by Leigh Lyn
THE 8TH SKY
A Psychological Novel
Leigh Lyn
Copyright © 2018 by Leigh Lyn.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover designed by Leigh Lyn.
Pebbles Publication.
Published In Hong Kong
Library Of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
‘The 8th Sky’ by Leigh Lyn
ISBN: 978-988-16751-2-5
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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Version 1
I would like to say thank you…
To my patient reviewers, for giving me precious comments and encouragements and helping me make the launch of 8th sky possible.
To my writer groups friends, for the many hours of discussions and being my friends.
To my loving mother, who is nothing like Niang, for her tireless support always.
To my lovable daughter, for being the best thing that ever came out of me.
To my friends, for supporting and distracting me with entertainment when I was blocked or bored.
Preface
The 8th Sky is a mind experiment, although I started writing it in 2009 as a memoir. Once I finished its first draft I realized how defined and hemmed in it was. I pondered how I could deconstruct the main protagonist Lin Lee’s world. I wondered if there was a way to keep the memoir format while integrating multiple points in a way that elucidates how Lin's reality is constructed. Being an architect, I came up with a spatial model for this reality. If you are interested in the ideas that inspired 8th Sky, you will find them in “Skies”, an e-book which you can download through this link and on the next page. It will add an extra layer of intrigue to the story and make the subplots in the story more meaningful. It's like finding an easter egg in a computer game!
I personally prefer to read without bothering about the signifier or signified, just experiencing the story itself. That being said, the experiment revealed that the best and worst reviews came from people who read it without peeking. They either said that it is astounding and sends their mind reeling or that they were thrown by it. Those who had the easter egg experienced the book quite differently (I used Amazon reviewers for my A tests and Goodreads reviewers for my B tests). Knowing the way 8th Sky is written gives them a decryption code that casts a bright light on what to make of the course of events and insights in the layering of the narratives. It is up to you whether you check out this easter egg after you finish the book or earlier if you need clues or if you’re scouting for reference and clues elsewhere are not as fruitful as you would have liked. I hope you’ll enjoy reading the 8th Sky as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Leigh Lyn
CHAPTER ONE
skies cover
PART ONE
Castle Peak
Chapter 1
Do you ever wonder about this mad world and how you ended up playing the role you do in it? I didn’t; I worked hard to get where I was. Until I spotted a plot hole in the narrative of my life and it crashed to a standstill.
When I woke up, the ceiling was white, the walls were white, the bedsheets, my robe, and the nurses’ uniforms were white. A white X of bandages adorned my face, under which my nose was a swollen mess of purple and blue. My head was pounding, and there were trails of light at the periphery of my vision. Overhearing the nurses say I was suffering an “acute psychotic episode,” my chest tightened and my throat closed. I began to hyperventilate. My heart was beating so fast I could hear it thrashing in my ears. All I knew was that one moment I was leading a team designing a science park and the next I was waking up to this simple diagnosis that obliterated my credibility.
A young nurse in a white uniform entered the room. Glancing at a clipboard, she muttered, “Lindsay Lee—”
“It’s Lin,” I said. “And there must have been a terrible mistake. There is no way—”
The nurse stopped me short. “Calm down and listen.”
“But this is a mistake. There is no way I belong here,” I said, not understanding or remembering how I got there.
“I’m not saying that at all, but you are at Castle Peak Psychiatric Hospital. It says here, you’re having hallucinations.”
“How would you know if they were hallucinations or not?” I shouted.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that. You’ll have to ask the doctor about the diagnosis, I’m afraid.”
“This is a fuckin’ setup.” I jumped up, realizing neither of us was getting through to the other. “I’m leaving.”
“Hang on, I’m calling someone,” she said, pressing a button above the headboard.
“Where are my clothes?”
She ignored me. Next, two men in blue hospital scrubs came in, forced me onto the bed. They held me there while the nurse plunged a needle into my arm, filling my head with vacant, black bliss.
The second time I woke up was two days later. No one bothered to talk to me to find out who I was or what had happened other than what the useless clipboard said; none of my family was allowed to visit. The whole world had amnesia except for me. Incapacitated and institutionalized, they were ready to forget me, never mind believe me.
My chest was so heavy I could barely breathe. The idea I might be stuck here, that I would never see my twin girls again, broke my heart. After hours of this, I couldn’t bear it any longer. Forcing every molecule of oxygen out of my lungs, I yelled as loud as I could, “This is a stitch up! They made us work for three days without sleep, and then beat me unconscious, because they know we’re onto them.”
