The orderly—what was his name, bathed in the fluorescent flicker of overheads—had fingers yellowed from nicotine and eyes like tourniquets tightening around my last good vein. He moved through the ward like a thief through a graveyard, pockets full of stolen pills and quiet threats. His shoes squeaked against linoleum in a rhythm that synced with my pulse—too fast, too erratic, like the wings of a moth trapped in a jar.
There was a rustle from the corner cot, where the old man who claimed to be Napoleon curled fetal around a pillowcase stuffed with newspaper. His whispers cut through the antiseptic stench: “They’re putting it in the pudding again.” The air tasted of lithium and overcooked peas, but under it all—something metallic, urgent. The kind of smell that lingers after a gunshot or a bad decision.
My tongue traced the jagged ridge of a molar I’d cracked during last week’s episode. The orderly—Carl, his name tag suddenly swam into focus—leaned over my bed, his breath sour with coffee and contempt. “You’re due for meds,” he said, but his pupils dilated when the fire alarm screamed to life down the hall. The sound wasn’t the usual intermittent bleat; this was a continuous wail that vibrated in my molars, the pitch of something truly burning.
Napoleon uncoiled like a sprung trap, his bare feet slapping the floor as he scrambled toward the door. The old man moved with a speed that defied his trembling hands, his hospital gown billowing behind him like a tattered standard. Carl hesitated—I saw the calculation flicker across his face: protocol versus whatever chaos was unfolding. The moment stretched until the sprinklers kicked on, painting the room in stale water and the acrid tang of activated pipes.
Somewhere beyond the dripping chaos, glass shattered. Not the clean break of an accident, but the purposeful violence of something—or someone—forcing their way in. The overhead lights stuttered, casting the ward in strobes of fluorescence that made the pooling water look black as oil. Napoleon’s laughter came in wet gasps, his fingers tapping Morse code against the door frame. “They’ve come for the pudding,” he hissed.
In my Svengali obsession—each one a lagoon, in my mind’s Genesis swimming with the fish swallowed by a whale blind as the prophet inside its belly—still hearing the ghost of the morphine dripping stitching me in time where the dead congregate in my head—I saw the asylum walls as shattered stained-glass, my jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth, my wrists still weeping from the restraints.
