The Hollow City (13 page)

“This does!”

“Listen,” says Linda, planting herself between me and the TV. “This is important. Nothing is going to happen.”

“You don’t understand—”

“I do understand,” she says calmly, “that’s why I’m doing this. TVs and cell phones and computers and everything else—they’re not out to get you. No one is reading your mind. No one is altering it.”

“I can’t do it,” I pant, “I can’t do it…”

“You’re going to get out of here,” she says. “You don’t believe me right now, but you will—one day you’ll be happy, and healthy, and free. You’ll have a home and a job and friends. Do you want to spend that time terrified of TVs?”

My eyes are closed; my head is shaking.

“Look at me,” she says. She holds my head with her hands, holding it still. “Look at me, Michael.” I open my eyes slowly. “There we go. Now listen. You’ve been scared of electronics for too long, and even when the drugs kick in and the hallucinations go away, you’ll still be scared of them out of pure habit. But there is nothing wrong. Can you say that?”

“No,” I whisper.

“Let’s start simple,” she says. She pushes me down into the couch, and I try to move but she holds me in place and I’m sitting on the couch and I can see the TV behind her, black and silent and staring. “We’re going to start very simply,” she says, “as simple as possible. We’re going to sit here, together, and just look at it, okay? We won’t turn it on, we can even unplug it if you want, but we’re going to sit here and get used to it. We’re going to pretend like there’s nothing wrong in the whole world.”

My voice is a quiet rasp. “Why do you want me to be here? What is it going to do to me?”

“It’s not going to do anything,” she says. “That’s why we’re here—so you can see that it’s not going to do anything. Alright?”

I look at the TV. It looks back. I grit my teeth.

I don’t want to be scared.

“Alright.” There are tears in my eyes. “Let’s do it.”

*   *   *

IT’S NOT LIKE A SWITCH
in my head; it’s not like the drugs just pulled a magic lever and suddenly all the crazy is gone. But the drugs are working. Slowly but surely, the Seroquel is changing the way I see the world.

Imagine that you’re looking through a pane of glass, thick with dirt, and someone’s washing it clean. It’s still smudged and dirty, covered with smears and grime and residue, but it’s better than it was. Light is peeking through, and certain images are coming clear. I’m getting better.

And that means I was sick.

I’m pretty sure the maggot was a hallucination. I mean, how could it be real? Things like that don’t exist, and if they did I definitely wouldn’t be the only one who knew about it. It would have left some tracks—a slime trail, or spoor, or bite marks, or something to show that it had been here. Someone would have seen something, and questions would have been asked, and the whole hospital would have gone into high alert. You can’t hide something like that. It can’t have been real.

I spend my days watching things—watching everything. There’s a patient in the commons room that no one ever talks to: is he real? He sits in the corner, talking to himself, and people pass by without saying anything. He might exist solely inside my head. At dinner one of the nurses talks to him, puts a hand on his shoulder; does that mean he’s real, or that she’s imaginary too? I watch her as she moves on, talking to other patients, asking about their day or their food or their anything. Maybe I’m imagining it all, making the patients move and respond in my head while in real life they sit still and say nothing because the nurse isn’t there. Can I do that? How real are my dreams? How deeply is my false reality blended with the real one? If Dr. Vanek is right, I have no way of knowing.

One thing I know for sure—the footsteps at night, the soft ones I thought were Shauna’s, are completely gone. There is no nurse who checks on us at night, only the night guard who wanders the halls and peeks in our windows. I think Shauna must be imaginary too, like the maggot: a hallucination created by a desperate mind. My subconscious mind created the quiet nurse, soft and beautiful and kind, because I’m lonely.

Why did my mind create the maggot?

I shudder again, seized by the fleeting thought of it shrunk down and burrowing through my head.

Dr. Little, I’m fairly sure, is real, and so are Devon and Linda and Vanek. Too many people have seen them, talked to them, reacted to them. They’re either all hallucinations or all real, and if my hallucinations can be that widespread then nothing’s real at all. What about my father? It almost makes sense that he’s fake—that my schizophrenic mind, left to raise itself as a young orphan, would create a father and, not knowing how a father should behave, pattern his behavior after the cruel realities of the world around me. The voice of the Earth, telling me I was no good and nobody loved me. As a child I fed myself, bathed myself, walked myself to school; is that because my father was negligent, or because he didn’t exist?

