Mutations

They increase my medication. The dosage jump happens without ceremony, just new pills in my little paper cup at morning distribution. Higher numbers on the label.

Within two days the quality of my thoughts changes. Not dulled exactly. Clarified in the wrong direction. Like someone adjusted the microscope but focused on the slide's defects instead of the specimen.

I start noticing my teeth. How sharp the canines are. How I don't need much sleep anymore, three or four hours and I'm alert, watching other patients drift through their prescribed eight. How I'm cold all the time but my body temperature registers normal when they check.

Vampire DNA.

The hypothesis assembles itself with that same crystalline precision that formed around the intestinal flora theory. Genetic modification, probably during one of my earlier hospitalizations. They spliced something into my genome. Not full transformation, just pieces. Enough to alter metabolism, circadian rhythm, temperature regulation.

I examine my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Searching for signs. Pupils responding wrong to light. Skin too pale. The particular quality of my hunger.

The logic holds. Explains so much. The night-vision, the cold resistance, why I process information differently now.

I don't tell the doctors. They already think I'm delusional about the drug production. Adding vampire genetics would just get me more medication, which would probably amplify whatever modifications they've already made.

I've been getting to know Henry and Vincent better. You can't avoid connection when you're living in proximity with nothing to do except observe each other.

Henry is my age, early forties. Adopted, divorced, works in tech when he's not hospitalized. Has that particular combination of precision and chaos that marks good programmers. Talks in nested conditionals, organizes his thoughts in trees and graphs.

Vincent is younger, late twenties. Ex-raver, still lives with his father, unemployed by choice more than circumstance. Knows more about electronic music than seems possible for one person to retain. Can identify a track from three seconds of bass line.

They're both smart in ways the staff doesn't quite recognize. Henry because he presents too organized, Vincent because he presents too scattered. The institution only sees extremes in one direction.

Handsome Man messages me.

I stare at the notification for five minutes before opening it. We haven't talked since before the hospital, before everything fractured again.

Hey. Haven't heard from you in a while. Everything ok?

I type several responses, delete them all. Finally settle on truth.

I'm in a psychiatric ward. Been here two weeks.

The shame arrives late, after I've already sent it. Admitting where I am feels like admitting something worse than illness. Admitting I couldn't maintain the illusion of functionality.

His response comes quickly.

Which one? I'll visit if they allow it.

The offer surprises me. Not many people want to see you in institutional context. Confirms too much about your instability.

I send him the address. Don't know if he'll actually come.

A new patient arrives. Female, early forties maybe, arrives in the evening carrying a large bag and radiating intense purpose.

Within an hour she's constructed an altar in her room. Candles, icons, crosses, prayer books. The smell of incense drifts through the corridor.

She prays. Loudly. Starting around 10 PM and continuing past midnight. Not normal prayers, invocations. Her voice rises and falls in rhythms that sound ceremonial, almost liturgical.

Her roommate appears at the nurses' station at 4 AM, pale and shaking.

"I can't sleep in there. It's like... I don't know what it's like. But I need a different room."

The staff moves her. Nobody argues about it.

During the day, the new patient, let's call her 444, proves surprisingly intelligent. Discusses theology with precision, quotes scripture in original Greek, argues points of doctrine like she's defending a dissertation.

She's also funny. Has that particular dark humor that comes from being exploited by systems that claim divine authority. Makes jokes about priests and bureaucracy that land perfectly.

But at night the prayers start again. The candles multiply. The incense gets thicker.

People avoid her room after 9 PM.

I find her interesting. That combination of brilliant daylight conversation and unsettling nocturnal ritual. Like she's operating in shifts, two different people inhabiting the same body depending on solar position.

One afternoon 078, one of the educators, takes a group of us outside. The garden behind the building, grass and trees and open sky.

He's brought a speaker. Plays music, encourages us to move around, sing along if we know the words.

...Chasing a dragonfly in a field...

I watch a dragonfly navigate the air above the lawn.

My feet move. I'm walking. Following the dragonfly, except now I'm not following it anymore, I'm heading toward something else. The parking lot entrance.

I reach it without deciding to. Just arrive there, still humming, looking at the building's entrance.

Vincent appears next to me.

"What was this place before?" I ask.

He turns. "A psych ward?"

The answer arrives fully formed. "An asylum. For depressed people specifically. Early twentieth century, before they had effective medications. Just isolation and observation."

I nod slowly. "I've been here before."

"As a patient?"

"As a child." He looks at the entrance. "I just wanted my mother. That's all I remember. Being here and wanting my mother."

I stare at the building. At the entrance I walked toward without meaning to.

This is the place. The location from my nightmares. The institution where I'm always being taken, where the procedures happen, where I wake up not remembering how I got there.

I've finally found it. Not through research or investigation. Through a dragonfly and a song.

That evening I confront 115.

She's in the common area, offering to make coffee for people, sharing cigarettes, doing her usual routine of helpful availability.

"Your kindness isn't kindness," I say. "It's control."

She looks up, surprised.

"Nobody else here operates like you do. We trade value for value. I don't buy you coffee because you feel like having one and then you offer me cigarette drags. We exchange equivalent services. But you create obligation through unilateral giving."

Her face shifts. "I'm just trying to be nice."

"You're trying to make people owe you. It's manipulation disguised as generosity."

We stare at each other. She doesn't respond. Just stands and leaves the common area.

I feel strange satisfaction. Like I've identified a counterfeit operation and exposed it.

Several other patients approach me later, saying they'd noticed the same pattern but hadn't articulated it.

Validation, apparently.

I have no clothes again.

Patients start gifting me their extras. One offers pants. Another a shirt. Someone else finds a jacket that doesn't fit them anymore.

