July 2, 2025
Not Alone
I knock on the peeling red door again, silently praying that she comes to the door this time, and I don’t have to go inside to retrieve her. I’ve never been inside her home, but from the stories I’ve heard, I don’t want to be. Of course, it’s possible the stories are exaggerated. The grass outside is slightly overgrown, the underpinning has some holes from animals or careless weed trimming, and the railing on the porch is beginning to rot. Everything looks like what you’d expect in this poor neighborhood. As I knock one last time before entering, roaches, disturbed from their slumber, begin emerging from the crack above the door, and I know the stories are true.
I push the door open, which is no small feat as she has apparently attempted to barricade it with overfilled black trash bags. As I force my way in some of the bags fall over, releasing their vile contents onto the floor and a rotten smell into the air. I step over food containers and papers smeared with red and brown substances and call out. “Carol, are you here?” I hear a shrill scream, “Go away!” I carefully weave my way through the piles of stacked boxes and trash, towards the sound of her voice.
As I make my way down the short hall, walking on a carpet of discarded clothing, I hear her voice, softer now, but more frantic. “I won’t go back; they can’t make me. I’m not crazy, they’re crazy. Not crazy, not crazy.”
I knock on the closed door at the end of the hallway. “Carol, it’s Ron. From Skyland Trails. You remember? Your family’s worried; you can’t just leave like that. We have to go back, okay?” I met Carol nearly a decade earlier on my first day at Skyland. She was one of the first patients, beginning outpatient treatments as a teenager and eventually requiring full-time care. Despite our best efforts, she remained convinced that beings from other planets were trying to communicate with her through her dreams and sometimes, when they had an urgent message, by beaming words directly into her brain. She had been briefly released a few times over the years, but due to her disordered thinking and delusions, she was never able to maintain for long. She was a sweet girl, but her mind had been damaged beyond repair, and now it was my job to keep her safe.
I slowly open the door at the end of the hallway. The room is mostly dark, with foil covering the windows. I can barely see Carol, still dressed in her hospital gown and robe, standing at the end of a bare soiled mattress, her feet surrounded by disassembled electronics. As she looks at me, recognition flashes in her bright blue eyes, joining the fear, not replacing it. The small bits of sunlight coming into the room through gaps in the foil shine on her hair, creating the illusion of an intense red halo around her head.
After a momentary pause where we both simply stare at each other deciding on our next moves, she seems to decide to accept my presence. “I can’t go back yet. If I finish this, I can finally prove it! They showed me how to talk to them!”
I decide to try to play into her fantasy as much as I can without lying to her, hoping that will coax her to return with me, where she can get the care she deserves away from this foul place. “Carol, the doctors will want to hear about this. Let’s go tell them.”
Even in her current state, she isn’t one to be fooled easily. She shakes her head, backing away from me, repeating her muttering. “Won’t go, not crazy, not crazy!” I approach her slowly, careful not to trip over the wires and circuits littering the stained carpet surrounding her. “No, please, you don’t understand!”
“I do Carol, I promise. I understand more than anyone in this world.” As soon as she is within arm’s length, I firmly pull her into a hug, holding my breath against the rancid smells emanating from her flesh, and after a moment she relaxes slightly in my arms. I remove the hypodermic needle from my pocket, and quickly inject its contents into her arm. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this Carol, but we have to take you back to where you’ll be safe,” I whisper into her ear, catching her small frame as she collapses under the weight of the drugs.
I carry her gently out of the house, taking care that our combined weight doesn’t collapse the most rotten boards on the porch, and place her on a stretcher in the back of the van. I tenderly attach the restraints and knock on the plexiglass panel that separates us from the driver, indicating we’re ready to depart.
I sit next to her throughout the trip, holding her hand and whispering words of peace and encouragement, hoping that some part of her subconscious will be comforted. Shortly before we arrive back at the facility, she awakens and begins murmuring frantically. “Shh, it’s okay Carol. You’re safe now. You’re not alone.”
“I’ll never be safe,” she murmurs, still shaking her head, her eyes unopened. “I’m never alone. They’ll never leave me alone. I hear them, all the time now, whispering. Always whispering. They won’t let me sleep.”
