Alone in his room with lavender walls, a steel plate mirror, and a dormitory mattress with tightly folded sheets, a skeleton-thin forty-four-year-old Ronald Neyman remained barefoot in a Hudson Psychiatric Hospital gown barely long enough to cover his knobby knees. Tall enough to touch a basketball net flat-footed, he towered over throngs of manic-depressives, epileptics, schizophrenics, and irrational subjects pacing the hall near his room. His pallid face gave stark contrast to the branch of purple spider veins beneath his neckline. Day or night, he wore the same expression, void of love or hate or any emotion along the continuum between the two. He ate. He slept. He played piano. Most days, he kept to himself, a prisoner in his own mind. Indifferent. Distant. And frequently distracted by patterns in nature like the shape of a butterfly’s wing or the geometric structure of frost crystals on a frozen windowpane. Most nights, he wore the same inoperable headphones with a three-inch stub of split audio cable dangling from the right-side speaker. Devoid of any music source except the one he derived in his head, he could recite every note from his mental catalogue of classic symphonies.

He buffed a broken piece of charcoal pencil on a sketch pad portrait of a naked woman engulfed in flames. He used his thumb to blend the darker shades and accentuate the distressed facial features of a woman afraid of her own shadow. The same woman who’d misjudged his motivations and abandoned him to a life of psychiatric evaluations by a team of doctors intellectually ill-equipped to understand his motivation.

He ripped the page from the pad of anatomical sketches and placed it in a box filled with similar drawings, each depicting a woman with tortured eyes, projecting her emotions through a two-dimensional space.

He ventured into the common area of the brightly lit isolation ward occupied by a cadre of listless residents wearing the same institutional garb reserved for the involuntarily confined: socks, pajama pants with sneakers, and white wristbands with their name and age. A few tortured souls paced aimlessly back and forth, humming or moaning, with pronounced facial tics, while others persisted in their own cone of silence, tethered to intravenous lines dripping clear fluid from rolling IV stands.

“Ten minutes!” Ronald Neyman heard the duty nurse decree, her raspy voice muted by his headphone pads.

He gazed out a window at the dark skyline outside the psychiatric hospital, observing an asteroid field of snowflakes and their complex arrangement of fractal patterns dotting the state-run property situated on a hill encompassed by a high brick wall topped with razor wire. A sweeping driveway intersected a portion of the visitor’s parking lot and the guard kiosk stationed behind an imposing gate, sequestered miles from the nearest highway or any semblance of civilization.

From his peripheral vision, he saw the nurse in a starched white uniform circling the foosball table which didn’t have a ball—near the Ping-Pong table without a net—her rolling medicine cart stocked with assorted pills and antipsychotic medications in liquid form. He palmed the charcoal pencil stub in his hand and computed a series of prime numbers in his head, ignoring the enemy encroaching on his personal space. 3187, 3191, 3203, 3209, 3217…

“Hand it over,” the nurse insisted in a scratchy, smoker’s voice, her petite frame obstructed by the pushcart.

Ronald Neyman slipped the headphones down. He gazed at the nurse with a blank expression.

“You heard me,” the nurse replied, “I don’t have time for your games tonight.” She produced a stun gun from her waistband. The instantly recognizable weapon kept most passive aggressors in check while she reserved the imminent threat of incapacitation for the dangerous few with a history of violent behavior. “Don’t make me use it,” she said bluntly, brandishing the electroshock device at her waist like a Dodge City gunslinger in a bad spaghetti western.

Ronald Neyman ignored the unsolicited distraction and returned his gaze to the wintery scene outside the window.

“The pencil, Mr. Neyman. I won’t ask you again.”

Ronald Neyman opened his fist to relinquish the contraband and recited prime numbers out loud. “3499, 3511, 3517, 3527…”

The nurse confiscated the charcoal pencil stub, stuffing it in her uniform pocket. “Where did you get this?”

Ronald Neyman tapped his fingernail on the window and continued with the prime number sequence.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Counting snowflakes.”

“Which ones?”

Ronald Neyman stopped tapping and wiped his hand on the glass. “All of them.”

The nurse pointed to his headphones and snapped her fingers. “Playtime’s over.”