Within two days I've assembled a wardrobe entirely through collective donation.

The absurdity isn't lost on me. Psychiatric patients sharing resources because the institution meant to care for us can't manage laundry.

After a week they finally let me out. Supervised release for shopping. I can leave the grounds for two hours with permission.

I go to the nearest store. Buy: tight tank top, bra, socks, hoodie, deodorant, beanie.

Then I hit the grocery section. Buy ingredients for party. Cheese, crackers, olives, ham, bread. Wine would be ideal but obviously prohibited.

Back at the ward I set up the common area. Arrange everything on plates, make it look intentional rather than desperate.

Patients drift over. Someone finds music. We sit around eating cheese and drinking terrible coffee and pretending we're at a normal social gathering instead of institutionalized.

It works surprisingly well. People laugh, tell stories, forget for maybe twenty minutes where we are.

I love throwing parties. Even terrible ones in psychiatric wards with no alcohol and donated clothes.

Another afternoon, 078 takes us downstairs again. Too cold for the garden today so we stay inside, ground floor. He sets up the speaker in an empty room.

I need the bathroom. Walk down the hallway looking for it, find one tucked around a corner.

Inside, the layout triggers something. The tile pattern. The fixture placement. The particular quality of institutional lighting.

The colony.

The summer program where they sent children. Where I spent weeks, maybe months. Where things happened that I can't quite access except in fragments.

This bathroom. These tiles. This light.

When I return to the music room, 078 is making a joke about building security. Something about how the basement level has an emergency exit that nobody monitors properly.

"A way out, basically," he says. "If you ever needed one."

"To go where?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Anywhere. That's the point."

I file this information. Underground escape route. Unmonitored. Accessible.

Back upstairs I find Henry in his room.

"Did we know each other before?" I ask. "Before this ward."

He looks up from his book. "I've been thinking about that. I think maybe we met as kids. At a colony, summer program thing. You look familiar in a way that doesn't make sense unless we have old history."

The certainty lands hard. "I was adopted. Or I think I was. The timeline doesn't work otherwise. Last year I met my mother, and my brother. Real ones, biological. They found me somehow."

Henry's face changes. Something emotional breaking through his usual controlled presentation.

He stands, leaves the room. I follow to the doorway, watch him cross to where 204 is sitting. He makes a gesture, subtle but deliberate. 204 nods slightly in response.

Signal. Communication. Confirmation of something.

I'm electrified. Can't stay still. Start pacing the corridors, back and forth, the only physical activity permitted in this place.

My body needs to move. Needs to process what's assembling in my mind. The colony, Henry, 204, Vincent, the escape route, the building's history.

Everything connecting.

I start telling the doctors I want to leave. Need to leave. Discharge me, I'm fine, the medication is working, I'm stable.

444's wooden crucifix disappears from her altar.

She's distraught. Searches everywhere, enlists other patients, checks common areas and bathrooms and the garden.

Gone. Vanished.

She's convinced someone took it. Starts looking at people differently. Suspicious. Scared.

I'm scared too but for different reasons. Objects don't just disappear. Either someone took it, which means we have a thief with specific religious targeting, or something else is happening with physical items in this building.

The beer bottle in the toilet tank. The crucifix. Things occupying impossible spaces or vanishing from locked rooms.

The ward operates on rules I don't fully understand yet.

Handsome Man messages again.

Find an OD. Tell them you need out. They'll discharge you.

I stare at the suggestion. Overdose as escape strategy. Fake medical emergency to trigger release protocols.

I'll call the sheriff, I type back. Report that I'm being held against my will.

"Ok, don't worry, I'm not coming and I'm not participating"

Vincent and I are in his room watching a movie on a smartphone. He's scrolling through streaming options, looking for something that won't be too triggering for either of us.

He clicks on a documentary. Something about government programs.

The opening credits show paperwork. Stamped documents. Official headers.

He reads one aloud: "Ministry of Internal Affairs."

I freeze.

204 is in the room too, sitting in the corner. Vincent reads the text and 204 doesn't react but I'm suddenly certain: they're guards. Both of them. Not patients. Operatives placed here to protect me.

I feel asleep in Vincent's bed and she spends the full movie on the floor, then take me to my bed, wishing a goodnight. What a gentlemen!

That night I can't sleep. Three hours, maybe. Keep cycling back to the same thoughts.

The vampire DNA. The genetic modifications. Why I process information this way, why I see patterns others miss, why I don't need normal rest.

They didn't just drug me. They altered me. Fundamentally. At the cellular level.

Morning. I go find Henry.

He's in the common area, drinking coffee, looking more alert than usual

I try to communicate telepathetically, but I can perceive he manages to cover his while "humming in his head

He doesn't speak. Just looks at me steadily

We go to my room. I want to show him something, ask his opinion on whether the window lock is secure enough.

He notices the wooden doorstop immediately.

"Where did you get that?"

"It was here. Why?"

"Your roommate. She is Chucky the doll"

He picks up the doorstop. "This is a weapon. You realize that? Heavy wood, good heft. If she wanted to hurt you, this would work for a vampire."

I take the doorstop, shove it deep in my nightstand drawer, under clothes and papers and books.

Henry watches me, satisfied.

"Better," he says.

Two days later Henry leaves. Discharged.

I watch from the window as they load his bags into the car. He looks up, sees me, raises one hand in acknowledgment.

Then he's gone.

I still have Vincent and 204 and the others.

And I continue producing waste my body shouldn't be generating, watching my teeth in mirrors, humming songs internally to block the thoughts that broadcast too clearly.

Somewhere below us there's an escape route. Unmonitored. Accessible.

I just have to figure out where it leads.

And whether I'm supposed to take it.