A collaborative story by The Parking Lot Confessional
(Pt 1: Amy K. Nichols, Pt 2: Amy McLane, Pt 3: Michael James Greenwald, Pt 4: S.C. Green)

Thursday and a quarter moon. Should have been a quiet night on the ward.

Lauren — Dr. Barstandt to the patients and staff — waved her security badge across the scanner and waited for the charge nurse to unlock the doors. She found the double-fail system a nuisance, but understood the necessity. Better safe than sued. Or worse.

The bolt clicked open, echoing through the empty corridor. Lauren clipped the badge back onto the pocket of her lab coat, pulled open the door and let it self-close behind her. Her Birks whispered across the yellowed linoleum as she walked toward the nurse’s station. She’d already passed rooms 106 and 108 — Mr. Turley and Mr. Denton’s rooms — by the time the bolt slid back into place.

Lauren addressed the patients with formality and respect, though the other doctors at St. Ninian’s argued they deserved neither. It was something she’d held onto since her days at U of I. Dr. Connell, her clinical psychology practicum advisor, insisted the old adage of vinegar and honey held true, particularly with the mentally infirm.

Lauren passed room 114. The lights were off, the reenforced window dark. Hopefully the old man was sleeping.

Judy, the charge nurse, greeted her with a worn smile. “Evening, Dr. B.”

“Slow night?” Lauren rested her elbows on the desk.

“Things got pretty loud earlier in 118, but other than that…”

“Ms. Portman?”

“You mean Mizz Cuckoo. Started pounding on the door, yelling something about ‘he’s here, he’s here’. Tried smashing her head into the wall, too, but we got her sedated and strapped before she could do damage.” Judy slid a file across the desk.

Lauren opened it and read the report. She pulled a pen from her coat pocket and clicked the tip again and again with her thumb. “She’s usually so compliant.”

“You’re telling me. Not even a full moon tonight.”

“And our gentleman in 114?”

“Our gentleman still hasn’t slept.”

Lauren stopped clicking the pen. “The lights are off.”

“You don’t believe me? Go see for yourself.” Judy set another file on top of the first.

“Did you ask him if he knew where he was?”

Judy sighed. “I asked him all the questions. No change.”

Lauren gathered the files and returned the pen to her pocket. “Alright. Guess I’ll start with him tonight. That’ll give Ms. Portman more time to sleep.”

She rapped her knuckles twice on the desk and walked to room 114. At the door, she stopped and flipped open the file. They knew so little about their newest patient, most of the report remained incomplete. Likely schizophrenic. Manic highs with acute insomnia. Compliant (so far). Non-violent (so far). Paper-clipped to the file was a black-and-white photo, the only item found in the patient’s possession. It was yellowed at the edges with an aged crease across one corner. In it a group of people dressed in early 40s fashion marveled at a passing car. A young man in the back stood out from the crowd. Taller than the rest. Wearing sunglasses and carrying a camera much too modern for the photo’s time.

Honey, not vinegar, Lauren reminded herself as she unlatched the door and flipped on the light. “Good evening, Mr. Cantor. I see you’re still awake.”

Mr. Cantor sat on the bed. His fingers curled around the bottom edge of his shirt, teasing for loose threads at the hem in the relentless, insistent manner of the occupied manic. He was not, Lauren noted with surprise, wearing any restraints. Her initial urge was to back out, lock the door, and go read Judy the riot act.

But it would be a retreat, and he would know she was afraid of him.

As Lauren hesitated in the doorway, Mr. Cantor relinquished his shirt hem and rose to his feet. He stood, spread his arms wide, his body filling the cell’s space. Lauren fought down the urge to step back.

“How are we doing this evening, Mr. Cantor?” she said, feeling like a solicitous parrot. The serious head cases often had this effect on her.

Mr. Cantor cocked his head, his eyes sparkling, opened his mouth, and sang in a ringing tenor, “Pardon me boy, is that the Chatanooga Choo-Choo?”

He did a little soft-shoe around the room.

“Have a seat, Mr. Cantor.” Lauren said. “I’m Dr. Barstandt. I’ve come to ask you a few questions.”

“You like questions? I got one for ya.” Cantor bounced back down onto his seat, loosely crossing his legs. “What’s a fella gotta do to get a drink in this joint?” He gave her a twinkling white smile, a smile full of friendly creases and charm, a smile that said stick with me kid, and we’ll go places.

“That’s the trouble with hospitals, isn’t it? Short on bartenders.”

