Authors: Denise Mathew
“But she’s always writing,” Norm protested.
As soon as Kaila’s six-foot-two frame had been pulled away from Norm, she went limp in Lou and Trip’s arms. When she did, as was the arrangement, they released Kaila. She stiffened her spine, standing erect. Though the fury that had temporarily set her mad had passed, she knew what would come next, sleep. As protocol warranted, a sedative was in her future. She hated the woozy feeling that the needle left with her, but was cheered that she could predict the future, know something before it was going to happen.
Norm shifted his arm. There was another loud pop when his shoulder slipped back into place. Then he was on his feet, looking quite like the cat that had eaten the canary. He hiked up his navy sweat pants that rode low on his scrawny physique, then went to retrieve his glasses now positioned beneath the chessboard table. Two patients sat focused on their chess game both wearing apt expressions as they pondered their next move. They were oblivious to Norm’s retrieval or the prior ruckus that had just ensued.
Nurse Jill, a regular on the day shift, rushed toward the three of them, a hypodermic needle was gripped in her pudgy hand. As she approached, Kaila heard the swish of Nurse Jill’s pantyhose covered thighs, rubbing together beneath the crisp white nurses uniform that nobody but Nurse Jill still wore. She even insisted on wearing a stiff pointed nurses hat pinned to her thick curly hair. Her attire was quite old-fashioned which begged the question of just how old she was. To Kaila, Nurse Jill seemed ageless, somewhere between forty and sixty-five, but most people said she was somewhere closer to the latter. Kaila had no idea if that was true or not, either way it never really mattered much to her.
“You’re going to feel a little pinch,” the nurse said.
Kaila nodded mutely. She hated the sedative more than anything else in the world, but knew that she deserved it. Norm had caught her right at the exact time when she was making a breakthrough, writing something that people around the world would read and by just reading it would know her. Faceless people would know that she knew things that others didn’t, or at least that Trillian did, and they would see the authority in her words. Now she was going to sleep an unnatural slumber, and even after she woke up again she knew it would be a while before she and Trillian could write again.
The poke of the needle in the flesh of her upper arm was as familiar as it was unwanted. Kaila had at least half a dozen outbursts in a week. Sometimes there were more, and a few times less, yet the sum of events hovered around the same number. Of course if Norm was in a particular type of mood to bug Kaila it pushed to the higher side of the range.
As her eyelids fluttered with the oblivion that would soon take her away, she watched Norm, his glasses askew on his bony face. He studied her with his dark eyes. Trip and Lou were there again, holding her as she fell into their grasp, but it didn’t matter anymore, the edge of resistance had been frayed by the drugs. There were no dreaded spiders only Norm. His smirk of satisfaction was the last thing she saw before she slipped away.
CHAPTER 2
“I have no idea why she lets Norm do it to her, I mean he does weird shit to all of us but Kaila is the only one who reacts. It’s exactly what the perv wants, you know…”
Kaila cracked one eye. Her roommate Pauline was sitting cross-legged on the bed opposite to hers. Janelle, a new girl who had been admitted for an attempted suicide, was sitting across from Pauline. Janelle’s attempt, or whatever she had been planning to do to herself when she had smashed a cars headlights and eaten the interior light bulbs, was by far the most original suicide attempt to Kaila’s recollection.
Janelle was a plump girl with perpetually greasy hair, Kaila wondered if she even showered and if she did, if she bothered to shampoo her hair. As if tuning in to Kaila’s return to the lucid world, the two girls turned their gaze toward her.
“So, sleeping beauty is awake,” Pauline said.
She tossed her ebony hair over her shoulder and gave Kaila a crooked grin, where only one side of her mouth went up while the other side remained frozen. It was the side effect that Pauline had been left with after her first failed suicide attempt, which had involved a gun in her mouth. From what Pauline had said she had been a crappy shot and had managed to blow through her cheek, severing a nerve that allowed her to smile. Reconstructive surgery and carefully placed hair mostly covered the botched attempt, but the lopsided smile could never be hidden.
