I woke up one morning to the nurse telling me that my unit rival had moved on. I was bummed because when I got him alone in the same room he didn’t poke at me or ramble on feverishly about being Jesus inside the walls and God walking on air like he would say in his own room.
Instead the guy made me smile, talking about food being on time and how clean the floor was that you could almost eat off of it.
He knew I was not eating and must’ve known that all I saw was filth and grime on anything fabric because one day he picked up a broom and started sweeping the meeting room where our meals were served. The only thing we had control over was a clean tile floor, he innocently postured while sweeping up after I ate my first piece of bread dunked in gravy. He had been here before.
After that moment I thought maybe I didn’t need to be in a hurry to break out of there. I began to explore other rooms where I picked up a new curious habit of watching other patients sleep for a moment, stealing their faces. They looked like they were from the Stone Age with round facial features, wild hair, and wide grins – puzzled but snuggled into their pillows contently. I got kicked out of a few rooms by staff but I never poked anybody, for sympathy that they would wake up frowning again.
There were no doors to the bedrooms but there was a closet door next to a lone bedroom the nurses would open every once in a while, walk into with a bucket, and return a few moments later with the same bucket. I was curious if the bucket was empty when they went in and full when they came out, or vice versa, so I took it upon myself to jiggle the handle to see if I could open the door. It was unlocked.
I hurriedly opened the door where I saw a heap of rags with a tiny man draped in them, fiercely gnawing on a bone, making extremely awful noises of flesh brutality as he devoured it whole. I walked away gingerly so nobody had to ask. I informed, “He was just eating in there.”
It was then I began poking my finger at everything that was not human to see if it was real. I would poke the walls, poke the table, poke into conversations, I would especially poke the food. I would poke water, poke ice. If I could I’d poke an elephant or a small grain of rice. Whatever I wanted to poke would suffice. My curiosity was becoming more and more visible while my demeanor was more nice.
With every new patient I would try to befriend because I did not want to be put into the smallest room of the smallest hallway with the smallest man, like the smallest Russian doll disappointed in the end.
In my mind, the closet is where they put the last guy to leave the unit, until a new round of patients came and had to learn all over again to sweep the clean floor and eat all the bread, to pique their interests by watching others sleep, and poking things not people, please.
I had to find a way to share this information so I could also vanish while everybody else was asleep.
Francis Erich McElroy 