Cantor uncrossed his legs and put both feet on the floor. “So?” His knees jittered as he bounced his heels.

“So, you should answer my questions. Then maybe you can get out of here.”

“Then maybe,” he muttered, “Then maybe then maybe Say, could you get me a newspaper, sweetheart? I need to do the crossword.”

Lauren frowned. She splayed open Cantor’s file,  plucked up the photo, and handed it to him.

“Can you-”

He crumpled and stuffed it crackling into his mouth. His jaws pumped. His eyes were like a rabid dog’s.

“That’s not going to do you any good.” Her voice was soft.

“Needs salt.” The wild hate in his eyes receded.

“It’s you in that photo, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t belong there, do you?”

“Baby I was born to belong there!” He jumped to his feet, began pacing. “Don’t you get it? Good God protect me from doctor dames. Anyway it’s a phoney. We was doing an art project.”

“‘We’?”

Cantor rolled his eyes. “Yeah, protect her. You broads all stick together like a flock of chickens. Gobble-gobble-gobble.”

“That’s a turkey, Mr. Cantor.”

“You’re all birds to me.” Pause. “Dirty double-crossing bitch.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tell her this- The fundamental things apply as time goes by.”

“Goodnight Mr. Cantor.” She shut the door, feeling pressure slide off her shoulders as she threw the lock. Time for a chat with Ms. Portman. If she wasn’t too sedated.

She noticed the lighting right away.  But could hear the rumble of thunder and saw a flash of lightning in the windows down at the end of the corridor she was walking towards and figured the dimness had to do with a power surge of some kind.  If she’d thought about it the fixtures would have struck her as odd, but she didn’t, and they didn’t.

She shifted the files to her other arm and continued walking.

At the intersection where the nurses station sat, an African-American orderly rounded the corner right in front of her, eyes cast downward, nearly clipping her with a cart overfilled with soiled linens.  Lauren could smell the blood and the excrement.

“Sorry, missus,” the orderly muttered.  He was an old man, speckled black and gray beard, bald head, and the fact she didn’t recognize him and that he wore the old uniforms, the white ones the administration had done away with in favor of the more mood-pleasing pink or blues, didn’t register; for economic times were tough, and administration plugged temps into orderly positions, especially overnight, which all the overnight nurses chirped about–having inexperienced, many times untrained, orderlies for the shift that would rationally be the safest, according to statistics compiled by the administration, but when dealing with the non-rational individual, overnight nurses knew rational thought and statistics made as much sense as ice-cream sundaes for dinner for the diabetics.

The African-American man flicked the cart forward and continued onward, one wheel squeaking.

“Wait a second,” she said, and the squeaking ceased.

The man turned slowly, head still down, shoulders slumped, and the idea he might be mentally challenged came into Lauren’s head.

“What is that in your hand?”

“Missus?”

“Your hand.”  She felt like a bitch, but rules were made and inside these walls rules were followed.

The man lifted his hand upward, wrist first, as though it were broken.  Gray smoke swirled toward the ceiling.  ”A cigarette, missus.”

The way he said it shocked her, as though it were the most regular thing in the world.  ”You can’t smoke that in here.”

“What?”

“Inside the building.  It’s against the law to smoke a cigarette.”

“Missus?”

Lauren softened her tone, the man obviously retarded, which was not his fault but showed how desperate the administration had gotten in these difficult economic times.  ”Sweetheart.”  She smiled, pinning the files under her arm and raising her hands, palms out toward him, fanning the air–non-verbal comms used to calm erratic patients, something she found herself doing throughout her life; at the coffee shop, when baby-sitting her nieces and nephews or training Stooges, her puppy.  ”There are laws and laws can’t be broken.”

The man flicked his eyes to her, swallowed.  ”Yes, missus.”  He extinguished the cigarette on a metal rod on the cart, slid the butt in the breast pocket of his white shirt.

“What’s going on here?” said a female voice.

Lauren whirled.  ”He was…”

The nurse wore the old-fashioned white nurse cap with a red cross on the bill, dark hair poufed into a bob, white nurse dress down to leggings and black tennis shoes.  She smiled, no creases near her crimson lips, none near her eyes when she furrowed her brow, straight white flesh on cheek and forehead of a woman in her early twenties.

“He was…”

“Yes, Doctor…” She peered at Lauren’s chest, frowned.  ”Barstandt?”

