The Hollow City (4 page)

My last hope has arrived: Dr. Vanek is here.

THREE

DR. VANEK THROWS OPEN THE DOOR
, nearly filling it with his bulk. I allow myself to hope that I might be released, but he seems to sense my optimism, and frowns and shakes his head.

“You made quite a splash here, they tell me.” He grunts slightly as he drops into the nearby chair. He has dark hair, ringing his face with a dark beard, and the frames of his glasses look thin and fragile. “I wish you’d have come to see me sometime in the past six months—it’s one thing to get a call from the hospital announcing your long-lost patient has finally surfaced, and it’s quite another to learn that said patient has managed to injure two members of the hospital staff—one of them, I might add, the head of the psych ward. You did not make any friends with your outburst yesterday, I assure you of that.”

“You’re in a mood,” I tell him. Dr. Vanek has always been gruff, much more so than any of the other psychiatrists I’ve dealt with. Some of them were great; I even had a crush on my old school counselor, a young, pretty woman named Beth. She’s the one who first diagnosed me with depression. She loved her job; loved helping people. On the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes I think the only reason Vanek got into medicine was to show off how smart he is.

“Didn’t I warn you about this, Michael?” Vanek rubs his forehead with thick, sausagelike fingers. “Didn’t I tell you, when you started missing a session here and there, that a lapse in treatment or medication could result in a heightening of your symptoms?”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

He sighs. “No, Michael, I never bring my cell phone to our sessions, you know that. Though now I understand that your distaste for technology has grown some new and interesting dimensions. Tell me about these Faceless Men.”

“They think I killed them. They think I’m this … Red Line Killer.”

Vanek raises his eyebrow. “Where did you get that idea?”

I open my mouth, but say nothing. I promised the reporter I wouldn’t say anything. I shrug. “It just … seems obvious.”

“Well,” says Vanek, nodding, “that saves me the trouble of breaking it to you gently. If we’re going to do anything about it, though, I think you ought to tell me where you’ve been for the last two weeks. The Red Line Killer killed a janitor in an industrial park last week, and it would be nice to be able to prove you were somewhere else.”

“Hiding,” I say. Vanek has a poor bedside manner, perhaps, but he’s not dumb. He might be able to see the truth. “You need to get me out of here. We can talk about all of this back in your office, or wherever you want, but not here.”

“I’m not here to get you out,” he says, staring at me intently. “I’m here to oversee your transfer and readmittance to Powell Psychiatric. Dr. Sardinha is recommending high security, intensive therapy, and neuroleptics.”

“Neuro … what?”

“Antipsychotic medication,” Vanek explains. “You’re not just a violent patient anymore, Michael, you’re a violent, schizophrenic patient. That is not a good combination in the eyes of our medical or legal systems.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Please, Michael, we prefer the term ‘mentally divergent.’”

“I don’t have multiple personalities.”

Vanek laughs, a rough sound, like a bark. “Double damnation on whoever started that misconception. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities; it means that your brain responds to stimuli that don’t exist. You see and hear things, like these Faceless Men of yours, and you believe things, like this paranoid plan of persecution and surveillance, that are not real.”

I sit up desperately, but the arm restraints stop me from leaning very far forward. “I’m not crazy,” I say quickly, “and I’m not paranoid.”

“Please, Michael,” he says, peering at me over the tops of his glasses. “You’ve been paranoid your entire life. That’s a reasonable enough reaction for someone who was kidnapped before he was even born, but ‘reasonable’ and ‘healthy’ are very different things.”

“This has nothing to do with my mother,” I say, angry at him for bringing it up. “Now listen, you’ve got to believe me. The Faceless Men are real—there was one in here last night. I saw him!”

“Well of course you saw him,” says Vanek, “that’s what I just explained—you see imaginary things that your brain perceives as real. It’s called a hallucination.”

“It was real,” I insist. How can I make him believe me? “He was as real as … as that wall, as the chair; he was as real as you and me.”

