My Name is Sheol by P. Julian
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Copyright © 2026 P. Julian
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ISBN: 9798268917185
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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.
My Name is Sheol - Full Text Section 2
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Chapter 4 - IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
47. Before we go any further you need to know: I am what psychiatrists call an unreliable historian. Although from the strangeness of this story so far you might already have guessed. Facts tend to desert you when you are teetering on the brink of psychosis, when you have not slept properly for months, when you are malnourished and confused and hemmed in by turbulence and paranoia on every side. In the best environment this is going to make you disoriented, even a beautiful natural environment with trees and sunshine and grass beneath your feet. But when you have been torn from your home and tied down in an ambulance and hauled through city streets towards a psych ward, towards what hostile staff and deranged patients you can’t possibly imagine? You’re lucky if you can separate fact from fantasy at all.
48. I would swear though: the day they brought me down to the hospital was a very strange day. We had endured a heat haze for many days across the city and months of dry weather in the wheat country to the north. As I looked out of the ambulance windows I saw the sky had turned a sickly shade of yellow, with darker reddish tinges skirting around its edges. It looked not so much cloudy as opaque and in that strange mustard sky there were whorls and vortices like you would expect to see in a swollen river, like storm-swirls closing on one another across the surface of Jupiter. It looked very much like the end of the world and that came as no surprise, as all life within me also felt like it was coming to an end.
49. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital officer Gaby jumped out and stood there waiting for me. The female paramedic looked at me doubtfully and asked whether I felt well enough to walk into the ward. She said they could bring me there without freeing me from the gurney if that was what I preferred. I said that I was happy to walk and she looked at me directly and said: are you going to behave yourself? Because if you're going to act up we might just leave you strapped down. I told her that I would behave and she patted me and said good girl that’s always for the best, as she began unclipping the soft blue webbing pinning me down to the bed.
50. Madness blurs any distinction between your interior landscape and what should remain exterior. My emotions had broken open and the sinister look of that sky could not be differentiated from what churned within me, the overpowering terror you feel when everything gains access to your inner world and you retain no boundaries against it. And even that turbulent sky was nothing compared to what churned and spewed towards me from the inside of the ward. I felt energies seethe towards me as soon as I turned towards the entrance, I wanted to run back behind Officer Gaby but both paramedics were behind me and they completely blocked that way. There were nurses striding towards me and all I could do was stand and tremble and close my eyes against it. It still makes me tremble sometimes to remember that moment: being dragged into the maddest place in the world, knowing that I was probably just as crazy.
51. I was escorted into the ward via a security station with a double set of electronically locked glass doors. The security staff asked me whether I was carrying any drugs or weapons and they patted me down in a half-hearted way. They waved me through and the nurses led me on to the ward, where despite all of my fear there came this strange anticlimactic moment where absolutely nothing happened. I was left alone in the chaos of the ward without any idea of what I was supposed to do, and it was a long time before another nurse appeared and ushered me into a consulting room. She told me to wait before pulling the door half-closed, and any time I got up to push the door shut another nurse would walk by and push it half-open again.
52. I sat in that room for a long time before someone came to sit with me. I have no idea whether he was a nurse or a doctor and because I never saw him again I suspect he was neither. He asked me a series of rapid-fire questions and I answered quite a few before I explained that I had already told these things to my psychiatrist. He peered at me and said: I know you are disoriented Che but you are in the hospital. This is a different time and place and I am asking you different things. He asked question after question without writing anything down and it all seemed incredibly repetitive and to this day I have no idea who this man was. He began to ask detailed questions about a situation I had encountered at work and about relationships within my workplace. I tried to tell him how anxious these questions made me but he just pressed on. These questions are important, he said. We really must get through these questions. If you would please just concentrate Che on the questions that I am asking. We cannot proceed if you refuse to answer my questions.
53. By the time the interview finished my anxiety had become unbearable. My interviewer flipped his notepad closed and rushed out of the room, leaving me there without any word of explanation. I plucked up the courage to walk across to the glass barriers of the nurses' station, tapping on the glass and asking for something to calm me down. After ignoring me for a while a nurse looked up and said: we can’t give you anything until the doctor has reviewed you. In my rising panic I tried to explain how I was feeling, how I just needed a little something to take the edge off but the nurse shrugged and said again: your doctor needs to see you first. She said something about the doctor needing to retain a clear view of me and I swore and said: I am not some fucking rat in a lab. I refuse to suffer for the convenience of some doctor. I started crying and pleading and saying: you have to give me something. Please I know you have something that will help.
