...

Tate had no idea how long he was in the padded cell. The drowsy euphoria brought on by the injected drug combined with the painkiller he'd taken before made time meaningless. He lay there on the floor of the dingy seclusion room, drifting in and out of something like sleep. Thoughts bled into dreams and back into conscious thought again so seamlessly, he couldn't tell which was which.

At some point an orderly took him back to his regular cell in the men's ward. The black-haired man removed the white leather straight jacket but Tate was too drugged to care. He just sprawled on his bed and lay there for a long time. Eventually he heard rattling at the door. Lifting his head he saw someone had pushed a dinner tray through the small slot in the door near the floor. The stuff looked a bit like beef stew. Tate had no appetite for it so he ignored it. A while later a staff member - a big black man - came to collect the tray and, seeing the pill cup still on the tray, picked it up and brought it over.

"Hey," the man said, nudging Tate roughly. "Take your meds."

The teen stirred and squinted at the man in white, not fully understanding what was going on. The man put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a hard jostle.

"Take your meds," the orderly repeated.

Tate took the cup and shifted a little, alert enough to grasp what was wanted of him. He could tell this guy was no Patrick. "Could I have some water?"

The stocky man turned to go grab the metal cup from the tray and while his back was turned Tate dumped the cup down the front of his hospital gown. He kept his fist closed, acting like he had the pills in his hand. When the orderly returned with the tin cup Tate pretended to take the pills all at once by pressing that hand quickly over his mouth. He took several gulps of the metal-flavored water, wincing at the taste in a convincing approximation of swallowing so many pills at the same time.

He passed both cups back to the attendant and collapsed onto the mattress again. He lay there for a long time before stirring again. When he'd been alone long enough for his hand to fall asleep from the way he was laying on it, he fished the pills back out. With some effort he got the bottom sheet up so he could stash the tablets in the mattress along with the ones from the morning. After he got the sheet put back he collapsed again and was soon asleep.

Weird dreams plagued him all night but when he woke in the morning, he couldn't remember any of them. An orderly brought his breakfast in. He'd seen the dark-haired man before but had no name to associate to him. Tate didn't feel like asking and the orderly wasn't chatty so the guy dropped off the tray and left without a word between them.

The food was like what he'd had the previous morning only this time the pill cup had some different pills in it. Tate examined them curiously. He hadn't bothered to look at what he was given with the evening meal he'd missed. He eventually ended up stuffing all but the painkiller into his mattress along with the rest.

His backside was feeling better, even before the pain pill kicked in. He took time after eating to examine the area as best he could without a mirror and grimaced. It looked bad; worse than it felt with several dark red stripes bruising his pale skin. He quickly covered himself again, ashamed of the marks. It was a physical reminder of how helpless he'd been.

...

Sometime later, the door opened again, and he was let out to be led first to the bathroom where the orderly watched him while he took a leak. Then Tate was led to the common room where that same song was playing on the record player again. There were only a couple of people in the room when the blond youth arrived: An old man who was sitting and drooling on himself and the guy who'd been singing in the commons the day before. The singing man wasn't singing at the moment, though. He was standing next to one of the windows, slowly banging his head against the sturdy mesh screen that covered it.

Unsettled, Tate found a spot on a deep red couch and sat down. It was more comfortable to sit on the soft cushion than one of the hard chairs would be. Slowly the room filled with other inmates, first just men but then women trickled in as well. Tate didn't see Harvey anywhere, which was a mild disappointment. He'd been hoping to ask the guy for a cigarette. He chewed his fingernails absently while watching the room.

A woman with dark brown tangled hair sat down next to him.

"Hi," she said with a smile that made her dark brown eyes look a bit unhinged. She looked to be in her mid-forties and had a dumpy physique beneath her asylum-issued button-down dress.

"Hey," he said around a finger.

"You're the new guy," she said, seeming proud of her knowledge.

"I guess," he responded, not sure what else to say.

"I'm Roberta." Her face twitched. "What's your name?"

"Tate," he supplied.

"I saw you looking at me."

He gave her a peculiar look. "I wasn't looking at you till you sat down."

"Don't lie," said Roberta, her smile fading. "I know you were."

Tate wrinkled his nose a little. He was about to deny it again when another woman sat down beside him, wedging herself on his other side between him and the arm of the couch. It put her in very close contact with him.

"He wasn't looking at you," she told the woman, smirking at her.

The new girl had short blonde hair and was several years younger than Roberta but was still older than Tate by a couple of years. He thought she might've been the woman he'd seen the day before who was talking to the lady with the baby doll.

