Chapter 27
ATOMISED MAN HAS A WAY OF SETTLING INTO PORES
You’ve Created A Monster - Bhones
Kookaburra
They make me shower twice.
Not because I’m dirty – well, I am; something about atomised man has a way of settling into pores – but because cleansing is ritual and ritual is control.
Places like this don’t call the police; everyone here signed the kind of contracts that make accidents disappear.
The water is too hot. The tile is the kind that pretends it’s clean even when it’s holding on to a memory of blood. I scrub until my skin squeaks and the doctor says, “That’s enough,” like she means it. She doesn’t. Nobody means anything here unless I make them.
They take the clothes. They take the shoes. They take the hair tie that was not regulation but looked harmless enough for three days. They return me to my room in a soft uniform the colour of institutional forgiveness and leave the door open because I’m not a prisoner.
Doctor Callaway waits in the chair by the window, clipboard balanced on one knee, spine straight enough to be a threat. There’s a single red dot on the collar of her blouse. She hasn’t noticed. Or she’s decided not to.
“Sit,” she says.
“On you?” I ask, sweet as syrup.
She doesn’t bite. “How are you feeling?”
“Hungry.”
“For food?”
“For a cigarette. For a walk. For the look on your face when you realised you weren’t going to stop me.” I smile at the memory. “That one. That look there.”
“Do you understand that what happened today constitutes an incident?”
“Do you understand that what happened today constitutes an outcome?” I fold myself onto the edge of the bed and tuck my feet under me like a well-behaved cobra. The mattress gives up a little sigh. “He put his hands on a patient. Twice. You’re welcome.”
Her pen hovers, then moves. She writes something I don’t try to read.
I don’t need to. I already know the gist: impulse control poor; charm intact; culpability diffuse; staff training inadequate; oversight required; my career a fragile vase balanced on the edge of a piano in an earthquake. Poor dear. She hates the vase.
“We’ll be conducting an internal review,” she says.
“You’ll be conducting a very thorough cover-up,” I correct. “Orderly slips on wet ground, meets industrial equipment. Tragic. The wood chipper gets a new safety guard. You get a headache. I get a shower.”
She watches me for a long beat. Her face is not kind. That’s why I like her. Kind faces always ask you to apologise for perfectly sensible things.
“Do you feel remorse?” she asks.
I run my tongue along my teeth, considering. “For the hydrangeas.”
Her mouth twitches; I win a point. “I’ve spoken to the board,” she says finally. “We’re tightening protocols. No equipment access without two staff present. No garden time without prior clearance from me. No…experiments.”
“Shame.” I glance at the window, at the slice of pale sky, the suggestion of green beyond. “The garden likes me.”
“The garden doesn’t like anything,” she says. “It tolerates. Like the rest of us.”
“That’s not true.” I lean back on my hands, let my hair drip shadows onto the pillowcase. “It likes attention. It likes blood. It likes patient hands.” I tilt my head and give her my best earnest look. “And it likes me.”
She looks down quickly at the clipboard.
A small tell. “You’re confined to your room until further notice,” she says.
“But I’m authorising a therapeutic schedule – reading material, supervised crafts, limited access to the solarium when it’s empty.
We need to stabilise you, Kayla. You can’t escalate like this again. ”
“Or what? You’ll call Seytan?” Her name tastes like a coin on my tongue – old metal, other people’s fingerprints.
“Or what,” Doctor Callaway says evenly, “I’ll be forced to reconsider whether you belong here at all.”
I study her. She means it. Or she thinks she does. But under the administrative tone there’s a flicker of something hotter, something like fascination’s little sister. She’s very careful not to feed it. She fails.
“Fine,” I say. “Then stabilise me.”
She blinks. “You’re agreeing.”
“I like schedules,” I tell her. “They make my rebellions feel earned.” I swing my feet to the floor and wipe a bead of water off my knee with my thumb.
“Bring me a book that isn’t written for mourners or managers.
Bring me tea that doesn’t taste beige. Bring me a needle and thread and something to take apart.
And later, when you’re feeling brave, bring me the file you think I haven’t seen. ”
Her eyes lift. “What file?”
“The one with the transfer codes.” I smile pleasantly. “I like to keep up with my travel plans.”
“You’re not being transferred.”
“Of course not,” I say, saccharine. “Not when I’m doing so well.”
There it is again – the twitch at the corner of her mouth, the crack in the vase. She stands, smoothing her skirt as if creases can be willed out of existence.
