Norman never brought much with him, when he came to visit Servway’s Protective Facility for the Criminally Insane. Only two pencils, and a scheduler in a binder that had a plastic tab labelled “notes,” behind which he could keep assorted loose-leaf paper.
The notes were so he could remember details from the conversations he had with patients. Writing specifics down helped keep track of contradictory or irrational claims. Norman always tried to follow the rationale behind conversations, because it wasn’t his job to point out discrepancies. He was only there to provide a friendly audience for patients who might otherwise have no chance for a normal connection with the outside world.
The binder was also useful in case anyone wanted to make a follow up appointment. He could make a note in his schedule right then and there, to make sure retirement’s routine didn’t zap his once sharp mind into forgetting.
He’d been coming to Servways for five years now, every Saturday and Tuesday, whenever someone wanted to talk to a visitor volunteer and specifically asked for him.
Servway’s housed both criminals deemed not guilty by reason of insanity and particularly violent patients the average psychiatric hospital wasn’t equipped to handle.
For confidentiality’s sake, Norman was never told what these high-security criminals had done to merit incarceration. But he’d been a policeman for 21 years of his life, and before that, an apprenticed officer. He’d seen enough on the job to know both what these men were capable of, and how they suffered from the tortures of their own psyches. He’d easily passed the qualifying entry assessments that assured he’d be a good fit for volunteering.
He drove a Renault Megane up to the single row of parking spaces beside the Servway Protective Facility’s double-gated entryway, parked, unclicked his seatbelt, grabbed his binder, opened the car door, closed it with a beeping click of his keys, and walked to the first set of bullet proof glass doors that slid open when he proffered a volunteer badge from an extendable lanyard’s reel, clipped to his side-pocket.
He turned to peer down the double-layered chain-link fence that encircled Servway’s high, cement walls. The clattering chatter of a reporter’s brigade announced he wasn’t the afternoon’s only visitor. Hugh Cossimer, the famed actor turned philanthropist, could be seen waving a hand to one side of his head to side-step encroaching cameras.
Cossimer often came to cheer the lives of patients who were fans of his films, though, Norman had heard, the waiting list to request Cossimer as a visitor was awfully long.
“No, no, please—not today,” Norman could hear Cossimer on the other side of the glass door he’d just passed through.
“Can we just ask who you’ll be visiting?”
“You seem to be under the impression everyone at Servways is an infamous serial killer—”
“Have you ever been in an interview with a serial killer?”
Norman tapped his identity card and let himself in.
“Hey-ya Norm,” Fred Bently was the guard between the gates today.
“Got some excitement, eh?”
“Oh yeah,” Fred was already stepping out from behind his desk to go tell the reporters they didn’t have security clearance for further admittance.
Hugh Cossimer crowded against the glass outer doors just as Norman slipped through the inner steel turn-styles of the gated entryway’s second precautionary division.
Inside, all was silent. Not even birds, really. Just level, red brick walkways. Norm followed one of these paths past a poplar tree and into the cold recesses of the clinic’s outer waiting rooms, to sign his name on a waiting form at the plexi-glass opening to a protected attendant’s station.
“Did he get any mail today?”
The attendant who had taken Norman’s signature for processing could see he was signed in to visit Rene Cartesius. Rene was relatively new to this psych ward; he’d only been held under high security protocols for three weeks now, but he’d already asked to meet with Norman eight times. He liked Norman. He’d pointed to his name at random, at first. But he’d found in the aging pensioner someone who’d listen.
And he was always claiming the extraordinarily influential family of which he was bastard offspring would eventually send him a letter; they kept up correspondence with his mother.
“No, no mail today, sorry,” the attendant turned from checking Rene’s pigeon-hole.
That wasn’t too unusual; patients seldom got mail, which was a blessing to the staff, who had to sort each and every envelope, to make sure no dangerous contraband snuck through. But Rene was so insistent: he’d get a letter soon; he was so sure of it.
“Has he gotten any since I was here last?”
“Nah, no chance I’m afraid,”
“Ah, too bad,”
“He’s got that upcoming hearing, though,”
“Oh, really?”
“This afternoon,”
“Oh good,” if the hearing went well, Rene might be able to return to a residential psychiatric facility like the one from which he had been transferred. The residential psychiatric facilities, being, as they were, unrelated to the country’s prison systems, imposed fewer security measures on patients, allowed greater freedoms. “Thanks, Wade.”
Norman knew practically all Servway’s staff and patients by name by now. Knowing even what small insights Wade could provide gave Norman some indication of what his conversation with Rene would analyze today.
“It’ll just be a few minutes,” Wade left to go get the volunteers’ visiting room ready.
Norman went back to sit in the fabricated-foam guest chair beside a water cooler, listening to the far-off sound of a collection of keys being turned in the lock to the hall that led to the room in which he’d shortly be visiting Rene.
