The Olive Mill

Fluorescent certainty fills the emergency room. This time will be different. Someone will finally see what is actually happening.

They perform their tests: blood drawn, vitals checked, reflexes tested. Then the ECG, electrodes placed across my chest with practiced efficiency.

I watch the technician’s face. “You’ve never had this before?”

“No.”

His eyebrows lift slightly before professional neutrality returns. A year of psychiatric treatment, and no one checked my heart. The omission speaks louder than any diagnosis.

I joke with the nurses as they work, small talk about village life, the cruel weather, anything to maintain the appearance of someone who belongs in ordinary reality.

They wheel me into observation. Other patients occupy beds in various states of distress or sedation. A doctor’s voice carries from the nurses’ station, words not meant for me:

“We have to admit her. She might wake up not knowing where she is, or who she is. Here we can keep her calm.”

The statement hangs in the sterile air. Keep her calm.

An elderly woman lies in the next bed, frail and disoriented, needing help to adjust her pillows. I assist automatically, my hands remembering how to offer comfort even when my mind operates in fragments.

Then they bring the girl.

She is young, maybe twenty, radiating restless energy like heat shimmer off summer pavement. Her eyes hold the specific emptiness I’ve learned to recognize, intelligence moving at high velocity through a landscape stripped of all softness.

Child trafficked. I know them instantly. We share markers: rapid processing speed, the desperation that never fully leaves the eyes, the chemical dependencies used to manage what consciousness cannot bear. Sexual exploitation leaves its signature in the body, hypervigilance paired with dissociative detachment, always scanning for threat while absent from the present.

They grow up mortified, never valued. Parents who rent them to organizations, providing just enough care to keep the commodity functional. Intelligence becomes a liability when it might lead to escape.

They learn to feel nothing except the twisted pleasure of inflicting the same damage they’ve endured. Sadism as the only emotion that penetrates the numbness.

I feel sorrow for them. But not safety.

They hate people like me, those who retain some thread of peace despite the violence. Our serenity feels like accusation.

The girl’s agitation grows. She paces, mutters, her body telegraphing instability.

I lower myself onto the bed slowly, every muscle prepared. Hypervigilant, I track her smallest movements, ready to react before conscious thought identifies the threat.

Hours pass in this suspended state until orderlies arrive to transfer me upstairs.

The psychiatric ward greets me like an old friend. The recognition is mutual, warm, disturbing in its familiarity.

“You came back here to celebrate your birthday?!”

“A rebirth,” I say, and mean it.

They dispense medication, different from last time, they assure me, better formulation, fewer side effects. I swallow obediently. The game requires participation.

My room is identical to last year’s, but this time I occupy Joy’s bed, the one by the window.

Another woman sleeps nearby. A younger girl lies across the room, her breathing uneven with medicated dreams.

Night arrives with institutional efficiency, lights dimmed, sounds muffled, the building settling into its nocturnal rhythm.

Around 5:30 AM, music seeps into my consciousness. Not from any visible source, too delicate, too precise. A music box melody, the kind that plays when you open childhood treasures wrapped in velvet and secrets.

The sound carries me somewhere else, an airplane cabin, perhaps. Cargo doors sealing with pneumatic finality. Wings extending, preparing for flight.

I drift between sleep and waking, unable to commit to either.

Morning announces itself with breakfast trays and medication rounds. Pills in small paper cups. Water to wash them down. The ritual of compliance.

I attempt exercise, basic movements to fight the lethargy already spreading through my limbs. The medication works quickly, dulling sharp edges, softening the boundaries where fear usually lives.

I return to bed and surrender to the drowsiness.

A psychologist arrives for an assessment. She claims we met last year.

I search my memory. Nothing. Her face triggers no recognition.

“I need to explain something,” I tell her, words slow through the chemical fog. “I’m being exploited by criminal organizations. They use techniques to make me unconscious, drugs, maybe, and I do things without any memory afterward. Complete erasure.”

She listens with professional attention.

“Could you lock me in a room with a video camera? I need evidence. I need to see what happens when I dissociate.”

Her face arranges into gentle refusal. “That’s not advisable. What happens during dissociation can be intense. Better not to observe it directly.”

Back in my room, disappointment settles like sediment. No answers. No evidence. Just more waiting.

Hunger gnaws; the medication amplifies appetite while dulling everything else. I watch the clock, counting minutes until lunch.

