Skin Deep: An excerpt

This is a chapter from the novel I did for National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org) last year. I actually wrote the required 50,000, but I'm not so sure of their quality. Think of "Fight Club" and "Office Space" falling in love and having an illegitimate child. It's called "Skin Deep," and it's the story of a young woman who tries to make someone love her and loses herself in the process. That description makes it sound like it's good, which it isn't. But I did like the first chapter, which follows.

Skin Deep
© Elle Lassiter, 2005

It all comes down to the choices you make. What time you get out of bed, what tie you wear, what color you paint your nails. It's all significant. Even the little things affect the course of your life. Especially the little things.

A soy latte could be the difference between you becoming the president of the United States and you asking, Would you like fries with that?

The problem is free will.

Right now, I'm second guessing some of the choices I've been making lately. Specifically, I'm thinking that letting all the assorted nuts out of their cages was maybe not such a great idea. Right now as I'm hiding under my desk, I'm thinking maybe I screwed up.

Until a couple hours ago, the former Lockwood State Mental Hospital and Training Center--now officially known as the Mental Hygienics Corporation's Lockwood Campus (or the Lock to the people who live and work here)--housed one thousand seventy two clients. Now, most of them are roaming free.

The Lock's Training and Rehabilitation Division provided services to the facility's four hundred and twenty six severely and profoundly mentally retarded clients, eighty percent of whom are not ambulatory. Most of them are still in the dayrooms and living areas, unable to leave even if they knew they were free to go. They are not a problem.

Just this morning, three hundred and fifty six mentally ill patients wandered the halls of the Mental Health Unit. Right now, the schizophrenics and schizoaffectives twitch and shudder out on the manicured lawns. They grimace and bug their eyes. They stick out their tongues and pluck at their ears from the tardive dyskinesia brought on from too many years of typical antipsychotic medications. The borderlines and the bipolars, they're crying and screaming from up in the trees. The sudden freedom has left them lost and confused. The sociopaths--you won't see the sociopaths. This is the moment they've been waiting for, and they're making the most of it. The sociopaths, they are long gone.

That would constitute a problem.

When the doors of the Lock's Forensic Unit opened as if of their own volition, two hundred and fifty eight NGRIs--that's not guilty by reason of insanity if you're not hip to the lingo--sprang from their cages. They're free, along with the twenty nine men and three women of the Sexually Violent Predator Unit, the rapists and pedophiles who were sent to the Lock after completing their prison sentences thanks to a liberal interpretation of the state's mental hygiene laws.

Now that is a problem wrapped in a complication inside a dilemma.

This morning, all one thousand and seventy two assorted nuts were safely locked inside the Lock's twenty thousand square feet of bedrooms, dayrooms, and cellblocks. Now, thanks to me, they are all free.

The reason I'm thinking maybe this wasn't such a good idea is, with all of them out there prowling the grounds, hiding behind the bushes and swinging from the trees, it's not safe to go outside. With them on the loose, there's no way for me to get home.

It's another case of those pesky choices jumping up and biting you in the ass.

From where I'm hiding I can't see anything, but I'm willing to bet that outside it looks like a scene from Night of the Living Dead. The wackos are out there screaming and yelling. You can hear windows shattering and car alarms blaring. In the parking lot, somebody's sports car just got its windshield smashed in. Somebody's SUV just got rolled over. You can hear metal crashing and scraping as it tumbles down the hill. The crazies are jumping up and down on roofs and hoods. Outside, they are climbing the walls.

I'm up on the fourth floor of the Central Administration Building, and for the time being the steel and Lexan doors are holding so I probably don't need to be hiding under the J-shaped desk of my cubicle. I probably should be calling Jamey to tell him that it's done, his mother is free, and to come and get me, instead of dialing up the local newspaper on my cell phone. I probably shouldn't have done ninety percent of the stupid things I've been doing for the last few months in a pathetic attempt to win Jamey's affection, but that's all water under the bridge at this point.

Right now I'm realizing how stupid I was to flip the switch from here at work. I could have unleashed the virus from any of a thousand places instead of here, and any of them would have meant I wouldn't be trapped under my desk, inside my office building, with a thousand maniacs outside. I guess maybe I didn't think things would get so out of hand so quickly. I thought I'd have time to survey my handiwork and sashay out the door hours before the shit ever hit the fan. I figured someone from Security would discover that all the locking systems had failed and that the screws would find a way to secure the buildings long before the psychos discovered that the doors were open.

And I thought that launching the virus from my manager's workstation would be a nice way to kill two birds with one stone.

Once the company sorts out this mess, she is so fired.