"He was so looking at me!" defended Roberta. "I saw him!"

"You think everyone's looking at you." The blonde woman grabbed Tate's free hand and clutched it with both hands between her breasts. "He'd rather look at me. Wouldn't you?"

"Fuck you, Shelley!" the older woman snapped.

Tate extracted himself from between them. He had to tug hard to retrieve his hand from the blonde woman. They watched him go then fell to bickering between themselves about who had driven him away.

The commons were filled up by that point; there was no place to sit where there weren't already people and Tate wanted to be alone. Hugging his middle and moving carefully so as not to make the hospital gown flap open, he went to the only place he could find that was somewhat uncrowded: Next to the record player. From there he surveyed the room and was again awed and disgusted by the sheer insanity he saw.

Naked, wasted-away people; people swaying; people mumbling to themselves. Many inmates were just sitting and staring. A guy over in one corner was puking and nobody was doing anything about it. When he finished he just wandered away from the vomit and still, no one did anything about it. The orderlies that were lurking in the shadows near the exits were ignoring everyone and everything, just talking to each other. Nobody wanted to volunteer to clean up the mess.

It was enough to make Tate's skin crawl. He remembered what he'd heard Harvey saying that first day. He knew he wasn't as crazy as many of the hospital's residents but he was beginning to fear that living in this kind of climate might make him that way. He looked over at the nearest window but the double layers of bars were discouraging. It wasn't a way out.

He looked around the room again and spied a guy who looked only a couple of years older than himself. The young man was sitting on one of the nearby sofas and held a small pad of paper that he was writing on a lot. His brown hair was neatly combed, though greasy. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips and a look of attentive focus. Taking a chance, Tate headed over to where he was and sat down near but not right next to him.

"Hey," he said. "Can I bum a smoke?"

The man looked up from his writing, assessed Tate head to toe, then shifted his pencil to the hand that was holding his pad of paper. He dug a pack of cigarettes out and shook one out for him. "Knock yourself out," he said.

Tate took one. "Got some matches?"

"Want me to kick you in the chest to get you started?" the other guy said. His tone was serious but there was a spark of humor in his green eyes. He put the cigarette pack away and produced a book of matches.

After he'd lit his cigarette Tate returned the matches and braved another question. "What are you writing?"

The man put the matches away then looked at his pad. "Notes."

"Why?"

The man looked at Tate for a moment before answering. "I'm doing research. I'm not actually supposed to be here. I'm a student at Boston University. I lied to get in here. My class is doing a study about how places like this can't tell the sane from the insane."

Tate wasn't sure whether to believe him. The guy seemed more stable than most of the room's other occupants. It was possible he was telling the truth but he could also be completely delusional.

The teen grinned at the bizarreness of it all. "I'm kind of finding it hard to tell that myself."

The man smiled. "Wait till you've been here a couple of months."

"I'm Tate."

"John," the man said. "What're you in for?"

"Fuck if I know," Tate lied and sucked on his cigarette. He'd decided he didn't want John to know what he'd done. The guy might not want to talk to him anymore and he was better company than the crazy bitches who were still bickering across the room. "I get these bad headaches and I guess that made them think I was crazy."

"Tough luck," John said sympathetically. "I've heard stranger tales. There's a woman in here - Betty - who was locked up because she wanted to move out of her parents' house. She was twenty-two when they had her committed. She's been through something like fifty ECT sessions. Batty as a belfry now."

"ECT?"

"Shock treatment," clarified John. "They took her away a few days ago. I heard they were going to give her a lobotomy."

"Lobotomy?"

"Yeah. It's where they take an ice pick and a hammer and..." John held his pencil up near the corner of his eye and made a tapping motion with the other hand. "Scrape the front of your brain away from your skull. Kills the nerves. Makes you a walking zombie."

"I know what it is. But why would they do that to her?" Tate said, appalled.

John hunched his shoulders in a shrug. "She got violent. All those shocks on a healthy brain... fried her good. She wasn't nuts when she came in here but she'll never get out."

"I heard nobody ever gets out of here," Tate said, bitterness leaking into his tone.

John crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on a nearby beat-up coffee table then dusted ashes off his pants where they'd fallen during his distraction with his writing. "I'll be getting out of here soon."

"How?"

"All I have to do is tell the doctor I'm insane and agree to take the anti-psychotic medication he wants me to and they'll release me."

"They're giving me meds but they didn't say they'd let me go if I took them," said Tate.

