The Hollow City by Dan Wells
“What if you’re right?” I whisper. “What if I am the Red Line Killer?”
“You’re not.”
“You don’t know that.” I look around, suddenly worried that someone is listening. A few patients are watching us, but they’re all on the far side of the room; the space around us is clear. I lean in closer. “I do fit the profile, like you said, and I have two weeks I can’t account for. Maybe more. If I’m capable of schizophrenia, who knows what I’m capable of?”
“Schizophrenia isn’t something you’re ‘capable of,’” he says, “it’s a disease. You don’t commit it, it happens to you. Now try to think back to those weeks you lost—”
“I’m twenty years old,” I say, cutting him off. “It’s not just two weeks. Can I account for all that time? Can you account for every moment of the last twenty years?”
“I think you’d remember killing someone and flaying his face.”
“Maybe I would, or maybe I’d block it out—selective memory…” I struggle for the word. “Repressed memory…”
“Dissociative amnesia,” says Vanek. “You’re suggesting that the act of killing was so traumatic that your mind repressed the memories to save you from them.”
“It’s possible.”
“It’s idiotic. Repressed memory, as a neurological function, is designed to protect you from things that happen to you; things you do willingly are, by nature, not foreign enough to shock your psyche that profoundly.”
Foreign enough to shock you … Something about his words remind me of Lucy, and the last thing she said: that my brain wouldn’t allow her to do anything impossible, like pass through a security guard. Once the mind creates an illusion, it won’t let itself be shocked by anything that might break it. But there is a gap in the system, a gray area where an illusion can progress to the point where reality can’t help but intrude. Like when Lucy broke in, and our inability to break back out brought the whole charade crashing down.
“What if,” I say slowly, “I thought that the killing was a good thing—maybe even a moral thing—and only realized the mistake when the deed was done?”
Vanek raises an eyebrow. “You’re determined to incriminate yourself in this.”
“I don’t want to be a killer, but think about it. What if my brain, thinking the Faceless Men were real, decided that it was my responsibility to save the world by stamping them out. So I’d go out and do it, and then when I tried to unmask them I realized it was all false, and the illusion shattered and the trauma forced the memory to repress.”
“And this happened twelve separate times?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“It’s scientifically possible that I could burst into flame at any moment, but it’s not exactly probable. Nor is it believably probable that your messed-up psychology managed to turn you into a first-time serial killer on twelve separate occasions. When I scared you with that bit about being the Red Line Killer, Michael, I was trying to force you into some semblance of self-preservation—to make you come up with an alibi. I need you to remember where you were in those lost weeks, but now you’re desperate to prove yourself guilty.”
“I’m just trying to follow the facts.”
“Then follow them down reasonable pathways. Your obsession with the Red Line victims is just one more example of your delusional narcissism—that if there’s a mystery somewhere in the world, you must be at the heart of it.”
Click click click click.
Vanek frowns. “Is that what I think it is?”
Dammit. “What?”
“You were clicking your teeth again,” says Vanek.
“On purpose.” It’s all I can do to keep them from clicking again.
“Then do it again.”
“What?”
“If you were clicking your teeth on purpose, do it again. I want to hear it.”
“No.”
“Should I call Dr. Little, then? Or Dr. Jones—you’d do it for her, I bet.”
“Fine.” Click. Click. Click. Click. I can’t do it as fast on purpose; can he tell the difference?
He pauses, thinking silently.
“It’s nothing,” I say again. “It’s not the drugs.”
“Tardive dyskinesia is very serious,” he says. “If it goes too far it can be irreversible, even without the drugs.”
“Why do you care so much all of a sudden?”
“Because you’re … you’re an interesting puzzle, and I don’t want you broken before you’re solved.”
“You’re as loving as ever.”
He stands up. “I’m serious, Michael. You have to break through to your lost memories—it could be crucial to the case as well as to your own mental health.”
“But the case comes first.”
“I don’t care what comes first,” he says, checking his watch. “Just remember.” He turns and walks away.
I scan the room, looking for the patient I think is a hallucination, and I watch him, willing him to walk through a wall or a nurse or another patient. He sits dumbly, staring at the TV.
Why is Vanek so concerned about the lost time?
What does he know that I don’t?
* * *
THE MOVEMENTS ARE GETTING WORSE.
I’ve learned to control the teeth click by tearing up a sock and keeping a ball of the rolled up fabric in the back of my mouth, wedged between my teeth; it doesn’t stop the movement, but it stops the noise, and if I’m careful around the nurses no one can tell. My arm is harder to hide, but all I really have to do is keep my hand in my pocket, clutching tightly to the fabric of my pants. It keeps my arm stiff, but that’s better than letting it fly all over the place. It’s just my left arm, and I’m right-handed, so I can still go around and do everything I used to do.
My head movements are the worst, nodding up and down almost constantly, but I’ve learned I can control it, at least in part, by flexing my neck muscles as hard as I can. When no one’s watching I hold my head with my right hand, or brace it against the wall, or slouch down in a chair and press my head against the back. It works well enough. Nobody’s noticed it yet.
