by Livian Grey
Time
© Livian Grey
2017
30/3 Productions Ltd.
Based, unfortunately, on actual events.
Time is a precious thing, yet Jeffrey is squandering in this vacancy. His fingers, usually nimble, now bordering on arthritic and useless from the drugs, fumble to roll his cigarette. His thumb will struggle to ignite his lighter, he won’t get any real relief from the hit, and he can’t have a snifter of something to settle his jangled nerves.
He waits for breakfast. You can’t eat before seven thirty and you’re awake at five, so that’s your problem. There’s free coffee, what more do you want? He waits for his pills. Morning routines are hindered by other patients. His world wakes up and soon he’ll be fed his medication that will have his head fuzzy enough to go back to bed. Then he’ll be forced up again for therapy at ten.
And so it goes. Meals, groups, meds. Lights out. That’s the day gone. Multiply by five, that’s your week, wasted.
Weekends, the therapy room is closed, obviously. The weekend skeleton staff leave a couple of newspapers out and unlock the board games — with their missing pieces and torn rule books — and leave them on the table in the rec room.
He writes to ignore the others and their stupid comments. Their ignorances. He’s not one of them, he doesn’t think the way they do. The TV blares, now with cheap cable, more channels to bore him and dozens more locked out.
Nothing works. Inside his body, all is a mess. Two weeks after starting his new meds, he can just take a piss, but a comfortable shit is out of the question. As for his dick, it’s less responsive to the visions he has in his head of his love long gone.
Jeffrey in a locked unisex ward. It’s a modern hospital, and there’s a bed shortage issue, so the state allows for this. Some of the inmates (“patients” doesn’t fit in this context, not in his mind) have shady backgrounds that they’ve yet to be sprung for. There’s one who stalks a younger girl, constantly trying to coax her somewhere secluded so he can grab at her middle and push himself up against her. She keeps her head down, demanding he leave her alone and heading to her room where she cries into her pillow, feeling abandoned.
Jeffrey likes her, so he keeps his distance and observes. He incriminates the stalker, tells the orderlies to keep a better eye on him whenever he’s around her. This rotation may pay attention, the next will forget, the head of staff that day neglecting to put it in the notes.
So then he’s unwittingly assigned to being her protector. She’s only twenty-two. The stalker; the tall, slightly hunched, leering piece of shit, is pushing thirty. Our hero in this is thirty-five and feels eighty. Doped up and ineffectual.
Carolyn, the damsel, returns to the rec room with her book and curls up on one of the battered armchairs. The stalker stops in the doorway, hovers, staring without blinking and finally says her name. She doesn’t react.
‘Fuck off, Charles,’ our hero says to him. ‘Leave her alone.’
Jeffrey has bulk and can square Charles off, and he doesn’t need to stand to prove it. Now he’s introducing himself as a threat to this pervert, it works to good effect. Charles retreats, scowling and suspicious he’ll lose his girl to him. Carolyn looks up at the door, sees the threat now gone, and turns her attention to Jeffrey.
‘Thank you,’ she mumbles.
He makes a smile, or rather some simulacrum of a smile. Crooked, awkward. Creepy. Though not as creepy as Charles, it seems.
She doesn’t shy from him. ‘What’s your name?’ she asks him.
‘Jeffrey,’ our hero just manages to answer.
She’s warming to him, and she approaches, her thumb in the place of her book. She sits at the table across from him, brighter now.
‘You don’t talk much,’ she says.
‘Not much to say.’
She nods at his notebook. ‘Are you a writer?’
‘Not by trade.’
‘Been here long?’
‘Two weeks almost.’
She’s new. In Charles’s eyes, nothing but new meat. The women who are usually detained here are in their forties, recovering alcoholics or prescription drug addicts, mothers struggling to care for their ungrateful families. They cry over so little. They end up in supermarkets staring at boxes of cereal with crippling indecision. The most benign comments trip them up.
