MirrorWorld

2.

“Hey, Crazy.”

Three of us turn around. We’re sitting along the back of an old plaid couch. Red, orange, and brown stripes. Ugly as crap from a crayon-eating dog, but it’s become our triple throne from which we can watch TV, which is currently showing The Price Is Right. No volume. All the screaming gets our lower-functioning friends riled up. And since there are twenty-three of them sitting around the room, bouncing back and forth, talking to gods or plotting the world’s end, silence is a good thing. It lets us hear them coming. But really, I just don’t want to get them in trouble or hurt them. After all, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re crazy.

Like me.

Like everyone in this place. Not counting Chubs, the other orderlies, doctors, nurses, guards, and janitorial staff, though some of them are suspect.

“Which one of us are you referring to, Chubs?” Shotgun Jones asks the orderly, whom we have deemed Chubs on account of his prodigious love handles. Shotgun is Chubs’s antithesis, a skinny man with equally thin glasses and hair.

“The only one of you who goes by Crazy,” Chubs says.

Seymour, the craziest of us, claps his hands frantically. “Crazy to the principal’s office! Ohh, you’re in trouble!”

“Actually,” Chubs says, “he’s got a visitor, and I needed to know you guys were going to play nice before I brought her in.”

“Her!” Seymour wiggles his fingers in front of his mouth. His big teeth and wide eyes complete the illusion that the man is an oversized chipmunk.

“Seymour,” I say. He stops. I look back to Chubs. “They’ll behave. But why does she want to come in here?”

He shrugs. “Some kind of specialist. Feels comfortable around nut… you guys.”

“Close one,” I say.

Chubs smiles nervously. “I’ll go get her.”

When the orderly is out of earshot, Shotgun taps my shoulder. “You ever get in trouble for… you know?”

“Breaking his finger?”

“Crack!” Seymour says a little too loudly, acting out breaking a branch over his knee. Some of our fellow “nutjobs”—the word Chubs is forbidden from saying—look up but don’t move from their positions around the room.

I shake my head. “No one ever said anything. He’s been a perfect gentleman since.” I slide down from the couch. “I’m going to take a walk. Let me know if she wins the dinette set.”

The large space is pristine. The white floors glow with a near-magical shine. When I first arrived at the SafeHaven, one word, I wondered why they kept the floor so clean. My first theory was that they wanted to impress visiting relatives. While some people are here for doing violent things, others are committed by loved ones before they get the chance. But I realized the truth after the first fight. Just a drop of blood on the gleaming floor stands out like a stop sign in the snow. Between that, the fourteen cameras, and several sets of watching eyes, committing a violent act inside this space, while not impossible, is hard to cover up. Unless you’re good at it, which, apparently, I am. Broken fingers don’t bleed.

The large, barred windows draw me toward the light of day. The outer wall is covered with tall windows, allowing those of us trapped inside a view of what we’re missing. I appreciate the ample sunlight, but it’s really just a tease. I can’t smell the rain, or the fresh-cut lawn, or anything else other than the scent of mold-tinged air-conditioning. I’ve considered leaving. I think I could manage it. But if this is where the law and society say I need to be, who am I to argue? I certainly don’t have anywhere else to go.

At least the people here understand me… not that they understand much of anything. But they accept me as one of them, even though I know, at my core, that I don’t belong here. Of course, most everyone here, save for Seymour, thinks the world would be better with them flailing through it.

The view today is mostly primary and secondary colors. Blue sky. Green grass and trees. White clouds. Black pavement—they redid it a week ago. Couldn’t even smell that. Looking down at the parking lot, I see far fewer cars than usual. It looks like half the regular staff are missing. Also interesting is an orange car. That’s new, I think. I can’t tell the make or model, but it sticks out among the various shades of gray preferred by SafeHaven’s staff.

“See anything interesting?” The voice is feminine. Quiet. My visitor has arrived.

“Your car,” I say. “I like the color.” I turn around. My visitor is attractive. Blond hair, tied back tight. High eyebrows that imply a good nature. And a kind smile. But her outfit… “You look like a pumpkin.”

Her smile broadens as she looks down at herself. “I do, don’t I?” She lifts her arms and the sides come up, like Batman’s cape, only neon. It’s a poncho. A bright orange hunter’s poncho.

“They wouldn’t let me in if I wasn’t wearing it. At least it matches the car.” She lowers her arms, revealing Shotgun and Seymour standing behind her, one to a side. She senses their presence and flinches, stepping closer to me. A few eyes around the room glance up, and then turn back down.

“She’s a doctor,” Seymour says, his fingers twitching madly in front of his mouth. “No, a specialist!”

“Ex-girlfriend,” Shotgun says with a smirk and a confident nod.

“An expert!” Seymour says. He’s getting a little too excited.

“Can you give us some privacy?” I ask the pair.

“Ex-girlfriend it is!” Shotgun says, pumping an imaginary shotgun, “Chick, chick,” and firing it into the air. “Boom!”