Lauren’s mouth felt as dry as a cotton swab.  Her eyes flicked to the African-American man, then to the old-fashioned fixtures lining the hallway, and in the dim light they let off she noticed the pristine white newness of floors and walls.  Thunder rolled, the whole building shook, fixtures along the walls blinked out and Lauren heard a generator kick on from somewhere in the building and red emergency lights snapped on.

“Well, looks as though we’ll be doing bed checks this evening by candle-light,” the nurse said, chirpily. “Curtis, you run along now and tell the others to get all the candles and holders from storage.”

Curtis bowed.  ”Yes, Nurse Tolivar.”  The cart’s wheel creaked all the way down the hallway.

Every couple seconds, lightning illuminated the window at the end of the corridor.  Behind doors, Lauren heard patients stirring and muttering.  Down the hallway a pounding began.

Miss Tolivar cast her eyes on Lauren.  ”Shall we, Doctor?”  She stepped aside grandly, offered the path to the nurses station with a slender pale arm.

Lauren stared at her, feeling sweat drip down her ribcage.  Miss Tolivar stared at her curiously when she didn’t respond, tilted her head, nibbled at her lower lip, a pink hue developing on her pale throat.  Lauren tried to get her mouth to work, but her tongue just flopped against her teeth.  She thought of the black-and-white photo she’d snuck and cut out of the paper the day after the accident, which she’d taped to every bathroom mirror she’d ever had: grade school, junior high, high school, college, medical school, apartment, house.  That woman was certainly not the girl standing in front of her now.

Miss Tolivar raised her hands, palms out toward Lauren, and fanned the air.  ”Doctor?  Shall we?”

Lauren swallowed; all the rules and laws she’d learned her whole life running through her head as she said the most irrational thing:  ”Well certainly, Mother.”

“Yes. Well,” she stammered. “No disrespect, doctor, but the patients won’t check themselves. At least we don’t encourage that. So unless there’s something wrong with your jaw, please close your mouth and let’s get on with rounds.”

Lauren pressed the files to her chest with one arm and straightened her lab coat with the other. A joke. It had to be. Dressing the part was one thing. She might have been entertained even, but the smoking still was inexcusable. Lauren wondered if Mr. Cantor was in on it too.

Nurse Tolivar pushed open the door to room 114 and looked back over her shoulder at Lauren.

“It’s been over an hour since they were all last checked. It’s going to get done with or without you.” She turned her head after the orderly. “Curtis! We’ll need your assistance in here please.”

Reluctantly he swiveled his cart around to head back, his eyes never breaking contact with the handle of the cart.

No. Lauren couldn’t let this go on any longer. Pulling one on her was one thing, but to subject the patients to this game could ruin moths of progress. She rushed in after the costumed nurse.

“Enough is en—” Lauren choked on her words. She had just walked out of Mr. Cantor’s single-bed, bare white-walled room.

It changed.

Sure the window was in the same spot, but instead of reinforced shatter-proof glass, a thin-paned window with bars hung in its place. The already cramped room held two beds, not one. Restraints dangled from the empty bed closest to the door. The other bed’s leather straps and buckles held down a man.

It couldn’t have been Mr. Cantor, she told herself. He had far fewer wrinkles, but those eyes.

Curtis entered behind Lauren, bringing her to her senses. She opened her mouth to give the nurse a once over. Tolivar made a gesture with her hand a second before a muscled arm wrapped Lauren’s throat and another pinned her arms to her side.

She struggled, kicking and bucking. Curtis’s grip never loosened. A ringing in her ears grew louder. She could just make out Tolivar’s voice, “-to the bed,” before the tinge of black framing her vision swallowed her completely.

###

A wave of nausea woke her. Lauren knew if she opened her eyes, she would lose what little dinner she’d eaten. The voices in the room thundered between her ears. Lauren tried to move her hands to her head. Cold leather bit into her wrists before she got them two inches off the bed. She tried to lift her head to see her hands, but more leather straps held her down.

Words wouldn’t form only tears, and with her head strapped to the bed looking up to the ceiling, they pooled in her ears.

“-walking the corridors like she owned the place.” She could hear the nurse even though all she saw was the ceiling.

“Told me I couldn’t smoke,” Curtis lamented.

“And why the hell not? If you have another, I could sure use one right now.”

She could hear rustling and then a slight pressure on her ankle followed by a snap as Curtis struck a match on her restraint. The stale tobacco crackled as it lit.

“You’re a good man, Curtis,” she said before letting go of a long exhale.

