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They put enough tranquilisers in you and the world around you starts to get a little bendy. The laws of physics and gravity aren’t the all-dominant forces they used to be; time is flexible.
At least, that’s what your brain thinks.
The window opposite me swelled and then shrank, like it was breathing. I was the one sat on the wooden bench with the glazed eyes and the spit leaking out the corner of my mouth. I’d watched it for around the last hour. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
It’s fun, if you haven’t got anything else to do.
I really didn’t have anything else to do.
“So tell me, I’m curious, how do you get the orderlies to call you ‘Mr Durden?’”
There was a man on the other end of the bench. A man had walked up the empty corridor, sat down beside me and started talking and I hadn’t noticed.
I was too busy watching the window.
That’s a little scary.
Huhn? I said.
I must be losing my mind.
“Them, the orderlies, the ones running around you like you’re the second coming. How does one manage that? Tell me how to make them call me ‘Mr Prior’ and stop wanking into my lunch.”
He had a clipped, English accent. Northern. He was short and wiry and blond and he looked like one of those dark horses that used to turn up to fights, the ones that everyone else wanted to take on, but he’d floor them in seconds. Everyone was still a potential fight. I was still weighing them up.
“I’m serious.”
He didn’t look serious.
I started an underground boxing ring, I offered.
“You started an underground boxing ring and now the orderlies are calling you Mr Durden?” Prior looked like he was trying to put two and two together.
Well, it was very popular.
“I imagine it was.” He said it with a flash of campness that was gone as soon as it began.
I told him my name. He looked confused.
My name isn’t Tyler Durden, I said.
Prior shifted in his seat, asked another question like he was looking for solid ground. “So why did you end up in this place? Where were you when the narrative ended?”
When what?
“When the dirty great bastards with the faces came and whisked you off to this place.” Prior said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “They can’t just leave us lying about once the book’s finished, I suppose. God knows what we’d get up to.”
I’d been. White walls. Soothing voices. Medication in little paper cups. God behind a big, walnut desk. I’d just blown up some buildings, I think.
“Well, no wonder they’ve filled you with horse tranquilizers.”
I shrugged, woozily. I wasn’t really a threat anymore. Not now I’d killed Tyler.
No-one seemed to listen.
“Any relation to the underground boxing ring?” He asked nonchalantly.
Yeah, actually it was, I said.
I hadn’t seen anyone else for days, and I hadn’t talked properly with anyone since I got in here, so I kept on for the sake of conversation.
Things got a little out of hand, I said.
Perhaps my conversation needed work.
Prior snorted, he found it funny. “Tell you what; you meet some characters up here. Then again, I suppose you would, considering where we are.”
I asked him where he was when he got picked up.
“I’d just been posted to London. Asthma.” saw my blank stare. “I’m a soldier.” He settled down into the bench, a couple of feet away from me, but his arm was slung over the back. It came a few inches close to my shoulder. “Still, I’ve been told it’s only temporary. They’re going to put me back where they found me, soon as the next book kicks off.”
He shot a dirty look up and down the corridor. “Sooner, rather than later, I should hope. If I weren’t already insane I think I’d be driven over the edge by the bloody isolation.”
I agreed.
Seeing another patient was pretty rare.
You’d think there’d be more, I said.
“Ah. Well. Literary types, they love their mad characters, don’t they? But they can’t bear to let them live to the end of the story.” He pulled a sneer. “The gun on the mantelpiece in the first act has to go off in the third and all that. It rather rounds off the story.”
I never read as many books as I wanted to. I never had enough time. There weren’t any books here. Not even magazines. The orderlies probably couldn’t read. I took his word for it. I wondered if I got any special dispensation for not reading a lot, seeing as I was a literary invention. A refugee.
Probably not.
“Lucky us, eh?”
Lucky us.
So why are you here? I asked. You a tourist?
He laughed - a short bark. “No, trust me, I’ve worked bloody hard to earn a place here. Neurasthenia.”
It sounded Victorian.
“Shell shock,” he clarified. “I only just got out of one asylum.”
Wait, so you’re better? I asked.
“Apparently not. It seems I have a violent alter-ego.”
I laughed this time and he looked at me, guarded. “Impressive?”
Familiar.
I know all about alter-egos. I used to have one, I told him, but I sorted it out. I fixed the problem. You see, I killed him.
Then I smiled, and the smile wrinkled the scars in my mangled, angry Halloween pumpkin face.
Tyler’s bullet wound.
