Hospital

  I wanted to get out. I wanted to scream too. But I couldn’t. My mouth couldn’t open so, of course, no voice or sound could come out. I cried though, that was one of the things I was able to do. My tears tasted funny, salty but weird. I got tired of crying after a while and then I just feel asleep. When I woke up, some doctor was poking at the machine that was connected to my body. He didn’t even look at me, as if I wasn’t there. He just wrote some things on a note pad and then left, leaving me trying to ask what had happened.

Because, no matter how much I tried, there was no way I could remember what had happened. I was certain I had been sick for a couple of days at home, some kind of flu or maybe a virus inside the stomach. It was awful but not strange, nothing out of the ordinary. And suddenly, one day, I woke up in that hospital feeling as if I had been beating up by someone. From the first moment, I wasn’t able to speak and whatever the put in my veins was making me doubt every single thing that I thought when I was awake.

 My body always felt awful. I was hurting too much every day and it felt there was something strange. One would think I would feel better as the days went by but I didn’t. I was feeling just as bad on day one as on the other ones. I don’t even know how long I was there. One night though, I heard something odd. Someone was crying very loudly and then she began to scream. She screamed for a long while until the voice stopped. Somehow, hearing her had made me feel a bit better, as if I could finally step out of that bed.

 But I didn’t do that. I glanced at the machine that was connected to me and realized it was probably telling the people in that place how I was feeling and maybe even what I was doing. If I disconnected it, maybe they would notice it in a few minutes and I would be caught before I could imagine a plan to get out of that place. I had to be smarter than them; I had to really think of a good plan to run away, to escape what was most likely some kind of prison or mental hospital. An awful place in any case.

 They kept injecting me with the same drugs but, luckily, I realized they really didn’t work anymore. My sore legs and arms where fighting the poison they were pumping in my veins. I felt better by the hour and they had no idea. I was tempted to smile but I still couldn’t do that. For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to speak yet. I couldn’t make any sounds but I had grown accustomed to that. In my head, there was only the idea of escaping that place and talking had nothing to do with that. I had already come up with a plan and didn’t even care if it could be successful.

  That very night, I stood up for the first time in a long time and I grabbed the machine to avoid getting disconnected from it. I then peaked through the nearest window, which was almost impossible as it was a bit higher than me. I had to stand on the tip of my toes in order to look down at a large yard made of stone. It had been raining. There was no one outside and the place looked as if it wasn’t precisely populated by many people. By the look of the place, it seemed to be far away from any city or town.

I then walked to the down and realized it wasn’t locked. They didn’t have a reason to lock the doors as they kept me, and probably all other patients, too drugged up to even walk around the room. I have to confess that I wasn’t feeling perfect right then, but I had to do something soon because I didn’t know why they were keeping us there. Maybe the final step in their “care” for us was to kill us. So waiting forever was not really the best choice. I just had to do something, no matter the result.

 I opened the door a bit, enough to look outside. It was very dark and even colder than inside the room. I couldn’t hear any sound, not a voice or anything else. I closed the door and faced the biggest problem I had: the chord in the machine was not long enough for me to parade around the hallway outside without the nurses and doctors noticing I wasn’t in my bed anymore. So I had to make a choice. It didn’t took me very long to decide to rip off the thing that was loading drugs into my system.

 The moment I did it, my body felt a little bit weaker but I had to go out soon and run down the hallway, hoping the nurses and doctors were kept away from the rooms outside of their working hours. It seemed I was right, because I didn’t see any of them as I descended to the ground floor. It was only when I got to the yard I had seen from above, that I actually saw a group of them running up the stairs, probably going to my room. I hid in the shadows for a bit and then stepped outside, in order to find an exit.

 It seemed nature wanted me to be successful because a storm begin brewing in a few moments and then rain came down hard. The water and the mist caused by the cold was enough to hide my body from my captors. I stepped out into the garden and tried finding a way out. But there was a tall brick wall all around the compound. So I had to make an effort, I had to make myself feel like shit once again, swallow all the pain in order to finally escape. I jumped many times until I finally got a grip and then my muscles ached as I hoisted my body to the other side of the wall.

