Richard went limp as the last shock finished surging through his body and left. He could smell the burnt hair on the sides of his head. His wrists were raw from pulling against the restraints and both his feet were cramping from involuntarily clenching his toes. He had flexed every muscle in his back and suddenly felt like he was entirely made of liquid.
“You can take him now. He’s had enough for one day. We’ll try again sometime tomorrow maybe.” Doctor Larson’s voice became distant as he exited through the sliding door.
Two of them came in, the larger ones, the meaner ones. They both had the dark swirling circles around their eyes. They had no definite focus in the swirls, they weren’t like human eyes in which you could tell who or what they were looking at by seeing where the pupils were. Instead the swirls had no focal point. They simply appeared to look at everything all at once. Richard could feel them looking at him, through him rather. To them he was like an animal, something to be contained and dealt with harshly whenever handled.
They undid the leather straps that held down his legs, then they pulled his arms loose. Finally one of them unscrewed the metal pegs on either side of his head and he could feel the pressure give way around his head. They lifted the metal bracket from around his forehead.
Suddenly he could feel them lifting him from the table, all the liquid lump that he was, he went with them, he couldn’t not go with them in the state he was in. His feet fell to the floor hard, although he couldn’t feel any pain, just the pressure as they hit the hard tile.
They carried him down the hall, Richard’s feet dragging behind him. They went past a lobby where he saw others who looked like patients, stumbling around what looked like a large rec room. Everything was passing in waves of clear and blurry, it was like staring through running water pouring across his vision. The hall was white, and the floor was grey, above that there was little detail. The sides of his head throbbed with spikes of pain, the top of his head felt cold, but he knew it had been partially shaved. They carried him to the end of the hall, then one of them let go and Richard fell to the floor. He heard the rattling of keys on a chain. He looked up and saw a guard pass by carrying what looked like a long black tube. Then they picked him back up, the sound of keys again hanging at one of their belts. He was once again looking at the floor. One of them gently kicked open the door they had just unlocked and they dragged Richard into a small white room.
It was monotone, monochrome, and monoform, white, white, white. It was a cell, but not padded like one would imagine in a place like this. It wasn’t a pillow of a room, but was free of opportunistic tools of self harm. It was rather plain and void of stimulus. The room was white, but did not impart a heavenly connotation, it could very well be maroon or tangerine and bear the same nothingness that it did as white. In such a vacuum of stimulus all colors could be as draining as white. At this point, Richard thought the room to be white for the shear fact that white rooms were cheaper than tangerine rooms.
There was a bed, which was nothing more than a box built into the floor with a three inch foam pad laid across the top. The pad had a tamper proof cover over it so that no one could eat themselves to death with the foam.
There was a window with bars and grating both blocking an opening that could be opened and shut electronically depending on weather. Aside from that, there was white and nothing more.
They lifted Richard to a sitting position on the bed, and when they let go he didn’t try to fight free. He was barely able to sit upright under his own power. They stood there for a moment, he figured it was to ensure he wouldn’t go face first into the tile floor. Then they exited through the same steel door they had entered. Richard heard the jingling of keys once more as his white room was locked from the outside.
After that, he just sat… he sat for what seemed like forever. His mind felt so fried, so absent of anything clear, that sitting and staring and expending no energy seemed like a fantastic idea. His eyes could only focus on the tile floor in front of him, his body could only focus on the work of breathing in and exhaling out and performing the necessary functions of the living. Although at this point, to count Richard among the living even seemed a stretch of the imagination. His mind attempted time and again to concentrate on that detail of somehow still being alive, despite all of this he now felt and experienced. It was like a self diagnostic system. His mind would send out a signal requesting status reports from the rest of him expecting the all clear and alive response, but would instead get such a dismal readout from every major faculty of his being that sitting and doing nothing may have been a survival strategy at this point.
He sat in the room where nothing moved, staring at a floor where nothing changed except for the mop streaks once a week. There was an absolute vacancy of anything noteworthy or inspiring and then suddenly there was blood; tiny droplets of blood, on the floor that had been so white. Richard looked up, his mind grasping at this source of stimulus.
At the window, looking out, stood Steven. His clothes were in tatters, scorched and burned into fragments that still loosely wove together and stayed on the man. The skin showing through from under the clothes was blackened and blistered in spots, but otherwise intact. Richard noticed that the right sleeve of Steven’s shirt was tied in a bloody dripping knot around the elbow. He had clearly lost the arm in the explosion at the station. The bottom of the knot was blood soaked and dripping small droplets of red onto the floor below.
One side of Steven’s face was scorched and blistered, and would be scarred forevermore. He looked Richard’s way briefly and saw that he had been noticed, then he turned back toward the window.
“Listen I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re scared to ask it out loud, but I still know that you’re thinking it.”
He fished in his pocket with his one good hand and pulled out a box of cigarettes. Then he shook the box and one cigarette popped out just far enough that he could clamp over it with his lips. He put the box back in his pocket and came back out with a lighter. He sparked a flame and held it to the cigarette. His bleeding stub of an arm raised up as if the ghost of a hand was helping shield the flame of the lighter. The cigarette took light and he put the lighter back into his left side pocket where everything now had to be accessed. He didn’t look at Richard, he just stared out the window. He didn’t appear to be focused on anything or watching anything particular out there, he just stared blankly as he spoke.
