Meltdown: Chapter Three

*originally published on Medium*

The room is illuminated only by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. I’m so cold, lines of sharp and cold crossing to hold me down to the chair beneath me. There is a table in front of me, familiar, like in the room where doctors with no faces ask me questions with no answers, but the room is not white. It is not bright. It is not sanitized. The air tastes thick, as if it has already been breathed a hundred times.

A man appears in front of me.

“What are you doing, Tasia?”

Is he talking to me?

“Natalie,” I say. “My name is Natalie.”

He slams his palms into the table and leans forward. The single lightbulb illuminates his face and a name drifts to the surface of my mind. Abner. His eyes are brown and placid, but his beard trembles with fury.

“This has to stop!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice shakes. I am still wearing my white hospital gown and I have no idea how I got here. “Where am I?”

“You can’t keep on like this. You have to come out of it.” He straightens and runs long fingers through his dark beard. “You have to find her.”

He stands up and walks backwards away from me. A mirror appears, blocking him from my sight, spanning the room. Lights blink on above me, flooding the room with harsh, blue-white light. I shield my eyes against the glare. When I open them again, I see a girl in front of me. She is wearing a white hospital gown. Behind her are the gray walls of a room lit with blue light. She stands out. She is not gray or white or blue. Her green eyes are startling in her gaunt brown face, a face marked with dark and textured acne scars. Metallic hair rolls away from her face in intense, wild, curls. She is efficiently built, like someone was making a person out of the least possible material. I look at her, and she looks back. I look down at my hands, and they are the color of her face, the bare skin of my wrist glowing warm brown under the cold light. In the mirror, she digs dirty fingernails into her bare flesh and tears away a thin layer of skin. Underneath is a network of scars, lined and bubbled, and the purple dot matrix tattoo. I look at my own arm. I can see the thin seam of false skin. I peel it away, and it stings. I have the same tattoo, the same randomized sequence of dark purple blocks, encoding my destiny. My arm, marked with my place in the world.

The mirror image spins, swims, in my vision. I am dizzy and sick. Everything in me is screaming no. No, don’t let her fool you. No, don’t let her win.

“I am not you.”

My words bounce and echo around the room. She is not listening. I slap the mirror with my open palms. “Hey! Get out of my head! I’m not you!”

She turns away from me in the reflection, her indefinite hair shifting colors in the light. Brown, black, gold, bronze, blue, purple. My eyes hurt from the colors, as if she exists outside the spectrum of human vision.

“Hey!” I pound on the glass again, and it begins to crack. Between the cracks, I see glimpses of something. My eyes run over and over it, my mind unable to put a name to what I’m looking at. Light, brighter than I have ever seen, so bright it stings. Green plants growing from the dirt, tall and wild and strange. No roof, no dome, no walls anywhere, nothing. Just blue, far above me. Blue itself. A ceiling made of the pure concept of color. It’s a blue unlike anything, not the flat blue of paint or the dim blue of lights. It’s dizzying, as incomprehensible as the colors in the ghost’s hair. Blue enough that tears prick my eyes from the pain of it.

A door slams closed across my mind. The vision is gone. As badly as the light and intensity hurt to look at, it hurts much worse to have them taken away.

“Give it back,” I beg. “Please. Let me go back there. I want to see it again.”

All I see is the mirror, spiderwebbed with cracks. The girl inside is furious now, her hair all smoke and flame, terrifying as the cracks split her into a thousand fractured echos of herself. She flies toward me, teeth like exposed bone behind snarling lips. I stumble back as she shatters through the mirror, glass exploding around us in a silvery shower. She cracks into me and wraps her hands around my throat. My head splinters against the ground.

“Get out!” She screams. “Murderer! Get out!”

↠

I gasp for air, and the air is clean and empty. I’m on my back, staring up at the pockmarked ceiling of my room in the hospital. I can’t stop shaking. My face is wet with sweat and tears.

Never again. I never want to feel like this again. I never want to see anything like what I just saw again. I feel it, every word, every sensation. My fists hurt from pounding on the glass. My body throbs with the pain of falling. I roll over to try to stand, but I’m too weak. The most I can do is curl in on myself like a baby. What hurts the most, more than my pounding head or the cold engulfing me, is the hollowness inside. All I have, all I know, are echoes of someone else’s life. Someone who doesn’t want me there. I have no longings, no heartbreaks, no past, no future.