But he came in, he talked to me, he yelled at me and he yelled at Devon, and then Devon and Dr. Little both talked to him, both touched him. I don’t know where the real world begins and ends.

It’s wishful thinking, I guess, to hope that my father isn’t real. I’m not that lucky.

What about the reporter, Kelly Fischer? She made me promise not to tell anyone she existed; she made me swear it. When she hid in the bathroom so the nurse didn’t see her—was she really in there, was she really hiding, or was it just my mind making excuses for why the nurse couldn’t see her? When she came in that day to the commons room she sat with me, right over there, but she didn’t talk to Linda, and Linda didn’t say anything to her.

There’s a knock on the door, but I don’t look up. I never do anymore. It’s never anyone I want to talk to. The handle turns and the door cracks open, and I smell her before she even speaks: the soft scent of flowers. Lucy.

“Michael?”

I look up and there she is, back again, back at last, peeking through the door. She sees my face and recognition lights up her eyes, and suddenly she’s running in again, holding me in her arms, crying into my neck. I hold her too, a long, warm bear hug. We sit that way for a minute, for two minutes, just holding each other. It’s been over a month since she was here, and I never want to let her go again.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I tried everything I could do, but I couldn’t get you out.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I bribed the night janitor,” she says. “He’s not part of it—you can trust him.”

“Part of what?” I take her by the hands and whisper darkly. “I’m sick—I really am. What is there to be part of?”

She frowns. “How can you be sick?”

“The drugs are working,” I say. “I think I might actually be schizophrenic.”

“But I’ve found so much,” she says. “You told me to look it up—the Red Line and the hospital and everything. There’s really something going on—”

“But I don’t want it to be true,” I say. “I’ve seen things that
can’t
be true—monsters, real monsters, and they have to be hallucinations. And there’s another girl—”

“Another girl?” asks Lucy, her voice loud and jealous. I quiet her with my hands, looking nervously at the door. She puts her hands on her hips. “What other girl?”

“A reporter,” I whisper, “from the
Sun
—but she’s completely fake. The last time you came to visit me, so did she, and I didn’t think anything about it because Dr. Little told me I was going to have a visitor, but he was talking about you—he said it was a girl, and that was you. The reporter was another hallucination trying to pull me deeper into the killer and the conspiracy and everything that isn’t real. Don’t you get it, Lucy? All of that is fake! Maybe it’s everything—the killer and the Faceless Men and everything. Don’t you see what this means? If it’s not real then I don’t have to be afraid anymore. I don’t have to hide.”

Loud footsteps echo in the hall, slowly coming closer, and I pull away from her. “The guard,” I say. “Close the door, quick—”

But it’s already closed.

I look back at her, confused. “Did you close the door?”

“I think so.”

“You just ran straight to me—the doors here don’t close by themselves, there’s no springs. Who closed the door?”

“I’m sure I closed it. I must have.”

The footsteps are almost here. “It doesn’t matter—get down.”

She rolls off the bed on the far side, away from the door, and ducks down behind it. I fall back, pretending to sleep, and watch through a slim crack in my eyelids as the night guard stops, looks in my window, and moves on. I wait longer, counting his steps as he moves away. He pauses again at the next door and I hold my breath. At last the footsteps continue, and I roll over to look at Lucy. She peeks up from the edge of the bed.

“This isn’t a hospital,” she says, “it’s a prison.”

“You said you’d found something,” I say, still staring at the door. “What did you find?”

“They’re really out to get you,” she says. “The whole hospital. The janitor is the only one you can trust—his name is Nick, and he’s going to help us escape.”

“What do they want?”

“I don’t know what they want,” she says, “but it doesn’t matter anymore—we can leave. We can leave right now and never come back, and you’ll never see them again, and then it won’t matter what they want because you’ll be free.”

I stare at her, breathing heavily, thinking about the outside. “The drugs are working,” I whisper. “Even if some of it’s real, some of it’s not, and I don’t want to go back to the way I was.”

