Session One
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
His voice speaks to me from a far away place. I veer off memory lane and snap back to reality. I suddenly realize that my fingers have been gently caressing my neck for the past 30 seconds without my even knowing. It’s such a curious thing, the mind. “Excuse me?” I ask.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” the doctor repeats. He fidgets nervously with the photo ID dangling around his neck. He’s worried, but whether he’s concerned about my well-being or his own, I’m not sure. “You know he’s…not there, right?”
“Please open the door,” I reply curtly. I probably shouldn’t be rude. After all, this doctor is providing me with a very generous favor. Only authorized personnel are granted access into the next room, and as of this moment, I am the first exception.
The doctor firmly nods his head, trying to mask his fear with a confident facade. “Very well,” he says. He tries to remove his ID from the lamination, but it refuses to come out.
Watching a man with a MD struggle with a piece of plastic makes me uncomfortable. I set my eyes elsewhere, and where better to focus them than on the metal door standing before me. Butterflies flutter nervously in the pit of my stomach. Behind this metal door lies an untold story; a mystery that’s been locked away for two decades; a puzzle that I intend on piecing together. Beyond this metal door, the rules that govern our world of logic and reason will no longer apply. It would almost be appropriate to hang a sign above the door that reads: “Please leave your morals and sanity at the door, thank you.”
Finally, the doctor withdraws his ID from the lamination. He gives me a weak smile, but his embarrassment refrains him from speaking. He swipes the ID through a small machine attached to the wall. I hear a loud buzz, which I assume signifies that the door has just been unlocked. The doctor wraps his fingers around the metal handle and pulls. With surprising ease, the door swings open to reveal the next room.
“After you, Mrs. Rita,” he tells me. He tries to make the gesture sound courteous, but I know that he’s just trying to postpone the interaction, even if it is for only a few seconds. I take a deep breath, as though doing so would somehow inflate my courage, and step through the doorway to meet St. Matthew’s most dangerous patient.
The doctor follows and shuts the door. There’s no going back now. He stands beside me and points to a lonely room at the far end of the hall. In his other hand is the photo ID. “Just one more door,” he says. “And then, he’s all yours.”
It’s a terrifying prospect. I stare at the door across the hall. It waits for me and beckons me forward. The doctor leads the way, and I follow after him like a child who’s afraid to get lost. It feels like I’ve traveled through a maze of obstacles to get here. I had to deal with security guards, elevators, metal detectors, and locked doors that rarely get opened. Now, I’m walking down a corridor that has only two rooms. One of them is my final destination. The other contains a few guards and security monitors. I give a swift look around the hallway and spot a surveillance camera in each corner. The amount of security in this place astounds me. I understand that the patient’s dangerous, but all of thise seems a bit excessive for just one man.
I pass by the glass window and smile at the security guards that stand behind it. But not one of them returns the gesture. In that room, there’s no smiles, no joy. There are only tired, gloomy faces with pale skin. I look at them, and I see sleepless nights and haunted dreams. They remind me of corpses, empty shells of the men they used to be, as though all of the life inside of them had been sucked out. Most men spend their nights with family and friends. But when the sun sets, these guys, on the other hand, have only a homicidal maniac for company.
St. Matthew’s is one of the most renowned psychiatric hospitals in California. Interestingly enough, the majority of its patients are here by choice. Only a small percentage of the overall population was admitted involuntarily. And only one, the one that I’m on my way to see now, is being held in a maximum-security facility. In fact, this entire ward was constructed solely for him.
When Jake first arrived to St. Mathew’s, there was a lot of controversy and debate regarding his placement in the hospital. Beloved fans and sympathizers felt that he should remain with the other patients. According to them, solitary confinement was a form of cruel and unusual punishment and wasn’t conducive for a person’s mental health, especially when that mental health was already damaged. Others demanded that he receive the death sentence, which was ludicrous given the extreme circumstances of the case. Naturally, it came as big news when the chief of staff told the public that Jake would be placed in the same psychiatric ward as the other involuntary patients. According to this doctor, Mr. Andrews was deeply disturbed, was unable to comprehend the distinction between right and wrong, and should be treated no differently than any other patient in the hospital. Five days after this announcement, Jake slit the chief of staff’s throat with a shard of glass, killing him within minutes. Four security guards went to restrain him. He beat two of them over the head with a chair, fracturing their skulls and putting them in comas. Suffice to say, after that incident, Jake was admitted to solitary confinement and has been here ever since; two decades of isolation, where the only visitors he gets are the voices inside his head.
The sound of our footsteps on the tile floor echoes all around, yet the hallway is eerily silent. Just as I begin to wonder whether coming here was a good idea, I suddenly find myself standing in front of the metal door: the last barrier between Jake and myself.
The doctor raises his hand to the metal door handle. Right away, I notice the violent tremble in his hand. His fingers grip the handle, and he gives a nervous gulp. I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. A doctor, who pursued and received a medical degree that would permit him to aid the mentally ill, is afraid of his own patient. And the sickest part of it all is that the good doctor isn’t even staying for the session. He’s merely introducing me to the subject and leaving, and yet those few minutes of being in Jake’s presence are still enough to terrify him.
The doctor gawks at the handle. He’s horrified of pulling it open. I look back to the glass window. I can no longer see the guards, but I can envision their worn-out, miserable faces staring at the monitors. I begin to feel disturbed by the entire scenario, haunted by a single question: what kind of man does it take to affect others so horrifically? I wonder about the inhumanities they’ve seen and the terrors that have filled their nights. It’s as if Jake’s insanity had somehow slipped underneath the crack of this metal door and infected their minds.
The doctor’s face turns toward mine. His face is completely drained of its color. “Security will be monitoring you on the screens,” he informs me in a voice that shakes as much as his hand. “And before we go inside, you have to remember one thing.”
My ears perk up. I’m almost afraid to hear what he’s going to say.
“No matter what he says,” begins the doctor, “he can’t hurt you. You have to remember that.”
I nod my head in silent reply. As I observe the doctor’s trembling hand and his pale face, I start to wonder whether he lives by his own advice. He lifts another quivering hand, the one that still holds his photo ID, and swipes it through a machine similar to the one before. Once again, a loud buzz signals the door’s unlocking. I stare straight ahead. I suddenly feel as though I’m about to stumble into Wonderland, as if this door represents the final border between normalcy and insanity.
The doctor slowly lifts the handle.
The butterflies zoom through my stomach. It feels like hours ago when the doctor asked me whether or not I was certain about doing this. At the time, I was, but now I have the strong urge to turn back and run out this building. It was foolish of me to pursue this, that having these sessions with Jake was a good idea. But at this point, there’s nothing for me to do but go forward.
The door creeps open, and a ray of light squeezes through the crack.
My heart thunders against my chest. My laptop bag suddenly feels like an anvil in my hand. I try to mentally prepare myself for what I’m about to experience, but I quickly realize that there’s nothing in this world that could ready me for what lies behind that door.
Finally, the portal into insanity opens, and there, sitting at a white table in the center of the room, is the king of its realm: Jake Andrews. Right away, I can tell that there’s something…off about this man. It’s as though danger radiates from his body like heat from the sun.
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