Asylum

by Kristen Selleck

  “Slow down a minute,” he said, looking confused, “What’s going on here, what’s this about? You’re all upset and out of breath. Are you okay?”

  “F-Fine. I’m sorry,” she added trying to breathe normally. “I just got to thinking th-that you might think I was blowing you off or something and I wasn’t and I didn’t want you to think that, I…”

  She trailed off, leaving her mouth open in hopes that some better words might come out. She had never meant to say any of that. It seemed that he was regarding her curiously now, probably trying to put his finger on exactly what was wrong with her.

  “No, no,” he said at last, “I’m always happy to have girls beating down the door to ask me out.” His smile was back, warm, genuine, and slightly teasing, the way she liked.

  “Who is it?” A feminine voice called from the room behind him.

  Chloe sucked in her breath and took a step back. Seth understand at once. He threw the door open to reveal a dark-haired girl sitting in his arm chair, holding a game controller.

  “Chloe…this is my little sister Rachel. Rachel this is Chloe.”

  Rachel must have hit the pause button, because she dropped the controller into her lap, and looked expectantly at Chloe. Chloe noticed that she had the same large hazel eyes as Seth. Her hair was darker, and longer even, though it had a tangled and matted look to it, as though she hadn’t brushed it in awhile. Her cheekbones were higher and her chin sharper. Her nose was slightly upturned and gave her face a mischievous air. Her smile, however, was the mirror image of Seth’s…relaxed…confident even. She returned Chloe’s gaze with the same level of scrutiny.

  “You’re right,” Rachel giggled to Seth, “She is cute!”

  Quick as a flash, Seth grabbed a pair of dirty boxers off the floor and whipped them at Rachel’s face. Rachel screeched and pretended to gag.

  “She thinks she’s funny,” he explained, “she’s not, but she thinks she is. Come in, come on in.”

  Chloe took a timid step inside. She rubbed the palms of her hands against her shirt. They were wet still.

  “You don’t look so good. You look worried,” Seth noticed. “You sure you’re alright there, kiddo?”

  Chloe nodded but avoided making eye contact. She knew that both Seth and Rachel were watching her.

  “I’m a little…I’m feeling sick, just a little,” she excused herself.

  “Me too,” Rachel smiled, “At least that’s what I told the school secretary this morning when I called in pretending to be my mom.”

  Chloe smiled politely, from the periphery of her vision she saw Seth glance between her and Rachel a few times.

  “Rachel, play your game. Come on Clo, let’s take that walk,” he said.

  Rachel rolled her eyes and picked up her game controller. “Nice to meet you!” she called after them.

  Seth ambled leisurely down the hallway, nodding as they passed one or two other students. It didn’t seem like he was in a hurry to go anywhere in particular. Chloe clasped her hands behind her back and followed a step after him.

  Once outside the building, Seth stopped and turned to face her.

  “Alright, here’s the thing. If you want this to count as a date to partly make up for ditching me this weekend, you’re going to have to at least hold hands with me, and yes I did say partly. I should be able to get a walk and dinner or a movie out of your guilt, right?”

  He smiled and held his hand out for hers. Chloe flinched. Her hands were clammy and probably still damp. Seth continued to hold his hand out.

  “You going to leave me hanging?” he asked.

  Chloe swiped her palm against her thigh and grabbed his hand, though she continued to avoid eye contact. Swinging their arms casually, Seth stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the parking lot, headed for the woods on the other side.

  “Alright, now how about you tell me what’s really the matter?” he asked.

  Chloe looked at him, startled. Tell him? Sure! Guess what, I’m a psychopath who sort of believes that she’s being hounded by ghosts. I see things that aren’t there and watch invisible hands spell out secret messages. The only thing I’m missing is a tin foil hat and an unshakeable belief in aliens. And now I’ve got Sam playing on team crazy too, though I half suspect that it’s because I’m the one who’s writing on walls, even though I can’t remember it. Still want to date me?

