“What’s the stop?”

“To see Char. Nobody’s visited her yet.”

My face flushes with shame. She called me a few days after she went into the hospital and started regaling me with paranoid rants about whispering widows in spruce trees and gods in her instant mashed potatoes. After ten minutes of that, I told myself that the call dropped. But it didn’t. After that, I dodged her daily dozen calls for a week, until I finally called the hospital and told them to tell her my phone was broken so she’d stop.

“It’s your birthday and all, but I think we should give that poor soul a dose of love, wha?” Gimp smiles.

The lockdown psych ward at the Regional is probably better than the old Butterscotch Palace, but not by much. The narrow mint-green corridors begin and end with hulking doors that require three different security codes before they heave open with a shrill alarm. The soundscape arches from claustrophobic silence to haunted howls to unbridled laughter of the unsettlingly maniacal variety, as bodies are shuffled in and out of sight. It smells like Band-Aids and feels like limbo. Not quite hell, but you can see it from here.

It’s the tail end of visiting hours. The orderly ushers us down the hall as a chaotic parade passes by. A young man goose steps along, yelling at the water fountain. An older woman tells me that she loves my hair, asks if I have a razor. The hospital PA crackles to life in the name of a code yellow, and a half-dozen newly electrified staff dart to the nearest grey leviathan door.

In the corner of the common room, Char is belting out an off-key version of “Hotel California” to a six-foot-tall ficus plant. She thinks it talks back to her and tells her to keep singing, which is certainly further proof of madness. Any plant in its right rhizome can tell that she’s as tone-deaf as a telephone pole.

Despite being jacked full of every psychosis-busting drug known to modern psychopharmacology for a solid month, Char is still out of her mind. But she’s elated to see us. I feel like I’m going to be sick, as a dizzying burst of blue-violet ribbons spring from her ears, bookending the alternating flashes of olive green and lemon pie–yellow emanating from the top of her head.

Gimp sees that I’m wobbly and white. He wraps his arm around my waist, and I relax a little, knowing that he’ll catch me with his good arm if I drop.

“My saviours!” Char gasps as she dashes toward us with open arms. “I knew you guys would come. See that one?” she says, pointing to the nurse in the locked Plexiglas vestibule. “She has the papers you need to sign. I’m not sure who has the papers to get Horatio out. The janitor, maybe.”

Horatio is the ficus plant. He, too, is being held against his will. The ignorant “sheeple” here only think he is a plant, but he is not. He is a philosopher king, and once he is exposed to fresh air, mankind will have a great “epissamee.”