I look down at my wrist, looking for the tattoo she showed me. It’s a blank, the same light brown of my skin, but not skin. Artificial edges, taped down. A bandage. I don’t remember what it’s protecting, what I might be healing from.

A nurse finds me there hours later. She doesn’t ask me if I’m hurt, or what happened. She just throws a robe over my sweaty body.

“I’ll call the doctor,” she says, and then she leaves me there.

It feels wrong, the way Dr. Wu comes in and examines me brusquely, without saying a word. His hands are cold. I don’t remember what life is supposed to be, but I can’t help thinking this isn’t it. Another nurse puts another needle in my arm. At least it warms me up, or maybe just numbs me to the cold. My eyes are heavy.

↠

“They can’t possibly still think she’s a candidate,” someone says. It must be the doctor. Whether it’s one that works on my bruised body or one that works on my broken mind, it makes no difference.

“It’s too soon to tell.”

“I think it’s been long enough that it’s clear to all of us, she’s not getting any better. She’s a drug addict with amnesia.”

“Still, she’s alive.”

“Is that all it takes? We used to have a whole process. We used to — “

“Things are different now. Just keep her sedated. I’ll talk to him.”

↠

Consciousness splashes over me and I try to open my eyes. They won’t unstick. I’m babbling out loud, in the clinic. I’m saying words I don’t understand, lists of names and places. I imagine the doctor stands over me, watching me.

“What is she talking about?” The nurse asks him, nervously.

“She’s delirious.” In my mind, the doctor turns and fiddles with the IV bag. “Let’s up her sedative and — ”

“Stop!”

The clinic door bangs open, the loudest sound I have heard since my own scream, the day I attacked the doctor who showed me the flashcard with the picture of the ghost’s mother. I open my eyes. Dr. Rhinehardt rushes inside, slightly out of breath. I have never seen any of them like this.

“She’s not delirious,” he says, shoving a tab under Dr. Wu’s nose. “She’s dreaming.”

Silently, the doctor scrolls through whatever is on the screen. After a long time, he says,

“I can’t believe it.”

Dr. Rhinehardt nods. “It’s working.”

The doctor turns back to me, slowly.

Close your eyes, the ghost hisses in my ear. Don’t let them know you can hear them.

“What next?” The doctor asks.

“Wean her off that drip,” Dr. Rhinehardt says. “I need to talk to her.”

↠

Dr. Rhinehardt is looking at me differently today. Kindly.

“Hello, Natalie,” he says, with an unfamiliar warmth in his voice. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine.” I chew on my lip. It’s dry and rough. Dr. Reinhardt’s office is clean, barely furnished. My padded socks rub against the stiff fabric of the armchair, my legs curled up under me. It’s hard to focus on what he’s saying over the swish, swish.

“We should talk about what happened.” He sets the tablet down and leans forward. “Can you tell me what exactly led to you overdosing on your medication?”

My thumb rubs over and over a rough spot on my cuticle, scratching, looking for an edge to tug at. My socks are still making that swish as my feet shake and jiggle. How can he hear himself think?

“Natalie?” He prompts.

“Aren’t you the brain doctor? Aren’t you supposed to stop crazy people from doing crazy things?” Blood rushes into my cheeks as soon as the words are out. I don’t like how I sound. Too direct. Too confrontational. Too much like her. I find the edge of the cuticle and rip into it.

“That’s not what I’m here for, Natalie.” Dr. Rhinehardt is measured and patient as always. “Yes, it’s true that I am monitoring your condition. But the fact is that I have many patients, and I can’t predict what any of you may do. I am here to provide the help that you ask for. Not to guess what you need.”

I don’t look at him. The dome of my thumbnail is dented in places, an imperfect curve. I peel back more skin.

He sighs. “I regret not realizing what was happening. What you did was very dangerous. You could have died.”

Would that have been so different? Would you even have noticed? I move my feet on purpose, trying to drown out those thoughts with swishing.

“I can assure you, Natalie, we would all have cared a great deal if you died.” Dr. Rhinehardt says.

My eyes snap to his face and for one heart-stopping second, I’m sure he can read my thoughts.

Dr. Rhinehardt makes a note on his clipboard. “When you were recovering, I noticed you were having a lot of strange dreams. Do you think you’re remembering?”

I pick at the skin.

Don’t tell him anything, the ghost says.

