This is the edited version of "Sanity" which will be published in the Autumn issue of Outercast. Link is on your right.
I have to say, I'm pretty proud of it.
Up until I met Ethan Lint, I believed in sanity. I was the one teaching people normalcy. I loved my job. I thought I was always doing the right thing. I, Liza Dalrymple, had achieved my goal in life to be the normal one.
My entire childhood had been spent with kids laughing at me because they thought I wasn’t normal. They called me Dalpimple because I had a bit too much of acne. I was the freak at school. I didn’t care, though. They could throw as many snowballs they wanted at me, as long as I knew deep down that I was the normal one. I knew I was sane, and they were just idiots.
After a hard day at school, I would come home and study. I was a geek, and proud of it. I kept thinking “I’ll show them in the end”. Show what, I didn’t exactly know. I just knew that some day, I would be the one deciding what was cool and what wasn’t. In school it was the main thing that bullied kids hoped for and clung to.
My neighbour was a doctor, and I loved to see her. When I reached the legal age, I started to work as a secretary for her, and I knew then I wanted to be a doctor.
I went to college, and was easily admitted in medical school. When I got top grades, I was comforted in my belief that I was the smart, normal one, and the others were idiots. When I chose psychiatry, I thought I did because it was so interesting, but looking back, I know it was only because it made me feel normal. I fringed upon insanity. Whenever someone in trial was cleared of charges for insanity, I thought the judicial system was rotten.
My views changed, but not too much, when I started my internship at a psychiatric ward. The first patient I treated thought he was a duck. If that was all of it, it would have been all right, but the man had tried to strangle his neighbour because she had attempted to convince him that he was, indeed, human. They had to lock him up. Couldn’t exactly put a man who thought he was a duck in jail, but they couldn’t either let a duck who tried to strangle his neighbour walk free.
There were many others like that, whose mind was in another place. I think I will always remember this girl, who had, at age six, killed her mother. After too many scary bedtime stories, she was sure that her mother wanted to kill her. It was, as she saw it, self-defence.
As a medical student, I was proud of myself in being reasonable, and at times, when I had drunk a bit too much, I would tell my friends those stories like fun jokes, despite the medical secrecy I was supposed to uphold.
All those mentally sick people around me, living outside the regular world, they made me feel sane. It was such a good feeling.
When I started working as a fully trained doctor, I felt so special. I had an office with “Liza Dalrymple” written in big bold letters on the door. I was the one saying what normalcy was. It wasn’t anything conceited, like “I know what’s right and wrong, you don’t”, but I was pretty sure that when I told someone that there wasn’t an elephant in his room trying to squash him, I was in my right mind.
It was hard, though, at times, to see some of my patients crying at night, because they thought they saw someone hiding behind the chair in their room. Trying to comfort kids at two in the morning who didn’t understand why their mommy and daddy weren’t sitting next to them, when their parents had in fact been killed in a shooting. I witnessed things that were not pretty. It made me enjoy my normal life even more. That, however, stopped when I met Ethan Lint.
Ethan’s boss had brought him to our attention one day, saying his employee said he communicated with Martians every night. His boss, a nice guy, didn’t mind this little bit of insanity, and had just asked for advice on what to do when Ethan randomly stopped taking care of customers when he had some urgent business to attend to with his extra terrestrial friends.
It wasn’t enough yet to make him a permanent resident of our ward. I just went to talk with him every few days, and soon enough, he started telling me about his alien friends. They seemed nice and harmless enough.
The patriarch, Robert ― who had surprisingly a human name, like the others ― was very wise, but liked to crack a joke from time to time. One day, he had tricked Janice, his niece, into believing they were going to leave Earth to visit Jupiter. It was that day, when Janice burst into tears that she liked Earth too much, that they had found out that she was in love with Ethan. Ethan had then confessed his love back, and they had been living a happy love story ever since. The only one to frown upon this relationship was James, Janice’s brother. He was convinced that his best friend, who was still living on Mars, should have been her love. Even though his best friend, Ethan had told me with a smirk, was already married. Ethan didn’t like James.
I agreed with Ethan’s boss; this bit of insanity was harmless enough, and though Ethan would be better of sane, there was no urgent need to cure him. I managed to convince him that his friends didn’t really want him to stop working at random just to spend time with them. His boss was happy with me, and since Ethan didn’t look like a threat to himself or anybody else, I left it at that.
