It’s hard to sleep in here at night. My bed has stayed made for weeks now, I can’t say exactly how long because there are no calendars in here and time has ceased to exist. I sit on a chair in the corner of the room and listen to the screams surrounding and the attempts of metal against wrists. One day I’ll find out if the screams are mine or not.
I don’t know how long the screams go on for. They start when the bars of light on the ground turn from sunset to night and stop when it turns from night to sunrise. If I look up I can only see a streak of sky. It’s always grey.
The screams have stopped by now. From somewhere I can the rattle of the cart. It always comes right after the screams stop. The creator fiddles with the padlock on my door and opens the door. I have to close my eyes as the light from the hallway hurts them. I can’t stand artificial light anymore.
‘Duncan Sheffield?’
‘Close the door,’ I say to the darkness.
I hear the door shut and open my eyes. I see the cart of syringes and medication. I enjoy blood tests. I enjoy watching the syringe dip into a hair-thin vein in my elbow and feeling the soft sucking of the blood, watching the syringe slowly fill with the thick, warm, metallic liquid. Brings back the old days. It’ll be completely satisfying if they still gave me something in return. Anything.
I humour the nurse by noticing something else for once. ‘What is it?’
She keeps staring at me. I can feel it when someone stares. She’s a pretty, Chinese girl, her hazel eyes wide. I don’t know how I look anymore. She comes here once a week to shave my jaw, in the afternoons. She started doing it when she realised I wasn’t going to bash her or claim her like apparently everyone else. I don’t know why she’s stuck in a dead-end job.
‘You’ve not been sleeping again, have you? You look like you’ve been punched in the eyes.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Why don’t you sleep?’
Which reason does she want? ‘You try sleeping, listening to the screams.’
‘Do the other patients bother you?’
‘Either them or me.’
She sighs and picks up a small plastic cup with multi-coloured pills. They were never fun. Too big to snort. ‘The doctor wants for you to see the psychiatrist again.’
I exhale. ‘I’ve told you people. It is not a mental illness. My mind is Swiss cheese.’
‘Do you want water?’
‘That would be nice.’
I swallow the pills and water, watching the syringes glitter in grey light. ‘What’s out there? What colour is the sky today?’
‘It’s blue, Duncan.’ The slight gasp at the end of my name has both of us realise that she’s said something she shouldn’t.
‘Nurses like you do not refer to their patients like me by their first name.’
The cups and pills and syringes rattle around quickly as she tries to escape. ‘I know, I’m – ‘
‘Why?’
Defeated. She turns around and comes back, closer than she’s ever been. Closer than anyone’s been since I found the recreational use for syringes. Her lips press against my own.
It inflicts nothing.
Rebecca comes to visit. Now, Rebecca doesn’t like coming to visit because she says she doesn’t like the idea of me being in a padded psychiatric room but I know the real reason is that she doesn’t like the idea of me at all. And the idea that she’ll seem the bad guy if she tries to divorce her ‘mentally unstable’ husband.
She sits on the edge of the bed. I watch her from my chair.
‘What day is it?’
‘Saturday. 7th of October.’
‘When did I come here?’
‘12th of February.’ She looks at me. For once. ‘I come every week. Every Saturday. Don’t you know how long a time that is?’
‘Seven days. One hundred and sixty eight hours. Ten thousand and eighty minutes, that is, if you come at the same minute of the same hour every Saturday.’
‘How do you remember that?’
Honestly, I have no idea. Now that I know that it is Saturday, I just have to count seven nights of screaming.
Rebecca clenches her hands around a brown paper bag. She doesn’t like to look at me. Her fears aren’t justified because she won’t see anything if she does look at me. ‘The nurses say you have insomnia.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Don’t you care?’
‘No.’
‘They say you look like death.’
‘I presume so.’
Rebecca’s long hair falls down over her face. I used to want to stroke that hair. I used to want to be near her. Her body shudders. Not again. ‘Duncan. Why did you start?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You loved me. Why did you destroy us?’
‘I didn’t destroy you.’
That went for much shorter than it usually goes for. It won’t happen again. ‘Don’t come and see me anymore. It doesn’t do you any good.’
Rebecca stands and throws the brown paper bag to me. ‘I made it for you.’ She leaves, taking pains to shut the door. I hear the bolt of the padlock and then open the bag.