Norman had come to understand the prison’s system of locks and keys fairly well, though he was only ever allowed rare glimpses beyond the outer waiting and conference rooms.
From what he had seen and heard, the patients’ rooms lined a hallway demarcated at either end by two doors which were both locked after 9pm, when those in residence were shepherded to bed after which the doors to their bedrooms were locked as well, to keep patients from harming one another.
Only men came to this security unit. A sister unit housed women, two towns over. Norman volunteered there sometimes too, but he found his services more often requested at Servway’s facilities for men, in part simply because inmate population here was greater.
After 9am, once everyone had been woken to wash and congregate for breakfast, the doors to the hallway that led to the mens’ rooms would be locked again, and the patients shepherded from the breakfast room to the communal sitting rooms to be kept under a strict ratio of six patients to every care giver.
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Keeping patients from returning to their individual bedrooms enforced socializing, but it also kept them from stealing others’ personal affects, an unlocked cabinet of which stood by each bolted down bed. A locked cabinet stood below this, to house the personal affects patients sometimes arrived with that might be temporarily deemed a hazard. Shoelaces, for example, were simply removed from the premises entirely, while orderlies oversaw the day to day locking of all these doors and drawers, ensuring safety by remaining dotted throughout the hallways.
“He’s ready now,” Wade came to collect Norman.
“Oh, perfect, thank you.”
Norman was led down a hallway that flanked the communal sitting rooms, waving through an opening in the corridor to some of his other usual conversation partners. He seemed to be the only volunteer visiting this unit today.
Hugh Cossimer must have gone to some other part of the building.
“Rene’s very excited today about the hearing later on,” another orderly accompanying Norman prompted, swiping a final crumpled drinking cup from the meeting room’s solo table.
“I heard!” Norman was genuinely excited for Rene. They all were.
He’d shown a great deal of improvement in the state of his mental health over the course of the three weeks Norman had been visiting him.
Three weeks was the minimum amount of time a patient was required to stay in higher security units like Servways, before his case could be reviewed and a panel of doctors decided whether he could be released to a less strenuously policed environment for a six-month evaluation period.
Rene seemed to be a good kid. He seemed like he could actually be out of here fairly quickly.
“Alright, Rene,” An orderly led him in.
“Rene,” Norman rose, hand outstretched, smiling, glad to shake hands. Both sat. The door closed. Orderlies here were very careful; they wouldn’t even call patients by nicknames that weren’t specifically requested by the patients themselves. This place was meant to heal, not punish.
Rene still had pinkish scarring along his left eye from the fight that had landed him in Servway’s Unit for Dangerous Persons to begin with.
Unlike most of the other inmates, he hadn’t come from the prison system, and he’d never been officially charged with a crime. The violent behavior for which he’d been transferred to Servways had occurred during a routine squabble at his old psychiatric ward.
“Look—look, come here; I’ve got to tell you something,” Rene leaned forward over the table, anxious. Norman leaned forward too. “The ticket came again,”
“The ticket?”
“Yeah, the ticket from last time remember? The ticket they said I didn’t have! It came again!”
Rene had started the fight that broke another inmate’s ribs because others had refused to believe he’d been mailed a luggage ticket from his uncle.
“The luggage ticket?”
“The luggage ticket! It came, again! I have it in my locker right now,”
“It’s the same—?”
“Same locker number 264, I knew it I knew he’d come for me, I always said he’d send me mail didn’t I always say he’d send me mail?”
“Rene—? The orderlies say you haven’t received any mail all this week,”
“No but that’s the thing I told you my uncle’s powerful enough he doesn’t need to go through mail sorting he can just send it to me directly; he pulls strings, he owns this place,”
“He owns Servway? I—did you tell me that already?” Norman always explained to each patient how, as he was getting up in years, he’d have to take notes when they spoke to make sure he remembered what they said. He flipped back through his binder’s notes now. There it was: ‘Rene’s uncle is head of Servways.’
“Oh, that’s right no wait here we go I remember now—on your mother’s side?”
“Well, my mother’s the one who got me in this mess in the first place, ‘cause, you know, she slept with my aunt’s husband’s brother; now he’s my dad—but his brother is my uncle; he’s very influential,”
Norman wrote down ‘aunt’s husband’s brother’s brother,’ and then realized he may have missed a crucial step in following the family tree.
“But no incest,”
“No no, no incest,” Rene was always very particular about ensuring there had been no incest.
“Can I see the ticket? Do you have it with you?”
“No no I always keep it hidden don’t want the other guys getting wrong ideas you know that’s my ticket out of here; I’ve got to keep it safe,”
“It’s got—money in the safe,”
“Yeah, loads of money, all sorts of money, enough to buy me a private institution like this if I wanted with my own gardens and staff,”
“Well that’s awesome Rene,”
“Yeah; yeah I’m real excited; it’s got documents too, to ensure I get the money,”
“Good, that’s good. I’m sure you will, but it’s always good to safeguard. You know, the uh—sometimes on weekends in the residential programs they let you out for a—vacation—”
“Yeah, yeah I know,”
“And I heard you’re going to have a hearing later today? Maybe they’ll release you to—ah, where was—” Norman searched his notes to find the name of the psychiatric hospital from which Rene had originally been transferred.
