Dr. Patel’s indulgent smile returned. “Your mind’s been telling itself a little story. A very convincing story, but a story all the same.”
I shook my head, remembering the timbre of her voice, the warmth of her body. “You can’t just make up another person. That’s ridiculous…”
Dr. Patel looked over at the others. “I think that will be sufficient for today.”
“I’m telling you—”
“We’ll have plenty of time to go over all this later, Mr. Mallory. Right now, it’s important that you rest.”
An invisible wall went up between us as he bent over his voice-recorder, leaving the others to descend on me with helpful smiles. Back in my room, I stared at the blank little TV mounted next to my bed. A chair for visitors sat at my side, empty since I’d been admitted two days before. Above the chair, a frosted window offered plenty of light but no view. The curtain around my bed was half-shut, separating me from my roommate—a thin, white-haired man who spent most of his time humming a tune I found vaguely familiar. At the moment, he wasn’t humming but whispering something I couldn’t quite make out. As I strained to hear, a sturdy, cheerful-looking nurse strode in with some pills and a glass of water. “Well hello, my dear! My name’s Meredith. I’ll be the nurse on duty this morning. You need anything at all, just push your call button by your side there, and I’ll come running, all right? Now, Dr. Patel has prescribed these for you…” She set the pills on a narrow table beside me. “You’ll want to take them with food so they don’t upset your tummy. I can get you some pudding or cookies, if you like.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I said.
“Well, how about some saltines? Just so you have something in you.”
“Do I…” I lowered my voice, not wanting to sound combative. “Do I have to take those?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Dr. Patel would like you to take them.”
“I understand that.” My voice quavered and I tried to smooth it out, to sound reasonable. Sane. “But do I have to take them?”
“No one will force you to take them,” Meredith said. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
I thought about the state I’d been in when I arrived at the hospitaclass="underline" strapped to a gurney, naked and bellowing, fighting anyone who tried to lay hands on me, snapping at them with my teeth.
“Um… were you here on the weekend?” I asked.
Meredith shook her head. “I had the weekend off. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” I gestured at the pills on the table. “So… you think I need those?”
“Dr. Patel seems to think so,” she said, diplomatically.
“What do you think?”
“I think he’s very good at his job.”
Her smile remained friendly, her gaze steady and calming. I felt a hard stirring of physical attraction and looked away. “I think,” I said, “I’ll just wait a bit. If that’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“All righty. Well, buzz me if you change your mind.” She took the pills back and left me alone with my neighbour, who’d gone quiet. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but after a minute he started humming that same maddeningly familiar tune.
For nearly a week, Meredith brought my pills with breakfast and took them away again when I politely refused. The terms of my confinement weren’t entirely clear, but I knew that the main door to the ward was locked and monitored with cameras. I could have visited the day room, but chose to remain in my own room, where my neighbour’s humming had begun to grow discordant and agitated. On his daily rounds, Dr. Patel insisted that I was never going to make any progress without medication, but Meredith never pressured, lingering in the room a few minutes to talk about the weather or innocuous stories in the news. When I finally worked up the nerve to tell Dr. Patel that I intended to refuse the medication indefinitely, he sat down in the visitor’s chair with my chart, looking mildly exasperated. “Do I need to remind you what brought you here?”
I didn’t answer and he jotted a note in my chart.
“It’s an illness, Felix. Just like diabetes or hypertension. The nature of your illness prevents you from recognizing this.”
“You weren’t there,” I said. “You can’t say for certain that it wasn’t real, that there isn’t some other explanation for what happened.”
“What I know,” Dr. Patel said, “is that you have nothing to lose by giving medication a chance.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
The next morning, I woke feeling that someone had been sitting in the visitor’s chair, watching me while I slept. Tiny particles of dust swirled in the narrow band of sunlight pushing through a gap in the curtains. The room was unusually quiet, the noise of faraway traffic just audible above the hiss of the ventilation system.
“Jasmine,” my neighbour said, in a sudden, loud voice, as if issuing a command, as if the name were a verb, something I was being instructed to do. I stared at the curtain dividing our beds, waiting for him to say something else. Then the door opened and an orderly rolled in with our breakfasts. I shut my eyes, pretending to be asleep. Once the orderly had gone, I chewed on a piece of dry toast and watched the curtain closely.
When Meredith came in a few minutes later, I told her that I wanted to take the pills.
“That’s good,” she said, looking genuinely pleased.
“I want to,” I repeated, “but I don’t know if I can.”
“Why not?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that my trips though time made me feel unique, that without them, there would be nothing to separate me from the pale man. She sat on the edge of my bed and smiled. She offered no advice, no platitudes, just her simple, calming presence. “Okay,” I muttered, and picked up the pills. After I’d taken them, she squeezed my hand and gave me a proud look. I flushed, absurdly pleased with myself. Before I could find the words to thank her, she stood up and carried on with her work, leaving me alone on the bed, straining to hold onto the warmth she’d briefly pressed into my hand.
For the next month, I took my pills every morning. Dr. Patel came and went, asking pointed questions, making small dosage changes based on my responses, calibrating me like a finicky machine. Gradually, the world around me felt more permanent. Time passed—slowly, predictably. My fixation on the past softened. My unimportance reasserted itself. People remained terrifying, but the intense paranoia I’d been experiencing abated.
Twice a week, I met with Dr. Howard, a distractingly attractive psychologist who favoured short skirts and high heels. Her fingers were conspicuously bare and she wore abstract little brooches that drew your eye to the exposed skin at the base of her throat, a prelude to cleavage, somehow more enticing than actual cleavage. She had a bizarre fixation on my childhood, teasing out old traumas, while I sat in a state of semi-aroused panic and responded with as few words as possible, wanting desperately to return to the quiet of my bed.
Meredith was different. She understood, or at least respected, my need to be closeted away and never tried to coax me out further than I was comfortable with. She had big motherly arms, solid thighs and a short, practical hairstyle. When she stepped into my personal space, my anxiety levels still went up, but only slightly. Unlike Dr. Patel, she treated me exactly as she would have treated someone with a physical illness, without judgment. She asked concrete questions about my life: where I grew up, where I went to school, my favourite bands and movies. She patiently listened to my halting replies, before sharing little details about herself—how she’d backpacked through Europe and Asia in her early twenties, then worked her way through college in a supermarket deli; how she was obsessed with reality television, and preferred nonfiction to fiction, and magazines to books. When she occasionally touched my arm for emphasis, the shape of her hand stayed long after she’d gone, like an impression in wet sand.