Looming high above them on overgrown cliffs is the abandoned hospital. It is said to be built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright who copied his style so closely he was sued and publicly shamed. The design was very similar to the Tokyo Imperial Hotel. In the 1920s Japan was seen as an emerging business market, that reputation changed after Peal Harbor. Creating an open contempt by the Federal Govt, that slashed funding and began to use the place as a punitive detention hospital for soldiers deemed “dangerous and insane” during ww2. Its a shame as the Japanese design ques of cherry blossom trees, rich wildlife and a peaceful garden aesthetic is wasted when it was decommissioned some time in then 1950s.
The ascent follows half eroded staircase dotted with gulfs of empty space, where parts of it slid down the hill in sinkholes. Climbing over shattered iron gates, massive drainage pipes, heads and limbs of roman style statues littering the hillside. The climb was beautiful but took over an hour. Out of breath about half way up, they pause to take in the views. Mist, fields of wild roses and rugged coastal cliffs send grandma into filling half her camera roll with birds and flowers. Returning to the climb, they get a better view of the hospital. Its shrouded in flowering trees. Its a place you would expect thunder and lightning, soot smeared stark gothic statues and lurking hunchbacks yelling about trespassing. Its none of that, more like a ancient temple or hidden palace in a lost city.
Reaching a second gate totally covered in vines and nesting birds, they set off an angry flocking birds protecting their nests. Retreated to a second gate that had some of its foundation slip down the cliff. Enabling them to climb underneath it and into a U shaped courtyard. This part is not as floral and grand. The courtyard was littered with old rolling beds, laundry carts and broken furniture. Coming to a bank of windows they peer inside. Its pitch black, not much is visible besides covered couches and dead plants. Every where they look are dead bugs and broken pottery. Coming to a chained door that seems to have been broken down with an axe. They climb through the gap in the double doors.
Inside is a huge empty room. Broken mirrors on the walls fill the entire black space with sparkly pieces of safety glass. ET feels like they have gone underground into a king’s bunker. The scale of the rooms is so vast he wonders if it was build for giants. Callisto and Grandma walk carefully on the broken glass. Among the vaulted ceilings and fallen arches are endless hallways branching off in other directions. Grandma thinks she knows where they are going and sets off the direction of some grand stairs decorated in lions heads. She says they are looking for an indoor pool that has the plants and specimens she is looking for. ET loves abandoned buildings and keeps trying to scare Callisto, she is murmering about wanting to leave before nightfall. This is probably wise.
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After stumbling around in the dark for about an hour, they hear the sound of falling rain echoing at the other side of a hallway. Coming to the door they see part of the roof has fallen in. Leaving the perfect environment for a microclimate for moths, dragonflies and fruit bats to nest on invasive trees. The water is surprisingly clean, where rain coming in the roof is rushing out the exterior doors like a waterfall. There is strange calmness here. Trees growing in an oasis among urban decay, creating waterfalls and moss covered statuary. The place took on a sacred quality. Grandma distracted Callisto with bugs and crawling things to capture in jars. ET looks at the graffiti. Taggers he has never seen have covered the walls, turning the open space into a vandals gallery.
Smashed statues, remarkable art and asian pottery make him feel like he is in a kings tomb. The stillness is shattered by the sounds of machinery and yelling. From the broken skylight they see a blinding light beam. Men in yellow radiation suits and black gas masks surge in the doors with guns drawn. ET doesn’t have time to check what became of Callisto and Grandma as gas grenades thrown at them knock him out. He can’t tell if he is dreaming or falling in and out of consciousness. He sees the world upside down from a speeding helicopter. Everywhere the world is filled with alarms and screams. Seeing the sunsetting in its red and black majesty. All he can think is he will never see his home again. They were abducted for organ harvest in a Government facility. Or so they thought.
ET awoke alone in a room that didn’t look real. It looked like something that came with toys that kept they from being damaged. Vacum-formed plastic totally white, even his skin seemed white here like the deathlessness of the walls burned his eyes and made his skin feel like it was bleached and burned. The chair was white, the hand cuffs attached to the table were white, the food tray and cup for feeding were white, even his shadow was white. He felt like he was growing old and dying in a place where the only sound is a feint buzzing in his ear drums and sound of his heart beating. When he made any noise from squeaking a chair on the ground or even audibly breathing too loud it filled him with terror.
He spend his days alternately chained to a table in an interview room where no one came, or chained to a gurney staring up at a stucco ceiling and bright electric lights that seemed to cause his eyeballs to shake like a stobe light and the sound of jet engines, air conditioning and far off sounds that could be alarms or voices so low he thinks its a hallucination. After what seemed like decades he started to be free of this mental construct of reality. He would have fantastic dreams laced with esortic mysteries, journeys to distant lands but always with the subtle realization of cold drool across his face or sticky plastic mattress pads under him causing bed sores. ET howled for someone to talk to him, explain where he is and why he is trapped in this hell of solitude, broken up only by restless sleep and feelings of violation by catheters, intravenous feeding, breathing tube ripping his throat raw and iv tubes aching in his arm