The Belote Asylum

On the deathly hollow, pale, dying... ill face of a man, like a portrait, I’d sworn the left eye just looked at me. His left eye. Daring that I come inside and read all about the patients who lost some part of their minds; these wringed spirits spread like butter on charred toast. Over a hopeless trial – nearly forsaken; we are. And anyone can feel it as a place of pity (made to feed us life but still rather take it) given the ones that might still have their hearts; like a lucky reason. The ones who live there, to the ones who work there, may secretly experience the same torments within these walls. Simply kept living in the mess they are handed. Our doctors and nurses - they live lesser in the stew, but more to stir it. We are the epitome of emotions, happy, sad, bars and leather-straps. The pills are for the body and the bodies chemicals ... the pills are for you. The pills are so there aren’t any accidents. But even the mop-bucket has bad memories. Wring it to the right, wring it to the left – it won’t matter when the soap is mixed with someone’s blood.. Oh, how that part of the floor will always remain tainted.

The right eye just moved... I mustn’t look at him...

The Asylum is called The Belote Asylum.

We don’t often get new people. Once you’ve come to the B.A. you live here for the rest of your life. Until you turn to bones. That’s our class rate. We only take the best of the worst, and that’s how it’s always been.

I once stole a portfolio from a vacant nurse’s office, during a flood renovation (after a suicide caused some damage in our pipelines... but I don’t want to get into that tragedy here.) I found the chance to snoop through a couple of drawers by sheer curiosity and the utter boredom my wandering the blank halls would give. That is when I found her. She was the only one left. It was the only thing in the room of any value to me. The folder had been dated over one-hundred years, and the pictures inside were just as bad as the things I’ve seen today. Some worse, though. I didn’t keep it ... at first. I wanted to, but I knew these hounds and how they stripped us down, day in and day out. My room was nothing, it was no real room. I couldn’t risk the punishment because I didn’t know what I would do with the information then, really. What’s a way out of this place? They rob your mind.

Yes, they can make you forget. You’d probably lose it anyway. I was so paranoid. A minute felt like ten. Three felt like forty. I wanted to run before I even opened the door into that office, but then I needed this woman’s information – and for that I was desperate.

Quickly, I concealed the papers in my gown. First I thought to burry them, afterward, for safe keeping, but that was a ruined plan when I remembered it was gardening season soon. Then: there was this floorboard I considered.. Only a couple of us knew about it; we stored cheap narcotics and snacks and pop in it, and we called it “the cubby”. Worked for two years straight!

I swiped the drawer clean and got the hell out of there.

I could not wait to hide myself out and read. Usually I hated all damp nights in my boxed room, illuminated by the screams and cries of my society. Weeping, howling, moaning through the night. Banging. Banging. Jangling keys when they were going to sedate. Needle. Medicine. Medicate... One paralysis in the night. Two paralyses gave me fright. Three paralyzed just can’t be right. Others got dragged away, but those were to the places you will learn of here.. So, I had to act like all was well and normal in a place that paired that decency impossible. "Well and normal." One would almost always have to act unwell and unnormal, unless they were in uniform, and prescribing us. Otherwise, you were a greater target, it felt.

That’s when all eyes feel like they’re on you – when you’ve got something to hide.

I was nearly drooling, sweating hungry to read about the ghosts and cobwebs of this place. This quiet cruelty proved requirable injustice.

On the eyes of the beholders, whom are kept locked out from regular design, watched me like there were no secret at all.

I made it.

From vouching dysphoria into dimpled pyjamas, above the sheets I rested.

One fold of the blue folder peeked from out of my breast gown. It took hours before I could finally take the folder out and put it on my bed. Always feeling half-safe.

A clipped picture. Typed writings, documents, notes, medical descriptions. Names. I had to leave it there while I changed. I felt like something was alive in my room (because I never got personal company, to any true nature). It wasn’t the feeling you would get with, say, holding a baby rabbit, or playing with a dog, or anything like that that we could share some kind of love with. I understood this spectrum though, because we were already the animals of the Asylum...