Swiss cheese sandwiches. My favourite.
No one’s sure what’s wrong with him, really. Everyone thinks he might know, but he won’t tell anyone. Sometimes we try and get him to tell us, but he’s already retreated by then. Maybe he’s permentantly retreated. Like I said, we don’t know.
Duncan Sheffield is the alien in room 103. He hasn’t been there long compared to most other patients here.
Most patients here carry on until all hours, slamming themselves against the padded walls. The women aren’t so bad. Sometimes you can have a normal conversation with them. The men, especially the psychopathic men, are terrifying. We female nurses don’t like going into their cells because they’re brutal to the point of rape. There’s a buzzer in each cell that we can press to gain help from the nurses’ station when this happens. Doesn’t work, though, if there’s no male nurse on shift because if another female nurse gets involved, she gets hurt too. We’re not allowed to quit our jobs because no one else comes to us seeking employment. You can’t blame them, really.
The upside is good money. The second upside arrived when Duncan Sheffield came.
He’s so much more to us than the cold, metal ‘Mr D Sheffield’ plaque next to the door of his cell. He was a late night admission. I was only new here. He had tried to commit suicide by sliding several needles full of cocaine into his veins and pushing down on them all. He didn’t come in strapped to a stretcher like most other patients. He walked in with his wife at his side. She looked afraid and he looked like he was admitted every night.
Because of his lack of suitcase, we thought he was just visiting someone outside hours. It wasn’t until we had to take his jacket off him that we saw all the bandages and his wife said that he didn’t need anything. She was right.
Duncan is an enigma. We are afraid and attracted to him at exactly the same time. He has never laid a finger on us and has never hurt us. He’s the sort of person that to a daydreamer, you’d wave your hand in front of their face and ask if anyone’s home. His wife said he was home, once. Then he left and never came back.
His wife says it was the death of their daughter that did it. We asked him about his daughter once. It’s the only time he’s screamed and cried himself to sleep. It was never brought up again.
There’s a bed in each cell and most patients use it. I have never seen Duncan use his bed. He sits, for hours, for days, on the floor of the cell, staring into nothing. The only time he sleeps is if we give him a sleeping pill. The only time he eats is when we physically feed him.
I want to cry when I see him. He is Death’s beautiful brother. His body is thin and used and through the darkness of insomnia surrounding his eyes, his irises are dull. He thinks that he is Death. Maybe he’s right.
On his good days, he’ll get up and leave the cell. He walks down the hallway to the window and looks out. You can tell in his face that he doesn’t know where he is. Then you can tell that he simply doesn’t care. He says that the sky is grey for him, even when I can see that it is blue.
On his bad days, he smuggles needles and cries. I had never seen a grown man cry before working here. I want to take him in my arms and let him sob into my shirt. We’re not sure if he’s strong or fragile.
He sees the psychiatrist regularly. Like us, the psychiatrist isn’t sure whether to like or dislike him. The psychiatrist said that mostly Duncan just sits there and stares blankly, like he does in his cell. But one day he came out and spoke. It’s not as if we can’t talk to him; sometimes we do manage to hold a conversation with him. But this one was special. He said that it is either him or the world that has stopped existing and he believes that it is him.
Duncan said he can remember bits and pieces of his life. He doesn’t know what day it is but remembers that he likes Swiss cheese sandwiches. From that day we realised how easy it was to keep him in his state of neutral happiness.
His wife came in here a month ago. She held a divorce paper in her hand. She asked us if she could visit him and we, naturally, said yes, because she always comes on a Saturday to see him. She got all the way to his door, raised her hand to knock… then paused and left again. She’s come back since, but without the divorce paper.
I wanted to hit her when I saw that paper. Then I realised that if I did that, I might be hurting Duncan. It was then I realised I wanted to protect him. Maybe love.
It was against all rules, I know. I don’t think he has told anyone. I don’t think he will.
I walked in to give him his pills. He seemed bothered that day and somewhat distressed, so maybe I should’ve left what I did for another day. Then again, maybe that encouraged me to do it, to reassure him.
All I did was kiss him. Just one kiss on his mouth, nothing more. I ignored his stale breath, the despair radiating from his body and I kissed him. He didn’t kiss me back, he didn’t move in the slightest. I left quickly. Nothing has changed. I move on with my life, putting myself into danger when I step into other male patients’ rooms and watching Duncan, knowing there is a mind inside the body and wondering if it’ll ever show itself in a way other than emotional destruction.
