Sanity by Judy Colella (beginner reading books for adults .TXT) 📕

families that had given up entirely, who gladly handed over the sum and substance of their embarrassing relatives’ estates, even large portions of their own, to make certain these disturbed individuals could be locked away forever, presumably cared for until their bodies caught up with the dead state of their minds.

This simply meant that the vast inheritance bequeathed to the asylum by Dr. Weatheridge was more than enough to keep the place running, the utilities paid, various supplies maintained in their inventory, and stocked with abundant food, canned, boxed, bagged, with shelf-lives that were longer than those of the humans they fed. Fresh meat, fish and produce were delivered weekly and kept in the freezers and refrigerated rooms, but when the asylum was shut down, and long before its lone remaining inmate had gotten the electricity running again without the help of the public utility company, everything fresh was basically compost.

It had taken him weeks to toss all of it into the furnaces; the contents of the smaller refrigerators couldn’t be gotten at because they had been padlocked. He’d removed the hinges, but still couldn’t open them all the way, so gave up after a while. When he was done getting rid of everything else, he took stock of the items in the pantries and found he had enough to keep himself alive for decades and beyond.

The day after his encounter with the young girl, he stood in the largest of the three pantries trying to decide what to have for lunch. A necessity more than a pleasure, eating had at last become a chore. He’d managed to get one element working on a small electric stove in one of the offices he was occupying, and was thus able to have hot meals every night. These meals came from a can and tasted like it, and he’d grown tired of pasta and rice. The water in which he cooked them came from pipes that flavored the liquid with copper and sulfur, and no amount of sauce could mask that taste. Bad enough he had to endure it in his tea and coffee.

The wine and other alcohol left behind by the doctors had been finished many years before. An entire week was spent in being stupidly drunk, his woes shoved sloppily aside while the wine and liquor lasted. He’d hurt himself on debris during his personal bacchanalia but hadn’t cared at all. When he sobered up, he found he’d apparently stitched several wounds closed but couldn’t remember doing it. The thin scars with their unevenly spaced rows of holes from the needle and thread faded to nearly nothing over time. He knew where they were, though, and sometimes looked at their faint tracery for entertainment.

Not today. Today he needed to eat something. He’d been too upset the night before to bother. That girl. What would happen now that somebody had seen him? Had she believed his lie about having once lived here and its false implication that he no longer did? Would she tell anyone? He didn’t want to think so.

“Tomato soup.” He said this aloud, reaching for a can with a generic black and white label. “Delicious.” Awful. It was condensed and he’d have to add water. He put the can back. On the shelf below he considered a row of products that required only heat. Chicken and Dumplings. Beef Stew. Chili with beef. Chili without beef. Chop Suey. Chicken Chow Mein. Shrimp Chow Mein. The line of possibilities ended with Corned Beef Hash.

Maybe the other pantry should be explored.

He walked out, stepping absently over a pile of twisted metal that had probably been a utensil shelf once. He would have moved it out of the way, but there really was nowhere to put it.

“Holy shit, she was right!”

Preoccupation with lunch choices had prevented him from hearing the back door being jimmied open, or the crunch of footsteps across enough of the kitchen to bring the police officers near the pantry. He whirled around, horrified, and began to shake. Who were these people? The police? What did they want with him? What were they doing in his home? What had that girl told them?

“Hey, kid, what, uh, you don’t belong in here. This place has been condemned.”

And well it should be, he thought, but didn’t respond.

“Are you okay?” The officer came closer. “Look, we don’t want to hurt you. We’re here to help.”

Oh, yes. That’s what the doctors had always said. Smiling, too. Then, having fooled their victims with this viciously false assurance, they would grab the poor fool who’d entered this place, knock him out with ether, or as they began doing forty-five years later, inject him with Thorazine or something worse, strip him, strap him to a cold metal table, and roll him off into an operating room for use in one of their experiments.

“Go away.”

“Can’t do that, kid. You’re gonna have to come with us. You have a family?”

“Leave me in peace.” I’m not a “kid.”

The expression that came over the officer’s face made it clear that those words sounded odd to him. “What?”

“Shit, who talks like that?” muttered an officer behind the first one.

A third policeman came forward. “Come on, come with us, please. You can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I’ve been here too long to leave now. It’s all I know. Please don’t ask me to go.” The dark look in his eyes intensified. His ghost was shrieking.

“Hey, ease up,” the first officer whispered to the others – there were three besides himself. “He’s obviously terrified.”

He could have run. He knew this place so well, no one would ever find him. In fact, that was how he’d avoided detection when the asylum was closed down. How he’d avoided discovery when vandals had come through at various times causing most of the destruction throughout the building. Time, of course, had done the rest, and didn’t care that he was there.

