by K B Jensen
Pieces of paper flew from the back seat, sheets of it, old receipts like doves fluttering through the air. Or did he imagine that?
The Last Stop
He woke up in the hospital with tubes in his arms. His shaky finger reached up to brush back his hair from his face and instead touched the gauze wrapped around his head. His throat was sore. He wondered how much time had passed since they had taken out the breathing tube.
He recalled screaming silently, a scream that breaks at your lips and stays there and dies with a breath. Help! Even now, in the hospital, he wanted to scream but he couldn’t do it, because the timing was off. Such things are better done in the moment. His fingers fumbled on the side of the bed, looking for the buttons. He raised the bed up. He lowered it down. Goddammit, he thought.
It hurt to crane his head. Something was pulling at the base of his skull, the bottom of his neck. He wanted to touch it, but he was afraid. He struggled to look at the rail on the bed and hit the right button. There it is. It says, Help. Thank God. The nurse will come. Help will come.
He pushed it once, twice, three times, and nothing happened.
“The button doesn’t work,” a voice said next to him. “It’s been disconnected. You’re in the psych ward. The help button doesn’t work in the psych ward.”
“What happened to her?” he asked in a creaky voice.
“Who?” the man’s voice said. He was on the other side of a closed, white curtain.
“The woman in the car with me,” Peter said.
“I don’t know,” the man said. He wheeled into view. He was dark haired and pale, sitting stiffly in his wheelchair, just outside the white curtain partition. “You want me to call the nurse?”
“Yes,” Peter said in a tired, raspy voice. He had almost nodded but had stopped just in time. His head still hurt.
“Delores!” the man shouted in a deep voice.
“Yes, Max?” a woman’s voice called from the hallway.
“Delores! Peter wants to talk with you again.”
She walked in with her clipboard, her pen on a string around her neck, in a pair of scrubs that hung loose off her body, as baggy as a prison jumpsuit—but in a respectable violet print rather than orange.
“What happened to Julie?” he asked, his voice breaking with the words.
“Peter,” she said, softly, sitting down in the chair next to his bed. “We’ve already had this conversation ten times this week. You wrote it down, remember?”
“What happened to the woman in the car?” he growled.
“Look, I don’t want you to keep fixating on her,” Delores said, patting his arm. She was not afraid of him, he noticed. Maybe he was too weak to be a threat to anyone anymore.
“Don’t baby me,” he said. “I hate it when people baby me. Where is she? Is she here? Down the hall? I’d like to see her.”
“No, Peter, she didn’t make it. You know that.”
“She told me stories, you know,” he said, wincing, trying not to cry. “She told me these wonderful stories to keep me awake that night.”
“Did she?” the nurse said, sighing.
“They were from a book,” he said. “I’d like to get a copy. The Book of Impossibility.”
“I know, Peter,” the nurse said. “I already brought you a copy. It’s from the library so don’t wreck it. It’s a magic book.”
“How will I remember to return it?” Peter said, looking up at her from his bed.
“I’ll remind you,” Delores said. “You’ll be here for a lot longer than the two-week borrowing period with the kind of problems you’ve got. You keep forgetting to eat for Pete’s sake. You keep repeating the same stories. We can’t have you leaving like this.”
She put his notebook and pen on the little desk attached to the bed and pushed it toward him. Then she sighed again and turned to walk out the door.
“Thanks, Delores,” he said. He was always polite to nurses. Maybe because they reminded him of his mother, the way she used to take care of him when he was sick.
He picked up the red notebook and opened it to the first page.
“Now, I remember,” he said out loud. It was a lie, but it was the truth.
It was evening, what seemed like days later, when the psychiatrist came to visit. He was a short man with dark lines of hair on his arms and little, round glasses, and some kind of accent. Peter stared at the man with suspicion. His memory was coming back. What would the interrogation be about this time? It was always the same, and it always got him riled up right before he was supposed to go to sleep.
“What were you doing that night, out walking around in the cold in the middle of a storm?”
“Nothing,” Peter would say. “I was doing nothing.”
“Tell me about your job. What happened at the bank?” the doctor would ask.
“Nothing,” Peter would say. “Nothing happened.”
“What happened with Elizabeth?” The doctor would ask.
“Nothing,” Peter would say. “Absolutely nothing.”
“What are your plans for the future?” The doctor would ask.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing,” Peter would say.
It was the wrong answer. The man scribbled something on his pad. “Have you ever had any thoughts of suicide?”
“Of course,” Peter said. “Hasn’t everyone?”
But tonight, the psychiatrist didn’t ask the same questions. The man looked tired of being stonewalled.
“How do you like it here?” the doctor asked.
“I like it just fine,” Peter said. “It’s nice not to have to worry about food.”
“Peter, you’ve been starving, haven’t you?” the psychiatrist said. “Forgetting to eat?”