“Carol, no one is talking to you. It’s all in your head.”
She looks at me, a clarity in her eyes that I’d never seen before and shakes her head emphatically. “It’s not. I remember. I remember everything. They came when I was a girl, camping in the backyard. They put me in a chair, there were no straps, but I couldn’t move. They put a helmet on me, lights flashed everywhere. I couldn’t see anyone, just tiny glimpses of movement to the sides and rustling behind me, but I felt them all around me. Then the pain, excruciating pain like someone was drilling inside my brain. It hurt so much!”
Tears stream down the sides of her face, pooling in her ears, but she never breaks my gaze. The pain in her voice is so viscous that I feel it is drowning me, and for a moment I can’t breathe. For the first time I think I can understand how excruciating and terrifying her experience must have been. I want to leave, I don’t want to hear this, I can’t handle this. But she needs to finally tell someone everything, and it’s fitting that I am the one she’s chosen to share this burden with, so I look into her eyes, as lovingly as I can, and listen to her story.
“I screamed for my daddy, but no sound came out. I prayed to God to protect me, and when I finally understood no one was coming to save me, I begged my own mind to let me pass out. And when the pain got even more intense I begged for death, anything to stop the pain. I’ve wanted to die every day since; most things are so jumbled in my brain most of the time, but that feeling, that hope, never goes away.”
I pull my gaze away from her glistening blue eyes for a moment, staring at the ceiling of the van, trying to wrestle back my own tears which are threatening to overcome me. After a moment spent fighting to maintain composure, I remind myself that this is about her feelings, not mine, and I force myself to meet her gaze once again. “What’s the next thing you remember Carol?” I ask, striving to keep the emotion out of my voice and expression.
“They put me back before my mom woke up, and everyone told me it was a dream, but I know. I know what they did to me.” She throws her head back, as much as her restraints will allow, and wails, “Haven’t they done enough? Why won’t they just leave me alone!”
I don’t try to argue with the events as she remembers them, but one thing doesn’t make sense to me and now, when she’s lucid for the first time in years, may be my only chance to get the answer to a question I have wanted to ask so many of my charges. “If you hate them so much, why were you trying so hard to communicate with them?”
“To make them stop! Make them fix whatever they did! Or, if they can’t, or won’t, to at least prove to you, to the doctors,” she spits the last word out vehemently, “that I’m not crazy. So I can go home, have a normal life.”
I know a normal life will never be an option for her; we had tried everything imaginable to repair her damaged mind with no success, so I try to get her to focus on the good things she still has. Her parents, who visit twice a week, more than anyone else’s family! Her favorite foods, the nonsensical comedy movies that she so enjoys, sunrises, sunsets. All the beauty of this planet that she still has to live for.
With every reminder of the good in her life, more tears fall from her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. None of that matters, don’t you see? While they’re here, in my head, I can never really live. I don’t want to spend years stuck in that place. I want to live. Or if I can’t, if I can’t have a real life, then I just want it to finally be over.”
I freeze for a moment, shocked by her words and the meaning behind them, before composing myself and speaking consolingly once more. “You’re just upset; you don’t mean that.”
“I do. Look at me. I’m me, for now. I don’t know how long it will last, so please listen to me. I know what happened, and I know what I hear all the time, and I know it will never stop. I know even if they left me alone, I’m too broken to ever be who I might have been if they hadn’t taken me. Please Ron, I’m begging you, please help me.”
I stare at the sky-blue carpet covering the floor of the van, considering her words for several minutes, feeling her eyes on me while she silently begs for my help. The thought of ending a life fills me with dread. It’s not the idea of getting caught; I know others in my position who have granted this request. I’ve even helped fake the records when necessary to keep families from asking too many questions. Not that many ask questions; most seem relieved when they are informed their relative in our care has passed on. I like to tell myself it’s because they’re comforted that their loved one has finally found peace in death that eluded them in life, but I know in reality most are just relieved to have the burden of their broken family member lifted.