 Everything hurt, but I knew I couldn’t just stay there complaining. I ran through some fields of wild flowers and then deeper into a forest. I had no idea where I was; I wasn’t able to recognize anything about my surroundings. But I was certain that no hospital of that kind could be too far away from some town or city. They probably needed a supermarket for groceries and pharmacies to get some of the drugs. At least I hoped that’s the way it all worked, because I had no other thing to do.

 The forest was rough and I had to stay there overnight. It was too dense and there was nothing I could grab to eat, but somehow I felt much better there than in the hospital. I felt all the drugs coming out of my body as I peed and sweated, feeling much better by the next morning. I walked even more that day and was lucky enough to find a small village. I got there walking by the road. I hoped not to look too scary, but there wasn’t a lot I could do related to that. I just needed to do something, to take the final risk.

 The first person that saw me was a little boy and that wasn’t probably the best thing ever. He got scared and called her mother, who came by very fast. I tried to talk again, but I couldn’t. She screamed and said things and I felt very dumb for not realizing that it would be very hard to communicate with others without being able to talk. So I just knelt in front of them and tried to show them how defenseless I was and how much in need of their help I was. I stayed like that for a while, until they left.

 I thought they had been scared and had just run away, but they did come back in a few minutes with a policeman. I was glad to see someone that could actually help me. I knelt again and put my hands together, trying to make him understand that I couldn’t talk. He apparently understood. He asked me to come with him and I nodded. He put me inside his car and we then rode for a while, until we got to the police station. There, some doctor checked on me, which made me feel awful but I knew it was necessary.

 Luckily, I still remembered how to write. My hands were not very ready to do it, but it was clear enough for the cops to understand. They sent patrol cars to the hospital and freed many people that were being submitted to experimental drugs of many kinds. None of them could talk either.

 I eventually realized I wasn’t in my own country.  I couldn’t remember everything from my past but it was clear I was completely out of my element. I had to learn to be unable to speak and it took me a while to get to the memories that would help me getting back home.

Stupidity

   The moment I came out of the water, I felt I was being allowed to live for some more time. It had been torture to swim to such depths in order to enter that cave, which acted as a secret hideout for those people. They appeared to have mastered the art of diving but I had no idea what was going to happen, so my reaction when we finally got there was entirely comprehensible. I think that even they thought so, because they let me cough and curse for a while, until everyone was inside the cave.

 Then, as before, they drew out their guns and pointed at me. They had kept them in tightly sealed bags and now they could use them again to threaten my life. The crazed man that had pushed into the water was the closest ones and water pressure had done nothing to eliminate the crazy face he was looking at me with. I knew he was just working for his boss, making sure everything happened according to plan. But I hated him nevertheless, for his weakness and his lack of interest for anything else than his boss.

 We started walking through the rock, the path illuminated with small lamps pierced into the cave itself. Someone had spent their time doing that, making the place seem like some sort of secret lair, which reminded me of movie villains, the kind that twist their moustaches and laugh in the most horrible and hilarious way. But this man was not one of those villains, he was much worse and he was capable of things no one would even imagine, things that no comic book villain would ever do.

 He had used the natural caves of that region of the Mexican coastline, to hide whenever someone came too close to his dealing and business. The amount of drugs he sent to every corner of the world was simply baffling. I had the chance of seeing some of the packages they were preparing and it was simply too much to send without the authorities noticing something strange. And yet, they managed to do it and sell millions and millions of dollars a year with such a rentable business. It was scary.

 And there I was, in the middle of all of it, just because of a mistake. Just because I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but also because I had allowed someone to take advantage of my stupidity. I promised never to fall for that again, but those kinds of promises are always empty and stupid, because most times people do not learn from their mistakes and I have no reason to be the exception to the rule. This wasn’t the first time I did something wrong, but it was the first time it had such serious consequences. It was obvious I could be killed at any moment and why I hadn’t was making me uncomfortable.

