He awoke from dreams of a salesman gesticulating like an insane gameshow host next to a long row of coffins . He lay in a oversized bed with a beautifully nude blonde whose name he couldn't remember. One end of the high-ceilinged and spacious room was dominated by a picture window looking through the leaves of an enormous oak tree complete with bouncing squirrels. He remembered that his name was Harold Means and that this place was a mental hospital. The crystal chandelier glowed to life, switched on by a red haired nurse in a spotless white uniform.
"Time to rise and shine, Mr. Means !"
Ignoring the sex therapist, the nurse flipped the sheet off the bed and handed him his freshly cleaned clothes. She smilingly watched him pull the grey sweat pants over his nakedness and shrug into the T-shirt, still warm from the dryer. He pulled on white socks, and then took his running shoes from the nurse and laced them up. Today he would go jogging with the dog before he went to see his therapist. The nurse followed him down the plushly carpeted hallway to the front door of the mansion.
"Don't forget to stretch, Harold ." she laughed and patted him affectionately as he stepped out the door.
Alfie, the sanitarium's brown and white springer spaniel greeted him enthusiastically in the backyard, prancing about joyously and standing on her back legs to paw the air excitedly. He scratched behind her ears and then sat down on the lawn for a minute to stretch. Alfie paced expectantly, waiting for him to finish, and then flashed off down the jogging trail ahead of him. As he jogged along behind the dog he tried to remember how he'd gotten into the mental hospital. He remembered being severely depressed, but the reasons seemed distant and dreamlike. He jogged along beside the lake while the dog barked happily at the ducks. She splashed into the shallows scattering ducks across the water and into the air. Something about Alfie and the ducks made him sad, he felt a somehow familiar constriction in his chest and wetness in his eyes.
After a shower and breakfast he walked upstairs to talk with his psychiatrist. He rapped lightly on the heavy wooden door and entered without awaiting a reply. The psychiatrist was an elderly man in a grey suit, behind a large desk; he waved Harold to a chair and ran a hand over his balding head as he looked at the display on the desk. Harold read the nameplate sitting on one corner of the desk: Dr. Hunter Eliza.
" So, Harold ...", the doctors voice was soft and understanding, "Do you remember how long you've been here on this visit?"
Harold shook his head negatively and the doctor continued, " You arrived last night, and were in pretty sad shape, so we gave you a mnemonic-null, and drained your wet-ware ... to help you over the transition. Do you know how long you were out of the hospital or do you even remember you've been here before?"
Harold shook his head slowly : 'no'.
"Okay, that will pass as the computers sort through your head and straighten it back out.Tell me how you feel today, and what you've been thinking..."
"Well...let's see... I woke up with somebody in my bed and I keep wondering what her name is..."
"That's Wendy, your sex therapist, she helps keep the lower centers of the brain happier with out resorting to drugs..."
"Yeah... ok... also.I felt sad once today..."
"When was that?"
"At the lake when the dog was chasing the ducks..."
"That's understandable.."
"Not to me."
"Well, maybe you can handle it in a few days... Did you think of anything else?"
"No... well maybe.... What's this place called?"
"Mitsubishi Mercy Hospital, Why?"
"I don't know..."
Three months later they had me back in ship-shape, and I knew why the dog and the ducks had made me so sad. There weren't any real dogs or real ducks on earth any more. Of course now I was cured they had to take me out of the iso-tank and unhook me from the psycho-simulacrum that had put my memories back in their proper places. I said goodbye to the staff who assembled to wish me luck; then they disconnected the neural cutout and I was back in my own body. It was dark in the long rectangular iso-tank box and I floated in a saline solution with my body wrapped in wires. Orderlies opened the box, flooding it with the light of the real world, I blinked and attempted to focus on the attendants as they unhooked the various exercise and monitoring leads of the ultra-modern psychotherapeutic device. I was lifted out of the machine and placed on a stretcher that rolled past a long line of identical rectangular iso-tanks and into a small brightly painted waiting room. The orderly came with my skinsuit.
"Okay citizen, here's your clothes... and try and stay out of here for a while, or we're gonna have to get you a job..."
He laughed at his witticism while I struggled into the skintight clothing and thumbed the oxygen feed to the indoor setting. I looked up at the tall, thin man with a shock of black hair and laughed along with him even though Dr. Eliza and I had discussed just such a possibility during our last session. The orderly handed me the release form and I signed it and headed out the door, pulling my hood over my head and thumbing the oxy-feed to full.
Newyork was dark and cold, I turned up the heat in my suit and headed for the Citizens Dorms. The scientists had been wrong about the greenhouse effect, something about suspended macro-molecules reflecting sunlight in the upper stratosphere. It rarely got above freezing in Newyork except in August, and the glaciers would be here in another hundred years to grind Newyork to dust. The city was mostly abandoned except around the Dorms, and the snow and ice drifted up against the boarded up windows of filthy gray abandoned office buildings. I tripped over something besides the ice in the cracked concrete and looked down to find the small blue face of a child, buried in the snow. There was no body attached. I stepped around it gagging, having no solid food to throw up, and shuffled on down the street, turning the heat in my skinsuit up until I stopped shivering.
