The Patient

by Jasper DeWitt

  And if I succeeded? Well, I would’ve let a somewhat paranoid but essentially stable patient out into society, and I could continue working at the hospital with a clean conscience, knowing the conspiracy was over.

  Before I did anything, I consulted Jocelyn. If something went wrong, it would affect my whole life, which meant it would have an impact on hers. She quizzed me about how certain I was that Joe wasn’t a danger. Then she asked if I trusted myself. I didn’t quite know how to answer; the question had thrown me. So she said, “If you don’t trust yourself, how can you expect anyone, whether it’s your patients, colleagues, or even me, to trust you?”

  So, there it was. Just a month after getting access to the patient who I was sure would make my career once I figured out his previously unknown condition, I was about to potentially wreck my career by letting him loose.

  Not that breaking a patient out of any mental hospital, let alone this one, would be easy. Security cameras were fairly ubiquitous on the premises, and the staff kept a close eye on who had the key to any locked rooms or wards. If I wanted to do this and at least try to protect myself, it’d have to look like an accident.

  My plan would have a chance only if the hospital were operating with a skeleton crew, so I opted to work late in the weeks before making my attempt. This would give me a sense of who was around during the hospital’s off-hours, and, more importantly, no one would think anything of seeing me in the hospital at those times. And because I’d agreed to take on so much extra work after Nessie died, I actually needed time in the hospital.

  As to the plan itself, it involved leaving my lab coat (and keys) in Joe’s room, supposedly by accident, then setting off an equally accidental fire alarm, which would cause most of the staff to evacuate the hospital, clearing the way for Joe’s escape. I also made sure Joe knew the way out by putting a floor plan of the hospital, with all the less used fire exits marked, inside a pack of gum which I then gave to him.

  In retrospect, it was a terribly easy plan to botch, and Joe himself called me out on that when I told him about it.

  “Doc, you’re crazier than I am,” he said with his characteristic crooked smile. “If that plan works, I’m Mickey Mouse.”

  “It will work,” I told him. “The staff are lazy, you don’t have a history of trying to break out, and no one will expect anyone to help you escape. Not after what happened with Nessie.”

  He shook his head fatalistically, but there was a gleam in his eye that told me I might have given him the first ounce of hope he’d had since being committed.

  “Well, I won’t start planning any trips, just in case,” he said wryly. “But if they catch me and throw me back in here, I won’t tell them it was your idea. Oh, and doc? God love ya for trying. If this works, I won’t forget that I owe you a life’s worth of freedom.”

  And that was it. All that was left was to carry out the plan. There I was, three weeks later, mildly nauseated from anxiety, my palms sweating, as I walked down the hallway towards Joe’s room. The faint muttering and gibbering from the patients I knew to be insane were almost a demented mirror of my own scattered thoughts.

  If I was caught, or he was, would they only fire me?

  Or would they want to make an example of me to anyone else who knew the secret, or who pried too deeply into Joe’s history?

  Perhaps Nessie’s death hadn’t been clear enough.

  Perhaps they really needed to send a message to anyone else who might have second thoughts.

  I’d met Dr. G——, after all, and she hadn’t seemed the type who might leave a loose end lying around.

  I didn’t really have to do this, did I?

  I could just turn around and walk out now.

  I should just turn around and walk out now. I had a fiancée. A life ahead of me. This wasn’t any of my business. I didn’t have to do this, did I?

  But no, I knew I had to. It was the right thing to do, and I was not going to make myself an accessory to what amounted to kidnapping and murder just because I was too afraid for my own skin. Besides, there was barely anyone on staff, and by the time my fire alarm had gone off, there’d be almost no one around to stop Joe from leaving. My plan was close to foolproof. It would be fine.

  As I reached the door to Joe’s room, the sound of heavy footsteps caught my ear, and I turned to see Hank, the orderly, walking slowly down the hallway with an armful of bedsheets.

  Shit. What if he knew what I was doing? No, that was impossible. There was no way anyone would know. I just needed to stay in Joe’s room until Hank moved on past this hallway. I could probably hear his footsteps even through Joe’s door. It would be fine. It would all be fine.

