Nowhere Man

We live in a world where everything can be categorized, stereotyped and judged.
There is no escape.
There are labels for everything now. Not just the everyday stuff, now you can even label and stereotype dreams, passions and any form of expression of the human soul.
There is no mystery to anything anymore. We took giant strides to get to know the unknown better. Now everyone knows about everything and has access to the world at their fingertips.
But suddenly the unknown seems to have been a better place. The places that were the escape caves have shrunk for everyone. Its crowded everywhere. If not filled with other escapists like you, with people trying to get photographs of the entire realm.
You dreamed of places where your soul could rush away in a flurry and you knew about things you didn't even have names for, things no one could take from you. But they know it all now, and have given it names. So you have nowhere to go.

Inside

Like a memory that always

Comes with a photograph,

Fleeting as snow or

Enough to drown in a sea of nostalgia,

You're a probability,

Pregnant with erratic senses

That oscillate between 

Realms of pointlessness

And worth.

No, I don't want to know

If the climax of the story

Lies in gray or purple.

Yes,I want to know

If the climax of the story

Lies in gray or purple.

The spider in my brain

Keeps secrets from me.

I try and train the eight legs.

But there's always one 

That slips out when I hold down the other seven.

I split into two halves constantly,

While the spider cackles and scurries around.

A child and an undertaker

Cross paths.

When I come to the surface gasping for breath

Senses will fade, maybe you will too.

Redemption - Part IV

I got a call at six a.m. the next morning from the police asking me to come down to the hospital. I hurriedly got ready and rushed out of my apartment. When I reached the hospital, I found Mr. Conrad sitting outside, head in his hands, murmuring to himself, flanked by two burly policemen. I went closer.

“Ma’am what business do you have here?” one of the policemen asked.

“I work here” I said hoarsely. “Wat happened? What’s wrong with Mr. Conrad?”

By now I could hear what he was murmuring to himself. “It can’t be, how is it possible? It can’t be, it can’t be”, he kept on saying.

Without waiting for an answer, I went into the building to the common area and found a small crowd towards Sam’s room. I hurried over to find all sorts of activity going on inside the room. Policemen shouting instructions, one policeman photographing the room, one rifling through Sam’s closet.  Sam was in his wheelchair, head slumped over the table, his mouth agape, the flicker gone from his brown eyes with its green flecks. I gasped.

“How did this happen?” I finally managed to whisper to the policeman in the room.

“Well ma’am we are not sure yet, the autopsy will confirm but it looks like his body had some kind of a reaction to one of these medicines”, he said pointing at the array of drugs kept on the table.

“And we found him writing in this journal, any idea about it?” handing me his diary.

I looked at the last few pages. “Sam you can do it, Sam you can do it, Sam you can do it” was all that was scrawled in Sam’s lazy cursive. Except the last page where he had been writing last night.

“I finally did it, I asked her out in some way I guess. It’s been ages since I felt this giddy and stupid. I think the muscles around my mouth are still frozen like hers were. She became awkward too. That’s a good sign…” 

The writing seemed to have paused a few minutes.

“That Mr. Conrad came in to ask if I had taken the new medicine. That guy is really creepy sometimes. I told him Janice had left it on the table for me. He asked me to take two of them instead of one and wouldn’t leave until I had taken them, strange little man. I just wanted him to leave so I took the medicines and smiled at him. He left and asked me to sleep soon, like that’s happening tonight after what I said to Jan….” 

and then the writing turned into crazy lines all over the page with an ink blot in the middle of the page. There were a few lines scrawled in shaky handwriting at the bottom.

“I had one of my visions again. This time it was different. I saw my family and they spoke to me even this time. My mom talked to me about the night they died. She said they were happy now. She said they could see I was happy too. I told them I couldn't agree more. 

And the hazy misshapen figure took shape today. I stared-it wasn’t Janice like I had joked earlier tonight. It was some other woman I didn’t know. My father spoke to me. “Sam, this is Agatha”. It was then that I recognized her from the portrait that hung on the hospital common room wall. 

She said to me, ”I am sorry Sam, but after my death my husband never meant to let any of those patients get better again. It was his way of getting revenge of some sort and finding solace for my early death, he blamed the world and so, he has been drugging the patients to make them suffer all this while. Nobody could suspect him and who would believe a bunch of mentally challenged people? Tell Janice, she will believe you."

Mr. Conrad’s new medicine seems to be doing something strange to me, I am cold. But I don’t care, I still can’t believe it, I talked to them Janice. This is the best night of my life. I asked you out and I met my family."

