by Welke, Ian
“Are you feeling all right?” Margaret’s voice is distorted, like a recording slowed down. It warps and buzzes like the people in my delusion.
“I’ll be okay. I just need to rest. Tell Mom not to worry, and that I love her.”
I lie down on the bed and pull the blankets up. Through the bed sheet I can make out the shape of my aunt standing in the doorway. She pauses like there’s something else, but doesn’t say anything more before she leaves.
~
I can’t tell how many days have passed. I have the vague sensation of weeks passing in a dreamy blur, but when some portion of the medication wears off one night, I know it’s less time than it feels like. The doctors lie. My perceptions lie. I can only trust what I know to be true.
The insomnia is beating the medication down. The meds pulse through my veins, working like a barrier that my thoughts push against in waves.
The noises that echo through my ward are worse than my apartment. The fans drone in the ventilation shafts. Every forty-ninth rotation there’s a metallic clink. Staccato footsteps tap the tile from the hall as the orderlies make their rounds, fewer at night than they’re supposed to make unless there’s a visitor watching over them. The patients’ cries rise each night in a bellow that grows into a swelling chorus reminding me of Mozart’s Requiem.
The sounds keep me awake from what I guess is one to two, but I don’t know for sure because there’s no clock in my room. Like my little cell is a casino or something. The sobbing is the worst. Masses of patients cry at the same time, some whimpering, others crying so hard they hyperventilate. It’s like neighborhood dogs in the night. It spreads directionally through the halls.
There’s a new sound tonight layered on top of the others. A humming. The tune is familiar, but I can’t place it. I hum it myself a bit. The whole floor is humming it. All of the patients together.
Stop it.
I force my eyes shut. The sooner I sleep, the sooner I can leave. I repeat this mantra hoping the spell will take effect.
Gradually, I lose myself in the drone of the fans, the sobs and hums of the patients, and the timed patrols of the orderlies and I drift off to sleep.
“Annie? There you are. You were a million miles away for a second,” Michael says. His face is lit by the sun both from the sky and the reflection coming off the water below. Even though this is college, back when we were together at Santa Cruz, he looks older like when I’d last seen him or imagined that I’d seen him.
The waves lap against the landing on the wharf. Barks of sea lions mix in with the caws of the gulls. The wind brushes over me, leaving goose bumps on my arms, but the sun shines above and I feel warm and calm.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “We really do need to find a way to get you out of there. I don’t think you’re in immediate danger, but there’s a reason they’re keeping you. I think there are tests. They’ll want to know why you’re resistant to the conversion program. You and the other patients. They must have lists of people who are immune, resistant, or not ready for conversion. But we can’t count on resistance. I’m sure that by now they’ve developed variations on the virus.” He pauses, a look of worry crosses his face. “And there are others who don’t need to be converted.”
“My aunt. The doctor.”
“Yes. They might be working with them without being processed. Or they could be controlled otherwise. Some obey the buzzing voice without ever asking questions.”
“My doctor says that sometimes the mind sees what it wants to see.”
“In that he is correct,” Michael says.
“If I can’t trust what I see, how do I know what is real?”
“The short answer is, you don’t. Not really.”
“So what do I do?”
“You either wait there and hope that they’re telling the truth, that I’m a delusion, or if you’ll trust me, maybe we can bust you out. You can still help. It’s not just any hospital you’ve been brought to. There’s a room in that facility that’s vital to their project. The answers to what they’re up to at the hospital are in that room.”
The sky grows dark. I shiver, remembering how quickly the weather at the shore can go from sun to storm. “They tried to use you. Or me. They made me think I was talking to you to try to get me to tell them where your friends are.”
“That must’ve been trippy.”
I laugh, not having heard that word since college. “How do I know that everything I’ve learned with you is real? How do I know I’m not crazy? How do I know that looking for this room won’t hinder my recovery?”
He laughs. “The short answer is you don’t. All the times that we came to this wharf when we were students, how many times when we were loaded did you think this wasn’t real?” He pauses, letting a cacophony of barking sea lions rise and subside. “Reality is subjective, and a dream state is a fine place to prove it.”
He cups his hands and opens them. He’s holding the smart phone he gave me at the mall.
“Just remember, if I tell you something in a dream, and then you see it for yourself when you’re awake, there must something to what I’m saying. If I give you something in a dream and it’s there when you wake up, something incredible must be happening.”
CHAPTER TEN
When I wake up, something’s gouged against my ribs. I reach under myself with both bandaged hands so I can grab it. I pull my phone out from under me. The phone Michael just handed me in my dream.
How do I know this isn’t part of the sickness? How do I know I’m not making myself worse? Obvious answer: I don’t.
I hold the phone under the top sheet so the security camera on the wall won’t spy what I have. I stick my head under the blankets and bite at the wrap binding my fingers together. No. This is a bad idea. I’m sure someone has tried biting through this gauze before, and it will take my teeth out before I’m able to free my hands.