  I focused on keeping my breathing calm. It wouldn’t help if I looked anxious. Then I turned the key to Joe’s room, stepped inside, shut the door gingerly behind me, and turned to face him. He was standing with his back to me, looking out the window, and I barely paid much attention to him as I frantically pulled off my lab coat and laid it on his bed, then sat down and listened to Hank’s footfalls.

  “Doc?”

  I turned to see Joe looking at me. There was a hungry, longing look in his eye, as of a starving man who knows he’s about to have a feast and can’t wait.

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “Yeah, Joe?”

  “Thanks,” Joe said, his voice a husky whisper. “This is exactly what I need.”

  His phrasing was a bit odd, but I didn’t think much of it. I smiled at him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  And with that, I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. I was about to turn and shut it again, when suddenly, a pair of hands as big as baseball mitts clamped themselves around my shoulders.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something, Parker?” boomed Hank’s basso voice from just beside the door. I froze, my mind racing. The orderly chuckled in my ear. “For such a smart kid, you sure do stupid shit.”

  Then from behind me came the gravelly voice of Dr. P——. “Evening, wonder boy.”

  Oh, fuck me.

  “Well, I’ll be. Speechless for once.” Dr. P—— strolled around Hank, exultant, his face split into a ghoulish grin. He leaned in close enough that I could smell whiskey on his breath.

  “Now, I’m gonna send someone to get your lab coat out of that room, but you and me? We’re going to go talk to Dr. G——, and you’re gonna tell her all about what you were planning to do with your newest patient in there tonight.”

  At those words, I began to struggle against Hank’s grip, though it was like pulling at iron bars. “Let me go!” I kept my voice low. “I don’t know what they’ve told you, but you don’t understand, Hank. They’re keeping a sane man in there! And he brings in so much money to this hospital that no one cares if he’s sane! She might’ve killed Nessie to keep it secret, Hank. Let me go and talk to him, and you’ll see. I swear, you’ll see.”

  Dr. P—— snickered. Hank didn’t join in, but his grip didn’t slacken. “Yeah, she said you’d say something like that. Sorry, kid. No can do.”

  The sheer crushing weight of my failure hit me all at once, and I was already jittery from the anxiety of doing something I knew was illicit. I was trying to suppress a groan of frustration when I heard something that spooked me.

  Inside Joe’s room, someone was laughing. But it wasn’t Joe; it couldn’t have been. It didn’t sound human at all. Instead, what emerged from that room was a sepulchral, moist, hacking chuckle that sounded like it came from a rotting throat. It was a voice I’d heard before, the same laugh that had risen from the fetid pool of blood and piss in my dream as it dragged my mother into its depths.

  A shiver knocked through me, but neither Hank nor Dr. P—— reacted. It wasn’t clear if they’d even heard it, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask. All I could do was stare at Joe’s door as Hank started to pull me away, that hoarse sound of nightmare echoing in the hallway and in my brain.

  April 10, 2008

  This part of the story is
where things start to get really hard, and, honestly, it’d be a lot easier to just stop here. But in some sense, writing this is like sucking poison out of my system, albeit years after the fact. But I won’t bore you with my agonizing.

  Dr. P—— gloated the entire way to the top floor and the medical director’s office. “I had your number from the minute they hired you. When I heard they were bringing in some Ivy League wiseass to work on my staff, I knew you’d cause trouble. I told her everything was going fine, she shouldn’t muck it up with some smarter-than-thou baby doc. But no, she was taking you on as a favor to an old friend. And to think, you were actually doing pretty well with your other patients, all things considered. Man, you high-and-mighty brats always think the sun shines out of each other’s asses, so she even hoped you might actually get something out of Joe. But now she’s gonna be so disappointed. I warned you, motherfucker. Don’t forget that. You’d still be the golden boy if you’d listened to me. But you had to meddle with something you don’t goddamn understand. You arrogant lightweight. You . . .”

