I Was Committed to Hargrove in 1984. The Patients Weren't the Problem. [Part 2]

By the second month I had stopped counting days.

That sounds worse than it was. It wasn't despair, it was just practicality. Counting days kept you oriented toward a future that Hargrove had no interest in delivering, and staying oriented toward it cost more than it gave back. Dom had figured that out in month one. I got there in month two. Gloria had stopped counting so long before us that she said she couldn't remember when, which either meant the number was too painful to hold or that she genuinely didn't know, and I never asked which.

What I counted instead was sessions.

Mine were every Tuesday. I had six by the time month two ended, and each one left the same residue. That small willingness, that slight agreeable film that I'd gotten better at naming and worse at preventing. I'd started keeping a private tally of how long it took to wear off after each session. First session: gone by dinner. Third session: still present the next morning. Fifth session: I lost forty minutes and never got them back, and the willingness that came with it didn't feel like it had worn off at all so much as it had settled somewhere I couldn't reach to measure it anymore. I'm getting ahead of myself. Gloria had warned us that the naming didn't help. You could be aware of a current and still get pulled by it. Awareness wasn't the same as resistance. The only thing that helped, she said, was giving them what they wanted in the room so they had no reason to push harder, and then spending the hours after rebuilding whatever the session had taken down.

I was getting decent at the performance. Good enough that Fell had started writing less during our sessions, which either meant he was satisfied or that he'd stopped needing the notes. I couldn't tell which and I didn't want to think too hard about what the second one implied.

Dom's notes in the back of his paperback were up to three pages by then. Small tight shorthand, nothing readable to anyone but him. He'd started using a second system for observations he considered high priority, marking them with a small x in the margin. When I asked him once how many x's he had, he looked at the back cover for a moment.

"Eleven." He closed the book.

The transfer notice for Gloria appeared on a Tuesday.

It turned up on a Tuesday. I found it by accident. I was waiting outside the administration office on the ground floor because Dom had sent me to ask about the process for receiving mail, which we both knew was a dead end but which gave me a reason to be standing in that hallway.

The office door was open three inches. Standard gap, the width of a foot that hasn't quite finished pulling back through a doorway. A staff member was at the desk with her back to me, a woman I recognized but didn't know by name, and she had a folder open in front of her and was writing something. Not on the folder. Below it, on the desk surface, something she was copying from the folder onto a separate form.

The top sheet of the folder was visible through the gap.

The font was larger than normal document type, which was the only reason I could read it from where I stood. That and the hallway was quiet and I'd stopped moving and I had nothing else to do but look.

TRANSFER AUTHORIZATION: INPATIENT RELOCATION.

Underneath that, a name. I won't put it here in case it matters later, but it wasn't a name I recognized. Then below that, a second line.

RECEIVING UNIT: EAST RESIDENTIAL ANNEX.

I'd never heard of an east residential annex. I'd never seen a door marked that way, never encountered a reference to it in anything posted or spoken in the building. There was the east corridor on the second floor that Dom had told me to avoid on day two, and there was nothing else east of the main building that I'd been able to see from any window available to me.

The woman at the desk turned her chair slightly to reach something on the shelf beside her and I moved before she could turn far enough to see me in the gap.

I walked back to Dom.

I told him what I'd seen and he sat with it for a long time without speaking, his thumb running along the spine of the paperback.

"The name on the transfer. First or last?"

I told him.

He opened the back cover of the book. Ran his finger down the shorthand until he found something. Closed it.

"She's been here four months. Came in two weeks before you." He set the book on the table. "She's been in the corridor twice that I've seen. Both times she came back the same day. Both times she was different after."

I asked what different meant.

"She used to sit by the window on the east side of the common area. Two days after the first time she went in the corridor, she moved to the center of the room. No window. She'd sit at the table facing the door and she wouldn't move for hours." He looked across the room at the woman in question, who was at a center table now, hands folded, watching the door with that familiar half-second patience. "Three weeks after the second time, she stopped sitting at all. She stands. By the wall."

I looked. The woman was at the table now. But I'd seen her standing by the wall. I'd filed it as a personal habit and not looked harder.

"How long before the transfer?" I asked.

"The date on the form. Did you see it?"

