Fools Follow, Part 4

In this round room, in a perfectly uncomfortable chair, a man sat. He was no different than anyone else, except that he thought he was sane. As such, he was frowning at the concoction in the cup he held. As he stared, his mind was having an argument about whether it was in his best interests to swallow the contents. The reason he was having an argument was because part of him was beginning to suspect that his actual mental state might not have anything to do with the length of his stay.

As he frowned at the cup full of pills, his mind strayed, and he began to worry about something else that had been bothering him recently: the fact that he didn’t remember his name. Bart sounded familiar for some reason, but it also sounded like a completely absurd moniker to place on a person, so he wasn’t completely sure if it was right. As he sat and stared, his mind wandered and tried to recollect simple things like his age, his birthday, and how he had ended up in this room, which he thought was the most unpleasant he had ever seen. Eventually, he looked up, because he had the feeling that he was not alone. In the facility, one was never truly alone. One was never truly alone because even in their rooms they were watched by electronic eyes, which presumably provided their secrets to human eyes.

This time, however, it was not an orderly who was watching him. Seated uncomfortably close to him in another irregular chair was a man he had never seen before. Despite all of his other possible and potential flaws, Bart liked to think that he had a good memory for faces. Especially faces that he saw on a regular basis three times a day for a lot of unremembered days. What was even odder to Bart was that the stranger, the person who he had never seen before was practically salivating over his pills. While drooling was surprisingly common, it was not usually over the chemicals they took.