Love was a concept he was only just beginning to understand. There had been psychiatrists when he’d been a child, countless medical professionals and a handful of quacks. They bandied around different words, all frantically trying to find a box that he and his so called symptoms fitted into, nice and neatly. The generation of categorisation, it was not enough just to accept that not everyone behaved or looked at the world in quite the same way, no, if you were different you needed a label. It kept the so called normal people from getting confused or distressed. Somehow, naming those who were different made them manageable, understandable and dispatched with the crippling fear of the unknown. He’d never thought he was anything they’d named him. He was just himself.
They had told him, when he’d been recruited, that he was special. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be special but it had made such a pleasant change from being treated like something faulty that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to object. His differences, the things that had so often kept him locked from the rest of the world, were going to be perfect here, they told him. He could just be himself and in doing so he could stay out of that horrible institution he’d been kept in. They were very sympathetic, they told him, of his plight and they were here to help him, to give him purpose. He suspected that they voiced their emotions because they understood that he couldn't read them.
He was to be a silent observer; it was a simple as that. To be housed just across the street from a woman, Marilyn, to watch her and to make note of everything she did. There would be screens, they explained, showing him every room of her house. Who she was wasn't important, he wasn't to ask any questions, just to watch and record, watch and record, for as long as they needed him to. So, after they had explained the task ahead, in great detail, and taught him how to use the various technologies required, he took his meager collection of belongings and he moved to the small house across the street from Marilyn.
As the first hours melted into days and the first days into weeks, the very walls between him and her seemed to simply disappear. It was as though he was living right there with her. In the mornings he would get up early, about 5:30 to ensure that he could shower before she woke, then he would prepare his breakfast, eating as he watched her do the same. He felt something that he understood to be companionship, a concept that had previously been foreign to him, which he had only ever witnessed as a bemused outsider. As they ate, he would talk to her, imagining her responses so clearly in his head that he often found himself almost believing that they were real.
When she left for work, he would watch her from the window, whispering goodbye and imagining her wrapping him in a tight embrace. Then, with her gone, he would sit at his desk, compiling his report on the day before. They liked to know everything, what time she woke, what she ate, how long she spent in the bathroom, the mood she appeared to be in, any phone calls she made and what she said during them. He was always thorough, they always praised how thorough he was, he liked detail. He especially liked details relating to her. Sometimes he would forget to omit their breakfast conversations and the report would return with a post-it note, reminding him that he was not permitted to make contact.
Sometimes, there would be a man. He was reminded, a little, of the large men that used to restrain him when he was having what they called an episode. They told him that he was strong when he was like that and yet, no matter how hard he tried, he never seemed able to fight them off. They always won and if losing over and over wasn't bad enough, there would always be punishment afterwards. We’re just trying to help you, they’d say, as they administered shock after shock. For a while it would work, he would be too afraid to do the things he knew they didn't like, he would pretend to be like one of them but then he would forget and the sorry cycle would begin again. The man that sometimes visited Marilyn frightened him but also made him feel something else, anger perhaps, or jealousy, he wasn't sure. He would become very agitated and his task, watching the screens for as long as Marilyn was conscious, would become very difficult. There were things he didn't like to watch, things he didn't understand.
Then, there were the nights without the man. These were the ones he liked best. He would watch her come in from work, kick off her shoes and sink into her favourite arm chair. Sometimes she would speak to her mother and he could listen to the details of her day away from him and he would imagine her life outside of the four walls they almost shared. He would watch as she ate dinner and think about everything they would talk about. She would tell him about the experiments she had done today, he had learnt that she was an important scientist, and he could tell her about the big dog that was often walked down the street during the day. At bedtime he would look away as she undressed, he remembered his mother and sister shooing him from the room when they wanted to change. When she climbed into bed, he would do the same, keeping the screen close to him and watching her as he drifted off to sleep.
One morning he woke and Marilyn was simply gone, for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, she had woken before 5:30. He sat glued to the screens for days, watching the empty rooms. He wrote his reports but no one came to collect them. On Wednesday, there was no delivery of groceries. He watched as the man came and went several times. He watched as the man returned, this time with several men in uniform. He watched as they broke down the door and searched through the rooms, upturning everything in Marilyn’s perfect home. He watched, suddenly frightened, as a pair of eyes looked directly at him on one screen and then another and another, like there was nothing between them but glass.
(November) Prompt #2 - Glass Walls
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Originally Posted by DoughGuy
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