I thought she trusted me because she fell asleep when I was in her room but when I found over a hundred pills in the skirting I knew she was keeping secrets. I wanted to yell at her but she looked very peaceful when she was asleep. I wonder if she dreamt when she was asleep or only when she was awake.
It was my job to clean the towels, the sheets, the pillow covers and pretty much anything else that could be cleaned in a washing machine. You have no idea the fluids that can come from a humans body. We excrete just about everything. I didn’t have a life outside of work, I often thought to myself I'm no different than those who cause the stains. I felt I was on my way to becoming insane and maybe that’s a good thing. I could relax like all the others. Then one day a lady named Breanna Gorkha came in. She was German and she was crazy. I liked her craziness though. Maybe because she was so attractive. Beauty had a way of changing your view on things, for better or worse. Her crazy was that she confused the stories in her head with the ones outside of it. I wasn’t sure the difference either but knew how to hide it from concerning others. I didn’t have anyone concerned about me. Sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad, but mostly good. I liked to clean Breanna’s stains. Often id smell them, no matter what the colour. The colours she made were nice and her sheets reminded my of abstract art. She also made art with paint and she would get lost in the trance. Her paintings didn’t make any sense and that’s why they were so good. I often wondered where the came from, then that made me wonder where I came from, then that made me wonder where those questions come from. Wherever it was Breanna lived there more than here, I wanted to live there too, but my imagination wasn’t good enough.
She had bitten someone’s pinkie off and told the police it was because he had a tumour in it. The tumour was cancerous and going to spread to the liver and kill the man. The man she loved too. He loved her too, his name was Derrick Gorkha, they were married. He was from Australia but had a look about him that suggested maybe he visited Nepal. Nepal is where mount Everest is. I had no interest in mount Everest and I hated Derrick. It was only a few weeks later that he too was in the Shagri Li mental asylum. All three of us now. Derrick was very nice to me, he was nice to everyone. He was in there because he wanted to be with Breanna. He wasn’t insane, I could tell, I could always tell. It was my superpower; that and cleaning straightjackets. Derrick didn’t tell the police about Breanna biting his pinkie off. He was an avid ten pin bowler and the lady noticed it. Black and blue and not even looked after. He was leaving blood on the bowls and she called the police. He didn’t say anything but they questioned Breanna and she didn’t see a reason to hide it. It was blurry. Everything was blurry. Derrick couldn’t be apart from Breanna as much as the visiting hours made him. So he threw shit at the police station window, his own. They didn’t do anything to him. I think because he was just a man and he was pretty good looking too. So he threatened to kill a lolly pop man every day for three weeks. He got a restraining order against him, the lolly pop man, so Derrick bought his own outfit and would get there five minutes before him and do his job. It was a whole process and somehow they didn’t realise what he was doing, or they did and didn’t care.
There was only one Asylum in the state so they had no other option than to put him in with his beloved. I only got a few months with Breanna before he showed up, three months and 11 days to be precise, three months and 11 beautiful days. I fell in love with her slowly. Watching her paint. It hurt me that I could not go where she was. She would see things I couldn’t and I wanted to ask her what she saw about me that I couldn’t but I was too scared. Until one day I did and she told me that I am like a horse before a storm, in touch with what's coming but as predictable as the horses actions. I didn’t know what it meant, I wanted to ask someone but didn’t know who. I would start coming in to work earlier and leaving later. I even started to mop the floor near where she painted. Even though that wasn’t my job. I hated going home because Derrick and Breanna were together and she wasn’t with me. I drove a small blue car and the radio didn’t work. Then one day it started to work but I got used to it not working so I never turned it on. The first time I spoke to her was when I noticed a pimple on the back of her neck. She was painting with blues. I waited until the pimple was ready to pop. Until it was white. It took two days of watching it and I walked up and said,
“Breanna, you have a pimple on your neck, do you want me to pop it for you? its white.”
“No” She said.
It was beautiful.
Derrick became everyone’s favourite. He was nice to me too and I hated him so much. He was the luckiest man in the world. He could visit where Breanna went and come back with a smile. He knew what to say and when to every single person. He was a medium who wasn’t stuck in between but lived there in leisure. He never had any stains unless it was a few days before his meeting with the people who wore suits and asked people questions.