In the shadows beneath my desk, I'm whispering to the reporter who answered my call. I'm telling him how there are one thousand and seventy two retards and wackos out on the front lawn, beating up cars and tearing out the windows and how I think my boss is maybe responsible for it. I'm not too sure, I whisper, but she's been acting weird lately. She's been very hostile for the past few weeks. On more than one occasion, I tell him, I've heard her mumbling something about "teaching them a lesson they'll never forget."

All of this is improvised. I worry I've maybe gone too far, but I remind myself that I passed too far when I hit the Enter key on the keyboard of my boss' computer a couple hours ago.

"Her name is Annette," I whisper into my cell phone. "Annette Tabon." I take the time to spell it for him.

I whisper, "You might want to check on Mary Beth Grainger as well. The Grainger Industries heiress, yes, that's her."

The reporter thanks me profusely, and I can tell he's just arrived on the Lockwood campus by the shriek that precedes the abrupt termination of our call. It seems that the living dead have claimed him.

Housekeeping has been falling down on the job. Under my desk, two paper clips and a broken rubber band lie forgotten and dejected. An M&M has been crushed into the carpet. Stuck under the thick plastic chair mat I find the long lost back of an earring. A nickel and four pennies. Under my desk is the shrapnel of my days here at the Lock. Had I not released the virus and freed the chickens from the coop, this would have been my legacy. If I quit tomorrow, if tomorrow I am hit by a bus or today the crazies find me and drag me away, if I leave this place and never come back, this is what they'll have to remember me by.

Even though I'm feeling more than a little afraid right now, I'm also feeling powerful. In the days and weeks that will follow, after all the nut jobs have been rounded up and safely returned to the booby hatch, once all the investigations have been concluded and the blame has been properly assessed, the State will terminate its contract with the Mental Hygienics Corporation and once again take responsibility for its mentally ill and mentally retarded citizens. The great privatization experiment will end in disaster and once proud politicians will wipe egg from their faces. The media will be flooded with stories of unauthorized psychological and medical experiments conducted on Lockwood's helpless patients, and even their staff. Around the world, shareholders will suffer substantial losses and the Mental Hygienics Corporation will issue a public apology to the victims and their families. They will be hit by a class action law suit and will pay out millions in damages. The Mental Hygienics Corporation will file bankruptcy, and the doors of their corporate headquarters will close forever.

For once, the little guy will win.

But right now, I'm hiding under my desk, trapped on the fourth floor of a building surrounded by a thousand maniacs. Now that the fire alarm is going off, I'm thinking maybe my boss had it right on my last performance evaluation. Maybe, despite all my technical knowledge and problem solving abilities, in spite of all my ingenuity, maybe I really do consistently demonstrate a lack of planning and foresight.

I don't know if there's an actual fire in the building or if somehow the fruitcakes have found a way inside and pulled the alarm. Either way, the future looks pretty bleak at the moment. I keep reminding myself that I am here by choice and that it's the little decisions you make that kill you.

Somewhere in the cubicle farm, someone is groaning. If it's one of my coworkers or one of the crazies, I don't know. The shuffling, shambling sound that accompanies the moans tells me it's probably the latter. The sound is getting closer, and I'm hoping the zombie stumbling towards me isn't smart enough to look under the desk. I'm hoping the labyrinth of laminate and fabric will send him off in another direction.

I'm hoping he'll make the wrong choice.

I start praying to that dubious deity we atheists turn to when reason won't save our asses. The god that isn't there, I'm asking her to keep the living dead from finding me. And that dubious deity just laughs back at me. Take this, non-believer, she says as synthesized punk rock beeps out of the cell phone I've forgotten is in my hand. It's playing Jamey's song.

Jamey. The reason I did all this. Even with the George Romero wannabe shuffling back in my direction, my heart does a weird triple beat in my chest, you know the one you get when the guy you love takes you in his arms and tells you that's it. You're the one for him.

I quickly flip open the phone and press it to my ear.

When I don't say anything, Jamey says my name.

"Farah," he says, "Farah, are you there?"

My whispered "Yes" sounds like a serpent's hiss.

"Did you do it? Did you load the virus?"

With the balding, sweating, salivating creature standing in the opening that the designers of the cubicle farm euphemistically call a door, chest heaving, fingers playing an invisible piano to the tune of tardive dyskinesia, there's no longer any need to whisper.

"They're out," I say, but the oddly calm voice doesn't seem to belong to me.

The zombie reaches for me, and suddenly my life is flashing before my eyes. I'm retracing my steps, rethinking all the choices that brought me here. I'm turning left instead of right. I'm not letting the word of a stranger affect me. I'm not walking into the tattoo shop, and I'm not getting myself carved and molded and remade into someone I'm not just so I can make some guy love me.

This time through, I'm making all the right choices.

The last thing I hear before the zombie rips the cell phone out of my grip is Jamey's voice.

"That's my girl," Jamey says, and hearing his voice I know if given the choice to do this all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.