“What do you want to know?” he said.
“I want to know why you haven’t come visit me in my dreams every night like you were supposed to. It’s been eleven long and difficult years and you’ve only made a handful of visits upon me during that time. What gives? Death didn’t free you from being my father, you know?”
There was no one there, the poor kid was talking to four empty white walls.
“Where’d you go?” the kid cried out to the emptiness again.
“I’m here, kid. I just don’t have any answer I can give you now. The Supreme Judge has me under a gag order. I will tell you this, though. Get out of this place. This place ain’t for you even if it’s part of your journey. I have to go now.”
“No, wait!” a look of resignation and a rough sigh was expelled from the boy when he saw his father wasn’t there anymore.
Doctor Hell took her notes regarding patient A-227. She didn’t look at him or seemed to take an interest in his questions. She only offered vague answers. The same attitude he’d seen in his previous drug dispensing havoc harbingers with a fancy title. An air of superiority in their eyes and in their tone. Hell was no different. I could see that the boy understood that she would never take an interest in healing him. She, like him, was too busy caring for herself, and not at all concerned with doing her job.
What a shame … damn what a shame I can’t do anything to help, I thought.
“Rod, get out of here, it’s past your 15.”
“What’s going to happen to A-227?” I asked Phil, my supervisor.
“They’re releasing him tomorrow. Hell’s orders.
“But, why? He’s ….”
“Don’t question it, kid. New government wants all the crazies out on the street. Talking bout it’s more ‘humane.’ But you know how it goes, there’s just no money to help these people. Now go take your 15.”
Yeah, but we’re complicit in all this, Phil.
I didn’t say it, but the thought would stay with me for a long time. I took my 15, drank, and wrote something down on an old receipt I had in my pocket.
After my shift, I sat on my desk at home not being able to shake away my complicity in a most inhumane action to come. A-227’s name was Daniel … Daniel Suarez. He saw his dad die in a hospital bed. The power went out, as it often did, interrupting the life support. His legs turned blue, and he died. Daniel could never move on from it after years of trying, and he slowly lost his mind. So, they locked him up, and now they were throwing him to the streets. Daniel’s father was the only family he had.
Another sad story, I bear witness to. I drank myself to sleep dreading the coming of the next day.
