Josh

They say there’s a time and a place for everything. A time. And a place.

The time was 1985. They said it was 2009. I knew it was 1985. Everyone said it was 2009. Eventually they convinced me it was 2009.

The place was a green, green glade in a green, green wood. Except it wasn’t. The place was a hospital bed in a secure room with triple-glazed, reinforced windows and green, green walls and staff that wore green, green tunics. It was all the wrong green green.

They asked me my name. I told them it was Josh. Joshua Xavier Horsbrecht. They said they’d check. They checked. They told me that Joshua Xavier Horsbrecht was declared dead in 1992. They told me that by now, Joshua Xavier Horsbrecht would be in his late thirties. Whereas I, I looked no more than sixteen, seventeen. So they didn’t believe I was Josh.

I told them I could prove I was Josh. I told them about Kyle, Josh’s brother. My brother. I told them about my parents, Josh’s parents. I told them about our friends, my friends, Kyle’s friends.

And that’s when things started to go really wrong.

First, I became A Suspect. They assumed that because I appeared to know plenty of things, know plenty of stuff, have plenty of information about Joshua Xavier Horsbrecht, that I must have had something to do with the fact that he was no longer alive. Despite the fact that he was. I was. Do you follow? Not that I’d killed him, of course, I looked too young to have even been born in 1992. But they thought I must know something.

Next, I became The Accused. And after a while, when there was no evidence to suggest that I’d ever been involved in anything remotely connected with anything homicidal, I was Patient 6024. That was a bummer. Having ridden out the storm of being The Accused, I had hoped that I could become something more like myself again.

Ok, Joshy, I thought to myself, this is a fix. They think you’re mad. Nuts. Barking. The proverbial box of frogs. For a while, I tried reasoning with them. Tried to engage them in conversation. I tried talking about things that showed them I wasn’t a lunatic. Philosophy. Shakespeare. The weather. Cricket. The rise of the moderates in El Salvador that had brought Duarte to power. Anything. They wrote things on pads. They consulted clipboards. They smiled their patronising smiles.

Right, I thought, if they think you’re mad – be mad. I took to staring out of the window for hours on end. I asked the kitchen for some jam with my breakfast. I put some of the jam into a clear plastic drinking cup. I stood by the window and I started catching flies in the cup. I thought about Renfield, the lunatic in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I thought about his great physical strength. I thought about his morbidly excitable nature. I remembered that his habit was to eat the creatures that he caught in the hope that he might obtain their life force. I washed out the clear plastic cup and threw the flies away. I wasn’t that mad. I wasn’t even mad.

I started muttering. Song lyrics, mostly, reciting them as a religious man might the Koran, or the Torah, giving them emphasis, giving them meaning. Mumbling them under my breath, just audible. To stand within the pleasure dome, decreed by Kubla Khan. That was a good one, had one or two of them fooled. Xanadu by Rush, from the Farewell to Kings album, if you’re interested.

Soon, though, I started to grow weary of who’s fooling whom. Stopped treating it as a game. Days became weeks. Became months. I started to wonder if I really was mad. I started asking questions. Started making demands. Let me see my parents. Let me see Kyle. Help me. Help me –