  Seriously, the jabber went on for the entire ten minutes it took to get to Dr. G——’s office.

  I had no idea what was going to happen to me, and I was stumped as to what had gone wrong. I suppose I also felt a sort of relief at being caught, considering that lying and subterfuge were not my professional goals, but I was in agony that Joe remained trapped. At the same time . . . what the hell had I heard from Joe’s room? I kept replaying the things Joe had said, then going back over Dr. G——’s warnings about his madness being contagious, wondering what was true. Or had everyone just been lying to me the whole time?

  I’d felt that unholy laugh in my bones. Had my fears of being caught made me snap? Or, if I was sane, how had Joe mirrored a laugh pulled from my worst childhood nightmare?

  My frantic, confused thoughts were interrupted as Hank yanked the door to Dr. G——’s office open and shoved me inside without a word. My nose nearly made contact with the carpet as I fell forward, and it took me a moment to steady myself and focus on the people in the room.

  Yes, people. Dr. G—— was there, of course, standing in front of her desk and glaring down at me with an expression that made me think of a hawk regarding a rotting carcass and deciding it wasn’t worth eating. But seated behind her, in the well-crafted leather armchair usually reserved for the medical director, sat a wizened, tired old man in a heavity patched sport coat, regarding me with hard eyes over a pair of well-worn silver spectacles. I had no idea who this stranger was, but if Dr. G—— was letting him use her chair, then he was obviously someone important. He looked far too old to be a plainclothes detective, as his wrinkled face and thinning silver hair marked him as a man who couldn’t have been less than seventy or eighty years old. But who else could he be?

  Dr. G—— turned to Hank and Dr. P——, who’d mercifully closed his trap, though he still looked jubilant, and said, “Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll take it from here.” Then she came over and gently closed the door behind them as they departed.

  The older man in the room with us cleared his throat and spoke with a patrician-sounding Mid-Atlantic accent that seemed oddly familiar, even though I couldn’t place it.

  “So this is the latest one, is it, Rose?”

  Dr. G—— didn’t reply but simply nodded. The gesture immediately struck me as out of place, and in a moment, I realized why. Her expression as she’d inclined her head had none of the curtness or haughtiness she’d displayed toward me. Instead, it was soft in its deference. Not caring about the cause, but simply glad to have scented weakness, I pushed myself to my feet and jabbed my finger at her accusingly.

  “Alright, I don’t know if you’re planning to fire me, or do something worse, but before you do, I want some fucking—”

  “Parker—” began Dr. G——, but I barreled right over her.

  “Answers! Did you think you could mislead me about a patient and that I’d take it lying down? Is all that crap in Joe’s file just there to keep him here?”

  “Parker—”

  “And even if it isn’t, why did you send your two thugs to spy on me every chance they got if you’ve got nothing to hide? Why’d you have one of them drag me here like I’m a prisoner? And how much have you been spying on me, if you knew what I was—”

  “PARKER.”

  Dr. G——’s white-hot voice seared the room, and almost by instinct, I shut up. The old man behind the desk chuckled.

  “He’s a feisty one. Reminds me of someone, Rose,” he said. Dr. G——’s pained expression gave me another momentary bit of courage.

  “And that’s another thing. Who the hell are—”

  “Parker, you are going to want to shut up and sit down right now before you say something we both regret.” Dr. G—— was barely taller than me in her heels, but her brutal aspect and ramrod-straight posture made her seem to tower over me. Not wanting to push any luck I might have, I cast my eyes around for the nearest chair and sat down immediately. She exhaled slowly and leaned back against her desk.

  “Now,” she said, “let’s get one thing straight before we go any further, Parker. I have no intention of hurting you. And although you pushed your luck on this point very far, I am not going to fire you either.”

  My mouth fell open. She laughed.

  “Quiet, I see. Good. Keep it that way, because as of now, you haven’t said anything that suggests you’ve done anything wrong, and therefore, whatever you might have been planning to do in Joe’s room tonight, we can both ignore it.”

