Authors: Neal Shusterman
You can’t get in your own head sometimes. You can pace around it, you can bang it against walls, but you can’t get inside.
“That’s not a bad thing,” Dr. Poirot tells you. “Because right now the things inside aren’t doing you much good, are they?”
“Not doing me much good,” you repeat. Or is it him repeating you? You’re never really sure, since cause and effect have become as shifty as time itself.
Dr. Poirot has a glass eye. You only know because your roommate told you, but now that you look, you can see that it is slightly smaller and doesn’t track as well as the other. Dr. Poirot wears bright Hawaiian shirts. He says it’s to make his patients feel more comfortable. Dr. Poirot prounounces his name Pwah-ROW. “Like Agatha Christie’s detective,” he told you. “You’re probably too young to know the character. Times change, times change.”
Dr. Poirot has a cheat sheet that tells him everything about you. Even things you don’t know yourself. How can you even begin to trust such a person?
“Forget the troubles of the outside world. Your job now is to rest,” he says as he flips the pages of your life.
“My job is to rest,” you echo, and are mad at yourself for being unable to offer anything but an echo. You don’t know whether or not it’s the meds making you do this, or your misfiring brain.
“Your mind is in a cast now,” he says. “Think of it that way. It was broken and now it’s in a cast.”
You ask if you can have things from home, but don’t know what to ask for. You have your own clothes to wear, but no belts or jewelry. Books are allowed, but no sharp pencils or ballpoint pens either. Nothing that can be used as a weapon against others, or against yourself. They do allow writing instruments in the rec room, but they are under constant guard by the pastels.
Later that morning, your breakfast, along with your morning meds, comes up in an epic projectile puke in the rec room. You had no internal warning, and it spews out all over the puzzle table like white-water foam.
The girl who seems to spend her life at that puzzle table throws a fit.
“You did that on purpose!” the perpetual puzzler yells. “I know you did!” She has blue hair with blond roots. The roots, you suspect, are accurate measures of how long she’s been here. When you puke on her puzzle, she launches herself at you—pushes you hard against the wall, and you’re too drugged up to fight back. You have a bad bruise on your arm now, but the pain of that is also numbed, like every other part of your nervous system.
A pastel persona is quick to restrain the perpetual puzzler before she can claw your eyes out, and another one escorts you away. There are always pastel personas around, quick to respond
if someone gets out of line, and if it gets really bad, there’s security dressed in black, but you don’t think they carry weapons, because weapons are too easy for a desperate person to grab.
You hear the puzzler crying as you leave. You want to cry, too, for her lost landscape, but instead it comes out as a laugh, which makes you feel even worse, and so you laugh even louder.
85. All Meat Must Be Tenderized
You are in the White Plastic Kitchen again. There are shapes around you that sometimes make sense and sometimes don’t. Monsters of malicious intent wear ever-changing masks. Voices join in a babbling chorus, and you can’t tell what direction they come from, or what dimension—one of the standard three, or one that’s only accessible through the part of your head that hurts all the time.
Tonight you sweat. The kitchen is too hot. And it only makes your head hurt worse.
“I have a brain tumor,” you tell a disembodied mask with a clipboard hovering beside it.
“No you don’t,” it says.
“It’s inoperable,” you insist. You can’t tell if the mask is male or female. You think that’s intentional.
“Both your MRI and CAT scan showed nothing out of the ordinary,” it says, looking at the clipboard—and you don’t argue, because you don’t want to be shoved back into the cannon.
The mask grows hands—or maybe it had hands all along that were just invisible until now. You feel pressure on your upper arm, and when you look, your whole arm is wedged into the crook of a guillotine.
“Hold still, I’m just checking your vitals,” the he-she mask says.
The guillotine slices down. You watch your arm flop on the ground like a trout in a boat. You groan, and the mask says, “Too small. Throw it back, yes?” And it tosses the arm out an open window that wasn’t there a moment ago. Yet when you look, your arm is still attached to your body.
“Systolic’s still high. We’ll up your Clonidine,” it says. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll just pop your head like a balloon.”