I had. I told him.

"Eight days."

That was the same week I got close to one of them. The late-stage ones. The ones who'd been through enough sessions that the drift had stopped being a drift and become something more permanent.

His name was Paul. I knew that from early group sessions, back when he still spoke enough to introduce himself. He'd been a contractor. Structural, not electrical. He built things, which I noted because I build things too and I'd thought about that when I first noticed him. He'd been at Hargrove for close to a year by the time I arrived. By month two of my stay he was past the point of attending group. He just existed in the building. Moved from room to room at intervals that had no apparent logic. Ate when food was in front of him. Responded to direct questions with a delay you could count.

I ended up alone with him in the common area on a Wednesday afternoon.

It wasn't planned. Most of the wing was in a scheduled group I'd been excused from, Dom was in an individual session, Gloria was in the yard. I'd stayed behind with a headache that was real enough that Reyes hadn't pushed it. Paul was in the room when I got there. He was sitting in one of the chairs along the east wall, spine straight, hands on his knees, watching the door.

I sat at one of the tables and tried to read a magazine from the stack they kept near the television. Three months old. Nothing in it I cared about. I kept my eyes on the pages and I was aware of Paul in the way you're aware of something large and quiet that you don't want to disturb.

Ten minutes passed. Maybe fifteen. I wasn't watching the clock.

Then Paul's head turned.

Not toward me. Toward the east wall. There was nothing on the east wall except the wall. Same institutional off-white as every other surface, a small scuff at knee height where something had bumped it, no windows on that side. He turned toward it and his face changed. The arrangement of his features shifted in some way I didn't have vocabulary for. His mouth opened slightly. His eyes moved. Fixed. The slow sweep of door, window, door was gone. Fixed on a specific point on the wall. About midway up. About three feet to the left of center.

I put the magazine down.

Paul's breathing changed. I could see it in his chest, in the collar of his gray jumpsuit moving. Slower. Much slower than it had been. His hands on his knees pressed flat and then relaxed and then pressed flat again.

He was listening to something.

I strained to hear what he was hearing and there was nothing. The building's ambient sound. The distant clatter of something in the kitchen, the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead, the tick of the heating system in the walls. Nothing else. But Paul was listening, and Paul was responding, and the response was in his body in a register I'd never seen in him before. His head tilted by two or three degrees.

Then he stood up.

He crossed the room to the east wall. He walked with that forward-weighted gait the late-stage ones had developed, slightly too much weight on the front foot, and he stopped in front of the exact point on the wall he'd been looking at. He raised one hand. He pressed his palm flat against the paint.

He stood like that for a long time.

I watched him from the table without moving. My headache had stopped being something I was thinking about.

Paul's palm stayed flat on the wall. His head was down, chin toward his chest, and his shoulders had dropped and he looked smaller than he was. The breathing, visible from eight feet away, had slowed to something that made me want to count the intervals, the way I'd counted the lights in the east corridor. I didn't count. I held the magazine and I watched.

Then his palm began to move.

Slow. Deliberate. Tracing something against the paint. A shape, though I couldn't make out what from where I sat. His fingers spread and then drew together and spread again, and the motion had the quality of recognition, the way your hand moves over a surface you've touched before in the dark and know by feel. He covered a space about two feet across, working left to right, then back, unhurried. A man reading something with his hand.

I stood up from the table.

I don't know why. Some combination of needing to see and needing to be closer to the door. I got to within five feet of him before I stopped. Close enough to see the paint clearly, the surface of the wall where his palm had moved, and there was nothing there. No mark, no residue, no impression in the paint. Just the wall. Just off-white and a scuff at knee height and nothing else.

Paul's hand went still.

His head came up. Not quickly. Slowly, the way you come up out of water. He was facing the wall. I was behind him and to the left. He turned his head, not his body, just the head rotating by degrees on the neck, until he was looking at me from the corner of his eye.

The eye was wrong.

Not deformed. Not visibly damaged. The pupil was the right shape. The color was right, the same dull brown I remembered from the early group sessions when he'd still been in them. But the pupil was wide. Wide for that room, for fluorescent light, for a Wednesday afternoon with nothing happening. Wide the way a lens goes wide when it's taking in as much as possible. When it needs to.

