The Fifth Floor

  I don’t remember what made me look more into things. I can’t recall the moment I decided things weren’t right, and when I looked closer at reality I found that reality was merely what we were told. We were being conditioned to believe in whatever we were told and if we disagreed, we were made to look insane and sent away to the 5th floor south of the old hospital on the edge of town. No one talks about the hospital because it is not in their handbook of reality. We, the residents of the 5th floor, were taboo and not to be though about by the normal’s.

     I cannot recall how I even ended up here on the 5th floor. I can’t remember how I became crazy, but I am not crazy. The world deemed me that way for some reason and I’m not sure what it takes to be sent here, but I achieved the requirements. I just woke up one night and saw my little white walled room with a single desk and a chair, where I write now, and not much else. I cried out loud for a long time when I understood my fate was this prison. For reasons unknown I was exiled and here I write to explain the things I have discovered about myself, my friends, and this empty world.

     All was numb for the first few weeks. I ate when they brought food, I took pills when they were ordered, and I went to groups like they strongly suggested. I didn’t ask questions because I had too many about myself and why I ended up here. I didn’t think about the bigger picture and nothing seemed out of place for a while. People were crazy and so was I. That was the answer that no one needed to give for it to be the truth, or so I had thought.

     There was a girl here with me, I don’t know her name or how she ended up on this floor as well, but she started acting up in the oddest of ways. The staff would rush to her before anyone could understand what had happened and they would hurry her to her room with a needle in her arm and without a word. She had brown unruly hair that cropped around her shoulders and she was very petite. It wasn’t hard to realize that she was so scrawny because of her diet or lack thereof. The change happened rapidly. When I first arrived she looked healthy and as numb as was. No questions asked and no trouble caused. Then everything changed drastically but no one noticed. Not even me.

     I realized something was wrong after dinner on my 5th week in. I had finished cleaning my plate and my mighty shake and had settled in the TV room. Usually the girl would finish a few minutes after me and would come claim her corner in the same room. The TV  room was together but separate and you could tell on closer inspection that it had been two separate rooms until someone tore down the wall in between. The girl preferred the corner of the other side of the room where it was darker and more remote. I always looked at her in curiosity as I was sure she couldn’t have seen the tv from over there, but no questions asked so I left it alone.

     That night was different and the air of the upper side of the 5th floor had grown much colder than normal. The girl had not come in yet and even though I did not know a single thing of her, I felt she was a companion. She was crazy as I was and I felt I knew her. SO I inched into the kitchen to see where she was and to my surprise she was still sitting with her meal. With staff standing around her, I ducked by and acted as if I were getting a cup of water, but I saw her plate was completely untouched. Her hair hung in her face and there was not a single word spoken. I went back into the TV room, not wanting to look nosey, and a show and a half later the girl was escorted to her room by staff who looked less than pleased.

     This continued for weeks until the girl was so malnourished she collapsed on her way to her room. Staff flew from their corners and took her to her room without a word, but the girl murmured of a drawing on her wall. I’m not sure if anyone else heard her, but the staff walked faster afterwards. This perplexed me for a number of reasons. Why stop eating for weeks, this place wasn’t that terrible. Yet she put up such a fight against staff, a silent fight where she did not say a word and neither did they, but there was the understanding that no matter how intimidating they stood around her, she would not eat. I was also curious as to what drawing she spoke of and why there was a picture on her wall and not mine. Then again, she was crazy. Perhaps she imagined it.

**********

     One day I saw the girl, who with the help of a forced IV looked a little meatier now, standing in the far corner of the TV room staring at the floor. At once she dropped to the ground in a hunched manner and I curiously walked towards her. She didn’t speak but I saw her mouth moving and her arm jerking to and fro on the ground. Upon further inspection and getting tenderly close, I saw a picture on the marble. The staff ran from nowhere and gathered her up and one placed a towel on the ground before anyone could see it, but I already had. She had drawn a clown on the floor. How se did it was a mystery as I saw no pencils or markers or anything of the sort. No questions were asked, as usual, but I had a million beginning to form.

     This happened everyday for the next two weeks. The girl was drawing pictures all over the place of clowns. I studied her closely, maybe more closely than staff. She would look so angry and mean, and then she would suddenly crouch down and begin her drawings. I began to understand he routine, her ticks and triggers. I knew when she would draw before she did I think. I had never studied a human being so closely ever before but she undoubtedly had something happening to her and I wanted to know what. One day I walked up to her as she started one of her fits, as I called them, and she looked up at me without any emotion on her face. We stared at one another for a few minutes without speaking and I thought that perhaps I had distracted her from her upcoming fit.

     Suddenly, though, her head cocked to the side and mine followed to the small corner by her feet. Se crouched down very fast and began to draw but not fast enough for me to notice something extraordinary. The clown was drawing itself. Without help from a hand the corners began to form and it hit me that the girl wasn’t having fits, she just noticed these drawings drawing them self and perhaps traced them hoping for a clue as to why they were happening, but these are just my ideas. I’ve never been able to ask her. She wasn’t around long after I saw what she saw.

     As you can imagine, the next week or so became very difficult. Had I seen the truth as the girl or had I become a little more insane? Had the clown drawings been drawing themselves or have I spent too much time in my head? I questioned everything and everything as reality or truth. Did the staff resemble a organized military unit, or were they just a good team? Did the food made me think less, or was that the hours of nothingness I endured? Was I crazy, or made to look crazy? I needed answered and I knew I’d find them.