“You will rest,” she says.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You will eat.”
“If you insist.”
“You will not leave this room without permission,” she finishes, and for the first time there’s steel in it. “If you try, you will be restrained.”
I widen my eyes. “Promise?”
She closes the door when she leaves, but it doesn’t click. It never clicks. This is not a prison. It’s a well-decorated cul-de-sac with nowhere to go.
I give it five minutes. I listen to footsteps recede, to a cart squeak along the corridor, to the rustle of paperwork like dry leaves. I count breaths. At sixty, I get up and start.
The trick to any cage is knowing which bars are decorative.
The window doesn’t open. The door opens too easily.
The camera in the corner has a smudge at the edge of its lens and a telltale lag when it pans left.
The vent cover is screwed in with a stripped head.
The bedside drawer sticks, but if you jiggle it forward and lift, it reveals the shallow space behind where useful things get lost. I don’t find anything useful. Yet.
Later, they bring me the tray. Tea that tastes like surrender. A small stack of books carefully chosen to pacify: mindfulness, grief, a novel where nothing truly awful happens to anyone that matters. I thank the guard with pretty eyes, and when he blushes I know how to ask him for things later.
Afternoon stretches. I nap with my eyes open and dream with my eyes closed and practise lying perfectly still. It’s a useful skill. Prey freezes. Predators perform it.
By evening, Doctor Callaway returns with the schedule. The list is neat, typed, stapled. Foolish. There’s a lot of damage I can do with a staple. But I say nothing and accept it with both hands like a supplicant offered a relic.
0700 wake; 0730 vitals; 0800 breakfast; 0900 check-in; 1000 crafts; 1130 reading; 1300 lunch; 1400 supervised solarium; 1600 resting time; 1700 therapy; 1830 dinner; 2000 quiet hour; 2100 lights.
“I love a lights-out,” I say. “Such ambition.”
She ignores that. “We’ll add garden time when I decide you won’t use it to mulch the staff.”
“It was one staff,” I say. “And he mulched beautifully.”
“Kayla.”
“Doctor.”
We regard each other like opponents across a chessboard. I can see the move she thinks she’s going to make. She can see the move I want her to think I am.
“What is Ark?” I ask, looking guilelessly amused.
Her face doesn’t change. But her pulse skips once at her throat. “A boat,” she says. “In a story. The bible I think.”
“Cute.” I lay the paper on my lap and smooth the crease. “Try again.”
She doesn’t. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
She won’t. But she will think about it all night and arrive at work with a little extra brightness to her polish, the way professionals do when they’ve convinced themselves they’re the one driving. And she’ll have a cover story ready. One I won’t believe.
“Doctor Callaway,” I say as she reaches the door.
She stops, hand on the frame. “Yes?”
“You’re doing very well,” I tell her.
“Go to sleep,” she says, but I see the small, involuntary laugh she swallows, and I know I’ve won today’s game.
I don’t sleep. The ceiling hums. The camera ticks, tiny variations like a breath catching.
Somewhere along the corridor, a code is called in a calm voice and then cancelled in a calmer one.
I think about the garden. I think about the way the chipper took him in, jawing down on his panic like it was an argument.
Then I think about Nightshade’s hands, steady even when he’s breaking; about Hatchet’s silence; about Bones’ eyes when he decides who lives.
I count the holes I’ve left in people and the holes people left in me and get lost somewhere after six.
Morning keeps its promise. Vitals, breakfast, the pulse oximeter chewing on my finger like an affectionate animal. They tell me I have a nice rhythm. I tell him so does he. He blushes and I catalogue the name on his badge. Ralph. People who blush are the easiest hooks.
Craft hour is a joke until it isn’t. They bring yarn and blunt needles and a basket of squares a dozen other people have started and never finished.
I don’t care enough to think about them.
My hands remember how to be careful. I knit three neat rows and nobody loses a finger.
This passes for success and two different staff members say they’re proud of me with that worried soft voice adults use when they’ve forgotten children know they’re lying.
Reading is better. They take me to the solarium – white chairs, white light, plants that look exhausted by the concept of being indoors, poor babies.
The glass is reinforced, of course. The lock on the door is new.
The camera in the corner is older than the wiring.
The orderly posted in the corner is neither.
“Morning,” he says, and gives me a smile he has practised in mirrors. The name on his tag is Caleb in letters that think they’re bigger than they are. He has a scab along the side of his thumb and a set of keys clipped to his belt.