I need something to read. The medication makes focusing difficult, but worse is the empty time between doses, when my mind assembles theories I can’t control.

At the nurses’ station, I scan the shelf. Political philosophy, self-help guides, outdated magazines. Then a small black book catches my eye. Plain cover, no decoration. Death at the Conference in white letters.

Back in bed, I open to the first page.

The town of P spreads along the coast, small, fictional, the kind of place where summer brings tourists and gossip in equal measure. The Bar serves as the town’s nervous system, where four old men play cards and dissect everyone’s business with surgical precision.

N deals. O complains about his hand. R makes a crude joke. T laughs too loud.

M tends bar with the weary patience of someone who’s heard every story twice. A former university researcher, now pouring wine and listening to conspiracy theories about the mayor’s mistress.

AB shows up dead in a rented apartment.

A chemical researcher, in town for an academic conference. Found slumped over his desk. Natural causes, the doctor says initially. Heart attack, maybe stroke. The Chief of police, S, clumsy, well-meaning, always a step behind, takes it for granted.

But M, notices things don’t add up. The victim’s notes show agitation. His colleagues act nervous. Someone cleaned the apartment too thoroughly.

The autopsy reveals poison. A complex chemical compound, expertly administered.

The old men at the Bar launch their investigation. They have theories, ridiculous, contradictory, occasionally accidentally insightful. R thinks it’s the conference organizer’s wife. O suspects the hotel manager. N rambles about pharmaceutical conspiracies.

M watches, listens, says little. But his mind works differently. He knows chemistry. academic politics, how researchers think when patents and tenure are at stake.

The victim had been close to a breakthrough, a new synthesis method, potentially worth millions. Three colleagues at the conference had access to his work. One had tried to replicate his results and failed. Another had published suspiciously similar research six months earlier. The third had been his graduate student once, before a falling out over authorship credit.

M starts asking quiet questions, just casual conversation while pouring drinks, while the old men play cards and provide unintentional cover.

He learns about the hotel kitchen where conference lunches were prepared, who had access to the victim’s room, which researcher had pharmacy connections that could source obscure compounds.

The solution comes to him during an argument between N and O about card rules. The poison wasn’t exotic, it was common, disguised through clever chemistry. The kind of thing a researcher would know how to do. The delivery method was simple once you understood the victim’s routines.

M explains it to S using napkin diagrams and drink glasses as props. The old men gather around, offering commentary that ranges from insightful to absurd.

The murderer was the former student. Professional jealousy, theft of intellectual property, fear of exposure. He’d added the compound to conference coffee during a break, knowing the victim drank three cups exactly, knowing the delayed reaction would provide an alibi.

The confession comes at the Bar, naturally. Everyone present, S, the old men, half the town. M lays out the chemistry with casual precision. The student realizes he’s caught, that someone actually understood his work well enough to see through it.

“Clever,” the student says finally. “I didn’t think anyone here would know.”

“That,” M replies, pouring wine, “was your mistake.”

I finish the book as dawn filters through the institutional windows. The simplicity of it, murder for academic credit, solved through chemistry and observation, feels almost restful after the chaos of my own theories.

I set the book aside and close my eyes, letting the medication pull me back toward sleep.

The afternoon brings another session. The doctor I saw monthly before stopping treatment last summer.

But his story has transformed.

“You chose to discontinue treatment,” he says, reviewing notes that contain a different history than mine. “I offered to adjust your medication, but you insisted on stopping. Same with the psychologist, you decided you didn’t need her anymore.”

Rage cuts through the pharmaceutical haze with surgical precision.

“That’s not true.” My voice comes out flat, controlled. “I can repeat our conversation. Verbatim. Every word.”

I do. Recreating the dialogue with exact intonation, the pauses, his specific phrases when he refused to consider alternatives, dismissed my complaints about side effects, removed my access to the psychologist without explanation.

My memory holds everything. Always has. That’s part of the problem, I don’t forget. Can’t forget. Every conversation archived with perfect fidelity.

His face shifts through several expressions before settling into defensive professionalism.

I leave his office, shock and fury competing for dominance. The corridor stretches endlessly, each step requiring deliberate intention.

Dinner arrives on schedule. I eat mechanically, tasting nothing.

Sleep comes fast, the medication’s final gift. Tomorrow will require renegotiating reality again. Tonight, I sink into oblivion, grateful for the temporary absence of all questions.