Dark Corners

Then Came the Misty Man

If I don’t write it, I forget it, so I write it. It’s not real writing with a pen and paper. The only paper here is for the toilets and they never let any of us have anything sharp like a pen. I understand that. Some of the people in here are crazy. So I write this down on my left palm with an imaginary pen held by my right hand. I’m doing that right now. It sounds silly, but when I write it down, I remember. When I don’t, I forget. I have to remember. There is so little left.

Hicks is hitting me again. It’s unfair. No hospital attendant should ever act like that, hitting the patients. It makes him mad seeing me write these things down. But I have to keep doing it or I’ll forget. Then I’ll wake up all sore and bruised and not know why.

But it hurts, him hitting me. Sometimes it hurts so much my mind moves through the shadows into other lands, other worlds, other times and dimensions. It’s really true. I know because I wrote it down on my hand. One time when Hicks was hitting me, it hurt so bad my mind walked off into the shadows, and there I met the Misty Man. I called him the Misty Man because I needed to write down something right away and I’d never seen anything like that before, a thing made of vapors, lights, and shadows. The Misty Man spoke to me then. He was in the shadows fleeing his own persecutor.

Ohhhhh. Hicks hit me hard that time. Real hard. I’m in for it this time. God, I don’t know why he hates me so. I’m not like the ones who have to be fed or get their diapers changed. I feed myself, wash myself, and go to the toilet alone. He should like me best of all. But I’m the one he likes to hit the most.

Maybe it’s because of who I was before the trial. This is, after all, a place for the criminally insane. The sign on the gate says so. An unthinkable thing. Another unthinkable thing. There is no memory of what I was supposed to have done because I wrote nothing down. It must have been bad though. Some of the things they said about me at the trial. I don’t remember what they said. I didn’t write that down. I did write down that they were bad things—

—kicked me. So hard.

Going away.

Gone.

Now I’ll cry, but just to myself. I can’t ever let Hicks see me cry.

When Hicks hits me in front of the other patients, or the nurses and doctors, he does it like he’s only joking, kidding around. But the words sting. The slaps hurt. Sometimes he takes my left hand and forces me to slap my own face.

“You don’t have a pencil,” Hicks explains with a sneer. “We don’t give sharp instruments to nuts. You don’t have any paper and nothing is written on your palm. Look!” He punches my upper arm. I keep writing. Hicks grabs my hand and shoves it into my face.

“Look at your palm, Nut! Can you read anything there?” Again he forces me to slap my own face. “Look at it, you nut! Look!”

He smacks the back of my head with his open hand. Some of the patients in the rec room laugh. Most don’t. Most have Hickses of their own.

“Look at it!”

I keep writing. I need to remember as much as I can. So much is gone. Like those three dead men and the dead woman. Don’t remember killing them. That woman and those three men. Don’t even remember who they were. I was told about the results of the trial, but I don’t remember the trial.

Sometimes I pick at these pieces of memory I have, then the feelings fill me, flattening me with that burning, deafening, shock wave of rage. I can’t write like that, so I never find out what it is. Better to leave it alone.

Hicks has stopped slapping my head. I look up to see why. Hicks is chunky with long, stringy dark hair, a few strands of which come down to his shoulders. His eyebrows turn up at the ends and his nose is lumpy and bulbous like some sort of mutant potato. He isn’t very big, but it doesn’t matter. The patients can’t hit back. The last patient who hit back was taken into the storeroom behind the hospital kitchen by half a dozen orderlies and beaten to death. That’s what they tell us.

Hicks is looking at someone across the room. I look and see her: Nurse Stover. She is shaking her head and frowning at Hicks. The look says several things. He knows better than to abuse patients in the rec room. That’s why they have the padded cells: secluded, sound proofed.

Bad form, Hicks, says her look.

All these witnesses.

Bad form.

Nurse Stover yawns and goes back to reading her tabloid, freshening up her fantasy of being abducted and raped by giant grasshoppers.

I study Nurse Stover, the wisps of unruly black hair on her neck rebelling against the tight bun beneath her starched white cap.

I couldn’t rape Nurse Stover.

The idea of it repels me.

I might think differently, though, if I were a giant grasshopper.

I could cut her throat. I wonder about that, because the doctor once said that the four victims I was supposed to have killed had all been butchered. Then, because I never speak, the doctor went back to making notes.

In my little rubber room for the night. Long ago I wrote that it looks like the upholstered interior of a really cheap coffin, and that hasn’t changed.

