Marcus Caine - The Last Words

I got to the last ring, the Doctor had that big ass grin on his face, when there was a commotion in the TV room.

We don’t really encourage the patients to watch the news, but we don’t forbid it either. After all, the general feeling here is that we are helping them to adjust to living in the real world, not trying to protect them from it. As Jude was placing that last ring on the tower of Hanoi there was a commotion from the TV room and he felt the need to go and check it. I suppose it makes sense that he was not as excited as I about completing the tower so easily, after all, he doesn’t’ even remember working on it all these weeks.

The news was ominous, but not completely out of the ordinary. A professor at Oxford had gone on a shooting spree, killing several people with a double barreled shotgun before being taken out, and apparently, he didn’t go down easily. A shooting at Oxford, even in England itself, seemed so odd. I supposed the shotgun had been for pheasant hunting, having lived in England for a time in my youth I knew that there really weren’t many guns there.

For some reason this seemed to particularly upset Marcus, who then upset the other patients, pointing at the TV and making some inarticulate noise. Why Marcus, and why this? Marcus is, in my opinion, autistic, and shouldn’t even be here, but in a different institution altogether that is better suited to his needs, but alas, he isn’t my patient. The peculiar thing is Marcus has never even indicated that he really understands the news, or anything else on television before. He often repeats things he hears, but never in a way that indicates he actually understands what he is saying. Even his journal entries, done entirely on a computer, are just, as they say, copy pasta of things he sees online: news reports, tweets, Chuck Norris jokes, pictures of cats, etc. I have often wondered if it all meant something to him, if he was trying to communicate through this medium, but have never seen a pattern to his entries.

Started today as I suppose I do every day; jumping out of bed, looking at my watch, seeing my tattoos, reading my damn journal. It seems like I get through the days OK. My memory can last a few hours, depending on what I’m trying to remember, so I can still know I know someone, even if I can’t always remember their name, and I know I’m in a hospital, even if I don’t always remember it’s in New York.

But, the mornings are hard, because after sleeping 7 or 8 hours, I don’t remember anything, at all. Not where I am. Not what has happened. I see those damn tatts, and I read the journal and I feel the scar on my head and I cry because my platoon is dead then I pull myself together and get on with the day, because I’m a soldier and that’s what I do.

And I get to know the locals, something I’ve always been good at. My skin color and language abilities made it easy for me to blend in over in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was always my specialty, so it’s what I continue trying to do; talk to people, chat them up. Some of them are barely coherent, some seem perfectly normal and fine, and most just don’t want to talk. Cassie loves talking, talking about how the internet and TV and radio have subliminal messages and are trying to get inside all of our heads and control us and drive us insane. Marcus talks about movies, actually, he talks in movies, repeating them word for word. Eric bitches about all the things he hates, which is all the things. But I always end up talking to Tim, or Tim Tom as everyone here calls him and he calls himself.

Big guy, huge, used to be in construction until an accident put a rod through his head. That’s why he’s here, because of the rod. It damaged his — what did the Doctor say? – Broca’s area, and now he can speak and write just fine but can’t understand any written or spoken language. Crazy, what the brain can do. But boy can he talk. I end up just listening to him talk about damn near everything and I have to admit, it calms me. It’s damn hilarious, but also oddly soothing, the way he just never shuts up.

Today I was just listening to him talk about welding some statue of a dragon when everyone seemed to get really upset over something on the news and I had to go see. Have to admit, it was odd. There was a shooting at Cambridge, which is sad, but I didn’t think much of it until someone told me about the shooting at Oxford the day before and I checked my journal and sure enough, a shooting at Oxford. But then they started talking about the shooting at Oxford earlier today. Today, but my journal said yesterday. I asked the Doctor, and he confirmed, yes, there was a shooting yesterday and another one today, and now this shooting at Cambridge. He was silent, he didn’t fall silent that often, and he left the room.

I was talking to Joe today about my art when everyone started raising a rumpus in the boob tube room. I saw what looked like a really nice university, really old looking, and they were wheeling people out of a building on gurneys. But of course I had no idea what was going on so I asked Joe and he pointed at the TV and made a gesture like a gun shooting. So, another shooting, that was sad, and probably at some nice college. That’s why I like Joe, not just because he listens but because he uses his body to communicate a lot. He even uses these military gestures that I’ve picked up. I guess he used them a lot as a soldier when they had to be quiet or he was trying to talk to someone in a different language. I knew he had been in Iraq, he had pointed to it on a map for me once and I had assumed he had just gone there cause he don’t really look Arab, he looks Mexican to me, or maybe Puerto Rican, or maybe Argentinian, hell, I don’t know. But I could understand him better than all the others because he gestures so much.

So, then later I was talking to him about this girl I’d know once or twice or thrice, a really pretty girl, way too pretty for a big hairy lug like me, and then everyone gets all upset again and we are all watching the news and I see Harvard. Now I know Harvard, I’m a Boston boy. Not that I went there or anything, nope, I’m just a blue collar guy who worked construction. But also, I’m an artist, or at least I was, back before the accident. Made things out of metal that just came straight out of my brain — dragons and centaurs and Pegasus, stuff like that.

And there’s swat teams there and everything and I ask Joe again what’s going on and he makes the gun gesture again and then shrugged his wtf shrug and holds up his hands saying five and now I see what the big deal is. Does he mean five people dead? Or five shootings? Either way I know there was at least two shootings today at nice schools and that is a big deal — really weird stuff.

So Jude decides to tell me what’s been on the news, even though I told him I don’t care and it’s all lies anyway just to get us to watch so they can beam the messages, the damn messages, into our head. But, he decides to go ahead despite my protest. So, five different shootings in two days; two at Oxford, one at Cambridge, one at Harvard, and now one just now somewhere in Norway. Crazy stuff, but it is a crazy world out there, beyond these walls, much crazier than it is in here. The people in here, at least they aren’t liars, they may not always tell you the truth, but they at least think they are telling you the truth. Even Dr. Gates, even he tells the truth. But five shootings, that is some crazy stuff, and at nice prestigious universities, where they teach people to lie, and they put messages in their heads.