I have never judged the others who have assisted our charges in finding a peaceful end to their tragic stories, but until this moment I never truly understood how painful of a decision it was. Grant the request and end a life or refuse and leave someone in unimaginable pain. But with all the horrible things I’ve done in my long life, and there are many, I’ve never gone so far as to purposefully end a life myself. It would be the ultimate failure of my purpose in this world. My job is to keep my charges safe, happy, and comfortable, but how can I possibly protect her from her own broken mind other than granting her request? Is it my own pride, my refusal to accept that I can’t fix her, can’t grant her peace any other way, that makes the idea so repulsive to me? To help her end things, I must first admit that I have failed, in so many ways. But this moment shouldn’t be about me, it’s about her, and she’s right, her mind is broken beyond repair. She will never find peace in this life. She must see the surrender in my eyes, because for the first time since I’ve known her, a look of tranquility settles on her face, and the overwhelming doubt and panic depart as I know I’ve made the right decision.
I pull another needle out of the kit near my feet, much larger than the last, and gently pierce her skin. “This won’t hurt at all,” I promise her. “Just a little stick, and then you’ll go to sleep.”
“And the voices will stop,” she breathes, a small smile lighting up her face.
“Yes, Carol, the voices will stop.”
I hold her hand long after her pulse has stopped, until the van jerks to a halt and Jack, as he’s called here, opens the door, bathing us in sunlight. He looks on the scene knowingly, mercifully not asking the questions I’m not sure I could bring myself to answer.
“You can’t beat yourself up over it,” he says consolingly. “We had no way of knowing when we first found them just how fragile human minds are.”
“Not knowing the consequences of our actions isn’t an excuse for them and all the damage they’ve caused.”
“No, it’s not. We can’t change our mistakes, not even we have that ability, we can only learn from them, resolve to be better, and try to minimize the suffering we caused. We’ve abandoned our home to be here, among them, trying to keep them safe, comfortable, happy. We’re doing everything in our power for them.”
Jack always says we, never pointing out that I was the one who suggested the experiments and continuously fought to take them farther and learn as much as we could. I chose the subjects based on what I know now was at best an elementary understanding of human nature and fortitude. All he did was support me and push the buttons. I shake my head slowly, recognizing my own words he’s repeating back to me, the logic behind the treatment homes on Earth, but unable in this moment to believe the words I once spoke. “What we do, it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. I should have told her the truth; maybe if she knew we knew she wasn’t crazy, it would have helped her.” I see the flaws in my words as they exit my mouth, and Jack does too. Since coming to this world, for reasons we don’t yet understand, we have lost our ability to communicate telepathically. However, in moments like this, I wonder if despite what he claims Jack hasn’t retained at least some of that ability, as his words seem to echo my thoughts.
“You know that wouldn’t have worked. Even if she knew what happened in the past was true, she would never have believed the voices she was still hearing weren’t caused by us as well. She would have hated us, not just for what we did, but for what she would have believed we were still doing. And the attention she would have attracted would at best have had even more people treating her like she was crazy and at worst endangered our mission, all our patients, all the homes we’ve established, not to mention all of us who came here, Hell, with the way this species is, if she attracted the attention of the wrong people, it could have endangered all our families back home, our entire civilization. I know we’re never going to see them again, but it’s still our duty to protect them too.”
“I know, you’re right, but there has to be something we can do, some way we can truly help them, doesn’t there?”
“We can’t fix what we broke; we can only try to minimize the pain we’ve caused.” He places a hand on my knee, attempting to console me as he has so many times before, and for a moment he and I are as still as Carol, each deep in our thoughts and ravaged by our guilt. “I’ll call the coroner for you, and her family. Remember, if you ever need to talk, I’m always here. You’re not alone.”
After he walks away, I slowly release Carol’s hand, placing it on her chest, and gently graze her forehead with my lips. I whisper a silent prayer to the invisible being so many of my charges believe in before leaving her in the van outside Skyland Trails. Inside my loyal brethren and the accidental victims of my curiosity and hubris await, and I return to them, prepared to recommence my endless search for atonement.