Carolyn is different. She’s childless, educated and has been committed for stress related psychosis. Accused by her physicians of seeing things and hearing voices, it’s clearer to Jeffrey from her descriptions that it’s a case of delusions of reference, another thing entirely. The TV’s not talking to her or saying her name, it’s not even saying anything that can’t be heard by anyone else but her. She’s just convinced the message is for her. At her worst, she can hear a call to arms from the most mundane of messages.
He’s better educated for his time in this hole; more perceptive, because he’s with the inmates twenty four seven and not half an hour three times a week, like the docs. He knows himself and he knows who’s faking to get out of a real detention in a real prison. The Blue ward upstairs is full of men pleading for treatment for their rapist tendencies, begging not to be thrown in jail where they’ll end up victims themselves.
‘I got some smokes,’ she says. ‘You want one?’
‘Okay.’
The small enclosed garden outside sits on the edge of the local wetlands, and odd prehistoric birds duck under the gates in the morning to pick up orange peels and apple cores, the waste of the fruit the patients are given that the stores can’t sell: the defects. So fitting.
Jeffrey sits with her on one of the benches and Carolyn offers him a cigarette. He accepts the gift, seeing they’re weaker than his usual brand.
Her fingers are painfully thin, and so is she. Not an anorexic, according to her, she just struggles to eat when she’s stressed. But the pills make her ravenous. She stuffs her face when she isn’t hungry, and sometimes lies awake at night thinking of huge slices of cake she wouldn’t normally want. She’s as annoyed, pent up and agitated as he is. She glowers at their jailers, sneering at them one day then refusing to acknowledge their presence the next. She’s biding her time, waiting to go home.
She has a boyfriend who rarely visits, who’s probably cheating on her because she’s too high maintenance. Hot and crazy just isn’t popular anymore. The manic pixie dream girl, according to her, is a myth; a beautiful muse invented by boyish writers and idealists. You forgot the mania part. It’s not nice to trivialise a manic girl, she says. She has lows. Crushing lows. Suicidal lows. And where are these boys when this happens? Dreaming of a girl who doesn’t even exist while washing their hands of the one they’re with, who won’t stop weeping uncontrollably.
‘Don’t insult me,’ she grumbles to these boys in conclusion. ‘Don’t patronise me.’ Those are the words she wishes she’d said but didn’t.
Jeffrey listens to her complaints without comment or judgement. It’s not something she’s granted often. He likes her, and not for her pretty face or svelte body or wispy brown hair. He looks past the scars where she’s picked at her blemishes as a teen and the sallow skin under her eyes. She’s more human than he is. More real and honest.
‘What about you?’ she asks.
‘I live alone. It makes sense for me.’
‘Anyone been to visit?’
‘They don’t know I’m here. Checked myself in after a drinking binge. I’m just waiting till the new meds kick in, then I’m out again.’
‘Lucky you,’ she smirks bitterly. ‘I’m involuntary. I have to stay twenty-eight days.’
‘You seem to be doing better than when you came in.’
‘Comparatively.’
‘Carolyn,’ one of the male orderlies calls from the door. ‘Visito
r.’
‘Who?’ she asks, stumping out her smoke.
‘Boyfriend, I think.’
She’s annoyed. She’s having a nice time talking to her new friend.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she mumbles to Jeffrey.
He’s just as irritated, her company is congenial enough that she’s taken his mind off his litany of troubles.
Back in his room, he unlocks his drawer where his personal belongings live. He’s responsible for all these things now. At the start, it’s all kept behind the nurse’s station in marked plastic containers, the room numbers written on tape stuck to the lids. When you have your shit together, you get your stuff back. He has a small mp3 player, and he sits on his bed, playing Bach loudly into his eardrums, drowning out the white noise in his head.
Charles is protesting, shouting down the corridors. He wants to make a phone call. He wants his meds now. He wants… He’s a