Her most recent admission had been her tenth suicide attempt. This time she had tried to kill herself by funneling the toxic exhaust fumes through a hose connected to the tail pipe of her car into the cab where she sat. All of this had occurred inside Pauline’s garage. The carbon monoxide monitor had alarmed and her parents had caught her long before she’d had a chance to die.
Without responding, Kaila pushed up onto her elbows, casting her eyes around the room as if for the first time. She skimmed over the space that had been hers since as far back as she could remember. This, as much as the rest of the place, was home. Sparse furnishings, mismatched wood and metal, all older than she was, but all hers. Even though the proprietors of the facility had tried over and again to update the room, she had fought the improvements.
Kaila had however, allowed the soft yellow walls to be repainted every two years. She ignored, and in doing so accepted, the curling posters of the things that mattered very little to her, things that the staff and previous roommates felt added to the ambiance. There were images of cuddly kittens, pictures with words of encouragement emblazoned across the front and also quotes that were supposed to be uplifting, imparting love and the fixings to the patients who felt so unloved.
Not that Kaila felt unloved, because to feel unloved you needed to know what love meant and so far that had been something that had eluded her. Love was what everyone talked about, flinging the word around like it was a tennis ball that could be tossed wherever they wanted. Somehow she knew that it was much more than that, though nobody really understood her belief. But that was the truth of it, nobody but the people that read her words in her blog understood what it all meant, what she and Trillian meant.
When Kaila spotted her laptop computer, slim, silver and everything that was real to her, on top of the table next to her bed, she sighed and flopped back onto the bed. She was comforted that everything was in order.
“I don’t know why you let that twisted perv get you going, you know I’ve heard that he actually gets off on you jumping him,” Pauline said, shifting her body in Kaila’s direction.
“I know, he likes my body on his, he told me so,” Kaila said.
She rested the back of her hand against her forehead.
“Shit, that’s just messed up weird Kaila,” Janelle said, shaking her head.
“I wonder what it would be like to have sex with him,” Kaila said, once again pushing up onto her elbows.
Her head still felt floaty and unfocused, a feeling that she knew would be with her for at least another day. For some reason she never seemed to be able to clear the drugs from her system as fast as the other patients seemed to, but that was probably because she had the most injections of any other residents in the place.
Pauline made a fake retching sound and grimaced.
“Don’t even say that, it’s disgusting Kaila, I mean I would rather have sex with Mr. Shull than Norm.”
Kaila stared at Pauline dumbly.
“Mr. Shull?” she repeated, “he’s like nine-hundred-years old…I don’t even think he can get an erection. Norm always gets an erection when I beat him up, I feel it through his sweatpants.”
“Fuck Kaila that’s beyond gross. Norm is gross. Don’t you remember why he’s in here?” Pauline said. Now the moving side of her mouth was curved down, matching the paralyzed side.
“For having sex with dead girls,” Kaila said in a flat tone.
“Among other things,” Janelle chimed in.
Although Janelle was relatively new to the facility, she was already well schooled about the patients in the place.
“Can we just drop the subject,” Pauline cut in.
A lock of hair had fallen forward and away from the star-shaped scar on her left cheek. She pushed it back into place where it once again hid the remembrance of her self-inflicted wound.
“But I wonder what it would feel like. I’ve seen those pornos on the Internet and the girls do a lot of moaning and they screw up their faces in weird ways. Do you think that’s what I would look like?” Kaila said, directing her question toward Pauline. Pauline’s expression was locked in repugnance.
“Kaila, I told you before those pornos aren’t a real representation of sex, it’s all overacting. Whoever taught you how to bypass the Net Nanny so you can watch porno in he first place should be shot, ” she said in a voice one might use to talk to a child.
In truth as intelligent as Kaila was, she was equally naïve having lived fifteen of her twenty-five years in the confines of the facility.
“His name was Stefen and you can’t shoot him because he’s already dead.”
Pauline released an exasperated sigh.
“Maybe I’ll invite Norm into the storage closet. I know that girl with the Mohawk haircut and the nose ring had sex with that guy David in there…” Kaila started to say.
