Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,75
the day I would kill a man.
I still wasn’t sure how you killed a man, especially one born out of a chemical imbalance in your brain. But I’d figure it out with Red’s help.
I swung my legs around the side of my bed and looked at the clock. 8:37 a.m. I felt an inner calm. A certain tranquility. Somehow, I just knew Red was gonna pull through. It was as if I already had tonight’s escape laid out in my head. It was like some kind of emotional foreshadowing. You know that feeling you get when you know something is going to go down a certain way?
I put on my clothes and walked toward the cafeteria.
In the hallway, I saw things differently. Looking at the other patients, I didn’t see people who were stuck in this facility. I saw people who were stuck within the confines of their own minds. The key to their escape lay deep beyond the layers of their subconscious. In a way, as I stared at them, I was staring at myself.
“Coffee, coffee, coffee!” Joe said yet again this fine morning as I walked past.
“Hey there, Joe,” I said, and like clockwork Ann came to give me the antipsychotic pills I would pretend to ingest and put in my right jacket pocket. As I placed the pills atop the mountain of others just like them, something hit me—I had officially run out of space to place any future pills. There had to be hundreds jammed in there. That eerily made me feel like it was a sign. Like this would be the last time Ann and I would do the medication mambo.
On the walls were pictures I never really noticed. Every year, the hospital gathered its patients for a yearly Christmas photo. Along the wall was every picture they had taken since the hospital had been built more than a hundred years ago. As I walked past the pictures, I came to the most recent ones. Looking deeply at a photograph, I spotted myself in the crowd. Looking at the photo even closer, all I saw was a shell of who I was.
I didn’t even remember taking these photos. I looked totally vacant. I had a hollow expression across my face. I could see everyone from the hospital in them, lined up like those class pictures in elementary school. While scanning a photograph’s surface with my fingertips, part of me was looking for Frank. In doing so, I noticed there was someone missing in the picture.
Red. Not only was he missing from this photo, he was also missing from the one from last year.
As I retraced my steps, walking backward, I noticed he wasn’t in a single Christmas photo taken during the entire decade he had been at the facility. I found this strange, but only for a moment . . . then I realized it.
His wife had died on Christmas, while skiing. To be honest, if something that traumatic happened to me on Christmas, I really wouldn’t want to take a photo either.
I continued on my way to meet Red for breakfast.
He was already sitting. He smiled and waved as I walked up.
“Okay, kid,” he said as soon as I sat across from him. “I got it. You know what today is, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, man. Thursday?”
“No, boy, well . . . I mean, yes, but it’s also holiday season!”
He was right! Man, I’d been so absorbed in trying to end this I’d been oblivious to everything else. Including the holiday!
“Okay, so it’s Christmas Eve, but . . . I don’t get it?”
“Flynn, it is the most lenient day of the year as far as security goes. There’s only a quarter of the staff working, which means fewer guards patrolling the hospital at night.”
He was right, and it filled me with even more promise.
“Okay, but how do we get out, Red?”
He took something out of his left robe pocket and held it in his hand. Placing the back of his hand on the tabletop, the object lay there hidden behind his fingers. As he unclenched his fist, opening his hand, I saw it.
“Holy shit!” I yelled.
“Quiet now, boy, quiet now!” he said, looking around the cafeteria.
It was a key card for our wing.
“How did you get this?” I asked, trying to keep my voice low.
“Now, old Red has his ways. G’on now, take it.” I stared at the object in awe. Finally, I was going make it out of this place! Nothing could hold