Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

I gathered the little breath I had left in a final effort to communicate. ‘My name is John Smith,’ I said through gasps. ‘It’s important to me that we do this exercise properly. Do you understand?’

The belt went abruptly slack. I manoeuvred myself around to face him.

We were lying in a heap on the floor of the shower cubicle. Blood and water puddled on the tiles around us.

He wasn’t an inmate I’d ever seen before. He was about the same age as me, slightly shorter and less heavy-set. He might have been chosen for his absence of distinguishing features. His fair hair was cropped or thinning. His face was empty of expression and his eyes held a terrifying blankness.

‘Please indicate that you’ve understood,’ I said.

The nod he gave seemed almost involuntary.

‘Good job,’ I said. ‘Now, I’m going to show you an array of pictures and I’m going to ask you to pick one. Do you understand?’

There was no nod this time. He narrowed his eyes, as though I were coming into focus.

‘It’s important to me that we do this exercise properly,’ I said.

His face had the suddenly alert expression of someone who has heard his name called from a distance. In that millisecond of hesitation, I hit him as hard as I could. His head slumped against the partition and I ran.

*

My injuries weren’t severe enough to merit a spell in the medical ward, but the cuts from the splintered wood required stitches, and the assault itself triggered a formal inquiry by Dr White and two approved mental health professionals.

I explained to them, as lucidly as I could, that my assailant, whose name they claimed was either Thomas Roberts or Robert Thomas, had launched his attack on me for no reason that I could fathom. I didn’t want to alienate the possibly sympathetic supervisors with what seemed to me undeniable: that the man was a zachot , a programmed assassin, who had been inserted into the Dennis Hill Unit in order to kill me, but I did point out the bizarre coincidence of our identical tattoos and I asked that Dr Webster be called to speak on my behalf.

It seemed like a reasonable request, even to Mumford and Kumar, the mental health professionals who made up the quorum with White on the panel and who had, at first glance, given every indication of being precisely the kind of obedient, risk-averse mediocrities one would need to whitewash an assassination attempt.

Mumford, to his credit, even suggested they adjourn the inquiry until Dr Webster could come in. However, as the senior member of staff, White was able to overrule them. He harrumphed at the pointlessness of the idea. Besides, he said, Webster was on indefinite personal leave. In his subsequent questions to me, he played down the significance of the tattoos and played up what he called the sexual component of the incident. The other client, he claimed, was alleging that I’d tried to assault him.

If I hadn’t been so heavily medicated, I would have laughed in his face. I asked him how the bruising to my back conformed to that theory; and to explain why, for that matter, I hadn’t sodomised the man when I had him at my mercy.

‘Didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know. Why didn’t you?’ The crude effort to depict me as a sexual predator was clearly intended to provoke me into another outburst. Mumford and Kumar exchanged uncomfortable glances. To them, White’s harshness was beginning to look both unprofessional and mean-spirited. To me, it was further confirmation of the scope and resourcefulness of the Common Task. I had no doubt that White had been suborned. I wanted to ask him if he had any pride. Didn’t he remember the scandal of Soviet psychiatry? How did he justify putting his profession at the service of a criminal cabal? But I held my tongue for fear of antagonising him.

I cleared my throat with a cough and said meekly that I recognised I had caused trouble in the past, but all I wanted was a chance at rehabilitation. ‘I really want to apologise for my prior negative behaviours,’ I said. ‘I’d like to be able to return to my work in the safe space.’

The plea for therapy clinched it. ‘We can certainly see about authorising a decrease in your medication if you’re feeling stable,’ Kumar conceded, with a glance at White. White wasn’t happy about it, but he had backed himself into a corner.

*

To have my wounds dressed, I had been taken to a medical unit at a different part of the site. At the time, I’d been too brain-fogged to take advantage of the looser security, but the change in medication heralded the return of greater mental acuity and I began thinking that if I were ever to escape, the medical unit would be the likeliest exit. The knowledge that I couldn’t avoid Roberts indefinitely was an additional incentive. He’d been sent to the seclusion cells, but in a matter of days he’d be back among us. He would be labouring with the handicap of a depot injection of Largactil and would probably be a lot less sprightly, but sooner or later he would return to finish what he’d been sent to do.

I took a little comfort from the knowledge that Webster had read my testimony. White knew it too. It had increased the pressure on everyone. The arrival of Roberts was the proof of that. But I worried about Webster as well. I hoped she had had the sense to take at least rudimentary precautions for her personal safety.

There were two keys on Webster’s key ring. One was for the door of her office, up on the second floor of the DHU and now completely out of bounds to me. The other, it turned out, was for one of the supply rooms close to the common area, which included basic first-aid equipment. I was able to slip in there after one lunchtime and soak my shirt with surgical spirit.

We had a microwave in the common area which was theoretically for the inmates on restricted diets or with food intolerances. It was supposed to be supervised, but, though secure, the DHU was not a penitentiary. Morale among the staff was low. Shifts were often understaffed and personnel from other parts of the hospital, who were more lax in their observance of correct protocol, would be rotated in to fill some of the gaps.

I chose the period after lunch because there was a shift change then. It was also the time of day when a kind of post-prandial ennui settled on the unit, bringing a consequent decline in vigilance. Around two fifteen in the afternoon, stinking of surgical spirit, I put one of Caiaphas’s Watchtowers in the microwave along with a generous handful of cutlery and turned it on. The arcing from the metal set the thin paper alight. I took out the flaming magazine and held it to my shirt. It lit with an energising whoosh. My intention had been to wrap myself in some curtains as soon as possible to extinguish the flames and minimise the actual damage to me. I had put on a pair of vests underneath the shirt with this in mind. I reasoned that, after a spectacular enough accident, the staff would send me to the infirmary irrespective of the severity of my injuries. From there I could make my escape.

What I hadn’t foreseen was Caiaphas’s coming into the room as I was holding the burning magazine aloft. When he realised what was alight, he uttered a terrible shriek and tried to jump on me. We wrestled for a moment. My shirt was by now entirely ablaze with leaping flames. I could feel the heat against my torso and smell my burning hair. The fire alarm sounded and Caiaphas snatched the magazine and ran whooping, waving it like a flag across the common area, pleading for God’s forgiveness on behalf of both of us.

Far from extinguishing the flames, the curtains turned out to be flammable and I continued to burn until the duty nurse arrived with a blanket. While I lay wreathed in choking black smoke on the floor of the unit, the ward was evacuated and the inmates filed out past me.