Lippe Simone - Blank

In the next room a technician stood blinking at an X-ray machine as it buzzed and pumped radiation into the eyes of an oblivious old man in a leather apron and corduroy slippers. Directly across the hall, on the other side of the glass, a window washer looked blankly in from his suspended platform with a squeegee in his hand. Ray looked back at him and wondered what floor he was on.

Past the treatment rooms a yellow arrow on the green wall pointed finally toward “Reception” and Ray quickened his pace. He passed the solid glass wall of an observation room with a population of what would be most efficiently generalized as junkies. There were a dozen of them on display, mostly men and a few women and all skinny and pale and exhibiting varying severities of homelessness. The observation room was enclosed behind thick glass and had no television, just a worn carpet and abused living room furniture that looked like it had been donated with no regrets by the seventies. With no baseball or test patterns to keep them occupied the indigenous of the region had turned to the matter of self-preservation and were trying to eat plastic plants and wax fruit. Ray noticed with some irony that the observation room was next to the cafeteria.

Ray was struck by what appeared to be a disturbing degree of purpose among the junkies. Whatever they’d been doing whenever everyone else on the floor had gone blank in a docile state had left them in what amounted to a slow-motion frenzy. They ambled about like chickens in a wartime barnyard picking at anything that resembled food before letting the plastic grapes and cotton leaves fall from their mouths and moving on. Ray tapped on the glass with a clinical curiosity to test the consciousness of the junkies and they stopped their foraging and looked at him as a group. Then they attacked with the full force of a mindless juggernaut unaware of the principal properties of two-inch glass.

Anemic blood popped in little explosions on the glass as the junkies broke their noses and cheeks and fingers before bouncing to the floor with a new hard-earned awareness of their surroundings. Some of them armed themselves and began hacking at the window with artificial bananas and grapefruit. Given a few weeks of bloody trial and error, Ray reasoned, they might get through that glass. He decided not to wait.

After the cafeteria the corridor widened to a minimalist reception area with a nurses’ station that had lost all its nurses. The reception seemed to span the entire floor with a bank of plastic chairs on one end and a green, under-maintained fish tank with two slimy goldfish at the other. Ray remembered, or at any rate knew, that they somehow managed to live rich and full lives hampered by a memory span of three seconds but he couldn’t bring himself to find any solace in the point.

Behind the fish tank was a floor-to-ceiling mirror with a mottled effect to make it look as much like marble as a mirror can, which isn’t very much. Ray saw himself for the first time and hoped that he at least had a nice personality.

He was average build and height and in only that regard unremarkable. Gaunt, possibly about thirty-five years old and perhaps good looking in his high school graduation picture, now his eyes were tiny bloodshot marbles at the bottom of inky wells of subcutaneous bleeding, like a meth-addict aggressively dedicated to his calling. His skin was the bloodless pallor of an arctic recluse and his lips were a worryingly natural shade of blue. In addition to the mysterious note from beyond memory on his left arm, the three main veins of both forearms were emphatically punctuated with needle marks. His brown hair looked as though he’d cut it himself with pliers and a carpet knife and where it wasn’t short it was missing altogether to accommodate circular bruises or burns above his temples and on top of his head. He searched his face for some reference to normal and found only the certainty that this wasn’t it, like the goldfish in the moldy tank who recognize food and their goldfish friends when and only when they see them.

Beyond the nurses’ station and next to the waiting area was another ill-green hallway but that held no interest for Ray. He wanted to leave. Facing the nurses’ station were double doors of reinforced glass and beyond the doors were elevators and a stairway and freedom. And the doors were firmly locked from the outside.

There’d be a key in the nurses’ station. He’d find the key and let himself out and be sure to lock up afterward. The station was a tidy surface of clipboards and newspapers, someone’s lunch and a computer with a spreadsheet of patients’ names and room numbers and attending physicians. He was tempted to look for his own name, hoping that it might appear in the doctor column, but instead he concentrated on the hundred drawers and the abandoned purse and pigeon holes full of every manner of hospital ephemera with the exception of keys.

Frustrated in his search, Ray finally turned his attention to the spreadsheet open on the computer but saw only the little blue property sticker on top of the screen which said “psychiatric ward”. Then the screen went blank, the air conditioning sighed to an expansive silence, and the lights went out.

He was an amnesiac locked in a darkened mental ward with two inches of glass separating him from an increasingly organized tribe of mindless junkies who’d already proven that they’d at least try to eat just about anything but, Ray reasoned, things could be worse.

Psychiatric wards are typically on the top floor of general care facilities, at least those general care facilities that have psychiatric wards. And those that do are in large cities equipped with emergency services and nice men in white coats who explain things in calm voices. All he had to do was wait. And for that purpose he had the goldfish and someone’s ample lunch (probably Nancy’s), a newspaper and, handily enough, a waiting area.

Ray installed himself on a plastic chair by the window with his newspaper and spread the sandwiches and bananas and thermos of coffee among the magazines on a low glass table. He poured out a cup of milky coffee, still lightly steaming, and bit into a ham sandwich before noticing the tabloid headline: “Memory Panic”.

LOS ANGELES — Experts are in agreement that the source of the global heat wave and mass amnesia which has struck entire communities around the globe is the unprecedented solar activity seen in the past month.

A panel of leading neuroscientists and meteorologists announced the consensus today at a news conference capping a marathon two-day emergency seminar at the Los Angeles Mental Health Authority.

Massive and increasingly violent solar flares, recently visible with the naked eye, have burnt cloud cover from seemingly random areas around the world. These same areas often experience an extreme form of mass amnesia which leaves victims with no capacity for speech or long-term memory.

Dr. Tom Spivic of the LA Mental Health Authority says “(the solar flares) essentially amount to massive doses of radiation causing instant necrosis to targeted portions of the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex (responsible for long-term memory) and the temporal lobe (responsible for speech and vision)”.

Dr. Spivic is a recognized expert in human cognitive neuroscience and the pioneer of a process popular science journals have called a “memorectomy” which employs barium charged “friendly neurotoxins” to selectively delete traumatic memories, used in the treatment of extreme cases of psychotics previously deemed incurable.

The panel was unable to comment on the likelihood of future incidents except to warn that the intensity and frequency of the solar flares appears to be increasing. The most recent occurrence on Sunday was also the most extreme, causing total amnesia among hundreds of residents and vacationers on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. While the radiation appears to penetrate all manner of shelter a party of scuba divers in the affected area remained unharmed.