As I approached the Citizens Dorms, I began to walk more cautiously. If anyone here recognized me as a recently released patient they would try and jack me for my hundred dollars. The front yard swarmed with people of every size and shape, feeding time, safest time of all because the police always came with the food wagon. I slipped in the front door and took the elevator upstairs to the greenhouse. Arty sat on the same bench he always did, feeding the rats bits of breadcrumbs and waiting on customers. A man of his position didn't line up for the food truck, someone would always be willing to trade food for even a few hours of release from the boredom of Citizens Dorm. Arty looked up at me, his bland face wrinkling as he recognized me. His voice growled much bigger than his wiry frame, and he had acquired a large black trenchcoat since last time I had seen him.
"So they managed to cure you again... the miracles of modern science... and you want some more of CWD's finest poison...."
I nodded, shuffling my feet and looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching our transaction.
"It'll take a little while..." Arty rasped, " You got that release money ?"
"Yea.." I whispered and sat down on his bench as he rose and scurried, beetle-like, off on his errand. A few minutes later he was back with his empty hand out.
"They got's... I need the cash up front... and don't wait for me here ...come back in an hour...'kay?"
I handed him the cash and shuffled out of the greenhouse and down to the front yard to wait for the man to come through with the goods. A couple of junkies nodded on the porch steps with three inch ashes on their cigarettes. I bummed a smoke and walked around the front yard looking at the trash frozen in ghastly sculptures in the ice. I didn't hear anyone behind me until after they hit me. The world was a spinning sheet of ice, legs stretching out to strike my ribs, my face, my crotch. There were five of them but I couldn't see any faces. I finally got my hands above my face, and after a while they stopped kicking me. They searched me thoroughly, tearing my singlesuit once or twice before they gave up in disgust and pissed on me. When I could move again I began the long crawl back to the front door of the dorm. At the bottom of the steps the same two junkies continued to nod.
One of them sluggishly nudged the other on the shoulder and mumbled, "Fucker, you owe me a cigarette, see he is still alive..."
The other looked at me through narrowed eyes, "Shit...so he is...here's your cigarette.."
I looked up at them in numb amazement and crawled up the steps to the door and leaned my back against it's warmth. I stopped shaking after a while and managed to get to the elevator and up to Arty's greenhouse. He was there sitting on his bench and turned up his nose at the smell of urine as I approached.
"You don't look so good, Harold . You sure you can handle a dose of Breakdown?"
"What else am I going to do? Wait in the Health Center line until somebody beats me up again? No, I think I'll stick to my usual methods... Let's see what the doctor brought us today."
I held out my hand and took the little brown envelope, opened it and dumped two small capsules into my hand. Breakdown: the crowning glory of the Army's Chemical Warfare Department, it would scramble my memories and my nervous system, leaving a twisted wreck of uncertain flesh... guaranteed to send me straight back to the psyche ward. The CWD called it Breakdown, we on the street call it Relapse.
I walked down to the showers and rinsed myself off without removing my skinsuit, then limped back upstairs to the hundred bed men's dormroom and lay down on the first empty cot-bed that I came to and waited for the Relapse to hit me. I thought of the girl's head in the street, and was flooded with the hopelessness of the earthbound; the hunger, dirt and violence of the one's they left behind on the dying mother world. Angels without wings, we become demons. I noticed that their were more bugs than usual on the ceiling, little black bugs with red stripes, and little red bugs with black stripes. When they began raining from the ceiling in slow motion I could barely remember the drug and almost screamed. I sat up in the cot and brushed the rapidly multiplying bugs onto the floor. Nobody seemed to notice, the bugs began to build up in a swarming pile on the floor at the foot of his bed, climbing one on top of the other until they were piled in a round pile two feet high and three around. He continued brushing them off his face and arms. When the pile jumped up and began prancing about in the shape of Alfie, he did scream but nobody noticed...
The next morning when the food truck came up he thought he heard it run over his puppy, he ran down to the courtyard...
"Here puppy ...here puppy puppy... where are you puppy puppy..."
All the people looked at him like he was telling a sick joke and he ran to the food truck. Under the wheels the still struggling puppy cried piteously, it's hind section totally crushed by the back wheel of the big, black van. When the door opened and the driver stepped out Harold was already crying.
"My puppy ... my puppy.... you killed my puppy...."
As he rushed the police officer, Harold saw him reach down and touch his stun field... electricity crackled in the air. He hugged the cop and his body began to twitch.
I awoke from dreams of working on a Japanese space station, and found myself lying in the huge bed in the Mercy hospital. I stroked Wendy's back and tried to remember what I had done while I was outside this time, but drew a blank. At least my adjustment period seemed to have gone more quickly. I knew where I was and that it was all a simulacrum, and I also knew it was a much happier place than Newyork. I had been in and out of this hospital 23 times in seven years. I dressed and went straight to my therapist's office, and entered without knocking. Dr. Eliza looked up at me as I entered.
"Back on your feet quick as a wink this time... we took the liberty and precaution of saving your wet-ware in storage, due to the recurrent nature of your problem and saved ourselves a lot of work.... "
"What about the job?", my throat almost cut the last word off the question.
Dr. Eliza's reply was quick,"Mitsubishi is offering you a job hunting virus programs in their Network. It won't pay much but you'll get full time access to an iso-tank and the Mercy Hospital simulacrum... I assured them that you would take the job, that was alright wasn't it?"
I smiled my first honest smile in many years,"Of course I'll take the job..."