 We finally got to a nice open gallery, where it was very cold and humid. The crazed man ordered me to stand still while some of the other men went ahead and checked if everything was fine. I just stood there, dripping wet still, trying to understand it all. Because it was obvious I should’ve been killed hours earlier but I hadn’t. Someone had prevented that from happening and I needed to know why. It was obvious their boss was the one who knew most, if not all, the answers and I had to speak to him.

 We were given clearance and moved ahead in moments. The next room was surprisingly lit by natural sunlight and had a pool of blue water in the middle. It was an outstanding view. So surprising in fact, that the crazy guy hit me with his gun because I had stopped to appreciate the space without his permission. He made my ribs feel broken, but I had to resist the pain and just walk on. We finally got to another illuminated room but this one was much larger and had no water in the middle. And he was there.

 Their boss was not the kind of man who I thought would be running an operation like that one. Maybe because the boss was not a man, but a woman. She had olive skin and curves that would have made her into a model in the eyes of any expert. However, she was delegating tasks and had a big gun strapped to her side. I also noticed a knife on her right sheen and a couple of scars all over her body. The woman had seen her fair share of battle and one would think that’s why she was fighting back.

 When she noticed me, she walked straight to the crazy eyed man and demanded her to tell him why they had taken so long. They started arguing about thing I did not understand, and I remembered I was in a place I didn’t fully comprehend.  I knew that they were dealing with drugs and that the man that had taken me there, to the coast, had been working with them, but that was it. It was not like he told me everything that was going on in his life. He had used deceit to take me there and I had fallen for it.

 She finally looked at me but didn’t say a word, she just smiled. Then, she ordered her men to bring a present she had prepared for me. I was very scared when I heard the word “present”. From someone like her, it was probably something not very pleasant and far from what a normal person would call “a present”. I stood frozen on the same spot, looking at her looking at me. It made me nervous but, somehow, it also disgusted me. It was as if I could feel what kind of person she was only by looking at her. And if my feeling were correct, she was simply the worst.

 Finally, the present was brought it. And it was none other than him, the man that had taken me with him to a luxurious vacation to the Mexican Riviera. I had been easy and stupid enough to accept, not seeing his probable true intentions. He was beaten up, his face all covered in bruises and cuts. But he was breathing and was apparently able to use his eyes because he stared at me and just said my name. He must have thought I was there to save him or something, as if I could do that.

 The woman came closer and explained that she knew everything that had happened. The man, a drug dealer, was her link to many mafias and other criminal organizations around the world. That’s why he travelled far and wide, making connections to strengthen their sales in other countries. He would often get men to help him, by making them think he was in love with them or at least very sexually attracted to him. And according to the woman, that ploy had worked surprising well for years.

 Apparently, many men had come before me, thinking they were there to enjoy the beach and the beauty of the region, only to realize that they were going to be used as drug mules or would be forced to work as dealers, under threat against themselves and their families. Some of those men were even closeted and that was another way to pressure them into doing whatever the organization wanted them to do. And others were just junkies, that would do anything in order to have at least some of the merchandise.

 He didn’t say a word after she finished talking about him and his men and his boys. He didn’t say a word. And he could’ve, even if it was hard to understand him. But he didn’t say a word. I had no idea what to do. I was trapped and would have to do whatever they wanted me to do know. They owned me because I hadn’t been strong enough to refuse his advances. I had been distracted by his looks and his charm. Stupidity runs wild in humans and especially in jaded men.

 She looked at me and, without saying one more word; she pulled out her gun and blew his head off in front of me. I gasped, but did not scream. His body fell lifeless on the floor, staining the beautiful clear rock with the darkness of the blood. The crazy eyed man grabbed the body and soon disappeared.

 The woman walked towards me and grabbed my face. She wanted to take a good look. For a moment, I thought I was dead, but then she called two men and told them to escort me to the airport. I would leave and never talk of anything I had seen there. She didn’t threaten me, she just knew I wouldn’t talk.

