Aloyuise: Patients and Potlucks
In a manner of speaking, nothing was supposed to happen. Nothing in my life is ever supposed to happen. I can't really help the fact my life is full of tragedy and a twisted form of comedy. Like some sort of sick higher power is making my life into a Shakespeare. Yet all in the same, things happen and I trudge through them in search for a moment of happiness. As they say when life hands you lemons you make lemonade, but what about all the other things you can use lemons for? I keep thinking there are other options, but I don't want to take the risk and try out a different possibility. I always play it safe, until now.
The irony in my life amuses me sometimes. You would think someone who is this messed up in the head would stay far, far away from a psych ward. Yet I find myself as a nurse, in the Aloyuise Institution, Los Angeles Division. The year was 1928 when being crazy was feared, and you would be admitted on just your neighbor's word. My employer, Marcus Aloyuise was the richest man in the state of California, and he owns a country wide chain of mental hospitals. The story was that his wife, rests her soul, was driven insane by three consecutive miscarriages. She went a little crazier each time, but the third was a breaking point for her. She went insane, throwing tantrums, and giving up on life completely. One day Mr. Aloyuise made the mistake of leaving her alone, and she swallowed a bottle of opium.
Since then he has been dedicated to the mentally insane, and in a way he has a major soft spot for them. I do too, of course, but it's more out of pity than anything else. I feel it is my duty to help those who cannot help themselves.
The building looked beautiful on the outside, with its marble walls, and grandeur pillars on the entrance. The build was huge, the size of an ordinary hospital, but the building before me was just for mental health. Like all things beautiful the horror lies within.
I glanced at the clock and the clock glanced at me with the time. I went to the front desk where Madge Cairo, the secretary waited. I clocked into work with the usual protocol.
"Good Morning Mr. Mellark!" She said in her usual bright and cheery voice.
"Morning Madge," I said automatically. There is something about her that unsettles me, like her excess happiness could harm me somehow. Who knows what people who are too happy can do?
"You have a fresh shipment coming in today!" She said.
Ah! I remember now why I don't like her. She thinks that just because they do not have the same capacity levels as us, which it makes them inferior to us. She is an ignorant woman, but she has to be tolerated because she is the Head Psychiatrist, Marvel Cairo's wife. Tolerating her offers job security, and I like to be safe in all measures.
"Well I guess that's great for us." I called back to her as I walked away to the nurse's station. I walked into a small white room with a coffee pot onto of a countertop that lined the left wall. A refrigerator stood across from me, and tables and chairs filled the rest of the room in an all over the place kind of fashion but all of the tables and chairs matched so it was obviously planned.
A lot of the nurses were female; in fact I was the only male who worked the day shift. The nurses here did their jobs quite efficiently, which was a horrible thing in my eyes. The acts that are committed by the staff here are unspeakable, but there are a few of the good ones left. We do our jobs like we are supposed to, but we try to prevent the bad things from happening on our watch.
"You look like the right side of Queen Mary's arse." Katniss said as I pulled out my usual chair, coffee in hand. She was a jokester, but in a place like this, jokes are hardly acceptable.
"You've looked worse." I retorted.
To the left of me sat Delly Cartwright, a blonde beauty whom I had grown up with. To my right sat a fox faced ginger name Julian, a newbie who had the courage slap the charge nurse for slapping a patient. Katniss sat across from me.
Together we make up the decent nurses, while the rest of them eyed us suspiciously.
I sipped my coffee. "We're getting more patients today."
"Really, we already have a lot on our plates as it is." Julian pouted.
"Give it a few more months and you will be able to handle anything this place throws at you." Delly said with a pat on Julian's back.
"Yeah, Monster Madge practically jumped out of her seat just to tell me." I said. "I can't stand her."
"Sssssshhhh. The walls have ears dummy!" Katniss said with a slap to the back of the head.
I glanced over my shoulder in reflex. The room was almost empty with the exception of the few night nurses waiting out the final minutes of their shift.
"What's for lunch? I brought the cookies" Katniss asked in an attempt to change the subject. You see we always eat together, and we always eat each other's cooking, because we get bored of our own. So one day Delly came up with a bright idea for a potluck every day. We all agreed to it of course, and when Julian came around we were eager to let her join in.
"I brought my meatloaf and mashed potatoes." Delly answered.
"I have the deviled eggs and salad." Julian said.
"Delicious I can't wait to bite." I said. Just then shift bell ring, yay the start of work.
"Oh! And I brought the biscuits and my stomach." I said.
"You're such a man." Katniss said with a click of her tongue and a shake of her head.
"Maybe so, but we can discuss my gender later. Let's go meet the new patients!" I said.
One by one we left the nurse's station, chit chatting away on useless information from new ways to cook eggs and such. All the nurses and doctors congregated at the Emergency Admission entrance. There were whispers that it was rumored that the police were escorting the new patients, and I would believe it. Half the patients here were 'escorted' by the police here.
You see the LAPD has been gaining a reputation for being useless and corrupt since the new Chief of Police was inducted. James E. Davis had hired a gun squad to insure the safety of the Los Angeles people. Rumor has it this gun squad came from the Los Angeles crime family, and that the police had made a deal with the crooks. But they're 'just rumors' people protested but even they cannot turn blind eyes to missing people and gun shots throughout the night.
The police showed up with three new people, two women and a man. They were brought to Marvel Cairo who then appointed the nurses who was in charge of these new patients. One of the women, the shorter of the two and the one who looked most childlike with brown hair, made a feisty last chance struggle to be free. She was almost successful, with her skill tactics of biting and evading but she was grabbed by the cuffs and brought down, hard.
The other woman looked sedate already, with a dazed look on her face and a soft smile. She had envious blonde hair, and to be honest she was more threatening to me than the impish short one. She had a Glamazon body and face, and she made any old, tatter, orange jumpsuit look runway worthy.
The boy could have been the Glamazon's twin. Envious blonde hair with a perfect body. Perfect, Perfect, Perfect, except those eyes. Those steel grey eyes that mirrored mine held horrors beyond my imagination.
Cairo escorted him over to me, and the horrors in his eyes brought horror to my face for reality had finally sunk in.
"Mellark meet Cato Monroe, your new patient." Cairo announced.
Shit.