  She gave me a pointed look before continuing. “Now, to answer both your implicit and explicit questions, I sent my orderlies to watch you because that has been standard procedure for every doctor Joe’s had since 1973. Normally, we send them to watch only every few weeks, but the reaction you had after your first session with him convinced me we should keep you under more constant surveillance.”

  I started to ask a question, but her hand shot up so quickly that I clapped my mouth shut.

  “First off, you spent almost twice as long in Joe’s room as anyone else has on their first session. Secondly, you didn’t look afraid so much as queasy and uncertain, neither of which portended that you’d gotten the same experience as his other doctors. In fact, the more we watched you, the less like his other doctors you became. For one thing, you kept going back in for similarly long sessions, and sometimes you even looked happy or relieved when you walked out. It didn’t make any sense to the orderlies or to me. So I did what any physician faced with a mystery does. I got a second opinion.”

  “That’s where I come in,” said the older man.

  “I’ll get to you.” Dr. G—— shot a reproachful look over her shoulder at the old guy. She turned back to me.

  “I suppose this is as good a time as any to introduce the two of you. Parker, meet Dr. Thomas A——, the first man to treat Joe and my earliest mentor as a psychiatrist.”

  Suddenly, I realized why I recognized his voice. It was an aged, slightly raspier version of the voice I’d heard on the tape of Joe’s first session. I almost had trouble believing it. If Dr. A—— was still alive, he must’ve been quite old. Still, he seemed lucid, even sharp. Right down to his eyes.

  After surveying me for a moment, the older man nodded. “A pleasure, Parker. Though I really can’t say I’m as impressed with you as I’d like to be. You might have the distinction of being the worst failure as a physician that Joe has ever had, given what we seem to have caught you trying to do.”

  The words were acid poured over an open wound. And it was a harshness delivered with such impersonal coolness. My face must have fallen, because the old man gave me an even sterner look.

  “Not used to being told you’re a fool, I see,” he said. “Well, you are, and thank God you’re a predictable one. Otherwise your idiocy might have done real damage. And now, you want to know how we knew. Rose told me that your greatest fear is not being able to save someone you care about. She also told me
that there was no one on staff after Nessie who mattered to you, and that everyone who did matter was likely well out of reach of anyone locked in this hospital. It followed from those facts that Joe would torture you by making you care about him, and then fail to save him.”

  He turned to Dr. G——. “I don’t blame you for not seeing it, Rose. You fell victim to a similar bit of trickery, if I recall correctly.”

  Dr. G—— flushed, which made Dr. A—— roll his eyes. “Yes, I know, you hate having your foolishness pointed out just as much as our boy here, but you were young. You grew out of it.”

  He turned back to me. “Which is something you’ll have to do, and fast, after that stunt you pulled tonight, Parker. Like Bruce P——, I’d have fired you. That man’s an oaf, but he knows how to protect this institution. Fortunately for you, Rose has a high opinion of your intellect and thinks you might be able to give us some insight into that walking mental plague we call a patient.”

  “That’s enough, Thomas,” said Dr. G——. “I don’t want to make the poor kid quit just yet, and you’re showing off. Plus there’s more to this lesson.

  “Parker, I keep referring to what you were planning to do in the vaguest possible terms for the sake of plausible deniability. We have only one person who claims to have heard you confess your intentions, and given who that is, we can dismiss it so long as you don’t say anything explicitly confessional. Now, I’m going to tell you who our witness is, but before I do, you have to promise that you’re not going to say something stupid that confirms the accusation. Deal?”

  I was utterly bewildered, but I nodded slowly. At that point, I was still coming down from the relief and gratitude I felt toward her for making such an effort to help me retain my position.

  “Good. Parker, we brought you here because one of Joe’s orderlies reported to us that he had been told you were planning to help Joe escape from the hospital. The person who told him was Joe himself.”

  Even if I’d wanted to confess, I couldn’t have. I was struck dumb by this news; my spine was ice; my mouth was dry; and, I felt like I might throw up if I tried to speak. Seeing my expression, Dr. G—— opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and a crystal rocks glass. She poured a generous amount into the glass and handed it to me.