The room is devoid of any colour, only white. It is the white of something that has been scrubbed obsessively, repeatedly until the surface forgets what colour it started with. The walls are white, the ceiling to which I have been opening my eyes to for the last nineteen days is white.
The room is minimalistic with nothing apart from the desk, the chair bolted to the floor and the bed I am currently lying in. According to them, nothing can be left unfastened as it will give me a chance to harm myself or someoen else, as if I wouldn't be able to without it. The walls are bare apart from the only window on the east wall, that also is frosted. I can see the light but can't see outside, as if giving me only the concept of outside not the freedom to actually see anything. The smell of antiseptic is lingering around. It has been like this for the last nineteen days, nineteen days of a concept of calm and peace in the hell that has taken over my world.
I only know the exact days because I have been marking them on the underside of the mattress where orderlies don't usually check. I have scratched small lines in groups of five with the corner of my thumbnail, the only sharp thing they've left me.
I find this funny, in the way that things are funny when you've been awake for most of four nights running and your sense of humour has started eating itself. I find this funny because the scratching is exactly what I documented on the walls of a decommissioned asylum in rural Tennessee three years ago, and I wrote in my case notes that it was a sign of deteriorating psychological coherence in the long-term isolated patient.
Look at me now, a case study in brewing. Primary source material.
My eyes feel heavey and they have started to sting in a way they do when you haven't slept for many many days and for the past nineteen days, I have barely slept even when the lights were turned off I couldn't close my eyes. For the past nineteen nights, I have been wide awake, staring at the white ceiling that still loooked white even in the dark as he stood at the foot of my bed. I have been staying very still as the ghost of Daniel stood at my feet, water dripping from him, opening and closing his mouth yet I can't hear a single thing he wants to tell me.
It was an accident, they say but I do not believe that and I will make hell on Earth for whoever is responsible.
I can hear someone approaching, I close my eyes. I know who this is even before the door opens. I do not move or look at her, Dr. Mellissa.
"Hello Mae! How are doing?" She asks in her usuall happy tone, smiling ear to ear just like I would do with patients. I finally open my eyes and see a staff following behind her with a chair. Dr. Mellissa sits across the table. The lady staff comes towards me carefully expecting a fight but I do not have the strength today so I sit up and walk myself to the chair that is bolted to the floor.
"Hello Doctor!", She looks surprised by my compliance today because for the past day that I have been here, I have only struggled and fough to get out of here whenever someone came. But today I am willing to put my case in front in need of any help regarding the dreams.
"I would prefer you call me Doctor too Dr. Mellissa." As I hold a doctorate in clinical psychology from Johns Hopkins and a secondary qualification in forensic psychiatry from a programme that officially doesn't offer secondary qualifications but makes exceptions.
"That's quiet right." Dr. Mellissa chukled.
"I know what you are doing right there." I know because over the years I have done this with several patients, several criminals or potential criminals.
"My sense of identity is intact Doctor." She tilts her head, still keeping the professional smile that we all psychologists are required to keep.
"I am Mae Lilliana Crow, 34 years and I hold a classified operative designation in NICRO, a bureau that does not appear in any government directory you would have access to, a department that works somewhere as psychological research and threat assessment. Anyone who is cleared to know more, almost no one is, would learn that the bureau operates at an intersection that most institutions refuse to acknowledge exists: the space between documented psychological phenomena and the things that happen in the field that do not fit neatly into documented psychological phenomena." I keep rambling on.
We investigate, in other words, the things that shouldn't be there. Sometimes those things are human. Terrorist cells with psychological conditioning programmes, cults with genuine neurological methodologies, state-sponsored experiments in perception manipulation. Its the kind of work that requires both a research degree and the ability to put a man on the ground and walk out of the room without looking back. Sometimes the things we investigate are less definitively human, which is a sentence I was trained not to write in official reports and which I have written several times in my head because there is nothing else to do in a white room at three in the morning.