“It has to be right? I mean how else could a man have lived through an explosion like that? How else could I have dug myself out of the rubble of all that destruction? How else could I have gotten into this facility without being shot or arrested? How could I have been standing here in your room without anyone detecting me?”
He took a long drag of his cigarette and breathed out a large plume of smoke that filled the room with a sweet tobacco scent and then retreated to the ceiling where it could gather before being sucked into the intake vent.
“So is it true you ask, even though you didn’t but I know you are wondering,” He smiled. “Yea its true, you’re freakin nuts.” Steven raised his shoulders which held up his one good hand and his bloody stump and said, “Surprise!”
When he dropped what remained of his right arm, he accidentally flung a streak of blood in Richard’s direction. Small red droplets sprinkled across Richard’s face, but he had not the energy even to wipe them away.
“Sorry.” He looked Richard’s way and Richard realized that he, they were one in the same. Steven was just like him.
“Ok, so we’ve established that you’re crazy, no offense despite the rather stupid euphemistic dodges that the doctor uses to confuse you, you are in fact very crazy. But being crazy does not mean that we’ve been wrong this whole time. They are still trying to get to me Richard.”
He stared at Richard for a moment, but Richard just stared back not saying anything.
“No, we haven’t been wrong at all. They’re hoping to fool you now Rich. They’re hoping that they’ve finally convinced you that I’m not real. They hope that you truly believe that I’m dead, that way the appearance of me will trigger you to believe them. In which case you’ll be convinced that you’re just crazy, there are no aliens, and guess what… They win. They’re hoping that you’ll stop listening to me now, that you’ll stop trusting me.”
“I’m saying though that we’ve been right the whole time. I’ve been telling you that your friend Hays was one of them from day one. Well you can see that now. Also don’t let them fool you about that station. In a war against the aliens, that would be considered a military target. We had to destroy it, because in a war, if you want to win, you have to have allies. Now we do.
“Ever since the signal went down on that tower we had allies. People can see them and it leaves them exposed. They are chameleons but aside from that they don’t possess any real defense system nor do they have advanced weaponry. If they can’t hide they can’t win.”
Richard looked up towards Steven who offered him a cigarette. Richard shook his head, knowing that it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be, not in here.
“Suit yourself…” Steven said. He stubbed out the first cigarette and lit another. “I know what you’re thinking… You’re thinking this place is an asylum, you’re flat nuts and if you ever want out of here you better pretend as best you can that I’m not here haunting you like some kinda war mongering ghost.”
“I don’t know what I have to do to get you to trust me Rich, but I’m the only one who you can trust. You think this is an Asylum, and they've put you here because you are a danger to society. The reality of it is that this place is more like a prison, a POW camp in the war against the aliens. All those people we passed in the hallway, are people they are studying. We are all people they fear might jeopardize the invasion effort.”
“We are prisoners of war now Rich. One day, the human resistance will look back and realize this is where it began. They’ll realize what we already know, that crazy people see aliens. Over time they’ll piece it together and know that all of it began with one man, with you Richard. They’ll call you a hero, the savior of humanity even. For what you did at that station, they’ll build monuments after you. It will be hailed as the first crucial blow against the alien invaders.”
“The only thing you have to decide is if it all has to end here. They’ll form a resistance and that resistance will need a leader. You should be that leader, Richard, they’ll listen to you because you can see them and you know how to stop them.”
“Now I know you noticed the guard outside, I think you may have been too drugged up to realize that he was carrying a shotgun. Now if this were only a mental asylum, what would be the need for the guard to be armed like that?”
“This is an installation, they’ve commandeered it and militarized it and now it’s a stronghold. They are still holding onto the notion that if they can win with you and these other poor souls, then the radio station and the aftermath going on now can become just a setback.”
“The people here are the last remnants of the first war, the war to win over the human mind. We represent the parts of the human mind that they just can’t quite get around. They can’t figure out how to hide from you and these people. If we can escape, we would essentially be the secret weapons against the invaders, the special forces.”
Richard continued to just stare, emotionless and indifferent.
“So I guess this is the point that you have to make a decision Richard. To me, its a very big decision, something that will impact the fate of humanity as we know it. If you trust me, then you know the importance of what I’m asking. If you think this is how they say, all in your head, then you don’t really need to do anything and it would be in your best interest not to mention this conversation if you wish to avoid more electroshock treatment. I’m a sickness and you can’t listen to me anymore.”
“Either way Richard, it’s time to cowboy up and make a choice, aliens or phantoms, invaders or illusions. It’s up to you, Rich. You hold all the cards now. Are we gonna figure out how to get that shotgun and take this war to the next level, or do we play good boy now and take the pills they push you? What’ll it be Richard?”
Richard stared at Steven for a long time, then he looked out the door as if considering the complexity of both scenarios, finally he looked toward the window. He strained to hear the sounds of war, the sirens and bombs and upheaval of chaos. Then he listened for the placid sounds of normalcy, but there was no sound through the window. There was no smell, except the smell of Steven’s cigarette. It was the only thing floating into Richard’s perception in the white vacuum of that room.
He looked back at Steven.
“Well?” Steven asked impatiently.
Richard smiled.