Metaphorphosis

Assessment

He shook his head in disbelief. It was just the weather, he told himself. Or maybe the fact that he spent the morning shitting his soul out of his ass in the toilet. It was about half an hour before lunchtime in the hospital, and the scorching sun burnt the concrete cruelly over the parking lot below them. The window cut the sunlight into neat, bright, hot squares, which shone directly behind his head. 

“No. No way. You only exist in my head.” 

“You’re saying I’m not actually here?” said the cockroach, as its antennae twitched in seeming offence. “That’s not very polite.”

Yes, it’s the weather. It was so hot that he was sweating all the drugs out or something, which must be why they weren’t working today.

“Stop it—get away from me! Stop talking, I know you’re not real, okay?!” he screamed. He motioned away from where the cockroach was on the floor—perhaps about 10 feet away from where his bed was—and grasped his pillow with one hand, and made as if he could throw it anytime he wanted. He waved the pillow around threateningly.

The cockroach made a vague motion—the patient supposed it was kind of like a shrug or something. A shrugging roach wasn’t something he was accustomed to seeing. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. I’ve actually got things to do, too.” It bowed its head, as if to say well then tally ho, and turned to leave.

“Oh yeah? Like what? Oi, don’t walk away from me, you little—” he growled. He raised the pillow higher above his head. 

“Huh? I thought you want me gone.” It didn’t look at him as it did before, but it stopped in its tracks. 

“Look—I—ugghhh” He put the pillow down forcefully in frustration. “You aren’t real!” 

“… I think I’m real.” The cockroach bowed its head down, as if to inspect its underside to check if it was really there. 

“What the fuck are you up to?” 

“Who, me? Gee, I dunno. I figure I’d go to the office, get some paperwork done, send faxes, have lunch out with the secretary down at the cafe. Christ almighty. What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m a cockroach, for fuck’s sake…” 

“Oh yeah? OH YEAH?” His saliva started spraying violently as he sputtered. They came down in big, fat drops that produced dark circles on the white bed sheets. “Specify it! What are you gonna go do today?”

“Why should I?” 

“Cos I’ll… I’ll throw this slipper at your face!” As he said so, he stumbled off his bed, fumbled around the floor until his hand reached the dirty flip-flop for his left foot, and raised it in the similar battle-ready way he clutched his pillow before. 

The cockroach stared at him blankly. “Damn. This is, what, the third time this week? I should avoid passing through the psych ward next time,” it mumbled to itself, and then said, “Okay, if you say so. I’m gonna go scamper down the hallway, go through the window at the end, crawl down the wall until I get to the first floor, avoid the darn cat that hangs out near the out-patient clinics on the second floor, and rummage through the security guard’s rubbish for food. It’s my thing, you know. Eating.” 

This is weird. Usually they tell me that they want to kill me. 

This is not a legitimate hallucination. 

“Huh. Yeah, right. If you really wanted to eat, you would have set up camp at the hospital cafeteria! Which is completely in another building! Why the security guard? It sounds like a fishy story, if you ask me…” 

“I moved away from my parent’s nest in the cafeteria ages ago. I moved at the fifth floor, where the interns sleep. It’s great there. They barely clean up after themselves, and they usually order take-out, so real food is not a problem. I’m going down to the security guard today cos it’s Friday and he’ll probably have mandarin oranges with him.” 

“… mandarin oranges?” He said dumbly. That fucking security guard, he was looking at me like I were a terrorist, he’s calling the Feds now, he’s pinning the blame on me for all those murders and bomb scares

The cockroach nodded. “It’s his thing. Mandarin oranges on a Friday. It’s probably because his wife died on a Friday, and they both liked mandarin oranges, and this is his way of remembering her every week. Well, at least that’s what he told the cat and the janitor one time… anyhow, it doesn’t make a difference to me how his Friday dietary habits came about.” 

“That fucking security guard… don’t ever trust him. He’s one of them.” 

“One of them?” 

“Yeah.” 

The cockroach paused, and then shrugged again, in that special cockroachy way. “I like mandarin oranges. I don’t have to trust him.” 

“… yeah. I suppose not,” the man said. He lowered the pillow on the bed, but in that instant he snapped, “Wait, what the heck am I saying?! I’m agreeing with a cockroach! A fucking cockroach!” In that instant, he knew that he had reached new lows in his illness. 

“You were agreeing with a reasonable cockroach, at least,” said the roach, and laughed. Its voice sounded tiny and scratchy, like Alvin and the Chipmunks played on an old recorder. “I have to tell you, though, the security guard isn’t ‘one of them,’ as you say he is. He’s got issues of his own—I mean, he’s got a steadily enlarging prostate, hypertension, and diabetes, and he can barely afford all the drugs he needs. He sure ain’t got the time to bother a guy like you.” 

