by ML Gardner
“They shouldn’t have done that.”
“I did well, Simon. It didn’t happen. No matter what they said or did, I never lost control. Not even when they–”
“I don’t want to know what they did,” I interrupted. She recoiled and dropped her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t care. Elizabeth, you have no idea. But I can’t know what they do or say to you.” My voice was barely audible. “It makes me want to kill them, and I have never wanted to kill anyone before. When I think of them saying things to you, making you cry, and doing God only knows what else. I just can’t know.” I caught the tiny nod that told me she understood.
“You did good,” I added quickly.
Dinner was over, and the nurse took the tray from in front of us, not bothering to ask if we were done.
“One day,” I said, with clenched fists, “I am going to look at you over dinner, and we’re going to be free to talk. And we’ll decide when it’s over.” I glared at the back of the nurse’s head.
I lay in bed and tried to think about Elizabeth. I preferred it to the other thing that had been bothering me lately. I saw her in my mind, but, recently, the last person I expected to cloud my thoughts of her was me.
I didn’t like how I felt most of the time. I was always on edge and paranoid. I didn’t like the things I thought or the way I felt. I was never, well, rarely, if I were to be honest, a violent person, but later I caught myself thinking thoughts that made me shudder when I was alone and calm. I rolled to my side and told myself that this place was simply starting to get to me. It had been close to six months, I think, and that’s a long time for a sane person to try to keep their sanity among the insane. The line between normal and abnormal behavior had begun to blur. I closed my eyes and told myself that tomorrow I would wake up acting and feeling the way I had before Elizabeth. Before her, I was biding my time. Learning their game and playing it well, hiding my visions from the staff. I was generally a harmless smartass who was mildly entertaining. I would try to get back to that. Calm, casual and quick witted, biding my time. I grunted in frustration at myself. You know that’s not possible now, idiot.
I rolled onto my back, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I tried to focus on her again. I tried to find her eyes, but they faded as my mind wandered. I wondered when exactly I had fallen in love with her. I couldn’t put a day, hour or moment on it. I knew within days of her arrival that I would love her more than anything. I had seen it. So I sought her out, started loving her before I even knew her, because I knew I would.
Still, I was confused. No. Don’t start questioning that. You know how you feel. Did I even have a choice? I wondered. No, I was destined to love her. Now it felt as if everything had spiraled out of control in a place where I had none to begin with. I was so utterly, violently protective of her, of us, that I could hardly enjoy it anymore. She – we, were the only tiny bit of happiness there is in this hellhole, and they had me so worried about losing it that I couldn’t even enjoy it!
I put my arm over my eyes to block out the light coming through the small window in my door. I tried to get some sleep. Lack of it hadn’t helped my less than sunny disposition.
Before the hospital had hired a full staff again, David had one more surprise for us. He came for me late the next evening, stepping softly and whispering. As usual, I worried he was trying too hard to help us, risked losing his job, or exposing us. But also, as usual, I couldn’t resist a few precious moments alone with her. I walked into the commons, which was dark and tidied for the night. Slightly confused, I turned to see David holding out a heavy winter coat. I took it and he pointed to the left. I saw that the metal door to the courtyard was propped open a crack. I smiled wide and raised my eyebrows.
“Really?” I asked in disbelief, glancing back at the door. Talk about the illusion of freedom.
“I can only give you twenty minutes,” he whispered apologetically.
“I’ll take it,” I said with a smile and slipped on the coat. I didn’t bother to button it as I nearly jogged to the door. She waited in the shadows, leaning against the wall in a coat far too big for her. Loretta’s, I thought. I could see my breath in smoky plumes in front of me as I walked. The full moon lit the courtyard just enough to see her. I walked a little faster until I reached her, and with the last step, my lips crashed into hers. I gathered her up, baggy coat and all, and kissed her like the starving man I was. I only broke the kiss once to tear apart the opening of the black coat, slip my arms in and around to pull her close to me. I’d be damned if even that would stand between us. Her hands found their way into my coat, and a hard shiver went through me as they slipped under my shirt. Her hands were warm, almost hot on my cold skin as she felt every muscle from the tops of my shoulders to the curve of my lower back. I gasped, pulling the breath from her lungs into mine as her hands slid to the front, covering every inch of my chest. I don’t know how long we stood there, pressed against the cold, brick wall. I lost consciousness of everything around me; time, space and temperature. It was freezing cold and I didn’t even care. Where I ended and she began blurred. At some point, I pulled away reluctantly with numb, swollen lips. I laughed and so did she.
“It’s nice to see you, too.” She laughed.
I looked to each side, holding her by the waist and then dropped my forehead to hers. I had to find away to cram everything into the few minutes we had left. There were things I wanted to tell her, plans we needed to make. Our time here at the asylum was coming to an end, and I needed to know that she would wait for me if she was the one who left first. She wiped my mind clean with another kiss, pulling me to her. Slower, we took the time to enjoy it. My hands neared dangerous places, and I ground the palms of them against her hipbones, pressing her into the wall. Away, but not too far away. I would suffer alone in my room for this later, but I didn’t care. Her hands hovered over my stomach and then dipped below that invisible line. I broke from her abruptly and grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t do that.” I smiled, but my voice begged. Her face changed in the dim light. “If you go there, there’s no going back,” I explained.
