The Remote (incident one)
The New Testament
A Beautiful Morning
Photography: Steve Johnson
Amelia snaps awake. For a few moments, she ponders the motes of dust in a shaft of morning sun; violins sweet in her head. But then the orchestra enters. Oh my god no. The song begins. No no no – None of that. It continues, unabated. Amelia tries to squeeze her brain shut but Rodgers and Hammerstein pick at her cerebral sores.
Ooooooooooh
Amelia grimaces. No.
Ooooooooooh
Please no.
Ooooooooooh
She takes a deep breath.
‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ has been unleashed upon her.
She rushes out of the room in her thin hospital gown. Henry is already at a table meant for two-player card games. She sits with him, exhausted, Gordon McRae happily riding a horse through her mind.
He gives her a grim smile. “Quite a show last night, huh? My favorite part was when someone told that old bitch no one wanted to see her wrinkly-ass vagina. Fucking classic.”
“Is that kind of thing normal in this place?” The second verse starts. Henry nods.
“Oh yeah. I’ve probably slept a total of twelve hours since I’ve been here.”
“Great. That’s just fucking great.”
“That’s just fucking hyperbole, Amelia. You’ll get used to it.”
Ooooooooooh – Amelia furrows her brow and covers her eyes. What the actual fuck? Are you really gonna sing this whole fucking song? The orderlies roll in the food carts. Amelia’s ears hone in on exactly which wheels are squealing this time, stopping the music.
Maxwell swoops in to help distribute trays. “What’ve we got here? Eggs Benedict? Belgian waffles? Bagels and lox? No… just scrambled powdered eggs, toast, hash, apple slices, and coffee. My favorite.” He casts a nasty look at Amelia, his third eyelid sliding back across his eyes. “Are you gonna let the freak have a knife to spread butter on her toast?” Amelia lies with her face, as if she isn’t hoping for serrated plastic to saw open her flesh. The orderly rolls his bored, brown eyes.
“Everyone’s toast has already been buttered, Max.” The food trays are handed out and she scans her plate. The toast is dried human skin. Eggs are bird fetuses, hash browns are fingernail clippings – and rat feces – and rat feces. Apple slices are safe. Henry gauges Amelia’s expression and agrees with her silent disappointment.
“I don’t understand why they give us this shit. My parents are paying four hundred dollars a day for me to be in here and this only makes me want to eat less.” Her stomach turns at the smell of preservatives.
“Henry, you seriously have the perfect body.”
“That’s because I throw up after I eat.” Jack-in-the-box. He motions to the apples and she reluctantly takes a small bite, then returns it to the partition in the tray.
“This apple tastes like if you chewed on a brand-new sock. Like, a brand-new one.”
“That’s weird.” He chomps on one of his. “Tastes fine to me. What about the toast?”
“Buttered toast has the texture of damp cardboard left out in the sun. I like it dry.” She inserts a mouthful of scrambled powdered eggs and conjures thoughts that make the act bearable.
People in other parts of the world have nothing to eat. I am grateful that I have access to high-quality food. This tastes good. I am enjoying the texture. This is nutritious. I do not want to spit it out. I do not want to throw it up. Some people eat garbage from dumpsters. I am lucky. I am grateful. I want this in my mouth. This is delicious.
“This is disgusting. It’s fucking disgusting. It’s like warm carpet padding.” Amelia swallows nonetheless.
“At least it’s warm. Sometimes everything is cold if the orderlies take too long.”
“It tastes like a blanket that has been left in the washer too long— like that smells.” Another bite proves to be too much and she spits it into her napkin. “Gross! Gross gross; I need a sip of water.” She takes a gulp but it doesn’t help. “How can I be like this when so many on this planet are hungry right now? I hate wasting food; they could at least let us serve our own portions.”
“Ah, the old ‘Children Starving in Africa’ guilt trip.”
“I try to keep that in mind: that I despise food others would kill for. Makes me feel ashamed, like it’s something I can control and I’m just ungrateful. It’s repulsive. I don’t know what to do about it. I think just liquids for me today.” A flurry of movement catches her eye. “What is Maxwell doing?” Maxwell is going from patient to patient, whispering in their ears, then gulping down their coffee. Amelia watches in horror as he steals the mute woman’s caffeine and downs it. Henry shrugs.
