Two Bit Hack by Billy Jones
Part 24, Mystery Folds
“A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.” — Anthony Hecht After my interview with Dr Stoner I knew I was on to something. There was no logical reason in the course of a normal psychiatric evaluation for him to ask me or anyone else if I ever thought I was somewhere I was not. I mean, not unless the patient had some sort of previous diagnosis that included thinking he or she was somewhere else. I’d never suffered from that and neither had the others I talked to. It wasn’t unusual for patients to leave from time to time only to come back in a few days or a few weeks. Sometimes they were discharged only to have a relapse. Other times they got sick or needed surgery. There were lots of legitimate reasons a patient might be removed from the asylum and later returned. That’s why no one questioned the night I was hauled away on a stretcher. Only thing is: I don’t remember being sick. But I do remember being home, riding my motorcycle to Asylumland, and looking down from the hillside. And I still had $2000. I remembered that Asylumland was just outside of Dillwyn, Virginia and I was certain I wasn’t supposed to know. “Why do you think you remembered?” Irene asked. “I don’t know,” I answered “I think they’re doing something to our minds and for just a day or so it stopped working.” “But why?” she asked. “Some kind of mind control,” I replied, “an experiment perhaps. They take us out of here and make us do things then keep us warehoused here until they need us again.” “But what about your neighbors and friends?” Irene asked, “You said they acted like everything was normal, like you’d been there all along.” “That’s the part that don’t make sense.” I said. “My family would never go along with something like this. It just doesn’t fit.” “So do you think Stoner is in on it?”
“He has to be, I insisted. “Remember the falsified patient records we found. He’s as dirty as they come.” “So how do we get out of here?” she asked. “The problem isn’t getting out,” I answered. “The problem is if they can still control our minds after we leave. If they can they’ll just turn us around and bring us right back. Hell, we might already be programmed to do just that.”
“Oh my god,” was Irene’s reply. “Do you really think that’s it?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. In the weeks that followed a young woman named, Georgia, who had recently been taken to the hospital for emergency surgery, returned telling everyone she had spent the entire time watching shows on Broadway and going out with this amazing young man she had met in New York. A few days later they carried Georgia out again. This time she was sedated and wearing a straight jacket. But instead of wheeling her out the front door like they had done the first time they moved her into another wing where we never saw Georgia again.
