On the 10th Day of Christmas: Story - Sleep Pill

 

 “I used to have a name once.” The man said.

I watched him as he examined his palms as if expecting to find his name etched in the curve of his flesh. Instead, all he saw was the identity code V2351 tattooed on his left wrist.

“What was it?”

He shook his head and raised his left shoulder in a shrug. “I forgot. You forget a lot of things here. Names, and them memories, they are like coins in your head and they fall out of the hole in your brain.” His right hand rose to play with a lock of greasy brown hair that fell across his face. “I think it might have been Claude or Charles, something like that.”

I jotted down the details on my notebook. Subject V2351 (Charles/Claude). Male. About 35 years old. Still has verbal facilities and lucid enough to answer my questions. The skin on his arms show the blue spatter bruising characteristic of a slox -- a sleep pill junkie. His green eyes were dark sunken orbs framed within a hollow-cheeked imitation of a human face. Rail thin, sat on a wheelchair since his legs can no longer carry the weight, not even of a small bag of cotton balls. He was shadow of a man who has seen the worst of the effects of Oxerxen A.

“How long do you think you’ve been here?” I asked. A routine question since I already read his file and knew most of the intake details.

The patient’s face scrunched in the effort of remembering. “Maybe four years? Maybe five?”

“One year and seven months, to be exact.” A brief look at his face confirmed his surprise. I opened his PI folder and read to him the specifics of his confinement. “You were admitted in the Angels of Mercy Hospital, Rhode Island on March 17, 2022 at 2:45 in the morning. You were brought in by an ambulance. You were reportedly drunk when you dropped down unconscious in front of a Chekhoot’s bar. The bar manager called the paramedics.”

“Yeah, that I remember. Chekhoot’s…” A slow grin spread on his face. “I could use a drink right now.” Then his faced crumpled into a frown as, I figured, he hit upon a memory that he didn’t like. Now anger filled his eyes and his voice was rough when he spoke. “Why are you bringing all this up again?”

I waited a beat before responding. His left eyebrow started their muscular spasms and his hands shook when he placed them, palms down, on the table between us. “I was sick, okay? I was sick. They didn’t have help for me then.”

I nodded. The National Sleep Institute was only founded later that year and before then, slox patients were segregated by placing them in the hospitals’ private wings. Junkies like him were individually transported to the Institute from all over the country after the Bill of Segregation was ratified. All logistics were paid for by the Department of Defense and the President of the United States himself kept direct tabs on the Institute’s security reports. “I am here to review your progress. I believe you voluntarily submitted yourself to participate in the Sleep Release Experiment, is that right?” He nodded in reply. “Good. This is in conjunction with that experiment. I need to identify all causal factors leading to your addiction to better inform us of how to pre-terminate the grounds of dependence.”

“Say what?”

“I want to talk to you so I can understand why people get addicted to the Sleep Pill.”

“Ha!” His sudden loud laughter stunned me. His frailty couldn’t seem to contain the derision he felt. “Why would anyone want to escape this fucking freaky world?”

“You tell me. You were a decent man, once. What happened?”

“I--- It’s so long ago, can’t expect me to remember that! I can’t even remember my own name!”

“It’s Charles.”

“Could’ve been Claude.” He murmured, rocking his upper body back and forth now, his hands folded tight into his chest. “I remember a Claude.”

I shifted gears in the conversation. On my notebook, I wrote down: Agitation pre-empting memory access. Claude a key memory he has subsumed into himself. “Have you made any friends here, Charles?”

He squinted his eyes at me and frowned. “I have… friends.” He answered slowly. “They’re all from here. We keep each other company.”

“Who are they?”

He rattled off a series of patient codes. I took note of the sheen in his eyes when he said the numbers. These people are in the epicenter of his newly constructed world, and whether he actually likes them or not, it provides him with some semblance of the world he left behind since being confined in the Institute. “Tell me about Patient C0201.”

“Patrick.” He provided. “He was in college. Duke or Dartmouth, some fancy shit like that.”

“He sounds smart.”

Charles snorted. “Smart and clueless, say.” He re-arranged himself in his seat and made himself comfortable as if preparing for a long storytelling session. “He’s one of those who just had to be Number One. He popped the pills to stay awake longer for studying.” He snorted. “Definitely not how I want to spend my sleep-free nights!”

I asked him if he knew how Patrick was admitted to the Institute. His face became animated describing the boy’s break down in the middle of his oral defense. He used his hands to emphasize how spittle started spewing from Patrick’s mouth and how he started bodily shaking his professor in Antiquities. “They literally had to take him away in a straitjacket.”

