I blinked my eyes open, groggy. Wires. Humming machines. A thin, crinkling mattress pad. I was in a hospital.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, got immediately yanked back down. A needle in my arm. Sticky heart rate monitors on my chest. I had to fight the urge to pull off the wires. Doing something like that would trigger an emergency response. I’d be tagged a problem patient. I would be closely monitored. My discharge could be delayed. I knew. I’d woken up in a hospital like this a time or two before.
I pulled my legs back up onto the bed. I had to stay calm. I had to figure out why the SWAT team had brought me to a quiet hospital, not a torture chamber or a laboratory. What day was it? What time? I kept my eyes on the hallway outside my room, but no one walked by. There was no one to ask questions to, no one to get information from.
Then, from the left, a man in green scrubs appeared. I called out, timid, “Excuse me! Who are you? Where am I?”
The man stopped, turned his head, and smiled wide. Stretching his arms to the skies, he pronounced, “I am Nelson Mandela.” Then he kept on walking.
A chill passed through me. I was in no ordinary hospital. I was in limbo.
I did the math quick. The fact that I was in some sort of limbo meant that the golden light experience I had a day or two ago was in fact enlightenment. That in turn meant that my father hadn’t installed a computer chip inside me. My parents hadn’t betrayed me. I was relieved. I understood what happened. With too little information and a powerful imagination, I had spun out of control. Once it was clear I couldn’t handle what had happened to me, the powers that be must have sent the Authorities to extract me. I had been brought here to stabilize.
The nurses who came later with a hospital gown for me to change into and a dinner tray with hot food, sweet orange juice all had biblical names. Dolores. David. Sarah. I was surrounded by angels. I felt safe. I felt comforted. When I asked what was going to happen next, Dolores told me I had to wait for the doctor to examine me before I could be taken to Exodus. I understood what she meant – the doctor was clearly god and Exodus was my passage home.
While I waited for the doctor, I wondered how the mechanics of it all worked. Had I slipped into a simulation sometime in the past two weeks? Would I be returned to that point in time? Was a minute in the real world worth an hour here? Was the real me fast asleep somewhere? Was I still on that plane home from Thiruvananthapuram? How much of what had happened was real? Leaving my mother in a parking lot? Threatening suicide? When I went through Exodus, would everything that happened in this alternate timeline be wiped?
An hour later, Dolores returned to tell me the doctor didn’t need to examine me. I’d been approved for Exodus. I was delighted. god must have been impressed by my cool, collected composure. I had passed all the tests. I now knew what I had experienced and what I needed to do once I returned to the real world – be steady and disciplined, keep an eye and an ear out for messages. I was ready to go back home.
Two attendants in blue scrubs wheeled a gurney to the hallway outside my room. I sat myself up on it, lay down quietly, let them strap me in snug. I closed my eyes as they wheeled me down the hospital corridors. I needed to fall asleep if I wanted to wake up. The backs of my eyelids exploded white as they rolled me out into the sunlight. As they rattled me up the ramp into the transport vehicle, the attendant to my right whispered in my ear, “A mantra is used to link you from Here to There. Your mantra is A Tribe Called Quest.”
“Oh,” I cried out. “I was wondering if I would remember any of this. Thank you for the mantra, thank you, thank you. I’ll never forget, I swear, I’ll never forget.”
Tears slipped down the sides of my face.
A Tribe Called Quest. A Tribe Called Quest. A Tribe Called Quest.
Knock your heels three times, say you wanna go home.
But of course, I didn’t go home, I didn’t travel back in time, and I didn’t snap back to the primary timeline. Nelson Mandela and the mantra were hallucinations, the doctor was just an ordinary doctor, and Exodus wasn’t my passage home.
Exodus was a psychiatric facility.
Everything about Exodus was confusing. I didn’t understand where I was for the first few days. I was convinced that I was at some liminal halfway point between limbo and the real world. After three or four days, I started to realize that I was already in the real world. It seemed god had placed me somewhere I could transition back to reality, somewhere I could get used to the power I held inside me. A woman in blue scrubs told me that I’d been involuntarily committed because I was a harm to myself. I was placed on a 72-hour hold which was then extended to a 14-day hold.
Roger that. Clearly, there were more lessons I needed to learn. I needed to prove my capability. I needed to show god that I was in control, that I wouldn’t spin out the same way again. I was up for the task.
The psychiatric facility took up one floor in a large, concrete building in Culver City. Two halls of rooms with two beds in each. A day room with a long table and paintings by patients past covering the walls. A television room with squeaky pleather couches. A medication counter. A central desk for the nurses and security guards to sit. A fenced-in outdoor area with picnic tables and a basketball hoop. I hadn’t realized that psychiatric facilities were so squalid and unimaginative, worn-down and mundane. I didn’t understand how anyone could get better in such an environment.
