The First Time He Saw It Their Way - John Fetto

The first time he saw it their way, he felt sick. It was as if the top of his head were sliced open and his brains bubbled over. His eyes blinked wildly, but the scene didn’t change. He was in a hospital. The walls were green and the floor, white linoleum. He wasn’t alone. In the room were a doctor and a nurse. The look on their faces didn’t change. They were concerned. They were sympathetic. And they hadn’t believed a word he had said.

“How often did you say?” The doctor’s eyes were watery grey, like fog hanging above a rice paddy, hiding god knew what so that each step forward was like a step along a tightrope stretched across bottomless abyss.

“Not often. Once. Just once.” He was trying to retreat, to climb back on solid ground. But the eyes on their faces prodded him forward out onto the wire, into the cold midst.

“You already told us of three occasions.”

The nurse nodded. She checked her clipboard and her lips moved as she counted one, two, three… The doctor had his witness. Outside was a thick orderly with biceps the size of his calves. He could bolt to the door but the orderly would stop him.

“So what?” he said and as soon as he said it he knew it was the wrong thing to say. He didn’t want to walk out on the wire and it pissed him off that they wouldn’t let him back in on the solid ground of the world of the sane. “What the fuck difference does it make how many times?”

The doctor frowned. He looked at the nurse and they shared a moment of understanding between them, two sane people in the presence of an insane, deluged, deranged vet who heard people talking to him who weren’t alive anymore. In that moment, his fate was sealed. The way they saw it, he was nuts.