The Last of the Mentally Ill

By Joseph Rauch

Never Let Me Go and Brave New World meet Turtles All the Way Down in a near future where a teen with mental illness becomes the center of seismic change.

 

In a near-future New York, Chester Owens - a tall, lumbering sixteen-year-old with severe social anxiety - clings to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Rauch
• Release date: Feb 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985001716

Book preview

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Joseph Rauch

Jacket copyright © 2022 by Coral Jade

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [e-mail]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

First Edition: January 2022

Bittar Publishing, New York, NY

515 West 18th Street

New York, NY 10011

Book interior design by Coral Jade

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Rauch, Joseph, author.

Title: The last of the mentally ill / Joseph Rauch.

Description: New York, NY: Bittar Publishing, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN: 2021919781 | ISBN: 979-8-9850017-0-9 (paperback) |

979-8-9850017-1-6 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH Alternative schools—Fiction. | Mentally ill—Fiction. | Mental health--Fiction. | Human experimentation in medicine—Fiction. | Genetic engineering—Fiction. | African American teenagers—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Dystopian | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Mental Illness | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Diversity & Multicultural | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Family / Orphans & Foster Homes | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / School & Education / General

Classification: LCC PS3618.A91 L37 2022 | DDC 813.6—dc23

I Am The Walrus

Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Copyright © 1967 Sony Music Publishing LLC

Copyright Renewed

All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219

International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

For anyone who has struggled with mental

illness and questioned their worth

chapter 1

A Day in the Life of

Chester Owens

Chester was having the meat grinder dream again. Steel bracelets strapped his body against a conveyor belt that moved slowly toward a mouth of monstrous machines. The factory was dark. Fluorescent lights flickered intermittently to reveal his captor, the mysterious blonde woman who wore floral dresses.

At this point, he had experienced the vision so many times that his mind had reached a strange place at the interstice of reality and lucidity. There were degrees of agency that seemed to depend entirely on chance. Sometimes he was able to move against the steel bracelets. Other nights he saw flashes of his room, as if a part of his consciousness had escaped the nightmare.

The worst version was when he was completely immobile. Like a sentient crash test dummy, he could only stare forward and wait for the impact.

There was one instance when he had managed to speak with the blonde woman. Little would come out, though. All he had uttered was, Why? She had not answered this question.

She had always spoken, however. Usually it was the same line: Now you’ll return to meat.

Even before the dream was over, Chester knew why he was having it. The blonde woman would be visiting today. Her inspection was always on the first Monday of the month.

Chester had not spoken to her, but he understood that she wielded a great deal of power over the residents of Greendale. Whenever she left, something changed, no matter how small. Occasionally she would leave with one of his classmates in tow, flanked by a row of beefy security guards. More often it was that she fired one of the staffers. Other times, construction began the day after she departed.

The dream ended as it often did: his body reached the blades, and he awoke to a tingling sensation. Light ebbed beneath the curtains that obscured his bedroom windows. The glow was usually the first external stimulus his mind registered.

Chester sighed and began the morning section of his daily routine. It started with urination, something he knew was far from idiosyncratic but still played an important part in the rhythm of the day. As he filled the bowl, the automatic toilet buzzed and whirred. Soon it would analyze the nutrients in his urine and confirm he had been taking his medication at the prescribed dosage. An automated report would be sent to the staff. The head psychiatrist, Janet, had not mentioned anything about Chester’s diet, so he assumed it was acceptable.

Chester’s alarm clock sounded. He had configured it to play random tracks in a customized Beatles playlist. Today it was A Day in the Life. He had tried to program his alarm clock so the song would begin in the middle section where Paul McCartney sang about waking up. He had yet to succeed, though, and he did not think it was worth asking a staffer for help. So the song began as it usually did: with lyrics about a man dying in a car crash. Chester did not mind the morbidity. Following a gory nightmare, it almost felt appropriate.

For a few minutes he ruminated on the parting words from the woman in the floral dress. Originally, he had interpreted the meat detail literally and wondered if perhaps Greendale was some sort of human farm. After dismissing that notion as absurd, he considered telling Janet about the nightmares. She might offer an insight. At the least she would be happy to see him open up and share something instead of the usual taciturn tactics.

Next was clothing. His wardrobe consisted of outfits that would draw the least amount of attention and judgment. He used to consider stocking up on duplicates of his favorite combination: blue jeans, a black t-shirt, white socks and grey sneakers. Unfortunately, he had realized that many people teased those who dressed the same way every day, and he did not want any comments. To belie the anxiety while satisfying his desire for simplicity, he varied the colors of his jeans and shirts but only selected items from the same brand.