"I speak four languages with fluency, two more with workable competence. I can field-strip a Glock 19 in under thirty seconds in the dark, which I demonstrated to my evaluators at twenty-two with something that my training supervisor called worrying enthusiasm. I have conducted forty-seven field investigations over eleven years, seven of which involved what our internal documentation refers to as category-adjacent phenomena and what I refer to, in the privacy of my own skull, as things that should not have been possible and were anyway." I have revised all this many many times in my head fearing I was scared I would lose the only thing that mattered in my life, the things I am good at, Am I anymore?
I have a personnel file that is largely complimentary and partially redacted, including a section on psychological resilience under extreme operational stress that rated me as exceptional.
That section, I imagine, has been annotated since. I imagine the annotation is not complimentary.
"That is good to hear." Dr. Mellissa says finally, putting both elbows on table, she leans forward, "Do you know why you are here Dr. Crow?"
How can I not know when every night, Daniel stands at my foot, soaking wet, trying to tell me something that I cannot hear.
"Do you think I wouldn't?" Dr. Mellissa is taken aback at my curt response. I know I should at least act a little professional after rejecting to talk to her for the past nineteen days. But I am tired and I am talking to her right now because I want to get out of here, by any means.
It all happened three months ago, or was it four months and nineteen days, I am losing the thread a little at the edges.
"Me and Daniel….Dr. Daniel Reed were conducting a routine investigation in a farmhouse outside of Tillamook, Oregon."
"What were you working on?" Dr. Mellissa attentively looks at me.
"The case was, by our bureau's standards, genuinely routine: a report of anomalous audio phenomena from a property with a history of occupation by a fringe research group, long since dissolved, who had used the basement for purposes our bureau wanted documented before the property transferred to a private buyer." I take a long breath. Dr. Mellissa waits for me to say further, to continue recounting the tragedy that has left me in state that is not so normal or functioning. I lean back and look up at the white ceiling. I have repeatedly lived the event over and over in the past days looking at this white ceiling. I have imagined how heavey of a feeling it would be if I finally spoke to the psychologist, recounting, reproccessing my trauma. But now as I finally do it, it does not feel that heavey or traumatic from the perspective of the person sitting opposite to me.
I had catalogued a hundred basements. I had catalogued the belongings of dissolved research groups in nine states. I knew the smell of old damp and old fear and old ambition gone to mould, and I was not concerned.
"It had been raining for three days and when we arrived at the facility, the basement was flooded. I was to go first but Daniel went ahead." Everything is very clear as if it was yeaterday.
"Daniel went first, as he always did, because he was six feet two and had the longer legs and the better flashlight…" and because we had an unspoken arrangement built over six years of partnership that had nothing to do with protocol and everything to do with the way two people calibrate to each other without discussing it.
"I was on the stairs when it all went down." I exhale, but my eyes are not teary. Over the past months, along with my sleep I have lost tears as well. I can see it all going down, like a movie playing repeatedly on the white ceiling, and the sound…the sound is still ringing in my ears. It hasn't left since. Always there… a high-ptched static.
"The ceiling of the basement came down in three sections. Daniel was under the second section. The third section came down on the stairs while I was on them, and I was thrown back into the doorway and sustained a fractured radius and a head laceration that required eleven stitches.." and I lay in the rain outside the farmhouse for forty minutes before emergency services arrived, and when they arrived they found me sitting up and trying to call Daniel's phone because I could hear it ringing somewhere under the rubble and I thought if I could hear the phone then he was near the phone and if he was near the phone then possibly he was ….he was not there at all.
I feel the air being sucked out of my lungs as I gasp trying to keep some in, my breathing getting shalower.
"Are you okay?" Dr. Mellissa stands up, being concerned. "I need you to look at me, Dr. Crow." I do, her image slowly coming into vision, blurry at first. I know how to ground myself, I have been doing this with my patients for may years. I know how to.
The circumstances were mundane and cruel. There was no foul play, no concealed explosive, no deliberate engineering. The building was very old and the ground was very wet and the load-bearing support had compromised over decades of neglect. An accident, by every metric available to the investigation team who spent three weeks going over the ruins, and I know…I know … they were thorough because I reviewed their methodology and their findings while I was still in the hospital and my assessment was that they had done the work correctly.