I lift the sheet enough to get a better look at the phone. A jagged edge is hinged on the side. I hold the phone against the mattress with one hand, and push against it with the other until I extend the sharp bit.
That part definitely wasn’t there before. Dream version of Michael, have you upgraded my phone with a little Swiss Army saw?
I roll to my side to put my body between my hands and the camera while I work the one-inch plastic blade against the bandages. The blade cuts slowly, but I manage to cut through the mitten on my left hand. The rhythmic steps of the orderlies drum down the hall. I clutch the phone to my chest, and roll over and pretend to sleep. The door window slides open. I keep my eyes shut, but sense that the flashlight beam is making its way over me.
Please don’t open the door.
I realize I’m holding my breath and I try to breathe normally in case the orderlies watch for the rise and fall of the blankets. The window slides back shut, and the orderly’s footsteps clop down the hall.
Gasping with relief, I turn on the phone with my freed hand. There’s an icon that looks like a camera with an anti-circle over it. I select that. “Spoof cameras? Y N.” I press the “Y.” A block lights up around the “Y” followed by a camera icon that turns red. It’s not the prettiest interface, but if it works, I’ll take function over form. The icon goes from red to green. I’ll assume that denotes that the phone’s security measures are working and I’m free from the camera. What’s the worst thing that could happen? They medicate me and confiscate the phone that Michael went through the trouble of hacking my dream to give me.
I hold the phone close to me like it’s a teddy bear. I only stop cradling it to get out of bed, and then because of paranoia, I make sure that the camera doesn’t change back to red as I approach the door. There’s an electronic lock on the door. Does the magic phone have something to pop it?
There are fourteen icons on the phone’s display. The second from the bottom right is a padlock. I press that and a query comes up: Proximity (in feet). I enter “1”, not wanting to op
en a bunch of locks in the facility all at once, and I move within a foot of the door before pressing enter. The door clicks and opens.
Bolt to the exit? There’s a new icon on the phone’s touch screen. When I press this an overlay map of the facility appears. An arrow points the way down the hall and around the corner. Moving dots blink and move down another corridor. Probably the orderlies. Great. This is like a scary GPS.
The echoes of the orderlies’ shoes match the directions the dots on the phone’s screen are headed. I estimate the dots timing with when they’ll get to this part of the hall. When the timing’s right, I dart down the hall and take the first right. My slippers make little noise, but don’t provide much grip on the tile floor. I slide around the corner on my left foot.
The moans and cries of the patients fill the hall. Goose pimples rise on my arms. I check the dots on the phone screen again.
Those better be accurate.
The sobbing sound of the patients grows loud enough that it drowns out the footsteps of the orderlies, and I realize I only have the app to go by.
The screen lights up red. This can’t be good. I sprint for the next door, hitting the open button for the door moments before I get to it. Reaching the other side, I close the door, doing my best not to panic and slam it shut. I hold my breath.
The orderly’s footsteps get louder and stop at the door. They turn away, getting softer as the dots on the phone head away.
I follow the direction the app shows me in instead of heading to the exit. The arrow on the screen leads to a door marked high voltage. Through the door, a corrugated metal staircase leads down into a narrow room. The room below glows red and steam rises from beneath a metal-mesh floor.
I tiptoe down the stairs. A lone computer terminal sits atop a strange table. The table looks as though it’s been carved from the bones of a whale or a mastodon. A gold chair, more like a throne than an office chair, sits in front of the table. The computer grows out of the desk. A membrane covers the monitor, stretched over it down to the table of the bone desk. I reach out and nervously touch the side of the membrane. It’s sticky, like a healing wound. Steam comes off the computer as I touch it. The whole room smells rusty, like blood.
Bonelike pipes like the ones in the warehouse feed into the base of the desk-computer-unit.
Just get it over with.
I sit down in the chair. I wipe the sweat from my forehead. The room breathes through the chair like it’s a lung. As I inhale, my mind connects with the machine.
In one large gasp, my mind breathes in the room and I see myself now back in the warehouse library. At once all of the information of the library, all of the information of this world and others floods my mind… Too much! Exhaling, the library leaves me. Flashes of it come and go as I pant for breath.
As soon as I can steady my breathing, I start to experiment more cautiously. I breathe in and out until I breathe in less deeply. Instead of all of the information of the library, I find myself looking at an exterior picture of what I somehow know to be the facility I’m in. It all feels like an incredibly lucid dream. I can sense my body’s surroundings in the background, but I don’t see them. I visualize the information through the computer.
With a translucent hand, I reach down and peel the roof from the building, revealing a row of boxes labeled patients, staff, and security. I skim the staff records first. Dr. Harris has a flag on his record. I press the flag, and a notation comes up: “Subject flagged for offering initial resistance to program. Security watch on his movements and communications.”
I find two icons in the security box. The first is a picture of the gate. The other is a photo of one of the guards. Mentally double-clicking the guard’s picture, I see two security guards on the map of the complex, similar to the screen on my phone app I used for dodging the orderlies.