Redemption - Part III

Sam had started to smile, a flicker returned to his eyes, he moved about the common room talking to other patients and his screaming almost disappeared from the time I had joined. Physically, his health seemed to be getting better too. He would smile at me and talk to me about his visions of his family, his life and how he couldn’t wait to leave the facility and be out in the world again. I must say, he was very charming and didn’t seem like a patient at a mental facility at all. He told me about the hazy figure in the distance in his visions and how close he was trying to understand who it was. It all seemed such normal behavior and conversation, there didn’t seem to be the slightest need for him being in the facility. 

Within two weeks of my joining the hospital, Mr. Conrad asked me to meet me in his office and congratulated me on my work. “I really didn’t do anything, it was all him” I said and smiled. He went on to tell me that if things went well, within two more weeks, Sam could be moved to another home where hospital-like conditions were not enforced but was still a place for the mentally disturbed  to be put up. 

“It’s a wonderful idea Mr. Conrad, Sam would be much more at ease if that actually works out”, I said. 

“Well, that’s what we are hoping for Miss Barton”, he said and stood up. 

“And oh yes, before I forget, the main reason I had called you here was to let you know of a new drug the research wing has come up with. They are currently packaging it for some of the patients. It took months to develop the correct formula and the tests were finally successful with the help of a new semi synthetic opiate compound, I won’t bore you with the details, but you can just pick up a batch for Sam from the research building before you go back. It’s a calming drug and it will also numb side effect pains of the other medicines he takes. Give him one every night for one week and we will see how he is reacting to it, okay?” 

“Okay Mr. Conrad, I’ll do that”, I said and left his office.

When I returned with the medicines, I told Sam about him possibly being moved out of the hospital. He looked a little dejected for a bit and then looked up and smiled,

”You know, I had another vision yesterday night when you were not here. The hazy figure was closer than ever before but was still misshapen, I still can’t figure out who it could be. I am one hundred percent sure these visions are from the future; my heart, soul, mind says that without even lingering about it so maybe my leaving this place could lead to some sort of closure on this, don’t you think?” “Well, that’s a marvelous way to look at the bright side of everything Sam, and now that you’re doing so much better, it could very well be!”, I said and smiled at him. 

Suddenly and almost mischievously, Sam said, “Or maybe after I leave from here, you and I could start something, you know, for all I know maybe you are that hazy figure in my visions”, grinning from ear to ear.  

He had brown eyes with flecks of green in them and with the flicker that had returned to them, they seemed to be alive entities of their own. My thoughts returned to Mr. Conrad’s eyes for a second- they seemed so black and still compared to Sam’s. I shook myself out of the trail of thoughts about people’s eyes.

“Well, I shall give it a thought Sam.” The muscles around my mouth seemed to have gotten stuck in the smile. I took a deep breath and said “Anyway, Mr. Conrad has sent a new medicine that will calm you better at night. I’ll put them on the table before I go.”

“Okay, thanks Janice”, Sam smiled. “I’ll write for some time in my journal before I sleep, leave the light on, okay? Goodnight”

“Goodnight Sam”.

Read Redemption Part - IV

Redemption - Part II

Out of these two patients under my care, there was a young Indian man named Sam who was assigned to me. I presume he had had a more Indian name like Shyam which perhaps got changed along the way so that the western world could refer to him with more ease. Or maybe he had been Sam all his life, there was no way to know. Some people have the worst of luck throughout their lives and this man was a living example of that.  

Sam was born and brought up in the USA itself. When he was six years old, he lost his parents and his little brother in a fire. He had been out camping with the school boy scouts team when the incident occurred. His parents and his little brother had gone to sleep comfortably in their beds unaware of the fate that would befall them that night. The fire started from one of the incense sticks his mother used for her daily ‘puja’, the Hindi word for the rituals performed towards God by Hindus. A streak of wind sneaked in from somewhere and toppled the little stick towards a nearby curtain which started smoking and eventually a fire broke out on the ground floor. By the time the Guptas (their surname was Gupta) were aware it was too late. Forensics confirmed death of all three members by asphyxiation from smoke inhalation. Sam was picked up from the camp in the dark hours of the next morning by a police officer who explained to him what had happened as best as he could.

Child Services came into the scene and Sam went through several homes on account of his ever increasing erratic and troubling behavior. Finally he was put in an orphanage where he picked fights every other day, ran away several times and even had an accident. This was another turning moment in his life. He had stolen the dean’s car and crashed it on the interstate. The accident left him paralyzed waist down. All other motor functions were normal waist up but it didn’t matter, it was as if the life had gone out of him after the accident, leaving an empty shell of skin, muscle and bone behind. Sam had been unhappy his entire life, and life never seemed to hold back on giving more reasons to be so.