John pressed his lips together briefly, considering. "I'm guessing from what you said that we weren't admitted under the same circumstances. See, I came to the hospital voluntarily. It sounds like you were committed involuntarily."

That made Tate laugh. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. But if you came here willingly... I think you're crazier than I am."

The man chuckled. "Maybe," he said.

"So is this all we do all day?" Tate asked, giving the commons another broad look. "Just sit around?"

John was writing again. He didn't look up as he answered. "Mostly. If you're well-behaved, you get more privileges."

"Like what?"

"Arts and crafts," said John. "Ceramics. Kitchen or laundry duty. Music. There are even some classes they offer for folks who might be able to work once they get out."

"Classes?" Tate said, nose crinkling. "Bad enough they have us locked up but they make you go to school too?"

John chuckled again. "Here, it's considered a privilege."

"Yeah, like doing laundry," Tate responded with a grin. "Fucking sadists."

"You get bored enough, laundry'll seem like a treat."

"I doubt that." Tate finished his cigarette and put it out.

"Better than being stuck in here," John pointed out. "That lady you were talking to?" He tipped his pencil toward Roberta in a quick gesture. "Had five kids. She stabbed all of them to death and left 'em on the bed she and her husband shared. Said she was sick of having to 'do everything herself'."

Tate blinked and looked at Roberta. Sure she'd seemed strange but he wouldn't have pegged her for a child murderer. But the story made him curious. "You know about anybody else here?"

"Yeah, sure," said John. "I've learned almost everybody's story. Everybody who can communicate anyway."

"What about him?" asked Tate, pointing to a wiry guy with black hair who was playing checkers with a Hispanic man.

"The white guy's been in and out of institutions since he was a kid," said John. "He's got some crazy stories to tell about the shit he's seen. The guy he's with set his neighbor on fire because he thought he stole something from him." He tipped his pencil toward an older black woman who was sitting at one of the tables slowly rocking herself side to side. "She was a prostitute. They force-sterilized her at the last place she was at. Sent her here and she got the shock-and-lobotomy treatment."

"She told you that?" Tate asked, caught somewhere between horrified and amazed.

"No," John said. He lit another cigarette. "One of the other gals who knew her from there did."

"What about that girl?" Tate pointed to the blonde woman, Shelley.

"Nympho," reported John. "There used to be a few of 'em running around here after the women's home closed up but most of them have been shipped off to other places. Shelley's... well." He gave a short laugh. "She's incurable."

"What's a nympho?"

John grinned. "A chick who likes sex too much."

"Are they going to lobotomize her too?" Tate glanced briefly at the rocking black woman.

"I doubt it," said John. "Too many of the staff here like what she has to offer."

Tate stared at him. "Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack," John nodded. "Some of the staff here are worse than the patients. I've heard some of the orderlies were hired from the prison work release program. Just... Be careful what you do and say. The best thing to do is pretend to go along with whatever it is they tell you. Kiss ass, be polite. Are you taking any medicine?"

Tate didn't answer immediately, not sure he wanted to tell John the truth. The man might tell the staff. "Why?"

"I haven't seen you in the drug line," said John. "You've been getting stuff in your cell, yeah?"

"Drug line?"

"Yeah," the man said, tapping his ash in the ashtray. "If you behave yourself, you'll start coming to the cafeteria for meals and pills. They do drug line four times a day - once before every meal and once more before bed. When they give you the pills, just keep them in your cheek, away from your saliva. Then when you can, go to the bathroom and spit them out in the toilet. Just make sure you pretend to act stoned or they'll cop wise."

Impressed, Tate tipped his head. "That works?"

"Sure," smiled John. "I do it all the time. Taking that shit fucks you up. It's why more than half the people here just sit around staring off into space."

Tate looked around the room again. What John said was true: The majority of the patients were just sitting and staring. Or rocking. Or twitching.

"Company," John murmured then and tucked his little notepad under his leg.

A tall dark-haired man was approaching them. He looked to be in his early 40's. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and gray slacks. He didn't look like a patient but he wasn't dressed in the uniform of a guard or orderly either.

"Tate Langdon?" the man asked with a pleasant smile.

Tate shifted on the couch and folded his arms. "Yeah."

"I'm Doctor Ben Harmon," said the man in the black sweater. "I'd like to speak with you if I could."

He phrased it nicely but Tate wasn't sure it was really a request. He considered saying no just to see what the man would do but he decided to play nice for the time being.

"Okay. Sure," he smiled back.

