One year later
Click. Stutter. Click. Stutter. Click. Stutter. The second hand of the white clock is always moving, yet it often tricks him into believing that the thin, plastic arm is not really moving at all. That it is stuck.
Click. Stutter.
Motionless upon a single bed in a Spartan whitewashed room: a man. Anyone that looks in at him, through the window in the door, any time he’s in here, will see him lying in the same position. He doesn’t move so much now, nor eat. When he’s inside his room, he tends to stare at the blank ceiling.
Click. Stutter.
Any exertion requires an effort that seems beyond his resources and will. But why move or do anything when your thoughts are so compelling? When so much needs to be figured out, remembered, sifted, considered? Then revisited and placed in the right order like stacked crockery? This way, he knows where all of his thoughts and feelings, random or otherwise, can be retrieved.
Click. Stutter.
His beard is much longer these days. His face careworn but usually emotionless or slumped by sadness. His eyes, most often blank from medication, only rest on standby as deeper explorations of consciousness commence.
Post-trauma world.
What can be said to the man who has lost everything and who knows things that no one will ever believe? He often thinks about this but believes the staff are sympathetic to his ideas, in their own way.
Click. Stutter.
He always fills the journal dutifully. He was given the thesaurus he asked for. Writing so many of his ideas and notions down makes him feel better, though he’s not sure why.
Click. Stutter.
Simple fittings and fixtures form the fabric of the world that encases him and meet his eyes when he wakes. Blue rubber mattress. A desk and chair coloured silver birch. Reinforced glass in the windows.
Upon the desk stands a photograph of Fiona and Gracey. Pictures Gracey has drawn and sent to her father are taped to the walls. Same things he sees every day. He notices all of their details.
The faint smell of cleaning fluid he doesn’t mind. Occasionally, a whiff of almonds may rise in his room but he’s never found the source. Fresh flowers bloom too and cast pollen, but there are no flowers in his room. Side effects of the medication, they say.
Click. Stutter.
He’s found that many of the other men in this facility are polite. Many are as silent as him. Some friendly overtures have even been made to him but he rebuffs them all. The other men here have done terrible things, are a danger to themselves and others, though you’d never know it by looking at them. They know about him too, that he killed his elderly neighbours and a crank called Blackwood, though nobody knows why. They’re still trying to figure that part out.
The narrative of the story – his story – that he endlessly recounted to detectives and doctors and psychiatrists has never changed. But the style of its telling has evolved over time, from impassioned to reasonable to morbid to flat.
His neighbours were cunning folk who used malicious magic to curse his home and household. The people next door were undetected serial murderers, who’d been doing away with their neighbours for years. The Moots were magicians who possessed the ability to channel the power of a captive god, a pagan deity that he has no name for, in order to transform themselves into large, vicious animals.
To protect his family and to remove the curse that manifested as an infection of the blood that was killing his daughter, he shot both neighbours in the legs with a borrowed shotgun and bound them. He confesses to that detail. But he never killed them. He let the god out and the god destroyed its jailers. That part of his story always forces his doctor to contrive to be unmoved.
Click. Stutter.
When he told Fiona about the facility and its small population, she looked at him in the way she must be looking at the strange men who now show an unwelcome interest in her. The men that alarm her. Tom just can’t be sure, with any certainty, how much of the affection and love and attraction that Fiona once felt for him has survived. Some of it, he thinks. But there’s nothing to rebuild and there’s no going back and they’re getting a divorce. He’s sure she’s seeing someone else.
Gracey still loves her daddy. And though his family had to relocate and start again, and now use Fiona’s maiden name, his soon-to-be-ex-wife has never discouraged her daughter from loving her father. In fact, no matter what anyone else says, he knows that Fiona will always defend him around Gracey and insist that his daughter cherish her memories of her daddy. For that, Tom will always love Fiona.
It is Gracey, more than anyone or any single thing that he has ever encountered in the world within his lifetime, that he misses with all of himself. Should she abandon him, he calmly acknowledges that what’s left of his life isn’t worth continuing with. Though he’ll never tell his daughter that, because he wouldn’t want to upset her.
The lights click out.
His thoughts begin their passage through another circle.
They eventually dim and settle to sleep and again he sees a bright green glade, amidst dark trees. He’s not alone here and never is. Something watches him. Always. He can turn and run through the cool groves and dart between the columns of trees, following the golden light and his sense of a presence existing just over there, or there, or ahead of him, where the wood opens and the birds sing; an array of birds he hasn’t seen since childhood that orchestrate melodies to delight him until tears run down his face. But he never finds the one who watches from afar and who is everywhere around him at the same time.
Nor does he ever find the stream that runs incessantly through those woods and his dreams. It might be under the ground.
And yet, often, he and the other one of the woods talk in his dreams and all is revealed and he wakes up laughing or crying with joy, or merely smiling. But not a word of what has been said amongst those forbiddingly beautiful trees can he remember when again he finds himself on the blue rubber mattress staring at the ceiling of his room.
Tom loves to dream. When he dreams he is not alone. He feels cherished.
Side effects, they say. He’s not so sure.
Click. Stutter.