Mental (Complete)

Three Little Words

I begin to stutter, but nothing coherent leaves my lips. The games these two are playing are becoming dangerous. They're now trying to convince me that I'm not even myself.

"Nathaniel Davis," the doctor says. "You two were roommates nearly three years ago. He figured out a way to overdose on his meds—you found him."

There are so many things that still didn't make sense. If what Dr. Tingsley is saying happens to be true, then I am absorbing the personalities of the people I've lost and keeping them alive in my psyche. What doesn't make sense is why Nathaniel was just now presenting himself after Judith's death. When I voice my question, the doctor just shrugs.

"It's wishful thinking," he answers. "Who wouldn't want to be young and handsome again?" A small, almost pained smile touches the doctors thin lips. "We believe that Judith's death came as such a shock to you that it suddenly sparked all these personalities to resurface. Before last week, we thought we'd gotten your meds perfected. You seemed to have full control. Now you're talking to yourself in the middle of the night and freaking yourself out."

"So, is Johnny another person who died then?" I asked after a moment.

Dr. Tingsley and nurse Samantha shoot worried looks at each other, obviously not expecting the question. I just glance between the two of them until the doctor clears his throat and returns my gaze.

"Uh, yes," he answers cautiously, his brows scrunched in concern. "We moved you to his ward several months after Nate's passing because you'd been begging for a new room since the boy's death."

"Were we friends?"

Doctor Tingsley grimaces at the question before answering. "Not exactly."

"Anyway," he continues on, "I want to know that you're understanding what we've been saying here today."

"What?" I joke with a lift of my brows. "That I'm a crazy, seventy-something year old murderer. Uh...no. Definitely don't believe you." I laugh, but it lacks humor.

"That's what I figured." The doctor sighs before standing and walking towards the door.

He leaves me alone with Samantha for several awkward minutes before returning with a small handheld DVD player. He takes his seat and places the device in front of me.

"I'd like you to watch this video," he says, his voice tinged with regret, and I feel myself tense with the need to deny whatever the video reveals.

The nurse hits play, and I watch as an old man walks the edges of a room, his hand skimming over the cushioned material until his finger lands on a hole. I can feel a slight tremor vibrating through my core as I witness the man bend slightly to peer through the hole. I've seen this before. The old man with his head leaning against the wall—unmoving. Only, he isn't unmoving. Every few minutes he backs away from the hole, walks the perimeter of the room, and then peers into the hole again.

He looks completely mad, but I remember doing those exact things just days before. Walking the edges of my new room, laughing internally at the weird old man I kept seeing in the hole, and talking to Judith as if we were meeting for the first time. Only, when I watch it on the video, I am only ever by myself: eating imaginary food, talking to imaginary people.

The video reveals Samantha entering the room on a few occasions to bring me food, but I have no memory of those moments. Anytime she'd enter, I'd barely even lift my head in acknowledgement. She'd just silently wait for me to eat and then leave.

"The monitors were an experiment," the doctor says softly. "We hoped you'd realize it was you that you were watching in the hole. We were wrong."

Not able to watch any more, I tear my gaze from the crazy old man on the video and glance down at my fingers. But, when I notice the bulging veins spidering their way over my age-spotted hands, my chest nearly collapses in on itself.