors for cover and blended with the dark because of our black and grey outfits. I considered screaming or calling out for help but the gun Paul kept against my waist made me decide otherwise.

  When we got behind the row of data processors closest to the control panel, a small Ziploc packet of pink powder—four pink pills ground into dust by me—levitated from Paul’s upturned palm and started flying towards the seated guards’ backs.

  Th
e packet went towards the mug on the table next to the female guard—a white mug with the picture of a comic book’s male superhero on it—and tipped all of its contents in, right before she picked up the mug and put it to her lips.

  Un-noticed and now empty, the packet flew back to us and hovered right in front of my face.

  “Keep it in your pocket,” I heard Paul say in my head. Her lips did not move.

  I obeyed because her gun remained against my waist.

  Another packet of pink powder came out of Paul’s pocket and flew towards the guards in the same way the previous one had done. This one went towards the mug on the table next to the male guard instead—a black mug with the words ‘Well Done, Dad! I’m Awesome!’ down its front. Before it could get its contents in though, the male guard reached for the mug and removed it from the table.

  Yes! I thought when I heard a loud sucking sound emanating from the male guard’s lips. The mug was empty.

  He set the mug back down but the packet of pink powder hovering in mid-air behind him didn’t continue towards it. Instead, it sank down under the control panel and hid in the shadows as if it were a helpless creature that feared being seen.

  “Want another?” the male guard asked the female guard. “I need more.”

  The female guard shook her head and yawned, her mouth wide like a zoo animal’s would be after a full meal. “No, but could you get me a Hyperpro? I feel like I just did Zoleplax or something.”