“Are you married?” Doctor Walden inquired. “Now that you are employed, I can actually ask that. As you know, we are colleagues and all.”
“She, uh… passed a while ago,” Gerald replied, using his carefully constructed response to such a question. He had designed it years ago to stay away from the pain.
“Ah. Well that is good, then. This place can suck up time, so to speak,” the Doctor explained, his face changing as he realized his mistake and attempted to backpedal. “Of course, I don’t mean it that…”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. So what are the current cases?” Gerald asked matter-of-factly, trying his hardest to shift the conversation.
“Good question… and a little difficult to answer here in my office,” Doctor Walden explained, a hand slowly unwinding the cellophane from his new package of cigarettes. “We should probably perform rounds and meet some of the, uh, guests we serve here. Shall we?”
“Yes sir… I am glad to have the opportunity and all, I just…” Gerald explained in a rush, hoping he did not offend the head doctor of the facility. It was hard for an ex-con to get a job, even if he did have his medical residency finished. Stupid mistakes made as a kid would take his entire adult life to fix.
“No, of course, Gerald. Curiosity is a good thing to have. It does not kill cats here at least,” the Doctor laughed heartily before it lead to a hacking cough. “My wife told me that I have to quit, but alas, I don’t have the time.”
Gerald smiled, understanding. “I was an addict myself when I was in high school, took my mom dying for me to ditch them.”
“At the time, you thought it wouldn’t catch up with you, right?”
Gerald nodded, remembering the day his mom had told him about the cancer.
“Irony, right? Death and cancer waving at you from another person’s eyes. I get it myself, although that has not reduced the amount I smoke at all. You should see my wife. Such looks of disapproval! Makes the milk curdle if it is on the counter behind me,” Dr. Walden laughed again, and again it carried over to a phlegmy cough. “Now. DR! Gerald. I should use the title in front of the staff and guests, shouldn’t I?”
Gerald smiled again, finding the old doctor’s manner pleasant even with the lung dropping coughing fits. Dr. Walden stood, grabbing a stack of clipboards from the nearby mail basket, its edges of folded plastic forming darker shadows within. Above it, a small double handled electronic device covered in ornate carvings hung from the wall, nestled within a gilded frame.
“These are the notes from the staff, updated twice a day. Part of your job is to interpret where necessary, and add your own notes for me to review. Since you and I will be working opposite shifts, your notes and my notes in these patient files is one of the primary ways we will communicate.”
“Of course,” Gerald nodded. He grabbed one of the offered clipboards from Walden’s hand and they both walked from the brightly lit office. “Is there anyone that dictates these into a computer somewhere?”
“No computers here. They don’t behave well,” Walden shrugged, leading Gerald down the hallway. “I am not sure if you have noticed, but everything here is analog. Clocks, locks, and pencils.”
Gerald thought about his time so far spent in the Bluejay Lane Memorial Hospital since his arrival. Mentally he had noted the lack of modern medical equipment and the unusual absence of the ubiquitous flat screened TVs found in so many places these days. But until it was pointed out explicitly, it didn’t register.
“Crazy huh?” Doctor Walden continued. “When I started the TVs were these massive tube monstrosities… huge! Like a TV would weigh a hundred pounds easy. Not like the little flatscreens these days. You pick them up with one hand! But even back then, with all the shielding, and all the insulation, even those big behemoths blew out. These little screens don’t stand a chance!”
“Bad wiring around here?” Gerald inquired.
“Uh, no, I don’t think so. Just the nature of the place.” Doctor Walden waved at the guard behind the multiple layers of bonded acrylic glass, and the barred prison gate buzzed open. “This right here is probably the highest tech thing we have in our little facility, and half the time, the buzzers fail. The doors get stuck in the locked position. Thankfully no fire marshal has stuck their heads in to question why our prisoners would burn to death in an emergency.”
“That sounds horrible,” Gerald grimaced.
“Yes it would be,” Doctor Walden smirked wryly.
They passed through the gates and entered the long white hallway of Section A. Gerald knew it was called that because of the full story height red letters painted on the far wall where the hallway opened into some sort of common room.
Doctor Walden continued, “This where the majority of our guests reside. We do have a Section B and C, but those wards are shut down for now. Not enough guests to fill the beds.”
“That is a bad thing?”
“It can be. So are you familiar with asymptomatic linear and nonlinear chronopathic disease?”
“I was with you up to asymptomatic…” Gerald admitted as they walked up to the first heavy metal door, inset with a glazed wire reinforced chunk of heavy acrylic glass. Behind it a young woman sat an easel painting a landscape. She appeared to be quite gifted from where Gerald was standing.
“Yes, yes… I understand that our course of study and treatment here is not well known, but as a lead physician, you will have to come up to speed quickly. First lets start with Chronopathy. Do you know what that is?”
“Time… an affliction with their sense of time?” Gerald tried.
“Yes, to an extent. Specifically, Chronopathy is a deep innate sense of time. All temporal things understand time, because we are in the flow of it. The river of time flows around us, if you will, and us with it,” Doctor Walden sounded excited to have a new listener in Gerald. “Human beings are especially prone to this sense of time. So having a disease or natural defect in that innate wiring causes a wide range of disorders on a spectrum, not unlike psychosis.”
