The Last Resort

A Novella in Voices

Allie Coker

• Publisher: Warren Publishing, Inc
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781954614161
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Psychiatrie & geistige Gesundheit

My immediate thought, I don't belong here, rebuffed before the half-day's end. Maybe I didn't have multiple personalities or talk to myself or have mood swings so bad that no one could be around me, but the truth was plain. I needed to be here. I did belong here.

Welcome to The Last Resort-a sanitarium for residents who feel imprisoned in their own minds. Whether staff member or patient, everyone finds themselves at the center of a complex system that, at its best, provides therapeutic care and, at its worst, blurs and blends the boundaries of what constitutes sane and insane. Regardless of the role each individual has to play, all of them are here for a reason and will be forced to examine themselves from every angle.

Told from various perspectives, The Last Resort is a frighteningly real novella from Allie Coker that reveals the vulnerable side of humanity and forces readers to stop and ask, "What is normal?"

PART ONE

THE LAST RESORT

What name do we put to an instinct
greater than survival?

#19145: The truth is a muddied thing. To begin with, there’s so little of it.

#28439: They don’t have magic answers like we thought they would. Lex works her way around her problems but finds no relief. We thought for sure we had just done something wrong, but no one could tell us what. They make us attend AA. One of the guys says that’s one good thing about being locked up—it keeps us clean. If I weren’t here, I’d be injecting fire into my veins right now, reeling on my back stoop, eyelids fluttering and the neighbors pretending not to notice again. When people can, they walk back and forth, over and over again, trying to make the small courtyard work for them, pacing the concrete and soaking in sunshine, peering through the narrow spaces between wooden slats of the impossibly high fence—perhaps not so impossible since escapees have scaled it before. The courtyard can’t be mistaken for a park, not even a garden, but if a stiff breeze blows the right way and you sit close to each other at the picnic table, just shooting the shit, you can imagine a hot July night with friends on the patio and beers in hand. Some people just stand planted in one spot, their arms out, as though they are solar powered.

Napping during the day in your room isn’t allowed since you have to be with the group where they can see you. A blanket is dragged every now and then through the halls, wrapped around the shoulders of a person too cold or tired to talk. The hard plastic couch—the same material as a child’s playset and initially an object of disgust—turned into the welcoming down of the plushest comforter after a few days. Swaddled and with their backs to us—a true sign of not caring—many sleep for hours until it is time for the group to go to dinner or rec therapy. You see a lot of tired people, napping people, but that is because their bodies are adjusting. It looks very similar to what you would imagine, but that’s just it—you have to get past looks.

Lex taught us about the ugly laws and how people used to get separated from society for doing regular stuff like cheating on your girl or being lazy. One moment, you could be reading a book in a hammock and then the next—bam! Behind lock and key. She told us about how places like this one were shut down in the ’70s. Lex knows a lot of stuff like that. A lot of people say she could work here, could have a key to the locked doors, if only she loved herself more. Lex talks about work a lot. She talks about how fast she can type and how she loves solving problems. She told us about her coworkers and how familial they are. She talks about the difficulty of making sure everything goes just right at her job every single day. For almost every topic, Lex has a work story. I used to wonder what she did to be brought here in handcuffs like the rest of us. I used to think it was a boy, but it turns out it was a lot of people and a lot of circumstances that put her here.

She says her name’s Sandy, but I call her Lex. We all call her Lex now. Sandy sounds like a fragile name, wishy-washy, a name that clings to your skin, and I figure if she were that fragile, she’d be a lot meaner. I call her Lex after Lex Luther because he’s the whip-smart but evil guy who brought down Superman. Lex isn’t evil, but obviously some part of her is filled with hate, mostly for herself. Plus, she talks about work a lot. Like it’s her life or something.

Every day, we wait to see who will get out next. They escort us back to our hall, and as the door swings open, I yell, “Cellblock Four West!” Lex hushes me when I do that. She hushes me a lot. She’s talkative here, but I think she has trouble sleeping. Whenever she falls asleep in the rec room, she tosses and turns, her jaw set tight as her mind grinds away.

A steel toilet with no lid or seat, a flimsy toothbrush, and thirty seconds of shower water at a time—that’s all you get. Waking up to that cold, metal rim and having to ask someone to unlock the shower door for you is its own wake-up call. Shampoo is rare, and razors are out of the question, so prepare to get furry. The only way you get a razor is if someone watches you while you shave, which is too creepy to even think about. Doors lock behind you for every ten feet or so of hallway to prevent drift, lag, and loss. Every piece of furniture is made of bulky plastic—unlikely to be thrown. When group and art therapy happen, we’re not allowed to have real pencils, just the stubby kind you get at a minigolf course. Why they think a small pencil would hurt any less when stabbed in your eye, I have no clue. Pens aren’t allowed either.

