Page 94 of Bend
The last thing I remembered was snorting a line of flake off Amanda’s tits.
And then?
Nothing.
Anxiety sat in my chest like a kinetic weight, but I wasn’t scared. I knew I wasn’t thinking right, that I was little more than a jumble of emotions and half sentences. I thought in colors, and saw in bursts of silence. The aggressive white light above illuminated the angles of the corners. The tight space and soft white walls were the product of some kind of regulating entity. Was I in prison? A hospital? Was I even in the United States? When would Deacon come for me?
Soon.
He’d come soon, and everything would be in control again.
Until then, I’d submit to the fog of my half-formed thoughts and nothing would go wrong.
***
“Do you know where you are?”
His voice was so gentle in powder blues and jazzy notes, but he was a stranger. I’d never heard a voice like that—thick and soft as heavy cream, a satin sheet on a bed of sand. I opened my eyes to bright white fog and a charcoal blur that must have been attached to the voice. Not a cop. Not a lawyer. Not an ER doc.
“No,” I croaked.
“I’m going to ask you some questions. All right?”
I nodded. I didn’t realize how quiet it was until the noise of the sheet rubbing against my ear sounded like an electric guitar amp set to eleven.
“Can you tell me your name?”
It wasn’t loud, that voice. Like Deacon’s, it had its own kind of authority, but unlike my master’s, it was gentle.
I cleared the frog from my throat. “Fiona.”
“Hi, Fiona. My name is Doctor Chapman. But you can call me Elliot.”
My eyes cleared a little. The charcoal smear turned into a beige oval with two green-grey dots for eyes and non-committally colored hair. His skin wrinkled around the eyes, but his mouth was young. He was either in his late twenties, or forty-ish, like Deacon. Or maybe somewhere in between.
“Good,” he said, crouching to meet my gaze. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Where do you live?”
That was a hard question, with its own complexity.
“The first thing that comes to mind,” the doctor said.
“Number three, Maundy Street.”
He nodded, so my answer must have been satisfactory. “Get cleaned up, get something to eat, then we can talk.”
I nodded, and the noise in my ear was less shocking. He stood and went for the white door with the little window at eye level.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Westonwood Acres.”
***
They fed me in my room from a metal tray. I didn’t eat much. I was shown to a small bathroom, where I was expected to clean up and change out of one light blue jumpsuit into another. I had never been squeamish about germs or ickiness, but in the soft cotton of my mind