“Just doin’ as the good Lord would have me.”

“Fine, fine.” Tension crept back into Tolivar’s voice. “We need to find which room she slipped from before we turn over shift.”

She heard the door swing open.

“Hopefully she’s from the southern ward. Better if it’s someone else’s jam-”

The door shut onto silence.

This just couldn’t be real. Her mind twisted and pulled attempting at any sense. Instead her sobs grew louder.

“Oh, there, there, bird.”

Lauren jerked her head to the side. Regardless, it only moved an inch at most.

“Oh! Sorry dear,” he said as his face moved into her field of vision.

“Better?” he asked. “Good.”

“M-m-mr. Cantor?”

“Call me Jimmy. And you are?”

She shook her head (as much as she could). “Dr. Barstandt. I’m not supposed to be here.”

“None of us are, bird. And one of us don’t have to be.”

As he talked, her mental twisting calmed. Then she realized, “How did you get out of bed? I saw you strapped in.”

“Oh, that’s easy. Well, maybe not if you weren’t me. Not until I got this anyway.”

He held up an old camera. The lens connected to the base of the camera by a pyramid-shaped bellows. Old as it was, it looked like it was made rather recently.

“This takes the best snap shots and you only have to wait several minutes before get to see what you snapped!”

He seemed overly excited for his camera.

“That’s nice.” She lacked the ability at the moment to feign sincerity. Jimmy picked up on it easy enough.

“Let me show you my last snap.”

He could hear him lifting his mattress off the box spring. The metal springs twanged when he dropped it.

“Take a look.”

He smiled as held the photo next to his face for her to see.

In the picture two faces peered at her cheek to cheek. Jimmy’s winning smile on the right, and Lauren’s placating grimace on the left. Her forehead sported a crease from temple to temple.

“Did Curtis or Tolivar let you take that while I was unconscious?”

“Oh, no,” he said quite serious. “I took this about an hour ago.”

What sanity Lauren felt she regained, threatened to slip again. She closed her eyes forcing another tear into her ear and said more to herself than to Mr. Cantor, “I wasn’t here an hour ago.”

“That’s right,” he agreed. “I was visiting with this lovely lady. A Miss Porterly I believe her name was.”

“Miss Portman?”

“Yes! That’s it! Have you met? She’s quite nice as long as you don’t get her excited. I showed her my wonderful camera and she all but fell to pieces.”

He showed Lauren another picture. This one showed Miss Portman in her room sitting up in her bed staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed. A mirror on the wall behind her caught the partial profile of Mr. Cantor, Jimmy, snapping the picture.

“I’m so terrible at secrets. I just have to share.” He sat on the edge of her bed, causing her to roll into him.

“The film is one snap ahead of the camera. At first anyhow. I snap a bird. I get a car. Two days later I see the car and snap it. Then I get a building.

“A month ago it changed. I snap a picture of a baby I know was going to take. I go to pull the film out. I’m some place else. Everything was crazy. Clothes, cars, everything just crazy. At least papers still had crossword puzzles in them. I think I might have gone crazy if that weren’t the same.”

Lauren doubted his sanity but kept it to herself.

“So after I snap Miss Portman, I pull the film and here I am in bed. I looked at the snap just before you came in. Oh I barely could contain myself. Sometimes I have to wait for weeks before I find the next snap, and here you are walking in my room just an hour later.”

He slapped his knee and hopped in joy. He looked back down at her, his smile faltering.

“Where’s my manners?”

He reached at her straps to unbuckle the leather. The buckle on her right ankle took longer for him to undo. There didn’t seem to be enough slack to disengage the rusty buckle. Jimmy won out and Lauren felt the blood flow back into her feet.

“Now,” he said with the charisma cranked. “Will you do me the honor posing for my next snap?”

Without waiting for an answer he sat down next to her and pressed his cheek to hers as if he knew her more intimately. He held the camera in front of their faces, guessing at the right angle.

“Here we go.”

He snapped the photo.

Lauren’s hand shot out at the film tab at the bottom of the camera and pulled the photo free.

“He—”

His voice cut off, gone.

Gone.

Jimmy was gone. The room was gone. She stood just outside of room 114. The hallway lights shone in their fluorescent glory. No storm raged outside. In her hand the photo waited for her under a black cover slip.

From behind the door came the wizened voice of Mr. Cantor.

“Dirty double-crossing bitch.”

She crumpled the unseen photo and threw it in a waste can as she passed the nurses station.