Was it his imagination, or was the doctor tearing up? Peter was making a grown man cry. How could the man cry so easily? Peter wasn’t sure if he should feel guilty for making him cry, or if he should congratulate himself for beating the enemy. No, not the enemy, he reminded himself. As for him, Peter was done crying. He was beyond crying. He hurt so badly he couldn’t cry anymore.
“It’s been a long day,” the psychiatrist said, rubbing his eyes. Peter wondered if he had lost someone, too.
“It reminds me of college, this place, like a dormitory,” Peter said, strangely cheerful. “Even the furniture looks the same.”
“Peter, you’re a lot better now, physically. We’d like you to stay in the psych unit just until we get a few things figured out. How much of this is head trauma versus other issues. We’d like to help you some more. Will you sign this form, so we can help you for another week?”
He signed the form like an obedient child. The words didn’t make much sense to him anyway, except for the word voluntary. He liked that word. Like he was a volunteer committing some kind of community service.
“What’s wrong with me, doc?” Peter said. “I’m not wired right, am I?”
“I’m going to give you some medication that’s going to rewire you,” the doctor said.
“What’s it for?” Peter asked. “What’s my diagnosis?”
“It’s too early to give you a diagnosis,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we get you the right medication.”
“Labels don’t matter,” Peter murmured. He was sure he was repeating something he had heard before. “But I have a right to know what’s wrong with me.” His voice rose.
“It’s too early to say. In the meantime, we’d like to take your pen away, just as a precaution. We consider you a suicide risk.”
“Take away my pen, take away my life!” Peter shouted. “You can’t take it away. I need to write the stories down. I don’t know if she ever wrote them all down.”
“You need to rest, Peter,” the doctor said gently. “You aren’t sleeping much.”
“Well, you aren’t helping much, asking me questions that get me upset right before I’m supposed to go to sleep.”
The doctor took off his glasses and rubbed his
eyes. “I’m sorry to bother you, Peter. It’s just that we need a little more time to get things sorted out, so we can help you get better.”
After the psychiatrist left the room, Peter got up and walked slowly down the corridor. The hallway smelled of bleach and the floor shined under the fluorescent lighting. One of the nurses gave him a soft look. “You should be in bed, Peter,” she said. “You need your rest.”
“You’re right,” he said, leaning over the counter. She didn’t notice he had taken her pen. He went back to his room to continue the story. He wondered briefly if writing was its own form of mental illness. If there were a pill to get him to stop writing, would he take it?
The nurse came and knocked on the door, and he hid the pen under his mattress. His roommate didn’t say a word, an accomplice to the crime. Peter couldn’t remember the nurse’s name. It was a blur. She was the blond one.
“I’ve got your meds for you,” she said, handing him two large pills in a small plastic cup and another Styrofoam cup full of water.
“I don’t want them,” he said. “I don’t trust pills.”
“Peter, you need these to get better,” she pleaded. “It’s not like the movies. I can’t force you to take them. All I can do is ask. Please take them. They’ll help you.”
She handed him an information sheet. It listed a long string of foreign sounding names and words. Used for the treatment of epilepsy and mood disorders, he read. I don’t have epilepsy, he thought. Why didn’t the doctor just put a name to the damn thing? Mood disorder. It made him wonder about the ups and downs. It was more like a sleep disorder in his mind. He didn’t remember the last time he had slept for more than a few hours. Each time they took his blood pressure, it had skyrocketed. His body seemed to have too much adrenaline. He was sweating bullets and wasn’t thinking clearly anymore. He knew that. It seemed like he went in and out. He kept forgetting things and remembering them later. The stories flitted in and out of his mind. He remembered the story about his grandfather with dementia. Was this like that? Was this the same feeling? The hard things were easy. The easy things were hard.
He held the cup in his hand. He held it and looked down at the pills, long and white. Would he take them? Should he take them? Tossing them all in his mouth at once, he swallowed them and wiped his mouth. He felt like Alice in Wonderland, so very small, so very large.
The hospital room was dark except for a small, yellow light coming from the outlet. The darkness reminded him of being in the womb. Peter imagined his mother’s heartbeat, felt his own. He told himself this was a peaceful place; there was no reason to be afraid. He curled into the fetal position in his hospital bed. A strange tingling shot through his arms and legs, through his very blood. It must be the medicine, he thought. His brain felt scrambled. When he squeezed his eyes shut, images shot through his mind, distorted, flickering, flashing, memories, pieces of art, green bright white flashes of stars, all sorts of little things.
He turned over in bed and opened his eyes and then he saw him, a figure, a dark figure that seemed fuzzy at first but slowly snapped into focus. Peter rubbed his eyes, but the figure still was there, crouching at his bedside.
“Are you a ghost?” Peter asked softly. He didn’t want to wake Max, who was snoring on the other side of the curtain.
“Maybe,” the man said. He was weathered. His hair had turned silver but it was short now, short and respectable, a bit corporate actually.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m you from another time.”
Peter reached out and touched the man’s face. The skin felt rough and stubbly. He could feel the tingle on his own skin when he touched the man. A shiver ran through him. They were connected somehow. This man was real, as real as anything anyway.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“So that you don’t lose hope,” the other Peter said. “You have a responsibility to live.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why do I have to live?”
