How old are you?Five fingers on one side, two on the other.
How many years have you been locked in this asylum?Twenty.
You’ve been locked up since you were thirty-two years old?Tap.
After three and a half weeks, I know I have to dig deeper, search for the words he’s waiting for me to say. I vigilantly keep track of the details he allows me to know. Writing them in my hand-sized notebook that I keep tucked away in the pocket of my dress.
When I walk the halls of the asylum, I hear whispers and bouts of laughter, all directed at me. I’m frowned upon for attempting to communicate on a personal level with Chekiss. They gawk at me like a child with a deformity. But I’ve practiced ways to ignore them. I visualize myself entering the thirteenth room, placing each step cautiously, wondering if that room knows that I aim my sights toward its opening.
But I must get through Chekiss first. If I’m to ever be taken seriously, if they are ever to take my word for gospel, it must start here.
I hold out a bowl of fruit, examining the colors that blossom within its perimeter. Strawberries, apples, and bananas. Chekiss shakes his head. Trying to get him to eat is like trying to break a tree trunk with your bare hands.
I’m tired of watching the orderlies shove a tube down his throat to force-feed him raw eggs.
I shrug. “All is well. I really brought it for me—they don’t like women eating around here. This is the only way I can get away with it.” It’s not entirely a lie. I’m starving.
Chekiss winces, furrowing his brow at something I said.
I set a banana slice on the tip of my tongue, pushing it against the roof of my mouth, its creamy sweetness filling my tastebuds with delight.
“I’m ready to finish our conversation if you are,” I say.
He watches me snag a strawberry curiously.
“Our first conversation. I told you that I sensed you believe you deserve what you’re getting in here.”
He pauses to remember, then nods once, his eyes droop, the color like a cluster of seaweed. His fingers scratch on the side of his head, fingernails digging through his short gray hair.
“If you were truly a monster… you would have fits of anger during your treatments. You wouldn’t feel sorrow for what you’ve done. And you do, don’t you? Feel sorrow for what happened to them.” I hold an apple slice over my lips, waiting for his reaction before I take a bite.
He stares at me, as solid as concrete, as focused as a lion on the hunt.
I nod, understanding. “They think I’m mad—the other conformists. They laugh at me for wanting to spend my time talking to you. But I ignore them… Because I have a theory. An idea I’m not ready to give up on yet.”
Chekiss reaches his hand into the bowl and scoops a handful of fruit into the palm of his hand, taking a piece at a time into his mouth. I resist the urge to smile at this small feat.
“You loved them. You—still love them, don’t you? And maybe you didn’t mean to hurt them. Maybe it was an accident. I can’t seem to let go of this idea. I can’t move on until I know the truth,” I say slowly. Carrying my heavy notions and tossing them into his lap.
“It wasn’t an accident.” Thunder without sound. A whip of energy bolting through my veins.
He. Speaks.
Like the crunching of dead leaves and the echoes of a growling bear, Chekiss speaks.
My pulse races under the skin of my throat, like tiny fireworks igniting over my pores. I can’t blink. I can’t even close my mouth.
“You didn’t want them to drown me,” he says, looking off to a distant memory. “When they brought you to see me in treatment. You wanted it to stop.”
I think back to my queasy stomach. Focusing on remaining perfectly still while Chekiss thrashed about like a wet, rabid animal.
I tap his hand twice. I can’t answer. I know I’m being watched.
He closes his eyes and lets out a deep sigh, like, after many decades, he can finally breathe. “I do still love them. But I meant to kill them, and I’d do it again.”
“You meant to?” I say with an unhinged jaw.
Chekiss tells me that the lady-doll regimen had driven his wife and daughter mad. The obsession with starvation and sinless skin was all-consuming. It was like a virus in their brains, chewing away at them. They became erratic in public, vomiting up small bits of food in the streets to show their self-control and keep their figures intact. The societal standards had ruined them. And all Chekiss saw were shells of the people they once were. It was only a matter of moments before their behavior granted them their own rooms in the asylum. It’s not unheard of—women and children often lose their wits and are forced out of society because their chaotic presence makes them a problem.