No one was the same size as him, so he did not need to worry about rushing to the rack. He had theorized that the woman who ran the thrift shop, a shared closet for residents, had scavenged clothing specifically for him. Purportedly, every article was donated from the outside world. Somewhere on the planet, outside the walls and fences of Greendale, there were other men who bumped their heads on the arches of doors and planked until they could find a bed big enough to contain their legs.

After the recent passage of his sixteenth birthday, Chester had measured his height at six feet and seven inches. Chester was not only tall, though. His shoe size was fifteen, double extra-large shirts fit him snugly and his measurements placed him in vague categories not displayed in the thrift shop catalogue. He ran and lifted weights daily, a commitment that had pressed his flesh even more tightly against the custom-crafted cloth.

Once he finished dressing, Chester drank a bit of orange juice and used it to swallow his prescribed daily morning pill, sixty milligrams of duloxetine. A selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, the drug was primarily for helping Chester sleep. Janet had recommended twenty milligrams at around age fourteen, when he started struggling to fall asleep and stay asleep for roughly eight hours. As his symptoms worsened during puberty, she upped the dosage to forty milligrams, then sixty. For almost a year, Chester had been content with that level. It seemed like his sleep symptoms were gradually improving.

Chester placed the orange juice carton back in his stout refrigerator. The only other items it contained were a Brita pitcher and large bottle of plain-flavored oat milk. In his studio apartment there was a bathroom, kitchen sink and counter, but no appliances for cooking, nothing that could birth flame and pain. There was also no metal cutlery or glassware. All he had for eating was a set of plastic plates and cups, as well as some utensils composed of a biodegradable, bamboo-based material.

The food was downstairs in the dining hall. Chester dreaded his trips to that part of the facility — the small talk, the encounters with people who had made comments about him or bullied him. He had taken a cooking class and wished he could make use of his skills. All he wanted was to maximize the time he spent alone or with his only friend, Felix.

Chester reflexively headed for his dream journal, but he swerved as he recalled that the dream had been a repeat, not worth documenting. Before heading down for breakfast, Chester stretched and meditated. He had learned some yoga poses by watching classes that practiced out on the central field during lunch. Because his stress tended to manifest as tension in his chest, he began by swinging his arms behind his back and arching forward.

Chester had grown accustomed to the logistically inconvenient aspects of his body. The simple fact was that humans designed objects and buildings for the majority of people who were much smaller than him. What he abhorred, however, was how his ponderous presence made it difficult to achieve the level of social invisibility he preferred. People constantly gawked at him or made asinine jokes about his height. Mostly it was the revolving door of Greendale employees. The novelty of his frame had worn off on his classmates, but there was always a new operations worker or chef who demonstrated the boundless nature of unoriginality. How’s the weather up there? was his least favorite by far.

After grabbing his tote bag and closing the door to his quarters, he pushed the door handle down to confirm it had automatically locked. He assumed the maintenance staff could access his apartment, but the lock at least seemed to keep out other students. More importantly, the safety check was part of his sacred routine, the order of which could not be violated unless absolutely necessary.

To minimize awkward and unnecessary interactions, Chester avoided the elevator. Despite being on the fifteenth floor of his tower, he did not mind the descent, and he relished the climb as another opportunity to maintain his physique. There were always fewer people on the stairs, none on a lucky day.

As he lumbered down the steps, he paused briefly near the flat portions of the stairwell and looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the side of the building. He caught glimpses of the horizon, mountains so distant and hazy a child could have smudged them into existence with the tip of a grey crayon. He wondered if people lived there and had spotted the Greendale towers on a clear day. Beyond the vanishing point, there was the rest of civilization, the portion of humanity who lived as those he had only seen on television.

Chester had not breathed outside the walls of Greendale, at least not at an age he could remember. Like the other residents, his teachers and therapists told him he was born outside the facility, abandoned by his parents and taken in by the staff. The story did not seem like a complete lie, but Chester doubted its veracity.

There was no point in pressing the staff for more information. Most people did not know anything. Those who did would not tell for fear of losing their employment.

Nonetheless, Chester had induced a fair amount about his situation. The vast majority of children who grew up in Greendale had a diagnosable mental illness that ranged in severity but generally did not inhibit daily functioning. Those who suffered some sort of breakdown or violent incident disappeared, supposedly transferred to another facility.