Rooms

   As soon as I opened my eyes, I was in fear. I couldn’t see a single thing, as everything surrounding me was pitch black. I could fear the air moving around me and I thought, for a moment, that I had heard some voices. But aside from that, I was there, in the dark, waiting for something. I did not know if I was standing up or lying down. I did not know if I was inside a building or outside. I felt cold, so maybe I was outside. But why was it pitch black? It made no sense at all, or so I thought.

 For a moment, I tried really hard to remember what had happened before. It was obvious that, as a living person, I would have been somewhere before. Or maybe… Maybe I was dead. Maybe this was death and I had just discovered what millions of people had wanted to know for millennia. Maybe death was just staying put for something that may or may not come. At least there was no pain. But that fear, that sense of dread, the one that makes you want to run away from a certain place… Is that death too?

 Then I noticed I had felt the wind earlier. Dead people are not supposed to feel, so maybe I wasn’t dead after all. Maybe someone had condemned me to a prison of darkness, maybe I was just incarcerated in the most horrible jail and I would live the rest of my days in the dark. That thought in my mind made me want to move but I couldn’t. I hadn’t realized it but my body was completely unable to move around. I could move my eyes but that was useless in such a dark environment. There was nothing to do, but wait.

 Of course, that’s easier said that done. It seemed easy to just be there, somewhere, and wait. But one can grow tired of waiting and waiting, without anything coming to you. Besides, darkness is inherently inhuman. As creative beings, we have learned to combat the dark, as we see in it everything that we fear about in the world. We see monsters that are here to kill and eat us, and we see our past failures and shortcomings being displayed over and over, in order to torture with everything that we are.

 I maybe shed a tear or two, I don’t really remember. Trying to think seems to be almost impossible in such a dark space. You don’t even know what you’re doing and when you can’t even see your nose or move around your wrists, it makes it even more surreal and horrible. I wanted to use my voice, to see if someone would come and help me. Maybe there would be no one to do that but at least tell me why I was there, where was I and how had I gotten to such a place. I just wanted to interact with someone else, even if that meant torture or the silent treatment. Anything was better than that.

 Suddenly, I felt myself move. At first, I thought it was something around me or under me, but then I realized it was I. It was me who was moving but I couldn’t really it was me making the orders. I was scared, but I didn’t try to fight it off. My body seemed to glide in the dark, probably looking for something. Then, I heard voices again. The same one I had heard the moment my eyes opened. They seemed distant but I knew they were coming from people or at least from something that could talk.

 Then, light started to flood the place I was in. An aperture had opened in front of me, horizontal in shape. White light was rushing in, as if the gates of a dam had been opened. I covered my eyes, trying to avoid being blinded by such a bright flow of light. I walked slowly, one foot after the other, trying to breathe as calmly as I could. I didn’t want to rush. I was afraid to die at any moment, as everything had been too much for me, just too much. I finally got closer to the light and I realized, I was in control of my own body again.

 I stopped covering my eyes and decided to check myself, my hands, my legs, my feet. Everything seemed just as I remembered it. The only strange thing was that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Of course, I knew that was uncommon but, for some reason, I did not care at all. I had survived the darkness, the obscurity of who knows how much time. I had felt myself dying or already dead, so who cared about having no clothes on? Maybe there was a reason for that and I had to know what that was.

 So I decided to walk into the light and find out. Every single part of my body was engulfed in white and, for a while, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t that color. It was so powerful that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I closed them tight and tried to navigate, walking like an idiot but knowing I hadn’t seen any objects in front of me before closing my eyes. I have no idea how much time I spent walking like that, but I eventually felt the wind on my skin again, so I decided to open my eyes.