Huh. I wonder…
I concentrate on dragging one of the dots like a desktop icon and force it to take the right turn. Focusing on the same dot, I find I can picture him. The fatter one. I concentrate and make him put his arms up. He follows my thoughts. He puts his hands on his head and twirls like a hefty ballerina.
I release him in an exhale, realizing the damage I could do to him if I’m not careful.
I breathe back in to reconnect with the computer. One thought about my phone, and the room shrinks like a minimized window. I see both the room and my phone next to one another in my mind’s eye. Concentrating on the interface, I open windows in smaller perspectives, the library, the asylum, and my phone. I grab the pictures for the gate and the guards and copy these apps straight to my phone.
Not sure how I did that.
I hope that the phone runs them. It seems to run everything else.
This just leaves the patient’s box. My own image is there, but I think I’ll save that for last. The rest of the patients are grouped together with a label marked “resistant.”
There’s a video clip of Dr. Harris. I open that up. The camera is on the doctor. It doesn’t show who is holding the camera or who is asking the questions.
Dr. Harris: The patients continue to resist the program. But we have been able to convince them, most of them at least, that what they’re experiencing is a psychotic break, and they have mostly been accepting of our experiments as hope for treatment.
Buzzing Voice: You say “mostly… ”
Dr. Harris looks uncomfortable and he won’t look at the interviewer directly.
Dr. Harris: Yes. Some of the patients have taken to their roles as mental patients and are attempting to resist treatment not because of a physiological resistance, but because they are assuming a role… This is what they understand that a mental patient does.
Buzzing Voice: Interesting. But not relevant. Have you isolated the defect yet?
Dr. Harris: (looking annoyed) Not yet. More interesting I think is patient thirteen.
Buzzing Voice: Yes. Interesting is that one. Have you scanned her cerebral wavelength?
Dr. Harris: (nodding) It is unique. It’s like she’s adapted to the program. I suspect that she’s merely pretending to believe that she’s a patient. She seems aware that she can’t trust what she senses. She seems to know that less time has passed than we’ve made her believe.
Buzzing Voice: I suspect our enemy is at work.
I release the image. Time to leave I think. I exhale and the room returns to normal. Reality zooms back from the vision of the computer-scape. The effect is dizzying. I don’t so much exit the computer as I feel it let go of me. Released from the machine, I stand. Checking my new “guards” utility on my phone to make sure it’s clear above, I make my way back up the metal staircase.
~
Doctor Harris’ office is on the way out. Against my better judgment, I need to speak to him.
What does he know? Can he help? He’s in danger himself. They’re watching him. Maybe I can help him.
I have to stop and hide in the shadows several times with my back pressed against the wall to wait for the orderlies to pass by. Watching one of them pass through the door at the other end of the hall, I move to the doctor’s office door.
I shut the door behind me, still worried that the orderlies might hear. There aren’t any lights on in the office, but I can hear Dr. Harris breathing. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the faint light, but after a moment I can pick out his outline at his desk next to the window.
“Doctor.” I press the lock on the door, and walk into the room, feeling in front of me for the edge of the desk.
He switches on the desk lamp. It lights his edge of the desk and the bottom half of his face, like he’s about to tell a ghost story and we’re sitting around a campfire. “I take it you are checking yourself out.”
“Interesting that you put it that way.”
Does he know I have the app?
“I don’t think the guards are going to just let me walk out.”
“I would rather you stayed. I think you could make progress here. Certainly I thi
nk you’d be safer.”
“But the nightmare, Doc. The nightmare is real.”
He rubs his temples and scratches the bottom edge of his comb-over. “Perhaps. Isn’t that one more reason to stay? It’s not safe out there.”
“And it’s safe in here? I know why the patients are here.”
“Your case is not like the others. If things were different you might be subjected to the same tests, but as is…”
I smile. I don’t need to ask, but I do anyway. “It’s Michael, isn’t it?”
He nods. He pulls a handkerchief from his pants pocket and cleans his glasses with it. “They want to know where he is. Until they find him, they have an interest in keeping you safe as leverage.”
“Who are they? Can you tell me that, Doc?”
He smiles, but he looks sadder than anyone I’ve ever seen. “I don’t know specifically. There’s always a they, isn’t there? The people in charge. The people with money and power that always need more of it.”
“But these don’t look like people at all.”
The doctor shrugs. “There are monsters of all sorts.”
“You could come with me. We might be able to help you. You might be able to help find a cure for all of this.”
He shakes his head. “I am not cut out for life on the run.”
“Well, I got to go, Doc. I’d say it’s been grand, but it’s just been more confusion. If you don’t mind, I’ll be needing your keys.”
His hand shakes as he gives them to me. I take them. “Jaguar, huh,” I say, looking at the car key.
“They’re wonderful cars. Do you not like them?”
“I just had a problem with one of their owners.”
“You’ll need to leave the car someplace or they’ll use it to track you.”
“You’re being pretty nice about this. I saw your file. You resisted. They’re watching you.”