54. It all seemed unnecessarily cruel. They had every conceivable sedative behind that desk and as I found out later they were only too eager to use them. Yet in that moment I was unable to get even the smallest bit of medication just to calm me down, when at the doctors’ further convenience I could be shot full of every disgusting chemical you can imagine: overwhelming intramuscular tranquilisers that crash your body and mind, the horrors of Haloperidol and Acuphase. But never anything that might actually make a person feel better, never anything to provide some emotional relief, to give you some buffer against chaos in your mind or the tormented patients surging around you on the ward.
55. In the end my pleas came to nothing and I was left anxious and unaided in the chaos of the ward. As patients shuffled past me I could feel strange tendrils raking across my heart, the dark pressure waves they formed in front of themselves as they pushed through the space we shared. One man in filthy pyjamas kept staring at me no matter where I stationed myself, I tried to shoo him away but he just mimicked me by flicking his tobacco-stained fingers. I had to keep ducking out of the path of a gangly young man who staggered in random directions across the ward. He had been scalded with a kettle of boiling water that his grandmother had poured over him in a crazed act of self-defence, he lurched around shirtless with his improvised dressings barely covering the horrible burns on his back. He spewed generalised verbal abuse before collapsing into runaway fits of tears, which would then dry suddenly as he resumed his wild abusive ramble across the ward.
56. My distress pushed me past any vague sense of unreality into a conviction that this was no longer the real world. Every last person on the ward seemed to be some kind of NPC, acting out simple looped routines that had been programmed into them long ago. I walked back to the nurses' station and shouted at the top of my voice, demanding that they give me Valium and threatening to kill myself or other patients if they refused. I began to scream out my demands but all they did was glance up at me from behind the thick glass of the nurses' station. I picked up a chair and threatened to smash the glass, warning that I was going to start killing people and in that moment I genuinely intended to do it. I wanted to smash these patients out of their governing matrix until it dawned on me that I was no different from them, that I was also an NPC as I weighed that chair in my hands. I saw how insubstantial my soul was and I knew that the nurses were not concerned about my posturing because I was merely an obsolete bit of code that would glitch ineffectively until some upgrade deleted me forever.
57. I let the chair slip slowly to the floor and I sank down to sit beside it. I remained slumped there until a nurse walked up to me and said: I can show you to your room if you like. I nodded and said yes and she said: why don't we do that. You’ll be more comfortable there. She pulled me to my feet and led me down a corridor and as we walked she said: it's not really such a bad place once you get used to it Che. If you can just try to relax your way into it. We walked to the end of the corridor and then into a room set up with two beds and she gestured for me to lie down on one of them. I flopped down face first and grabbed the pillow and squeezed my arms around it and she said: the doctor will see you soon, Che. Things will get much better once the doctor conducts his review.
58. As the nurse moved back towards the door the space in the room began to yaw strangely. She seemed a very long way away and I felt time slow rapidly to the point where I knew that the nurse would never quite arrive at that door. Time was grinding towards a halt that would inter me in this room forever. If you have ever experienced this kind of time dilation you will understand how much more terrifying it was than the energy swirling out on the ward. I had feared violence or spiritual intrusion from other patients but this was a much more visceral fear. Knowing that the doctor was never going to see me - that no doctor ever would - and that I was being interred somewhere blank and endless for the enormity of my sins.
59. I lay there feeling condemned until a tiny hope built in me. Out of the fact that I was still able to feel even though I was feeling such hideous things. If I have one piece of advice for people who find themselves in that condition: even when you are sunk to the depths of hell you must remain open to your feelings. They will always move within you to prove that you are a genuinely living being, with all of the dignity of that condition that can never be undone. Just as my mind was convinced that my life was forfeit I was also empowered to feel into the texture of that self-accusation. And because feelings are never immutable - no single feeling can last for very long - to feel one emotion inevitably means you will feel further and further things. Dragging you past any particular conviction, reprieving you from even the darkest accusation.