“Reality,” says Vanek, frowning. He leans forward and gestures with his hand. “Think of it this way: the human brain does not have a direct connection to reality—not yours, not mine, not anyone’s. We can only perceive something after it’s been filtered through our senses—our eyes, our ears, etc.—and then communicated to our brain. Our brain takes that information and reconstructs it to create the most accurate picture of reality that it can. That’s good enough for most of us, but schizophrenia breaks the system—the signal from your senses to your brain gets corrupted somewhere along the line, so when your brain puts together its picture of reality, that picture is full of extra, artificial information. Some people hear voices, others see faces or colors or other things. Put simply, the reality you perceive is separate from the reality that actually exists.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “My brain doesn’t do that.”

“Everyone’s brain does it to some extent—what do you think a dream is? It’s a false reality that your brain creates out of remembered stimuli, extrapolating where necessary to fill in the gaps. The difference, of course, is that a dream is usually healthy, while a hallucination is not.”

I shake my head. On top of being trapped, now I’m being disbelieved and studied and who knows what else. My chances of escape are slipping away with every word that comes out of his mouth. “This is…” I don’t know what to say. “This is stupid and unfair and … illegal.” I tug on the arm restraints. “You can’t say I’m crazy just because I saw something you haven’t seen. What about … what about God? Can you lock someone up for believing in God? You’ve never seen him, so he’s probably just a hallucination, right?”

“It’s times like these I wish I had an assistant to explain things sensitively,” says Vanek. “I don’t have the patience for it.”

“Obviously not,” I say, “or you wouldn’t have jumped straight from ‘Michael’s saying strange things’ to ‘Michael’s a delusional psychotic.’”

“It wasn’t my diagnosis, Michael.” He sighs and rubs his forehead again, his eyes closed. “It was Dr. Sardinha’s.”

“The one I kicked? They said I broke his nose—no wonder he wants to lock me up.”

“Thank you for arriving at the point I started this conversation with ten minutes ago.”

“And his diagnosis doesn’t seem suspicious to you?”

“Listen, Michael, it’s more than just you saying strange things. Hallucinations and delusions are the most visible symptoms of schizophrenia, but they’re not the most important. The big ones, the ones at the core of the disease, are depression—which you’ve had for years—and ‘disorganized behavior,’ which is a fancy way of saying … well, of describing the way you’ve been living for the past six months: you stopped taking care of yourself, you wander around and get lost, you do bizarre things like carry faucet handles in your pockets—”

“I didn’t do any of that.”

He holds up a small metal lever—the knob from a bathroom sink. I recognize it instantly as mine, though I have no idea where it came from.

“This was in your pocket when you were admitted, though I suppose it’s not damning in itself. Shall we enumerate the other points on the list?” He ticks off his fingers one by one. “You stopped coming to our sessions, you stopped going to work, you eventually stopped doing everything—the cops found you living under an overpass. You haven’t shaved in months, you haven’t bathed in weeks, and the police report suggests that you’d been pissing in your pants for days.”

“I was being chased,” I say, gritting my teeth. “We were trying to get out of town, and sometimes … sometimes hiding from the bad guys requires sacrifices. What else was I supposed to do?”

“How can you be sure you were hiding?” he asks. “Do you even remember where you were? Or why you went there?”

I look at him silently, trying desperately to remember anything about the last two weeks, but all I get are quick snatches—meaningless bits of sight and sound and smell that I can’t piece together into anything coherent. It’s like trying to look at the world through a dirty glass, smeared and warped and blurry.

He sighs. “You had no money and no ID; the only thing you did have, in fact, was the water faucet.”

“I remember the faucet!” I say suddenly, shocked at my own outburst. Excitement wells up inside of me—the first memory to return from the two missing weeks. “I can’t remember much—I think something happened to my head—but I remember the faucet handle. I was defending myself.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t hit a cop with it, or you’d be in even more trouble than you are now.”

“Not like that,” I say. “It was to keep the hot water turned off. The Faceless Men had tracked me down, but they couldn’t get to me through the wires like they usually did, so they filled the water heater with cyanide instead. I took the faucets off to make sure it couldn’t get out.”