     When the girl was gone, I grieved for a few days. I didn’t know where she went, or if something happened to her, or she got better. She was just gone, and I felt all the more alone. I began to pay more attention to the staff. I didn’t want to bring attention to myself so I acted as I normally would. I acted crazy. I watched quietly from the corners and the water cooler and followed the rules like a good little patient. They did nothing out of the ordinary, looked mean, acted gruff, and handed out meds like candy. I did notice that a lot of the staff spent more time than necessary in their windowed room.

     One particularly courageous night I snuck from my room while the staff did their 15minute rounds. It was difficult to sneak down the empty hallway and though there were cameras, I knew how little they were checked. I had watched the habits of the staff, knew them better than perhaps I knew myself. I knew at some point when they began this duty; they enjoyed it to some point. They thought they were helping us, but the years grew on them like a cold leech, and they acted even colder to us now.

     I crept down the hall and when one of the staff walked out of the windowed room, I crashed into them, spiraling us both to the floor. This idea was a hard one to make, I was afraid of the consequences and timid is my nature but I came to the conclusion that I was on the 5th floor, and they were trained for crazy outbursts. The staffs in the room were not shocked at my break in, they would have been more shocked if they knew how clearly I was thinking when I did it. How sane I felt in acting on it.

      The staff I knocked over grabbed my arm but I flung his grip and in turn threw myself to the back side of the room near the medicine room. I stood now and did a half-crouching stance as the staff began to close in on me, and when they lunged, I jumped back into the door to the meds room and felt myself falling. It was a floating type of falling, gentle yet fast moving. As if time had slowed down or I had sped up. The darkness closed in on me as the light from the windowed room shrunk from me. I was dying.

********

     Death wasn’t as peaceful as I imagined, especially since I only thought I was dying. I know this will sound crazy, but I fell through a vortex in the windowed room to another 4rd world parallel dimension of some sort. Staff members followed me but I hid well and eventually found my way into some sort of dungeon with long rusty pipes running all through it. It was when I climbed one of the larger pipes that I heard the barking. Followed were the growling and the snarling, and finally the sobbing of myself. Crashing through the doors came a set of bears and wolves and another creature I couldn’t place in our kingdom. I held fast to the ceiling and I cried because I thought I might not have died before, but ill sure enough find my death in the mouth of one of these beasts.

     I hung my arms from the ceiling until the snarling and barking continued but I was untouched. I could feel their breaths and their rage, but they could not graze me. It was an odd happening, but I counted my blessings and jumped down from the pipe. The large animals all evaporated when my feet touched the ground and I found myself alone once more. Something the staff was into was creating all this voodoo and I had to tell the other patients. We are not crazy, we are made to believe were crazy by these magic using futuristic staff. For all I know the country was involved. The government. Our families. No one was to be trusted anymore. Not now.

      I managed somehow to find my way out of that vortex and with no sign of the staff I walked to the living quarters and door by door to tell the others the truth. I skipped a few doors because I knew they wouldn’t understand me anyway since one was mute and a few others slower than normal and I crept into the room of a man who looked much younger than his band said. I woke him, told him everything and right when I believe he was beginning to believe me, I heard loud thumping outside his room. He looked just as shocked so I snuck to his door window and peered into the long corridor. There, at the end, were many men-things that slumped around as they trudged down the hall. These were unknown to this world, but they began to check each room, no doubt in search of me.

     The man allowed me to hide under his bed so I slunk underneath him and waited for the thumping. I heard the latch on the door open and with a grunt, one of the men walked in. I peeked out through a small crack in the sheets and saw that the flesh on his face had almost melted. His eyes sulked into his cheeks and he was a pasty green-blue. I didn't believe him to be alive. He grabbed the bed sheets and yanked them back, revealing me. I screamed as he drug me out by my hair and my kicking had no affect on his cool limbs. Another man slinked into the room and shoved a long needle in my neck. I bit him and he was bitter, no blood leaked onto my lips, but the man groaned and I saw him raise his arm in response. The look in his eyes changed from a dull nothing to a hatred I’d never seen before, his arm flung towards me and hit the side of my head hard-

*********

     I awoke in my new room. Its locked and from the small details I remember from stories, it had to be one of the seclusion rooms. I have only seen my assigned staff and my doctor who tells me of my many delusions when I tell him of my discoveries. No one in the 5h floor was crazy, we were shown these things, these magical things that made us seem insane to the world. Maybe the whole world was in on it. Yet in that case, no one would believe it. So I told the doctor of a conspiracy theory, where the staff were some sort of force that kept people whose importance is unknown, locked away and drugged up and if and when they begin to realize what has happened they send them bear illusions or clown drawings to make them feel crazy. To convince them that it is only best they are there on the 5th floor south.

      I am on many new medications, most of which make me drowsy, and that’s why it has taken me many days to write this. They are for my "delusions" of which I do not have and therefore are doing only god knows what to me. I have not been outside this room for a long time and I know it is only a ploy in which they wish to brainwash me into forgetting, perhaps their hoping for Stockholm syndrome and Ill change into some sort of numb slave. I assure you, none of that will happen because I am not crazy. No one is crazy, we are only made to seem that way by our own demons. Whether they staff or enemies?  I cannot stop them, but I write this in hopes that maybe you will. You needed to know the truth. It will be a daunting task but never forget, it’s for the greater good, and you can trust me because like I said, I’m not insane.