 The light room had been left behind and now I was in something else. It looked like a forest, complete with the tallest trees I had ever seen and the sound of small animals and birds all around me. I even heard a stream passing nearby, and dead leaves being stepped on by several types of creatures. However, something told me that I wasn’t really there or at least not completely. I just knew that forest was just another room, after the one with darkness and the one with blinding light. It made no sense for me to just appear in the forest out of the blue. Nothing made sense.

 However, there was no coming back. I couldn’t see the light room anywhere, I couldn’t see which way I had come through. It was just the forest and I. So I started walking, feeling with my toes the moistness of the ground and the harshness of the rotten tree bark. Walking felt better than being in that dark room trapped inside some sort of prison. At least in that forest, even if it really wasn’t a forest, I could feel a little bit of freedom. When a bird landed near me, I started crying for no apparent reason.

 Watching such a delicate creature made me crumble, so much so that my knees failed and I knelt in the middle of that place, almost by force. I couldn’t stop feeling what I was feeling, I couldn’t stop blaming myself for a bunch of things and excusing myself for others. So many things were going trough my head that it made me feel sick for a moment. And just after a couple of minutes, it all ended in nothing more than a sob. I felt weak and stupid, but I stood up and kept walking towards the stream.

 It was just a small brook coming down from some mountain. The water in it was cold but filled with life. There were fish swimming upstream and plants moving around with no will of their own. It was beautiful too but I knew that I needed to keep moving. It made no sense for me to stay there forever, to just give up on knowing who I really was and why had I been dropped in such a horrible place. For a moment, I thought I would cry once again. But I didn’t because I had grown tired of not being in control.

 It was then, when that thought happened to cross my mind, when a door, a simple wooden door, appeared out of thin air. It stood there, by a tree, as if it had been waiting for me to get to the conclusion that I had gotten to. Fearing no more, I got closer and opened it. A big breath and I was in. I found myself to be in another room, much smaller than the ones before. There was no detail on the floor or the ceiling, only an armchair at the center, with someone sitting on it. I walked around the armchair and swallowed hard.

 It was I. The person sitting in the armchair was me. I had some sort of goggles on and gloves that attached me to the chair. My head was tilted to the right, as if I had fallen asleep. I tried to touch my shoulder, his shoulder, but noticed my hand went through his skin, as if he was made of nothing.

 No. I have to correct myself. It wasn’t him who wasn’t real. It was me. I was the one that had been living a lie and he was the one outside, somewhere else, the actual me trying to do something. But what was that? I would never know. Right then my body started to fade and everything returned to the dark.

The place beyond the mountains

   Lakia ran in front of her owner and then waited for a bit. After all, Madame Greska was an elderly woman that needed a cane to support her weight. Even so, she liked to take a walk around the village every single day with her dog, as she had done for years and years. Her husband used to join them for the walk but he had died very recently and now a stroll around the fields was the only thing really making her feel alive. There was nothing more for her in this world, so she took what little she had around.

 And one of those things was the nature and beauty of her village’s surroundings. It was a very small town, deep into a very steep mountain range, so the modern world had been kept largely at bay. There was electricity and hot water but that was basically it. Very few people came but those who did chose the town precisely because it seemed to have been frozen in time. Madame Greska’s clothes were even the traditional attire for women of the region, something women did not wear anymore elsewhere.

 But in that place between the mountains, people lived a different kind of life. As she smelled the deep and beautiful smell of the lavender fields, the woman looked at how peaceful it all seemed, how untouched and perfect the countryside was and that could also have been said about the town itself. The homes had been built almost three hundred years ago by hand, stone by stone, and they had been kept in the same conditions since then. No major changes had ever been done.

 Even when electricity came, people came up with ways to install the whole thing without having to modify their homes or the general look of their town. And it was a success because no one would have ever thought those interventions had been made there. The town was made up of about twenty to thirty houses, all very similar, some of then containing the post office, the mayor’s office, the restaurant, the bar, the hotel and some other dependencies needed in the town’s daily life.

