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CHAPTER ONE: Arrival
“Most of all, pain.”
JUNHONG'S POV
The glass dorrs swing open in perfect sync, precisely timed so you don't have to think. You just stroll right in. I doubt it's quite as easy to turn around and walk back outside. Retreat to stable ground. Home turf. I'm sure that it'd be nearly impossible in a place like this.
An orderly escorts me down spit-shined corridors, past tinted plexiglas and closed, unmarked doors. I wonder what's behind those. Mysteries. I walk, one foor in front of the other, as I count the tiles on the floor so I don't have to focus on the blur of painted smiles or fake faces. A mannequin-looking woman in a tight blue suit, with a too-short skirt (and legs that can wear it), in a Betty Boop voice halts us.
"I'm Dr. Jung. Welcome to Michin Hospital for the Mentally Ill. I'll give you a tour!" Her eyes fell onto the orderly standing beside me with his large hand on my shoulder despite his smaller height. "Minjung-ssi, please take Junhong's things to his room."
I scoff. Michin Hospital for the Mentally Ill? Is she trying to make me feel better or worse? She's speaking as if this place were a five-star resort, instead of a lockdown where crazies pace and wait. The only good thing so far is that this place doesn't smell like that hospital stink I've always hated. Oh yes, it's all very clean, from the lunchroom chairs to the bathroom sink. Spotless. But the clean comes minus the gag-me smell that steeps every inch of that antiseptic hell where they excised the damnable bullet.
I wonder what my dad said when he heard that I tried to put myself six feet under - and failed. I should have put the gun to my head. I should have worried less about brain damage and more about getting dead. Instead, I decided a shot through the heart would make it stop beating and rip it apart to bleed me out.
I couldn't even do that right. The bullet hit bone and left my heart in one piece. In hindsight, luck wasn't with me that day. My mom found me too soon. If she hadn't come in, my pitiful life might have ebbed to the ground in arterial flow. I thought Umma would have died too at the sight of so much blood and the thought of it staining her white Armani blouse.
"Junhong-ah, what have you done?" She asked. "Tell me this was just an accident! Please tell me!"
She never heard my reply that day. She didn't even bother to shed a tear over her son's failed suicide attempt. I don't remember much after that, except for the speed. Ghostly red lights, spinning faster and faster, as I began to recede from consciousness. There was frenzied motion as I floated through the ER doors. I remember a needle's sting. I also remember, just before the black hole swallowed me, seeing Umma's face. Her furious eyes followed me down into sleep.
It's a curious place, the Land of Blood Loss and Anesthesia. It's dark and bitter cold, and nightmares and truth collide, and you wonder if death could unfold fear so real. You try to move to the light, but you find that you can't even move, with your arms strapped tight and overflowing tubes. Then everything hits you like a train at full speed. Voices, strange faces, crazy smells. Pain.
Most of all, pain.
TAEMIN'S POV
I just saw a new guy check into the hospital with a shorter orderly at his side. Tall, built, with an adorably handsome face, and acting too tough to stumble. I scoff. He's a nutshell asking to crack. I wonder as I watch the orderly him to his room if he's even considered letting another guy touch that hot body of his.
Word travels fast here, and rumor has it that the new guy has been given the room across from mine.
Besides for the new people coming in or old people going out, Michin Hospital is a pretty peaceful place most of the time. As long as my meds are on time. Ha! Get it? Most of the time, if my meds are on time... If you don't get it, you've never been in a place like this, and you've never hung tough from one med call till the next.
Wasted. That's the only way to get by in this "Hospital for the Mentally Ill". That's a really nice way to nickname a loony bin. Everyone in here is crazy one way or another. Everyone. Even the so-called doctors.
Most of the patients here? Druggies. I mean, if you're gonna purposely lose your mind, you want to get it back some day. Don't you? Okay, maybe not.
Well, I lost my mind a long time ago, but it wasn't exactly my idea. happens, as they say. And my literally hit the fan. But enough sappy crap. We were talking about drugs. I won't tell you that I haven't tried that hard stuff that people smuggle in from overseas, but it wasn't really my thing. I saw enough people, all wound up, drop over the edge, and I guess I just decided not to jump that far into things.
My thing was more along the lines of pills. I ended up taking sixteen too many, and I ended up in here. When I get out in a few months, I'll try twenty-six and see if I can survive that as well. I mean, you'd think sixteen pills and ten bottles of soju would do the trick. Maybe it would have, but I just had to drink that extra bottle of red win. I passed out, just like I expected. What I didn't expect was waking up, head stuck to the sidewalk, surrounded by puke.
Oh yeah, I heaved the whole ing thing. Better yet, guess who happened to drive by? You got it. One of Seoul's finest. The poor cop didn't know what to do with me - clean me up, haul me in, or puke himself. So he did all three, but his boss told him to take me to the ER. Hospital first. Loony bin later.
CHAEKYUNG'S POV
I hate this feeling like I'm here, but I'm not. Like someone cares, but they don't. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere else but here, and escape lies just past that window above me. I know my counselor's out there in the hallway, waiting for me. But I'm too tired to pick myself up and join her. So I just sit here, brain wobbling. Tipping. Tripping on antidepressants.
I wonder if they give everyone their pills twice a day on the first day of being here. Do they actually diagnose first, or do they just think everyone here is depressed?
My arm throbs, and I look down at the bandage, a small red stain beginning to slither. Did I pop a stitch? Wouldn't that be awesome?
The first cut wasn't the deepest. No, not at all. It was like the others, a subtle rend of anxious skin, a gentle pulse of crimson, just enough to hush the demons shrieking inside my brain. But this time, they wouldn't shut up. They just kept on screaming, just like Umma when she was going through one of her crazy moments. Worse thing was, the older I got, the more I began to see how much I resembled Umma, falling in and out of craziness.
That day, I thought about screaming. So I just gave myself to the knife, and I asked it to bite a little harder, chew a little deeper. The hot, scarlet rush felt so delicious, so I couldn't stop there. The blade might have even reached bone, but my dongsaeng Hyungjun, barged into the bathroom. He found me leaning against our grandmother's new porcelain tub, turning its unstained white to red. You should have heard him scream.
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