“Did you come here in a straitjacket?” I interjected.

His face suddenly became all straight lines and hard planes. “No. I was really more like Marissa. They brought me in an ambulance. Tied to the bed.” His eyes shifted to his left. Aha! Memory. Finally! I have to tread carefully from that point on.

“Why did they tie her to the bed? Was she restless?”

“No. She was violent. Like me. She used to be one really good lay, or so she keeps telling us. She’s a hooker in New York. A high-class one, pays really well. It must’ve right? Sleep Pills aren’t cheap.”

I shook my head. “It’s expensive, and hard to access.”

“Hard as hell. But in her case, her handler hands it out to them like candies in the bank. Keeps them performing all night long, all day over. More action, more profits.”

“There is a high incidence of prostitutes suffering from sleep pill syndrome.” I affirmed. “Mostly for the same reasons. Profit.”

“Moolah.” He emphasized. “Lots and lots of it.”

“Did she tell you what happened while she was violent?”

Charles nodded. He rubbed his legs, a sign he was stimulated by his knowledge of Marissa’s reason for admission. He leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “She went fuck crazy.” He laughed out loud. “And I don’t mean just insane. She went crazy for the fuck. She needed sex as much as she needed slox. Started scaring off the genteel clients. Until one night after downing two of the pips, she just went shit-fuck-hell mad. She was with a congressman that night, and in the middle of sex, she bit his nipple off. Clean cut away from the chest! Ha!”

I doubt it was clean. Teeth leaves corrugated marks on flesh and the act of tearing will not be tidy. But that’s not a point I’d like to clarify right then, since it was clear he was getting closer to where I needed him to be. “Were you that violent?”

His bark of laughter echoed through the dark room. “No! Not that way!” his laugh faded to chuckles. Until finally, the chuckle turned into a sniff. He lowered his head and stared at his hands again.“I was…worse. I think.”

“What did you do, Charles?”

“Nothing. I did nothing.”

It was my turn to lean forward towards him. “They brought you in tied to your stretcher. The nurses were scared to come near you. They had to raise the salary of the one medical aide they could persuade to touch you. That’s not nothing.”

A long silence stretched between us. I have watched hundreds of patients fidget before. I have sat there while shadows lengthened. I’m good at this game. Charles, obviously, was not.

“I just want to see my family again.” He said, voice soft as air.

“They’re dead.”

I was not surprised at his anger. What surprised me was the vehemence and complexity of his denial. “NO! They’re just… just asleep… They are sleeping!” he struggled to stand up, but it was standard procedure to tie them to their chairs during briefings. He was violently thrown back to his seat. An Institute guard stepped out of the shadows and nearer to the examination table. I motioned for him to stay. “Let me stand up from here, you son of a bitch!”

“I can’t do that, Charles. But you can sit down and try to proceed with this conversation more calmly.”

“Calm?! Fuck you! You just told me my family is dead, and you want me to calm down?” he yelled. “Fuck off!”

The guard cleared his throat. “Sedative?”

“No, thanks, Roberto. He needs to be lucid for what I will ask him next.”

Charles kicked at the table. But it was a fixed heavy wood furniture and it only budged the tiniest inch. “You will not ask me anymore questions, asshole! Get me out of here!”

“But I do. I have a couple more questions.” I looked at him with all the will power I can muster. “How did you kill them, Charles?”

“My name is Claude. And I didn’t kill my family.”

“So how did they die?”

“I already said, they’re not dead!”

I pushed two photographs towards him. “Anne-Marie and little Charlotte. Found dead inside your house the night you got stone drunk and high on slox on 53^rd Avenue.” The photos showed the mother and child inside the master bedroom, on the bed. Their skin was the sallow color of death, but their bodies were lovingly arranged. Little Charlotte was even clutching a Raggedy doll.

“They’re just sleeping. You have to believe me.”

“Trace shows they swallowed large amounts of arsenic.Ingested.” I flipped open his file again. “It says here there were traces of arsenic in your clothing the night you were rushed to the hospital. Arsenic and curry powder.” I closed the file again. “What did you have for dinner that night, Charles?”

“I don’t remember. How can I remember something stupid like that?” he pulled at the cuffs on his wrist.

“Chicken curry, I bet.”

Charles howled. Howled like a madman. He sounded as if he was burning from the inside. “Why are you doing this? Why?”

