Murmuration
What do you know about schizophrenia?
He’s tearing the photos off the walls. He’s not screaming, and aside from the scrape of frames being torn from where they hang and the shattering of glass as they’re thrown to the floor, there’s little other noise. He’s not thinking, not really, aside from What is happening to me, what is happening to me, what is happening to me?
Remarkably, he doesn’t cut himself on flying glass or shards of wood. He doesn’t cry, everything too frozen in his brain to even really process what he’s supposed to be feeling right now. It might be a panic attack, it might be something more, he’s not sure. He just knows that the photos on the wall are lying, and he can’t have them up anymore. He can’t see those faces staring back at him, not really, not—
“Mr. Hughes.”
It cuts through everything. The storm in his head. The thundering of his heart. The pressure behind his eyes that keeps pulsing. The need to tear apart everything he can get his hands on. The rage he feels bursting deep within him. He knows what the man on the balcony felt like now. When the woman came at him with the knife. It’s not real, he knows, that event, but it feels real, and he understands the anger. He can’t ever imagine hitting anyone, much less a woman, but he can understand why.
It makes him nauseous to know he gets it. That he can relate to it.
He thinks, Oh my god. How have I—
“Mr. Hughes.”
It all snaps back into place.
He’s standing in the middle of the diner. Broken glass is all around him. There are pictures still hanging on the walls, but they’re crooked. Most are on the floor. On the tables. Shattered, the pictures wrinkled or torn. The glass crunches under his Chucks. He can’t—
“Can you hear me, Mr. Hughes?”
There’s a bright flash of light. The diner is filled with it. It’s all-encompassing, and he raises a hand to shield his eyes.
The light dies out. There’s residual flashes as the darkness descends again.
All he can hear is the sound of his own ragged breathing.
He’s—
—on his back, he’s on his back and everything is grainy, and everything is loud, and he can make out shapes moving around him, and they’re garbled, speaking in grunts and groans, and the machines are screaming around him, and he’s Mike Frazier, he is, he is, but those grunts and groans say, “Mr. Hughes, do you understand me, Mr. Hughes? Are you sure he’s—”
He wants to laugh. Somehow, he wants to laugh, because now he’s positive he’s crazy. Or it’s aliens. He’s been abducted because They Came from Outer Space and maybe they are on an island. Maybe that’s what this whole thing is. They Came from Outer Space and put them all on an island, an island called Amorea and they can never leave. They’re being experimented on and wouldn’t that make much more sense? It would. Because he’s not crazy, he can’t be, not after everything, not when he’s finally found something that belongs just to him, that he can give himself completely to. Especially after all this time. They’ve finally gotten to where they’re supposed to be. They’ve gotten their act together, and he’s thinking, Sean, Sean, Sean—
(What if he’s not real?)
(No, he thinks. No, no, no.)
(What if they take him away like Nadine the African Queen?)
(They can’t. They can’t.)
(She loved a man. You could see it by the look on her face. She loved a man, and he called you Mikey, that’s fo sho. She was a stacked honey, and he loved her, and you know it. You know him.)
(Oscar, he thinks. His name is Oscar and he was my friend.)
“Mr. Hughes,” the garbled voices say from above him, and he wants to answer them, wants to scream at them, what do you want, what do you want from me, why are you doing this, how could you do this to us, we’re people, we’re human people, but he can’t. He can’t make a noise beyond a choking, wet gurgle, and there’s something constricting his throat. His panic escalates, but he’s not moving. He can’t move, and he doesn’t know what they’ve done to him, how they’re doing this, but it’s all—
“Mike?”
He opens his eyes.
Sean’s there. Sean’s in front of him. Sean’s in front of him looking soft and sleep-rumpled and confused. He’s wearing plaid sleep pants and a white shirt. He’s wiping an eye with his hand and yawning.
“What’s going on?”
Mike doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how he got here, standing at the front door to Sean’s little bungalow in the middle of the night. One moment he was destroying the diner and then They Came from Outer Space, and now he’s here. With Sean.
He doesn’t know what to say. He opens his mouth and is startled when a broken sound falls out. It’s harsh and grating and he tries to swallow past the lump in his throat, but he can’t quite get there.