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“I suppose,” Alex said in a flat, distant tone, deliberately playing dumb. It wasn’t at all difficult.
Henry turned him and shoved him, getting him moving. As he shuffled away, Alex glanced back over his shoulder. Jax’s head didn’t move. Her hands stayed limp at her sides.
But her eyes followed him.
He knew the private, lonely hell she was in. He knew because he felt the same way.
If Alex was in a daze before, he was even more dazed as they made their way back across the ninth floor to the men’s wing, to his room. He was beginning to remember pieces.
He recognized, if distantly, that he had to do something.
He knew that no one was going to show up to save him.
He knew that he had to help himself or things were only going to get worse. Henry had made that clear enough. His mother was going to suffer, but the worst of it would be reserved for Jax.
If Alex wanted to prevent that, he had to do something.
“Here we go,” Henry said as they finally made their way across to the men’s sunroom. “You should sit here and enjoy the sunshine while you think things over.”
“All right,” Alex said.
The orderly guided him over to the couches against the wall. Alex sat without protest. On the other side of the room men stared at the television. Alex stared at the floor.
When he heard squeaking he looked over and saw that the squeak was coming from shiny black shoes. “Snack time, folks,” the overweight orderly said as he pushed the cart into the room.
“You should have yourself a sandwich, Alex,” Henry said.
Alex merely nodded.
“And in the meantime, you think about things. You think real hard on the answers we want because we’re running out of patience. Do you understand?”
Alex nodded again without looking up.
Henry handed him a paper plate with a whole-wheat sandwich on it and a plastic glass of orange drink from the cart. “We’ll talk later.”
Alex nodded again without looking up. As he watched Henry walking away, he took a sip of orange juice, holding the cool liquid in his mouth under his tongue as his mind frantically tried to summon action. It was like trying to push the dead weight of a mountain.
He ate a few bites of the tasteless sandwich to the sounds of contestants in a game show giving answers to questions. Frequently the television audience broke out in laughter. The men watching didn’t react.
Alex needed answers.
Not at all hungry, he set down the plate with the sandwich. He sat for a time staring at nothing, his mind hopelessly blank, feeling overwhelmed with frustration at his inability to think.
The only thing that he seemed able to keep in focus was the image of Jax. The emotion connected to that image was buried somewhere deep within him.
He finally got up and began making his way back toward his room, the whole way struggling to reason out what he could do. But under the dampening fog of Thorazine, his thoughts would not crystallize. Shuffling his way down the hall, he knew that the drugs were preventing him from thinking of a way to fight back.
From somewhere, realization suddenly seemed to be there. Being able to think was not the immediate solution, it was the problem. He’d been focusing on the problem, rather than the solution. The real solution was to eliminate what was preventing him from thinking: the drugs.
In his room, he sat in the chair. Light coming in the frosted window behind slowly faded away to blackness. After a time he smelled food and heard the dinner cart being wheeled down the hall to the sunroom, where they fed the patients. When one of the women from the cafeteria stuck her head in to remind him that it was dinnertime, Alex only nodded. He wasn’t hungry.
As he sat listening to the buzz of the overhead lights, he held tight to the core of the real solution: getting off the drugs so that he could think. He worked at that notion like a mental worry stone. He grasped that if he was to solve anything, he first had to find a way not to take the drugs they gave him. After that, his mind would work.
He didn’t know how he could manage such a thing. They made him take his medication. They waited and made sure he took it. If he didn’t, they would force him. He couldn’t fight them off.
And then, the answer was simply there.
He had to somehow make them think that he had taken his medication. He had to trick them. But how in the world could he do such a thing?
He sat for hours as the evening wore on, struggling mightily to come up with a way to do it. If he didn’t somehow accomplish what he needed to do, Jax was going to suffer.
He wasn’t aware of the idea coming to him. But he realized that it had. Some part of him, some inner will, held on to that solution for dear life so that it couldn’t slip away from him.
He knew that if he could pull it off, then without the drugs his mind would begin to work and then maybe he would be able to come to his own rescue.
He got up and turned on the smaller reading light over the bed, then shut off the main ceiling lights. The smaller light gave off a muted illumination, but it was plenty of light to see by, and it made the room dimmer than the hall. The partial darkness would help cover what he intended to do.
Exhausted from the effort of plotting and adjusting the lights, he flopped back into his chair to wait for the nurse to arrive with his evening medications.
He nodded off twice before she arrived.
He woke with a start when she knocked and announced “Medication time” in a musical voice. She was one of the nicer nurses, a top-heavy woman with at least a dozen moles on her face and more on her plump arms. She always had a ready smile.
“I have your medications for you, Alex.”
Alex nodded and reached up for the cup of Thorazine on the tray before she had a chance to wonder if he might need help.
He tipped his head back as he poured the syrupy medication into his mouth, then brought his head back down, making a face as he swallowed. He crushed the paper cup in one hand and tossed it in the wastebasket beside his chair.
He hadn’t swallowed the medication, though. He held the Thorazine syrup in the hollow under his tongue.
She held the tray out for him. He dumped the second cup with the pills into his mouth and immediately captured them under his tongue as well as he tossed the cup in the trash.
The nurse yawned while she waited for him to wash down the pills. Alex had to repress his urge to yawn in sympathy with her as he immediately took the third cup with the water. He drank it down as he tipped his head back, pretending that he was swallowing the pills with the water, and then as his head was coming back down after swallowing the water, he used his tongue to push the syrup and pills out and into the cup.
Alex immediately crumpled the paper cup with the Thorazine and pills in it as he had done with the previous two and tossed it in the wastebasket.
“Have a good night, Alex,” the nurse said as she hurried away.
Alex sat in the dimly lit room, unable to summon joy, exhilaration, or triumph.
But he knew that when the drugs in his system began to wear off, he would feel all of those deli
cious things and much more.
33.
BY THE NEX MORNING, Alex was noticeably more alert. While not entirely out from under the numbing influence of the drugs, he did feel as if he was coming out of a long, dark sleep. He knew it would take more time for the drugs to get out of his system. Also, even though he had spit out the last dose of Thorazine, it wasn’t possible to spit out one hundred percent of it. At least he’d been able to completely eliminate the pills.
The first thing he did when he woke was to take the cup from the night before, the one with the medications in it, and crumple it up inside a paper napkin just to make sure that there was no chance the people who collected the trash would see any syrup or pills and alert the staff.
If anyone found out that he wasn’t being controlled by the drugs, they would put him in physical restraints. These people were only posing as medical professionals, after all. They were hardly interested in his well-being. He didn’t know how many of the staff were involved in the scheme, so he dared not trust any of them. For all he knew, the whole place could be in on it.
When a nurse came in with his morning dose of medications, Alex acted the same as he had been acting for days—lethargic, uninterested, sleepy—and repeated his trick of spitting the Thorazine and the pills into the water cup and throwing it away.
Almost immediately after the nurse left, Dr. Hoffmann strolled briskly into the room. Alex concentrated on sitting still and staring. He finally looked up, blinking slowly as he met the doctor’s gaze.
“How are we doing this morning, Alex?”
“Fine.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said as he pulled the blood-pressure cuff from a pocket.
He wrapped the cuff around Alex’s arm and pumped up the bulb, then read the dial as he let air out. When finished, he pulled the stethoscope from his ears.
“Just as I promised, you’re getting acclimated to the medication.” He wrote on his chart as he talked. “Your blood pressure is coming back up. It’s a little surprising, but everyone reacts differently. You’re young and strong, so your body is handling it well.”
Alex stared without answering.
