by Joe Derkacht
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Ten of us, me in pajamas and bathrobe, everyone else in street clothes, were in the dayroom, facing each other in a circle of folding metal chairs. A lab-coated, white-haired, overweight older man, who seemed to be in charge, sat with a stack of manila folders on his lap, holding the top one open with his right hand while he wrote with his left. He adjusted his black horn-rimmed glasses before looking up and focusing his attention on me.
“You do know why you’re here, don’t you, Mr. Raventhorst?”
His milky blue eyes inspected me as if he couldn’t possibly make the psychic connection between the shell that is the body and the person living inside. I stared down at hands lying unfolded like an open book in my lap. They were strong and callused, obviously the hands of a working man but with neatly-trimmed nails.
Why am I here? I asked myself. Vaguely, I remembered waking up to the sight of a woman’s face hovering over me like a vulture ready to tear out my eyes.
Next to the man in charge sat a blonde in a nurse’s uniform, the one woman in our midst. Except for a bandage over her nose, she might be the vulture-woman, Nurse Jo. She seemed to enjoy the doctor’s interrogational style. As the seconds dragged by, her grin stretched wider, pulling her lips back from her eyeteeth as if in anticipation of an easy meal.
A barrage of mental images flashed across the inner screen of my mind. None of them made sense, none could be connected with any sort of continuity or logic. They just were, with their meaning tantalizingly out of reach, if they could be said to have meaning at all. Mostly, the images were of my mother and father, of shouting matches with the sound alternately blaring and fading, like with poor radio reception. Every once in awhile a momentary flash of scenery was thrown in, of an impossibly brilliant city or of miles and miles of forest stretching toward the far horizon. Everything else was a total blur. Somehow, I had grown into adulthood without the attendant memories. How could I possibly know what had brought me to this place or who these people were or what they wanted?
“I don’t know,” I finally managed to answer, each word arriving in multiple, tortured syllables.
Titters broke from around the circle. The nurse grinned wider. The doctor stared over his glasses and wrote again in the folder.
“A few more electroshock treatments and we’ll take care of that stutter of yours,” he announced.
“Delusional,” one of the inmates to my left opined. I wasn’t sure who was the target of his remark; all I knew was that I didn’t like the sound of the word electroshock.
The doctor slapped the folder shut. “In the meantime,” he said, “we’ll continue with your daily doses of Thorazine.”