Brittany and I carried on our affair for much longer than I ever expected.
It’s difficult to perform admirably in bed when you’re worried about being caught by a hall monitor, but between Brittany’s insatiable appetite and my increasing desire to answer the call of the void, it became easier and easier.
I didn’t have words for it then but now I know that that is exactly what it was: with every thrust and kiss and moan, I was becoming less and less afraid to answer the call of the void. I was becoming a version of myself that I genuinely liked.
About a month into my stay, a new patient was brought in. I only ever knew him as “Jezz.”
Now, every psych ward has its problem children, but I’ve never seen anyone try and raise as much hell as Jezz did. To this day I couldn’t begin to tell you why. Some people just get off on making other people’s lives miserable, and Jezz was one of those people. During group therapy he would constantly interrupt and antagonize the doctors, he’d throw his food trays at nurses, he’d deliberately paint graphically violent pictures during arts and crafts… he was just a natural troublemaker.
I’ve dealt with people like Jezz all my life. Being the quiet, introverted, cooperative person that I am, people like Jezz have always thought I was weaker than them and subsequently took a lot of time making me feel inferior. When you’re a kid, they tell you, “just walk away” and “be the better person.” And then they want to wonder why an entire generation is afraid of confrontation. I threw all that nonsense away early in life. Bullies thrive on the idea that people aren’t going to fight back, so I made it my mission to surprise them.
I don’t think Jezz ever expected me to answer him back during his bullying. I managed to keep my mouth shut for a while. You have to wait until the right moment to let loose, otherwise you run the risk of the bully seeing you as just a fun obstacle to hurdle through.
One day, during arts and crafts, Jezz decided to paint a picture of me with my throat cut. I think he expected me to feel uneasy or scared. Instead I just smiled bemusedly.
The void called at that moment. I’m not sure where it came from, but it just popped out of my mouth:
“Jezz, did you daddy fuck you as well as beat you?”
I’d always thought that expression “you could hear a pin drop” was a figure of speech, but if I’d had a pin, you could’ve literally heard it drop from across the room. Everyone, and I mean everyone, stopped and stared at me. Jezz’s eyes went wide.
“What did you just say?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear me? Okay, sorry…” I cleared my throat, “I was just wondering if your dad just beat you as a child or if he also spent nights pumping his cream up your chocolate donut? If so, I bet you liked it, eh?”
Jezz made a move towards me, his eyes wide and his mouth twisted in a furious grimace. The orderlies got to him before he could get his hands on me and they pulled him away. Jezz threw empty threats at me, promising to gut me from groin to throat. The doctor made it clear that what I said wasn’t going to be tolerated but I could see in her eyes that she was glad someone had finally talked back to the little cretin. I looked over at Brittany, who winked at me and did a soft clap. I winked back.
Brittany didn’t come to my room that night. If I’m being totally honest, I was just a tad relieved. I needed time to replenish my fluids. However, around an hour after lights out, I heard whispering outside my room. It took me all of ten seconds to realize it was Jezz.
Outside my door, he whispered all sorts of things. How he was going to wait until the exact right moment to end my life, how he was going to fuck my dying body so that I bled out of every hole I had… a plethora of lurid details. Didn’t take the idiot long to get caught. The hall monitor found him and I heard a scuffle out in the hall. It wasn’t long before the noise died down, so I’m guessing the docs gave him a healthy dose of Haloperidol. One of the orderlies came in to see if I was okay and I reassured them. Nice people, really.
For the entirety of the next day, Jezz was confined to his room. Apparently he’d managed to do a number on one of the orderly’s faces before the sedative did its work. Thankfully no serious damage was done, but it was enough for the people on the ward to finally keep Jezz where he’d always belonged. It was nice to have one day go by without incident.
That night, however, things began to change.