Greendale was one of several educational institutions in a network. Chester had not heard the name of this umbrella organization, and he did not know exactly how many schools there were. He was, however, certain about the existence of a pre-college facility. Greendale employees openly discussed aspects of this branch, including the blonde woman’s main office there. The teachers said he would move to the pre-college campus for his junior and senior years of high school, a prospect that filled him with dread. It had been hard to establish even the small amount of mental and emotional comfort he enjoyed at Greendale.

The staff constantly collected data on everyone. There was the urine and stool analysis, mental health questionnaires that assessed progress, as well as seasonal blood tests and brain scans. After age six, administrators asked Chester to stand in one of two lines while he waited to be examined. Eventually he realized he was in the line for students who had not made significant progress in coping with their mental illnesses. Some students moved from one line to the other. Chester had been in the no progress line for nearly a decade.

The line for food was less depressing. Chester waited for granola, fruit and yogurt, which was much faster than scrambled eggs and bagels. New chefs cracked jokes about how he should take a double serving. His indifferent response usually deterred them from a repeat performance.

Chester was not rude, though. He had learned the value of manners and making eye contact. He forced smiles when he felt he had to. Because he was minimal with his speech, thank you was one of the only phrases many of the employees ever heard him utter.

He took a seat at the far corner of the room where he could see everything, and no one could walk behind him without first passing through his periphery. A genuine smile spread across his face as he anticipated Felix’s arrival.

Two employees were eating nearby, a man and a woman.

Hey, is that Waterson girl gone? asked the man. I didn’t see her when I was sweeping up near the infirmary.

Yeah, didn’t you hear? replied the woman. She tried to stab one of the nurses with a needle.

Woah! exclaimed the janitor, revealing a bit of the scrambled eggs that had been further scrambled in his mouth. What was her deal anyway?

The woman shrugged and said, The shrinks never tell me. I just help them cart people away when they can’t handle it anymore. I think I know why, though.

Why? asked the janitor, his pitch rising in anticipation.

The security guard shifted her eyes around. Don’t make me say it, she whispered, although her commitment to secrecy seemed facetious.

Oh, come on, urged the janitor.

She ceremoniously summoned her smartphone and began tapping. Chester assumed she was going to show a text to the janitor. Instead the chorus of Borderline by Madonna played for a few seconds. A suppressed laughter traveled to Chester’s ears, and he immediately understood the joke.

You’re terrible, honey, and I fucking love it! proclaimed the janitor.

Chester averted his eyes and pretended he had been mixing his granola into his yogurt. His cheeks tightened, and he worried he was about to smile — even laugh — and reveal he had been eavesdropping. After mentally chastising himself for nearly laughing at something so offensive, he tried to analyze the situation beyond himself. The employees were being horribly insensitive. Chester maintained that point. On the other hand, Greendale had instilled him with a complex sense of empathy. There was a whole class on it, after all. It must be difficult, he thought, to care for people with severe mental illnesses. The female security guard was one of the few people who had survived years of high turnover, and Chester could remember when she was patient and kind. Her empathy had aged and fatigued, strained by the undiscerning symptoms of Greendale’s violent minority.

Felix arrived, accompanied by a nurse. He paced along the perimeter of the dining hall, slapped his tray down on the table and plopped into a chair. The chair rocked and rattled for a moment, and Felix savored the sensation as if he were on an amusement park ride. He savored everything he could, and there was hardly a minute when he was not having fun.

Felix flung his hand in the air and waved to Chester as if they were far apart.

Morning, Chester, he shouted.

Morning, Felix, said Chester.

The nurse made eye contact with Chester, and they nodded to each other, nearly in unison. The understanding was that Chester supervised Felix during meal times, allowing the nurse a reprieve for breaks or other tasks.

Non-verbal communication was one of the few social standards Chester approved of. One of his teachers said most communication was non-verbal. This idea made Chester feel better about his lack of enthusiasm for speaking. It was possible that what mental health professionals had pathologized was simply a preference for minimalism.

His few attempts at leveraging verbal communication had been frustrating and fruitless. He felt, however, that there was no choice but to speak. Despite its mantra of acceptance for everyone and celebration of introversion, most Greendale classes factored participation into final grades.

Chester abhorred that word: participation. Its true meaning did not specify speech, but in the classroom it was a synonym for voicing opinions and shouting answers. Even the most thoughtless comments would have a net positive effect on grades.

A few weeks ago Chester had considered participating when he realized the teacher had made a mistake. But then his study of empathy kicked in. If he corrected the teacher in front of the class, the teacher might feel humiliated. Chester decided to converse privately with the teacher after class so he could claim credit without risking an embarrassing scene. Instead of responding with appreciation, the teacher asked why Chester had not raised the issue during the lecture.