As the duo retreats back to the couch-throne, the woman turns to me again, looking a little less sure of herself.

“That’s why we call him Shotgun Jones,” I explain.

“Right,” she says, straightening her pumpkin suit. Her smile disappears. The eyebrows descend. “Do you want to be here?”

“I want to smell the new pavement,” I tell her.

A mix of confusion and disappointment contorts her pretty face.

“You know I’m crazy, right?”

“With a capital C,” she says. “I’ve been told. But you’re not crazy.”

“You know my real name?”

“Lowercase c.”

“Oh. Then what am I?”

“I’ll let your doctor explain it to you. Later. Right now, I need a very plain yes or no answer. Do you want to leave this place? Or do you want to spend the rest of your life waiting to see who replaces Drew Carey on the Price Is Right?”

“He’s funny,” I say.

“Bob was better.”

“I don’t really remember Bob.”

“You don’t remember anything past a year ago.” She makes sure I’m looking in her eyes. “All but two days of your remembered life have been in this place. Before that was two days in a jail cell and an hour at a bar. Am I wrong?”

“No.”

My eyes turn to the floor and then back out at the view. “Would I be leaving today?”

I see the motion of her nod in my periphery.

“Yes,” I say. “I want to leave.”

“First,” she says. “I need proof.”

“Of what?”

“Step one. What do you think of me?”

I look her up and down, appraising her. I stop on her eyes. “You’re intelligent. Driven. Brave. You’re also hiding something, but who isn’t?”

“Is that all?”

“I’d also like to sleep with you, but you already knew that.”

“What makes you say that?” she asks.

“Have you looked in a mirror? Who wouldn’t want to sleep with you?”

She looks down at the bright orange poncho. “Most of me is covered.”

“Your face would more than make up for any flaws beneath it, and not everything is hidden.” I glance down at her chest, from which the loose poncho hangs, and am only slightly surprised to find my right hand cupping her left breast. A complete lack of fear means that I sometimes act without thought. Fear acts as a social buffer, giving most people time to contemplate their actions and the ramifications. Not only do I lack that buffer, the potential negative effects of my actions don’t faze me. Only my strong moral code keeps me in check, but on occasions like this, it’s all hindsight.

“Very good,” she says, like I’ve passed a test.

I withdraw my hand and apologize, but she waves the words away like they’re some kind of stink. “Step two.” She reaches up and slides her fingers beneath the collar of my shirt. For a moment, I think she’s going to repay the fondle with one of her own, but she takes hold of something that she shouldn’t know is there. The chain slides out from under my shirt. Having it is technically against the rules, but the few times they’ve tried to take it, I’ve gone actual crazy. I don’t know what it is, where it’s from, or why I cling to it, but I know I can’t live without it. And that I would kill to retrieve it.

The pendant at the end of the chain falls free, hanging on the metal links. It’s a colorful mash-up of melted plastics formed into a crude circle.

“Are you afraid?” she asks.

“I’m resisting the urge to break your hand.”

She turns the pendant around, reading the single word etched into the flat backside. “Evidence.” She frowns for a moment but covers it up quickly. “Do you know what this is?”

It feels like my soul, but I know that’s ridiculous, so I shake my head. “It’s the craziest thing about me, so you better put it back.”

She does, slipping it inside my collar and letting it drop.

“Now, step three.” The vinyl of her poncho makes a shhh sound as her arm rises. Her hand emerges holding a ceramic three-inch blade. “Stab yourself.”

“Why?”

She squints at me. “Are you afraid?”

“I’m not stupid, if that’s what you’re trying to figure out.”

She looks out the window to the long driveway that ends a quarter mile away, the gates blocked from view by lush oaks. “There is an ambulance waiting at the end of the drive. They’ll be here within minutes. You’ll be rushed to the hospital.”

“Only it won’t be a hospital,” I say. “Where will it be?”

She smiles; this time it’s forced. “Won’t be here.”

I reach out and take the blade from her. “Run.”

She looks horrified for a moment, hearing a threat where there was none intended.

“This isn’t going to go over well.” I look around the room.

Understanding widens her eyes. She backs away slowly, turns around, and hurries for the metal chain-link gate, which Chubs opens from the other side.

Knife in hand, I look out the window. It’s a beautiful day. I bet it smells wonderful.

A scream tears my eyes away from the window. “Dollar ninety-five! Dollar ninety-five!” It’s Seymour, repeating what he’d just seen on TV. Both hands flail in my direction. At my stomach. “Help! Help! Help! Dollar ninety-five.”

“Chick, chick, boom!” Shotgun says, shooting his imaginary weapon straight at me, his face twisted up in horror. “Chick, chick, boom!”

As the large room explodes with activity, I look down. Two inches of the knife’s blade are currently buried in my torso. Someone’s going to have to clean this floor tonight, I think, and fall to my knees.