  Chloe swallowed and squeezed his hand.

  “I told you already,” she mumbled, “I was worried that you thought I wasn’t interested in you and…and I didn’t want you to think that.”

  Seth stepped over the curb and together they walked under the pines. Last year’s needles crunched underfoot. The noise of campus life disappeared behind them.

  “Yeah, I’m not buying that though,” Seth said, not looking at her. “How about I tell you what I think and then you can tell me I’m right?”

  “What if you’re wrong?” Chloe asked.

  “Then you’re going to have to actually open your mouth, talk to me and convince me that I’m wrong. It won’t be easy,” Seth cautioned.

  “Alright,” she agreed.

  Seth nodded. Beneath the pines not a breath of wind stirred. It was entirely still.

  “When I opened the door, you looked terrified. You looked like something was chasing you. I was sure you were going to tell me that something else had happened. Something with your room, but you didn’t. Now I know I should have called you this weekend, I should have stopped by, but believe it or not, I was actually busy. I had practice and a couple of friends had a get together and my folks stopped by…” Seth stopped for a minute and then shook his head. “Look, the truth is even with all that stuff I must have picked up the phone a dozen times and started to dial your number and then hung up. I just…I just didn’t want to come on too strong, you know what I mean?”

  Chloe nodded.

  “Sam told me not to call you because it would look desperate,” she admitted.

  Seth laughed.

  “Right, and meanwhile the guys always talk about the “three day rule”. Always leave a girl hanging three day before you call. But anyways, I’m getting off point. So where was I…okay, when I opened the door I thought you looked scared and I got the feeling you were kind of bullshitting me, and I think maybe…maybe it’s because I haven’t handled the whole situation very well.”

  “The situation?” Chloe asked.

  “Yeah. I realize that you were really upset about the Ouija board and the light burning out and, of course, your room getting all messed up, and I thought that by trying to be rational and make you see it from my point of view, it would help you. But maybe all I did was make you feel like I wasn’t taking you seriously. I wasn’t there when any of it happened so it’s easy for me to say ’hey, don’t worry about it!’ So I think something else scared you now, and you think that if you tell me about it, I’ll blow it off like I did before, or make you feel like you’re being dumb. So go ahead, tell me that I’m right,” he smiled.

  Chloe smirked and shook her head. He didn’t miss much. He read people very well, maybe too well for it to work out in the long run.

  “You’re right,” she conceded.

  “Of course I am,” he agreed. “So now I want to make you a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I want you to try and trust me enough to give me a real answer when I ask what’s wrong, and for my part I’ll try to deserve that trust.”

  Chloe was glad he wasn’t looking at her just then. He was too nice, too good and too healthy, it made her feel awful.

  “Clo?” he asked quietly.

  “I saw something,” she admitted. “I was in my room and a bottle of white-out fell off my desk and spilled on the floor, and I was nowhere near it.”

  She paused and glanced up at him tentatively. Trust him? God, but she wanted to. He was waiting, listening, she took a deep breath.

  “I thought I saw something in it. I thought I saw the
letters A and M,” she admitted.

  Seth nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “See? Now you think I’m a nut, don’t you?” Chloe asked.

  “No,” he answered, “I think it must have been very scary, especially after everything else that’s happened.”

  “But you don’t possibly believe that it’s real, do you? You think I imagined it?” Chloe pushed.

  “I think something scared you and I don’t know what it was. My mind tends to look for rational explanations for everything, yes, but I can’t say it isn’t something that can’t be explained, and no…I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  “Maybe you just don’t know me well enough,” Chloe snorted.

  “Look, Clo-- you have a tough time talking to people, because you‘re shy, right? And you‘re shy because you don‘t think people will like you…more specifically, that I‘ll like you. But if you don‘t ever give anyone a chance-- I think what I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to be perfect. Maybe you don’t know yourself well enough.”