60. The other power that can never be unseated is your agency over the flesh given to you when you came into the world. It remains entirely yours to guide down any path you choose, even dark paths which lead towards dissolution and death. I lay on that bed and felt that same agency within me: the power to wiggle my fingers and move my toes and shift one knee up underneath my body. Confirming my bodily existence in a genuinely identifiable place, even if it were some corner of hell that remained entirely foreign to me. Lifting me out of the ghastly sense of being buried alive, even though it took enormous effort to shift my body. Breaking the spell of stalled time and dragging my body slowly out of its stuck frame.
61. It took a long time but I did eventually get to meet with my new psychiatrist: the doctor who had been allocated to me in the hospital, the one who had signed the forms to bring me in. I’m not sure how much I want to say about that meeting or indeed whether there is anything to say. It left very little impression on me although my memory of it remains quite clear. I can tell you that his attitude towards me was even more cool and distant than the attitude of my previous doctor, and like Doctor Samuels he was completely uninterested in hearing about my dream experiences. I do remember that he kept staring downwards at what I guessed were Doctor Samuels’ notes, giving me the unmistakable impression that he did not come to me with an open mind.
62. One thing that did surprise me was that my new psychiatrist did not prescribe any additional medication. I knew that involuntary treatment in hospital was a clear medical escalation and I expected my medicine to escalate. I told the doctor how distressed I was to be on the ward and how I needed something to settle me down and he just nodded and hummed at me without much interest. And when I had finished speaking he responded with little disconnected speeches that I found hard to follow. He didn't want to muddy the waters, he said. He wanted to see how things progressed without adding complexity to the therapeutic picture. He mentioned some kind of team meeting where my case had been discussed and how the team were fully on board with this approach. I asked him about Valium or perhaps just some sleepers and he said: no Che this is not part of the plan. We need to keep you available to us in your lucid state. We certainly don’t want to trouble the waters.
63. The rest of the consult went much the same way. The doctor directed most of his attention to my notes, occasionally making small noises of approbation or query or concern. I expected him to ask me about my relationship with my mother or how things were going at college but there was nothing even remotely like that. I tried to interject once or twice in order to tell him about my dreams but I had already learned that this subject would never get any air and my attempts to raise it were lukewarm at best. I tried to edge towards it by saying how poor my sleep had been - how hard it was to distinguish between my sleeping and my waking states - but the doctor just shrugged without giving me any response and went back to studying my notes.
64. The doctor had strange little slumps from time to time when he was reading or speaking, dipping down into tiny micro-sleeps or minor fits that sank his consciousness out of the consulting room. Until a slight noise would jolt him back up out of his slump, perhaps me clearing my throat or slightly shifting in my chair. He kept narrowing his eyes as though the glare of the room was dazzling him, the light angling down out of the harsh fluorescent tubes recessed into the ceiling, the phased LEDs twinkling from panels in the walls. I would guess that these were illusions created by my mental state but the more I watched the more contingent the doctor’s presence in the room seemed. Even the way he hunched down in his white plastic chair, poring over notes which kept dragging him down out of the true texture of the world.
65. At the end of the consult the doctor said: well Che I think that's what we will do. We’ll keep things as they are and treat you here for the time being and hope that things start to look up. I told him that the hospital was not a therapeutic place for me and that it was making me worse. I asked whether I could go home to recover there and he said: you know where that ended up Che. You are much too unwell to go home. When you regain a little more insight you will understand that. I told him that I had read the statistics on violence in psychiatric hospitals and he said: of course, of course, this is true wherever we keep human beings. Try not to feel too worried about it. The nurse prompted the doctor towards discussing discharge planning and he said yes certainly thank you we are always moving towards discharge. But to talk about it now would be to put the cart well before the horse.
66. The doctor gathered up his things in a distracted kind of way, saying he is overdue at another meeting. He exited the room without saying anything further and I am left there feeling dejected and dismissed. The nurse — who I have scarcely noticed — turns towards me with a quiet smile and says: Che thank you for letting me sit in with you on this meeting. I tell her there is no need to thank me and she smiles and nods as though she disagrees with me in the sweetest possible way. She asks whether I feel upset and I tell her how I had hoped to get some relief from the intrusiveness of the ward and she nods at me and says: there are some things that can’t be helped Che. But I am here to help you if I can. And I can definitely promise: this is a safe place for you. A therapeutic space too I hope you will find. You will find your way out of here very soon, that is what I believe. If you are willing to let a few things go and focus on what you came here to do.