He looked at me for four seconds. I know it was four because I counted and I couldn't stop myself from counting.

Then he turned back to the wall.

His hand came up again. Pressed flat. Still.

I left before anyone came back. I walked to the nearest bathroom and I ran cold water over my wrists until the shaking in my hands was something I could pass off as a chill if anyone asked, which nobody did.

Dom's response, when I told him that night, was to open the back of the paperback and write something down without asking me to repeat any part of it.

When he finished he looked at what he'd written.

"East wall of the common area."

"About midway up. Three feet left of center."

"That's the wall that backs up against the east corridor."

I hadn't worked that out yet. When he said it I worked it out.

"The corridor is on the other side of that wall."

"The other side of that wall," he confirmed. He closed the book. "Something in the corridor was communicating with him. Or he was communicating with it. Or both." He set the book down. "And he knew exactly where to put his hand."

I asked if he thought Paul knew what he was doing.

Dom thought about it longer than I expected.

"I think something in him knew. Whether Paul knew is a different question."

I went into the east corridor on a Friday in week nine.

I want to be precise about this because I've told it wrong before, told it with more confidence than I had at the time. I had no plan going in. Dom didn't know. He'd have stopped me, or more likely come with me, and I didn't want to put him in that position. I went in because it was a Friday afternoon and the building was quieter on Friday afternoons than any other time, something about the staffing rotation, and I'd been standing at the entrance to the corridor for three minutes already without anyone coming through the main hall, and my feet moved before I'd made a decision about whether they should.

Twelve steps in and the air changed.

The temperature was fine. The smell was fine. Something else, with less obvious physical character. The fluorescent tubes were cycling. Four seconds, down and up. I kept my eyes off them and my attention on the doors lining either side. All closed. All with the standard handles, no locks visible. Six on each side, twelve in total plus the window at the far end.

What I noticed after the air was the sound.

Related to the hum from the sessions but lower. Much lower. Below the threshold of hearing, almost, in the register where sound becomes pressure rather than noise. It was in the floor. I could feel it in my boots, in the soles of my feet, and once I was aware of it I could feel it in my back teeth the way I'd felt the door closing on the first day, though different in character. Continuous, sustained, patient rather than a single impact.

I walked to the third door on the right.

I put my hand on the handle.

The sound in my feet got stronger. Not louder. Stronger. There's a difference and I'm not sure I can explain it but my body understood the difference clearly. My hand stayed on the handle and I stood there and I was aware of the door's temperature the way you become aware of things when your system has already decided something is wrong. It was warm. Room temperature would've been fine. This was warmer. Warm the way a surface gets when something on the other side of it has been running for a long time.

I took my hand off the handle.

I walked back to the corridor entrance. I walked back to the common area. I sat down. I breathed.

That was all I saw. I know that's not much. It didn't feel like nothing at the time.

I told Dom about the corridor that same night.

He sat across from me at the common area table with his coffee cup empty in front of him and he listened to all of it without interrupting, which was unusual for him. When I finished he turned the cup in a slow circle on the table, once around, twice.

"The warmth on the door."

"The handle. Yes."

"You're sure it wasn't ambient."

"The handles on our room doors are cold. The handles on the bathroom doors are cold. The handles on every door in this building run cold because the building runs cold." I kept my voice at the level we used for these conversations, low and flat and unremarkable. "This one was warm."

He turned the cup again.

"And the sound in the floor."

"Same frequency as the sessions. Or close enough that I couldn't tell the difference." I looked at my hands. "It was in the corridor. Not just in Fell's office. Whatever produces it, the source isn't localized to his room."

Dom put the cup down. He looked at the east wall of the common area, which from the table was just a wall, just paint, nothing indicating what was behind it or how far back the behind went.

"Paul knows. Whatever the late-stage ones become, they can feel it through the walls. They orient toward it." He looked at me. "You felt it in the floor."

I said I had.

"You've had five sessions."

I said I knew.

He picked up the cup, remembered it was empty, put it back down. "Don't go in the corridor again. Not alone." He didn't wait for me to agree, which meant he knew I might not agree and didn't want to have the argument. He stood up and collected the cup and went to return it to the window.