  Seth paused near one of the large pine trees. Dropping her hand he reached out and stroked the scaly bark.

  “Did you know that in California, there’s a pine tree that’s over 4,000 years old? It’s a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, and it’s one of the oldest living organisms in the world,” he said. “Did you know that even for a red pine, like this one, the average age expectancy is about 250 years?”

  “Okay,” Chloe shrugged.

  “Do you know what the average life expectancy is for us?” He turned to face her.

  “I don’t know, maybe 75 years?” she said.

  “It’s 77 for me, 80 for you,” he smiled. “You know what that means?”

  “Sure, it means when we’re worm chow these trees will still be here.”

  Seth laughed. It almost sounded too loud under the noiseless pines. High above, where the branches started, some sort of bird cawed in response.

  “I was going to say that in comparison we don’t have a lot of time. I was going to say that we don’t really have years to waste worrying what people might think, or throwing away time by hiding ourselves when we really want to be found.”

  “Wow, you’re a deep one,” Chloe giggled. “If that‘s your pick-up line it‘s way better than ‘what‘s your major?’.” Seth laughed again.

  “Well, since you’ve already gone and ruined the uhhh…mood,” he accused, “I’m going to keep the awkwardness going by letting you know that I was planning on kissing you.”

  Chloe grinned and looked at her feet.

  “Clo?” he asked, placing his hand under her chin.

  “Just do it. Do it before I smash my head into a tree, or a bird poops on me, or lightening strikes,” she grumbled, beaming red.

  Seth looked up at the pine canopy.

  “I don’t think it’s going to rain, but I do think I heard a bird a minute ago, you think I should chance it?” he asked.

  She didn’t have time to think up a smart answer. As she looked up, he was already moving in, his hand still under her chin. She wasn’t even going to have time to figure out what to do with her hands or whether she should-

  Thinking stopped. His lips were warm, gentle. It was easy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On one side of the elevator, Sam frowned and drummed her fingers impatiently against the paneling. The downpour outside had frizzed her normally short, straight bob into an even shorter mass of curls. Raindrops sparked in her hair. She shook her head violently and yanked her fingers through the wet mess a few times. She was angry. It seemed to Chloe that every one of Sam’s quick, silent movements shouted an accusation at her. Even the way she stood, pressed against the wall on the other side of the elevator, like she was trying to get as far away from Chloe as she could.

  The elevator dinged and the metal doors opened jerkily to display the dim, grey-walled library basement. Sam swept out of the elevator without a glance at Chloe and stalked down a side hallway, putting as large a distance between the two of them as possible.

  Moving a great deal slower, Chloe sighed and stepped off the elevator. Sam was behaving like an angry child, but Chloe hadn’t exactly handled the situation with the greatest level of maturity either, and getting caught in the rain after missing the bus to the library certainly hadn’t helped matters. Now they were soaked, exhausted, and ten minutes late for their first meeting with Dr. Willard.

  Down the hallway echoed the slam of a door, announcing to Chloe that Sam must have found room 28B. Sam would cool off, Chloe decided. She would calm down and see reason, nobody could stay “silent-treatment-mad” for very long. Especially if you lived with that nobody.

  Chloe found the room and tried to open the door without making a noise. She slipped into the room and stood behind Sam who didn’t bother glancing back. Dr. Willard was already talking to Sam when he noticed Chloe.

  “Oh good, good!” he commended them. “This is it!” Dr. Willard held his arms open to indicate the room. It reminded Chloe a lot of his office, only the small basement space held even more of the cardboard filing boxes. They were stacked along the walls and clustered in random groups, leaving little space to navigate. Some of the boxes had dates written on the outside along with some sort of letter code. TCSH 1890-1900, she read, EIA 1850-1875. From what she could see of the walls, they displayed well over a hundred photos, almost all in black and white. Some were framed, some were tacked up with push pins. All seemed to be of old brick buildings which resembled their own Kirkbride Hall. An old, battered, wooden bench supported a laptop, and something that looked like it might be a printer or copier.