They made me swallow another cup of meds. Knowing their effect, I jumped off my bed and escaped into the corridor with two nurses on my heels. As I sprinted down the ward, I kept repeating the whole thing as loud as I could. My face was stretched so tight over my skull it felt like it would rip into a million pieces. Every time I opened my mouth, I worried my heart would spill out of my throat. I was running down the corridor when someone standing at the barred gate at the end of the hall caught my eye: It was Baimaonu, my friend. I was so glad I stormed toward her. But, reaching her, I discovered she was an old man in a white lab coat. I was so shocked my mind blanked. I stared at him as he stepped back. It was his hair that had enthralled me. Billowing to the rhythm of his moves, it was long and white, bewitching as snow in June.
I gazed at him as he said, “I’m Dr. Wen. You must be Lin.”
Speechless and bewildered, all I could do was look at him.
He took his eyes off me, turned to a male nurse and nodded. They jumped on me, forced me down, and injected something into my arm. The light expired, sinking me into a deep black void, and then something strange happened. A fire roared through my mind, burning away clips of my past. When I woke up again, the angst and agony faded into a vast, mind-numbing feeling of contentedness that scared the hell out of me.
“How’s your bruise?” Dr. Wen asked, touching the mud-colored stain splashed along the middle of my face a few days later. I was in his office. In contrast to the other spacious but sterile rooms in the hospital, it was overgrown with ferns and orchids. Stretched out at the doc
tor’s feet was a white bull terrier with freckled ears and a pink tongue with a peculiar little side-slit draped over the edge of its open mouth.
“My bruise is not the problem,” I said, looking at Dr. Wen out of the corner of my eye from my place on his leather couch. “But now I know why the Chinese have yellow skin.”
“Why is that?” Dr. Wen’s eyes moved over my face and body like a coroner’s inspecting a corpse at a crime scene.
“Because we’re forever recovering from our afflictions.”
Dr. Wen smiled wryly.
“Tell me why I am here, Doctor.”
“You’ve had a traumatizing experience, and your mind is overstressed.”
“I meant the real reason why I’m here; why my mind is overstressed.”
“You’re right in the sense that your mind is not accountable for this,” he said, steepling the tips of his hands together. “Your body is. Because it’s so tough, you stayed awake and kept going for seventy plus hours. Even the strongest mind will snap after such serious sleep deprivation. Your strength became your weakness.”
It was true. Even I couldn’t control myself, but you would act this way if they woke you up in an asylum and force-fed you those damn pills morning, noon, and night. Pickled in drugs, my brain was short-circuiting, alternating long spells of oblivion and darkness with epiphanies, moments of bewildering clarity during which my mind basked in a crystal-clear light. My memories had holes I couldn’t explain. History became so malleable it terrified me that my mind could play tricks on me like that. The only thing I knew for certain was that this was orchestrated. They’d set me up.
What made matters worse was that I had no one I could confide in. I couldn’t trust any of them. Not the doctors, not the nurses and, least of all, the inmates, most of whom just looked at me with a mixture of horror and suspicion.
Once, when I managed to fool the nurses and dodge a round of the meds, I snapped out of it and blurted out, “They made me design it; those bastards are building gynecological hell holes everywhere!”
Mesmerized by the profanities lacing every sentence that came out of my mouth, I grabbed an older nurse named Frieda by her arm and pleaded, “Those friggin’ jackasses pushed and pushed until my fuckin’ mind fried.”
“Calm down and go to sleep,” Frieda said. “The doctor says you’ll feel better after you sleep it off.”
“Sleep it off? Each time I do, the meds empty my mind until there’s nothing of me left.” I wept. “They hollow out my life and imprison me in a shucked shell of bruised skin, and all you want me to do is sleep more?”
Something in Frieda’s eyes told me she knew what I was saying was true, but I knew she’d never admit it. I jumped off the bed to start my daily escapade.
“Catch her!” A young nurse screamed at two male nurses seated behind the nurses’ station. When they tried, I lunged at them and shouted, “Can’t you see you’ve been blindsided?”
“Come and tell me about it,” Frieda said.
I ran away, screaming, “They use this friggin’ madhouse to silence those who don’t comply, and what do you do? You turn a blind eye. You are just puppets in their script.”
“Calm down first,” she said, following me.
Profanities far beyond my proficiency spiced up my speech. Blunt and damning judgments came out of my mouth about people I barely knew. Along with my real allegations came bizarre ones my frantic mind added on top. The first chance I saw, I would make a run for it. They had a nurse check on me every half hour, which became fifteen minutes, then ten, and five, until they had a staff member staying in my vicinity at all times.
I still got away. But they always caught me in the end. They injected me and strapped me with leathers to a bed in an empty white room in the basement of the hospital. Fluorescent light tubes shone into my eyes, glaring artificial light turned up so bright it blinded my vision and eliminated any notion of shape or form. A mind-numbing contentedness poised in a chlorine-reeking silence replaced my thoughts. For hours I lay there, staring at the white expanse with no choice but to soak in the white nothingness. Hours became days and days became weeks. My mind cleansed, my dreams invaded, and my thoughts dismissed, I pondered how long I could take this before I ceased to be.