God, I want to know who I am. I want out of here, to be free of Hicks, but to do that I have to remember my name.

It’s a rule. If I can’t remember my name, I’m crazy and they won’t let me loose. If I tell them my name, then I’m cured and can be sent back out to do whatever it is that I once did.

If I ever find out what my name is, I will write it down. I must remember to write it down. It’s important.

What was it that took my name and memory?

Was it the Misty Man?

The Misty Man had filled the corner of my cell after that one terrible beating Hicks had given me. It was like the punishment had excreted the Misty Man into existence by the sheer demand of my pain and need.

A god?

A ghost?

The projections of an other dimensional alien whose brain waves seeped through the cracks of his own dimension? That’s what I believe. He was locked up and tortured by his own kind and he reached for me the same way that I reached for him. Then we met. I saw him in my cell. He saw me in his cell.

What’s there to believe? The doctor had pushed around a pink form. He told me that I had been overworked, under great stress. Then there was a death. Then there were four more deaths.

According to the doctor.

The issue isn’t communication with aliens, the doctor had said. The issue is getting in touch with reality. The issue is getting better.

What was it? Numbers, policy, politics, habit, arbitrary rules? I was caught in a bind, assaulted by rubber stamps, there had been that embarrassment before the Foreign Relations Committee, that dressing down by the Secretary, and then someone had died.

Someone had died.

Dear, dear someone. Dear, dear one. Are you the one I fear to remember? Are you the one I walk Hell trying to forget?

Then there were great gaps torn into my memory; then the hospital and Hicks. Then came the Misty Man. The creature asked me what I wanted to do about it.

“About what?” I asked the thing.

“About life, the planet, the universe, things.” The voice was level, devoid of emotion. There were muted lights within the mist. The lights were the emotions the mind words couldn’t feel. The Misty Man cared about me. It cared about what I thought, what I wanted, about the ocean of pain in which I was drowning.

I was scared. It was the only time I ever thought I was crazy. My need, though, drove me toward the creature. The Misty Man listened to my pain. It told me how it suffered. It asked me things: How is my time? There are no days, no nights, in the Misty Man’s reality. Only mass and time.

The Misty Man was isolated from its kind, removed from its body and held in a field that rendered it powerless in its own dimension. My pain had driven my mind into the Misty Man’s dimension. There I have the power.

“Through you,” said the Misty Man, “I can have power again. Through me, you can have power again. We can have power through each other.”

If it is true, there is something I can do about my day, my year, my existence. I can bring back to life those who should have never died. I can kill those who should have never been born.

“Are these things we can do?” I had asked the Misty Man.

The creature didn’t know. We would have to try out our powers through each other and see.

“You have already slain someone for me,” the Misty Man said. It was a caretaker the shadow hated: the shadow’s Hicks. “You wanted to kill your caretaker and instead you killed mine. We must have other ways to serve ourselves by serving each other. Shall I kill your caretaker?”

I didn’t want Hicks killed. Not just right then. But it made me feel strong. It was my choice. Life or death for Hicks became my choice. He could be brought down with nothing more than my wish.

“You’re repressing the memory of what you’ve done,” says the doctor. “What you did was so unacceptable to your own moral sense, your mind refuses to admit to it. It’s a very common survival mechanism. If the past can’t be remembered, it doesn’t exist? If it doesn’t exist, then you didn’t do it. But to chop out that piece of reality you’ve lost your entire past.”

What he says sounds stupid. I write it down here for the whole world to see. It’s stupid, what the doctor says.

Everybody knows why I can’t remember. I didn’t write it down.

His office is shabby. He doesn’t even hang up his diplomas and certificates. The way his office looks says to me that even he doesn’t like it there. Everything looks like it was reclaimed from the Salvation Army before it could be repaired. Even the doctor looks bald, threadbare, worn out.

All he has left now are eyes.

Eyes and a watch.

Eyes and a watch, and a clock on the wall.

His eyes look at his watch, his mouth makes another bored comment, the eyes look at the clock on the wall, then aim down again and look at the watch.

“Well, we’re done for today.”

This time the session went for only six minutes. The state pays him for forty-five.

“Shall I melt his legs?” asks the Misty Man.

I giggle and the doctor opens the door to allow me and the Misty Man to exit.

I have to get this down fast.

It’s night.

Hicks’s voice in the hall woke me up.

I hear him talking outside the door.

The orderly named Boyle answers. They talk angrily about a football game: who should be congratulated, who should die, who should be cast down into Obscure Hell as gross incompetents, as though they were authorities on incompetence.