To the ones in suits it was fun for them but they didn’t show it. They were very serious. But I could tell how much they enjoyed what they were doing. Their game was to be serious, to look serious and they were very good at it. They never spoke to me, not once. I spoke to them once.
Their foot was on the corner of a bed sheet and I was trying to pick it up.
“Excuse me” I said, but they didn’t hear it.
So I waited for them to move. That’s when I heard the type of questions they would ask.
“Tell me about this dream”
“Well” answered a patient named Jill, “I am at work at the beginning, I'm a primary school teacher. Then I get told by a student that my husband is cheating on me. So I leave and go home to see him. When I get home he is gone, everything, even the memory of him. So I don’t know what to do now because I only know to be his husband. Now I am just no one. So I walk off and I keep walking. There are a lot of trains. Trains. Trains! Trains!! and they’re so noisy that I ask them to be quiet and they don’t. So I walk away from them but they follow me, so I try and run but I cant. Eventually I am in a room and an old lady is drinking white wine. A lot of it. She keeps winking at me and then another girl walks in and she is very beautiful, the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, she is glowing. The lady drinking white wine is disgusted by her and teases her. I don’t know why but the glowing lady gets very upset. She shouldn’t care what this old drunk lady thinks should she?”
“Go on” Said the man standing on the bed sheet,
“So the beautiful lady yells at the ugly old drunk and upsets her. She says she is just a stupid drunk too dumb to handle reality so she drowns herself in illusions.”
“Interesting,” Says the suit, not interested.
“And then the old lady smashes her wine glass into her face. Her glow goes and now she is covered in disgusting scars. She is hideous. More hideous than the drunk because you know what she used to look like. The drunk lady laughs. And she keeps laughing and laughing and then I wake up. Its horrible.”
I stood there completely invisible.
“Ok so this is what's happening” Says the suit, they have an answer for everything, “The drunk lady is a symbol for your own chaos. For the part of you that wants to destroy everything. The beautiful lady is a symbol for your ego. The one who is perfect in the eyes of the world. Obviously they clash, this is what we call duality. Do you remember your accident Miss Parker?”
Her name was Jill Parker, they never called them by their first names, too personal.
“Accident?”
“Miss Parker you are in here because you tried to kill your husband”
“I have a husband?”
“You did have a husband, this was seventeen years ago”
“Oh yes, of course my beautiful Darryl, I could never forget my sweetheart. He is a war hero you know? Fought in Korea, but don’t ask him about it, you can never ask him about it, don’t ask him about it, ok? promise?”
“Ok Miss Parker, that’s enough for today,”
“Promise?” she asked,
“Yes miss Parker, I promise.” Replied the suit.
Then the man in the suit finally moved. Walked past me without seeing me just after writing something in his book. Just confirmed she is still a spastic.
Breanna had gone through three suits. I never got to hear their meetings even though I tried. It was hard, even for someone as invisible for me.
The problem Derrick had was the diagnosis he earnt through conscious actions to be with Breanna were medicated. I think they thought, that if a man did all this for love then he is a type of crazy anyway. I didn’t think he was crazy because I had the same love for Breanna. He tried to not take his medicine but they watched him. There was no way around it for anyone. The drugs everyone took made them worse, it didn’t make any sense. It was obvious they were all lab rats for these chemicals. The pills were as long as a toddlers rude finger and as thick as a gorillas. They were red and white just like a cartoon. When derrick took them he was much slower. Even his resilient mind that could return from that world started to get confused. I loved it. He would look at me as if he was seeing someone from his school. I didn’t go to his school. I didn’t go to anyone’s school. One day they took Breanna’s painting supplies away from here because of budget cuts. Then what she painted poured into the real world. She used her own blood to paint a picture on the bathroom tiles, it was a beautiful picture even though I couldn’t understand it. We didn’t have enough workers so I would work long shifts. It was perfect. I worked 16 hours a day and instead of driving home I just slept in my car. Then I would still come in earlier and leave later to see what Breanna was doing. One day she left a blue stain on her sheets. I asked her how she did it and she said she didn’t, a man named Goffrey did. I told her no man named Goffrey ever came in here and she said he did, I just cant see him, that made me sad, I wanted to see Goffrey too, I wanted to see everything she saw. I had some money saved up because of the long hours I was working so I bought some paints and canvases for Breanna. This allowed me to sit with her in her room and she started to like me.
