Below The Fold

They make me take that one at night. It’s supposed to help me sleep, they say. It doesn’t. The moaning in the halls keeps me up. It keeps everyone up. And then they start screaming at the people who won’t stop moaning. So the moaners just moan louder and the screamers just scream louder until finally, they send the twins in and they pick one of us out at random and beat us with one of those car antenna things. And then it goes back to quiet moans and starts all over again.
I hate the blue pill. It makes my head feel like it’s full of Vaseline. It’s like I’m looking through a dirty fish bowl at everything I see. It makes my head buzz a little, too, like the sound of a TV on a channel with no reception. And it doesn’t even help me sleep. It just confuses me a little more.
The white pills don’t bother me as much, except they make my stomach hurt and the give me the runs. That really sucks when they won’t let me out of my room. A couple times, I had to go in the corner. There’s nothing more humiliating than the look a nurse gives you when you’ve had to shit in the corner of your own room. Like you’re a helpless baby with no damned sense. But try to explain that it’s their own fucking fault for keeping you locked in a room and making you take some kind of laxative disguised as a psychotropic drug, and they tell you you’re delusional. It’s just my way of lashing out, they say, refusing to conform to the normal paradigms of civilized, decent, god-and-country-and-apple-motherfucking-pie-America. Like, me shitting in the corner of some god forsaken mental hospital was really a slight against the president and the Constitution and Thomas Jefferson and Betsy Ross and the Stars and Stripes and Charlie fucking Brown and his stupid beagle.
But try not to take the pill and see what happens. Everyone tries it. Few try more than once. That buys you a night strapped to your bed with an I.V. and a visit from one, and sometimes both, of the twins. You’ll even be begging to take the pill within a few minutes, and they’ll just laugh and keep beating you with that antenna thing.
They killed Cheese Cole just a couple weeks ago, just for not taking the pill. He grabbed the antenna thing and bent it when one of the twins was hitting him with it, so the other one grabbed Cheese by the head and whipped him around so hard, his neck snapped. They told everyone he hung himself. Cheese didn’t have a family, so no one really seemed to give a damn. The twins have been extra brutal since they got away with murder.
I have a family. At least, I did when I came here. I haven’t heard from any of them in a long time. I’m not sure how long. At least three Christmases. I really only gauge time by the holiday decorations they put up. It’s almost Easter now. The candy dish on the nurse’s station is filled with pastel colored jelly beans. At Christmas, it’s filled with green and red M&Ms.
I told Emily not to come back here after her first visit. She couldn’t handle this place. I could see it in her eyes. She was scared out of her wits. And I still looked like hell from everything that had happened. That didn’t help. She couldn’t stop crying, though she tried. She didn’t sob or lose control, but tears were streaming down her cheeks the whole time she was here. I couldn’t take seeing her like that any more than she could handle Clarence Adler playing with himself across the room as he watched us talk. I smashed his nose the next day with my elbow.
I told Emily this place would kill us both if she came back to visit. She told me I was a fool, that we could get through this. I told the staff I didn’t want to take visitors any longer. She came a few more times, but I wouldn’t see her. And then she stopped.
I haven’t heard from her since.
But I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Every night, I pray for her, and think about our wedding day and do everything I can to dream about her while I sleep—with what little sleep I get, between all the moaning. The fucking moaning. It’s getting louder. The screaming started a few minutes ago.
The twins will be coming soon.