Hospitalised - Pt 1.

I have not known whether it is night or day for a long time now: here it is neither. The room is flooded with the faintly pinkish light of four electric lamps for what through meticulous counting I have ascertained to be sixteen hours; then they are shut off for another twelve. A twenty-eight hour ‘day’: I wonder whether this shortens or lengthens my life? I had originally attempted to retain the twenty-four-hour system, but eventually abandoned this as being irrelevant and confusing given that the sun on which that system was based is no longer present. Naturally, I have abandoned months and years by extension: all I know is that, since I began counting, I have experienced two-hundred and nineteen cycles of light and dark. I find it very hard to estimate how long I was here prior to my attempts at counting; I suspect that I was on far stronger medication at that point.

Currently, this takes the form of one injection each day, administered approximately thirty minutes prior to the lights’ fading. The nurse enters through the partially-concealed door to the left of the bed – the panel in the wall in front of where I lie refuses to budge. She does not answer any of my questions. Her lips are clamped so tightly shut that the flesh surrounding them is bleached white, in wan contrast to the yellow of her face. I know the latter shade very well: it is the yellow of dog-ends and fatigue, of closed rooms like this one and of recycled air. I believe it to be the colour of nausea, though that is perhaps solely because I always feel a slippery, unwholesome weight crawl through my abdomen while her work is underway. I suspect that this is a side-effect of my injection, along with the sickly weariness that gathers about my temples. Though the nurse’s thin hair, pallor and flabby, powerful limbs invoked in me open revulsion, I now realise that she is as much a victim of this place as I am – perhaps more so. She is, after all, a part of its blandness, its lifeless machinery; while I at least have the painful, blisteringly positive knowledge that I did not always belong here.

My greatest fear is no longer that I am sick with something serious. Of course I am sick! I am in hospital! If I was not sick before, I am now. No, my greatest fear is that I believe that my illness was always present, that I will become unable to imagine a time when I was not sick, that it represents not an invasion in to my beautiful biological system but rather that it will be accepted (by my brain, if not necessarily by my body) as a functioning part of it.

In all honesty I suppose that I am making something of an assumption by supposing that I am in a hospital rather than, say, a prison. I cannot remember ever doing anything in my life that would entail a prison sentence – but then I cannot remember being ill, either. My guess is a hospital simply because of the medication (unless I am so dangerous a criminal that I require constant pharmaceutical injections?), and because of the nurse’s uniform, which is of the starched white cloth that I associate with the medical profession. Perhaps I am in a prison hospital. Perhaps I am here because I am mentally ill, ill enough to have attacked someone and forgotten about it, dreamt it away along with any legal process that I might have been subjected to. I wonder whether or not I shall ever find out. I wonder whether or not I will ever see a doctor. Perhaps I have already been diagnosed while I was sleeping – indeed, it does not seem entirely impossible that I am visited every night by an army of specialists and consultants who perform all manner of tests and experiments so gently that I do not stir from my warm, cloying slumber.

Sometimes – in fact, very often – I wonder whether or not it is prudent for me to cogitate over such matters. I have no other entertainment, I suppose, besides my counting and pacing the room, but speculation as to what my precise predicament might be requires that I attempt to imagine what might lie beyond the walls between which I am confined. I feel as though that might be somewhat dangerous, given, the enormity of the task (after all, this building might be anything – perhaps I have been kidnapped by crazed scientists and this is merely a simulation in a warehouse somewhere?!), the lack of clues with which I have to work, and, most crushingly, the fact that if I am never let out of here I may never know for sure. I feel that such speculation will almost certainly drive me mad – assuming that that has not happened already – and yet I am increasingly drawn to fantasies of the outside world, of sunlight and sound, which force themselves irresistibly upon my drugged mind whenever I let my guard slip.

It has now been two hours and twenty-nine minutes since my last dose: time for me to submit myself to whatever observations and experiments may or may not be carried out upon my sleeping body. I void my mind, and close my eyes.