by Anna Ferrara
Since I couldn’t get the door Dr Clark always entered from open, (and believe me, I tried, many times) there was nothing else I could do but experiment with what I could do. I did the whole secretly-spitting-up-pills-down-the-toilet thing for three entire months to see if it would bring Paul back again and guess what?
It didn’t. None of the horrid things Dr Clark said not taking my pills would make happen actually happened. I didn’t find myself lost in another vivid psychotic episode, I didn’t start self-mutilating again, and, best of all, the bandaged parts of my body never once hurt. Ironically, not taking any pills made me feel much better physically. I stopped getting sick after breakfast (though I kept on pretending to vomit after every meal) and I started feeling less foggy in the head. I felt more awake than ever before and even began noticing interesting patterns in my Wonderdrug routine.
For example, I noticed Dr Clark would always mention I was mentally ill at least three times during therapy. He would give me the exact same look of disbelief—face blank, eyebrows up for five seconds—if I told him my vivid psychotic episode felt real and would look away right before reminding me I was Blaine every single time. He would scribble significantly more on his tablet when I talked about the functional details of my vivid psychotic episode—how we did what we did, how we got to where we got to—and significantly less when I talked about my feelings, hopes and desires. He would want the most unnecessary of details—“Was there any weird energy in the air as the keycard flew? Did the temperature change? Were there any sounds?”—but would always be reminding me that none of those things ‘ever happened’ afterwards. He was always asking how I felt, with utmost concern on his face, yet never once did a thing to actually help me feel better. He was always telling me I was getting better but could never confirm when I was going to be cured. He was always warning me about the dangers of not taking medication but never actually noticed I wasn’t even on them.
After three whole months without pills in my system, I eventually began seeing everything Paul had been saying about Wonderdrug myself.
Wonderdrug clearly did not care about my health.
Wonderdrug clearly did not function the way a real hospital would.
Dr Clark likely wasn’t even a real doctor.
Chapter 31
Date Unknown
“I had a dream last night,” I told Dr Clark, when I could stand being at the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre no longer. “Gemma was in it.”
Dr Clark’s large black eyes twinkled with interest—the way they always twinkled whenever I spoke of ‘crazy things’ that weren’t my feelings. “Let’s talk about it,” he said.
I took a deep breath and nodded, covered my face with both palms and tried my best to blush like genuinely innocent girls probably would do in similar situations. “I dreamt she was in my ward, on my bed, asking how I was. She gave me a phone number, told me to call her if I wasn’t dead. She said life on the outside hadn’t been too good to her so if life was good in here, she would consider coming back here too.”
Dr Clark’s eyes remained twinkly as he observed me. I watched him tap the stylus pen against his tablet many, many times. “Do you think that would really happen?” he said eventually. “Would Gemma, an imaginary person, really come here if you called her?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still remember the phone number?”
“By heart.”
Dr Clark nodded and looked away in thought for a period. When he looked up at me again, his eyes were twinkling more than ever. “Alright. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend acting on information obtained from dreams but since today is Moody Monday, what do you say we get up to a little mischief together, hm? Follow your dream? See what surprises happen?”
My cheeks rose by themselves and I found myself not even having to feign being delighted. “I say yeah. Just to see what surprises happen.”
He smiled, reached into his lab coat, took out a phone—the latest Android model, the one which could do holographic video calls—and handed it to me. “Go ahead. Who knows? You might learn a thing or two about yourself in the process?”
Or I might learn a thing or two about you? I smiled like a sweet young thing would, took the phone, admired and breathed in its plastic-scented newness then keyed in the number a little Asian child once told me about.
The number she said I was to call if I ever found myself stuck at Wonderdrug. I had thought long and hard for a way out and every time, that phone number turned out to be the only option I had. There was no way I was getting out of my ward on my own. If the number didn’t work, if nobody picked up, I would find out I was permanently screwed but that was a risk I was now willing to take. I was sick of being at Wonderdrug. I was sick of being pushed around any which way life dictated.
My fingers trembled. My palm stained the phone’s gratifyingly smooth backing with sweat. I put the phone to my ear. It rang. Once, twice, three times, then...
“Hello?” a woman said. Not Gemma. The voice on the line was much deeper and huskier; the voice of an older woman, likely a heavy smoker.
“Gemma? Is that you?” Paul once said all phone calls could be tracked by CRO and everything Paul ever said was word again so I kept the act up. “It’s me, Lane. I mean... Blaine but, of course, yes, you know me as Lane. Anyway, I... I saw you in my dream last night. You wanted to know how I was doing so I thought I’d call and tell you I’m doing great. The Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre in New York is really great. My doctor’s great, the food is really great, the amenities are also great. I really think you should come join me. Soon.”
“Ha ha,” the woman on the other line said. She didn’t sound amused though. “I ain’t crazy like you are, psycho! And I ain’t who you think I am so don’t call again!” The line went dead.
My hope died along with it. The voice on the other line hadn’t been one I recognised and whoever that was had been clearly unfriendly. I took a deep breath and handed the phone back to Dr Clark who wouldn’t stop staring at me like I were some freak show.
