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It’s dark in the hospital, and Brett’s watching television. He doesn’t want to get up to change the channel, so it’s just an infomercial, but that’s ok. He’s still being entertained.
Besides, anything’s better than being alone with his thoughts in this place. There are things he likes to ignore, has to ignore, really, and that can be very difficult to do when there’s nothing to distract him.
This job is nice, it really is. Easy. Margaret, the nurse, has most everything under control, so he can usually just relax. Give a few injections, maybe a suppository if it’s a good day. Sleep with the patients if they’re hot. Write reports, though he isn’t good at those.
Late at night, though, it can get to him, working in such a bleak place. Most people who enter never leave. Sometimes, alone in the dark lounge, he can imagine that they’re all still here. Spilling out of the rooms, crowding the hallways, talking and screaming and crying.
He used to tell Margaret when he felt like that. That was way back, though, when he first got here. Now he wouldn’t dare. The look she gives him when he mentions anything even remotely out of the ordinary… it’s not something he likes to see. If he can avoid it, no matter how afraid he is, he does.
Tonight is one of those nights. Every little noise gives him the heebie-jeebies. Must be because the hospital is empty– the last patient in their most recent drug trial died yesterday, and they don’t get a new batch in until this weekend. Margaret was here somewhere, but she’d only make things worse.
Brett stands up, decides maybe a walk will help. It will ground him, remind him that he’s real, or at least that’s what he tells himself.
He walks in a carefully curated loop through the hospital, avoiding certain places like the plague. The second floor bathroom, for one. Nasty place. Not somewhere to visit alone, in his opinion. Exam Room One, on the third floor– that was where he’d found his first suicide. Even though the hospital wasn’t a loony bin anymore, it wasn’t uncommon for patients to kill themselves, especially if they were on some of the rougher drugs. Hallucinogens and all that. And of course, the little room.
Brett found the little room by mistake some years ago. It must have been in his first few months at the hospital, fresh out of residency and still excited about medicine. It was well hidden, a small, discrete door inside one of the last rooms on the hall, way up on the fifth floor. He’d been looking for something, a patient’s iPod maybe, and the door had caught his eye. He’d done a double take: had it always been there? Had he just never noticed it before? It didn’t matter. He’d seen it and he’d needed to open it and he did, silly, silly Brett.
Now he spends most days pretending he didn’t know what was in that room.
Now he spends most days avoiding the fifth floor altogether.
Brett walks, footfalls on the freshly waxed floor the only sound. He sometimes listens to music, but when he’s in one of these moods, he finds that music only makes him more paranoid. He likes being able to hear everything. It’s reassuring.
He passes a window, looks out to see the cloudy sky. Probably will rain tomorrow. Hm. Maybe he’ll go out, see if he can get a date or something. The hospital on rainy days can be quite bleak. It’s been harder though, lately. He can feel the hospital clinging to him even when he leaves. His only real friends now are those who also work in medicine, especially those that have been to this hospital. Others… it’s hard to relate to them. He can’t have normal conversations anymore.
And then there was Margaret. He couldn’t really call her a friend, could he. He wanted to, sometimes, but he was afraid of her too, and he was almost certain she hated him. He wasn’t even sure why. Probably the hospital getting to her.
They’d hooked up a few times early on, before Brett had realized certain things about her. For one, she was gay– he was almost sure of it. He saw how she looked at female patients, how she touched them. Lingering just a bit longer than needed. Nothing untoward, no, that was his department, but still. Repressed to within an inch of her life, but gay nonetheless.
The dealbreaker for Brett wasn’t that, though. If she wanted to pretend to like men he was happy to help. But his real concern was the amount of time she spent on the fifth floor. The fifth floor, home of the room that he tried so hard to never, ever think about. Sometimes when he touched her, even just small things like reaching over to grab a paper, he could feel it on her, the fear and the something that was so uniquely of the little room. Because where else could she be going? They never had patients on the fifth floor. Brett forbade it.
Brett’s nearly done with his round, walking past the empty dining room. He considers going into the office, doing something productive like checking his email or brushing up on the incoming patient’s medical records, but decides against it. People don’t usually expect that kind of thing from him anyway.
He decides to sleep. He has a bed here, but the room scares him, not that he’d admit that. More often than not he sleeps in the lounge on the tiny little couch, all folded up into himself. Tonight is no exception.
Brett dreams, just like he always does in the hospital. Dark things. Some of it is to be expected as a cancer doctor: dreams of patients dying, surgeries gone wrong, grieving parents and partners and children. But some of it is unique. Dreams of mirrors and bathtubs and innocent little doors behind which terrors lie.
Brett wakes early, a crick in his neck from the uncomfortable couch. Weak sunlight slants in from the windows. For a moment, he swears he’s not alone in the room, but it passes quickly.
He stands up, stretches. Another day at the hospital, just like all the others. Better go find Margaret.