Actually, they are.

Boyle is Danny’s orderly. Boyle is a body builder with a big belly. Danny is a writer who spends his time thinking of ways to kill Boyle and a book editor named Herb Liselli. Danny will kill Boyle tomorrow. Danny always says that. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. I think he’s afraid if he kills Boyle, the other orderlies will gang up and kill him. Danny’s crazy though. That’s why he’s locked up in a room like mine. He’s a writer.

He has a good plan, even so. His plan to kill Boyle is very good, but he made me promise not to write it down. He’s afraid Hicks will read it and tell Boyle. I didn’t write it down, so I don’t remember the plan, but Danny promised to tell me again right after he kills Boyle. He told me that once he kills Boyle, he’ll go after Herb Liselli. Once Liselli is dead, Danny doesn’t care what happens. Then I can use the plan.

Boyle swears and his words fade as he moves away from the door. They have decided who the stupid football players are and now Hicks is looking at me through the peephole. I keep writing down everything on my palm even though I know it makes him furious. I don’t do it to make him angry, although I don’t think Hicks believes that.

The door latch clicks.

The smell of the food.

It’s food time and I didn’t even know. The smell. I’m hungry. The smell makes my mouth water.

Hicks pushes open the door with his ass and says, “Lunch time, Nut. Put your imaginary pencil and pad away and pay attention.”

I don’t.

I keep writing.

He pushes me back, pulls me to my feet, and forces a big spoonful of something into my mouth. I want to feed myself. I can do it. And I am hungry.

He digs the edge of the spoon into my upper pallet, making me cry out. He did it on purpose. I see the look in his eyes.

I gag on it. The something that was on the spoon is like a thousand tiny bugs in my mouth. I’m sure it must be rice. But it isn’t like rice. It’s like bugs. Thousands of tough, crunchy little beetles. I push it out of my mouth with my tongue.

“Damn you, you stupid pig!” Hicks drops everything, grabs the hair on the back of my head, and brings back his fist.

The Misty Man asks me, “Now?”

“No,” I answer. “Not just yet.”

Darkness—

I awake to countless aches. They divide, organize, process, and center into several major systems. The Misty Man explores them with fingers of black fog.

There is a swelling over my left eye. My cheeks are swollen, the bones beneath bruised. My ribs ache all over my sides where Hicks kicked me. The ring finger on my left hand, the thumb and index fingers of my right hand, are broken. Black with blood, the skin stretched so tightly over the swelling it shines. My hands hurt terribly.

“Hicks,” stated the Misty Man.

“Yes. This time I know it’s him. I wrote it down. This time I know.”

There is a crusty substance in my nose and on my upper lip. It’s dried blood. “How can I write now? He’s broken my fingers.”

The Misty Man’s power fills my mind. If I can write on an imaginary pad with an imaginary pencil, I can hold the imaginary pencil with imaginary fingers.

I laugh and it’s a howl of power and victory. I can write.

The writing is in my head, and the doctor doesn’t even notice my hands are not moving. Nor does he notice my broken fingers, black and swollen. The dried blood on my lip.

He looks at the clock, looks at his watch. Looks back at the clock.

“Doctor,” I say out loud. There is a smile on my face because he’s got to be excited about me speaking. I know I’ve been locked up here for over three years, and this is the first time I’ve ever said anything.

The doctor looks at the clock, looks at his watch.

I check my notes to see if I really did speak to him, and I did. Maybe it wasn’t loud enough for him to hear.

“Doctor?”

The doctor turns his head toward me, his eyebrows going up. “Yes?”

“I spoke.”

The doctor nods and looks back at the clock. “I told you that you could anytime you wanted.”

Deep red, pus yellow, blackening eddies of anger fill the room, cover the walls, flow through the barred windows, cover the earth.

If the Misty Man should appear this second and ask me to end the universe, I—

“Our time’s about up.” The doctor leans forward and places his hands on his chair’s armrests preparatory to standing.

“What about my hands?” I ask.

The doctor stood. “I noticed you weren’t pretending to write down things. If you’ll remember I told you—”

“No. Look. My fingers. They’re broken.” I held them out for him to see.

“Broken?” The doctor walked over, took each of my hands in one of his, and looked down at them. “How did you do this?”

“Hicks did it. He broke them to keep me from writing.”

“Nonsense. You did this to yourself, didn’t you?”