“Oh that’s his usual morning routine: drinking all the coffee he can get his hands on.”
“Yes! Yes! I think that’s a record, folks: SIX!” yells Maxwell triumphantly. “Sexy sixy, sexy sixy!” he chants, gyrating his hips. Amelia drags her eyes back to the Styrofoam plate.
“So… they let him, of all people, consume everyone’s coffee first thing in the morning?”
“Every single day,” he replies, chewing a bite of toast. “Anything he does before noon is entirely their fault.” An awkward silence shoves the song back into Amelia’s ears. There is an uncomfortable silence for him, but for Amelia there is only music. “Well… Tell me about yourself,” he says. It pauses again.
“Hm. Well, if I had to choose between being deaf or blind, I would choose blind even though you’re supposed to say deaf due to things like balance and adaptation. If there’s one thing I wish I could live without, it’s food. I would give up ten years of my life to be permanently twenty pounds thinner. I can play six instruments and sing in eight languages. If I were guaranteed not to get caught, I would kill a person for ten million dollars.”
She blinks and sees the girl: head bashed in, teeth through the cheek, unrecognizable as a face – Body bruised and broken, heaving lungs torn by the sharp shards of broken ribs. In an instant all that, then opens her eyes to escape to the light. She blinks again and the skull is shining pink and white between mats of hair. Her gums are black already, and one eye, terrified and begging – Flailing.
“I think rapists and child molesters should be castrated without anesthesia. I would like to develop excellent night vision. I am bisexual. In life, I’m still most impressed by love. My greatest fear is being tortured by dentists dressed up as clowns.” Rip out the liar’s teeth. “My favorite cereal is Cinnamon Toast Crunch and my favorite color is black, then red. I’m afraid to have children because I don’t want them to suffer like I suffer, and every day for almost ten years I wake up in the morning wishing I hadn’t.” Henry swallows the eggs in his mouth before she asks, “You?”
“Um, like I said, I’m here for bulimia. It’s not uncommon among wrestlers. I guess it started in middle school—”
Amelia interrupts him. “I don’t want to know about your disorder. I want to know about you.”
He pauses to collect his thoughts, then starts again, “Okay, um, I’m nineteen. I’m an only child. I got an athletic scholarship to Northwestern and moved here from Indiana. I’m from Indiana…” He’s not sure what else to say, and the conversation lapses back into silence for him and Oklahoma! for her.
Nurse Rhonda appears, scowling at Amelia’s tray. “Just one bite of a single apple slice. Interesting. This will be charted.”
Amelia snaps at her. “Why don’t you chart Maxwell drinking six cups of coffee instead of worrying about whether or not I subject myself to this shit you people call ‘food'?” you fucking cow. Nurse Rhonda turns on Henry.
“Henry, are you encouraging this behavior?”
“No!” he says, innocent hands in the air. Choke the boy.
“Better not be. You want to get out of here, don’t you?” She gives Henry a saccharine smile as Amelia imagines what she would look like with a full beard and bat wings.
“Of course. I’ll try to be a better influence.” Strangle the boy.
“Good,” judges the nurse. “Smoking lounge is open. Free time til lunch.”
After Henry’s smoke break, they play cards and talk for hours at the table. Another meal goes by uneaten. Another cigarette beckons him. Everyone else has been gathered around the television since breakfast, glued to a Judge Judy marathon. Amelia isn’t watching but she can hear every bastardization of the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from the opposite end of the room. G G G Eb – Each repetition sears a new scar on her heart – G G G Eb – The synth orchestra butchering the four most recognizable notes ever written – G G G Eb – Profaning a composition most musicians regard as holy. Is this some sort of sick, cosmic joke? She hails a nurse.
“Can you please turn that shit off? It’s been on Court TV since I got here. If I have to hear the theme to Judge Judy one more time, I’m gonna walk over to that television and put my head through it.”
A voice comes from behind a newspaper, “Somebody already tried that.” A middle-aged black man with glasses sits on a couch facing away from the television. Amelia squints at the TV across the room and sees that it is bolted to the wall under a shield of Plexiglass. The nurse turns up her nose.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not in charge of things like the remote.”
“The remote?” an orderly pops up. A man at the counter answers him.