“Thoughts come from a place called South Morang” She said, “And they come to each person for a reason, because they too want to live in this world. This is a beautiful world don’t you think?”
I looked into her blues eyes and said, “Yes.”
“Thoughts are words from another. Goffrey told me that he wishes he could talk to you because he thinks you would listen”
“Then why doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know, ill ask him if he comes back, he is at work.”
I thought she trusted me because she fell asleep when I was in her room but when I found over a hundred pills in the skirting of her room I knew she was keeping secrets. I wanted to yell at her but she looked very peaceful when she was asleep. I wonder if she dreamt when she was asleep or only when she was awake.
A few weeks later, after sitting in her room as she painted and then keeping the paintings in my car I asked her about the pills.
“I don’t take them” she said, “They close the door to reality. You know how I was telling you about thoughts?”
“Yeah,”
“Well the thing that happens in this world is ignorance sees silence as wisdom. When you speak a thought they judge you because the thought reached you but if you hold on to the thought. If you suffocate it from entering this world then everyone leaves you alone. I told you didn’t I? That thoughts come to you for a reason?”
“Yeah.” I said.
“So how could I stop them from entering this world. How could I do that?”
“I don’t know”,
“Do you ever have thoughts that want to be alive?” She asked me,
“No” I lied, and I wanted to tell her I loved her, but I kept it in that world she talks about; South Morang.
I asked her, “Can you visit this place?”
“I can, as long as I'm not on those pills. Because they trust me. What do you think of trust?”
“I don’t think about it,” I said,
“Its very important to never lie,”
“But you didn’t tell me about the pills?”
“You never asked”
“If you can go to South Morang, can you see the thoughts that I don’t speak?”
“No” She lied, I didn’t know she lied until later.
The more I fell in love with Breanna the more I hated Derrick. Especially when he was nice to me, I hated that so much. He looked down on me, he thought he was better than me and because he was I believed him.
One night when Breanna was asleep and I watched her nose whistle with breath and I whispered to her, “derrick hates you. Derrick it a bad man. Derrick wants to kill you.”
I whispered those three sentences to her for three hours and it was like meditation. It made me feel so good. I would take her paintings and pills to my car. I would keep the paintings in the back seat but throw the pills to possums. They didn’t eat them. Once I saw a rat eat them and it even made him crazy. So I killed him. I killed any rat that ate the pills, I'm not sure why. When I killed them I thought of Derrick. When they would squeal id imagine it being him that squealed. Id feel their frail little bones crumble in my hands and when I threw them into the forest for the birds to eat id shout, “Cya later Derrick you dickhead!”
Breanna was falling in love with me, I could tell. Because she kept talking to me. Sometimes she would ask me how I was, how I am going and what I do with my free time. I never told her about the rats and instead told her I play basketball. She asked me about it but I didn’t know anything about basketball so I read a book about it. Then she would always ask me about Basketball and I think we fell in love with it together. She painted a painting of a basketball. Well, that’s what I thought anyway.
My car was getting full so I asked her, “What do you want me to do with the paintings?”
“Whatever you want”
“But you spend so much time on them, shouldn’t they go somewhere special?”
“They’re alive,” she said, “that is special enough. Wherever they go is not up to me anymore”
“I will take them to my grandmothers shed.”
“Perfect.”
Now the biggest issue was Derrick. As many rats I killed he still lived. Soon killing the rats wasn’t even exciting. So I killed one possum and then a kangaroo but the birds didn’t take them and when I slept I could smell them rotting away in the forest. The conversations about basketball dried up too. An hour a day Breanna and Derrick got to sit with each other on the grass. They would speak to each other the same way the suits do. Like they’re both in on something and id never know. Her body changed when she was with him. It stood tall and her shoulders were back, even her eye colour changed to green. I couldn’t make her eyes change, I couldn’t even make her shoulders move back. The drugs were hurting derrick, I could tell that much, but Breanna was like sobriety to him. Derrick couldn’t hide his pills in the skirting because he was a man and they really made sure the men swallow their pills. They were a little easier on the women because they weren’t as strong. Before I got here there was the famous watermelon accident of ’89. A big Mauri man was hiding them under his tongue and flushing them down the toilet. A few weeks later he grabbed a nurses head and popped it like it was a watermelon. Apparently it was horrific. Now you need someone to pat you down before you go to the toilet (every time) and the men get watched extra carefully. You would too if you thought someone might pop your head. But it was work, no one liked their job and they all come with problems. My uncle was an electrician and from climbing up the ladder so many times his left knee needed a reconstruction. Its not as bad as getting your head popped but then again, maybe its worse.