“For her,” the man said.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Since when did you ever make sense?”
Peter laughed, and the older man laughed in unison and the sound had a strange echoing feel to it. It reminded him of his brother, the way their voices mingled, indistinguishable from one another when they spoke at once.
“I know now is a rough time, but it will get better,” the man said.
“How do you know that?” Peter sat up in bed and crossed his arms, clutching them tightly in the dark.
“Because I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. The world is a beautiful place, and you have a place in it.”
“I keep losing track of time,” Peter said, motioning to his clothes. He kept forgetting to change them. “The pills make me sleepy.”
“Time doesn’t matter,” the man said. “You can learn to live without it.”
“I’m crazy, aren’t I?” Peter asked.
“There’s nothing wrong with crazy,” the man said. “I’d rather be crazy than normal. Normal people are sheep. They’re afraid of people thinking they’re crazy, so they never step out of line. You’re free, free to do whatever you want, to wander wherever you want.”
“What should I do then, when I get out of here?” Peter asked.
“You have itchy feet, always have, so why don’t you travel the world?”
“Never stop moving,” Peter murmured. “That’s what I’ll do.”
“I have to go now,” the man said. “The nurses will be coming soon to check on you. You’ll be fine. You just have to accept a few things first.”
Peter stood up shakily. His arms and legs felt sluggish, like he was supposed to be asleep.
“It’s the medication,” the man said, reading his mind. “Sometimes it makes you feel worse before you feel better. Goodbye, Peter.”
“Goodbye, Peter,” Peter said.
Peter tried not to view the psychiatrist as an adversary, as an enemy, but at the same time it was hard to trust him. After all, the man thought he was crazy. Not that the psychiatrist would ever use those words. He wouldn’t even tell Peter what was wrong with him exactly. Maybe he didn’t know or maybe he didn’t want to say anything negative, but Peter didn’t like it. It occurred to him that the doctor was not God, that he was trying the best he could to help, but Peter still wanted answers.
“Have you ever had a hallucination?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t know,” Peter said, thinking of the old man who visited in the dark. He wondered if Max had told the doctor about him mumbling in the night. “I had a dream last night I thought was real, and I felt like my blood was burning. Does that count as a hallucination?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Have you ever heard voices?”
“Don’t think so,” Peter said. Sometimes, when he was falling asleep, he imagined someone calling his name softly. Peter, Peter. No, that didn’t count. He was sure everyone heard things like that in their sleep.
“Tell me about the girl in the car,” the doctor said.
“The woman in the car,” Peter corrected. “Don’t be a misogynistic prick.” What was he saying? The truth? He had no filter, things just poured out of his mouth. Was it the medication? It filled him with a small amount of horror.
The psychiatrist barely flinched. Perhaps he was used to it.
“She was lovely,” he said. “She was one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Except for the fact that she hit me with her car. But I guess that wasn’t really her fault.”
“I hear you’ve been writing about her,” the doctor said.
“Not really about her per se, just the stories she told me, the stories we told each other to pass the time in the snowstorm. You see, it’s the only way to keep her alive.”
“But she isn’t alive,” the doctor said, putting the tips of his fingers together to form a tent with his hands, massive hands. Strong hands, white and covered with blue veins that rose like ridges. Maybe he was older than Peter first had
thought.
“I know that,” Peter snapped. “But she had this thing about her stories, that through them she could live forever.”
“Do you believe that?” the doctor said, blinking a few times.
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “But it can’t hurt to tell them.”
“But it can hurt, Peter,” the doctor said. “If you can’t let them go. If you can’t let her go.”
“I barely knew her,” Peter said. The last thing he was going to do was confess to this man. It was a secret. She’d never know. He’d never know.
“Peter, do you care to tell me why you were out there in that snowstorm?”
“No, I don’t want to tell you.”
“It’s because you needed help, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t need anyone’s help,” Peter said. “I’m fine.”
“You are most certainly not fine,” the doctor said. “I’ve talked at length to the social worker. The nurses have told me your stories. That bit about the bank, there was some truth to it, wasn’t there?”
“Just one part,” Peter said.
“They never filed any charges against you, Peter,” the doctor said. “They never thought you did it. You were being paranoid.”
Peter felt his mouth go dry as cotton.
“And what about Elizabeth, do you want to get in contact with her, to let her know you’re here?”
“She won’t care,” Peter said. She’s forgotten me, so I’ve forgotten her, he thought.
“How do you know?” the doctor said.
“No one sends flowers to the psych ward,” Peter said sharply.
“That’s not true,” the doctor said. “Some do.”
“It’s rare. Admit it,” Peter said. “Besides, I don’t care about Elizabeth anymore.”
“Let me get this straight. You got in trouble with your job, you lost your girlfriend, you were wandering around in a blizzard hoping to die, and you don’t care anymore?”
“Not really,” Peter said. “But I’m not suicidal, not anymore.”