“Yeah, it’s gone. We already tried programming a new one but it don’t work. Can’t change the channel or volume by hand cuz of the damn Plexiglass. You seen it?”
“No,” the orderly shakes his head. “Been looking for that thing for almost a week. Disappeared! Ask Candace.”
“Candace!” he calls over his shoulder. “You seen the remote?”
A young woman joins them at the front and they unlock the latch and enter the patient area to look. “You know, I swear I saw it over here the other day…” The men dig between the couch cushions as Candace searches the floor underneath. “Startin’ to drive me nuts, too. Wish we could just unplug it. Shoulda had like an opening for the cord or something.” After all the cushions are upended, the patients fidgeting and pacing, the channel suddenly changes.
PANDEMONIUM.
The patients scream in rage and fear as G G G Eb shrugs off the TV loop and burns into Amelia’s mind. Only that: G G G Eb as if it were still playing. Lucia begins wailing in Spanish at the top of her lungs, Rosemary shouts obscenities at the bewildered orderlies, and Maxwell tickles the mute viciously. The orderlies break them up to separate some into isolation quarters. Most scurry to their rooms for safety on their own.
Amelia closes her eyes with relief at the termination of the incessant pattern, interrupted by focusing on the chaos caused by whatever benevolent force changed the channel. When she opens them, she finds the common room empty except for the man sitting on the sofa with his back to the television. She throws the cushions back onto the other couch and sighs, looking to the man comfortably reading a newspaper with the slightest hint of a smile on his face.
“How do you deal with this place? You seem normal.”
“I put myself in for medication management. Manic depression.”
“You’re bipolar?”
“No, I’m Marvin.” He closes the newspaper to shake her hand, like a perfectly sane human being. “But I do have bipolar disorder.” Person-first, of course. Why am I such an asshole?
“Amelia.”
He places the paper carefully over a bump on the cushion, then leans forward, elbow to knee. “Still getting used to the place?”
“After that shit show? Honestly, I’m just happy to be free of Judge Judy. I don’t know how you sit on that couch all day with these psychos.”
“They’re not psychos; they are human beings with sick brains. I am one of them. You are one of them. You’re in for trying to kill yourself, right? Even Maxwell wouldn’t do that.” Amelia is caught off guard. Slash out the eyes! Break the glass and put the shards IN – Put them IN the corneas! “You can’t hurt yourself here, so that’s a positive. Might as well try to relax, to appreciate this place for what it is: safe.” Snort shards of glass into my brain and shred it to pieces. “I also need a safe place to go when things go sideways.” Amelia considers the practicality of his glasses. Exploding shards in the eye – IN the cornea. He is safe from that.
“So you’re here by choice?”
“Absolutely. It’s my responsibility to myself and my loved ones to take control in my treatment, by taking my medication. I must be constantly vigilant; always on the lookout for instability. When I have big med changes, I put myself in the hospital with people who know how to help me instead of making impossible demands on my family. It causes less dis—” Amelia interrupts him.
“Sweet! Price Is Right.” Marvin goes back to reading his newspaper while Amelia zones out on the well-protected TV.
Music References
Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ - Rogers and Hammerstein
Judge Judy Theme / Symphony No. 5: Movement I - Beethoven (rolling in his grave)
“I also need a safe place to go when things go sideways.”
“So you’re here by choice?”
“Absolutely. It’s my responsibility to myself and my loved ones to take control in my treatment, by taking my medication. I must be constantly vigilant; always on the lookout for instability.”
I’m grateful I got there too … twice I was “voluntarily” committed in suicidal desperation, but the last time by choice.
Damn I wish I could have smoked during stays 2 & 3 though: the first time in uni the Quebecois still allowed smoking. Hôtel-Dieu indeed, score one for the Catholics.
Now all 🇨🇦 hospitals (all 🇨🇦 indoor spaces except homes actually) are 😱 smoke free 🤷♂️
At least nicotine patches were available.
And all my stays have been “free”, which beats the hell out of bankrupting oneself to get help. Still have to get meds and therapy fully covered though, but I’m among the very lucky with an employer benefits plan that makes meds free for us.
Keep fighting, Amelia.
Your fire is inspirational, and hopefully never again self-immolating.