But there’s no point in lying. He’s here to help me. “No,” I say. “It’s this other… voice. This other person. I have some of her memories. Her life is strange. Nothing like life here.”

“But, Natalie, you do know that you didn’t always live here.”

“I know, but I don’t remember.”

Dr. Rhinehardt purses his lips, thinking. “Maybe it would be helpful if you could articulate some of these delusions to me. Tell me about this other person.”

There is something distinctly uncomfortable about this idea. I shift in my seat. I can’t imagine telling Dr. Rhinehardt about my struggle to remain myself, the feeling of invasion by this other mind, the fear of my own insanity. The guilt that crushes me.

He looks thoughtful. “I think it will be good for your treatment if you can say these things out loud, Natalie. Sometimes expressing our fears can take away their power.”

My teeth catch on the sharp edges of my lips. Maybe the more I resist talking about it, the more control I’m giving the ghost. My tongue flicks over my lower lip before I work it between my teeth.

“I don’t know when it started,” I say, finally. “When I got here, maybe. Maybe before. But I hear this other voice. There’s another person in my mind.”

Dr. Rhinehardt doesn’t take notes. He just nods, listening.

“She’s angry all the time. She wants me to fight. Or maybe she wants to kill me. I think…” I catch a piece of skin between my teeth, the pain making my mouth water. “I remember her dying. She fell. I think she’s a ghost.”

Dr. Rhinehardt leans forward slightly. “And you have her memories?”

I tug on the sleeves of the gray sweater I’m wearing over my hospital gown, trying to hide my sore and scabbed fingers from myself. “They’re like dreams. I see them when I take my medicine, or when I’m sedated. But they’re jumbled. I usually have no control over what I see. Sometimes she’s a little girl.”

“So you usually have no control. Does that mean there are times when you do have control?”

“Just these last few times. I was more… aware. More myself. I’m inside her head in the memories, but if I remember that I’m still me, I can make them change. I can see different things.” A creeping feeling at the back of my neck tells me the ghost is here, listening to me betray her secrets. I don’t owe you anything, I tell her, angrily. Still, I feel her panic. I lick at the fresh blood I’ve drawn from my lower lip. It tastes like tears.

Dr. Rhinehardt sits back and takes a few notes on his tablet. After an unbearably long silence, he leans over and presses the intercom.

“Nurse, start prep on a B118.”

What the spuzz does that mean? The ghost is visible now, pacing in front of me, but I’m numb.

“I think you have more potential than you know, Natalie. And I’m going to prove it to you.” Dr. Rhinehardt sets his notes aside. “My treatments are unconventional, but they get results.”

He reaches into the pocket of his lab coat and hands me a small notebook, and a soft-tipped marker. “Do me a favor tonight, and write down anything you remember, or dream. Can you do that for me?”

I take the notebook. It feels strangely good to have something, some object, that isn’t white or gray or blue. Something to belong to me. I fiddle with the solid weight of the pen, and he doesn’t take it away from me when I get up to leave.

Stab him with it and run! The ghost yells at me. I ignore her. I will do what he asks.

↠

What I see that night is a room full of people, silent, waiting for a man to speak. It’s a man I’ve seen before, in the ghost’s memories. This was the day she saw him for the first time, when the green-haired boy with the black eyes and the warm hands persuaded her to go. Niko, she called him. Niko pointed out the man they’d come to see.

“There he is. Abner Robledo.”

He was normal, pleasant-looking, not at all the imposing figure of revolution she had imagined. This is the guy? This is who we’re pinning our hopes on? She was disappointed. I can taste it, slightly bitter. He looks like he ought to be teaching Earth History, or running a soup kitchen.

Then he started to talk.

“Friends,” he said, and his voice was warm and hypnotic. “I can’t tell you what joy it brings to my heart to see you all assembled here tonight. To know that I am not alone in this fight — that we are not alone. It is truly an honor.” He bowed his head slightly and cleared his throat before continuing. “I know that all of you are here for one reason: because you believe that the system is corrupt. It is irreversibly broken. The men and women leading our city are greedy. They are selfish. They will not hesitate to exploit every one of us for their own profit.”

An angry murmur of agreement rippled through the room.

“ProsCo controls everything in Omega. They tell us that resources are dwindling, that we’re running at a loss. That we all have to accept our pay cuts, and the rationing, and the brutality of their security, for our own good. But in their inner circle, they turn food into prosthetic faces, breast implants, hair extensions, shoes. And out here, on the outskirts, our children go to bed hungry every night.” Abner’s kind face was lined with pain. He looked into the faces of each person in the room. “Does that seem right to you?”

