I hear them. The Crazies in the rooms next to me. They bang their fists against the walls, the floors. The most violent are sent to a windowless box not even big enough to be called a room. I know because I've been there.
One Crazy in the cell across the hall, a thin woman with scraggly blonde hair, mutters to herself about some man who apparently visits her in the night. It creeps me out, but not as much as the Crazy in the cell down the hall. He can get violent at times. I remember once when I was being "escorted" to the dining hall, he suddenly lashed out at me from through the bars of his cage. His hands were gnarled and shaky, his fingernails coated with blood, which I assumed was his because of the scratches that traveled from his face to his arms in jagged streaks. Took me three days to heal the light scrapes he gave me.
But he's not the worst. Oh no, not the worst. The worst is the man who never comes out of his room, his sanctuary. His flesh smells and looks like it's literally rotting off his bones and he screams whenever someone comes near him, starting up a chain reaction of similar screeching from the other cells in Section 3.
There are five sections, or so I heard, I'm never let out of mine, all consisting of their own separate dining hall and recreation room at one end and restrooms and infirmary at the other. Between these are 25 cells for "patients", I refer to them as Crazies, to inhabit, a few rooms for nurses to live in, a couple lockdown cells for violent patients, and of course some rooms dedicated to nothing. Personally, I think those rooms are there for when the nurses need to break away from the constant crying and depression. I could've sworn I saw cigarette smoke seeping through the cracks one day.
But me and the Crazies don't mind. I don't associate myself with them because I'm not like them. I'm not crazy, my mind isn't different from people outside the asylum, people like the nurses or doctors. I'm not like the few Crazies who scream they're not crazy and that they don't belong here because they are in denial of being crazy. They do belong here, but I don't. I am different from the Crazies. I'm surprised I'm not crazy by now, living with these people for months. But I get breaks from them, from everyone.
My specialized doctor, who oddly enough is also the woman across the hall's doctor, orders my personal nurse to subject me to hydrotherapy for three days straight every month or so. It's nearly impossible to keep track of the days as none of us are allowed outside and it always seems like late day in the asylum.
The walls are bright yellow with stupid daisies painted on them so that they reflect the bright lights above and make the hall appear to be filled with sunshine. The windows are useless to let in sunlight because the nurses had them painted over so that the sun wouldn't "harm" their patients. I don't think I've ever been exposed to real sunlight even once since I got here. Damn nurses. On the topic of the asylum's inner decor, while the walls and windows are painted bright and repulsively cheerful, the floor is just depressing. I've heard that when the building was first opened, some eighty-seven years ago, they put down some matching carpet, but they removed the carpet and replaced it with plain concrete because it was too much of a hassle to keep cleaning the blood and vomit off it. Called it unsanitary.
Not that it mattered much. The only ones who would have really cared would be the staff and I, seeing as the patients were all mad.
It's a terrible shame, really. All these people gone to waste, sent to rot in this hellhole because they're too mentally unstable to contribute to society. Treated like trash because they can't function like you and I do. Why keep them alive, why bother? They'll never get better. Even if you diagnose them as cured, release them into the world, they'll never think any differently from when they were in this godforsaken place. They'll never think right, they'll never be like anyone else.
What's worse than this, though, is that I'm the only one who realizes it. Everybody else is an idiot! They're all fools! Everyone! Nobody but me will ever understand this because they're all too caught up in their phony diagnoses. If the doctor says that a Crazie is fine, the people will believe him. But if I tell them that they're wrong, nobody thinks twice about my own realization. Believe me on this, now, listen closely because you'll never hear this from anybody else, every single patient that walks into this asylum to be treated, whether they are said to be or not, whether they ever get out, every single one will always be mad.