67. The kindness of this nurse is unlike anything I have experienced in the hospital. I ask for her name and she tells me it is Ariel. I ask why she remained so quiet during the consult and she says: there are hierarchies in this place like any other Che. But there are deeper aspects to it as well. Will you give me a few minutes? Nurse Ariel gets up and walks over to the door, indicating gently with her hands that I should remain where I am, and in no time at all she comes back with a paper cup that steams very slightly as she puts it in my hands. I take a sip and I know this sounds ridiculous but it is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. It is thick like fine hot chocolate but there are spicy notes to it as well, the surface is perfectly foamed and the warmth of it floods the core of my being. I look at her in surprise and she smiles and nods and says: there are always good things in bad places, Che. And you must remember: in this particular place one of those good things is you.
68. There is strength in the cup along with the sweetness and I thank Ariel for bringing it to me. It definitely makes things look different when I walk back out into the ward. The whole place shines a bit brighter and I can see subtle structures and constraints that make the ward seem much safer than it originally seemed. The tight routes that unwell patients are constrained to walk, by the same psychic strictures that condemned them to be there in the first place. I also see my own right to traverse the space in any way I choose without apology or deference to anyone. If I remain conscious of the work I have been brought here to do nobody can strip me of that entitlement: neither patient nor doctor nor nurse nor advocate nor visitor. As long as I remain true to the task I have been given, if I do not seek to leave before my purpose here is achieved.
Chapter 5 - THE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL
69. Forcing people into confined spaces is a dangerous thing to do, and when those people are in the grip of severe mental illness things get downright insane. All that churning psychic energy, the confused reference and identity, the verbal aggression that breaks out so easily and the constant threat of violence. You hear such places being called zoos and you could no doubt sell tickets to voyeurs whose taste runs to the degradation of human beings. This is something that writers and filmmakers understand very well: you set stories in psych wards when you need to show a person completely humiliated and broken down. And the strangest thing? There is no therapeutic value in concentrating mad people into such places and there never has been. Nobody even tries to make that claim, let alone defend it.
70. The ward seemed hostile by design and it was particularly hostile to any connection between patients. The nurses continually reminded us not to make friends - focus on your own recovery, be respectful towards the recovery of others - and they would actively intervene if conversations became too intense or strayed on to therapeutic matters or discussions about what brought us here. I understood the point but we remained human beings no matter how damaged and there seemed something genuinely cruel about the efforts of the staff to divide us. How rapidly they swooped in when they saw intimate conversations, sometimes directly but more often by stealth: dragging patients away for a blood test or a blood pressure reading just when some genuine connection looked set to occur.
71. Serena was the first patient I really got to speak to. She was sharp and sarcastic and she was sceptical about the medical system in the same way I was. We spoke a few times and she seemed to really like me but she was difficult to engage for any length of time. She constantly shifted her feet and her posture, and her agitation would get worse the longer she stood with me and talked. She was always apologetic about what she called her akathisia: a side-effect of the intramuscular medication they were giving her. They had prescribed another drug to suppress it but it was only partially effective and she could not stop shifting and tensing her muscles and grinding her teeth. It looked really uncomfortable and I felt really sorry for her but later I heard that her main issue was not psychiatric illness but methamphetamine addiction and withdrawal, which I suppose might have been the real cause of her distress.
72. Whatever had brought Serena into the hospital it became increasingly clear that she was genuinely unwell. The more I spoke to her the more she seemed to be talking to something surrounding me, something to the exterior of my body and disconnected from my soul. Her words sounded sensible enough but they were always spoken past me and never directly to me, and the more we chatted the more I started to wonder whether she could even see me standing in front of her. One time she asked me whether I had been sent to the hospital to connect with her and without thinking I said yes, yes it does feel a bit like that. I didn’t mean to sound threatening but she flinched and looked at me directly for the first time with her eyes wide open and from that moment she avoided all contact with me, moving whenever I moved to stay as far from me as possible.