“Interesting,” Gerald admitted as he watched the young lady make precise brushstrokes of oil on canvas. It was hypnotic almost.
“This patient is Moonstone. No last name. No documented birth record. She is one of our oldest patients… been here since the early 1970’s.”
“She doesn’t look a day over sixteen,” Gerald commented.
Doctor Walden agreed emphatically, “And she believes it is 1972. In fact, she believes it so fiercely that her body has not aged a single day since then. Her blood and marrow tests, spinal fluid and nervous system sampling all comes back with the same markers day after day for decades. She paints the same picture every day as well,” Doctor Walden sighed heavily. “We have to switch out the canvas and make every single thing the same in her room. She resets every night when she falls asleep.”
“Resets?”
“Just what it sounds like. I think Moonstone’s short term memory fails to be committed and her neural pathways reset to the morning of April 4th, 1972 every day. My predecessor believed a series of government-led drug testing resulted in her current condition, but we have no proof.”
“Every day?”
“Every day. Come, come. Next room,” Doctor Walden lead Gerald to the next door, again, inlaid with the heavy glass. “This is Bruno Viskolov, he is our chimera.”
Gerald peered into the glass to see a man sitting on a chair, watching his hands. Gerald leaned closer to get a better look, and the man grew hazy for a moment and then popped back into focus. He was no longer a man, but a small boy. In another moment, he grew hazy again and an elderly man sat stooped, ravaged by the affects of time. “What the hell?!”
“Bruno is physically manifesting within his own time stream. His corporeal and temporal forms are not aligned. We can control some of it with medication, but Bruno is clever. He is able to control his phasing to some extent, so he is able to flush anything we give him in moments. Thank god he is gentle. His adult form is very muscular and he could do some real damage during treatment.”
“My god, his right arm is that of a baby but it is attached to the body of a grown man,” Gerald exclaimed.
“That is the proof I have that he is in more control than he leads on… and why I call him our chimera. He is able to shift specific parts of his body to other points in his time stream. It is bizarre to see a grown man waddle around on baby legs, or a small child’s head attached to a muscle bound Russian. Ironically, the mental capacity is always there, and it does not affect his reasoning or emotional state. You can carry on a very lengthy complicated discussion with Bruno in the form of a baby and he will sound like the thirty eight year old he is. He is quite intelligent; loves to read.”
Doctor Walden strolled languidly on to the next door, as if surveying a sparse bookcase at the local library.
“… And this guest is our most recent addition and happens to be the star of the ward. Our very own Thomas Mayweather, a real bonafide Chronopath.”
“Chronopath?” Gerald raised his eyebrow.
“Colloquially known as a Time Traveler. The irony is he believes he is a scientist.”
“Why is that ironic?”
“Because, Mr. Mayweather here believes that he created a time machine to travel through time. When in reality, he didn’t use a machine at all. He is a Chronopath… he can travel through time, and space for that matter, at will. He just doesn’t believe it. He is so wrapped up in his delusion of being a mad scientist, that he is effectively stuck. He could literally pop out of here anytime he wanted, if would only accept the truth.”
Gerald nodded, trying to mentally accept the possibility of someone being able to travel through time anytime they wanted. It sounded like hogwash… but after seeing Bruno next door, his capability to accept the impossible seemed to have increased in a short amount of time. “So, where is his machine?”
“It’s in my office actually. I hung it on the wall.”
“Ah. I saw that,” Gerald recalled. “I wondered what it was.”
“Yes, it is a Time Machine,” Doctor Walden used air quotes. “Covered in dials and buttons and all sorts of other lights and batteries… all of it just a focal point for Mr. Mayweather to pour his mental energy into… and BAM!” Doctor Walden slapped his palm, “He is fifty years in the past to get caught by police for breaking and entering into a private residence, foolishly claimed he was a time traveler, and consequently, becoming our guest here.”
“Wait… he actually is from the future?”
“Yes, as far as I can tell medically. Higher amount of radio isotopes in his body. Some form of a nuclear event must occur between now and then… I rather not think about it. Quite well mentally, except for the delusion, of course.”
“You think he came back to avert a disaster or something?” Gerald tried.
“He won’t tell us. Claims he would corrupt the past or something silly like that. Very emphatic about it.”
Gerald looked in to see a mousy brown-haired man strapped to a bed, drooling.
“Drugged and restrained,” Doctor Walden observed. “Thorazine, if you were curious.”
“I wasn’t,” Gerald said, watching the mad scientist roll his head over sleepily.
“He is very agitated when he is not drugged. We keep him sedated for his own protection,” Doctor Walden concluded.
“Of course.”
“I have thought about it often, actually… what I would do if I could travel anywhere and anytime. The possibilities are endless right?” Doctor Walden mused.
Gerald thought of Mara and the night that led him to prison. “Yeah… I could think of a few things.”
“Well don’t. Not healthy to feed their delusions,” Doctor Walden replied as if he was closing a book. He turned on his heel and headed back the way they had come. “Let’s head to the Nurse’s station and I will introduce you.”
Gerald mentally filed it away anyway. Something to think about. The life he had built was a life, but it wasn’t the same life he could have had with Mara. He took one last lingering look into the Chronopath’s cell, and followed Doctor Walden with his mind swirling with all the potential futures and pasts.
All he had to do was be patient. And with a grin, he realized that here, he had all the time he would ever need to think it through.