The room was silent. There were no words.

“Last year, I led a protest in front of ProsCo,” Abner said. “My friends and I just wanted to start a conversation. We protested with signs and words. And how were we greeted? With guns. With gas bombs. With beatings. Security murdered six of us in cold blood, as we passively resisted. I spent eight months in prison for that protest. And why? Because we dared to speak up against the meat machine that victimizes people like you and me. Does that seem right?”

“No.” The room echoed with people beginning to stir.

“Hundreds of children die each year, in Indigo alone, of starvation and easily-cured illnesses. All because they claim that the resources don’t exist to provide us the food and medicine we need, and yet last year councilman Harrow had a lifesize statue of himself synthesized for the porch of his enormous home in Founder’s Circle. Does that seem right to you?” Abner’s voice never rose above the gentle hum of conversation, but the anger bubbling inside him was almost tangible.

The people in the room, though, were anything but quiet. Chairs scraped as people bolted to their feet, propelled by anxious frustration. I can feel the way the rage rose in the ghost, as well.

“And people like you and I are letting it happen. We aren’t stopping them. We’ve let ourselves be seduced by the siren song of ‘the balance.’ We’re blinded by their propaganda, believing the lie that we deserve everything we get. That we only deserve what we get. We’ve gone numb to the plight of our neighbors. We’ve been blinded by tribalism, and around us, children are dying. Our children are dying. Does that seem right to you?”

The room erupted. Men climbed onto chairs, calling for a march on Founder’s Circle. Women shouted, screamed. Beside the ghost, Niko’s warm hands tightened into burning fists. Her own smoldering rage was resolving itself into something real, something solid and hot. Something to start a fire with.

“Will you help us?” Abner asks, quietly, holding his hands out.

I will help. She had to help. She knew what she had to do.

She waited for the people to filter out, then made her way over to Abner.

“Niko.” He smiled and took his hand. “Good to see you. Thank you for coming.”

Niko nodded. “Abner, this is Tasia. I think she can help.”

…

As soon as I wake up, I start writing. My hand shakes a little but I make the letters as tidy as possible. I write down everything, the rantings of the man and the things the crowd yelled and the way I lost myself at the end, so caught up by emotion that I dissolved into the memory. By the time I’m finished writing, I’m exhausted. I lay back on the bed and close my eyes. Blissfully, I sleep this time, with no dreams at all.

In the morning, a nurse brings me a tray. I eat my rations quickly and then open the notebook, eager to review my notes before meeting Dr. Rhinehardt.

My heart drops. The pages are solid black, covered in scribbles and scratches. The memory has already started to fade and I can’t hold onto its edges.

Frantically, I flip through the pages I wrote, hoping for something, just a few words to jog my memory. There is nothing but scratches and blocks of ink. The first blank page has a message scribbled on it.

Don’t tell them anything.

My mind races. I don’t know how, but the ghost is physical. She is affecting my real life. Chills run through me at the thought. Despair clutches at the edges of my sanity. Everything felt so different yesterday, when I believed Dr. Rhinehardt could actually help me. And now I’ve failed to do the one thing he asked of me.

Tears of frustration prick at my eyelids and I throw the book across the room. Useless, useless, useless. I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes.

The nurse comes to lead me to Dr. Rhinehardt’s office. I carry the notebook with me. I did my best to write down what I remember, but it’s a pathetic imitation of what I knew last night. Still, maybe Dr. Rhinehardt can help me figure out why this is happening, how the ghost is becoming real.

I sit down in the oversized chair and clutch the notebook anxiously. Dr. Rhinehardt is drinking a cup of tea.

“How are you today, Natalie?” he asks.

“It didn’t work,” I blurt. I hold the notebook out.

He doesn’t reach for it. “I know,” he says. “Let me show you something.” He sets his tea down and picks his tablet up. Then he does something none of them have ever done before. He crosses the room to stand beside me, and shows me the screen.

“After your overdose, we decided to switch on the surveillance cameras in your room.” He pulls up a video. I can see the nondescript walls of a cell. A bald figure is lying in the bed. Their body is thin and wasted, and it’s hard to tell if it’s a man or a woman, a child or an adult. They kick the blankets off at night like I do.