“Does it still work? You know, after what they did to you,” she asked boldly.
“Well, it works for one, so I suppose it will work just fine for two.” I laughed, but she missed the joke entirely and moved on to her next question. “But you know it works, from girls before?”
I squirmed under her stare. She wanted to know about the women before her. Before I came here. “I have these precious few minutes with you. I don’t want to talk about them.”
“But I’m curious. I can’t picture you outside of here. What was your life like?”
I took her hand, and we walked slowly, began a loop around the perimeter of the courtyard.
“There weren’t a whole lot of girls who wanted to date the local psychic. But a few were brave enough or curious enough. And they all were weird.”
“What were they like?” she asked, hugging my arms with both of hers.
“There was Cassandra. She was with the circus.” I saw her eyebrows shoot up and I smiled. “I told you they were weird. Anyway, this was before we lived here. We lived in upstate New York. I was looking at the animals behind the tent. I felt sorry for them. They looked so sad, caged up and lonely. She was one of the acrobats and we hit it off. I wasn’t anything new or scary to her. She lived her entire life with freaks. She was my first,” I confided.
“Girlfriend?” she asked.
“First everything.” Her face didn’t change as she walked slowly beside me. “Then there was the one that had shaking fits. That was interesting.” She looked up at me in question. “Going swimming was tricky,” I joked. “She would stop and stare, but she wouldn’t see things like I do, she would just shake all over. She was always very tired after.”
“Was she crazy?”
“No it was just something in her brain, they said. She couldn’t help it.”
“Who else?”
Actually, there
were a string of short relationships with girls who didn’t know about me and would take off as soon as they found out, and some odd balls who didn’t mind my freakish visions. In return, I would look away from the flaws that kept them from dating anyone considered normal. But I had no time for all that.
“There were a few of them after graduation and before here. But I don’t want to talk about them.” I insisted this time and she dropped it. “Besides, I don’t remember half of their names, and, more importantly, it was nothing like this.”
She seemed to like that and snuggled closer, putting her head on my shoulder as we walked.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you have someone special before here?”
“Not really. The closest thing to a beau I had was the son of one of my daddy’s customers.”
“And?” I nudged her thick coat.
“It’s stupid.” She laughed nervously.
“No, it’s not. I want to hear. I told you about mine.”
She sighed and I thought about the ticking clock. “Like I said, he was the son of one of Daddy’s customers who came from halfway around the world to hand pick leather for his furniture business. There was always such a fluster before they came. My mother would clean the house, top to bottom and cook for days on end. I never understood that because they never came in the house nor stayed to eat. Anyway, Pierre was a year older than me. While our fathers would conduct their business, we would go off and have fun.”
“What was having fun?” I teased.
“No, not that,” she said, flustered. “Close,” she added with a laugh. “But no. At first, we’d just sit by the lake and talk, play games. His father took all day to pick his leather, so sometimes we would go on a picnic.”
“So was he a beau?”
“Well, no. Not really. Sort of.”
“I’m really confused.” I laughed.
“Well, we only saw each other four times a year, but we had a lot of fun when we were together.” She smiled.
“And you never?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “Though he loved to talk about it. He was more than happy to tell me everything I’d ever need to know.” Her face scrunched up in distaste. “And a few things I could have done without.”
“I don’t think I want to know,” I said, smiling and relaxed.
“You don’t.” Her eyebrows rose in agreement. “But just like you said.” She stopped and hugged me suddenly. “It was nothing like this.”
David whistled lightly from the door. He couldn’t see us, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t worried. I looked back at her with a heavy sigh.
“One more.” I kissed her in the shadows of the trees, quick but thorough before we walked, hand-in-hand back to our cage.
She came into lunch the next day looking exhausted again. I didn’t need to ask, I already knew. She looked up and smiled, tired and weak. “I did good,” she said.
Later that day the doctor told me something I hadn’t seen coming, in any form. He said I was doing better, and they were going to begin the process of thinking about, maybe, letting me out. Eventually. I smiled, remembering the vision of us leaving here together. I knew that it may not be physically together, walking out of the iron gates, holding hands. It may be me first and then her, or her first and then me, but either way, I knew it would happen, and I knew we would be together out there. It looked like it was all falling into place, and it gave me some hope and helped me get through the next few days.
I saw little of Elizabeth for three days. Like a junkie coming off morphine, I twitched nervously with a constant anxious feeling. I didn’t want to eat, and I had little interest in anything. I couldn’t concentrate, even on the visions that came. They had grown stranger, involving faces I didn’t recognize, places I had never been. I didn’t understand them, and I didn’t have the mental focus to try. It can’t be like this all the time, I thought to myself, running my hand through my tangled hair. If love were like this all the time, for everyone, then society would collapse in on itself. It was completely focused, yet as unproductive as possible. No, it can’t be. It’s this place. It’s the lack of control. The inability to protect her. To enjoy her. It’ll be better when we get out there. It has to be, I assured myself.