“A-ha! So you are one of them! Any insect siding with the enemy is my enemy as well!” He threw the pillow, but he missed the cockroach by about 2 meters to the left. The cockroach scampered under the bed. 

“The fuck, man?!” the cockroach said. “Aye, ya know what, forget it. I don’t have to be here. I got orange peel to eat.” With that the voice faded away. The patient saw the insect scamper down the hallway, until it was a tiny, brown-black spot in his vision, which then promptly disappeared under the doorway. As he stared, his vision was blocked by a white-and-grey blur. 

_______________________________

“Sir? Good noon, sir? It’s lunchtime, and you have not eaten your food.” 

His vision focused. It was a male nurse carrying his chart. The nurse touched his shoulder briefly, and when he saw that the patient responded to him, he let go.

It was here that he noticed that he was mumbling something to himself over and over. The enemy. The enemy. The enemy. 

“Sir, you have to try to eat on schedule, okay? It’s part of your healing process,” said the nurse. These people insisted that all the patients follow a schedule. In the morning, the interns made them exercise with simple calisthenics. 8 AM and 8 PM, he gets to drink his medicine. And in between, he gets meals and his daily dose of auditory hallucination. Occasionally, the doctor visits too. 

The nurse left him afterward, and he was left staring at the space where he previously was. Despite what the nurse said, he did not have any appetite, and especially not for the food given to him, which was ground pork with rice. His attention drifting, he suddenly became aware of the other guy in the male ward, who was in the bed opposite him.

The other patient was a younger boy, about 21 years of age, who was admitted about a week before him. The story was, the night he was admitted, he was screaming that the devil will burn the whole hospital down. He was sedated for the night; when he awoke the next morning, he was less agitated, but insisted that the devil resided in him, and that things were going according to the devils’ plan, and everyone was mistaken for keeping him in there. 

The boy smiled at him from his side of the room. He said, “You were acting pretty weird back there, mister.” 

He said nothing. He was offended by the boy’s aloof demeanor, which he thought was contrived and inappropriate. Instead, he turned away and stared at the door, where the cockroach disappeared. 

“He isn’t coming back, you know. Not by the way you scared him off.”

“Stop talking to me, kid,” he said gruffly. I don’t need a person obviously crazier than I am to think that I am crazier than he is.

“Obviously, the little guy was talking to you, too. It’s Wednesday, so he probably said something about going to the conference room for the weekly case discussion and buffet.”

“It’s Friday, dumbass. Get your days right. They’re gonna keep you here for much longer if they think you’re getting memory problems.” 

The boy laughed. “Sorry, old man, I’m a little embarrassed having you of all people pointing that out to me. Friday, huh? Then it’s the orange peels from the security guard. Not everyday you see a cockroach with a strict schedule…” He paused and laughed again. “Oh, wait. For the last week, I have seen that thing everyday. Except the doctor doesn’t believe me when I say so. So technically, I’ve only been imagining it for eight days straight now. Tough luck for me. They might increase the dose of whatever it is they’re using for my head right now.”

The patient didn’t say anything, but his frown deepened upon listening to the boy’s monologue. 

“Ehh. Tough beans for me. And people wonder why I spend so much time in my head, when imaginary people and insects talk to me, and real people won’t.” With that, the boy got up from his bed, stretched, and walked out of the room to go to the recreation room next door. And then he was alone, and the entire room, and eventually his mind, became silent and still. 

______________________________

He was given his second dose for the day, and it was only a matter of time before he felt the effects of sedation. His eyelids lost the power to keep open, and his limbs became lead-heavy. His consciousness weakened and eventually shut off. 

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but his eyes, without warning, snapped open, and wakefulness switched on like a newly changed fluorescent light over a clean, dark room. When he awoke, it was dark. No sounds were heard except the slightly-muted chirping of crickets outside, and the quiet breathing of the boy on the other side of the room. 

When his eyes got used to the darkness, he discovered that he was face-to-face with a cockroach. 

“Good evening,” it said. It crawled on the blanket over his chest and stopped. 

He sat up quickly from his bed. He pulled himself away from the blanket, and the cockroach scrambled so that it could keep itself near him. 

“Calm down, buddy. It’s okay. I’m here to help ya,” it said. 

“F-f-fuck.” He forced his voice from going above a whisper; he did not want to wake anyone up and risk having a medicine pushed in his veins again. No, not at this hour. “Get the fuck out of here, or else I’ll kill you. Or you know what, why the fuck am I even negotiating, I should just—”

“Calm the fuck down, I said!” the cockroach screamed. The patient was taken aback, but no-one else seemed to have heard the scream. “Okay. If you want to kill me, you can just go ahead, but the very fact that you haven’t even got the guts to kill me with your bare hands means that you won’t.” 

He narrowed his eyes. “Who… what are you, anyway? Stop, please stop…”

“I am the one who could help you,” said the cockroach.

_________________________________

I’ll continue this once I phrase the next events correctly. - jdvp 02-24-12