Some of these things are actually spoken. Some aren’t. Yet you hear them all the same, and you can’t tell which words are out loud, and which are sent to you telepathically.
“Let’s have a look at that bruise. Is it tender?” He-she looks at the purple bit of flesh given to you by the blue-haired puzzle-girl.
“Hmm—nice and tender,” he-she says or doesn’t say. “Good! All our beef should cut like butter.” Then you’re left to slowly broil in your own juices.
You don’t know what this stuff is they feed the kids within these painfully bare institutional walls. Chicken, maybe? Beef stew?
The only thing you can clearly identify is Jell-O. There’s lots of it. Little bits of peaches or pineapple are mired within it, suspended in red jiggling transparency. You can relate to their plight. Especially when the meds kick in. There are times when the world is gelatinous around you, and it takes such a gathering of willpower just to move the slightest bit, it hardly seems worth the effort.
You exist from meal to meal, in spite of the fact that food means nothing anymore, because you have neither a feeling of hunger nor a sense of taste. It’s a side effect of your magical medical cocktail.
“Only temporary,” Dr. Poirot says. “Only temporary.”
Which doesn’t really mean much to you, because time no longer moves forward. It doesn’t move sideways anymore either. Now it just spins in place like a little kid making himself dizzy.
You learn to measure time by therapy sessions.
Three times a day, for an hour at a time, they corral you into a circle and force you to listen to things that are so awful you can’t purge them from your mind. A girl describes, in graphic detail, how she was repeatedly raped by her stepbrother, before trying to slit her own throat. A boy explains step-by-step what it’s like to shoot up with heroin, and sell yourself on the streets to earn money for more. The demons these kids ride are awful, and you want to turn away, run away, cover your ears, but you’re forced to listen because it’s “therapeutic.” You wonder what freaking moron decided it was a good idea to torture screwed-up kids by making them listen to one another’s living nightmares.
You tell your parents about it, and to your surprise, they are as furious as you.
“My son’s fifteen!” your father says to the head pastel. “You’re exposing him to horrors no kid should be exposed to—much less one who’s sick—and you call that therapy?”
Way to go, Dad. It’s the first sign that maybe he’s not an impostor after all.
Your parents’ complaints bring about results. A new “facilitator” takes over the therapy group to help rein things in, and keep the therapy rodeo from being overly traumatic to impressionable young minds. “I’m not here to brainwash you,” he tells us. “I’m just here to help you speak your mind.”
His name is Carlyle.
“The dreams you’re having trouble me,” the captain says. “They reek of malevolence and subversive intent.”
We sit in his study, just the two of us. He smokes a smoldering pipe stuffed with seaweed skimmed from the ocean. The parrot’s perch is empty.
“But dreams give you insight,” I point out.
The captain leans closer, the acrid smoke of his pipe stinging my eyes. “Not these dreams.”
I keep expecting the parrot to voice an opinion, forgetting that he’s not in the room. I’ve become so used to the captain and the parrot as a team, it makes me uneasy.
“The masked demons you speak of in your dreams of the white kitchen threaten to undo all that we’ve worked for,” the captain says, “and our journey will be for naught.”
I wonder if the parrot has suffered the same fate as his father, and has had an unwanted visit to the galley, which is nowhere near as sterile and bright as my dream-kitchen. Has he had an appointment with the chopping block? I’ve often thought I’d like the parrot gone, yet the thought of his absence brings me foreboding.
The captain could not have done away with him, because the captain and I are in cahoots. As long as I am a key part of both the captain’s and the parrot’s schemes, then both are safe if I make no move one way or the other. There are times I want them both to survive. There are times I want them both dead. But I live in fear of only one of them remaining.
“Listen to me well,” the captain instructs. “You must not go to the white kitchen. Keep your eyes closed to the brightness of its light. Resist that place with every fiber of your being. Everything depends on you staying here with us. With me.”
