Maybe it’s because of who I was before the trial. This is, after all, a place for the criminally insane. The sign on the gate says so. An unthinkable thing. Another unthinkable thing. There is no memory of what I was supposed to have done because I wrote nothing down. It must have been bad though. Some of the things they said about me at the trial. I don’t remember what they said. I didn’t write that down. I did write down that they were bad things—
—kicked me. So hard.
Going away.
Gone.
Now I’ll cry, but just to myself. I can’t ever let Hicks see me cry.
When Hicks hits me in front of the other patients, or the nurses and doctors, he does it like he’s only joking, kidding around. But the words sting. The slaps hurt. Sometimes he takes my left hand and forces me to slap my own face.
“You don’t have a pencil,” Hicks explains with a sneer. “We don’t give sharp instruments to nuts. You don’t have any paper and nothing is written on your palm. Look!” He punches my upper arm. I keep writing. Hicks grabs my hand and shoves it into my face.
“Look at your palm, Nut! Can you read anything there?” Again he forces me to slap my own face. “Look at it, you nut! Look!”
He smacks the back of my head with his open hand. Some of the patients in the rec room laugh. Most don’t. Most have Hickses of their own.
“Look at it!”
I keep writing. I need to remember as much as I can. So much is gone. Like those three dead men and the dead woman. Don’t remember killing them. That woman and those three men. Don’t even remember who they were. I was told about the results of the trial, but I don’t remember the trial.
Sometimes I pick at these pieces of memory I have, then the feelings fill me, flattening me with that burning, deafening, shock wave of rage. I can’t write like that, so I never find out what it is. Better to leave it alone.
Hicks has stopped slapping my head. I look up to see why. Hicks is chunky with long, stringy dark hair, a few strands of which come down to his shoulders. His eyebrows turn up at the ends and his nose is lumpy and bulbous like some sort of mutant potato. He isn’t very big, but it doesn’t matter. The patients can’t hit back. The last patient who hit back was taken into the storeroom behind the hospital kitchen by half a dozen orderlies and beaten to death. That’s what they tell us.
Hicks is looking at someone across the room. I look and see her: Nurse Stover. She is shaking her head and frowning at Hicks. The look says several things. He knows better than to abuse patients in the rec room. That’s why they have the padded cells: secluded, sound proofed.
Bad form, Hicks, says her look.
All these witnesses.
Bad form.
Nurse Stover yawns and goes back to reading her tabloid, freshening up her fantasy of being abducted and raped by giant grasshoppers.
I study Nurse Stover, the wisps of unruly black hair on her neck rebelling against the tight bun beneath her starched white cap.
I couldn’t rape Nurse Stover.
The idea of it repels me.
I might think differently, though, if I were a giant grasshopper.
I could cut her throat. I wonder about that, because the doctor once said that the four victims I was supposed to have killed had all been butchered. Then, because I never speak, the doctor went back to making notes.
In my little rubber room for the night. Long ago I wrote that it looks like the upholstered interior of a really cheap coffin, and that hasn’t changed.
God, I want to know who I am. I want out of here, to be free of Hicks, but to do that I have to remember my name.
It’s a rule. If I can’t remember my name, I’m crazy and they won’t let me loose. If I tell them my name, then I’m cured and can be sent back out to do whatever it is that I once did.
If I ever find out what my name is, I will write it down. I must remember to write it down. It’s important.
What was it that took my name and memory?
Was it the Misty Man?
The Misty Man had filled the corner of my cell after that one terrible beating Hicks had given me. It was like the punishment had excreted the Misty Man into existence by the sheer demand of my pain and need.
A god?
A ghost?
The projections of an other dimensional alien whose brain waves seeped through the cracks of his own dimension? That’s what I believe. He was locked up and tortured by his own kind and he reached for me the same way that I reached for him. Then we met. I saw him in my cell. He saw me in his cell.
What’s there to believe? The doctor had pushed around a pink form. He told me that I had been overworked, under great stress. Then there was a death. Then there were four more deaths.
According to the doctor.
The issue isn’t communication with aliens, the doctor had said. The issue is getting in touch with reality. The issue is getting better.
What was it? Numbers, policy, politics, habit, arbitrary rules? I was caught in a bind, assaulted by rubber stamps, there had been that embarrassment before the Foreign Relations Committee, that dressing down by the Secretary, and then someone had died.
Someone had died.
Dear, dear someone. Dear, dear one. Are you the one I fear to remember? Are you the one I walk Hell trying to forget?
Then there were great gaps torn into my memory; then the hospital and Hicks. Then came the Misty Man. The creature asked me what I wanted to do about it.
“About what?” I asked the thing.
“About life, the planet, the universe, things.” The voice was level, devoid of emotion. There were muted lights within the mist. The lights were the emotions the mind words couldn’t feel. The Misty Man cared about me. It cared about what I thought, what I wanted, about the ocean of pain in which I was drowning.
I was scared. It was the only time I ever thought I was crazy. My need, though, drove me toward the creature. The Misty Man listened to my pain. It told me how it suffered. It asked me things: How is my time? There are no days, no nights, in the Misty Man’s reality. Only mass and time.
The Misty Man was isolated from its kind, removed from its body and held in a field that rendered it powerless in its own dimension. My pain had driven my mind into the Misty Man’s dimension. There I have the power.
“Through you,” said the Misty Man, “I can have power again. Through me, you can have power again. We can have power through each other.”
If it is true, there is something I can do about my day, my year, my existence. I can bring back to life those who should have never died. I can kill those who should have never been born.
“Are these things we can do?” I had asked the Misty Man.
The creature didn’t know. We would have to try out our powers through each other and see.
“You have already slain someone for me,” the Misty Man said. It was a caretaker the shadow hated: the shadow’s Hicks. “You wanted to kill your caretaker and instead you killed mine. We must have other ways to serve ourselves by serving each other. Shall I kill your caretaker?”
I didn’t want Hicks killed. Not just right then. But it made me feel strong. It was my choice. Life or death for Hicks became my choice. He could be brought down with nothing more than my wish.
“You’re repressing the memory of what you’ve done,” says the doctor. “What you did was so unacceptable to your own moral sense, your mind refuses to admit to it. It’s a very common survival mechanism. If the past can’t be remembered, it doesn’t exist? If it doesn’t exist, then you didn’t do it. But to chop out that piece of reality you’ve lost your entire past.”