The acoustics carried the rhythmic sound of footsteps on sterile institutional linoleum in echoes down the darkened hall. In the stillness of the night, those echoes were like haunted whispers from some tragic, haunted past, murmuring seductively into Nathan’s ears. During the daytime hours, the mental hospital was an entirely different place, humming with sometimes erratic activity and displaying plenty of life. At night, it had the quality of a tomb.
Occasionally there would arise the faint noises of sleeping moans or mutterings from one of the patients disturbing the silence, but for the most part their sleep was unbroken, the magic of sedatives producing peace where otherwise there might have been turmoil.
As he walked down the corridors of his assigned ward, peeking into the occupied rooms during his routine circuit of this particular branch of the facility, the only thing that he could focus on was how much he wanted to hurry back to the common room shared between his ward and that of another co-worker of his. Leyna had fewer patients under her wing in the rooms on her rounds, so she would probably be back in the recreational area well before he finished up with his.
This was what he looked forward to during the shifts that they happened to share, as relatively infrequent as they might be. The building itself was an eerie place, that much was true. And that alone was a satisfactory explanation as to why it was so important to spend the nights there with someone else rather than alone, in isolation within the staff offices located on the respective ward that one was assigned to.
He could hear the muffled audio from the television as he approached the door into the common area. This was their routine on the nights that they were both there, sitting together and watching television, conversing on whatever happened to cross their minds, it was perhaps a bit banal and mundane but he spent every day anticipating the nights when he knew that he could look forward to her presence there with him. Neither of them suspected it, no one did yet, but the comfort he derived from these routines was something that Nathan would look back on with desperate longing in only a short time. Outside of the walls where they found themselves, something insidious was beginning, the world was changing in ways that no one could see yet, but nothing would ever be the same, and no one would remain untouched for long. For now, he was blissfully unaware, and in that tranquil ignorance everything went on as it had day after day.
He used his identification badge to disengage the locking mechanism for the door rather than go through the trouble of pulling his keychain from his pocket, and as he opened it, he asked, “So, what are we going to be watching tonight?”
She turned towards him where she was sitting, a smile stealing across her face. “I do have the first season of Beverly Hills 90210 with me on DVD; we could start with that and go from there,” he replied before turning back to the television, her smile transforming into a devious smirk as she did so.
He couldn’t mask the look of disdain that immediately spread across his features, and clearly she wasn’t oblivious to his natural response to her flippant suggestion either. Without looking up from the sofa where she was still grinning she muttered just loud enough for him to hear her with a mocking pout to her tone, “Don’t judge me.”
“I would never dare,” he replied, his tone one of mocking apology to match her own.
“I could feel you judging me, your judgmental eyes boring a hole into me. Don’t try to deny it,” she said in her typical deadpan manner.
The television displayed some animated program, the product of equal parts surrealism and the counter-culture desire to cross the line into poor taste and offensiveness, more than likely a fair amount of drug use in the mix as well. It didn’t matter what was being broadcast though, not to him, it was only background noise. Only occasionally did conversation lapse and attention shift to the screen and what was being displayed upon it.
“So, what are your thoughts on abortion?” she asked abruptly, after a period of silence. He was too accustomed to the seemingly random shifts in conversation to be taken aback by the sudden question arising without preamble; though he was a little bit curious as to whether there was some personal reason inspiring the query.
“Well,” he replied, “personally, I’m sort of against it. But I don’t think that other people should be expected to see things the same way that I do.” He paused for a second, trying to frame his thoughts, hoping to put things together coherently. “I guess it just seems wrong to me when a person or a group of people tries to force other people to behave as if they believed the same things that the group in question does.
“What about you?” he continued, “What is your opinion on the subject?”
“I just don’t like the thought of having anyone tell me what I need to do when it concerns something so personal,” she responded. He nodded, realizing that there wouldn’t be any further elaboration from her on the subject unless he happened to push forward. His timidity won out over curiosity though, and he refrained from asking her if there was something specific that had led to that particular issue being on her mind.
The conversation continued on from there, spanning the hours as the end of their respective shifts approached, as all of their conversations did.
The specifics of their dialogue weren’t of the greatest importance to him or apparently to her, but the conversation and companionship were both comforting and frequently entertaining, even when a good deal of the discussion was of a fairly superficial nature.
There she sat; fewer than three feet from him, sharing the sofa, at opposite ends, while all he could think about was how much he wished that she was closer than she was. They talked for hours, subjects dissolving into tangents, discursive and without discernable pattern. The whole while he just couldn’t stop himself from thinking about how much he wanted her to move closer to him, to make some sort of indication that she was looking at him in the same way that he couldn’t help but look at her, with desire and growing affection.
