Jack Fell

the yellow between the slips

Next to clock is a clockwise spiral scratched on the wall in red crayon. Eyeball it and breathe uneasy. I never use red to mark the slips. The loops are too close and tight. Dig out my sliver of charcoal and etch a black triangle around the spiral. Flinch as the air around me crackles. The overhead squawks. Heavy disembodied sigh from the brink then a fragged well past giving a fuck male voice calls a code yellow on another unit. Time to get busy. Keep moving through the first set of magnetically sealed fire doors. Take the machine’s pulse by sound and smell and visible light plus the unseen vibrations beyond the spectrum. Listen for the pink and brown noise in the lower megahertz. Total silence is rare on the unit never feels right. Silence at the Fort feels hot. Fragile. Like gas expanding too slow too fast. Like some thing or some body is about to blow. Third set of double doors you hear furious screeching. Demonic male voice that devolves to gibberish piglike snorting semi coherent fuck you bitch stupid hoe sorry cracker ass cunt to sobbing I aint crazy nah huh yall got me fucked up nah yall sorry motherfuckers crazy all yall best reckonize you bout to get fired uh huh now what yeh best let me go cuz I’m fixin to clown for real then crash boom of naked human body throwing self into wall. I can feel the tremors from a hundred feet. Followed by pale thunder of bony fists and bare feet thumping metal door. Noise and chaos and the buzz of impending violence feels like home. Regulate the breathing and remember the agreements. The air on this side of the Fort is recycled chemical with a faraway underbelly barnacle of putrid. The funk seeps into your clothes and skin and nasal passages and stays with you long after you’ve clocked out. Never one singular smell or not one I can identify but the brightest flowers today are mildew and manstink with notes of fetid nutsack and menstrual blood. Murky cheese and rotavirus and rotting feet. Black mold and fear.

At the fourth set of doors rattle through the questions. How bad. What’s the census. Ninety-two at last count. Did nightmare patient X discharge yet. Do I have enough gas in my tank to last the night. Have I slept today. Do I have cigarettes. Do I have menthols. Do I have change for the vending machine and a book to read if I get jammed up. Do I have knife and flashlight and radio clipped to my belt. Do I have a spare set of scrubs or extra t-shirt in case the gear I’m wearing gets shredded in a hold or somebody hurls a cup of urine or blood my way. How many patients will I need to deescalate, manipulate, mindfuck or physically threaten to make it through the night. How many will I have to put my hands on. How many takedowns before the left knee gives out for good. How long before I zig when I ought zag and get my skull bounced off a wall for the last time. Circle back to how bad is it gonna be and the only question that matters. Do we have enough staff to keep the patients safe from each other and themselves. To keep ourselves safe from them. Flash of clockwise spiral in my head. I don’t remember using red crayon. I need to do a better job mapping the slips. Need to keep track of where the yellow hallways are or risk never finding my way out. I haven’t mentioned the yellow to Josephine or any of my crew. Because I don’t want to turn in my shoelaces just yet. It only happens in the long gloaming between two and four am. Making rounds or going down to the cargo bay and out of blue turn onto a hallway I’ve never seen before. Always yellow and the air doesn’t feel the same as anywhere else in the hospital and I can’t always find the slip between here and there.

The yellow will disappear you. The yellow will eat your mind raw and chew your body to dust. The yellow becomes you. Like you got swallowed up by a whale and you’re inside the guts of it and now you’re part of the whale and the inside of your head is a dirty lemon sky. What is the yellow. Everything is yellow down here.

The dank carpets are the blighted harvest yellow of a motel room worn thin stained with smoke and water damage. Murder scene yellow. The cinderblock walls are the bleached bone yellow used in prisons. Industrial yellow. The halls don’t make sense. They present as a logical grid with straight lines running in four directions but this is an illusion. The hallways curve and bend. They stretch and fold back on themselves. Dead ends and closed loops of yellow and nonsensical glitches in every direction. Blind spots and cramped corners and impossibly long narrows. Long slabs of gouged lemon cinderblock and stretches of exposed plaster tagged with indecipherable symbols and diagrams scrawled in crayon and charcoal and scratched deep with knifepoint or screwdriver. Number sequences and stick figure hieroglyphs. Odd nautical notations with longitude but no latitude. Smudged barcodes and clock faces with no hands. Caveman star charts. But these marks are pale and less frequent the deeper into yellow you travel. Low ceiling of gray patchwork particle board with great oozing stains like upside down puddles of rust. The light is a thin sickly fluorescent that flickers and hiccups out of time with the low machine hum and drone then abruptly stops. Then restarts. The dead space between is never the same. Long breath. The space of two heartbeats might be two minutes twitching in space might be two hours of agony. Then raw naked relief when the hum resumes. The machine is necessary and sometimes the silence isn’t silent. Murmur of voices near and far. Faraway mutter of shadowy footsteps. Flash bright echo of animal scream choked off mid breath. The barely audible scratching chewing grunting and fucking sounds from above and behind the walls. The wings are the worst. Unseen winged creatures buzz past just beyond peripheral but near enough to flutter the hair or brush your lips with the stink of sulphur and taste of salt. The wings don’t feel like feathers. They feel like skin. Flinch and flail but don’t freak out. Keep walking. At next crossing stop in the rough center to breathe and stare into the yellow as far as I can see and measure four parched sunflower horizons. Four black lemon vanishing points. The air down here tastes of metal and dirt. Too cold with uncomfortable pockets of warm and damp. Slow down your breathing. This part of the hospital doesn’t exist so there are no cameras. No one is watching. No overhead audio. Zero cell signal and my radio is dead.

Long exhale and slow my heartbeat to glimpse the telltale straylight of a reverse slip up ahead and to the left. The ghost gray with glimmer of red should take me back to the hospital proper and the voice in my head reminds me to map the gray. Take out knife and charcoal to mark my passage with clockwise spiral inside an upside down triangle. Walk a few paces in every direction to be reasonably sure of my position then add hashmark ones and zeroes at left corner to indicate color and spin and direction in spacetime. Mutter and shrug yeah I fucking know and wish I had a smoke. I’m aware the mark is incomplete. It’s only half there and not the half that matters neither. Forward and back in time are tricky enough to keep sorted but the up and down through and beyond four dimensional space is impossible. Not impossible you just don’t see it yet. Now the alien laugh that sounds like your own laugh on tape played back at you underwater. Not your voice but definitely your voice and floating out of phase like it comes from the yellow. I squash this shit down with a sideways glance and wonder how long I’ve been standing next to the time clock. And when did I start using red crayon to tag the slips. Gather myself for the sickness and walk through a ghost gray door that isn’t a door.

*postscript. this is fiction. mostly. from the recovered diary of Jack Fell, protagonist. Involuntary the novel.