The Fourth Padded Wall

Things had once again gotten way out of hand.

The young man looked through the one-way glass into the padded room where several straitjacketed men were sitting motionless, staring intently at each other. He turned to face the doctor sitting beside him.

“What the hell is going on in there?”

“Begging your pardon sir, I did just as you said. So far, your plan seems to have worked”

So that’s what it was.

Earlier, he had joked that if they convinced the men suffering from chronic schizophrenia that they in fact were hearing voices as a result of ESP, then the men’s disorders would no longer pose any problem, provided that all of the patients involved remained institutionalized, something which was at this point likely for all of them anyway given their conditions. The theory was, he had explained, that if they thought they had a rational (if seemingly impossible) explanation for the voices, then the voices would take the form of whatever they would expect from that explanation. In this case, each man would believe that he was having a cerebral conversation with the others. The main flaw in all of this, however, was that the entire concept had been meant as a joke.

Apparently, Dr. Renault thought that he was serious.

However, that brought up an entirely different set of questions. So what if the Doctor thought he was serious? He was just here as a volunteer with no medical training whatsoever! It didn’t make any sense!

Obviously there was something he had missed. The facts made that painfully clear. What they failed to do as of yet was tell him what he had missed. This was normal behavior for facts, and he was just sick of it. He was missing things and forgetting things all the time, and the facts always seemed to blow him off when he went looking to them for help. On a whim, the young man looked down at the badge hanging on a string around his neck. The first two letters were he noticed were: “Dr.” Across the bottom of his badge were the words: “Chief of Psychiatry.”

Horseshit.

How had he missed that?

At least that explained why everyone was regarding him with an unmistakable air of respect, and seemed to harbor… yes, that’s what it was… a sort of fear of screwing up in front of . He had until this point chalked this up to his charm and dashing good looks. This new information took him down a peg. However, he had a lifetime and probable hours of therapy ahead of him to deal with his insecurities. Now was the time to deal with the situation at hand, and quickly… this was starting to look like the sort of development that could lead him down a regrettable course of action to an unfortunate conclusion.

“Thank you, Doctor, good job. I think I can take care of it from here. Don’t you have other patients to deal with?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Doctor left the room.

“OK, think”

“I’m trying, nothing’s happening”

“Just calm down, don’t panic”

“You know, now isn’t the time to be referencing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

“Did I say that the answer to your problem was 42? Did I suggest that the reason that this was happening was because today is Thursday? No. I told you NOT TO FUCKING PANIC. Maybe you should listen to me instead of crawling up my ass”

“Hold the phone…who the fuck are you, and what are you doing in my head?”

“I don’t know pal, that’s your problem”

He had a lot of problems. This one, he couldn’t address at the moment. In fact, he could address it, and that was indeed the problem. He turned instead to the straitjacketed men who were undergoing the cutting-edge treatment he had apparently invented.

Apparently as a result of an unheard argument, one of the men had lunged forward to tackle another. A tackle is of course a tremendously hard thing to do when your arms are strapped behind your back. This is a fact that is often forgotten in the heat of the moment. Likewise, it is also forgotten that starting a fight in a room full of restless mental patients is a course of action that if consistently followed, will drive your insurance premiums through the roof, to say nothing for the considerable injury sustained. What resulted was a ridiculous melee that would have been hilarious if one was personally removed from the debacle, and not, say, responsible for it.

He decided that this was the perfect time to leave the observation room. He needed to collect his thoughts, and he was in precisely the wrong condition at the moment to do so. He turned away from the window just as one of the patients managed to get his arms out of his straitjacket, and left the room. The instant he did so, he caught sight of a short man with a “volunteer” badge around his neck. There was a doctor to his left who was thoroughly unamused by the short man’s attempts to give him orders. The young man quickly ducked back into the observation room. This time he didn’t even bother to check on the patients, and pulled down the blinds. Had he looked he would have seen the entire group of them sitting in a circle, levitating.

He couldn’t handle it all. He got the sudden feeling that the Universe was rotating around his head at an alarming rate. He immediately tried to counter this by spinning himself in his chair in the opposite direction. The result was disastrous. The first thing that happened he nearly passed out from the sensation of the Universe rotating around him at an even more alarming rate. The next thing that happened was that he actually passed out.

An hour passed before he came to. He wondered if it was safe to open his eyes. What the hell, he thought, things couldn’t get much worse. The fact that that very thought itself makes bad things happen somehow escaped him. Nevertheless, he opened his eyes. He found himself collapsed on the floor. Good, he thought. The floor was something he could handle. He then saw a pair of shoes on the floor. Specifically, a pair of shoes that also happened at the time to be attached to a pair of feet. Presumably, the owner of that pair of feet was also in the room with him, but he wasn’t in a terrible rush to find out. After a long pause, he looked slowly up to see a long white lab coat, and a clipboard. He also found that the owner of the shoes, the feet, the lab coat, and the clipboard was a grayish green alien who, as declared by the badge around his neck, was named “Wowbagger” and held some sort of position that he had never heard of.

Whatever the alien was doing here, it couldn’t be good news

The very distressed young man had no idea what to make of the name tag, or for that matter the face of the alien who owned it, except that it was clear that he couldn’t possibly exist. That was not what bothered him. If “Wowbagger” couldn’t possibly exist, then it was obvious that he existed impossibly, because there was no other way he could be standing there in front of him. What bothered him was the clipboard. He knew perfectly well how to react to the clipboard, and that was panic. In all his life, there was no one occasion in which any good had come from a clipboard.

