Tales from the Gateway

by E. E. Holmes

  “That sounds like it sucks,” I said, trying to sound off-hand.

  “It does,” Colleen said. “That’s kind of the point. It’s how they stop people from breaking the rules.”

  “Have any of you ever had to do it?” I asked.

  “I did once, when I first got here,” Jacob said. “They said I was ‘resistant in my therapy settings.’ You throw one chair at a doctor and they get all defensive.”

  Meghan giggled, staring soppily at Jacob like he was the most badass, and therefore most attractive, thing she’d ever seen. I could actually see her future clichéd relationship struggles playing out across the cafeteria table, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud with my mouth full of cornflakes. Hitch your wagon to a star, sweetie.

  “So, how long until they let her back into her regular routine?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it. The truth was that I was much more interested in what was happening with Hannah than I had any logical reason to be.

  Trevor shrugged unconcernedly. “A few days, probably, as long as she cooperates with the restrictions they put on her. She’s been in there a lot, but it’s never been for very long.”

  “Yeah, I’d say she’s pretty good at it by now,” Colleen said.

  “So what’s the deal with her, anyway?” I asked.

  “You mean what is she in for?” Trevor asked, again with the prison terminology.

  “If you want to put it like that, yes.”

  All four of them looked at each other in a darkly significant sort of way, and I immediately regretted asking them, sure I was now going to get the hallway gossip version of the truth, which, most of the time, barely resembled the truth at all.

  “She hallucinates,” Meghan said at last. “Like, all the time. Voices and people that aren’t there. She’s been in institutions all over the state her entire life.”

  “They bring in special doctors just to see her. Carley says she’s been on every med they can throw at her, and nothing works,” Colleen added.

  “Yeah, well, Carley is a chemistry experiment herself,” Jacob said. “But she’s right, Hannah’s running out of options here. They’re going to move her soon, I bet. Someplace higher security. Someplace permanent.”

  Trevor nodded. “She freaks everyone out, including the staff.”

  “Right,” I said, losing what little appetite I had for my now soggy cereal. “Well, I guess I should be happy she wasn’t in my room, then.”

  §

  I didn’t see Hannah at all that day; so that part of the gossip was true, at least. I couldn’t stop looking for her, though; in the hallways, before group therapy, in the rec room during free time. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was my fault she was being punished, no matter how much I told myself that was stupid. I hadn’t done anything wrong. She was the one outside of my room in the middle of the night—the room that she warned me away from, for whatever insane reason. I’d ignored her; of course I had! Whatever issues she had with my room, they were obviously a side effect of her well-documented hallucinations. By all accounts, she did this sort of thing all the time. I had nothing to feel guilty about, and certainly nothing to be scared of.

  Until that night.

  It began the moment I walked into my room for quiet hours at eight o’clock. I pulled the door shut behind me to find my suitcase and duffel bag stacked neatly by the door. I stared down at them, trying to remember why I’d moved them there, instead of leaving them under the bed, where they were out of the way. Then I noticed the shape of the duffel bag: not flaccid and crumpled, but plump and rounded. I nudged it with my foot.

  It barely budged. It was packed.

  Even more confused, I crossed over to my bureau and pulled the drawers open one by one. All empty. I drew back the closet door: nothing but a cluster of empty hangers.

  What the hell?

  I walked right back out of my room and down the hallway to the staff desk, where a nurse was on duty.

  “Excuse me, but am I being moved?” I asked.

  She frowned at me. “Moved? Moved where?”

  “That’s what I’m asking. Am I being put in a different room? A different hall? Sent home early for good behavior?”

  She picked up a red three-ring binder. “What’s your name, again?”

  “Milo Chang.”

  “What room are you in?”

  “12A.”

  She flipped through the binder, frowning deeply and muttering to herself. “No, there is no room change scheduled. What made you think you were being moved?”

  “Because someone was in my room and whoever it was packed up all my stuff!”

  “Why would anyone do that?” the nurse asked me, her tone skeptical.

  “I have no idea! Why do you think I’m out here, asking you?” I shouted back.

  The nurse’s expression became instantly stern, and I could recognize impending disaster in the slant of her eyebrows. I did not want to get on the wrong side of any of these people in my first week here. I’d seen nurses and other staff members hold serious grudges against the kids with attitude problems, and that was one road I did not feel like skipping on down, at least not right now. I took a deep breath and forced a smile back on my face.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just a little freaked out that someone touched all my stuff, that’s all. Is it possible someone did a room search, or cleaned in there, or something like that?”

  The nurse continued to scowl at me. “Room searches are with cause only. Cleaners don’t come until Wednesday.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, smiling even more broadly in my mounting panic. “I must have, uh… moved that stuff myself and forgotten about it. Thanks for your help.”

  I went back to my room and stood in the open doorway, staring at the bags like I was waiting for them to do something interesting. When they didn’t start singing show tunes or yodeling, I mentally slapped myself and pulled them into the middle of the room, where I set to unpacking them again. I couldn’t explain what had happened, so I did the logical thing and decided to ignore it completely. Then I sat on my bed and started writing a comic book letter to my sister.

