Hmm. This took me longer than it should have, and to tell you the truth, I'm not too happy with this chapter. But I hope you like it!
FOUR
Over the next two days, Martha found herself in meeting after meeting… mental health professionals love meetings, she knew. Plans for the patients, charts, avoiding lawsuits, experimentation, confidentiality, and just plain left-hand-knowing-what-the-right-hand-is-doing type stuff. And on and on and on…
She met the rest of the hospital staff. She had a private, official meeting with those who would be working under her, though that group had a high turnover rate, since the delusional patients in the Tardis usually creeped out the nurses and orderlies. She and Dr. Smith met to arrange the details of Dr. Smith's departure. Martha consulted with a couple of other psychiatrists about what little they knew of the Tenth Patient. She got a tour of the inner workings of the clinic.
And in so doing, she learned that there was a media control room. She could Shanghai the patient's television, as it were, and put on it whatever she wanted him to see. She could do the same with his radio, stereo systems and computer access. If she wished, she could shut off his satellite and radio signals, and the patients were not allowed to use the internet anyway.
She remembered making a mental note of Drs. Chesterton and Wright experimenting with input devices, and decided to use the media Shanghai to carry through with her experiment, though she wasn't sure what she would input. She went into the patients' video library to see what she might find, and came back with two DVDs of the RSC's filmed versions of Love's Labours Lost and MacBeth. She also grabbed a documentary on the life of Shakespeare. She put the DVD on in the patient's room, then checked on him to make sure he was watching it. He was. Later, she'd have an orderly switch to the documentary, and then play them all again. Eventually, she would go into the room, and see what they would conjure up.
She spent one more afternoon in the file room, and skipped all the way to the end of the First Patient's stay. At some point in the rotation, Drs. Chesterton and Wright had been replaced by Dr. Benjamin Jackson. It was on his watch that the First Patient died, in October, 1966.
"Jackson – 28/10/66. The patient has been deteriorating quickly, and I fear the end is nigh. He did suffer so when Susan stopped coming round each day. She has since got married, and he was not allowed to attend the ceremony (though, it is still in dispute whether he even knew there was a ceremony), and since then, there has been a marked decline in his physical health. I cannot yet ascertain whether the mental condition and the physical are related. If the mental condition is contributing to the physical decline, then my job just became ever so much more difficult. Forgive me for saying so, but I suppose we'll have to wait for the autopsy results, in order to find out.
"Jackson – 29/10/66. Today, the patient fought with orderlies – this was his chief endeavour of the day. They tried to give him his medication, and he refused it. They tried to help him change his clothes, and he insisted that they unhand him. They tried to clean his quarters, and he threw them out. Whatever they wanted to do, he wanted them doing the opposite, and his words, as usual, sounded like complete gibberish. He would not even listen to me, warning him that he might exert himself. I fear for what is to come since he has not taken his stabilising medications, and has refused therapy and all other treatments. Facility leadership dictates that I leave for the night; but I walk away from the hospital tonight under extreme protest. I do not believe my patient is long for this world, and tonight's care might be crucial."
Blimey, again with Facility Leadership. What is going on with that? Martha asked herself, not for the first time.
"Jackson – 30/10/66. I came in this morning to find my patient had passed in his sleep. The medical examiner put time of death at approximately 11:15 last night. Tomorrow, I will begin casting about for my replacement, and facility leadership shall regroup, and cast about for a new patient. I do not intend to stay on, once the new 'regime,' as it were, has taken effect. I will help ease the transition any way I can, and then I shall find gainful employment elsewhere. Incidentally the funeral is in four days, and there will be no autopsy, as per facility leadership. As such, this will be my final communication concerning data on this particular patient."
Martha placed this file back on the shelf, and pulled the next one. The Second Patient, once settled, was under the care of Dr. James McCrimmon.
"McCrimmon – 5/11/66. My patient, the Second Patient of Ward 40 (which the staff has now taken to calling Tardis Ward), arrived two days ago. Dr. Jackson and I helped him get settled, as this patient, unlike the previous, does not have any family to speak of. No children, no spouse, siblings are persona non grata.
"Dr. Jackson departed this morning on holiday. He will return in two weeks to tie up loose ends, to which I look forward, because he would be interested to see the new development. When the patient arrived, he was suffering from standard delusions, of the type seen throughout the recorded history of mental health. The delusion would switch from one to the next, but always he was convinced that he was some important historical figure or another. His favourite was Napoleon – this was his most frequent guise. Others included Julius Caesar, Heinrich Himmler, Confucius, Amerigo Vespucci and William the Conqueror. And these are just the ones his previous care-givers know of. However, today, the patient announced that he is the Doctor. I have been treating him warily; his behaviour within his current delusion does not match any others of his from the past, and does not match the behaviour of a doctor. And I am not yet certain whether this particular delusion is to do with his new environment, in a hospital surrounded by doctors, or whether he heard talk of the previous patient's delusion, and is appropriating the imagery. Fortunately, the patient's delusions do not last longer than forty-eight hours, generally speaking, and according to his history, he will have switched to some other guise in a couple of days. As the other delusions resurface, I should be able to get a clearer reading on his mental state, and the story of this 'Doctor' of his."