“Because… there’s no other way to help you, Charles. Or should I say, Mr. Perraud.” I bowed my head. “I need you to remember these tragic events so we, at the Institute, could help you overcome your addiction to the Sleep Pill.”

He spat at me. Literally spewed his saliva on me. “Overcome my addiction? Why do you keep feeding us the pips then? Why do you keep giving it to me?”

“You’re body is highly saturated with Oxerxen A, and if we do not slough off the drug from your system, you will… well. You will die, Mr. Perraud.” I tapped my notebook. “And we can’t let you die. Not yet. We need to understand what went wrong with the pill, Charles. Imagine, by answering my questions, you will help a thousand, no, a million slox junkies out there.”

“You mean, you want to create a stronger better drug so more junkies will stay addicted to it. You’re one of them. I saw your ID. You’re one of them pharmaceutical companies. You brought this evil to the world.”

I leaned back form my chair and rubbed my temples. The first pangs of migraine were clawing their way to my head. “We had highly skilled psychiatrists working on the product. I’m one of them. We didn’t know it will get so awry. We meant well, you can believe that. Imagine, a single pill will cure human species’ need to sleep. Sleep optional lifestyle will help mankind actualize their potentials. The animal testing went fine. Slox mice performed even better than the normal ones. We knew we had a breakthrough in our hands.”

Charles was looking a little glazed over, but I pushed on, wanting to make him understand. “Do you see it? You must’ve saw it. You took the pill too.”

He closed his eyes as if in great pain. His voice, when he spoke, was cracking from the sheer weight of his memories. “I took the pill to do more. Be more. Wasn’t that your slogan or something? Before I was addicted to slox, I was addicted to work. I pulled 72 hours once, without sleep. All for the sake of bringing home the much needed money.” He took a deep breath. “But then, things started to change. I had more mood swings, I was sure people were trying to ruin my career, some were even going to kill me. I wasn’t… nice anymore. They fired me.” He kicked at the table more feebly this time.

“So what did you do?”

“What was I to do? My family was going to starve. I cannot imagine my wife’s face if I had to tell her our house was repossessed. I did it for them. I don’t want them to suffer. So I put them into deep sleep. But I can’t go there yet. I can’t sleep. So I took more of the pills.”

“And you got drunk. When you collapsed and was brought to the hospital, they tried to detox you from slox, didn’t they?”

“They knew I was on it. But they weren’t sure how much yet. Tests takes so long. But the thing with taking higher dosages of the pill was, the hangover was more painful. You need it more, within shorter and shorter time. I needed it. They didn’t have any.”

“So you killed the intern?”

He nodded. “It was a mistake. I didn’t mean to. In my head, he was this monster. And I needed to kill him, to save myself. I killed him.”

“How?”

“I strangled him with his stethoscope. We were alone in the room.”

“And after you strangled him?”

He gave me a pleading, haunted look. “I don’t remember.” He answered in a low voice.

“Yes you do.” I said, just as soft. “Tell me, and release yourself from that prison in your head.”

“I… I cracked his head open using the bed winder I wrenched away from the metal frame. That thing that goes around to pull you up or down.”

“And?”

“And that’s it.”

I looked at him with pityingly. “Charles. You ate his brains.”

He sobbed. “No.”

“Yes.”

Charles threw up. “Stop, please.” He gasped and puked, swallowing some again. “Just kill me, please. Let me be with them.”

I watched him until he recovered slightly.

“We both know that I’m not really here anymore. I died when they did.”

I saw his life light pulsing light and dark. He’s calling out for death, for his redemption. But ---

“No.” I stood up and motioned to the guard to open the door. “Not yet.”

“Please! Please!!! You can’t leave me here you sonafobitch!” he tried to stand up, violently, wrenching his arms from his sockets. He howled in pain. “You open a can of worms and now you have to help me get rid of it, you asshole!”

The door closed. Another guard escorted me down the hallway. I can still hear the echoes of Charles’ pleas. My shoes made a staccato sound on the marbled floor. I passed the other rooms where other patients were in states of disrepair themselves. I wrote on my notebook as I walked. I have enough to prove that the pill is causing irregularities in the pre-frontal cortex region of the brain, causing people to lose their rational thought and enhancing their animalistic instincts. It happened to all of them. I sighed. So many casualties. In my mind, they were collateral damage. Broken toy soldiers in the forefront of a war against mediocrity. But the future is still bright.

“Better.” I murmured to myself. “We will make it better. You’ll be so proud, Charles.”

From his room, Charles screamed.

-=--=-=-=