I regretted it deeply when one day, Ethan was admitted in my hospital’s ER. He had jumped through his window. When I first came to see him, he was unconscious. Once a handsome young man, Ethan was now covered with bruises. His nose was broken and swollen, and so were both his legs. His head had been shaved in order to let the cuts on his skull heal.
When I came back a few days later, he was conscious again. I had dreaded this moment, because I had to find out why he had tried to commit suicide, and then take the decision whether he should be locked up in the psychiatric ward. It was, as you can imagine, a hard decision to take.
When I asked him why he had jumped through the window, his answer was the kind I had feared. He told me that James had caught Janice and himself in a compromising position, and since he couldn’t condone that sort of behaviour, they had left for Jupiter. To him, it was a perfect reason to die. To me, it was a perfect reason to make him a resident of my ward.
At first, Ethan thought my ward was just a special place for people whose heart had been broken. He thought my job was to mend it. Slowly enough, he understood that he could leave not when his heart would be mended, but when his mind would be put back in place.
I never forgot the day he fully realised that. He was in my office, talking about Janice, and he suddenly stopped speaking. I asked him what was wrong, and he looked at me straight in the eyes and said, “You think I’m insane, don’t you? You think Janice doesn’t exist and my heart isn’t really broken?”
I had a principle: I never lied to my patients, only tried to avoid the cold hard truth. However, there was no way I could avoid it that day. I looked back in his eyes, and said, “Ethan, nobody has ever met Robert, Janice or James before. It is hard for us to believe you. I, for one, do not believe that Janice exists. However, as long as you think she exists, I will listen to you.”
“And what happens the day I don’t believe she exists any-more?”, he asked.
“That day, you will be able to leave the ward.”
Ethan left my office ponderingly. He came back the next day, and told me that maybe Robert, Janice and James had been a fragment of his imagination and that he didn’t believe they existed anymore. Once again, I told him the truth. It was obvious enough that he had said that just to get out.
He reminded me of the old joke of a psychiatric patient who thought his toothbrush was a dog. He kept dragging it around on a leash. One day, he goes see the psychiatrist and says “Don’t you think my toothbrush is pretty?”
The doctor answers “You don’t think it’s a dog anymore?”
“Well, no, doctor, it’s quite obvious a toothbrush.”
“All right,” the doctor answers, “You’re fit to leave then!”
When the man reaches the exit, he takes his toothbrush out of his pocket and whispers, “We got him, Rex!”
Ethan spent the next two weeks trying to convince me that his Martian friends didn’t exist. I was sceptical at first, but then noticed that he was getting more sullen every day. That was usually a sign that the patient came back to normalcy, and that they realised that they had been living in a dream for years. It was good to see them slip out of insanity, but also sad to watch them lose their years long daydream.
The day before Ethan left the ward, I found him in his room, crying. I sat beside him, and waited for him to talk. Recently, I had come to the conclusion that Ethan only talked when he was ready. Finally, he started.
“When I was a kid, in pre-school, everybody had a secret friend they talked to. I had one too. It was Janice. She always understood me. She was the coolest imaginary friend ever. She was from another planet. Janice understood me better than anyone. She was smart and pretty. And, then, I grew up, and I grew out of it.
“Then, just a few years ago, at a time when I was very lonely, she came back. She wasn’t alone, there was also Robert and James with her. I had three friends, then. At first, they were just in my mind, but they grew silently, and came in my life. I couldn’t live without them, do you understand, Doctor Dalrymple? They were the only ones who talked to me. Everybody thought I was a weirdo. I know now that they weren’t real, but they were so nice, that I made myself believe it. I loved them. They were all I had.”
That night, I signed Ethan Lint’s release papers.
When I came home, I felt completely crushed. I tried to make myself believe that I had done something right, that now Ethan wasn’t a danger to himself anymore. I tried to remember what he looked like when he first came in my ward, bruised and both legs broken from jumping through a window. He thought my job was to mend his heart. I just couldn’t get around the fact that I had broken it once more.
The next day, Ethan left the hospital. I decided to follow him for his first morning out, as I often did with my most difficult patients. Ethan wasn’t a difficult patient though, I was merely curious. He first went to see his former boss, probably to know if he could get his job back. He then wandered in the streets, stopping in his favourite shops. He kept smiling, looking around, like a child on his first visit to the zoo. He looked very much like an ex-convict just out of jail.
After a few hours, he went into a shop I had never noticed before; a hole in the wall that you can miss when you walk by. It was an astronomy shop. I heard him ask the shop attendant, “Would you have maps of Jupiter, by any chance?”
I smiled at myself and left him at that. Sometimes, I thought, sanity is way overrated.