He hits fast-forward, and I watch them wake up in exaggerated speed. They stretch, and rub one hand over their stubbled scalp. They reach for my notebook and begin to write.

They keep writing and writing, filling up pages. When they finish, they lie back and close their eyes. Dr. Rhinehardt keeps playing. I watch the corner of the room, waiting for the ghost. My heart thumps wildly. Where is she?

Movement catches my eye and Dr. Rhinehardt slows the video. The figure in the bed gets up and picks up the notebook. They uncap the pen and start methodically scribbling, scratching over and over until the paper is torn in places, and every word is obliterated. Then they write a note and close the book. They stand on the bed and lean up, way up, on their toes. Up close, the face looks feminine, despite the shaved head and shapeless form. The picture is black and white, but I can tell her eyes are lighter than her skin. There are darker spots on her face. Scars. She might have been a little bit pretty once, but now she’s only angry and broken.

“I know you’re watching,” she says, in a voice a little deeper and a lot more threatening than mine. “She’s not going to tell you anything. I won’t let her.”

I’m shaking. I can’t help it. That’s me. I don’t recognize myself, but I know that it’s me, in that video, talking to the camera. Talking about myself like I’m someone else. Like I’m two people.

“I’m possessed,” I whisper. My skin prickles with pins and needles and the hair on my arms stands straight up. I run my palms over the stubble that covers my head.

Dr. Rhinehardt turns the tablet off and stands over me. “No,” he says. “You aren’t possessed.” He returns to his chair and sits looking at me for a few moments, his tented fingers resting against his pursed lips. “Dr. Wu, Dr. Abernathy, and myself, had a conference last night about you. We discussed all the possibilities of your case. After seeing this — ” he taps the tablet. “My suspicions are confirmed. Natalie, you have been in a fugue state. This fugue state is the result of dissociative identity disorder, most likely brought on by trauma. We see it in many cases of abused children. Some minds simply cannot tolerate the strain of severe abuse, and so they retreat and create a stronger alter-ego who can, in a sense, ‘protect’ the fragile core personality from the trauma.”

I stare at him, trying to keep up with what he’s saying. “Are you telling me that… I am her? She’s me? Everything I’m seeing… those are my real memories?”

“Yes and no.” Dr. Rhinehardt picks up his tea. “Large parts of her memory and experiences are fabricated. They’re part of the mind’s way of making her feel real to you. So you can call her up when you need her, to protect you.”

“I don’t want her! I don’t need protection!” My lungs burn. No. No. This can’t be true.

“You need protection now more than ever.” Dr. Rhinehardt smiles sadly. “This fabricated identity is protecting you from yourself, Natalie. From your real memories.”

“Why?” I almost choke on the word.

“Because your core personality can’t handle the truth of what you’ve done.” Dr. Rhinehardt sighs. “It’s something that’s puzzled all of us since you arrived here. With the exception of the incident with Dr. Abernathy, you’ve never shown violent tendencies. Yet it was an act of extreme violence that got you sent here. Now we understand: it was your other personality who…” he trailed off.

My heart is thumping against my ribs, pumping dread through my veins. “Who what?” I dig my fingernails into my palms. “What did I do?”

Dr. Rhinehardt shakes his head. “If your mind is protecting you, it must be for a reason,” he says. “I don’t want to risk causing another break by shocking your system.”

“Please.” My whole body is vibrating. “I need to know.”

Dr. Rhinehardt looks at me for a long time. “No.” He shakes his head. “We need to help you remember on your own.”

Tears are coursing down my face. “How am I supposed to do that, when I have a whole other personality inside my head who’s determined not to let me remember anything?”

“You are still in charge, Natalie.” Dr. Rhinehardt leans forward, his voice calm. “You are the core personality. Ultimately, your other personalities are subordinate to you.”

“Personalities?” I choke back hysteria. “There are more than one?”

Dr. Rhinehardt frowns. “I’m not sure. Usually in cases this advanced, we’ll find more than one. However, your alternate personality seems unusually well-developed, so it could be that your mind simply delved into creating one incredibly rich identity, rather than multiple personalities.”

I cover my face with my hands. “I don’t know what’s real.” My whole body heaves and jerks with the sobs that overtake me.

“We can help you.”

I raise my head. “How?”

“Do you remember those unconventional methods I mentioned yesterday?” He regards me thoughtfully. “Your treatment is ready. I think it’s time to begin.”