“What did she say?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to keep disappointment from showing on my face by making sure my face stayed blank. “Wrong number,” I said and realised the disappointment came out in my voice anyhow.
Dr Clark narrowed his eyes and gave me a few sympathetic nods but there was just something about his face that suggested he didn’t quite believe me. One big breath and a few dramatic blinks later though, his face was as kind and friendly as it always was again, as if he had never been suspicious of me at all. “Well, that’s why I call them Moody Monday and Touchy Tuesday. And that’s why you need to keep taking your medication, Miss Thompson.”
I agreed, and not just verbally.
That night, I swallowed all the pink and blue pills that came with dinner.
There was no point in knowing everything that was wrong if there was nothing I could do to change it, I decided. Might as well get with the programme and get the programme over and done with, I thought. If CRO didn’t want me to be aware of what was really going on, perhaps it was best if I wasn’t.
Chapter 32
The Day I Became A Whole New Person
“You have to swallow,” I heard someone say a couple of nights later. “Move your throat. Follow my fingertips.” Something soft landed on my neck and pushed my skin up then down.
In that moment, I couldn’t remember what ‘swallow’ meant. I knew I had known the word before and guessed it was likely an action of some sort but, for the life of me, couldn’t recall how to physically make it happen. I felt my brain let go of my body and found myself drifting away into sweet nothingness; I found myself enjoying the lack of light, sound, sensations and emotions.
Something bit me in the arm. Or rather, that’s what it felt like. My body jerked away from that sweet nothingness and moved back towards my brain where it remained somehow next to it yet not quite connected. I tried to open my eyes but
they were as heavy as a wall of bricks and wouldn’t budge.
“You’ll be fine in a minute,” the same person said. “The counteragent’s working. Just give it some time.”
What in the world was a counteragent? I tried to ask but my lips simply wouldn’t move, so I gave up. I stopped caring and let myself float back towards sweet nothingness where I much preferred to be and was absolutely content.
Something grabbed my arm and shook it vigorously a second later. “Okay, Lane, enough sleeping. You have to wake up now!”
Who in the world...? I wrenched my eyelids open and was surprised to find it was now easy to do so. But that became the least of my concerns the moment I caught sight of what was in front of me.
Someone, or some thing, was in my ward, on my bed, peering down at me in the dark. Her—it was most definitely a her—face was attractive but not entirely human. Her eyes and hair, worn in a loose ponytail, were normal and human in appearance—both brown—but her skin wasn’t. Her skin was grey like light-coloured cement and just as patchy. I thought she looked very much like a statue with fake hair and eyes plastered on. Her features—strong nose and sharp eyes—were vaguely exotic. She wore a black jacket with a hood at the back and had a small black gym bag slung across her torso.
I gasped, sat up and backed away from her at once. I recognised her! She was the odd-coloured woman I ran into at the alleyway behind The Canned Food Factory Hotel! The one who killed a CRO agent right in front of me!
“Great, you’re moving,” she said. She grinned like we were old friends and threw a bundle of black clothes into my hands. “Get changed now. We’re leaving. I already got your tracker out so don’t worry about that.”
I unravelled the bundle of clothes but got sidetracked when I realised I had hands in place of bandaged stumps. Perfectly functional, smooth and tanned hands. No fingers dislocated whatsoever. I could wriggle all my fingers without any pain.
Used bandages lay like pencil shavings all over the sheets. I realised the bandages over my left forearm and right calf had been removed too. Both parts looked normal again, as if they had never even been injured before.
“Yes,” the odd-coloured woman said. “I got them out while you were waking up to save time. Now come on, move. The clothes are the closest I could find in your style so I hope you like them.”
I held up the black t-shirt I had in my hands and saw the print of a raised middle finger down its front. I glanced at the skinny black jeans under the t-shirt and realised the odd-coloured woman did actually understand me pretty well. “Wait,” I said. “So you’re the blue woman I called? The woman from my past?”
The odd-coloured woman put an odd-coloured hand on her throat and bent her chin down so low, a double chin appeared over her slender neck. “Ha ha. Don’t call again!” she said in a suddenly low, husky voice that sounded like it belonged to an old woman. She lifted her chin and removed the theatrical voice and instantly looked young—about as old as I was—again. “Yes, I’m pretty good at playing pretend, though I have to say, you’re pretty good at it yourself. Good job in getting the call made, I never would have known you were back here otherwise. They made it look like you were out on the streets in Mexico so that’s where I had been searching for months. Anyway, do change now please, we’re on a tight schedule.”
I didn’t change. I couldn’t move. Not when I knew who she was. “Did you kill my parents and uncle?” I asked with a frown.
“Yes, but they’re not really your parents so he’s not really your uncle. Don’t give me that look, that man was planning on raping you so he had to go. Your ‘parents’ I felt a little bad about because all they actually did was talk too much about your strange body but…” She shrugged. “I guess we all have to do what we all have to do sometimes. Even the hard stuff.”
I gaped at her, speechless.