That wasn’t going to change any time soon.

“ Is this your name?” Asked the alien, pointing to a series of characters on the clipboard that did, in fact amount to his name,

“Yes”

“ Right then. You are without any doubt a pitiful waste of life”

And with that, the alien left.

The young man had half a mind to just fall unconscious yet again. He realized however that his time and energies would be better spent going mad and running away, in either order. He then decided that it would make much more sense to put off insanity until after he had put a few good miles in between himself and the tangle of improbabilities, impossibilities, and just plain stupidity that seemed to have taken hold of the hospital. He realized, however, as regrettable a course of action it might be, that insanity was probably something he'd have to get around to eventually. As he ran out the door and down the corridor, he for an instant met eyes with the short man he had seen before, who was now reluctantly carrying a large bundle of lab coats.

About twenty minutes later, the young man was slowly climbing the stairs to his room, panting. He opened the door, and collapsed onto his bed. Screw madness, he thought. It could wait until he’d had some rest. Procrastination was a hobby of his, and for the first time ever it was having a positive affect on his mental well-being. He slept through the next three days. When he woke up he found a Post-It note attached to his face which said: “Wake Up” He promptly tore the offensive note off of his face and threw it away.

He looked around the room, and found it thankfully devoid of insulting grayish green aliens. He also found that the world was no longer violently spinning around his head, which was another plus. Still, something felt weird. Once again, his subconscious wasn’t offering the faintest bit of help, other than that something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right. It suddenly occurred to him to measure the angles of the corners in his room. After four quick measurements, he found that they were all obtuse.

He was sick and tired of impossibility, and could only think of one way to deal with it. Given, it was absurd and quite destructive, but he was at his wit’s end. He went to the basement and found a sledgehammer. Using a Sharpie, he labeled each wall with a number. He then drove the sledgehammer straight through the wall marked “4”. Stepping through the hole he had made, he discovered exactly what was wrong.

The first thing he found was wrong was that there was no immediate surface to step on, which led to the second thing, which was that his ankle hurt like hell. The third thing was the fact that there was an enormous, groggy-eyed figure sitting at an equally enormous chair typing on what appeared to be an enormous keyboard in front of him. The giant’s face looked familiar, and wore a look that clearly said, “I’ve been up all night typing.” He had no clue how he was able to discern this, but was determined to know.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I am Patrick Desmond,” replied the giant.

“What? I am Patrick Desmond!”

“I know. I am you!”

“If you are me, then who am I?”

“You are me!”

“Are you me or am I you?”

The writer had at this point taken the device as far as it could go without becoming exceedingly stupid. What he hadn’t thought of was how to end it. He first tried asking the miniaturized version of himself to please go the hell back to where he came from. Failing this, he directed the runt’s attention to the screen, and explained how easily he could write a bullet through his head. To prove his point, he added a part in which the main character of his story suffered a broken nose, which immediately appeared on his fictional self. Defeated, the tiny Patrick jumped back through the hole in the fourth wall. He could feel his nose straighten as a supererogatory paragraph was deleted.

Needless to say, Patrick had a lot to think about. Aside from the obvious problem of facing up to the fact that he was a fictional character, there was the also the matter of his bedroom wall. With some quick thinking and the relocation of a large poster that had been hanging on wall number 2, he solved the problem for the time being. Having one problem solved, he turned his mind to the problem of his mistaken identity. He didn’t get much of a chance to think about it before he heard the doorbell ring. He opened the door, and found the same short man he had encountered three days ago standing on his doorstep in a pizza delivery uniform carrying three pizza boxes. Apparently, things had failed to work themselves out in the three preceding days. The short man also seemed to recognize him, judging by the scowl on his face.

“You!” he shouted.

Patrick did the only sensible thing he could given the situation. Three large pepperoni pizzas later, he realized that there was still an unconscious doctor/pizza delivery man on his front porch. He disposed of the empty boxes, and went back downstairs. He picked up the small man and carried him to the delivery van. Placing the man in the passenger’s seat, he started the engine and drove five miles away. He then pocketed the card with his address written on it, then got out of the car and walked to the nearest bus stop. Five hours later, he arrived home. In his mailbox he found an envelope from the mental hospital he had volunteered at. Inside was a piece of paper with a number that he rather liked written on it.

Returning to his room, Patrick began to ponder what he had seen beyond the large and suspiciously low-hanging poster on his wall. Was his life being controlled by a procrastinating giant sitting at a computer? Impossible, he thought. He certainly felt like he was making his own decisions. However, he really had nothing to judge it against. Another, more interesting thought occurred to him. What if he was the controlling force behind all of this, and the giant Patrick was merely a chronicler. He realized that this was unlikely, remembering that with a few simple keystrokes, the giant Patrick had broken his nose.

Suddenly, Patrick remembered that he had some unfinished business. He immediately saw to it.

Several hours later, he was being dragged down a corridor by two orderlies, his arms strapped in a straitjacket. They came to a doorway, and dragged him into a room full of people wearing similar garments.

“Okay everyone,” said one of them, “I’d like you all to say hello to Patrick Desmond.”

All of a sudden, Patrick heard about a dozen voices shout “You!” in his mind.