I don’t know if it was love in a motherly way, to take care of him, or if it was love in that I needed him and romance. I still don’t know. All I know is that I love the alien.
He wasn’t always like this. I don’t think the doctors realise it, but he wasn’t always like this. He used to realise that he was a living, breathing, human being.
Sometimes I wish I had been the one to find Kylie. Not him. I don’t think I would’ve been in his shoes right now if I had. And he would be at home. But Duncan found her. On the bathroom floor, blood pouring from her nose, ears, eyes and mouth, his syringes scattered around her body. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.
Mum and Dad never liked Duncan. Ever. ‘Becky,’ they’d say, ‘we understand your feelings towards this man but he doesn’t seem normal.’ He had always been a bit messed up. At least he was good at hiding the syringes and cocaine from everyone. He encouraged me to try once and I’ve never done it again. I can’t stand physical pain.
But he was my messed up man. And I loved him. And when Kylie was born, Duncan loved both of us enough to go about his business when we believed that her prying eyes were closed. Curiosity killed Kylie.
Duncan believes that he killed Kylie. I don’t know who I believe.
I don’t think he loves me. I don’t know if he did love me and if cocaine came before me or not. He never wanted to stop it. I asked him, but I may as well have been asking the wall. They seem to be the same thing now, though.
I thought he would stop after Kylie’s death. I thought he might wake up to himself and realise that if he didn’t stop, he’d find himself face-down as well. He had always been so careful not to overdose but his mind was already slipping… I’ll never forget seeing the blood spurt from his arms, dripping onto the tiles and slipping into the syringes, and the look on his face still haunts me. Dead. Anaesthetised. Sleeping. Understanding. Not caring.
He still has that look and he hasn’t woken up yet. I can barely look at him now. Kylie took his mind with him when she left and he cannot go back to being my Duncan.
Where does this leave me?
Last night was a bad night. Duncan had a bad night.
He’d never kill himself, though it looks like he already has.
I visit him. That pretty, Chinese nurse was at the desk. We’ve never spoken but her look has always been icy towards me since the day I arrived – and departed – with the uncompleted divorce papers. She always watches Duncan’s closed door, wondering where she stands in his abyss world. Where she’d like to stand. I’m not sure if I ever stood in the place where she wants to be; I think cocaine beat me to it. She doesn’t have a chance.
I open the door and I can hear the bones move in his neck as Duncan snaps his head towards me. I want to run as his eyes look at something towards me, something that I can’t see. His eyes glimmer silently within shrunken depths and he doesn’t move his dark blonde hair when it falls down in front of them.
The glimmer disappears when he looks at me directly. ‘I told you not to come back.’
I feel like a child when he stares at me and I want to break away. I don’t. ‘I wanted to.’
‘Hmm.’ His eyes move on again and his voice becomes monotone as he looks away, crawling back into himself again. ‘Did you bring… did you bring a sandwich?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘Okay.’
I stare at him and he stares at something else as I ask the question on my mind. ‘What happened last night?’ I’ve already asked before I realise he no longer understands the concept of ‘last night’. I try again. ‘Why do you hurt yourself?’
‘It won’t kill me.’
‘It will kill you!’ I snap, tired of him, tired of his ways, tired of his supposed after-life, tired of his sleeping, tired of feeling third best in his life, behind Kylie and cocaine. I walk quickly to him and he sits up. I don’t know if he’s taking notice and I don’t care, but I have to speak. ‘You’re not dead, Duncan! I know you think you are but you’re not! Kylie’s dead!’ His face flinches slightly at her name. A sign of life. ‘I don’t want to see you here in this room! I want you home…’
My legs give out on me. I crumple in front of him, undefeated. ‘I don’t need you to love me. You never did and I doubt you ever will. I love you. Wake up from the anaesthesia and tell someone what you’re thinking. Tell me.’
I look at him, bracing myself against my fear. Minutes go by and he doesn’t respond; instead, his gaze disappears again. I gently put my hand to his face, surprised that his skin is not as translucent as I thought. ‘Tell someone and come home.’
I get up and leave him. I walk down a corridor and lean against a wall, out of sight from the Chinese nurse. I wrap my arms around myself a smile a disillusioned smile.