Hey Jack,
The hospital discharged me this morning. They pushed us out, padlocked the doors, and boarded up the windows with wooden planks. I’m sitting on a cement step outside the locked facility. There’s just enough space for my frozen butt, the bitter wind whipping spits of snow at my face, hard as beach sand. I borrowed—without permission—a defunct script pad for this letter. I’ll read it whenever I locate you, whatever state of existence you’re in, dead or alive. How many years has it been? How is your mom, Mrs. Rizzo? I had a crush on her early on. You knew that, right? Sorry if you didn’t. Got into big trouble over my crushes and mother complexes, even as a kid.
So, my phone is long gone, confiscated at the start of my commitment here. My excuse for not keeping in touch. I wonder what the smart phones are like now? Doesn’t really matter. I don’t know where anyone is living or if living, nor their situation or phone number. Everything has changed.
The air smells different than I remember it, something pungent hanging in the smog, mutating into sickly sweet when the wind blows. I don’t recognize it. Any ideas?
I’m hearing sounds foreign to my ears, things that weren’t here before, including a train riding a loose set of tracks. Reminds me of the last woman to take care of me one night; shacked up with her in the luxury suite on Huntington; the dilapidated trolley and tracks always rattling and keeping the place noisy and vibrating in the dark, everything in constant motion. That is what I recall now, along with her smile that still haunts me, showing up in nightmarish forms each night, along with my late mother’s silent presence and vigilant observation. The hospital couldn’t medicate this out of me, not the smile or rattling, nor mom watching me—all of it being a complex of associations. According to Dr. Hoo—yes, that is his name—it’s some kind of redundancy hidden in my brain’s wiring. A buried imprint, like a footprint on the moon that never erodes, unless someone or something blows on it, steps on it, or waters it. Funny guy!
“We can’t fix what we can’t find,” he told me. Adding, “But it is there somewhere!”
Yep, thanks Doc!
Sorry, I digressed. So much shit circling around my head, as always, Back on point, we received the discharge letters during dessert last night, distributed by aides here on visas with little English. They sported big smiles, not knowing the intent of the letter, nor their own fate at the facility. I felt bad for them, but didn’t want to spoil whatever moments of stress free living they had remaining.
According to the letter and high court, mental disorders no longer meet the criteria for legitimate medical conditions. They’ve been reclassified as character flaws. A hard fought victory for health insurance companies; and the pharmaceutical industry vowing to continue their own fight, recruiting “users” of their magic, mind numbing cocktails for the class action suits, so I’ve been told.
Natalia, the twenty-something tattooed nurse, gave me her cell number and said, “Don’t go without your meds, Isaac. I know where to get them, call me. You understand?” I nodded yes and she wrapped her arms around me; they felt soft and cold around my neck, not like I’d ever imagined her or any woman’s embrace: a bit unnatural, like she’d been in cold storage, but I would have welcomed more. Yeah, crossed my mind that she’s a black market robot, one of the newest models, without all the electronics being worked out, such as skin temperature control. Heard that they test these units in the psychiatric wards. Convince a paranoid patient that a robot is not a robot, and they’ve got one hell of a good product, right? That is their thinking, I suppose. Market testing never changes…the vulnerable always being the guinea pigs.
A few of us remained in the dining hall after receiving the letters, picking at our apple crisp, and deep in thought, disbelief, paranoia, delusion, or what have you. I heard some whimpers. Not sure what I was feeling, other than numb. Still feeling that way, can you tell? Maybe they’d medicated the dessert. The apple crisp was extra yummy, being my last dessert for only God knows how long. Hope they hadn’t drugged it!
I’d been chosen as the unofficial interpreter of letters, making sense of situations for the seriously confused souls among us. They’d come up to me, sometimes running, tapping my shoulder and shoving the letter in my face. I tried to break it down as simply and gently as possible.
It would go something like this:
“Hey friend. Well, seems as though the hospital is closing down tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“Not enough money to keep running it.”
“What? Why? Tell me why?”
“I don’t know why. There’s just not enough money for us anymore. Other priorities…the viruses, wars, reconstruction work, all that crime in the city, building robots, and other crap that’s more important than catering to our mental anomalies, which they don’t believe in anymore. That’s how they see it, my friend.”
A few of them yelled at me, as if I had something to do with it. I’d respond with, “Don’t shoot the messenger, my friend.” They were so paranoid that they confused the messenger with the perpetrators, telling me to watch my back on the outside. Seriously disrupted souls going out into the world. Scary thought! I tried to help, and now I’m on their hit lists. And be assured, these will be crimes of passion, me being the evil one within their mental aberrations and machinations. Ha ha…the rhyme is unintentional.
A few others cried and asked, “How can they do this to us?” and I’d say, “It’s not the hospital’s fault. Your friends here, the guys and gals in the white coats, they’re losing their jobs here tomorrow, most of them having families to support.”
But, truth be told, we couldn’t care less about them anymore. We’d never considered the doctors, nurses, and aides as anyone who existed outside of the hospital or our imaginations. They’d become our temporary surrogates of whatever we’d lost or abandoned us in the real world; the last mental vestiges of our families, friends, lovers, and enemies, but paid to care for us; role players to fit our pleasures, pains, fears, hopes. And deep down, as fucked up as we were inside, we knew the truth. The facility was like a dream in the night, a stage removed from the real world, where our old shit played out, again and again. So many stories I could tell ya, but don’t want to bore you, and my fingers are too frozen to narrate it all now.
So, following our final prep work for exile, each one of us was handed a bus ticket, six month’s script of general anti-psychotic, an identity card, a paper list of city resources, 50 dollars on Amazon plastic, and the clothes we first arrived with, which don’t fit right anymore. That was it. Time to rejoin the general population, regardless of whatever interfered with our mental functioning.
The bus dropped us downtown near city hall. We scattered in every direction, appearing disoriented and stared at like the circus just came to town: wearing our ragged, ill-fitting clothes; talking to ourselves; and squinting like we’d been living in caves for 20 years—shading our eyes from the dim sunlight filtering through the sickly sweet smog.
Made my way back here with a few others, who looked like zombies banging on anything resembling a former entrance. Now I’m the only one still here, freezing my butt off writing to you. Feeling cold and numb inside, too. Yeah, maybe they drugged the dessert, or I’m dazed and confused over my sudden exile. Where is home?
See ya soon,
Isaac
© 2023 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Notes from David 