73. Most people maintain some dignity even in a psych ward but there is also a kind of dignity in casting away all pretence to it. Jonathan had done that spectacularly. He was openly mad and he made no bones about it, although his brand of frank insanity began to look more rational the longer you were around it. While other patients shambled around in grubby pyjamas Jonathan was always dressed in style, in smart jackets with button-down shirts and more often than not he wore a tie. His dark hair was pushed back rakishly and he looked very strange and attractive and the whole impression was that of a brilliant, dissolute genius. Knowing things the rest of us could never hope to know, things we shouldn't even be bummed about not knowing. He kept a notebook and a few fountain pens jutting out of his jacket pocket, and whenever he was asked about them he would tap them with two fingers and say: uno dos tres cuatro cinco cinco seis. Which I felt had some deep significance although I could not imagine what it was.
74. Jonathan could be very civilised and charming but he was also prone to what he called Dangerous Arousal. This kept him confined to the High Dependency Unit except for those brief periods he was calm enough to come back on to the open ward. One evening I saw him being escorted out of HDU amidst his overspilling thanks to the nurses, promising to behave himself this time and to be no further trouble on the ward. I was sitting at one of the ward computers trying to send an email and it kept crashing and losing my work and I forgot about Jonathan until he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me very politely whether I would like a drink. I glanced at the luridly coloured liquid he was offering me in a plastic cup and I smelled booze and I looked at him in surprise.
Where did you get alcohol? I asked.
Hand sanitiser, he said.
Hand sanitiser and orange juice. Equal parts.
Would you like one?
I've had two and I'm really on my way.
75. I told Jonathan that drink was no good for me and after offering once more for politeness he smiled and nudged me and said: your loss chica. He drained the cup in one and over the next few minutes I saw him pumping away at the hand sanitiser a couple more times. I feel sure that at least one nurse noticed him do it but nobody tried to stop him. He soon broke into song and his singing got quite raucous before he shifted from singing to screeching and suddenly he was rampaging around the dining area. He started yelling abuse at a patient sitting in one corner of the lounge, a bearded man who always wore a keffiyeh and who seemed like some kind of sworn enemy to Jonathan. The two of them started yelling threats and insults and anyone who had seen their previous confrontations would know what was coming next. Jonathan screamed at the man that he was going to kill him, that he deserved what he was going to get, while the other patient laughed and repaid those threats with interest until Jonathan began to move against him.
76. As Jonathan moved time seemed to slow down, as nurses began to intervene by attaching themselves to him as he went. One grabbed his left arm and another attached herself to his right, nurses grabbed at the fabric of his jacket and his trousers as he moved more and more slowly across the room. He somehow remained upright despite the increasing weight, dragging his human cargo towards the man he was now swearing to kill. His enemy looked completely unconcerned and kept on with his laughter and his taunts, easing himself back in his chair with his feet raised to defend himself if Jonathan ever arrived. I had a strange flash that this man was in fact orchestrating the whole thing, that he was some kind of Lord of Misrule who had inveigled Jonathan into getting drunk and becoming aggressive and forfeiting his place on the ward.
77. Eventually enough nurses got hold of Jonathan to drag him to the floor. They held him down until someone got a needle into him and his strength laboured and failed. He fell silent apart from his ragged breathing and they dragged him up onto his feet and back towards the High Dependency Unit. As they moved he started giggling wildly and then apologising profusely to anyone who would listen, saying that he was going to have a headache in the morning, a terrible hangover that would last him for days. Do not drink the hand sanitiser my good friends! As though any of us were planning to. O how I wish I had never found that demon drink in the first place! He winked at me as he was dragged past, going back into the hole he had escaped for less than an hour, saying: you made the right choice, chica! Apologies for not seeing that before. Your choice will always be the right choice no matter what you decide to do.
78. The ward was consistently chaotic but there were some deeply sane people there, including a sweet and earnest young man named Martin. He was a lived-experience support worker who had struggled with his own mental health issues, who had now recovered enough to support other people on the same path. He came in every second morning with pots full of brewed coffee and packets of chocolate biscuits, to sit and talk with patients about their experiences both in life and on the ward. There was nothing rarefied about the topics we discussed but Martin’s presence made them feel significant, as though our stay in hospital was just a small part of a larger and more pressing story. He was always gracious and respectful and very generous with his coffee and when I approached him after the first meeting to say thank you he smiled and said: Che I should be thanking you. People have a lot to learn from the insights you generously share.