Ronald Neyman turned away from the window. “Dr. Jenkins said I could have these.”

The nurse took two paper cups from her cart: one with water and one with pills. “Fine. But you will take your meds.”

“They hurt my head.”

“Not my problem.” The nurse grasped the radio from her belt to call for assistance. “I don’t have time for your antics today, Ronald. You can take your meds from me, or you can take them through the needle when Nurse Darrell gets here.”

Ronald Neyman turned to face the window. He slipped the headphones back over his ears to mute the useless conversation and the sound of angry footsteps approaching.

* * *

Ronald Neyman returned to his room and focused on a red crayon likeness of himself with arms longer than his legs, holding a woman’s decapitated head. It had raven black hair and hollow eyes. An inscription at the bottom of the paper read Save Faith.

He exchanged the brown crayon for a nub of red crayon he’d smuggled in his rectum from the arts and crafts room. He blended the colors to add texture, rubbing what was left of the brown wax to enhance the lifelike appearance.

When a buzzer sounded, he palmed the red crayon before Darrell Jordan, a male nurse with a James Harden beard and defensive lineman stature, entered with a medicine cart on wheels, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A keychain swung from his belt which was also equipped with a Motorola radio and a can of pepper spray.

Ronald Neyman stepped aside to accommodate the imposing nurse and the rolling pharmacy of antipsychotic pills in paper cups, each labeled with a patient name.

“You’re a sick motherfucker,” Darrell spoke from his gut reaction to Neyman’s twisted graffiti sketched in crayon. “The crayons don’t belong to you. If Dr. Jenkins finds out, he’ll strap you to the table and shock you back to the future.” He picked a sandwich baggie off the mattress and sniffed it a foot away to confirm what he already suspected. Then he dropped it on Ronald’s uneaten food tray between a scoop of minced meat with instant mashed potatoes and a toasted breadstick carved in the shape of a spoon. “You think you’re smarter than me?”

Ronald Neyman balled the red crayon in his fist and started humming. He contemplated the drawing on the wall, recalling details of the face photocopied in his eidetic memory.

“Give up the crayon.”

“I’m not finished.”

Darrell produced a syringe loaded with a sedating cocktail of medications mixed from equal parts Benadryl, Haldol, and Ativan. Cutaneous veins rippled on his dark forearm. “Like hell you’re not. Give me the fucking crayon, or I’m gunna B-52 your ass!”

Ronald Neyman opened his hand with his fingers unfurled like dead spider legs to reveal the contraband. “I can’t stay here.”

Darrell snatched the crayon and dropped it in his shirt pocket. “You’re sure as hell not coming home with me.” He exchanged the syringe for the open pill container with Ronald’s first name and last initial scrawled with black marker. He dumped the pills in Neyman’s open palm. “Hurry up.”

Ronald Neyman lifted the pills toward his mouth and turned his head to cough hard enough to distract the male nurse’s attention as he chocked the cart wheels with the front of his size fourteen foot.

“Swallow!” Darrell demanded. He moved the obstructed cart to get closer and inadvertently spilled the tray of uneaten minced meat and mashed potatoes. Splattered food dotted his shoes and pants near his ankles.

“You clumsy motherfucker!” Darrell stepped backward and removed the radio on his belt. “I need a mop in room five,” he shouted at the microphone with his finger on the talk button. He flicked a spot of mashed potato off his shirt and patted his empty breast pocket. He holstered the radio and shoved Neyman into the wall. “Where’s the crayon?”

Ronald Neyman kept his arms at his sides, swiftly weaving nervous fingers.

Darrell slapped the side of his head. “Where’s the fucking crayon you stole out of my pocket?”

Ronald Neyman remained steadfast, profoundly withdrawn and completely preoccupied in his own mind. His sullen expression conveyed an emotional flatness.

Darrell scanned the room and stepped over spilled food to retrieve the red crayon stub from the floor. He rolled the cart away, crunching a piece of breadstick under a wobbly caster wheel. “You pull this crap one more time, and you’ll spend a week in the straight jacket sucking your food through a straw.”

Ronald Neyman waited for the male nurse to leave. Then he opened his mouth and spit two Clozapine tablets in his hand.