“We can get you other drugs, but you have to come with me! Nick let me in, and he’s going to let us out, but we…” She stops. She stares at the door, then at me; her face is streaked with confusion. “We can’t.”

I stare back, feeling worry grow through me like a weed. “We can’t what?”

“We can’t leave.”

“But you bribed the janitor, right?”

She looks confused, like she’s struggling to remember something. “Well, yeah…”

“And he’s going to let you back out again, right?”

“Of course, but…” she shakes her head. “This doesn’t make sense.”

I step toward her. “What doesn’t make sense?”

“I remember bribing the janitor, and I remember coming in to get you out, but we can’t leave.”

“
We
can’t or
I
can’t?”

She looks at me, disoriented, her mouth open. “It’s not that specific, it’s just … I know it. It’s a fact in the back of my mind: we’re going to go to the gate, just like my plan, but the janitor’s not going to be there, and we’re going to be trapped. There’s no way we can get out.”

“You think he’s betrayed you?”

“It’s not like that, Michael, it’s—it’s not a hunch, it’s a fact. I know it as clearly as I know my own name.” She pauses. “Lucy Briggs.” Her voice is tentative; probing.

I nod, slowly. “Lucy Briggs.” Her eyes are wide with fear. I realize that she’s wearing the same clothes she had on last time—a black T-shirt and black jeans. I try to remember her wearing something else, but … I can’t.

“What’s going on?”

And then I think it, and the instant I think it I know it’s true, and she knows it too, and I see it on her face and I know that she thinks my thoughts and that means that I’m right, and I don’t dare say it out loud.

Her voice is a puff of wind. “I’m not real.”

My heart breaks in half.

“I’m a hallucination, Michael.”

“No.”

She steps toward me. “The night janitor didn’t let me in here, you just imagined me here, and the janitor was the explanation you made up to explain how it happened, but it doesn’t hold up because now we can’t get back out.”

I grit my teeth. “You’re real.”

“You knew it—in the back of your mind you knew it was all a fake, so I knew it too, because everything I am is a part of you.”

My eyes are hot with tears, and I shout with rage. “You’re real!”

She comes closer, catching my wrist with her hand, and I feel the touch and the warmth and the pressure but no texture, and I look in her eyes and my reflection is wrong—a younger me, well-dressed and handsome and half-remembered. A distorted reflection from my own memory; an idealized me in the eyes of my ideal woman.

“Michael, I’m so sorry.”

“How can you be sorry if you don’t exist?” I’m crying; I twist away from her grip and grab her arm, but it doesn’t feel right—the heft is there, the solidity, but I can tell it isn’t real. There should be more give—and suddenly there is. I think that I should feel her heartbeat in her wrist and suddenly I can, in the same instant I think of it. My mind is filling in the details in a desperate bid to hold on to the fantasy.

“This can’t be real,” I say, then instantly contradict myself. “You have to be real.”

“I wish I was.”

“You have to be real!” I shout. She flinches, pulling away from my grasp. “I can see you, I can feel you, I can smell you.”

“I’m all in your head.”

“You’re smarter than me,” I say, throwing up my hands. “You have a bigger vocabulary than me; you talk about people I haven’t met. How could I possibly have made you up?”

“You’ve heard things,” she says, stepping toward me. “You’ve seen things, you’ve read things, and you’ve absorbed it all like a sponge and now it’s locked in your subconscious, and when you talk to me it all just … comes out. You don’t know it—conscious Michael Shipman doesn’t know it—but it’s all in there and your brain decided, for whatever reason, that Lucy Briggs can remember it even if you can’t.”

I sit down on the bed. Lucy puts her hand on my shoulder and I know it’s there, but I also know it’s not. I stare into her face—perfectly beautiful, delicate and strong at the same time. The girl next door who’s also a supermodel. I laugh.

“I guess I should have known it was too good to be true, huh?” I take her hand—I hold it in my own, soft and warm and alive. “The perfect woman, smart and funny and gorgeous, who just happened to fall madly in love with a nobody.”

“You’re not a nobody.”

“I’m a homeless mental patient with a high school equivalency and a dead-end job found for me by a social worker. If you were real you’d have a rich boyfriend and a penthouse in the middle of downtown.”