"Would you join me over here?" the doctor said, motioning to a nearby pair of old armchairs that had cleared out.

"Fine with me."

Tate got up then and, making sure to hold his hospital gown closed, he headed over to the nearest of the two chairs and resettled himself there.

"How are you feeling, Tate?" Ben asked once he'd seated himself.

"Just peachy, doc," the teenager smiled. "How are you?"

"Doing well," Dr. Harmon responded with another smile. "I understand you've been seeing Doctor Thredson."

"Well, we're not going steady yet," Tate joked. "But I think he's going to give me his class ring soon."

He was rewarded with a small laugh from the doctor. "Funny. So you've been getting along well with him?"

"Yeah," said Tate, growing more curious about the man. Why'd he care so much about Tate's therapist? "He seems all right. Well. Except the fact that he had them shoot me full of dope and locked me in the 'seclusion room'." Suddenly reminded of the betrayal, Tate's smile drained from his dark eyes.

"I'd heard about that," Dr. Harmon admitted. "I understand it had something to do with your not wanting to be kept here."

Tate's expression darkened and he folded his arms over his middle. "Dr. Thredson said I'm stuck here until I get better but that there's no cure for what I have."

Ben was a little surprised at that fatalistic prediction and wondered if the patient was dramatizing it. "Well, perhaps you need a second set of ears to hear your situation," he suggested. "I find it hard to believe anyone who doesn't have a fatal disease is incurable."

"What, you want to shrink me too?"

The doctor smiled benignly. "You're Dr. Thredson's patient. But if you told him that you'd like to speak with me as well, I'm sure you'd be given the opportunity."

A thin line appeared between Tate's brows beneath his unkempt bangs. "You want me to ask him if I can see you?" His expression cleared into an amused grin. "I don't know, doc. I'm not sure if he's hip to swinging."

Ben laughed. "You might be right," he agreed. Then he got serious. "I think I can help you. I think we have a lot to teach each other."

"How's that?" Tate asked, curious. He didn't really feel he needed help from anyone but the people who were offering seemed to be an unusual bunch.

" I understand you," said the doctor confidently. "I've had a lot of experience working with troubled young people. More than Thredson has. Hell, I was a troubled teen, once upon a time."

"Yeah?" Tate's curiosity was further tickled. He liked stories that began with 'once upon a time'. "I'm supposed to talk to Doctor Thredson tomorrow. I'll ask him about one of those, what-do-ya-call-em... group therapy things?"

"Group isn't necessary," Dr. Harmon smiled. "Just let him know you want to schedule some time with me. He'll know what to do to get that set up. I hope we can chat real soon."

Dr. Harmon got up then and, with a pat on the teen's shoulder, the man made his way out of the commons. Shelley followed him out.

...

As with the previous day, when the lunch hour rolled around, Tate was taken back to his cell. He now understood why it had been so quiet the day before: Most of the other patients in the block were at the cafeteria. He was stuck sitting in his locked room. He envied the freedom of the other patients but he doubted their food was any better since it all came from the same place.

He stashed all of his pills but the painkiller. While the medication hadn't cured his chronic headache, it made the pain a lot easier to ignore. The food was barely palatable but he choked it down anyway since he was hungry. When he was finished, he inspected his backside again and found the swelling had gone down quite a bit. There were still some ugly bruises but they would fade. The worst was over.

With nothing else to do, he lay down on his bed. He wasn't tired but after a few minutes the codeine took the edge off his boredom. He thought about masturbating just to pass the time but it wasn't dark and he didn't want to risk getting caught again. That irritated him a little. He didn't like having his behavior dictated - especially not that behavior.

He shut his eyes and tried to imagine what had been happening on Star Trek. He liked the show, even though the fight sequences were pretty cheesy. He liked the idea of speeding about the night sky in a space craft, fighting alien races and making out with alien chicks. Captain Tate Langdon had a certain ring to it. Captain Tate.

"Why did Captain Kirk piss on the clock?" he said to no one. "Because he wanted to boldly go where no man had gone before."

He chuckled, then he sighed. Only a couple of days in the bug house and he was already talking to himself. Not a good sign. He sat up and looked around the room but nothing had changed. There was still nothing to do. Nothing to read. Nothing to write.

Tate loved to read and write. That's what had gotten him through many hard times in his youth and kept him hanging on. It was through reading and writing that he'd found a conduit for the subjects that engaged him - and enraged him. He could fill up pages with the loathing he felt for much of humanity.