That morning after Brittany’s first visit was the only time I’d seen or felt anything out of the ordinary. My dreams, however, were changing for the worse. They weren’t necessarily violent but they were more surreal than any dreams I could remember. I would confront long-dead relatives and enemies with brutal takedowns, leaving them in blubbering heaps over which I’d laugh with cruel satisfaction. With her visits, Brittany slowly taught me how to dream lucidly. Any time I had an overly surreal dream that was too realistic, I’d look down to count my fingers. You can’t read or count properly in dreams, so if you try to count your fingers, you’ll find you have way more or way less digits than ten. It’s a good method and I owe it to Brittany for teaching me.
The night of the day that Jezz had been confined to his room, I had the first graphically violent dream since I’d been in the psych ward. It started off simply. I was standing in the empty corridor of the ward, the hall monitor asleep in his chair. I didn’t walk so much as float down the corridor. I felt that my head was lower than normal and I knew somehow that my head was stooped, kind of like a vulture. I floated down to Jezz’s room and suddenly I was on the other side of the door.
I’d rather not go into detail about what happened in that dream, but suffice to say it was one of the most horrific things I’d ever had to suffer through. I begged to wake up, but the waking world didn’t come until the next morning when I was shocked out of my sleep by a shrill scream.
We were all ordered to stay in our rooms until further notice. Food and medication would be brought to us and any activities were cancelled.
Around 3:00 PM, the head of the ward and a nurse knocked on my door and came in. I was surprised to see them and welcomed them in despite the grave looks on their faces.
They asked me about the little interaction Jezz and I had and I told them that after hearing him whisper outside my room, I hadn’t seen him at all. I hadn’t expected to, given his sedation and isolation. The doctor and nurse were obviously deeply concerned so I asked what had happened. They made me swear to secrecy and I’m violating that promise now, but what can I do? I have to share this.
The scream that had woken me up had been one of the nurses finding what was left of Jezz. They found him lying in his bed, which had been moved to the center of the room. His head was at the foot of the bed and his feet were on the pillow. His hands were splayed out over the sides of the bed and he had been gutted from groin to throat, his innards strewn all over the room like some kind of macabre decoration.
I said nothing and hung my head. The doctor and nurse knew me. They knew I didn’t have a violent bone in my body and that I never would’ve done such a thing to anyone, but there were obviously a lot of questions that needed to be answered. The door had been locked, as always, so nobody could’ve gotten in and only the orderlies had the keys. More so, there were absolutely no footprints in the large puddles of blood on the floor, so their best bet was to deem it a suicide, but even that seemed unlikely because there was no weapon found in the room and Jezz’s splayed stomach showed no signs of bruising; whatever had cut into him had met with no resistance at all.
Obviously I didn’t have any answers for the questions they threw at me. All I could do was lay down and stare blankly into the wall. They thanked me for my willingness to help and went on their way.
That night, Brittany came to my room again. I told her not to expect much from me that night, but she assured me it was okay. She’d just come to see if I was alright. Of course I wasn’t and I didn’t try to act otherwise. That night, Brittany and I just cuddled in my bed, staring up at the ceiling and taking in everything that had happened. At one point, Brittany took my cheek in her hand and kissed my other cheek gently. I held her hand and smiled. I’d been a little worried that our relationship was purely physical but in that moment I realized that there was more.
I was released from the hospital a week later. The doctors told me that there was simply nothing else to be done and that they were sure I could now handle whatever issues I may have on my own. They gave me prescriptions for Celexa and Vistaril and after a couple of hours, I was back in my apartment. I laid down in my own bed for the first time in what seemed like forever and started to cry. All I could think about was Brittany. I feel bad admitting that, knowing what had happened to Jezz, but my relationship with Brittany had kept me strong, and now I was facing the rest of my life with only the memory of her.
I was over the moon when I checked my Facebook a couple days later and saw Brittany had sent me a friend request. I accepted it immediately. Along with the request, she’d sent a message.
“Hey! I’m out of the hospital now. Now that we’re both out, I have to ask… have you seen Him yet?”