They started her on a new medicine. The other one had slipped out only twice in the several dozen times they pushed her to her limit, and they hoped that with this new medicine, they could keep it from happening at all, and she could leave. I didn’t like it. It made her sluggish and foggy. She wasn’t my Elizabeth. Her eyes were dull and she moved almost in slow motion.
One day she sat, heavy-limbed and clumsy, next to Ronnie and across the table from me. She had forgotten that I had told her to sit with her roommate, that I would sit with Ronnie. I was dosing out our time together, trying to keep the staff oblivious. Ronnie glanced over at her nervously, mumbling as he ate. She didn’t even notice him. We didn’t say much through the meal. I decided that when we got out, I would toss whatever mind-numbing pills they had her on into the lake I had seen us walking by. She was just fine before. She was gaining more control, keeping the other one deep down. I knew with the peaceful life I would give her that it wouldn’t ever need to come out again. It wouldn’t need to because I would be strong for her when she couldn’t be. She smiled at me as she stood, swaying lopsided and groggy. She rolled forward, and I could imagine the room spinning around her. She reached open palmed and blinded for anything to grasp, and her hand came down on the corner of Ronnie’s tray. Everything happened in slow motion and still flashed too quickly for me to stop it. Ronnie’s tray fell, dumping the contents of badly over-and-undercooked food into his lap. He stood, thrust his chair out from behind him and screamed, loud and angry. He lunged at her, his long bony fingers spread wide and aimed for her neck. He took a hold of it and fell, tumbling back over the chair, screaming and squeezing her neck in a vise. Her head bounced off the hard floor repeatedly as her face turned blue.
I seemed to be watching from outside my body. I saw myself, in one fluid movement, toss the wooden table out of my way. It flipped and skidded, providing a direct path to her. I heard the nurse blow the whistle in long earsplitting bursts, but no one came. I grabbed Ronnie by his hair and shirt and ripped him off her. After throwing him to the floor, I stopped for a split-second to glance back at her; she was lying on her side, gasping and choking. I could see the patch of blood seeping through her dark hair, the back of her head split open from the impact of hitting the floor. I dropped onto him and swung with all my strength, hitting his face blindly. Then I choked him. He had choked nearly everyone in this building, and the bastard had it coming. I heard her coughing and crying behind me, still trying to catch her breath, and I couldn’t squeeze the bastard’s neck hard enough. I felt two sets of hands pulling on each arm. Another wrapped around my neck, choking me as they tried to pull me away. Suddenly, everyone let go, and I fell forward on Ronnie with the release of counter pressure. David grabbed each wrist and wrenched my hands off Ronnie’s neck. He was yelling at me, but I didn’t hear what he said. He pulled me several feet away and dropped me on the floor like change. I went sprawling, hitting the side of my head. I looked around frantically for Elizabeth, but I couldn’t find her. Something shiny caught my eye, and I saw the nurse coming at me with a needle. I scrambled backwards like a crab, trying to get away. My back hit the wall and there was nowhere to go. I looked to David for help. He bent over Ronnie, his back deliberately turned to me. It took six of them to hold me down as the nurse shoved the plunger down, shooting burning milky liquid into my thigh. I vaguely remember being confused when they were preparing me for the shock. I passed out with the first blast of current.
I opened my eyes and saw the blurry, white door of the confinement room standing on its side. I blinked hard several times, the side of my head throbbing from the concrete floor. I sat up slowly; the first thing I did was lean my head back on the wall and close
my eyes, taking my inventory. It was all there. Including a few new images of her I didn’t want. Her mouth moved like a fish out of water, and her flooding eyes bulged as he choked her. Blood dripped down onto the floor from the gash on her head. I remembered that’s why I was here, and I could only hope that I hadn’t killed him. I’d never get out of here if I had. Though he would deserve it for touching her, I thought. I shuddered to think, had David not been there, how easily I could have killed him.
They left me there the rest of the day. The room was so small I couldn’t take three full paces across it. There was nothing; just a white cube with a drain in the center of a concrete floor, and a bright light overhead too high to reach. The sound of my breathing echoed and it irritated me. I passed the time thinking of her, pulling out her words with the images.
‘I’ve never been so happy.’
‘I’m better because of you.’
‘As long as I have you, I can stay strong.’
That one was my favorite. I told her she never had to go back to her home if she didn’t want to. We could start a new life somewhere, and she would never have to see another cow, if that’s what she wanted. In hushed whispers mingled with our own sort of sign language, we had talked about what our life would be like out there, one day. I groaned and grabbed two handfuls of my hair when I realized I had most likely severely postponed that with my little outburst. Pushing that fear aside, I went back into my head to be near her.
David came to get me a few hours later. The door swung open wide and he loomed in the doorway, staring at me, not happy.
“I can’t believe you did that,” he said. He was obviously alone to speak to me so freely.
“Yeah, well, I suppose you’d just wait patiently for the nurse’s needle if it was Loretta he was choking the shit out of,” I said as I walked past him. My legs were sore and my head still hurt.
