Fractured

Eleven

Eleven

            Joel suddenly was aware.  Almost as if he had just woke, but he knew he had not been sleeping.  He was blinded from bright light, and couldn’t seam to move.  Shapes in the room began to take form, and he realized that it wasn’t just light, but the room itself.  The room was painted white, the ceiling and the walls.

            Joel tried to sit up but found he was restrained.  He began to panic.  “Where am I?  Help, help me!”  He began to scream at the top of his lungs.  And all at once the past caught up with him.  He remembered, oh God, he remembered.  Jason, his sister, her husband, and the doctor, he remembered them all.  It's all in my head, it's not real, he tried desperately to reassure himself.

But was it real, Joel had no real sense of anything to anchor himself to.  Was this all just a part of his schizophrenia?  Or had he really killed them?  Panic won out, and Joel began to scream blindly.  He was confused, he hurt, and his mind had betrayed him.  "Help me!"  He screamed out at the top of his lungs.

            An orderly dressed in white followed by a doctor also dressed in white, entered the room moving to either side of Joel’s bed.  The orderly pressed a hard hand on the indentation between Joel’s shoulder and his chest pinning him to the bed.  The doctor spoke as he briefly consulted the chart that had been attached to the outside of the door.  “Joel, please calm down or I will have to medicate you.”

            Joel continued to scream, “Where am I?  Why am I tied down?  Who are you?  Help me, help me!”  Joel continued to scream.  The doctor reached into a pocket on her lab coat pulled a syringe from it.  He removed the safety cap on the needle.  “What are you doing?  Why are you doing this to me?  What is that?”

            The doctor slid the needle into Joel’s arm and injected the contents.  Joel continued his rant, but his volume lessened and his speed slowed.  His speech became muddled and unrecognizable.  Then he slipped into unconsciousness.

The man slipped into unconsciousness, and Dan lifted his weight off of him.  He stared for just a fleeting moment before he turned and looked over at Doctor Stevenson.

            “Hey doc?” asked Dan turning to look back at Joel.

            “Hmm?” the doctor muttered as he wrote on a piece of paper.

            “What is this guys story?  I didn't know that anyone was in this room.”

Dan recognized just the briefest warning in Doctor Stevenson's eyes, but it was gone before he was sure that he had indeed seen it.  "Well, i'm not his treating Doctor."  He paused and looked into the file that he was holding under the paper that he had been writing on.  "It seams that Joel here is a patient of Doctor, um, Doctor Wagner.  You would have to ask him what is going on with this patient."

With that Doctor Stevenson turned and walked out the door of the tiny room.  Dan followed, and shut the door behind him.  He took a second to make sure that the door had fully shut behind him.  As he did so he stole a glance at one of the two-armed guards standing to either side of the door on the hallway side.

Both of the guards that were staring at him, making him feel like an intruder.  He turned and headed down the hall back toward the little office that he would spend most of his shift in.  Residing to nine more hours of his shift Dan found a well read trashy romance novel that one of his coworkers had brought in.

Two and a half hours latter, Dan had finished the novel, and it was bad.  A professional football player returns to his small hometown after he broke his leg, and rekindles a romance with the town beauty.  There was no plot, the characters were flat and dull, and there were grammatical errors on every third or fourth page.  He could write better trash than that.

In disgust of himself for having actually read the entire book, he placed the book back were he found it and went back to the work desk and began to write his shift notes.  Dan had been working the graveyard shifts at the State Hospital for over three years now.  The required information flowed out of him and onto the computer screen almost by itself.

Then came the mystery guest down the hallway.  Dan knew that he had to write up an incident report noting the general time, the Doctor involved, and briefly what happened.  He realized that he didn't know the patients name.  A brief search in the computer turned up no results.

What was his name, Doctor Stevenson had mentioned it.  Was it Joe, or Joel, no, that's not it either.  With no name he wrote the report referring to the patient as "patient in room 217."  Just as he was finishing up there was a gentle tapping at the office door.

Dan turned and saw Doctor Stevenson standing there, Dan began to say hello, but was stopped short by the finger up to Doctor Stevenson's lips.  Taking only one step into the room, the doctor placed an envelope onto the desk, turned and left.

Dan just sat there for a minute, he was witness to what had just happened, but his mind was trying to make sense of it.  Doctor Stevenson had knocked lightly on the door, gestured for Dan to remain quiet, placed an envelope on the desk and then left.

Dan sat forward in his chair and reached across the desk to were the envelope lay.  Sitting back, he examined the envelope and then opened it up.  Inside there were several smaller envelopes that were all sealed and had names printed on them, and one hand written note that was not in an envelope.  Unfolding the note he began to read;

Dan, I am sorry but I need your assistance with delivering some information to the press.  Contained in each envelope is as much detailed medical information that I could find on our mystery patient Joel.  It would seam that the government is doing a great deal to hide whomever he is, and why he is here.

This is the sum of what I know; last week there was that very large gas leak up in Kamas.  They still have not released the official number of people who died.  Or even what caused the leak in the first place.  It seams that Joel came from there, and is part, if not key to what happened.  His brain is deteriorating at an unnatural rate; a disease such as a prion could cause this.  I also found out that he was suffering from a very strong case of schizophrenia.  When he was brought in he had acute malnutrition, as if he had only been eating the bare minimum to live for several weeks.

What ever is going on here, the government or at least a portion of it, is trying to cover this up as best as they can.  My name is on all of the files, and I will be responsible for the release of this information.  I just need you to drop off the envelopes.

Dan abruptly laughed out loud.  In the silence of the office, the noise seamed foreign and out of place.  He reread the note to make sure that he understood correctly and then examined the smaller envelopes more closely.  The Salt Lake Tribune, The Deseret News, KSL, Fox, CBS, ABC, The City Weekly even had it's own envelope for crying out loud.

Dan laughed again, this time letting it all come out in a long belly laugh that left his gut feeling soar.  A government cover up?  Dan's mind couldn't even conceive where Doctor Stevenson had come up with this crazy story.  Sure the gas leak was big news, and our mystery guest was a little strange.  But this was the State Hospital, were everyone sent their crazies.

Dan stuffed the note and all of the smaller envelopes into the larger one, tossed it on to the desk, and turned to the computer.  Opening a word document, Dan began to outline his own idea for a trashy romance novel.