The odd-coloured woman observed my face and sighed. She put her hands—strange, stone-like hands—on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. “Lane, I’ve been watching over you since you were a baby so trust me. Come with me and you’ll be safe from now on, I assure you.”
Her words didn’t make sense to me. She hardly looked old enough to have been mature when I was a baby, for one, but more importantly, I didn’t understand why anybody would care to watch over me at all. “I’m just a nobody,” I said. “I’ve done nothing extraordinary, nothing remarkable.”
“I know, I made sure of that.” She dragged me into a standing position and pulled the blue gown I was wearing up above my head in one swift move, to my horror. “Had you been outstanding, had you been Gemma Diaz, you would have spent your entire life in the clutches of the Office.”
I watched, mortified, as she grabbed the rude t-shirt and pulled it over my head and naked torso. “Wait, are you saying I’m really Gemma Diaz?” I asked as she took my arms and pulled them out through the sleeves of the t-shirt. I flinched the moment she touched me for her hands were icy cold. As cold as hands would be if you submerged them in a bucket of ice for longer than a minute.
“Yes.” She put the pair of jeans at my feet and ordered me to step in so I did, quickly, grateful I wouldn’t have to be naked in front of her a minute longer. “The Office had their eyes on you way before you were born so we had to swap you. That was the only way we were going to get you away from them. We didn’t think you’d end up getting pushed off a fifty storey building one day, of course.” She shrugged again, grabbed me by the hand—and made me flinch again—and dragged me towards the door Dr Clark always entered from.
“Do you know who pushed me?”
“Yes, but let’s talk about that later.” The odd-coloured woman fished out a keycard made of rubber from her pocket, tapped it on the door the way Dr Clark always tapped his wrist before leaving my ward and opened the door without a hitch.
We went through that same small black-painted space I now recognised and went out through the door Paul brought me out of the first time we escaped Wonderdrug. That door had been locked when we approached it—red decorative line on the metal square above the handle instead of a green one—but the rubber keycard the odd-coloured woman had in her hand turned out to be as functional as any dismembered wrist. When we stepped out, I found myself back in that long corridor I once saw a hoard of patients in blue gowns standing around in.
The long corridor was empty this time. No swarm of patients in blue, no guards with rifles. Just me and the odd-coloured woman who peered cautiously around as if the corridor wasn’t quite safe.
“This way,” she said and led us towards the exit Paul and I had once dashed towards like record-breaking Olympians. “We’ll take the stairs to the loading bay.”
“Wait.” I stopped in my tracks. “We need to get Paul out. And Gemma. Lend me your card.”
The odd-coloured woman turned back to me and frowned. “Gemma’s not here,” she whispered. “And I didn’t cater for Paul’s escape. We’ll have to leave her.” She took me by the wrist with one icy hand and tried to drag me forward.
I held my ground and refused to budge. “We can’t,” I said in a volume that matched her whisper. “She came back here for me. I have to get her out too, no matter what.”
“I didn’t hack the cameras in her room, Lane. We’ll be seen if we go in and all hell will break loose. This is not up for discussion.”
I didn’t bother arguing. Instead, I snatched up the rubber keycard she had sticking out of the front pocket of her black jeans and ran towards the door directly opposite the one we had stepped out from—Paul’s ward, if her blueprint sketches had been anything to go by. I tapped the rubber keycard against the security panel on the door and pushed in the moment the line of red light above the handle turned green.
“Christ! Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”
I didn’t care. I ran through the small black-painted room I found within, tapped the security panel on the inner most door with the same rubber keycard and went right in.
/> I found myself in a ward that looked exactly like mine would through a mirror. Whilst my bed had been on the left of the entrance, this ward’s bed was on the right. There was a woman in a blue gown asleep in the queen-sized bed in the middle. She had long, brown, curly hair which was also red at the roots. I ran towards her in relief and shook her right away.
“Paul, wake up!” I said but winced the moment I got to see her face up close.
There were two gigantic raw patches on both sides of her head. They went all the way up to the top of her forehead and down past her cheekbones as well as past the ends of her eyes and deep into her hair. They looked thick and protruded—a mix of dark brown scabs and bright red fresh wounds—but simultaneously seemed also immensely sunken, going way past the boundaries of her skull.
“Paul! Get up!” I grabbed her shoulders, pulled her into a sitting position and shook her more violently, suddenly full of rage. “We’re getting the hell out of here now. For good!”
Paul didn’t move. She didn’t wake up. She didn’t seem to hear me. She simply kept breathing in a calm, rhythmic way that suggested deep sleep and was practically as good as... dead.
Fuck. I wondered why briefly but stopped because I knew it was not a good time to ponder. I swung her arms around my shoulders, shoved my hip next to hers and dragged her motionless body off the bed, towards the door. She felt like she weighed a ton and the weight of her strained my back but I pushed on because I knew there was no way in hell I was leaving her there a minute longer.
I heard the alarm the moment I made it through the first door—the same loud and deafening alarm I heard the day Paul tried to break all curiosities out—and it only got louder when I opened the door that led to the main corridor.