I guess that’s just the way it felt breaking the rules... Spying on another person’s life... Holding the forbidden remorse. This is when I began to worry that I should find some information I wouldn’t like. It would only make me hate the B.A. more, but part of me wanted that, and it was that part that told me I had to...I had to know.

Ignoring the manic calls against the boogeymen and satanic-whitecoats, I sat and began. Everything seemed general, sad – sure, but these walls here were coated with the deepest sadness, anyhow. You grow to feel less sympathy in our nature here. But the oddest picture struck me a second under the noisy echo of societal “needs”... A baby? I thought. It must’ve been one of the nurses’ children accidentally slipped into the folder. But it wasn’t. The child’s information was on the next page. It said that she was brought into The Belote Asylum when she was six months old, for “progressive crying” and “erratic visual stimuli” which had been classified to certain signs of “possession” and “demonic holds”. The patient stayed in the B.A. her entire life... progressively getting worse and having been under many lists of various treatments (that were quite estranged to what I’d been able to see over my time there..) She died on a charting-table (that was high, cold tin, and typically used for surgery..) at the age of 94. It read to be a horrible, horrible life. What was her name? What was her name? Oh yes that’s right, it was Ms. Aileen Vanwell. Tragic longevity, for the B.A. - A horror story indeed...

I wanted to learn more about the only infant who managed to reach inside these walls, and I thought about how I would find my way to leak the information that I would soon read. But it would have to at least wait until tomorrow (I told myself then). I had swallowed enough old depression for the hallowed night, and I would need to get the papers into the floor by morning, or by breakfast I would be detained.

...

To the authorities that will soon hear this:

People call this one “Firehead”, but we’ll be calling him Patient Q – the one who’s eyes are painted red at the lid, here, like his hair and beard, combed with piss. Pale, and silent like a mute. Patient Q. You will know me as Patient Y in The Belote Asylum, and there will be no questions on this. Unfortunately, we cannot meet every inmate that landed in this reckless institution (the way boulders fall from skies), but there will be a few along the way. And may you righteously wonder if I am mad. Wonder, as I had.

We will get to this point, this awful point, when I am no longer trying not to look at him... After all the years of my living there, if it can somehow be classified for the means to a life; and you will see what sickness chambers in the hallways of the Asylum.

No longer, as he looks at me, forever now, while I speak.

It was me and Patient A who ran the loose floorboard. People call him “Psycho” and they had a right to, but it had to be him because he got most of the goods, and me? Well, Patient Y was good with persuasion when he wasn’t ripping his hair out from psychosis.

They called it ‘The Belote Asylum’ because it used to be an old Native Casino back in the day. We stole it. Belote [buh-lot] was a card game for two players. Using 32 cards it’s a trick-taking game that was fancied in France.

Every patient was some kind of schizophrenic. That’s the mess of the word. Schizophrenia is the toilet, and you are the turd. The turd patient then gets flushed down into a whole sewage of different lines and systems from the schizophrenic toilet. It’s shitty, and complex.

Patient A was a short delusional Irish “Arian Nazi” who loved Hitler. The thing was, he didn’t believe the fucker was dead! (Well, the other messed up thing was how determined he kept - to believe he was honestly serving as a Nazi Soldier at the time...though I must give him the credit, that when I confronted him, after blaming his lie to some blond hair blue eyed myth, he replied saying that not all of the Führer’s men needed this attribute...) He was intelligent, as many would turn out to be there, but he rambled (as many would... and I am guilty of that too.) Patient A would rat-me-out if he looked through the folder. He would see the dates and aspire to tell the supervisors that I had (with this) “schemed” to make him paranoid, somehow, (even though all he did every day was yell at the TV!!) It wouldn’t work. He would find it. He’s too meticulous. He’s OCD, extremely OCD, he would always pat the tiny wall spaces under the floorboard every check or take from our cubby. No. He’d grab it the second I put it in there, and he would of known it was mine.

I needed to find somewhere else.

Patient Q: your eyes look dead and they won’t stop staring at me. Stop looking at me.

