The patients in ward J3 are arguing in the communal lounge over reruns of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
“Who sang ‘Islands in the Stream with Dolly Parton’?” Regis Philbin asks jovially.
The new guy, who’s only been here five hours and hasn’t felt the full effects of his meds yet repeats, “Kevin Bacon, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Bacon,” under his breath over and over, spittle frothing at the sides of his mouth. The group’s usually placid mother-figure screams, “Kenny Rogers! It’s Kenny fucking Rogers!” jumping up and down. The old guy who’s been here longer than the nurses yells, “Pamela Anderson,” although it’s not even listed as a possible answer. But he yells Pamela Anderson every time he’s asked any question from his name to does he need the toilet. The Kevin Bacon repeater talks faster and louder, gripping the sides of the chair so hard his hands are bone-white slabs. Seconds later, he’ll smash them into the centre of Pamela Anderson’s throat leading to two nights in isolation.
The guy slumped comatose at the back pushes his chair into a corner, watches the TV over their heads as the riot breaks out. The host reveals the answer, and he marks a letter on a serviette then tucks it into his sleeve. He hasn’t got a single answer wrong since he checked in two months ago. If he was really on the show, he’d be eleven million dollars richer by now.
He was a lawyer once. A really good one with famous clients and an impeccable history. He was hardly ever home. In his head, he knew it was because he was working to build a good life for his wife and young daughter. This was so obvious to him that he never said it out loud, just went to work every day at dawn and came home after dark, day after day, every day the same. Until the day he came home, and everything was different; the house was empty, all signs of previous occupancy evaporated, not a rattle or a lip gloss left behind. In the days after he’d wondered whether they’d ever existed or if he’d only imagined them.
Too practical and undramatic for suicide, he needed somewhere where he could exist without exerting any effort, his pain pleasantly medicated away.
He knew what it took to end up in a place like J3, several of his clients had gone through breakdowns. You just had to be a massive public inconvenience, something the authorities wanted to clean up quickly.
A visit to the supermarket in the nude where he recited Chaucer to a watermelon had got him his initial arrest and when he committed a series of defecating incidents in the pot plants surrounding the town hall on a busy Saturday he was taken in the back of a van to ward J3.
This was his lot now, sometimes he wrote poetry on the toilet, but most of the time he just sat, staring and breathing. He never wants to leave, he can never reintegrate into a world without his wife and daughter.
He remembers them in infinite detail, like minutely pixelated portraits in his mind. He spends hours manipulating their features in his memory, bending his wife’s mouth at the corners into a smile or narrowing his daughter’s jawline and elongating her profile to imagine how she’ll look as a young woman. He’s grateful for the relief of the meds round every four hours, one hundred micrograms of Clozapine makes their faces fuzzy for just over an hour before every detail reappears as if they’re standing right in front of him. His daughter was only fourteen months old when they left and would have forgotten him completely by now. Memory was a peculiar thin
The lounge room riot was easing, the new guy had been marched out by the nurses and everyone had fallen into daytime television catatonia again. He wondered how many of them were disguising their trauma as mania too, perhaps failing to belong in today’s world was the new definition of sanity. One of the nurses looked towards him at the back and whispered something to her colleague. They were getting suspicious; it would be time for him to restate his need to be here soon. Last time, he ate the goldfish in the psychiatrist’s office, but he sensed this was a bit tame, bordering on someone acting like they were having a breakdown rather than actually in the midst of one. Everyone had their own opinions of madness these days, it was like some bizarre performance review where you had to prove your insanity hadn’t slipped.
He stared forwards at the screen unflinching, allowing his mouth to fall slack so drool seeped down his chin. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? The problem was that they had too much time to think. This was hardly nursing, the TV did most of the work.
It struck him just like that, the means to the most enormous inconvenience – probably the biggest riot ward J3 had ever seen. Before they knew what was coming, he jumped up and sprinted towards the TV where he started beating Regis Philbin to a pulp, elbowing and headbutting the screen, cold plastic soothing against his skull. There was a crack and a fizz, and the television died. In seconds, he felt hands on his collar pulling him back, the patients piled in with punches as alarms sounded. One well-aimed blow hit his temple and the world began to spin.
The last thing he thought of before he passed out was his daughter, looking up from her pram, not long after she’d said ‘Da-Da’ for the first time. Looking up at him like he was the most important thing in the world. He reached towards her thinking for a moment she was real, and then everything went black, and he fell backwards into nothing.