I suppose they think I’m weird, keeping my hand shoved into my pocket all day and slouching down in chairs and corners, but that doesn’t bother me. They already think I’m crazy, right? As long as they don’t take away the drugs.
I’m a little worried about Dr. Vanek’s warning—that the dyskinesia becomes permanent after too long—but the drugs are worth the risk. I’m cured now: literally cured of all my hallucinations. I haven’t seen any maggots or Faceless Men; I haven’t heard any weird sounds or phantom footsteps. All of the terrors I’ve lived with for year after year are completely false—nightmares I thought I could never wake up from. I know that now. And I never want to lose that again.
I don’t know how to explain what it’s like—to suddenly wake up one morning and not feel psychotic anymore. To be free of the buzzing in my ears, the voices in my head, the twitching shadows on the edge of my vision. Some of my secondary symptoms are still there, of course—you can’t just turn off a lifelong phobia of cell phones just because the false cause of the phobia has finally been removed. I still feel paranoid sometimes, and scared, and worried that as soon as I let my guard down, something—I don’t know what—is going to jump out of the darkness. I never realized just how scared I used to be, all the time, thinking about running and hiding and all the ways the monsters were trying to kill me. Losing that is like learning to breathe for the first time. The dirty window I’ve been looking through is finally clean, and the view to the other side is glorious.
If I can hold my head still long enough to look through it.
Meals are the hardest part. I can’t hold my head because I need my hand to feed myself, and I can’t muffle my teeth because the wadded fabric in my mouth stops me from chewing. I have to take it out, and grit my teeth as long as I can, and flex my neck until it feels like my head is going to burst. One bite at a time: pick up a
Today is meatloaf and mashed potatoes; easy to cut, easy to swallow. I barely even have to chew, though that’s hardly a problem with my jaw clattering like a wind-up monkey. Halfway through the meal I see Dr. Little watching me from across the room, and I flex my neck even harder, feeling my face go red with the effort, doing everything I can to stay still. Raise the fork, open the mouth, chew. Dr. Little comes toward me, and my heart sinks. Please don’t notice me.
“That’s remarkable,” he says.
I smile, forcing my lips to move and my chin to stay still. “Thank you.” The words are a grueling effort. “What’s. Remarkable?”
“Your self-control,” he says. “You hide it so well I don’t think I would have noticed if Linda hadn’t raised the suspicion in her last report.”
My words are slow and measured. “I haven’t done. Anything wrong.” I set down my fork and rest my hand in my chin, hoping it looks natural.
“Oh,” he says quickly. “Oh no, of course you haven’t done anything wrong; we’re trying to help you, not punish you. But your tardive dyskinesia is back, the involuntary movements we talked about before. You hide it well, but it’s simply not safe. Your drugs will have to be switched.”
“No,” I shake my head, my control slipping. “Please don’t take. Me off Seroquel. It works. It. Clears up everything. I’ve never felt like this. Before.”
“You’re trading a mental prison for a physical one,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not worth it. We’ll start you on Clozaril tomorrow morning.”
Starting over from scratch—a low dose of a brand-new drug. I feel my eyes grow hot, and my voice is a ragged whisper. “It will all. Come back.”
“Probably,” he says. His plastic smile is gone; he looks at me impassively, the closest Dr. Little ever gets to sympathy. “Your hallucinations will likely return, for a time, but Clozaril is very effective and you should be back in shape again soon.”
“Please don’t—”
“I’m sorry, Michael. It’s for your own good.” He walks away, summoning Devon and pulling out his prescription pad, and I feel my life crumbling around me.
FOURTEEN
I GET NO SEROQUEL that evening, and all night long I lie awake in bed while the world around me warps and curdles. My room is full of noises; the hall and the hospital and the whole city beyond it echoes with shouts and horns and scrapes and howls. I have no way of knowing if they’re real. Should the drugs wear off this quickly?
It’s nearly one in the morning when I see a light in the corner of my clock radio display—a tiny red dot I don’t remember seeing before. Is it watching me? Was I a fool this whole time, eating up their psychobabble and believing it was all a delusion and letting down my guard? But I’m just freaking out; it’s probably completely innocent. But then why is that dot there? I lie still just in case, showing them nothing.
Click click click click.
In the morning Dr. Little arrives with a new nurse—not one of the regular care nurses but a clinical tech I’ve never seen before. She carries a tray of needles and tubes. There’s a guard behind them, large and somber.
“Good morning, Michael!” Dr. Little has his smile pasted on again, broad and delighted, his eyes wide and slightly buggy under his glasses. “Sleep well?”
I glance at the clock radio, just barely, and he follows my gaze and his smile never falters.
“As I told you yesterday,” he says, “we’re starting you this morning on a drug called Clozaril.”
I glance at the nurse, setting her tray of needles on my dresser. “It’s an injection?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he says, holding up a small plastic cup with a tiny yellow pill; I look closer and see that it’s been clipped in half. “Twelve point five milligrams,” he says, “so small you don’t even need water, though of course we brought you some.” He smiles again, and the nurse sits me up in the bed. “Either way, though, we need to draw a little of your blood. Nothing frightening, just a test.”