79. Martin does not hide the fact that he has endured severe mental illness, so severe in fact that he really shouldn't be here. And yet here I am, he says. He has resumed his former work in the outside world but he also feels bound to come back into this space to provide such help as he can. Through his basic kindness and courtesy but also his genuine ability to say: I know how that feels. I know that kind of hopelessness very well. He says that he has now discovered the opposite of hopelessness which he calls Love, he always says that Love is the major part of what he does. He also says: to care about people and bring them small comforts is not a trivial thing. We don't like to talk about Love in therapeutic settings but there is no therapy without Love, there is no healing without Love, there is no understanding or any other kind of help without Love. Unless interventions are done with real care and regard for the patient they can never be therapeutic. There is nothing that can heal us or redeem us that is not based in Love.
80. Martin would chat to me briefly if I approached him after coffee although I could tell that one-on-one contact made him a little uneasy. I was curious to know whether the doctors supported his work and he said: there are some. Most of them remain quite hostile to the concept of peer-to-peer work. But there are definitely nurses who support it Che and I know you've seen them. They love the work we do even when patients get a bit rowdy, they swing by to chat and support us and even have a few laughs. They know that we are doing good things even if their colleagues deny it and that little bit is enough. Just a nod from those particular nurses, that genuine bit of encouragement. And of course when I encounter people like you Che. Learning from you and the things that you know, improving my own life every day out of what patients have to teach me.
81. I met other patients and talked with some of them but the vast majority seemed to be shut down. Muttering obsessively and walking in predetermined directions, arriving back constantly at the tea and coffee nook without ever making a drink. Nurses would redirect them again and again - perhaps to sit down in the art room with a puzzle or some paints - but after idly dabbing at their work a few times they would get up and continue their compulsive walking around. I still think of these patients as NPCs because that is the only way I can interpret their behaviour, their obsessions and their stock responses and the repeated questions they would ask without waiting for an answer. How they pawed impotently at the coffee machine or tapped continuously on the glass of the nurses' station until they were dispensed a cigarette, how they would circle back the same way every ten or fifteen minutes to beg for another smoke and then another.
82. There was one patient who seemed like the exact opposite of an NPC, a tall young man named Luc. He seemed terribly sad and withdrawn but he retained a feeling of being wholly animate and independent in his presence on the ward. He moved slowly but deliberately and when I came near him I felt as though I might be a guest inside a world built entirely for him. I will admit to his being quite handsome and you might accuse me of letting that alter my view of him but against the grey walls of this place he would shine even if he were the opposite of good-looking. I had never met him before but he struck me as intensely familiar, although many encounters in hospital do feel like reunions rather than fresh meetings. He is a few years older than me but there is a tenderness to him amongst all of his gravity, a slight lift to his presence that calls to me compellingly.
83. Luc wears grimy bandages wrapped around each one of his wrists. Although they look very worn I can sense that the wounds beneath them remain fresh. When he walks through the ward he half-cradles his hands in front of himself as though they were causing him pain and his bindings are so tattered that you can glimpse the livid wounds beneath. I don't know why the nurses won’t help him: to bind up his arms with fresh dressings or even just keep them clean. They must notice the inflammation under the heels of his hands, the hint of livid scoring beneath the upper end of each filthy bandage. I would offer to tend them myself but I have no supplies and if the nurses refuse to help him I can’t see how there is anything they would allow me to do.
84. Luc’s presence is powerful enough to reach out physically into the ward. Any time I get close to him the constant smell of cleaning fluid starts to disappear. The staff are always spraying equipment down and wiping up surfaces and even the bedsheets and the lounge furniture stink of the same chemicals. It has the sharpness of bleach but it also carries a sulphurous undertone, rasping and burning in my nostrils as I breathe it in. My skin has begun to reek of it and I cannot get the taste out of my mouth and his presence is the only thing that keeps these smells at bay. He also clears the death smell that lurks underneath these chemicals: the reek of dead and decomposing things, like those horrible deodorising liquids that always smell so much worse than the decay they are supposed to mask, so much more revolting than just leaving the smell of death without trying to hide it away.
85. The first time I spoke to Luc was a genuine accident. One of the nurses asked me whether I would like a cup of cocoa and although I accompanied him to the tea station I did not notice that he was making two drinks. When they were made he motioned me to follow him and we walked over to a couch where Luc was sat thumbing through a magazine. The nurse set down one cup in front of him and asked: Is it OK if Che sits here?