I don’t think. I swing and smash the doctor’s face with the heel of my right hand. He falls to the floor and I jump on his face, smashing that tired smugness until it becomes nothing. There are noises behind me, a shout, something sharp stabbing into my leg—

In the bed rest wing, splinted and taped, strapped down on a bed covered with a discolored rubber sheet. I study the straps around my wrists and ankles and across my chest. I nod at the wisdom. They are afraid I’ll use the tape and splints to kill myself. Or someone else.

I can’t reach to scratch my nose, my ear, my crotch, or anything. I don’t like being strapped down. It makes me so helpless, vulnerable, dependent.

A sound.

From behind me, out of sight, the sound of a footstep.

My mouth is so dry.

Hicks moves into view.

“Nut, the doctor says you talk now. And what’s the first thing out of your filthy mouth? You tattle on me about your fingers. You know, you’re not just crazy. You’re stupid, too.” Hicks pronounces the word like stoopud.

The orderly looks down at my right hand. With his middle finger he traces along the surface of my splinted index finger. Just the touch makes my finger throb.

“The doctor didn’t believe what you said, Nut. I told him you broke your own fingers just to get attention, and he believed me. That’s because it’s true.” He grasped my middle finger with his fist and began bending it back. “You did break your own fingers. You’re not writing now, are you?”

Yes I am.

More and more he bends back my finger. Blinding lights flash as I feel the bones crack, the ends grind together. I vomit from the pain. It covers my cheek, wets my hair. I hate vomit.

Hicks laughs.

“I don’t clean this wing, Nut. Let’s see if we can make you crap, too.” He begins bending back my right ring finger.

The world gets soft and black.

All of my fingers are broken. Both of my hands are in casts. I am clean and the sheets are clean, my arms still in restraints.

“If you ask me to do it,” says the Misty Man, “I will take care of those who cause you pain. We have to do it together. You must want and I will do. If you do not want, I cannot do. I’ll kill Hicks. Your doctor. Anyone.”

“Everyone isn’t bad,” I tell him. “Even Hicks and the doctor. They aren’t evil. The doctor is washed up, frustrated, hurt, old, disappointed with his life. He can’t see the pain in others because his own pain fills his sight. Hicks is the same. The world is populated with men and women who are just like them. I’m like them. I couldn’t kill them for that.”

Smug laughter comes from the Misty Man’s image. “You tried to kill the doctor for that.”

“No.” I turn my face away from the dark. “I was wrong. I didn’t think. I just reacted. The doctor doesn’t deserve to die for what he thinks.”

“What he thinks of you?”

“Especially for what he thinks of me.”

“What then for the doctor? I think you know it’s time to do something. They’ve replaced the caretaker you killed for me with someone who is very gentle and kind. In a like manner, I could help you.”

I think. There has to be something between doing nothing and doing murder. Another option or two. After all, I’m not some kind of psycho killer. “The doctor needs different work,” I tell the Misty Man. “Something away from here.”

For a long time the Misty Man is silent. “At least let me kill Hicks,” asks the creature.

Something, either compassion or vengeance, touched my heart. “Hicks is sick,” I told the Misty Man. “He needs help. Hicks needs to be in here.”

The image of the Misty Man fills with blue lights and a few yellow glows. It fades and I am again alone. I let the anger, the pain, the rage fill me until I scream the universe out of existence.

The new doctor closes the folder and tosses it on his desk. He has his diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall as though he wants to be there.

He wears black-rimmed glasses and works with his tie down and his sleeves rolled up. Danny says he’s a good man. I agree with him. The Misty Man did very well. I wonder what happened to the old doctor.

The desk is new, as is the chair in which I am sitting. Instead of pajamas I am wearing my raw silk sport jacket and tan slacks. Suede shoes are on my feet. Socks, too.

I put them all on myself. I fed myself, washed myself, made my own way to the new doctor’s office. I lean forward and eye a manila folder upon the new doctor’s new desk and grin inwardly as the world suddenly opens its doors.

My name is Paul Linden.

Mr. Paul Linden.

It’s printed in big letters right on my file folder. Now I know my name. Suddenly I’m sane.

“With what you’ve suffered here, Paul, I don’t know how many of us could have maintained our sanity, much less your excellent attitude,” says the new doctor. He speaks in a calm but rapid manner. My imaginary fingers have difficulty keeping up.

“They were human beings doing the best they could with what they had,” I answer. “Besides, forgiveness is the price of serenity, isn’t it?”

The doctor nods, a big smile on his face. He waves his hand at my folder. “You’ve been rather suddenly cleared of all charges, which means that your reason for being committed here expired with them. If you want, I imagine you could sue the police, the state, and this institution for a considerable fortune.”