  This was a thing of ours. I didn’t want her imagining the worst about the places I kept being sent away to, so I drew my experiences into little comic strips called The Astounding Adventures of Milo. They all started with something that really happened, something lame, like getting lost on the way to the cafeteria or playing solitaire during free time, but usually ended with ninjas or a spaceship, or me riding off on a winged unicorn. She was way into unicorns, and I was way into sending home the gayest illustrations possible to further indirectly piss off my father, so it all worked out nicely.

  I was at it maybe twenty minutes or so when the light on my bedside table flickered and went out. I reached over and tapped it a few times, and the bulb sort of blinked and flashed temperamentally before flaring back on again. I went back to my drawing.

  A few moments later, it happened again. I reached into the lamp and twisted the bulb to tighten it, and picked up my pen. As I laid it to the paper, the bulb exploded.

  Tiny shards of glass and filament flew everywhere, and I threw my notebook up in front of my face to protect myself from the shrapnel. Then I sat frozen in the semi-darkness, my heart racing and my breath coming in quick, rattled gasps.

  Okay, I told myself, as calmly as I could. Okay. That was just a lightbulb. It’s an old building, and the lightbulb blew out. Just a little power surge. Nothing to freak out about.

  I stood up, a little unsteadily, if I’m being honest, and crossed over to the other side of the room, where another lamp stood in the corner by the window. Carefully, because my hands were shaking, I pulled off the shade, unscrewed the lightbulb, and carried it back to the bedside lamp. I yanked my sleeves down over my fingers to avoid cutting myself as I removed the jagged remaining base of the shattered bulb still lodged in the lamp, and then slowly screwed in the new one. It flared to a gentle glow.

>   See? Problem solved. Nothing to worry about.

  The words were still on the tip of my inner voice’s tongue when the lamp flew across the room, crashed against the opposite wall, and broke into about a million pieces.

  I can’t be sure how long it took for the nurses to come running, but I know that I hadn’t moved a single muscle from where I stood, frozen in horror, staring at the remains of the lamp like a gawker at a celebrity sighting.

  I don’t think I even heard their questions until the third or fourth time they asked me. By the time I was able to tear my eyes away from the lamp, they were already shaking me by the shoulders and using words like “shock” and “medication”.

  “Milo. MILO. Answer me. What happened?”

  I found her face, which was offensively close to mine at this point. Her breath smelled like coffee. “I… the lamp broke.”

  “Yes, I can see that. What happened? Why did you throw it?”

  All I could smell was coffee. “I didn’t throw it. It… it just broke.”

  The two nurses looked at each other, then at the pile of lighting carnage in the corner. “It just broke?” asked Coffee-breath.

  “Yeah.”

  There was another strange smell that had caught my attention. It was weirdly metallic and stung my nose, like it was charged with electricity.

  “Milo, now is not the moment to be dishonest. That lamp has obviously been thrown. Now tell me why you did that, please.”

  I rubbed furiously at my nose, which was starting to tingle. The smell, whatever it was, was starting to give me a headache. “I’m telling you the truth. It just broke. It must have fallen, or…” I looked around the room in vain for something that might have caused the lamp to do what it had just done, but I couldn’t concentrate.

  “Milo,” Coffee-breath said again, wrapping her mouth around my name like an adult wraps her hand around a bratty kid’s arm when she’s telling him off. “I’m going to give you one last chance to explain to me why you destroyed New Beginnings property.”

  Some sort of energy in the room was pulsating around me. It was dark and negative; I could actually feel it enveloping me. The metallic smell was getting stronger, starting to burn. Eyes watering, nose stinging, and my fear finally breaking over me like a cresting wave, I rounded on the woman in sudden anger. “I already told you I didn’t do it. But here’s something I haven’t told you yet: I would strongly recommend you chase that next pot of coffee with a healthy dose of mouthwash, sweetness, because your breath could strip paint!”

  And that, kids, is how you land yourself in solitary on your second night in a mental institution. I hope you were taking notes. There will be a quiz at the end of the story.

  Coffee-breath’s eyes went wide in shock, and the other nurse let out a quick bark of a laugh, before quickly composing her face again into a stern expression. Then they both took me by an arm and marched me out of my room and into the hallway.

  “Stop! Stop her! Margaret, grab her!” a voice echoed from our left. We turned just in time to see Hannah barreling down the corridor and skidding to a stop beside us, where Coffee-breath, who was apparently called Margaret, abandoned her hold on me and grabbed onto Hannah instead.

  “Are… you… okay?” Hannah gasped at me between heaving breaths, as she bent over and clutched at her side.

  I stared down at her, and it dawned on me that she knew. She had come running down here because, somehow, she knew what had just happened in my room. How the hell did she know?

  “Milo? Are you okay?” she repeated, her eyes raking me from top to bottom as though assessing me for visible damage.

  “I… yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

  “Okay isn’t the word I’d choose,” Margaret said, adjusting her hold on Hannah so that she had one arm pinned behind her back. “He’s destroying property and disrespecting staff. In fact, he’s on his way to a stint in the behavioral hall, so you’ll have some company.” She turned to two more nurses, both male, who had just arrived breathless beside us. “What’s the matter,” said Margaret, “can’t keep a handle on one tiny patient? What is this, the third time she’s gotten out of a locked ward on your watch?”