Sure, he said.
She can sit where she likes.
The nurse turned to me and said: this is Luc.
He has a strange sense of humour.
But his heart is in the right place.
Isn’t that right Luc?
Luc grunted out some kind of reply.
86. This is the first time I have spoken with Luc but it doesn’t feel that way. There is no constriction in his soul and I am surprised at how little shyness I feel. His energy is a little intense but it does not make me pull back, I feel like I could never be repulsed by him as strange as that is to say.
I’m Che, I say.
I gathered, he says.
And we have met before.
When? I ask.
Before, he says. Before.
Waving his hand in the air.
He looks distracted for a moment before his attention swings back to me, creasing his brow as he asks me: why did they call you Che?
It’s after some prophet, I say.
God will Strengthen, he says.
I look at him in surprise.
How do you know that?
87. Che, he says. It is imperative for you to know that I am an absolute nutcase. I demolished my phone with my bare hands and I cut myself on the shards and instead of being dead I seem to have subsumed its contents into myself. When I close my eyes I can look up anything I want, and I mean: the whole repository of the knowledge of the world. And not one blank spot have I found. The whole world is now crammed inside of me and that is the opposite of what I wanted to happen. I keep asking the doctors to treat me for it but they just deny it is happening, I have shown them what I can do but they have no interest in it at all. The drugs they give me are the wrong drugs and I know they will never work and it is because of this curse that I know it. They have offered me ECT but that will just burn away the bright parts of my brain and leave nothing but the dross. Only the undertones that would never work for me, only the underscore which drags everybody down.
88. What kind of name is Luke? I ask.
It’s Luc, he says. L-U-C.
Short for…
It’s just Luc.
It’s not…
The fallen angel?
Luc leans his head back as he closes his eyes.
I understand your question, he says. Clever girl. But I really don’t think that’s me. Although wouldn’t it be fitting: a trick name for a condemned soul who never really guessed that he was fallen. Who rebelled against a jealous God who was quite frequently a brutal God also. Perhaps he was the one who informed the prophets, who warned Mary about the violation to come. No, Che. I don’t think so. He was never enfleshed the way we are, they could never have held him in this place. How could he be grounded with such terrible strength in his wings?
89. Luc finishes speaking and then asks me again for my name. I tell him once more and he says: no I mean your full name. I say that Che is my full name but he shakes his head resolutely.
I doubt it, he says.
I doubt that’s your full name.
Smiling as he asks me.
Do you know why I think that?
Your parents might be into radical politics Che but from the look of you I doubt it. When I feel my way towards your name it seems like some kind of placeholder. Something short that speaks of something longer with much more impact and effect. Some potential power that may become absolute in certain places although never the places you would choose. Obscured until the last possible moment and even within that moment. You should listen to me, Che. You must press on and find out. Until you know the meaning of your name you will never comprehend why you came here.
90. Luc speaks so intensely and intimately that I am encouraged to be intimate in return, in those spaces between his speech when he lapses back into silence.
Your arms, I say.
Your wrists.
What about them? He says.
He knows what I want to ask but I feel ashamed to ask it and he does not open up the discussion. I search for something off-hand to say about his wounds, hoping to direct the discussion in a non-threatening way.
Your dressings, I say.
They’re so dirty.
Why won’t they change them for you?
He narrows his eyes and tilts his head a little.
Who are you to notice these things?
What?
What is your interest in these things?
91. I don't know what Luc is asking me and I have no idea how to respond. He must know that his poor wounds are barely covered, that their windings are so scuffed and tattered that they are peeling away from his arms. He has taken the ends of each bandage and stuffed them underneath other parts of his bindings but it hardly makes any difference, they keep unwinding and coming apart and he is continually loosening them a few turns so he can secure them again. He already feels suspicious of me but I cannot pull my eyes away from the livid wounds above and below those dressings. I want to wrap them tightly or give him some other comfort but I know he would refuse it so I just sit there quietly looking down at his arms.
92. I can help you, I say eventually.
With your bandages.
I know how to fix them so they stay tied.
I move towards him but he pulls his hands away.
Who said you could help me?
Who was it that sent you here?