So he could have hidden himself safely away. But he knew that he’d never be left alone after this. They’d keep coming back. Searching. Scaring him. Giving him no peace. No freedom to wander this place of self-confinement. This was suddenly no longer his safe haven, his asylum from the outside and its mysteries. Resistance and flight no longer had a purpose.

“Never mind,” he said quietly. “I’ll go with you.”

His arrival at Weatheridge Asylum had been in a horse-drawn hansom cab that had to vie for space on the narrow streets with increasing horseless-carriage traffic. Since his father didn’t trust anything that claimed to be propelled by electricity or steam (other than trains in the latter case), he’d never ridden in an automobile either. Until this day.

Parked outside the back door was a patrol car. He stared at the compact vehicle, at its official decals and stripes of gold against dark, metallic blue, then at the interior of the back seat when its rear door was opened for him. It looked…comfortable. Not in the way something familiar would be called that, but physically, yes. This didn’t surprise him. People wouldn’t use these things so much if they were not. A gentle nudge by one of the officers reminded him that he was supposed to get inside. He wasn’t sure how to do that.

“The door is small,” he said, leaning down a bit.

“What do you mean?”

He straightened. “Could you show me how to get inside?”

The officers exchanged looks that might have meant anything, but he suspected they were having a hard time understanding or believing that he didn’t know how to properly enter an automobile.

The officer who had first spoken to him opened the front passenger door and got in.

“Ah.” Now it was easy if awkward.

His door was shut, the second policeman went around to the other side and got in next to him in the back, while the third slid into the driver’s seat.

So much…too much…the quiet hum of the motor wasn’t startling, but the crackle of a muffled voice that belonged to none of the officers and coming from somewhere near the front most definitely was. Then there was the speed…the completely transformed streets…so much traffic…huge vehicles looking as if they would devour the smaller ones in front of them…people – all ages, hundreds of them, it seemed – and signs. Everywhere. Some even glowed, confusing him further. Most of them made no sense to him. Wireless what? Mobile…phones? Amber Alert? He closed his eyes, longing to go back to the asylum, a child needing his mother.

“Are you okay?”

He jumped slightly, having momentarily forgotten someone was sitting beside him. His eyes flew open. “No.”

The vehicle slowed, surrounded now by others like it. Ahead, a massive building loomed, a structure unlike any he’d seen before. Cement to glass, glass to steel, the entirety of it white, shining, taller than the landscaped trees around its base. So this was where the constabulary did its business now? The door opened beside him, but he was unaware, too engrossed in staring up through the windshield on the other side of the glass partition separating back seat from front.

“You, er, can get out now…hey! Hello?”

He responded to the nudge on his arm, hauling his gaze back down and then up again to the face of the policeman. “I beg your pardon?”

“You can get out of the car.” The officer spoke slowly this time, enunciating his words carefully.

Not helpful speech. Sarcasm. He recognized it as such but said nothing of it as he clambered out, clumsy in reverse.

They brought him in through steel-framed glass doors. On the other side was an odd device that reminded him of the conveyor belt that had been installed in the asylum cafeteria so plastic plates, cups and flatware could be brought efficiently into the kitchen where they were thrown away by those who wouldn’t fling them against the walls. Next to this machine stood a large policeman whose face seemed incapable of holding an expression of any kind. And adjacent to these was an arch. He was told to walk under it which he did, wondering why, and then was led to another area where men and women sat at desks, each with those strange objects that looked like televisions with what would have been typewriters in front of them, except that the keyboards were attached to nothing. Computers, but more alien to his eyes than the few acquired by the asylum in later years.

After passing through this section, they took him to a room with a metal table and a few chairs, nothing else. His eyes searched quickly, fearfully, for cabinets that would hold medical instruments and found nothing but walls.

“Have a seat.”

He nodded and sat at the table. They left him alone for a short while, during which he refused to let himself think. What would be the point? He’d lived too long to care much about the opinions of Worry.

The door opened and a woman in a skirt he deemed indecently short entered. She was carrying some kind of case and a curious smile. The case was set on the table, the smile set more firmly, as she sat opposite him. “Good afternoon.”

Manners might still matter, he thought, so he responded in kind.

She opened the case and removed something that was silver, slightly rectangular, and flat. The top part was pulled upward, opening it and revealing an inverted apple etched in the shiny surface. He couldn’t see what was inside, of course, but heard a small chiming sound, followed by some kind of light that tinged the woman’s face faintly blue.

“What’s your name, sweetheart? I’m afraid no one has thought to ask you that yet.” Raised eyebrows pulled the smile’s corners further up.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Elyse Franco.”

A psychiatrist…no, psychologist. That fit better. He’d certainly known enough of both to recognize the difference. “What are you going to do to me?” He contained the fear with considerable effort.

“Do to you?” She uttered a short laugh of surprise, and for the first time, her expression was genuine. “What do you mean, hon?”

God, I’m so much