  “Give it a rest, Margaret,” the burlier of the two said, taking Hannah from her.

  Hannah didn’t struggle or respond. In fact, she wasn’t paying the slightest attention to anything the nurses were saying. Once she had satisfied herself that I was alright, she had begun staring, with unsettling intensity, through my open bedroom door.

  As she did so, the strange, metallic smell began to dissipate, and all my bizarre symptoms—the stinging in my eyes and nose, the pounding headache— vanished without a trace. That energy, that terrible energy was gone, and I felt light and free again. I took a deep, unfettered breath and then looked over at Hannah in wonder.

  “How the hell did you do that?” I asked her.

  “I wish I knew,” she muttered, and before either of us could say another word, the male nurses marched her, none too gently, back down the hallway and through the double doors.

  §

  Every attempt at an apology was completely ignored; I might as well have been begging and pleading with the wall. I tried every excuse in my little bag of tricks, and turned on what I consider to be an intoxicating amount of charm, but Margaret was not interested in forgiving me. Nope, her only interest was revenge, and that revenge came in the form of tossing me, even as I spewed a constant stream of remorse, into my very own room on the behavioral ward.

  “Remember when you asked earlier if you were being moved?” Margaret asked, with a perverse smile that showed every one of her coffee-stained teeth. “It turns out you are getting your wish after all.”

  “It wasn’t a request!” I shouted as the door closed on me.

  I was so mad at myself that I would have yelled, if that wouldn’t have made me look even more unhinged than she already thought I was. I knew better than to pull shit like that when I was in one of these places. It just wasn’t worth the fallout, which I would now be dealing with for the remainder of my stay, not to mention the crap I’d get from my parents when the inevitable phone call was made to inform them of my outburst.

  My new status as a troublemaker earned me a new schedule, which was even more abysmally awful than the old one. I was removed from all social activities, was banned from the common areas, and now had double sessions one-on-one with the good Doctor Mulligan, who talked to me with the kind of condescension usually reserved for dogs who shit in the house. And worst of all, my recreational time was now replaced with menial tasks meant as punishment. I cleaned graffiti off of the walls, folded piles and piles of sheets, and stuffed envelopes full of pamphlets and literature on patient services. It was reporting for this last task, on the third day of my sentence, that I found myself in the same room as Hannah. She was sitting at the table, already folding bright pink flyers emblazoned with the names of various eating disorders. I dropped into the seat next to her, the nurse hovering over me to make sure I started my work without complaint. I waited a few minutes after the nurse retreated before I spoke.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  “So, here we are. Doing time together.”

  She allowed herself a small smile. “Yup, I guess you could put it that way.”

  “I’m pretty new to the cell block. You’ll have to show me the ropes. Rumor around the place has it that you are a frequent flyer over here.”

  The smile was gone as quickly as it appeared, and I regretted the joke. “Sorry. Sometimes I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut. Actually, I never know when to keep my mouth shut.” I stuffed a few envelopes in silence.

  “It’s fine,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t be surprised that the other kids told you that. I mean, it is true. I’m here all the time. I’m sort of famous for it.”

  I tried to leave it at that, but I’m too damn nosy for my own good, so I took a deep breath and asked the question I was dying to know the answer to. �
��So… why are you here? Or I guess I should say, why are we both here? Because you and I both know I didn’t throw that lamp, and I’m willing to bet that it didn’t throw itself.”

  She put down the envelope she was holding and began tracing her fingers absently over a thin white scar on her wrist. “I owe you an explanation. I know that. I’m really sorry I didn’t just give you one before, but… well, let’s just say that explanations rarely go well for me.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean that when I actually decide to give the real explanation, I usually wind up scaring someone off or landing myself on a new med,” she said with an utterly humorless laugh. It was the saddest, most hollow laugh I’d ever heard, and it dug out a little hole inside me.

  That was the first place I made room for her in my life.

  “Whatever you have to tell me can’t be as strange as what already happened to me,” I said, with a stab at encouragement. “I’m already scared, and I promise I won’t go telling tales to those hags no matter how weird your explanation is,” I said, cocking a thumb over my shoulder at the forms of the two nurses stationed by the door.

  Hannah raised her eyes from her battered wrists and locked onto my gaze. She seemed to be deciding something, and I felt myself go completely still, like I was posing for a painting. I held my breath, waiting to see what her verdict would be, if she would judge me worthy of her secret. I felt the little hole in my chest open wider, as though aching to receive whatever it was she might have to tell.

  Finally, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a little folded square of paper. Carefully, she opened it up and smoothed it gently on her knee, where we could safely peruse it without the nurses noticing. It was a patient profile, like the one they undoubtedly had of me and every other kid in the place stashed away in some filing cabinet somewhere. This one was obviously old, though. The paper it was printed on was yellowed and curling at the edges, and the information looked as though it had been entered by hand on a typewriter. A small black and white photograph was stapled to the upper left-hand corner.