He thought about the people at the university, the ones he shot. They hardly seemed real. They were mostly shapes he'd seen through a scope and through a haze of drugs. Men and women. Alone and in clusters. They had no faces, no identities. Faceless injured people. Faceless dead people. He didn't know how many he'd hit or what their names were. He didn't have to know their names to know that almost every one of them would only ever be remembered as one of his victims. They would be faceless to the rest of the world too.

An hour crawled slowly by before he was finally let out of his cell by two orderlies. He wasn't taken to the common room, though; they took him to the hydrotherapy room. The white older guy ran a bath in one of the deep tubs while the black guy ordered him to strip down. Tate didn't want to get naked but the orderly looked like he might do something about it if he didn't cooperate. The teen quickly weighed his options and the potential outcomes and decided to strip.

"Get in," the other guy told him once he was naked

The water was too hot when Tate got into the tub. It burned his feet. He didn't sit down. "Can you turn the heat down?"

"Sit," the big black orderly said without an ounce of sympathy.

"It's too hot," Tate insisted. "It's fucking steaming."

The man grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him down into the water. Tate hollered and thrashed but that only made the other orderly come over and help hold him down. The water scalded his genitals and set fire to the bruises on his backside but he forced himself to hold still. After a couple of tense moments the men let him go.

Tate shifted, slowly bringing as much of his body up out of the hot water as he dared, without bringing the orderlies down on him again. The short, white guy shoved a small bar of soap into his hand and told him to wash. When he started to lather up, the short white guy and the bigger black guy fell to chatting with each other.

While they talked, Tate washed. His nerves had almost deadened against the heat of the water, so long as he didn't move vigorously. He didn't pay much attention to what the guards were saying initially, lost in his bitter world of self-pity, but it eventually dawned on him they were gossiping about the people at Briarcliff. He learned through their conversation that the muscular black orderly's name was Cecil and the white guy with the thick Bostonian accent was Max.

Tate also learned there was a doctor at Briarcliff who had a limp, and whom they believed was abusing heroin. According to the orderlies, there was also a fat female nurse in intake who was screwing patients in exchange for being set free. Tate heard about the 'hot chick' who'd been taken for 'full course' shock treatment, and how that wasn't a bad thing because it would mean she wouldn't care if the orderlies fucked her. They talked about the 'head surgeon' and how he kept body parts in some secret basement laboratory. Neither staff member cared that Tate was right there, listening.

"I'm done," he said during a lull in their chat.

They inspected him and decided he'd done well enough. Max handed him a towel, which Tate took as he left the tub. The air was brisk on his over-heated, scarlet skin. He dried off starting with his hair to give his extremities time to cool.

"See?" Cecil said like he was talking to a child-a particularly slow child. "Doesn't that feel better? Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and all that jazz."

Tate glared at him from the shadows of the towel on his head, but he checked his reaction as John's words came back to him: The best thing is just to pretend to go along with whatever it is they tell you. Kiss ass, be polite. He was outnumbered and naked. Now was not the time to start a fight.

"Yeah," he lied. He forced a smile though he evaded eye contact as he shifted the towel from his head to his back. "I feel better now."

Inside, he chafed at agreeing with the man but the big black guy seemed to enjoy hearing him do it.

"Finish up," man said, not in an unpleasant way. "Max has some clean clothes for you."

When Tate was done with the towel, Cecil took it from him and the other orderly handed him a pile of gray-blue clothes. Not a gown. Actual clothes. Underpants and everything. There were no shoes in the pile but there were some white socks. The orderlies both laughed at the way Tate's face lit up.

"Just like fucking Christmas," Max said.

"Thanks," Tate said as he accepted the pile of garments. He meant it, too.

He dressed quickly and fully, even though it meant getting his new socks wet on the tile floor. It felt incredibly good to be clothed again. The outfit was loose but it was a far cry better than the viewing gown he'd been living in the past couple of days. It made him feel more respected. More human.

Going back into the chaos of the common room wasn't so bad that time.

...

Author's Note:

I wasn't expecting Shelley to show up. She wasn't a character I was particularly interested in. But she sort of barged in there. Kinda like she did in the show.

Both John and the hot bath were inspired by real life. Star Trek was really big in 1968. I don't think Tate would have been a huge fan but he may have liked the idea of escaping the planet to go blast alien creatures. More likely he would've been into media like Batman, Rosemary's Baby, and Yellow Submarine (also out in 1968).

So next chapter's the last one of this episode. In it we have more about the ladies of Briarcliff and (Briar)cliffhanger or two.