These are strange questions but I do my best to answer them. I tell him that it is no problem for me to help him, that I am just another patient and I don't mean him any harm. He scoffs at that and lets out a hard laugh as he jumps up from where we are sitting. He gestures towards the room and says: trust me I'm a doctor. That's what every single one of you says. Especially when you are doing your best to pretend not to be one.
93. Luc is obviously distressed and I don't follow him when he walks away. Just as I never press him on his strange accusations or any other thing that he says. I make sure to say hello when I see him and I have even offered to make him coffee, and although he never accepts anything from me I know that part of him would like to. Sometimes he seems convinced that I am some kind of doctor, and at other times he looks at me as though I am something more formidable than that. Most commonly I think he classes me with the nurses but what never changes is his watchfulness around me. As we see each other again and again on the ward I expect him to become less cautious but he seems to go in the opposite direction. The more he sees me the more reluctant he is to engage, and he is ever more watchful whenever I draw close.
94. I know this all sounds unpleasant but Luc is not self-centred. In fact he seems quite self-effacing even though his sadness has consumed his focus to the point where he has little left to spare. With concentrated seeing I can discern a kind of energetic anomaly gathered just below his heart, a region which should be shining out but has instead collapsed into something like a black hole. An inescapable void with a visible event horizon that has consumed all of the light around him, along with any love that has ever flowed towards him. It is a terrible thing to witness - especially through the lens of my insanity - but I can also see how there might be some genuine promise in it. From the place where the material accreted by this singularity resides, how it might be reversed so all that love and light can come streaming back into the world.
95. I had many strange encounters on the ward but my encounter with Manic Jesus was by far the strangest. I first came across him lying rigid and silent across one of the couches, his arms outstretched and his head slumped forward with his chin resting against his chest. His legs jutted out stiffly in front of him with his feet crossed, his hands were held open and pressed back against the rough fabric of the couch. I was looking for something to read on a nearby bookshelf and although I tried not to disturb him his head suddenly jerked towards me and he said: is it you who says this of me? Or have others told it to you? His expression was so pained and bewildered that for a moment I just stared at him, before quickly apologising and stepping back a few paces. His chin slumped back down towards his chest and he lapsed into silence once more.
96. Manic Jesus wandered around the ward in one of two distinct moods. The first I would call Delirium where he had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. He staggered around and held up his hands as if to fend off blows, calling out names I didn't recognise and questions that made no sense. At other times he would suddenly recover and snap back into the state I called Admonition. He would list every sin that each patient had committed, ranging even towards early childhood and sins that are usually overlooked. He cried out that any rebellious action is a matter of deadly sin, no matter how young the transgressor or how minor the crime. Every time we had thrown down food, every time we had cried, every time we had fought against sleep or rebelled against natural limits. Each one of these was a matter of mortal peril and for every sin there was the threat of eternal punishment. Manic Jesus raved about the strait gate and the narrow way, he ranted about the eye of the needle and how none of us would be passing through.
97. Jesus bore open wounds on his hands both front and back. They were never dressed or bandaged although the stretched sleeves of his hospital pyjamas usually hung down far enough to cover them. He shuffled around wincing as though his feet were wounded too, and although they were always covered by his pyjama pants they left the linoleum floor slightly discoloured as he went. I never saw a nurse attend to this shabby martyr or pay him any attention at all and I began to wonder whether he was only my own hallucination. He seemed utterly forsaken and would cry out to God in plaintive ways although with his accent I could never understand much of what he was saying. He gave sermons to empty chairs and rebuked the empty tables of the dining area between meals, and although he spoke with great fervour and intensity I could not shake the feeling that Manic Jesus was leading his invisible followers astray.
98. Manic Jesus harangued his absent disciples but he seemed completely disconnected from the actual people on the ward. For the most part he ignored me too, until one afternoon I walked past him holding a fresh-made cup of coffee. It may have been the smell of the coffee or me getting too close to him but he suddenly snapped out of his delirium and began gesturing towards me. He mouthed silent words and I did not know what he wanted until he cried out in a clear voice: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I was going to tell him this was not my name but he cried again: I know why I am here. Held for the harrowing and never to rise. I had no answer for him, although I felt this was a genuine complaint and that it was properly levelled at me. But nobody needs Jesus as their enemy and so I just set my coffee down on the table in front of him and walked away from where he stood. After I reached a certain distance he slumped back and subsided into his delirium and never spoke to me again.
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