Vanek is watching me, stubby fingers folded across his round chest. “You removed your father’s faucet handles? No wonder they found you living on the street.”

“I…” I stop. He’s right—my father would never have allowed it. He was not a patient man. “I wasn’t living there. Did I get kicked out?”

“When did you leave your father’s house?”

“Two weeks ago, I think. I … I remember I tried to take the TV outside, to make the house safe. I think he threw a fit.”

“That sounds like him. And you.” Vanek pulls off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “If your father cared half as much about his son as he does about his television, some of this behavior might have been reported early enough to make a difference.”

“I got away from home,” I say, not really paying attention. “They had no reason to poison me unless I’d escaped from the web of electronic surveillance—and they were trying to poison me, which means I’d done it. I’d found a place without any wires.” I laugh. “I think it scared them.” So little of the past few days made sense to me, but this did. The Faceless Men were on my trail, and I’d almost gotten away. It was just a chance encounter with the police that got me back on their radar—which means that if I can get away again, and avoid the police this time, I can escape completely.

Except I can’t leave without Lucy. Are they holding her hostage to keep me from running? Where is she?

“Listen to yourself, Michael,” says Vanek, leaning forward. “Inconsistency is one of the best ways to spot a delusion, so let’s consider: first the Faceless Men are tracking you, and then when they lose track of you they decide to kill you in the most obtuse, convoluted way possible. How did they know which water heater to spike with cyanide if they didn’t know where you were? And if they did know where you were, why not just plant more listening devices and continue observing you? And the biggest question of all: if they wanted you dead, why not just kill you outright? Why bother with such a roundabout plan?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “If I knew all the pieces of the Plan, do you think I’d be strapped to this hospital bed?” I tug again on the restraints for emphasis. “I have been running from these people for months. What do I have to do to convince you?”

“Why are they observing you: a jobless, homeless nobody?”

“I have a job,” I shoot back. “And a home, and a girlfriend, and everything. I have an entire life, and they are trying to take it away.”

“You haven’t done anything important,” says Vanek. “You don’t know anything important. You’re nothing.”

“I have something they want.”

“You have nothing.”

“But I do,” I say, “I know it. I think I’d found something, right when I disappeared—a thing or a place or maybe a person. Something they didn’t want anyone to ever find, and I found it. But now…”

Vanek leans forward. “Where is it?”

“Look, I don’t know why I can’t remember anything, and I don’t know what I have, but I know that they want it, which means that they want me. They want me more than anything in the world.”

Vanek smiles. “Narcissism is the other best way to spot a delusion.” I try to talk, but he stops me with his hand. “Paranoid schizophrenia involves, inherently, a heightened belief in your own importance—that all of these vast, hyperintelligent superorganizations have nothing better to do than watch your TV and poison your water heater.”

“Dr. Vanek, you’ve got to believe me. They want me because they’re scared of me. I’m the key to their whole Plan, or I found the key to their Plan, and they don’t dare let me loose because they think I’m going to stop them, but I don’t care anymore. I don’t need to stop them, I just want to get away.” I pause. “Lucy and I were going to go to a farm.”

“It’s a reflection of the fact that your reality exists solely in your mind,” says Vanek, brushing past my comments as if they weren’t even there. “The Faceless Men don’t have anyone better to spy on because, to them, no one else exists. You’re both the center and the circumference of their entire, imaginary world.”

“Stop saying that!” My face is hot, and I feel rage boiling inside me. I take a deep breath, and realize my fists are clenched. “If you’re not going to help me, just get out of here.” If Vanek doesn’t believe me, and something horrible’s happened to Lucy, who’s left?

Vanek stares at me for a long time, watching silently. Finally he nods. “You’re right,” he says. “I can’t convince you your reality is false any more than I could convince anyone else in the world. That’s what’s going to make this so difficult to treat.”

“So let me go.”

“I already told you, Michael, that’s not my call. Once you’re at Powell they’re going to do some more tests—not physical tests, don’t worry—and if they agree with Sardinha’s diagnosis, they’ll start you on antipsychotic medication.”

“I don’t want drugs.”