They untied me, but everything stayed the same. It drove me ape-shit to live in a fabricated world, yet I couldn’t bear to live in a void either. I had to stop my life from crumbling any further before there was nothing left other than a heap of disjointed thoughts and meaningless serendipitous memories. When Wendy, a young nurse, came into my room, I sat up and asked, “Can I have paper and a pencil?”
I figured that, if I wrote my thoughts down, I could check and see if they made sense or not. But she said it was against the rules, so I waited for Frieda and asked her.
“Hospital policy forbids it. But why? What do you want to write, sweetie?”
It was the first time someone had asked me what I wanted. I was so touched, tears welled up. After I explained, Frieda said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
A few minutes later, she returned and gave me a legal pad and a soft, blue crayon.
I crouched on my bed and began to write. Blue thoughts spilled out onto the page one after the other. I stopped after a few minutes to read what I had written, and my heart grew heavy. It wasn’t that it didn’t make sense; it did. It was the way the thoughts fractured and scattered over the page in front of my eyes, becoming isolated cries swamped by the emptiness of the paper. One after another, the words expired and disappeared like blue boulders sinking below the surface of a yellow lake. What were they doing to me?
Chapter 2
“Mental illness is like snow; every flake is unique, and every patient is an enigma we need to unravel,” Dr. Wen mused, at the start of our first session.
We were seated in the comfort of his office in front of a bay window overlooking the hospital’s sun-drenched garden.
“Is it?”
My eyes wandered over the happy faces in the photos populating the wall behind him, captured images of him and an elderly lady posing in an array of places with what appeared to be their grown children and their families. On a yacht, on a ski slope, at the beach. Each photo was a window into the privileged life of the man authorized to decide whether my thoughts were admissible, whether I would be buried alive, or whether I would go home tomorrow. A man I should not antagonize, yet I heard myself ask, “Or is madness an escape?”
“How is it an escape, Lin?”
Dr. Wen’s face was straight and inscrutable. Yet his eyes failed to conceal his curiosity as they examined my face and my hand, which was covering the throbbing vein in my temple. Part of me knew I was sabotaging myself. I had become an inmate; a person without any credibility because I could not contain my outraged self.
“I mean your escape, not mine,” I said, pointing at Dr. Wen. “You live in an existential swamp! You put folks who dare to speak out in this asylum. You serve the self-serving chosen ones, and for that you get to live in their comfort. In exchange you guard the collective narrative stifling those who threaten it, securing your position and the status quo. That’s how you avoid the havoc the truth would unravel in your world.”
Dr. Wen sighed. “That’s a commonly used argument here that has never been proven.”
“Of course, there are plenty of patients here who are sick, but I’m not talking about those.” Given one hour a day to air my grievance, I ran wild during these sessions. “I’m talking about those who’ve seen things we shouldn’t; who know things you don’t.”
“I am not here to argue."
“Let me finish! With your wishy-washy diagnosis, I lose all my credibility and need to prove I’m sane while you marinate my brain in drugs.” In my anguish to get it all out, I rained spittle down on a tired-looking Dr. Wen. “But you know what? You are the deluded ones. You, on your shaky pedestal in your swamp where you drown people brave enough to speak the truth.”
“What is the truth?�
�
I stared at him, feeling trapped. “My truth right now is they worked me to the bone for seventy-two hours without sleep. They beat me unconscious, and they, I mean you, drugged me until the holes in my mind grow bigger and bigger.”
“I understand you feel wronged.”
“No, you don’t. They did this to me, because I’m onto something they don’t want me to find out. And they are so desperate they’ll do anything to stop me.”
“I understand why you’re upset,” Dr. Wen said in a banal, soothing voice. “And I believe all snowflakes are precious and worth saving, which I will try if you let me.”
Upset? This place had washed over me like a nuke, wiping out everything I’d worked for my entire life. There were others like me, but most inmates had signed themselves in because they didn’t want to be sick. There was an old scientist who believed himself to be Joseph Mengele, an Emperor Qianlong, and an Empress Wu Zetian, a nameless bunch who didn’t know who or what they were, and then there was June.
June was my fresh-faced cellmate who said that Castle Peak had a case to match each disorder mentioned in the Manual of Mental Disorders. She called it their Bible. Copies of it were everywhere, referred to by doctors and nurses alike. June showed me her own, which she had nicked and hidden under her mattress. She gave me an extensive rundown of each of the patients’ disorders and their symptoms. Which were the ones to watch, which were harmless, whose bark was louder than their bite, and other insights. I was grateful I’d found a friend I could trust; that is, until one evening when I decided to turn in early. On my way to my cell, I passed the nurses’ station and overheard two nurses chatting.