"McCrimmon – 6/11/66. The patient persists today in calling himself 'the Doctor.' And even stranger, he has explained to me that he is not of this world, and implied that the room he stays in is his spaceship. This is perfectly in keeping with the previous patient. I am not sure how to proceed. I am absolutely flummoxed, nervous, somewhat regretful of having given Dr. Jackson permission to take a holiday before I became acclamated to my patient. I fear that the patient is even more fragile than before, and I must approach with extreme caution. I am confused, not sure what to think… I have never seen any phenomenon such as this. I must return to my research."
Martha could see that Dr. McCrimmon was taken aback by these revelations, as she was herself. She felt the whole phenomenon was totally weird, and could now see how the percetion of a "curse" or haunting could come about, especially if it happened again with the next patient, and the next. It was creepy, and more than just a coincidence. And she was coming to it forty years later, with prior knowledge, and tools to work with! She tried to imagine how it must have felt hearing those words coming from a totally independent patient, with no warning at all.
After this, Dr. McCrimmon began researching historical references to 'the Doctor' and travellers of time and space, and some of the aliens that the First Patient had named. He felt that given the Second Patient's historical obsessions, the Doctor might indeed be some relatively obscure figure from history, and the fact that the First Patient was delusional in the same way was merely a coincidence. But Dr. McCrimmon was discouraged after three days, and resolved to spend time with the patient, gather data, and wait for Dr. Jackson's return. The next few narratives were stories, like with the First and Tenth Patients, of aliens, battles, time travel and heroism, in which Dr. McCrimmon played a key role, but 'the Doctor' was the centre of the action.
Eventually, of course, Dr. Jackson returned.
"Jackson – 20/11/66. I am vexed in the extreme. Upon my return from holiday, Dr. McCrimmon was positively bursting to tell me that the Second Patient's delusion (bordering on schizophrenia) now matches that of the First. In addition, the Second Patient has never sustained a single delusion for longer than forty-eight hours, but his tenure as 'the Doctor' has now endured for fourteen days. I had previously been planning to take my services elsewhere as of Christmas, but now I believe I must, and want to, remain here at the BBC for another few months. I shall set my departure for six months from now, which will be May, 1967, unless the patient reverts to form. Curious, very, very curious."
Jackson and McCrimmon continued to work with the Second Patient, documenting his adventures in time and space, until the spring. At some point, once they were sure that the delusion was the same as the First Patient's, they inquired as to how the Doctor accounts for this change in his appearance and personality, wondering if he even noticed the change. The Second Patient reported that those of his alien species could perform a "renewal" of their bodies when they die, or are mortally wounded.
Martha's jaw dropped. The Doctor would "renew" himself all the way up to a Tenth incarnation? How long could this go on? Could the Doctor predict how many renewals he would have? Could the Doctor, the alien life form, live indefinitely? Would he account for his own final death if and when the hospital ever closed for good, or would the delusion travel with him to another facility?
Is it this place causing the delusion, or something else? These, she reckoned, were questions the psychiatric staff had been asking for forty years. What made her think she could answer them now?
Dr. Jackson left the Tardis on 13 May, 1967, and Dr. McCrimmon was left alone with the patient.
She reckoned that this was a good place to stop. The reading had exhausted Martha's eyes and brain, and she realised she hadn't had any contact with her patient since her first day, except to force him to watch Shakespeare. It was time to see what effect this would have.
She entered the Tardis room and the patient was seated at the table in the centre, having his lunch. He was reading a book, and did not acknowledge her. She glanced over his shoulder, and she could see that it was a Shakespeare play. She pulled his chart from the end of the bed. The patient had requested a copy of Love's Labours Lost the day before, and an orderly had brought it to him when he'd brought the evening meds.
"Doctor?" she asked.
He looked up and seemed to see her for the first time. He abandoned his lunch and his book and got to his feet in a hurry. He was dressed in the brown pin-striped suit today, and he said "I promised you a trip!"
She nodded.
With flourish, he pulled on a brown trench coat and fluttered his eyebrows at her. "Brave new world."
"Where are we?" she asked.
"Take a look."
She stepped toward him, and he seemed to lead her through an invisible door.
"Where are we?" she asked again. "Sorry, whole new language. When are we?"
"Somewhere before the invention of the toilet," he said.
"Are we safe? Can we move around and stuff?" she wanted to know. She was trying to work out whether this Doctor's rules of time travel were consistent with the others'.