Exodus had problems, big ones. The communal showers were dirty and reeked of piss. The food was tasteless and one-size-fits-all – a hulking, six-foot man was given the same amount of food as a slight, five-foot woman. Everyone was hungry all the time. With single-use plastics, every meal generated a small mountain of waste. I watched staff yell at patients for being unaware of where they were and what they were doing. I overheard staff say derogatory things about patients, especially those who were recovering from addiction. Several staff were of the opinion that sinners got what they deserved. A security guard referred to us as ‘dirty animals.’ I could count on one hand the number of staff who were compassionate individuals. And then, of course, each patient had their own story of trauma and injustice.
But me? I was fine.
I tugged on the sleeve of my sweater, navy blue with red stripes. Sitting across from me, an old, white man took notes on a clipboard. Sliding his pen into his shirt pocket, he looked up at me, shifting in his squeaky, black pleather armchair.
“Based on what you told me and the nurse’s observations, my diagnosis is bipolar disorder.”
I wrinkled my nose. It made no sense. I knew what bipolar disorder was. I had friends who lived with it. I’d watched tv shows that centered around it. But nothing that had happened to me in the past two weeks was anything like that. I was a woman with depression, yes. I was a woman who had experienced enlightenment, yes. But bipolar disorder? It just made no sense.
I politely disagreed with the man. I told him how I’d been seeing a therapist for six months who had only ever diagnosed me with depression. She was a woman of color. She knew me. I trusted her opinion. I wanted to talk to her before I took any medication. He sighed, deep and weary.
“I’ll write you a prescription for Abilify at a low dosage. I would highly recommend you take the medication.”
“But I don’t have to take it if I don’t want to, correct?”
“Correct,” he said. “But again, I highly recommend you take the medication.”
I refused my medication every night. After all, the psychiatrist was making his recommendations on partial information. He didn’t know the whole story. I hadn’t told him about my golden light experience or my telepathic connection with Kannan or limbo. Details not pertinent to the task at hand, stories too big to be told. Besides, I had figured out that all they needed was an explanation for what was on the police report. Why had I threatened suicide with a knife? Was I still a threat to myself? They didn’t understand I had used suicide to drive my mother out of my apartment. They didn’t know I suspected my parents were involved in a terrible experiment at the time. They didn’t know that I never had any real desire to kill myself. They just knew I had a knife and had made a threat. The authorities had acted in accordance to their protocols. Now I had to figure out the protocols of this place. Then I could finally make my way back home.
In the meantime, I set about fixing all the problems I saw. I identified the most sympathetic staff member and showed her the showers. She talked to the cleaning staff and the showers began to smell of bleach. Patients took showers more readily. I showed the other patients how they could reduce the amount of plastic they used. I began putting whatever food I did not want to eat in the middle of the dining room table, offering it to those who were still hungry. Other patients quickly followed suit. Whenever I saw a staff member mistreating a patient, I intervened and stayed with the patient until the staff member left. Other patients noticed what I was doing and began to do the same in their own ways. Within a week, the ward became an entirely different place. Brighter. Nicer. Kinder. Further evidence of my enlightened status.
Ten days in, I finally figured out my exit strategy. An advocate from the court would be coming by on Monday. If I could convince him that I did not need to remain on an involuntary hold, I would be released. I spent all of Sunday gathering documents and evidence to prove my sanity. The meeting with the advocate lasted less than ten minutes. He signed my release form. All that was left to do was to get a signature from the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was not happy to let me go without medication, but he couldn’t argue with my stellar track record, my airtight case. I was clearly functional and no longer a danger to myself. He signed the papers too.
Elation. I was finally going home. One of the staff members brought me a cup of tea to celebrate. Christina, another staff member, wrote my name in fancy lettering on the paper bag that would hold my belongings and signed up to drop me off at my apartment. I said goodbye to all the other patients, sweet friends. I gave them my name, phone number, and address. Stay in touch, stay in touch, I begged them.
The next morning, I got into the back of the transport car. Heavy wire separated me from the driver seat. Christina pulled up to my apartment and turned around to say goodbye. “Stay safe, Anjana,” she said. “Stay well.” I thanked her, then got out of the car, waved goodbye as she left.
Alone for the first time in weeks, I stared up at my apartment building, clutching my brown paper bag to my chest. A low breeze played with my hair. I’d thought about this moment for so long, but no further. What on earth was supposed to happen next?
Originally posted on a now defunct personal blogging website.