“Well shit, I’d have had sex with David too if he’d have asked me,” Janelle piped in. David had been a university football player who had accidentally overdosed on cocaine, but had survived to tell the sordid tale. He hadn’t been in very long but the time he had been in Wildwind, the storage closet had built quite a reputation.
“I’m not sure if I would have wanted to go in the closet with
him
,” Kaila said.
She crossed her arms across her plain white cotton t-shirt that looked exactly the same as every other t-shirt in her drawer. Wearing anything other than white tees and grey fleece sweat pants made Kaila feel nervous. In fact wearing any colors other than white and grey caused her so much anxiety that the staff, and every one of her prior roommates, never bothered to suggest that she change her attire no matter what the occasion. Even shifting the colors by wearing a grey shirt and white pants was cause for an outburst, that resulted in a sedative and a few days of added meds. Kaila was a creature of habit and anything that diverted slightly from the expected was cause for panic, something that usually resulted in a violent act. Most times it had involved an inanimate object like a chair or a television, of late it was all Norm.
“You’d go in with
Norm
, but not David?” Pauline asked, placing exaggerated emphasis on the word Norm. She screwed up her face in rancor.
Kaila nodded. Pauline threw up her hand, halting the conversation. “We seriously need to change this subject because if we don’t I’m not going to be able to get my breakfast down.”
“Breakfast,” Kaila repeated.
She suddenly realized how famished she was. She wasn’t sure when she had eaten last only that it had been quite a while ago.
“Yeah, we should get going,” Janelle said, glancing down at the large-faced black plastic watch, strapped to her left wrist. “The dining room stops serving food in half an hour.”
“Honestly Janelle, is that all you can think about? Food?” Pauline asked.
She rolled her eyes in Janelle’s direction.
“You definitely could stand to lay off a few meals.”
Janelle puffed up as if she was going to say something nasty. Before she could, Pauline grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a long open-mouthed kiss that left Janelle lost for words.
“Maybe you need to take Janelle in the closet,” Kaila said, arching an eyebrow in their direction. After a kiss that seemed to go on forever, the two girls finally broke apart.
“Maybe I already have,” Pauline said, winking at Janelle.
A blush worked its way up the rolls of Janelle’s neck. Even darker red splotches colored her cheeks seconds later.
“I’ve seen pornos with women having sex too and…” Kaila started.
“Don’t even go there,” Pauline said.
She threw her hand up, signaling for Kaila to stop talking.
Pauline grabbed Janelle’s hand in hers and they both stood up. Now that the two of them were on their feet, the absolute absurdity of their pairing was more than visible to anyone with eyes. Janelle was short and squat, with buckteeth, rounded cheeks and acne that covered every part of her face in bulbous red pimples, that looked ready to explode at the slightest provocation. Her massive breasts always seemed too big to be accommodated by any of the multitude of tops that she wore. No matter what style, fabric or weave that she donned, the material crossing her bust line was consistently pulled taut, looking more than a little uncomfortable. In absolute contrast, Janelle’s hips were boyishly straight, her legs twig-like, giving her a figure like that of an apple with two toothpicks stuck into its base.
Pauline was mixed race, her mother was of Swedish descent, her father Japanese. Pauline was the best parts of the mixing of the gene pools. She was statuesque with the figure of a super model. With her hair obscuring the sins of her past, she was nothing short of magazine worthy. Pauline’s full lips, high cheekbones and crystalline blue eyes, made her a presence to behold. Her skin was flawless, like that of a porcelain doll; it cut a sharp but pleasant contrast with her silky midnight black hair. The fact that she almost always dressed in unrelieved black only accented her near perfect form.
Pauline released Janelle’s hand just long enough to pretend to tug an invisible rope attached to Kaila. Kaila responded to the untouch that felt like a touch to her. She leapt up from her thin-mattressed bed that was standard for the facility. Though the bedspreads had seen changes over the years, going from floral to geometric designs to the current solid lilac, the metal-framed beds with the curved, railed headboard had remained the same.
Kaila didn’t know how old the beds were, only that they had been the same style as they had been fifteen years before when she had first come to live in the facility.