Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25612295-20150325175932

They were bright – the hospital halls – and long, so that the light from every window formed stripes of color and shadow across the floor. I walked down the row of windows, taking two steps over each stripe as I passed. One, two in brightness, one, two in shadow. I brushed up against the plain, white wall that faced the windows as one of the hospital’s caregivers walked by me. He was pushing a wheelchair, in which sat a patient of no older than twenty years. I slowed down and looked over my shoulder as the pair continued on their way. In the few weeks since I had started working here, I had never seen that young patient before.

Cedar Specialist Hospital. Flanked by stringy, Pennsylvania forest on its left side and unkempt fields on its right and back, one could call the place isolated, if not for the rows of charming, colonial houses just around the road’s bend and down the hill beyond. I liked my work as a janitor there; well, at least, I liked it better than washing dishes at the diner every night, back at the town where I lived. I was so naïve. If I had kept my old job in town and never visited that place, I would still be living a peaceful life.

I was in college, studying psychology, and had been renting a nearby house with a couple of friends for the past two years. Life had been simple. Then I applied for the job at Cedar Specialist and my life was slowly turned upside-down.

Anyway – it was the young patient in the wheelchair that had caught my attention that evening. Like I said, I had never seen him before. He looked like a mannequin, with delicate, unblemished features and an expressionless face seemingly shaped out of fiberglass. He was about my age, though perhaps several times more handsome, with smooth auburn hair and deep, dark eyes. I shuddered to think how he could possibly have ended up living in a place like this. What had he done – what had happened to him – that could have changed his life so drastically? Looking more closely at the form that slowly continued down the hall, I now noticed a small curve, a dent, near the back of his head, on the left side of the skull. He had suffered some sort of accident.

Persistent vegetative state, the doctors called it. Every patient at Cedar Specialist Hospital had been diagnosed with it. Bearers of PVS are disconnected from the outside world, unable to move, communicate, or feel. None of the afflicted are completely lifeless, however. Brain activity persists, despite severe limitations, and may even change to match outside stimuli. Many people with PVS are known to groan, laugh, or even cry at random intervals. Hence the controversy that surrounds whether or not PVS victims are, in reality, trapped – still conscious – in their own bodies.

Later that day, when the sky was nearly black, I walked to the hospital’s kitchen with a cart of cleaning supplies, ready for my last job of the day. I was looking down at the slightly tilted, wooden flooring, which creaked loudly under my sneaker-clad feet, obscuring the voice of one of the younger caretakers as she called my name. Only when my cart nearly collided with her did I become suddenly aware of her presence in the dimly lit corridor.

“Oh-! Sorry Patricia,” I said.

“Hey Wesley,” she greeted, breathing out heavily, as if in relief. “Good to see you.” Her tan, slender hand was clasped around the doorknob of the basement door, which she promptly pushed shut.

“What were you doing in the basement?” I asked. “You weren’t in the boiler room, were you? The place is off limits now because of the pump failure.”

“No, I know, it was just…Alex needed me to take care of something,” Patricia explained, referring to a fellow caretaker.

“What was it?”

“Well…” Patricia looked away. “The rooms have gotten way too crowded lately, and now, with the repairs they’re making on the south wing, we’ve just run out of places to put everyone. So, yeah…Alex asked me to move one of the patients downstairs for now. Once things are back to normal, of course, he’ll be returned to the third floor.”

“That’s too bad,” I remarked. “It’s cold down there. Are you sure you can’t keep him up here in the hallway or something?”

“Alex told me to put him in the basement, so that’s where he’ll have to go,” Patricia explained. “I mean, I understand what he’s thinking; there’s tons of visitors that come in and out of here every day to see their loved ones. What would they think if they saw random patients sitting out in the hallways because we don’t have enough beds? They’d worry.”

“But isn’t it just about as bad if we’re keeping their loved ones in the basement?”

“We aren’t going to put patients with families down there,” Patricia whispered, pulling her hand off the doorknob to turn it palm-up in my direction. “Right now, it’s just Keir Eccleston. You’ve seen him before, right?”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“I don’t think so.”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“He’s one of the youngest patients, just eighteen years old. He’s got auburn hair, very pale-”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“Oh, right,” I interjected. “I remember now; I saw him just this morning.”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“I hate having to put him down there,” Patricia sighed. “But he’s one of the only patients with no immediate family. The rest of the Eccleston died from carbon monoxide poisoning, you see. They’d left a car running in their garage overnight.”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“How terrible.”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“It happened right after Keir suffered the fall that damaged his brain, in fact. This might sound crazy, but…I’ve heard tell from some other staff members that Keir was, originally, in a coma. When he woke up, he was totally conscious; it was like a medical miracle. Then he was told about the accident, that killed his family and…he ended up like this. Unresponsive.”

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“Is that even possible?” I whispered.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“Probably not.” Patricia breathed in, licking her lips. “Let’s just…forget about it, alright?” She asked.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">After finishing my conversation with Patricia, I cleaned up the kitchen and returned to the hallway. I had to go to the storage area in the basement to put away the cleaning supplies. I reopened the narrow wooden door and eased the large wheel-mounted cart down the uneven steps beyond, relying on my sense of touch to reach the basement floor. There were no light switches present until you reached the last step of the staircase.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">A bottle of disinfectant slid off of one of the metal shelves and clattered down the steps. The thudding noise it produced grew increasingly distant and uneven as I continued to follow it.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">My hand felt along the dusty, brick wall for the light switch and turned it on, illuminating two bare ceiling bulbs that hung affixed to the patchwork rafters. Below me lay the bottle, curiously upright on the dark, dirt floor. I picked it up and put it back on the cart. Then, as I looked to my left for the door to the storage closet, I noticed that it was already open. Barely visible in a weak trickle of light from the ceiling bulbs were a pair of dark brown, men’s shoes, laced up and faintly glossed. Only a moment later did I realize that those shoes were attached to a person. He was sitting, motionlessly, in the darkness of the closet.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">“Hello, Keir,” I said, smiling, as I recognized the shadowed figure across from me. Once I reached the storage area and turned on its only light switch, I realized that he was smiling back. I blinked rapidly for a moment, before reminding myself that every PVS patient has their own quirks. But the whites of his eyes were so unnervingly large, and his pupils were so dilated from hours of darkness –

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">I stepped away, staring, almost expecting Keir’s smile to fade. It did not. Rigid in his stupor, the young man remained grin-faced, with his eyes fixed on me.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">He looked at me in the same way that a little girl looks at candy.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">Displacing my aversion to Keir on Patricia’s overdramatic tale, I stepped forward again and pulled him out of the storage room by the arms of his wheelchair. I was becoming increasingly confused as to why Patricia would have left the patient in there, of all places. Firstly, I needed to use this space for my cart of supplies. Secondly, if her motive had been to hide him away, couldn’t she have at least shut the door?

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph">A/N: I hope it's alright that I'm posting unfinished work here. If not, then feel free to delete this, admins. Any advice is appreciated. (Also, Fun Times At Cedar Specialist is just a working title, in case anyone was wondering.) <ac_metadata title="Fun Times At Cedar Specialist (Unreviewed and Unfinished)"> </ac_metadata>