One kid yells. All he does is yell and talk to no one in particular. All. The. Time. There’s something really wrong with that kid. I say “kid,” but we’re all adults here, at least in the eyes of the law. When they take our vitals every day, I always try to beat the young ones by getting the lowest blood pressure. Nothing like a little friendly competition to help make light of our situation, I guess.

Some of them are only in their twenties or younger! How’d they end up here so fast? What did life do to them so quickly? I’m triple their age and would never think of doing that stuff. My blood pressure runs kinda high, but I still do my best—sit still, stay calm. H.D. had to break up a bad fight the other day—some kid swinging and attacking anybody near him. They threw him in solitary. The lights go on and off, but there’s no doorknob inside, even though we can watch him through the window. Some people are just outta their minds. Sure, I wanted to hurt people, but that was different. They were chasing me.

H.D.: I try my best to help them. After all, I could just as easily end up here one day. My night shift relief, Cameron, makes the rounds every fifteen minutes, which includes checking who’s asleep and marking their position to make sure they’re not trying to harm themselves or those in the room with them. I stay up and review like a worried camp counselor. Who spoke in group today? Who responded to rec time or pet therapy? Who isn’t eating? Who is beating their head on the wall again? It’s surprising to me to see so many oldsters in here. They’re easily two to three decades older than me, and I’m not a spring chicken—more of a middle-aged rooster.

Sometimes the system makes me feel useless. Sure, there are others in my position who don’t care. They look and sound bored and do the bare minimum of watching the group to ensure they don’t escape. But if you’re not here to help people, then why do it? This job may not be glamorous or joyful, but sometimes I think the world is twice as messed up on the outside. I truly believe I could easily end up on this unit one day, taking timed showers with push buttons, not being able to see the outside world without a fence, eating the same meals on rotation with plastic silverware. There’s nothing special about any of us that prevents us from slipping; we’re all susceptible. I just try to do a little bit of good, to help them some. You can always tell who will end up back here though. This batch seems like a cakewalk compared to some. One guy we had in last month—well, we’ll see him again.

#80912: I do not belong here. They should have just sent me back home to handle my problems on my own—that’s the reasonable thing to do. Here, everyone looks at me funny. They think I don’t notice, but I do.

The first three days of my stay, I walked past the locked door with trepidation. Some kind of confinement room meant for a single occupant. A cell where the lights and locks are controlled from the outside—somehow used to calm people down (supposedly). There was a creepy little window that bowed in and seemed out of place on the door. The light stayed off, and the door stayed locked. Some of the long-term residents—imagine being here for more than a month!—told me that’s where Boris stays, describing him as a hulking, six-foot-five guy with shoulders that barely fit through the doorway and tattoos on his eyelids. His silence is so thick you could choke on it. Lured in, I kept trying to peek until my third day. My heart thumped rapidly the closer I edged to the door with the darkened, concave window. Finally, I got so close that the toes of my shoes almost lined up with the doorframe. Almost. One of those girl loonies with long, blond hair came up behind me, lightly tapped my shoulders, and yelled, “Boo!” My eardrum exploded, and an electric pulse jutted through my neck and into my skull. My heart drummed triple time. That’s when I knew Boris wasn’t real at all. Should have known better than to listen to a bunch of nuts.

They’re almost as bad as the nurses who all whisper about me at night. They think I don’t know, but I can hear them. They’re trying to keep me here when I don’t need to be here. I hear snatches of their hushed conversations. They won’t use my name, but when they say “she” and “her,” I know they mean me. I need to get back to my life, which has been falling apart rapidly. My significant other of three years started cheating on me six months ago, though he’ll never admit it. He’s working more hours than before, and once a week, he leaves the house with his buddies to go “bowling.” When he comes back a few hours later, smiling and cheerful as he gloats over the scorecard he shows me, I wonder how much he had to pay some dumb schmuck to obtain it. Two of my coworkers have been making me look bad to the boss and are trying to push me out. They deny everything. That’s what I don’t get about people—why do they deny so much?

G.K.: People I meet outside my job always assume the patients I work with claim they’re George Washington or an alien from deep space. Or they think I work with kids who levitate and speak in forty-three different tongues—they’ve seen all the movies. While there certainly are people who may fit those descriptions and need critical help, the people I tend to work with are usually disturbed in a different way. They are people who can function in ...