He imagined that he caught glances from her now and again, suggestive of something kindred to his own impulses regarding her, but he couldn’t silence the fear that spoke up in his mind, insisting that he was just letting wishful thinking play cruel games with his mind. He didn’t dare go out on a limb and express his desires to her, for fear of losing these opportunities to share her company and to enjoy this torturous proximity, knowing that the risk was simply too great that she would take his advance as an offense. Because, no matter how excruciating it was for him to have her so close while plagued with this fear and uncertainty, it was still the single best part about his nights these days and the one thing he actively enjoyed about his job. These precious hours in her presence made the days spent looking forward to them more than worth his while.
She appealed to him in so many ways, and he longed to express these things to her in some way that might somehow win her affection. With words or with actions, he didn’t care about the specific form that expression might take; he simply wanted to lay everything out on the table. It ran contrary to his nature that he was having such a difficult time keeping these thoughts bottled up inside. He wished that he could pride himself on his candor, his willingness to always let everyone around him know precisely where they stood with respect to him, but that was not who he was. He wanted nothing more than to be a more confident man, to be the sort of person who would never hesitate to share what was on their mind; yet, here he was, afraid to do so much as touch on the surface contours of what he found himself thinking of her.
Within only the first couple of weeks that he’d worked with her, he felt a definite irresistible bond with Leyna. It wasn’t just that she was as attractive to him as she happened to be. Attraction alone was a common enough thing that it could easily be dismissed. There was something more beneath the surface, a barely perceived connection that he couldn’t reconcile with what he knew of life and relationships, even solely for himself.
It wasn’t enough that she appeared to share some of his ideological leanings on the surface. Even combined with his intense physical attraction to her, these apparent ideological similarities would not be adequate to explain the sense of resonance that he felt whenever she was even remotely nearby.
The earlier years of his college education provided him with ample means to try and describe how he felt, but nothing that he would ever dare to say out loud to her. Oppositional charged ions could not have experienced a pull as powerful as the force that seemed to draw his attention steadily toward her. The gravitational attraction of a singularity seemed like it must pale in comparison with the lure that she held over him. Even without her near he found himself focusing on her, remembering her face with vivid clarity when he closed his eyes, the sound of her voice. She existed within his thoughts with the same sort of concrete reality that she enjoyed in the real world that they shared.
The concept of soul mates would cross his mind if he believed in the existence of the human soul. All that he knew for certain was that something mysterious, some impetus that he did not, and perhaps could not, understand was making her so enticing to him that it felt almost magnetic in nature.
He didn’t know a lot about her really. The details of her life were primarily an unknown variable for him, but he was getting to know her better every time they had occasion to visit. He absorbed every new bit of information that she revealed with something approaching rapt pleasure.
It was particularly pleasing to him when she made an off-hand comment later that night about being sexually deprived, assuaging his slight concerns that there had been a very good reason for her to have been thinking about abortion earlier on in the shift. Looking at her with a bit of puzzlement, he wondered how the hell that could even be possible. The look on her face as she had spoken was one of total sincerity.
“You have sex,” he insisted, incredulity quite apparent in his tone.
“No, really I don’t,” she replied with an ever so slight frown manifesting on her lips. “It’s kind of sad, actually.”
“Oh really?” he asked sarcastically, assuming that she was being absurdly self-deprecating for some reason that he hadn’t yet discerned.
“No one wants to get with this,” she said with a self-effacing grin as she gestured towards herself like she was on display, the mannerism and the words seeming to reinforce his presumption that she was joking, but there was something about the tone and the look in her eyes that implied a hint of sadness.
He could never quite tell whether she was being sincere or facetious when she said things like that. He had to assume that her choice of wording was intended to imply sarcasm, but even if she was making a joke, he sometimes had to wonder how much of that humor was designed to provide a mask for feelings that weren’t altogether so far off from what she actually said. He knew enough about her by now to be confident in his belief that she didn’t have the most positive self-image, for whatever reason.
She didn’t think that she was pretty, as she had stated once before. He found her to be magnificent, radiant even. He saw her so differently from how she appeared to imagine herself, their perceptions so diametrically opposed as to seem like they couldn’t possibly be describing the same thing.
She was not only beautiful to him, but enthralling in a way that he couldn’t explain; something that held him captive like a siren would have in an ancient Greek myth. Yet he could never seem to tell her any of this, not without risking far more than he was willing to lose. It was a tragedy to him that he wasn’t able to share with her that he could guarantee that there was at least someone who definitely found her attractive.