"Of course we can, why do you ask?"
"It's like in the films," she reminded him. "You step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race!"
"Tell you what then, don't step on any butterflies," he advised her flippantly. She thought she noted a bit of exasperation. "What have butterflies ever done to you?"
They established that the year was 1599, the year Love's Labours Lost was mounted at the Globe theatre. She asked a few more time-travel questions, including whether she, as a black woman, would be treated all right at this time in history, or what would happen if she accidentally killed one of her ancestors. He rather dismissed her questions – she would absolutely make sure to note that. It seemed to her that a delusion as detailed as this Doctor thing would bring with it some fairly stringent policies regarding travelling through time, and the social implications of displacing someone from the twentieth or twenty-first century, but the Tenth did not seem to have any of these concerns. She would definitely keep her eyes open for notes about the other patients expounding on such things.
He pointed out to her that 1599 was "not so different" from her time, including popular entertainment. He took her round to face the television, where the Shakespeare DVDs had apparently been playing on a loop. Love's Labours Lost was just finishing up, and the patient began to applaud. Martha followed suit, including shouting "Author, author!" hoping it would provoke the patient to add William Shakespeare himself to the fantasy.
"Genius," the Doctor said. "He's a genius – the genius, the most human human there's ever been. Now we're going to hear him speak!"
Fantastic, Martha thought. Shakespeare is here on stage!
"Always, he chooses the best words, new, beautiful, brilliant words!" the Doctor told her, enthusiastically.
A pause, and then his face fell.
"You should never meet your heroes," he said. Apparently, Shakespeare had said something less than eloquent.
"Dr. Martha Jones, 4 April, 2007, time is eighteen fifty-one. Today was my second meeting with the Tenth Patient, or the Tenth Doctor, whichever way we're choosing to see him. His delusion persists as I thought it would. He is continually exasperated with me because I'm not in-the-know on certain things, and he has been tacitly refusing to fill me in. I wonder if this is because he thinks I may be temporary. At one point, he stated that he doesn't like starting from scratch when I asked a question, and at another point, he reported, and I quote, Rose would know. I suspect he is still in transition…
"Anyway, a few days ago, I received a tour of the BBC facility and learned of the media piping, the ability to show the patient whatever audio/visual material I wish him to see. In light of the Doctor's apparent time-travelling ability, I began showing the patient videos of Love's Labours Lost, MacBeth and a documentary on William Shakespeare that we had in the patient media library. As I predicted, today, the Doctor and I had a rollicking Shakespearean adventure. It was very interesting, indeed! According to the documentary, Shakespeare wrote a play called Love's Labours Won, as a continuation of Love's Labours Lost, but it was… well, lost somehow. The Doctor's internal adventure today attempted to explain this, using Shakespeare himself as a character, as well as elements from MacBeth, namely the witches. Only, because the Doctor is an alien, the witches were not of an occult sort, they were, in fact, from another planet and were attempting to destroy the Earth with Shakespeare's words. I was immensely intrigued by the patient's ideas here. He stated that the aliens, the witches, use words as equations the way humans use numbers, and this causes things to happen. This is, apparently, how his pseudo-scientific delusion accounts for something as fantastical as witchcraft."
Martha laughed to herself. She thought about how strange it is that a completely delusional patient should have to come up with devices to accommodate fantastical elements.
"The witches were attempting to use the play Love's Labours Won as their equation that opens some portal or other, and allows them to destroy our planet. The play was lost when Shakespeare himself shouted at them, using his unique words… and a little help from Harry Potter. That was my doing.
"I have been reading accounts of the First and Second Patients' tenure here, and one thing I have never run across is how the Doctor processes information. But I believe I witnessed this happening. For part of the day, the patient had us in an old inn, and we lay on the bed together for a bit, while he basically thought aloud. I perceived that he was working out the physics of the whole affair in his head. This is notable because in all past accounts, the Doctor has just known the answers, as though the delusional patient has written out the story beforehand. I also witnessed him doing something similar when we were, ironically, supposed to be in a jail cell at Bedlam. He began shouting about the number fourteen and its significance, and what it might have to do with the witch he was apparently seeing before him. This Doctor has a very different way of working through data – it's like, if he were a computer, his CPU would be transparent. You can almost see neurons firing and wheels turning. It's absolutely fascinating to watch.
"It's also fascinating to see how input influences the delusion. I'd like to do a bit more research on this, more experiementation, to see how different things manifest. For example, if we put football on the telly, would we then be playing at the World Cup, trying to save the world from Zinedine Zidane? I can't wait to find out.
"I'm going to sign off now. My hope for the next couple of weeks is that the patient will acclamate to my presence, though it is interesting to see effects of an attachment to another psychiatrist…"
Just keep your distance, Martha, she told herself.