You don’t so much sleep as borrow eight hours from death. When the meds peak, and you can’t get in your head, you can’t dream either. Maybe in the earliest hours of the morning, just before
waking up, you’ll slide into your own unconscious mind, but you’ll wake all too soon.
You come to know the pattern of your particular chemical bombardment. The numbness, the lack of focus, the artificial sense of peace when the meds first hit your system. The growing paranoia and anxiety as they wane. The worse you feel, the more you can get into the treacherous waters of your own thoughts. The greater the threat from inside, the more you long for those waters, as if you’ve grown accustomed to the terrible tentacles that seek to draw you into their crushing embrace.
Sometimes you can see why you need the cocktail. Other times you can’t believe you even thought that. And so it goes, waxing and waning like a tide, both toxic and healing at the same time.
When the tide is high, you believe in the walls of this place. When the tide is low, you start to believe other things.
“Once your brain chemistry begins to settle,” Dr. Poirot says, “what’s real and what’s not real will become increasingly clear.”
You’re not entirely convinced that’s a good thing.
“He looks at maps all day long,” Carlyle, the therapy guy, tells you. “We call him the navigator.”
The kid sitting at the table in the corner of the rec room pores
wide-eyed over a map of Europe. You can’t help but be curious.
“Why do you have it upside down?” you ask him.
He doesn’t look up from his map. “Gotta break up the known patterns to see what’s really there.” It sort of makes sense. You’ve been there, so you know what he means.
With a green marker he draws purposeful lines between cities as if he knows exactly what he’s doing. The map is a wild web of green. “Solve the pattern, and it solves everything,” he says, and it gives you a chill, because it reminds you so much of yourself. You sit down across from him. He’s older than you. Seventeen, maybe. He has a faint goatee trying hard to express itself, but it’s six months short of becoming a reality.
Finally he looks up at you with the same intensity with which he scoured the map. “Name’s Hal,” he says, putting up his hand to shake, but taking it down before you can shake it.
“Short for Haldol?”
“Cute. Short for Harold, but that’s a parental designation. I am no more Harold than I am Seth, the Egyptian god of chaos. Although Seth is my middle name.”
He jiggles his marker in his fingers and mumbles words that rhyme with “middle,” and somehow that leads him to bring his pen down on Vienna.
“Mozart!” he says. “The violin was his instrument of choice. Here is where he died in poverty.” He holds the pen on the point of the city. Green ink bleeds into the suburbs. “This is where it will start,” he says. “I thought I had it yesterday, but I was
wrong. This time I’m right.”
“What will start?” you ask.
“Does it matter?” Then he mumbles, “Matter, flatter, fatter, hatter. Mad Hatter!”
He leaps up from the chair and asks the nearest pastel persona if they can put on
Alice in Wonderland
—the creepy one with Johnny Depp—because there’s something important about it, and he must view it immediately.
“We don’t have that one,” the pastel tells him. “How about the Disney cartoon version?”
Hal waves his hand in disgust. “Why is everyone here so useless?” he says, then looks at you. “Present company excepted.”
It makes you feel good to be, for once, excluded from the ranks of the useless.
They make Hal your roommate. Your old roommate, whose name and face you’ve already forgotten, was discharged that morning. Hal is moved in before the bed is cold.
“You seem to get along,” a pastel persona tells you. “Hal hasn’t been able to share a room with anyone, but you he likes. Go figure.”
You’re not sure whether that’s a compliment or an insult.
Hal arrives with an overstuffed portfolio of maps torn from atlases and pilfered from AAA.
“My mother brings new ones sometimes,” he tells me. “Every addition is a step in the right direction.”
He has written mysterious things on the lines that he draws between cities. And he orates random thoughts of profundity with such authority that you want to write them down and hang them on the wall, but they only allow writing instruments in the rec room.
“Man is often lost in a technological, physiological, astrological lack of logical existence that can best be described as a whole lot of nothing lightly dashed with an obvious hint of Scotch,” Hal says. You wish you could remember it so you could recite it to your parents, and show them that you, too, are profound—but these days things just don’t go in one ear and out the other, they actually teleport, avoiding the space between.