Saving Anna Karenina
Part 32
Start with Part 1, and read a short synopsis of the original book.
The other patients filtered into the dining room for breakfast. Anna had eaten, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “drunk” the cereal dessert. She still longed for an entree.
The wide-eyed woman walked directly to the table where Anna sat with the man who still couldn’t get his clothes from the nurses. She spoke with some agitation about a court hearing. He muttered indecipherably.
“How many meals have you eaten today — is this your second breakfast?” she asked him with a shrill voice.
A large grey-eyed boy collapsed in the chair next to her, his tray clattering onto the table.
“These doctors,” continued the shrill woman. “They give us Zyprexa, and we get fat! Look at us — all you guys talk about is food. Matyas, all you do is sleep!” she addressed the grey-eyed boy. “We’ve all gained at least fifteen pounds since we got here. I’m 160! That’s thirty pounds more than I was before I came here! I bet you wouldn’t even mind if you stayed in here forever as long as they fed you every hour. It’s terrible. How is it helping you to stay in here for weeks just to eat, sleep, and gain weight?”
“I’m eating two if anyone will give me their breakfast,” said the boy called Matyas, grinning.
Anna noticed grains of sleep residue in his red-rimmed eyes. On the side of his face was a pattern from sleeping on some textured fabric. Anna noticed his lips, so full and red. His accent wasn’t American. He had a shock of thick black hair, and olive skin. She stopped eating to watch him. He seemed so unaffected by the others. So free, and, despite his lumbering form, beautiful.
In the entryway, the servant was shouting at a woman in her sixties with neat blond hair and elegant bone structure.
“Don’t speak to me like that,” said the woman.
“I have to get out of this place,” shouted the wide-eyed woman. “I have to get out of here! It’s driving me insane!”
A boy with a mustache and longish hair came and sat at the table with them.
“Don’t challenge that seventy-two-hour thing,” he said.
“Seventy-two hours? I’ve been here for three weeks! I’ve been to court three times! The doctors lied in court about me, and Theo. Right?” The wide-eyed woman looked at Anna’s original dining companion — Theo, apparently. He nodded as he inhaled a second tray of breakfast, which had been handed over by a pregnant woman.
“Blair, you’re so dramatic,” said Matyas.
“The doctors said I was found in a snowbank with my suitcases on my head. That’s a lie! That’s dramatic. The truth, Matyas, is that I was getting into a cab in front of the Apple Store when this fucking cop arrested me. I was trying to share a cab with this guy to go to my hotel near Grand Central, and the cop told me it wasn’t legal to share cabs in New York City. And you know what I told him? I said, ‘Officer, I’m 39-years-old, and I don’t have someone to travel with back to my hotel in midtown. Do you know how tiring it gets to be a woman of my age and still have to do everything alone? I have no one to share my life with. I am just going to share a cab with this gentleman here who also happens to be going uptown.’ And then he arrested me! That fucking pig!”
Anna didn’t know what an apple store was, but the story almost made her weep. To be thirty-nine and unwanted by men was the subject of many of her nightmares.
“All I know, Blair, is that you can’t challenge the doctors to try and get out of this hospital,” said the mustached man, eating his cereal. “Because if you do, they rally all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and there ain’t no humpty dumpty, just your brain.”
“They pushed me off the wall,” said Blair. Then she turned her focus on Anna. “You checked yourself in, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “What do you mean?”
“You signed a paper saying you wanted to be hospitalized.” Blair narrowed her eyes and leaned towards her. Anna drew back. The boy with grey eyes wasn’t watching. He was eating like someone who wanted to stay out of trouble. Anna looked around for someone to rescue her.
“Most of the people in here didn’t have a choice about it,” said the mustached one. “Did you sign a piece of paper before you were brought here in the wheelchair, or not?”
Anna remembered signing something. “Yes,” she said, relieved.
“Yes you signed something?”
Anna nodded.
“I thought so,” said Blair, sighing. “The doctors leave people who checked themselves in alone. You’re lucky. They use the rest of us for experiments. Why else would they keep Matyas here for three months?”
“Cause I’m schizo,” he said, smiling.
“Oh, shut up,” said Blair.”You’re not schizo.”
Anna breathed deeply as she put this together. It explained the students and crowd of white coats around Dr. Lin. Three months was a long time.
This is part 32 of a serialized novella being published each Thursday. It is a speculative sequel to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina.
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31
I’m the author of Oh, the Places Where You’ll Have a Nervous Breakdown.