“Yeah, yeah Collins, Collins is where they’d take me to; they’re taking me there later this afternoon. I’m real excited, I think I’ve got a chance; they don’t want me to know about how influential my family is but my uncle likes me now he’s different than the rest he’s not in on it all, he wants me to know about them see. He’s letting me in because he knows I can handle it. It’s very important. Not everyone can, you know; it’s a big responsibility knowing; they could just decide to get rid of me—get me out of the way—”
“Are you worried they might try that? Do you feel threatened?” Usually Norman’s conversations with patients remained strictly confidential. But delusions that caused patients pain he felt liable to bring to the attention of psychiatrists who were better equipped to help counter them.
“No no I’m just saying they could; I’m not worried they would; see, once I let everyone know, they can’t get rid of me,”
“Know—about your uncle’s high up position at Servways?”
“Yeah, yeah, board of directors and not just Servways; he can draw from all kinds of different psychiatric facilities. Now you’ve gotta remember they’ve got loads of things they’re trying to do; you have to watch out for the pigeons; you have to kill the pigeons; they’re not pigeons they’re spy drones remember that they spy on you for my uncle, my uncle’s really high up, he’s very influential,”
“The pigeons?”
“Right, yeah, the pigeons; they’ve got lasers in their eyes for cyber-optic cameras that go straight to their brain and those relay back to my uncle, but he’s given me the ticket see, because now he finally wants me to know; but he didn’t let anybody see, because that’d subvert the system; it has to be secret it can’t go through the mailing shoots ‘cause here they don’t know about how he controls everything; they don’t know about it but my uncle wants it all out in the open—that’s why he’s instructing me,“
“With the ticket?”
“Yeah,”
“About the birds?”
“Yeah, the pigeons, they have lasers in their eyes which lead back into optic nerve cameras, you know, you have to be ready for the optic nerve cameras you have to make sure you can outsmart them,”
Norman wrote down ‘optic nerve cameras.’ “You know I think that kind of technology would actually be pretty useful in a sting operation—”
“Yeah see now you’re thinking like him, that’s good; now you’re thinking like him; that’s why he uses them, all the time; it’s always a sting operation; they’re always watching, yeah; you’ve got that police stuff, I like that,”
Rene was agitated today; he kept shifting forward to slide his chair closer to the table. Norman could tell he was anxious about the upcoming hearing.
“So, if they decide you can be let out on good behavior, you get—”
“Yeah bumped to the lesser security yeah,”
“And then, 6 months probationary period and if you pass that—”
“Yeah, yeah I know a normal prison,” (to account for the fact he’d broken an innocent man’s ribs), “but I don’t think I’m gonna like that I don’t think they can hold me there,”
Patients often felt they were better off in some sort of institution, “I like it here; I can stay here, that’s why my uncle gave me the ticket,”
“So, you’d like to stay at Servways?”
“No no I mean I want my old room back, you know, I want my old room back,”
“But just, still at a facility,”
“Yeah, yeah exactl;y I like the facilities,”
“Well I’ll miss you if you do transfer,”
“Oh, I’ll tell you; I’ll let you know; my uncle can tell you too, and besides it’ll be a while processing after the hearing,”
“Right, good, okay; and you’d be transferred to Collins? That’s not too far away,”
“Yeah yeah well, Collins is where they take me, yeah,”
“Awesome. Alright, that’s not bad. Although, you know, if you do want a chance at your old room back—I might not tell them about the ticket—it might look—bad?—”
“Oh, it subverts the system, I know, that’s because my uncle’s at the head of the system, right? So, they’re gonna have to let me out,”
“Yeah,”
Norman had meant, more, they might find the return of this divisive illusion a cause for concern. What if some other patient should similarly claim, once again, that the ticket didn’t exist?
“But you wouldn’t—mm. I’m just worried they’ll find that disconcerting,”
“Oh no no I’m not gonna punch anyone again I’ve learned my lesson,”
Norman’s face split into a grin. “That’s what I was worried about; I’m so glad,”
“Oh yeah no no that was really more about power dynamics; he was claiming my uncle wasn’t head of Swervways and I was saying, ‘no you don’t understand,’ but now I see my uncle has to keep it that way, otherwise outsiders may know,”
“Oh yeah, no, that makes sense,”
“Yeah yeah, I know how to play it now, no worries,”
“Good. But you will let me know how it goes?”
“Oh yeah yeah, I can put you down for next Tuesday, does that work?”
“Yeah, next Tuesday sounds great!”