The Mush Room
D ragging the March Hare to the Mush Room is sinful. Unforgivable. I’m not sure why my legs allow me to go the distance or why my head allows me the possibility.
“What are you doing, Alice?” Tom appears out of nowhere.
“The March thinks he can remember if exposed to the torture of shock therapy,” I reply while the March willingly lays himself on the table.
“What a brilliant idea!” Tom mocks us. “We only have an hour and a half left. I’m contemplating whether to push the button or not, and you’re here having fun.”
“Does that look fun to you?” I pull him from his collar and drag him to a corner against the side of the room. “I’m about to shock my best friend.”
“Best friend, huh!” Tom is losing his temper. He too is scared with the ticking clock in the back of our heads. “All mad people are friends, I suppose.”
“You’re a piece of…” I push him back against the wall.
“You shouldn’t be swearing, Alice,” the March, in his child’s persona again, says.
“That’s why I shut up.” I pat him. “Are you comfortable laying here?”
He chuckles. “That’s a neat question. Asking a man if he’s comfortable in his grave.”
I chuckle back in masked pain. It’s hard to understand whether the March is a man or a child sometimes. It seems like the two personas come and go. But aren’t we all both child and adult inside?
“You will need to strap my feet and hands down, Alice,” he says.
“How do you even know that?”
“I’ve been shocked before. Don’t remember when, but someone was trying to get the information out of my head. When I said strap, I really mean chain. But I don’t want to freak myself out.” He stares at the ceiling like someone who’s expecting a needle in the buttocks and looks away.
Chaining him, I see his limbs stiffen. I pat him again, but it has no effect on him. I wonder if I have the courage to sacrifice myself for a bigger cause like him.
“Now you have to put the cap on my head. The one with the six screws,” he says, still looking up.
Tom beats me to it and pulls it out of the wardrobe. “May I?” He makes the March wear it. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
The darker, messed up inner Tom surfaces. I’d once heard that some men apply to the military not to serve their country, but to scratch an itch of wanting to kill and harm others. Sometimes I wonder about people who work in asylums like Tom. Maybe they aren’t here to help, but to scratch an itch. An insane one.
“Four of the six screws on the cap need to be turned,” the March reminds Tom. It’s something I know for a fact from the days when I’d been shocked by Waltraud. More than four screws guarantees the death of the patient. Some patients can only handle three. The screws end with electrical pads that stick to the side of the head.
“Four screws turned,” Tom says with the enthusiasm of a psycho wearing clown’s make up, two bananas instead of devil’s horns on his head.
I dismiss him and watch the March Hare. It’d be stupid patting him again, knowing it doesn’t make a difference. I’m admiring his solid posture, trying not to vocalize his utter fear.
I stand right next to him, and bend over to whisper in his ear. “We can still not do this.”
“If I die in an hour and a half, I think I’d regret not having tried this,” he says. “I once heard people’s most common regret on their death bed is not trying things.”
I chuckle lightly. Even in his darkest hour, he is trying to make me laugh.
“I, too, don’t want to regret anything,” Tom says. “So let me do the shock therapy.”
“Get out!” I push Tom away. “Go wait for me to tell you if we’re going to have to push the button.”
“But, Alice…”
“If you don’t leave this room right now, I’m going to shock you instead of him.” I show him my Dark Alice face.
Tom swallows hard, so much so that he can’t swallow at all. He leaves the room, his eyes glued to mine. It’s like when you gently leave the room with a lion in it; you have your eyes glued on the predator, making sure you’re safe to go.
“Now back to you, March,” I say. “Like I said, we can still stop this.”
The March reaches for my hands, but his fingers stop midway due to the chains. I reach for him instead. He is in a cold sweat. “I have to do it, Alice.”
“Why? I can’t understand. Even if we dig into your mind, what memory exactly will help us get out of here?”
“One memory.”
“Are you sure? What memory is that?”
“The memory of a patient who lived in this asylum and wrote on those walls. A patient who knew a big secret. Probably the whereabouts of the Six Keys. What the Wonderland War is about. And more.”
“We’re not sure of any of this, March.”
“I’m sure,” he insists. “I’m sure that Patient 14 knows something big and that we need to find him.”
“How can you be so sure?”
The March’s frightened eyes stare back at me. “I have an inescapable feeling inside of me.”
“What feeling?”
Again, he tries to crane his neck closer but the cap with the screws stops him halfway. He whispers, “That I’ve met Patient 14 in The Hole.”