I decided to change Derricks pills. I had access to everywhere, being invisible had its perks. I put blue and white ones where the red and white ones were meant to go. No one noticed.
“Stevie,” He said to me,
“I am not Stevie, I am Confucius” I reply,
“Stevie!!! I cant make it to Volleyball tonight man, I've got a date with Breanna,”
“Breanna is dead Derrick. She killed herself because of you, leave her alone!”
“ha ha you’ve always been morbid Stevie, how is your old man going?”
“I told you, my name is Poseidon, now get back to your room before I stick this mop up your ass!”
“Ok boss, sorry to catch you on a bad day, ill see you round man!”
Even when I was trying to break that stubborn optimistic mind he still belittled me with kindness. I didn’t know who Stevie was, some guy who played volleyball I guess. My name was Glenn. With two n’s. I don’t know what the second one is for, My Grandma would always say,
“You know what the second N in your name stands for?”
“No grandma”
“Nothing. Cause you're nothing!”
“Sorry Grandma” Id say.
Breanna became distant with me as I watched her paint. She was worried about Derrick. Destiny wasn’t being kind to her. I think he was the only thing she cared about.
“Let me see if I can help him,” Id say to try and please her,
“You need to find a way to get him off the medicine they are giving him.”
“Ok.”
So I made it worse and a week later I said to her, “He is only on blood pressure tablets?”
“It cant be,”
“I'm sorry, but this is all him. They don’t know what to do. They need to send him for a brain scan”
I made it all up obviously.
I tried to kill another rat but felt nothing. I tried to eat one of Breanna’s paintings but the canvas was too hard to bite. My teeth were sore because I kept forgetting to brush them cause my toothbrush was at home. At my Grandmas.
One day I walked in to change the sheets of Derricks bed. He was standing at the window. Some sanity peered through a glaze like a ray of light after a storm.
“They’re trying to kill me” he said,
“Who?”
“The government,”
“Why?”
“Because I'm free. They don’t like people who are free,”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah its true isn’t it. How are they doing it?”
“Through frequencies straight to your brain. Do you know about south Morang?”
His eyes sharpened, he couldn’t believe I knew.
“Yes,” said Derrick, “of course.”
“Well the government know about it too. So they send people there to corrupt it. There is only one way to beat them.”
“Beat them? How do I beat the? What do they want from me?”
“Its because you're special Derrick. But you know that.”
He nodded in agreeance.
“How do I beat them?”
“You jump through that window.”
He made no facial expressions which was a facial expression in itself.
“You got me confused now Stevie.”
I walked up to him and grabbed him by the back of the neck as if he was a rat.
“Listen Derrick, we are at fucking war with these people. If you truly care about freedom. If you care about love. Are you in love Derrick?”
He nodded with intensity in his eyes. The intensity Breanna put in them.
“You know this is all fake, this is your test. You jump out that fucking window and you prove to them your soul cant be corrupted. You show them you aren’t going to bend your knee to these people!”
He turned to look how far the fall was. He would have to smash through the window and we were on the fifth level facing the parking lot.so it would kill him. I could see my blue car through the window.
Facing back to me, “Nah, I can fight this thing. Me.”
I didn’t have time for that so I pushed him. His back shattered the glass. His drug fuelled body was in a state of delirium and I felt strong. I grabbed some of the glass and put it into his neck. Then pushed him through the window.
“Derrick jumped through the window!” I yelled,
A floor mopper run in.
“Not derrick! What happened?”
“He just looked at me and said the government were after him. I told him to calm down but he jumped through the glass headfirst!”
A few weeks later I sat with Breanna. No one told her Derrick was dead. They said to her that he was going to get treatment because he might have a brain tumour, but he will be back soon. One night as she slept I leant in to kiss her goodnight. My sweet angel sleeping in serenity. That’s when I felt it. A paint brush into my neck. My body laid there as I stood behind it. Watching Breanna paint the walls with my insides. When she was done she turned to me and said,
“Welcome to South Morang,”
I turned to see Derrick and he smiled,
“Welcome to South Morang.”