  “This,” Dr. Willard continued, “is my collection. It’s the largest collection of asylum writings in the world. At least, that I know of! Mostly it’s comprised of journals, letters, logbooks, doctor’s notes and newspaper articles from or pertaining to patients of American asylums, with special emphasis on Michigan asylums, but I do have a few parchments from Bedlam itself!”

  Dr. Willard paused, grinning expectantly, as though he were waiting for both girls to shout, “Oh surely not!! Bedlam??? How amazing!!” When he noticed that the girls continued to stare politely and silently at him, his grin dropped into an almost pout.

  “It’s the oldest asylum in the world? In England…the...uhhh…Bethlehem Royal Hospital? It’s quite famous really, I mean bedlam has become an adjective… The parchments are from the seventeenth century…it’s really quite something to have…” he trailed off, watching both girls for any trace of enthusiasm. They kept polite poker faces.

  “Never mind. The oldest bits, like the Bedlam writings have been scanned and are on file here,” he pointed over the stacks towards the laptop. “Eventually I mean to have all the pieces scanned and accessible by computer, the less these artifacts are handled, the better. But right now we’ve only gotten through 1840. Everything else is here, in these boxes. Now!” he clapped his hands together and regained his excited smile. “Here’s how this works. Each box has the period of time the material inside it is from, and generally they encompass between five and ten years. The letters in front of those dates refer to which facility the material was recovered from. For instance, TCSH, is Traverse City State Hospital, PSH is Pontiac State Hospital, etcetera, etcetera. There is a list here,” he said and poked one stubby finger at a sheet of paper tacked to the wall next to him. Chloe and Sam nodded.

  “It’s probably not a very good system, and I mean to improve upon it once everything is in the computer. Even the naming is kind of haphazard. Each of these institutions has had several names, so it can be rather confusing. The Pontiac State Hospital, has been referred to as the Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, the Eastern Michigan Asylum, Michigan State Asylum, Clinton Valley Center. In fact, when I rescue these documents from places other than the asylum they originated from, it’s hard just to place them! Michigan State Asylum can refer to many of the hospitals actually…but I digress. For now, this is the way it’s set up. I expect both o
f you to use extreme care in handling each and every one of these papers. You will wear gloves, which I will provide, and you will do your best to leave everything in the exact order that you found it in. You understand?”

  Chloe and Sam nodded again. Dr. Willard took a file folder from under his arm, pulled out two sheets of lined paper and handed them to the girls. Upon each was an identical list, handwritten by someone who must have studied calligraphy. The cursive words were perfectly formed with little embellishments and thick, black ink.

  “These are specific things I need you to look for. At this point, I have very exact topics in mind. You’ll notice that there are several names on the list, with dates and the institutions that they may be associated with next to them. These people are mostly transients that have been found registered at three or more institutions in their lifetime. I am currently completing a study on what I like to call the roaming mad. Mostly these are drifters who are admitted and released or escaped from different asylums over and over. It is my theory that there are a great deal more of these than we previously thought, and it is of especial interest to me to find any of their personal recollections, as their having experienced several institutions makes them connoisseurs of sorts. Also, you’ll note several organizations on the list as well. These are all societies formed by ex-patients, outside the walls so-to-speak. You’ll notice the Anti-Insane Asylum Society on the list, which was formed by an ex-patient committed by her husband for arguing against his religious beliefs. Any reference to this by a patient would be interesting, as it would gauge what and if patients had understanding of reformist actions on the outside. Finally, though I have no actual names to search for, any reference whatsoever to patient groups inside the asylum…and by that I mean groups formed by patients for patients…any such groups should be tagged immediately. It does not matter to me whether it is a group formed for music practice, or philosophy or what have you, any group is of great interest to me. It seems to me that with the number of people confined to this system, living under the conditions that many of them lived under, such groups should be ubiquitous, though I have yet to find a single one.”