I hold out my arm while the nurse ties a plastic tube around my bicep. “Is there something you can do with my blood? Something about the dyskinesia?” If they can, maybe I won’t need a new drug after all.
“I’m afraid not, Michael; the dyskinesia will have to go away on its own or not at all, and we sincerely hope that we’ve discontinued treatment early enough to be rid of it. The good news is, Clozaril bears an extremely low risk of tardive dyskinesia, a mere fraction of the other neuroleptics you’ve tried. It’s not even a concern, really, though naturally we’ll keep an eye on you just in case.” The nurse swabs my arm with disinfectant, on the inside of the elbow, and preps a syringe. She pricks me in a bulging vein and begins to draw out blood while Dr. Little continues. “On top of that, Clozaril is happily the most effective drug we have for the treatment of schizophrenia, and now that you’re on it—”
“Wait,” I say, “it’s the most effective, and it has no side effects? Why didn’t you just start with it, then?”
“I didn’t say it had no side effects, Michael, I said that tardive dyskinesia is not one of them. Clozaril runs a very high risk of blood and heart disorders, hence the blood test—we’ll be testing your blood again every four days to see what kind of effect the drug is having, and we need a healthy baseline of comparison.”
“What?”
The nurse slides the needle out of my arm, pressing down on the hole with a wad of cotton and bending my elbow closed to hold it in place. I put pressure on the cotton and stand up angrily. “This is going to give me a heart disorder?”
“Not with regular blood tests, no. You’ll be perfectly safe. Without regular blood tests … yes. The risk is actually quite high, which is why we only use Clozaril for cases like yours that prove highly resistant to treatment.”
“That doesn’t sound ‘perfectly safe’ to me.”
“I apologize for the word choice, Michael.” He offers me the cup with the pill, but I don’t take it. “Nothing is ‘perfectly’ safe. But you’re in a hospital, Michael—you’re surrounded by doctors and nurses every hour of the day, with medical facilities close at hand if there’s ever an emergency.”
“Is there going to be an emergency?”
“We’re doing everything we can to prevent one.”
“You need my consent for something like this.”
“We have your father’s consent.” He smiles. “He signed last night.”
I stare at him for a moment, then turn away. I’m a mental patient; I don’t get to make my own choices anymore. I take a deep breath and run my hand through my hair, trying to think.
“Look, Michael,” says Dr. Little, stepping closer. “The Seroquel was working, and you knew it—you loved it. You were finally free. I want to help you get back to that point but this is the only thing I can give you. There are risks, I admit, but everything else has more risks.” He holds out the cup. “The symptoms and the hallucinations are all going to start coming back—slowly at first, but then more and more as the Seroquel washes out of your system. It will take awhile for the Clozaril to build you back up to the same point, but the sooner you start it, the sooner your problems will all go away again.”
I close my eyes. He’s right—heart disorder or not, I don’t want to be like I was. I can’t live like that again, and this drug’s either going to cure me or kill me, and aren’t those the only options anyway? I turn back, darting a quick glance at his eyes, then at the radio. The red dot is still there, an unblinking eye. The nurse has my blood in a vial on her tray, all ready to go.
Dr. Little pushes the cup closer. I take it from his hand.
Ha
I drop it in my mouth and swallow. I don’t even feel it going down.
* * *
“MICHAEL.”
There’s no one in the room. I go back to my jigsaw puzzle.
“Michael, it’s me. The one who’s trying to help you.”
“You’re not real.”
“Of course I’m real, I’m as real as you are.”
“You’re a voice in my head.”
“Don’t believe their lies, Michael, you’re not crazy—they’re studying you. You’re a rat in a maze.”
I look up. “If you’re real, where are you?”
“I’m in the vent.”
“That’s impossible.”
“My voice is in the vent; my body’s in the next room.”
“Should I go there and look?”
“You can’t let them see—you can’t let them know we’re working together.”
“We’re not working together.”
“We have to kill Dr. Little, Michael—he’s the one keeping you here. It’s your only way out.”
I stand up abruptly, storming to the door and running to the next room: Gordon’s room. There’s no one there. I look under the bed, behind the chairs; I even open the dresser drawers. No one. I go back to my room and do the same, searching under and behind everything I can find, but there’s no one hiding anywhere. I push the heavy chair in front of the air vent and go back to my puzzle.
The voice is muffled. “You’re such an idiot, Michael; you’re a useless, worthless, brainless idiot! Kill Dr. Little and get out of here! Are you a coward?”
I scrape the puzzle pieces back into their box and take them to the commons room. The voice keeps shouting at me, and I count out loud to drown it out.
* * *
I SLEEP IN MY CHAIR, the blankets piled on top of the clock on the dresser. In four days I get another blood test, and when the results come back Dr. Little approves a raise in my dose. The voice in the air vent goes away, but Shauna tells me that patient was transferred anyway. I eat by myself; I talk to Linda about my father. In four more days I have another blood test, and now I’m getting twenty-five milligrams of Clozaril twice a day, and of course Shauna isn’t real. I know that.