The morning came, and I had slept with my new research under the covers in case privacy should’ve been disturbed as it usually was - at any given time. Waking with no windows, no technology, no mirror or picture on the wall that had no paint really, not a knock, but a banging side-palm startled me the way no “innocent conscience” should ever be kept. I tucked the folder into my pants and kept it behind my shirt, but no-one could go-on living life this way in the B.A.

Breakfast had less commotion for whatever dosage proved better for that swing of the month. I walked like a frightened crack fiend; hyped on heroin and trying to configure who amongst me were real from fake, like some of my friends proved on the inside, and some when I had been out. Patient B does that. His is unique though: fighting imaginary hallucinations. You should have seen him swinging at the air! He’d go berserk!! Ha. But it wasn’t funny when he hurt himself. It never was. People call him “Fists”. (I think you get the point..) Another one of my friends on the inside was Patient X. People call her “Coocoo”. She hears voices, but she’s sweet.

Lighten up, Firehead. Give them a chance, would you?

I never liked the food half the time. I did like feeling nothing from being doped-up, but everything goes in circles like the Earth, and I’d end up getting paranoid or upset or hating that damnation of lacker-substance they gave for being good. Good is quiet. Quiet is nothing. Nothing is nothing. Lacking substance. ‘That’s the way well put!’ (The “pharmacist” used to say to us..)

Where was I to hide Ms. Vanwell? They could do random testing at any second, really. Strip me down, and I’d be in for. There are places in the B.A. you don’t want to go to..

I had to eat, I couldn’t run-around! I couldn’t look suspicious. Well, everyone always looked suspicious in one way or the next, but I didn’t want to give a reason. I sat next to Patient N. People call him “Grind”.

“Good morning.” I said.

“Good mornin’” He said with a nod back. I put my tray down and managed to sit without receiving a papercut on my belly. “You sleep?” He asked. He hears voices too.

“Yes.” I said.

“I didn’t get a wink.” He shook his head in disappointment. By then I was already too preoccupied with trying to spot a good place for my hideout. “Heard Winston again, and Huck.” He said, “Don’t matter how deep I stick my fingers in my ears.” I wasn’t listening though, I suppose there lies the irony in a nut-house: fusion of will occurs. While I was scanning applicable options, the nurses patrolled the tables like vultures hungry for our moral lack. I may have liked some, but definitely not all, and especially not a majority! Keep to yourself is key.

I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have anywhere. Maybe I needed someone? Patient N? “They were yapping on about self-righteousness and the human-spirit, amen, and all that crap! I said: God damnit! Would the two of you let a poor fello’ get some shuteye?”

I laughed, for him.

“Some nights are tougher than others.” I said.

“Yup.” He simply agreed and kept to eating his meal with his easy fashion.

“Say, you know the floorboard?” I asked him, failing to hide my reluctance.

“Ye I do.. What’d they got in?” Patient N had small ground-down teeth. Some had a bit of black trim to them.

“No, I’m not wondering about that today.” I said on his country-bound accent chomping away the food in his mouth. He looked at me attentively, with wide eyes watching. “Know anywhere like that?” I said it quieter, hinting that the nurses or security shouldn’t hear this. He thought a moment on,

“There are these stairs..” He looked up into his mind while saying, “There was a little break in the concrete underneath, near the lower step so you ain’t see. You might stash a thing in there.” He said.

“Oh yeah?!” I got excited, “Which case?” and wanted to know.

“Down the South Side hall.” He said, “I ain’t sure though, it’s been a couple years, yuh Huck.” I ignored the slight relay he dismissed himself to at the time and couldn’t help but feel pleased that this could possibly turn out to be so easy! But then he changed it with a fact.. “But if you want it a secret, why put your stash in a spot Grind knows about?” His jaw cascaded side-to-side.. I hummed with regret like a sullen day.

“That’s true.” I told him, and then I stood myself up. “I’m going to get some juice. Anyways, thank you for your help.” I brought my tray away and I never got that drink.