I sat at the table and looked at the east wall and thought about the warmth on the door handle and whether it had still been there when I'd turned and walked away, and whether the fact that I hadn't checked meant something.

My fifth session with Fell was the following Tuesday.

I went in with Gloria's methods layered as carefully as I could manage. The slight delay before answering. The particular quality of attention that reads as receptive. The body language of someone being gently, gradually opened up. I'd practiced it in my room the night before, going through the motions in front of the narrow window, checking the reflection.

Fell was different.

Not dramatically. Nothing I could have pointed to and said that, that's the thing that's changed. He moved the same. He spoke at the same register. The reading glasses came off and went back on with the same frequency. He asked about my father again and I gave the same answers I always gave and he received them the same way, head tilted at that slight angle, pen moving at the pace of someone who writes everything down because they've learned that everything matters eventually.

It was the pauses that were different. In the first four sessions there had been pauses, of course, the natural gaps of a conversation where someone is listening or formulating. These felt longer. Not by much. Three or four seconds where there had been two. Enough that my eye wanted to check his face and I kept it from doing that because checking his face was the one thing Gloria had said I should never do in session, that Fell read faces the way other people read text, completely and quickly and with full retention.

He asked about work. He asked how I was sleeping.

"Well enough."

He wrote something down. The scratch of the pen on the notepad, which I'd been tracking since the first session, had a different rhythm than usual. More frequent. Shorter bursts.

Then he asked something he hadn't asked before.

"Do you ever feel a pull toward certain parts of the building?"

I kept the delay to one beat. "I'm not sure I follow."

"Some patients describe a kind of orientation." He took his glasses off. Cleaned them with the hem of his coat, deliberate, an unhurried motion he'd never used in a session before. "A gravitational quality. Certain rooms. Certain areas." He put the glasses back on and looked at me over the top of the frames, not through them. "It's a common feature of the integration process. Nothing to be concerned about. I'm curious whether you've noticed anything like that."

I said I hadn't.

He held my gaze for a moment before he wrote it down.

The session went on. I can account for the first thirty minutes. Fell continued with the standard questions. The sound was present and I kept my palms flat on my thighs and worked through the fabric texture the way Gloria had taught me to use physical sensation as an anchor. I was managing. The small willingness was there at the edges but I was holding a perimeter around it.

Then I was in the corridor outside his office and it was fifty minutes later and I was holding my notes. The small folded paper they gave you after each session with the date and time and the name of the next appointment. It was in my hand. My hand was at my side.

The corridor was empty. The overhead light buzzed. Somewhere down the hall a door closed, the soft definitive click of a latch, and the sound of it pulled my attention back into my body the way a sudden noise in a dark room does.

Forty minutes. I have the first ten. I have the corridor. The forty minutes between them are not there.

I stood in the corridor for a long time after that. Not moving. Just accounting for what I could and could not access.

I could tell you the date. The day of the week. My name, my age, where I was born, what my mother's kitchen smelled like on Sunday mornings, the name of the street I grew up on in Poughkeepsie, the make and model of the truck I drove for the contracting firm, what Caroline looked like when she laughed. Everything I'd gone into the session with was intact. I took inventory carefully, the way you go through a toolbox after a job site, checking each slot, making sure nothing had walked off.

What I couldn't find was the session itself. Not a fragment. Not an impression. Not the trailing edge of a thought or the ghost of a question. Just a clean absence where forty minutes had been.

That was the part I kept returning to. Gaps in recall have explanations. A bad session, stress, medication. Any of those could account for missing content. What I couldn't account for was the quality of the absence. It was precise. It had edges. On one side: Fell asking me something, the question itself gone, only the awareness that a question had been posed. On the other side: the corridor, the appointment slip, the latch. And between those two points, nothing. Not the blurred nothing of sleep or the static nothing of shock. A clean cut. The way a wire looks when someone has taken a pair of shears to it.

The forty minutes were simply not there.

One moment I was in the chair with Fell asking me something I could not recall, and then I was in the corridor with the appointment slip in my hand and the latch clicking shut down the hall.

I found Gloria before I found Dom.