“I’m aware of that, doctor. I can’t afford to be vindictive, however. Things happen, and I understand that. Besides, resentment and revenge can eat me alive. I’ve learned that much here. As far as I’m concerned, the past is past.”

“Well, the sessions we’ve had together, as well as all of your tests, show you to be one of the best adjusted humans on Earth. Of course no one will ever accuse the previous administration of this institution with keeping too many records.”

He laughs.

I laugh.

The Misty Man laughs.

Doctor and former patient stand, shake hands, and laugh again. It is funny. The right papers aren’t there, the right persons aren’t available, and out of the shadows comes this editor of Danny’s, Herb Liselli, to admit to everything.

In the hallway the doctor walks ahead to talk with the guard on the security door. I stay behind for a moment. Danny and a dozen other patients are waiting to say good-bye. Danny turns away, hurt that I am leaving him there.

“Danny. Good-bye.”

Danny shrugs, shakes his dark curls, and keeps his eyes closed. “Guess I’ll miss you, Nut. You didn’t tell the new doc anything about my plan, did you? You didn’t tell him what I’m going to do to Boyle?”

“No. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“You sure?”

“I don’t remember it, Danny.” I lower my voice. “I didn’t write it down, so how could I remember it?”

I give Danny a big hug and whisper in his ear, “You remember Herb Liselli, that editor you want to dismember?”

I feel Danny’s head nod against my cheek. “He’s coming here as a patient, Danny. It shouldn’t be more than a few weeks.”

“Are you sure?” Danny asks in a whisper, his eyes as wide with promise as a child’s on Christmas morning.

“The Misty Man worked it. Call it a gift from me to you.” Danny holds me at arm’s length, tears of gratitude in his eyes. I squeeze Danny’s shoulder and look at the other patients. Teddy, Mike, Grandma, Rough Stuff and the rest. I nod to a few, touch hands with them, give another hug or two.

When done, I ask Danny, “Where’s Hicks?”

“We brought him.” Danny points to a patient squatting and leaning his shoulder against the wall, his arms wrapped around his knees. Hicks’s eyes look around, his neck muscles twitching. Danny stands next to him and Hicks cowers and covers his head with his arms.

“Don’t hit me!” he cries quietly. “Please, don’t hit me.”

I squat in front of him. I can see one of Hicks’s eyes, wide and frightened, peering at me from between trembling forearms. “I’m leaving now, Hicks. Keep trying, let these people help you, and you’ll be fine.” I pat his arm. “Every now and then I’ll be back to visit you.”

Hicks violently shakes his head and whimpers. I squeeze his shoulder and stand up. I hug Danny again, say some more good-byes, and go to the security door. I hug the new doctor and nod at the guard. The guard isn’t a hugger.

“What’ll you do after this, Paul?” asks the new doctor.

“I’m going back to my old job at Defense. But, Doc, come the election don’t be surprised if the President nominates someone who looks a lot like me to be the new Secretary of Defense.”

The doctor frowns and cocks his head to one side. “You’re not setting yourself up for a big fall, are you, Paul? Those confirmation hearings can get pretty rugged. Even though you were cleared of those charges, you did have a minor breakdown. Are you certain the President would want to put you through something like that?”

“Yes,” I agreed, “Things like that often place a nomination under a shadow.” I gave a tiny giggle and then took control of myself. “The Cold War is over, doctor, and the world is swamped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that no longer have any purpose. I have a couple of ideas for what to do with them. The value of the ideas should outweigh any reservations concerning the state of my mental health. Besides, I’ve done a few favors that have placed some good people on my side.”

The doctor’s eyes say that he thinks I’m chasing a fantasy. I shake hands with the doctor one last time, the security guard smiles through the grill, unlocks the door, and I step into the chill of a winter afternoon.

Somewhere, somewhen, in a distant dimension, the essence of Iyef Nu Reyitim was released from its restraint field and was returned to its body to resume normal life. The investigator, recently placed in charge of the case, said many, many apologies to Iyef, for no one could remember why Iyef had ever been placed in restraint. There were empty files and blank data cores at the mental support facility, as well as several counselors who had literally lost their minds. Strangest of all were the curious blanks that appeared in news and history cores all over the world. Nonetheless, Iyef accepted the apology, ate most of the investigator, and streaked away from the facility directly toward the closest major population center.

Iyef Nu Reyitim and his shadow were free.