The only activity Sam now did was scream out at times and then start to sob. He screamed that he had visions of the future. He would scream and then start talking in illegible sentences, words all disordered, making wild gestures and then as suddenly as he had started, he would stop, start to sob and then eventually quieten down. From what was gathered, the vision similar every time - he could see his mother, father and his little brother, but they were not in the house or anyplace he remembered being with them. The part with his family always seemed constant but the place he saw them kept on changing- sometimes it was in the clouds, sometimes at the local fair or sometimes at their own old backyard. He also screamed about another misshapen hazy figure in his visions, standing at a distance. Mr. Conrad took deep interest in trying to learn about the man’s visions. He always had a research intern around Sam, taking notes of his behavior and what he talked about. The other nurses claimed that the research wing had even secretly done experiments to decipher what was going on in his mind. Of course, they didn’t have proof to back up their story. But these erratic visions kept repeating themselves over and over every day; that is, until the day I came in to work. All the other nurses had the same story to tell- Sam had been the empty human shell going through the cycles of everyday mental hospital life with his erratic visions and screaming until the day I had arrived. 

Read Redemption - Part III

Redemption - Part I

It’s no surprise that the people I work with are the most peculiar of the lot. Some talk to invisible people, some with themselves, some keep looking at walls or objects without blinking once, some of them have trouble remembering things etc. They are good people, none of them have the slightest streak of menace about them, but they are and can never be part of society because their behavior doesn’t conform to what society deems acceptable.

I work at the Agatha Psychiatric Treatment Facility as a nurse. The asylum is privately funded and also has a research wing for mental illnesses. It was started by a certain Mr. Conrad who moved to the USA from Germany after his wife, Agatha, passed away from Rett’s Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder for which there is no cure till this day. The symptoms were comparable to autism, hence, treatment was meted out for the same. Unfortunately, the prognosis for her condition wasn’t accurate and she passed away at the age of thirty eight. Mr. Conrad was forty two years old when the doctors gave him the news. He had no other family or relatives (not close ones anyway) in Hanover where he and Mrs. Conrad had lived since the day they had gotten married. He was devastated by her early death and couldn’t stay in the town nor in the country and subsequently moved to Kansas City in the United States of America.

Within two years of moving to the new country, with the help of the German community in the nearby town of Hermann, he started the Agatha Psychiatric Treatment Facility. The facility soon gained recognition for its work in the research wing in addition to the resources offered to the asylum patients. The number of patrons and sponsors increased and the facility flourished over the years. They even added a new block for juvenile patients at the back of the original building. Mr. Conrad took an avid interest in keeping up with everything- from the state of the buildings, supplies for patients to the research being carried out. We would often see him going around the facility, always surrounded by people from different teams, listening to them, talking to them about various issues.

Agatha Psychiatric Treatment Facility was very systematic (I daresay the German methodical precision was at play here!) in terms of its hours and tasks assigned to its employees. We worked in twelve hour shifts every two days. Each nurse was assigned to five patients. With my induction, we were now a team of thirteen nurses. Any new patient brought in was assigned as an extra to one nurse as a temporary solution till a new nurse came in. We had sixty two patients at the facility. I had just two patients under my care for now. When they had been brought in, two out of the twelve nurses had one extra patient each to take care of. Once I joined, they had been assigned under my care. As per the rules, the next three patients to be brought in would be put under my care. That’s how the world of nursing worked here at the facility. Since everything was regulated, our professional and personal life was much regulated too. It struck a perfect balance in my own life somehow.

Read Redemption - Part II

It's Time

I noticed when she tiptoed into room,
Careful not to wake me up.
She had her hands full,
Two children, work and a husband to take care of.
I wasn't asleep,
She didn't notice my breathing was uneven.
I watched her go into the kitchen and eat a little.
Her left hand seemed itchy,
I knew the itching would start today.

Hence there was blueberry cheesecake in the fridge.
The bathroom was cleaned and the tabletops dusted.
The clothes washed and set out for the next day.
She loved the fact that whenever she checked her phone,
A text saying "I love you" waited for her.
Three personal words interspersed between
the millions of corporate words
she had to go through everyday.

At the end of the day, her hair still smelled like the start of it,
Little nooks and crannies on her body where my limbs fitted perfectly.
Changing into my t-shirts over sized for her,
She could fall asleep almost anywhere when tired.
I snuggled in beside her if there was room for me.
Or I would carry her to the bed.
We always woke up with our backs to each other.
She had a habit of finishing my cigarette after sex.

She didn't make the connection between
Her itchy left hand and the cheesecake.
Probably just assumed I was in a good mood;
I loved going that extra mile
And making sure she never knew I did.
Her smile said it all.
There was always her favourite music,
Books and food I blended in with mine.
I had no complaints about a gorgeous woman
hugging me and kissing me anytime.

I knew the itching would start today
So an extra mile had been added to the
daily extra mile.
We had seen a doctor about it months back.
He concluded it was some weird connection with her time of the month.