She was at her window, same as always, hands in her lap, watching the yard. I sat across from her at an angle that kept my face out of direct sightline from the door. I waited until the nearest staff member moved to the far end of the room.

"I lost forty minutes."

She kept her eyes on the yard. A long pause. Long enough that I thought she hadn't heard me.

"Which session?"

"Fifth."

She turned and looked at me. It was the first time she'd looked directly at me with an expression I could read as anything close to alarm. It passed quickly. She put it somewhere and smoothed over the place it had been.

"That's early."

"What does that mean."

"It means you respond fast." She turned back to the yard. "Fell's noted it."

I asked her how she knew what Fell had noted.

She reached into the pocket of her jumpsuit and pulled out a folded square of paper. She unfolded it carefully, with the precise movements of someone handling something they've handled many times. She placed it flat on the table between us and pushed it toward me with two fingers.

It was a page. One page, partial, the bottom half. The top half had been torn away cleanly. What remained was a column of patient identifiers, numbers rather than names, with notes beside each one in a small dense hand I recognized as Fell's from the session paperwork. Most of the notes I couldn't parse. Medical shorthand, abbreviations I didn't have the context to decode.

One line was circled. In pencil. Very lightly, but circled.

The patient number I didn't recognize. The note beside it read: accelerated receptivity: corridor ready.

I looked up at Gloria.

"Where did you get this?"

"Administration office. The door is open more often than they think it is." She refolded the paper with the same careful precision and put it back in her pocket. "I've been collecting them for eight months."

"How many do you have."

"Enough. Enough to know that corridor ready means something specific and that something specific is not good and that once Fell writes it, the transfer to the east residential annex follows within two weeks."

I thought about the transfer form I'd seen. The name on it.

"Two weeks."

"Give or take."

Down the hall the staff member was moving back toward us. Gloria's hands went back to her lap. Her eyes went back to the yard. The conversation was over with the efficiency of someone who has learned to time these things exactly.

I sat there for another minute and then I got up and went to find Dom.

He was at the table in the common area, paperback open, not reading it.

I sat across from him. I looked at his face. He already knew something. Not what I'd just learned. Something adjacent to it, from a different direction. He had the particular stillness he got when he was processing information he hadn't decided how to use yet.

"Gloria."

He looked at me. "When?"

"The transfer notice I saw in the office. The name I didn't recognize was hers." I'd worked it out on the walk from the window. Her patient number, on the form, matching what I'd seen through the office door. The name I hadn't recognized was her legal name. The name her husband had used on the commitment papers. It was different from what she'd told us, and the gap between those two names said something about the circumstances of her commitment that I hadn't known before and wasn't the right time to think about.

He looked at me. "How long."

"Eight days from when I saw the form. That was three days ago."

He looked at the table. Then at the paperback. He opened the back cover and sat there looking at his own shorthand.

"Five days."

The television across the room played something with the sound too low to hear. Paul was in his chair by the east wall, hands on his knees. His eyes ran their circuit. Door, window, television, door. Back to the beginning. No pause, no preference, nothing you could call looking.

"We need to talk to her. While we still can."

Dom closed the book.

"Yeah. We do."

He sat there with the book in his lap and his eyes on the middle distance, and I let him sit there, because I'd learned that Dom's stillness before a decision was not hesitation, it was preparation, and interrupting it cost more than waiting for it to finish.

The heating system clicked in the walls. Paul's head turned two degrees toward the east wall. His eyes didn't follow. Just his head, tilted at that slight angle, the way it had tilted the afternoon I'd watched him press his palm flat against the paint.

Then he turned back.

Door. Window. Television. Door.

Dom stood up. He slid the paperback into the pocket of his jumpsuit.

"Tomorrow morning. Early, before the first session. The bench at the far end of the yard." He looked at me. "Don't tell her tonight. Let her sleep."

I asked if he thought she was sleeping.

He walked to the serving window to return his cup and I sat at the table alone and watched Paul run his circuit until the lights-out announcement came over the intercom, flat and routine, and the room began to empty.

I was the last one out.

I looked at the east wall on the way to the door. Off-white paint, knee-height scuff, the particular blankness of a surface that doesn't know it's being looked at.

The floor hummed under my boots all the way down the hall.