It really wasn’t just that he found her attractive though; there was something about her character that he admired. She had none of the difficulty expressing herself that he was experiencing where she was concerned. She could be stubbornly evasive and truly pigheaded about things that pertained to her, but she also had little difficulty when it came to speaking out when she felt there was a need to do so. He’d always felt more comfortable in the background, remaining under the radar whenever it was possible to do so, but she was more than willing to make waves if she felt that that they were required.
While he silently mused over earlier elements of the conversation, they continued to talk, his attention only marginally there.
“I don’t think that she means to be condescending,” she explained, now discussing one of their superiors at the hospital, “but it pisses me off just the same when she comes across that way.”
“Well, of course it does; no one likes to be talked down to,” he replied.
“I’m going to have to say something to her, just to make her aware of it,” she decided, a determination that he probably would have neglected to make.
His attention drifted again as he watched her lips forming words, as her tongue subtly moistened them at irregular intervals. He watched those supple lips part as breath exhaled, and he longed to feel that breath against the sensitive flesh of his neck, the texture of those lips against his own as the pressure behind them increased. He yearned for the sensation of her lips parting, and her tongue brushing against his lips as it slid between them. He wondered if it would feel as exquisitely beautiful as it did in his imagination.
He knew that he really should say something to her, that he shouldn’t just sit her petrified by fear. Sooner or later these visits would end, and inevitably there would come a time when he may very well never see her again. Any possibility, no matter how remote it might be, of reciprocation would then disappear. By then it would be too late; all of those probabilities that he considered, whether high or low, would have collapsed to zero. Even knowing all of this, he just couldn’t bring himself to act. He could rationalize it to himself, saying that if she interpreted it wrong, he could end up losing his job. But he knew that she would never take things that far, even if she weren’t able to return his attraction, which was just another small thread in the tapestry of what made her so beautiful to him.
He sat there wondering why she couldn’t take the initiative and provide him with some sort of clue if he was right in suspecting that maybe there was something mutual, an advance that was unmistakable for anything but attraction to him. Of course it was always possible that she really just wasn’t interested at all, in which case it made perfect sense that she wasn’t showing any overt interest. But maybe, he told himself over and over again, just maybe she was simply as afraid of rejection as he was. He knew that, giving himself flimsy, poorly thought out excuses to keep his hopes up was unhealthy. As long as he could conceivably think that there was even a marginal chance of her feeling the same way as he did, he could avoid beginning the painful process of coming to terms with the fact that this infatuation of his was a dead end street.
The night came to an end sooner than he would have liked, they always seemed to, and they once again went their separate ways. He saw their parting as an almost physically painful thing while fairly certain that, to her, it was just the end of another day.
He dreaded the passage of the next few days, the intervening period of time before he would again share her company. He knew with confidence that she would be on his mind far more frequently than was truly reasonable. He was aware, with utmost clarity, that he probably wouldn’t cross her mind at all. He accepted that, but still he hoped that he was wrong. If he thought prayer was anything more than masturbatory, self-indulgent activity, he would be praying that she couldn’t shake him from her thoughts the entire time that they were apart. But if he were a gambling man, he wouldn’t take odds on that ever being the case.
He walked slowly out to the parking lot, unlocking his car by remote when he was still a dozen feet distant. He slid behind the wheel, rotated the key in the ignition, and drove away from the facility. His final thoughts as he left the parking lot were about whether he could find some reasonable sounding justification for showing up that weekend when he knew that she would be there. He dismissed the thoughts immediately as being more befitting a stalker than a potential romantic partner, and he knew that he was flattering himself with just the internal suggestion of that potential being real anywhere outside of his imagination.
The sunrise was beautiful, if not a little bit of an annoyance when he was forced to travel directly into the glare that it produced. The clouds from the thunderstorm the night before had obviously started to dissipate sometime during the night while he was entirely and intently focused on something else.
The long hours spent in the common room shared between their two respective wards had been enough to usher in a new dawn while he remained totally oblivious to the passage of his time.
The world was washed clean for a brief period of time by the storm that had raged through the evening before and into the beginning of the early morning hours. It never stayed clean for long though, and even the temporary interval of rain-induced cleanliness was illusory in nature. Nothing had actually changed.
Nothing ever really changed, or so he thought. If only he were right, because the changes that were coming were something that he could never have imagined in even his most feverish nightmare.
His morning drive from the hospital grounds to his one-bedroom apartment was always a chance for him to unwind, to let his mind wander towards a center, a place of emptiness, somewhere subdued and without pressure. It just seemed like more and more often that place of peace and internal sanctuary was more difficult to reach after the nights that he spent with her. Everywhere that his mind would turn, seeking peace, there she was.
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