Bedlam

He was lying on the hospital bed with his eyes closed and arms at ease. She, who had been pacing around the barebone room for a number of hours whose record was abandoned a long time ago, could still not figure out why they were both here. To her, he seemed perfectly alright, and yet here he was - unconscious and unpredictable. She kept wishing a doctor would barge into the room and reassure her that this was all the result of something ridiculous: a deficiency, an allergy. But more than that, she wished he would wake up and look at her. So many times she gripped his hand, and each time, tears pooled in her eyes when he would not reciprocate.

After what seemed like the hundredth squeeze-and-weep, she stood up to go to the bathroom. Ever since finding herself in this situation, she had tried to limit her time away from him, which is why she was unable to search the building for a doctor or nurse who could help them out. Even when she peed, her thighs barely touched the edge of the seat.

It couldn't have been longer than a minute and a half that she was in there. When she exited, the room looked no different than when she had left it. He was still lying there in the exact same position. Except for one tiny thing, though: his eyes were wide open.

He was staring at the ceiling with the most placid expression she had ever seen him wear. Her heart leaped with pure joy. But before she could take one step closer to him, she noticed another tiny change in his condition that slammed her heart down to her knees. A scalpel where her hand had been mere moments ago. An involuntary gasp escaped her lungs, and it was then that he turned his head in her direction. Glowering straight into her eyes, it seemed as though he was warning her to stay where she was, to resist making the leap she desperately craved, and before she could so much as frame a question in her head or exclaim his name, he lifted his t-shirt, placed the instrument squarely in the center of his abdomen, and cut himself open up to his chest.

Until then, the silence in the room had raised tingles down her spine. Now, however, it was bursting with her screams of horror and utter disbelief. Her mouth was open wider than both their eyes. And yet, through the deafening noise that ought definitely to have alerted the entire building by now, he continued slicing into his skin with the methodical precision of a pathologist performing an autopsy. Quite absurdly, the first thought in her head was how there was nobody around to sew him back together. That's when she realized - she was going to have to be the one to do it.

She didn't know how to, of course, and she was terrified at the thought of killing him if she did not do it right. Instead of tending to him in those moments of unprecedented insanity that they most assuredly had not covered in their daily drills, she ran out the door. Their friends were huddled in a corner, and as soon as they caught her attention, she broke down and started to sob uncontrollably.

All their efforts at calming her down proved ineffectual, especially because they couldn't make any sense of what she was saying. First, it was her blubbering that made her incoherent, and then, it was her words. As she was in the middle of stringing together the sequence of events through panic and what she recognized as the beginnings of hysteria, she glanced over the shoulder of one of her friends and saw him walking past them - in the direction of their room. But... How was that possible? Hadn't she just left him in his bed, psychotic and bleeding to death? This time, he was not looking at her. In fact, it didn't seem like he was looking at anything at all.

Her eyes lowered from his face to his torso, and she gasped. The clothes were spotless, cleaner than she had been for a year now. There was absolutely no sign of wreckage whatsoever. Not understanding what to make of this, she trailed off in the middle of her sentence and started running towards the room. 

It was empty. The bed, the bathroom - nothing. No sign of him. And it was at that precise moment that she fell over the edge. There was crying and shrieking, so much of it, as though someone had just had their skin shred open and their body electrocuted. It stopped as abruptly as it began. The spine-tingling silence was returning, and he was holding her tight in his arms, stroking her hair, chanting over and over that he was right here. Right here. Right here!

She opened her eyes and stared, his eyes mirroring her emotions. He was the one on the verge of tears this time as several people held her down and attempted to seize the scalpel out of her death grip. She looked around her, and remembering where she was, finally let go. The last thing she remembered seeing before losing time again was his face, struck down like a tree by lightning. And she knew then, that he could not wait to take her home from this bedlam.

This story was first published in Sleep Aquarium.

Cover Picture Courtesy: Shayan Dasgupta