'It's Mister Klein from the Wellness Center.'
The name seemed vaguely familiar. It had a distant quality, as if it belonged somewhere in the recollections of childhood, not something current. I bent my head to the door, trying to fix a face to the name, and slowly features came into shape in my imagination. A slender, balding man, with thick glasses and a slight lisp, who rubbed his chin nervously near the end of the afternoon, when he grew tired, or else when one of his client patients wasn't making progress. I wasn't sure that he was actually there. I wasn't sure that I could actually hear him. But I knew that somewhere a Mister Klein actually did exist, that he and I had spoken many times in his too-bright, sparse office, and that there was a slim possibility that this was indeed him.
'What do you want?' I demanded, still standing by the door.
'You've missed your last couple of regularly scheduled therapy appointments. We're concerned about you.'
'Missed my appointments?'
'Yes. And you have medications that need to be monitored. Prescriptions that probably need filling. Would you please open the door?'
'Why are you here for me?'
'I told you,' Mister Klein continued. 'You have been regularly scheduled at the clinic. You have missed appointments. You've never missed appointments before. Not since your release from Western State. People are concerned.'
I shook my head. I knew enough not to open the door.
'I'm fine,' I lied. 'Please leave me alone.'
'You don't sound fine, Francis. You sound stressed. I could hear shouting from inside your apartment when I came up the stairs. It sounded like a fight was going on. Is there someone in there with you?'
'No,' I said. This wasn't exactly true, nor was it exactly false.
'Why won't you open the door and we can talk a little more easily.'
'No.'
'Francis, there's nothing to be afraid of.'
There was everything to be afraid of. 'Leave me alone. I don't want your help.'
'If I leave you alone, will you promise to come to the clinic on your own?'
'When?'
'Today. Tomorrow at the latest.'
'Maybe.'
'That's not much of a promise, Francis!'
'I'll try'
'I need your word that you will come to the clinic either today or tomorrow and get a full examination'
'Or what?'
'Francis,' he said patiently, 'do you really need to ask that question?'
Again I placed my head against the door, banging it with my forehead, once, then twice, as if I could chase thoughts and fears out of my thinking. 'You'll send me back to the hospital,' I said cautiously. Very quietly.
'What? I can't hear you.'
'I don't want to go back,' I continued. 'I hated it there. I almost died. I don't want to go back to the hospital.'
'Francis, the hospital is closed. Closed for good. You won't have to return there. No one does.'
'I just can't go back.'
'Francis, why won't you open the door?'
'You're not really there,' I said. 'You're just another dream.'
Mister Klein hesitated, then said, 'Francis, your sisters are worried about you. Many people are worried about you. Why won't you let me take you to the clinic?'
'The clinic isn't real.'
'It is. You know it. You've been there many times before.'
'Go away.'
'Then promise me you will come there on your own.'
I took a deep breath. 'All right. I promise.'
'Say it,' Mister Klein insisted.
'I promise I will come to the clinic.'
'When?'
'Today. Or tomorrow.'
'I have your word?'
'Yes.'
I could feel Mister Klein hesitating again, just beyond the door, as if assessing whether or not to believe me. Finally, after a moment of silence, he said, 'Okay then. I'll accept that. But don't let me down, Francis.'
'I won't.'
'If you let me down, Francis, I will be back.'
This sounded to me like a threat. I sighed deeply. 'I'll be there,' I said.
I listened for the sound of his footsteps retreating down the hallway.
Good, I said to myself, and I scrambled back to the wall of writing. I dismissed Mister Klein from my memory, right alongside hunger, thirst, sleep, and everything else that might intrude on my storytelling.
It was well past midnight, and Francis felt alone in the midst of the harsh breathing and disjointed snoring sounds of the Amherst dormitory. He was in that troubled half sleep, a place between wakefulness and dreams, where the world around him was indistinct, as if its moorings to reality had come loose and it was being tugged back and forth by tides and currents that he could not see.
He was worried about Peter, who was locked in a padded isolation cell at Mister Evil's order, and probably struggling against all sorts of fears along with a straitjacket. Francis remembered his own hours in isolation and shuddered. Restrained and alone, they had filled him with dread. He guessed that it would be just as harsh for Peter, who would probably not even have the questionable advantages of being drugged. Peter had told Francis many times that he wasn't afraid of going to prison, but somehow Francis didn't think that the world of jail, no matter how harsh, equated with an isolation cell at Western State. In the isolation cells, it was as if one spent every second with ghosts of unspeakable pain.
He thought to himself: It is lucky that we are all crazy. Because if we weren't, then this place would make us crazy in pretty quick time.
Francis felt an arrow of despair strike him, as he understood in that second that Peter's grip on reality would, one way or another, open the exit door to the hospital. At the same time he knew how hard it would be for him to gain enough purchase on the slippery, shale rock slope of his imagination to ever persuade Gulptilil or Evans or anyone at Western State to release him. Even if he were to start informing on Lucy Jones and her investigative progress to
Gulp-a-pill, as the doctor wanted, he doubted that it would lead to anything other than more nights listening to men moan in torment as they dreamed of terrible things.
Troubled by everything that stalked him in his sleep, struggling with everything that surrounded him when he was awake, Francis closed his eyes and shut out sounds around him, praying that he would get a few hours of dreamless rest before morning.
To his right, a few bunks away, he could hear a sudden thrashing sound, as one of the patients twisted and turned in nightmare. He kept his eyes closed, as if that could shut out whatever personal agony had intruded on some other patient's dreams.
After a moment, the noise receded, and he squeezed his lids together, murmuring to