Prior’s eye twitched.
“Up for a walk?” Bright and sunny and fake and trying to cover up the fact that I had got under his skin somehow. He stood, already sure about moving on. Unsure whether to take me.
It’s all the same, I told him.
“Ah, not true, I found a yellow sofa once.” He pointed behind him. “Back there.”
There really isn’t anything worth looking at, I told him.
“It’s not a sight-seeing spot, is it?” He looked ahead down the corridor. “It’ll be something to do,” and I debated with myself whether it’d be worth it.
He could go and I could stay and then in a minute an hour a day I’d wonder if he’d ever been here.
He grinned at me with something detached behind the eyes, something
familiar, and I wondered whether he was here at all.
But it occurred to me how much I missed Tyler, which is weird because I fucking hated the guy. He terrified me. But for a long time, Tyler and I were best friends, and I realised once in a while that I missed him like I'd miss my own arm.
“What will you be missing, exactly?” Prior asked and the answer was nothing, so I followed.
Slowly, at first. Some of the side effects of Risperidone are as follows:
drowsiness;
nausea and vomiting;
unusual tiredness or weakness;
weight gain;
and, of course, joint pain.
Not a fast walker.
Prior went through a side door into a stairwell, down one floor and back out again. The corridor was exactly the same except for the fact it sloped down at intervals.
“Oh, this is new…” Prior grinned conspiratorially like a kid that’s just found discarded pornography in the woods. “Lucky charm, you are mate,” and he slapped me on the shoulder.
I’d been here before.
I’d come up those stairs we’d been down.
There was someone down there.
Prior walked downhill. I stood still. I could go back up, he wouldn’t see me go. I’d just disappear.
Except he turned around.
“Are you come or not? Pull your finger out your arse.”
As always, I will drag you through this, kicking and screaming, and in the end, you will thank me.
I followed.
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Walking is a brainless activity. One foot in front of the other. It’s hardwired into the lizard brain, like breathing. We walked for miles.
My limbs loosened up. My head felt less like cheap, stupid fluff. I hurt. I shook.
Days.
The frosted windows got smaller and then disappeared. The light changed. Prior stopped.
His shoulders were tight, you could see the adrenaline racing through him. Fight or flight.
Prior didn’t like being underground.
The lights flickered.
I asked him, what is it?
(Neurasthenia)
“Tunnels,” he said. “Just like being in a tunnel.” He started “I…” then looked at me and thought better. “Never mind.”
(Shell shock)
“Didn’t think this place went underground.” Stiff upper-lip reaffixed, he snorted. “Of course it does.”
(PTSD)
We could go back? I keep making suggestions that I know people are going to ignore.
“There’s nothing back that way.” His eyes were vacant. He’d sunk back into his skull. “Keep moving forward.” Like he didn’t have a choice. “Sometimes you just keep moving forward.”
No, I said, you really don’t.
“I’m sorry, have you got anything better to do?”
I didn’t answer.
“Why don’t you want to go down there?” He asked. “What’s down there?”
I laughed. The answer seemed so stupid.
Others.
“Let’s have a look then.” Maybe it was inevitable. It didn’t seem like I had a choice.
We reached the junction in the corridor. Preordained. To the left and the right there were rows of cells. The light was almost non-existent here. It smelt like piss; old, concentrated ammonia. Prior picked his way carefully down to the left.
“I can smell your cunt.” A voice came out of the fourth cell down.
Prior giggled. “Oh lovely, Charming, really, but you’re a bit off in the…” He’d reached the cell.
He looked back at me.
“…you heard that, right?”
I’d heard it too.
“No one in here.”
The cell at the end, I told him. That’s the only one that’s occupied.
I stayed at the centre of the junction.
“You frightened?”
No, I said. Lying through my teeth. He just never shuts up, I told him.
Prior looked down the corridor.
Then back at me.
“What’s he in for?”
Cannibalism.
“I can hear you, you know.” Different voice. Different cell. “Yes, I’ve heard you before,” the voice said to me. “The boy who punches himself in the face.”
I was leaving.
“HOW’S TYLER?” It echoed down the corridor.
I ran.
Running is not like walking. There’s conscious effort involved with running, unless you get a big enough hit of adrenaline and then the first clue of what you’re doing is that your lungs are burning and your breath is rasping out of you.
I didn’t get far.
Tyler’s dead, I said to no-one in particular.