 They celebrated festivals in the summer as well as in the winter and they also had a small church on the outskirts to praise the Virgin Mary, the protector of the mountain towns. It was there that they prayed for days and days during the hard times, that had never come to the mountains but that had been looming around them for quite some time. The town was never in the middle of any historical occurrence but they had been very close in a number of times and only prayer and keeping their traditions had seemed to do the work and keep all the bad things at bay, away from their paradise.

 One of those bad things was war, both great wars in this case. During the first one, Madame Greska had not been alive yet. But her parents told her when she was young how they feared for their lives when a messenger arrived, having been sent by the royal house hold in order to announce all over the country that the war had begun. For them, it had been the announcement of a tragedy; something that they just knew would change their lives forever. So they prayed and prepared, and waited and waited.

 But the war never came to them. The small town stayed as it had been for hundreds of years and its people, although fearful, were able to live normal lives, plowing their fields and harvesting their crops. They had animals and even did a little bit of commerce between themselves and neighboring small towns. It was only in those opportunities when someone would come back, updating everyone about what was happening beyond the mountains. But somehow, all of it just seemed like a bedtime story.

 No soldiers ever came and those machines that people had invented to fly had been simply considered exaggerations. No one there ever saw a tank or even a rifle. They had no idea what mustard gas was and how it affected people. In time, many years after the end of the war, some travellers did tell them about what they had heard and seem. So the war did become a little bit more real but probably not real enough. For the people of such a small town, all those grandiose stories were just that, stories.

 Madame Greska grew up during the times between the wars and she remembered those days fondly. She remembered frolicking around the meadows in the spring, catching tadpoles with her sister and running after some dog, probably Lakia’s grandfather. Something she had always loved was when, in winter, they would offer her ice cones in the town’s festival. They were made out of ice collected in the mountains surrounding the town and they would then add some flavoring, most likely some kind of berry.

 Her parents her very caring people, the farmer type. They had a couple of cows and would sell the milk in the town’s market, every single day. Her mother was the one that had to do the heavy work and her father was in charge of selling the product. She never knew why her mother had to carry such heavy buckets and walk the cows to a prairie where they could eat. Her father didn’t seem to do that much at all. But he was such a nice and funny guy that, no one ever really seemed to be able to be mad at him. He was just the kind of person that would lift your spirits any day of the week.

 That was until the Second World War. The town was left untouched by that one too but they were more affected by it in ways very few people can understand. Again, no soldiers ever stepped on the stone streets of the small town nor they walked among the lavender fields. But it was people that heard about what was going on and how now it seemed to be worse than the last time. The atrocities people talked about were so heinous that some people even qualified them as fabrications and dismissed them completely.

 But by the end of the second year of the war, people noticed that it did seem like something completely different that before. More and more, people that had been beyond the mountains would tell everyone in town about the battles being fought and the threats being fulfilled. And those people would almost always come with some kind of proof, mostly in the shape of flyers and newspapers, which had become easier to find. They came with detailed stories and even with pictures of the horrors.

 This caused town to prepare once again. And even knowing the war would probably never get to them, they did try to cut off some ties with the outside world in order to prevent anything bad from coming to them. Some youngsters were even thinking about the bigger picture, what would happen if the enemy won the war and was able to take everything for themselves? They thought about it for a long time until one day, something happened that made them take a step that their families would regret for life.

 One night, a large group of planes passed over town. They were noisy and seemed to be flying really low. Most villagers thought their tie had come. But no, the planes continued for a bit and then started dropping their payload on a neighboring town, much larger than Madame Greska’s village. It was beyond the mountains but the explosions were so potent that they could be seen from afar. This event caused many young men to decide joining the army and fight for the freedom of the whole nation.

 None of them ever returned. Only letter with their uniform and a picture of their battalion would get to their families, who would mourn them forever. Brave young men that had decided that their ignored village was more than enough to be able to fight tyrants and monsters.

 Two of those men were Madame Greska’s brothers. And she was so affected by the tragedy that she was never able to have children. Her body was able to do it but somehow inside seemed to prevent any pregnancy. It seemed her soul had always been in mourning and would always be.