That was starting to look like a mistake. Tyler would have loved talking to that guy. He’d have made a big show about not caring, laughed, called everything coming out of the guy’s mouth bullshit, but he would have enjoyed himself. Tyler was Teflon, waterproof, bulletp…
Prior was still talking to the guy in the cell.
I wanted to see how he was doing.
Outside the cell at the end, Prior was half in half out of the murk. Prior wasn’t laughing, calling it all bullshit. Prior was angry. The words were low and lost in the echo but he was definitely angry.
The guy in the cell answered, pleased with himself. You could tell by the tone but the words weren’t clear. When he stopped talking he laughed.
Prior wasn’t laughing.
He threw himself at the reinforced plastic partition so the sound ricocheted down the hall, so close now that his nose was smashed up against it. He started spitting out words like hissing.
The guy in the cell laughed harder.
Prior backed off, turned to see the chair behind him and grabbed it by the back. He whipped his arm and the chair went flying into the plastic. It bounced off with a dull thud.
And the guy in the cell kept right on laughing.
Prior stalked back up the corridor, past me and left, straight on from where I’d just come. I caught up, but Prior wasn’t offering any words. I wasn’t great at starting conversations. I usually just finished them. I put a hand on his shoulder.
What the hell was that all about?
He swung round and smacked his fist into my face.
This, I knew how to do.
I was still standing when he hit again and drove me back to the wall, then piled the fist downward into my gut. I skidded down the wall ‘til I connected with floor.
He hauled his big, regulation army boot back and kicked me in the ribs and I laughed.
Trust me, I said, get it all out. You’ll feel better.
He kicked me again.
You’ll feel great.
I’d been knocked onto my back and I found one of my legs halfway in the air. I drove my slippered heel into his groin, from below.
One of my teeth was loose.
Prior doubled over and stayed that way. His eyes were tearing up but he looked puzzled.
Probably wondering where one of his testicles had ended up.
Prior looked at me.
“Wait, where are we?”
Huh.
“Oh….god. You hit me in the balls?”
Hmm. Kinda, I told him.
Waking up in strange places with sore balls? I’ve been there, I wanted to tell him.
Sometimes I wondered if Tyler would wake up strange places feeling unexplainably bored.
I wondered if I used to look like Prior did when I woke up. I think I probably did.
Or, more accurately, Prior looked like me.
Because under and behind and inside Prior, something horrible had been growing.
Nothing is static.
Everything is falling apart.
The swing doors at the end of the corridor slammed open and our heads twisted away to look.
Four men came through the door. Two of them were orderlies.
We’ve been looking for you, Mr Durden.
Being slammed to the floor by a man twice your weight and bouncing your head off the beige, speckled linoleum is an experience that doesn’t bear repeating.
Pressed on top of me like a big, meaty blanket, an orderly pushed a needle into my arm and I received the pressure-sting of intramuscular injection.
The two that weren’t orderlies were watching us, but in a way that didn’t seem to involve any actual looking, or any eyes. They weren’t like the orderlies. They were different.
Loxapine started creeping through my brain with sticky fingers.
I remembered them now.
They had turned up outside my room. Taken me out, down a hallway, through some swing doors that should have lead to a cafeteria - only this time they lead to another hallway and another room, and they left me there, and that was it. They hadn’t talked.
No welcoming party.
I remembered everything.
No-one ever talked to me. It’d been weeks since I’d spoken to anyone. Or maybe months. Maybe years.
The window breathes. The walls swell and shrink. The hallways stretch on forever.
Time is flexible.
Prior, his arms locked behind his back, was being pushed forwards. This must be a transfer. “Right, lads. If I’m going back, there’d better be an extremely graphic sex-scene on the other end, or there is going to be blood.” Prior was smiling, gleeful, but with something detached behind the eyes.
They each grabbed one of Prior’s shoulders.
“Oy. Easy. Easy!”
They dragged him through the swing doors.
I remembered everything.
I’d been in heaven, with its white walls and its soothing musak. I’d talked to God behind his big walnut desk. People had whispered to me that things were going to plan. We’ll have you back soon.
You’ll get better. Move on. Move up.
People don’t tell me that anymore, here. The rooms are deserted. The fluorescent lights flicker. Everywhere smells of damp. I don’t visit God.
And the orderlies don’t tell me about Project Mayhem. The tell me to eat this. Swallow this one. Sit down.
Move out of the way, Mr Durden.
Maybe I’ve been here years.
I watch the window.
Inhale. Exhale.