No one was socially adept to the point of absolution, and there were so many paradoxes and logical fallacies in social norms. People greeted each other by asking how they were doing, but most of the time they did not want to know or hear an answer that was longer than two seconds. Non-verbal communication was more effective and efficient for greeting, yet people insisted on phrases that were either superfluous, nonsensical or rhetorical. People pressured each other into speaking candidly and then complained or criticized when the truth was hard to stomach. There were commands framed as questions, questions that were actually statements and statements that stated nothing. Metaphors murdered birds to preach productivity. There were so many cherished idioms that, to Chester, seemed idiotic and insipid.

Chester loved his time with Felix because he could truly be himself. There was no expectation to perform. When they were together, it was like teleporting to a version of the world that made sense.

Felix surveyed the bits of granola and fruit that had bounced out of his bowl and onto the outskirts of his tray. He pinched each piece with his hands and tossed them into his mouth. Far from the most dexterous person, many of his pinches missed or failed to grasp the food long enough to feed himself. The scene reminded Chester of the claw machine he had seen in movies. He imagined that only Felix would be able to enjoy something so repetitive and frustrating.

Ball later? asked Felix.

Yeah, Chester replied in between bites.

The pair tossed a ball around every day during the lunch break, and every day Felix asked if they would continue tomorrow. The activity had become part of Chester’s holy routine.

Once they were done eating, they took their trays to the disposal area. There was a conveyor belt that transported the trays behind a tiled wall. In front of the wall there were two holes, one labeled waste to energy and another compost. The staff constantly explained exactly what materials went in which hole. A flier between the openings read, Keep Greendale Green!

Sustainable, green, eco-friendly, environmentally conscious — Chester had seen these words and phrases pasted around the campus, as well as their numerous variations. Chester assumed the stories of climate change were true, so he appreciated the fact that Greendale was dedicated to sustainable operation and teaching their students to live this way.

What annoyed him was when Greendale staff became braggadocious. They frequently attempted to illustrate the value of their precious school by claiming most regions in the outside world were destroying the environment.

As Chester moved from grade to grade, he witnessed other facets of this comparative tactic. His teachers lectured at length about how most education systems were archaic and failed to endow students with relevant skills. It was best that Greendale did not offer regular access to desserts because sweets increased the chance of developing cavities and diseases. There was still a stigma attached to mental illness in most of the world, but not Greendale, not as much.

To argue that people were able to physically isolate and abstain from travel for long periods of time without going insane, teachers constantly referenced the coronavirus pandemic of the early 2020s.

You’re lucky you were only a baby then. We had to live through it.

At least when you get out of here, you’ll get to be in a normal world.

If we were able to make it through that, then you can make it through this.

You’ve got it easy here. Wait until you get out into the world.

Chester’s theory was that this communications strategy had two goals. The first was to overprepare Greendale students for a world that was purportedly cruel and unforgiving. The second was to instill a sense of gratitude that would counteract the pain of the truths every resident knew: most people in the world were not born in facilities. They grew up with parents, siblings, commutes, candy, open lands, city streets. Instead of living the first eighteen years of their lives in a decorated cage, they were born with a degree of freedom that could not be denied or downplayed.

Like all the children of Greendale, Chester did not know anything about his biological family, or if he even had one. Greendale had given him the last name, Owens. It could have come from anywhere, though. Janet might have chosen it, or maybe it was the product of some sort of name generator.

Chester had not completely ruled out the possibility of Owens being his genuine last name, one from living parents. The scenario was unlikely, however. A real last name would make it easier for Greendale students to find their birth parents — assuming they existed — after leaving the system.

For years Chester had vaguely fantasized about the idea of a typical childhood. It was not until recently, however, that he attempted to vividly paint a mental image of his mother and father.

A few months ago one of the security guards said, Here comes that Blake Griffin-looking boy. Chester had not heard of this person, so he used his computer to look him up.

All Greendale students had computers and smartphones with limited capabilities. The primary restriction was that thousands of internet search terms and apps were blocked. Smartphones could only call within the Greendale campus and would be confiscated before leaving the facility.

Commercial pornography was blocked and banned. There was, however, a database of Approved Educational and Recreational Pornography. As a supplement to instruction in class, these videos covered a wide range of sex-related topics: the non-verbal aspects of consent, examples of where the viewer might lie on the Kinsey scale, condom application, sex positions, polyamory, the parts of the vagina, kissing, foreplay, how to pleasure someone and help them achieve an orgasm. In the recreational section of the database there were popups that reminded students how mainstream pornography in the outside world perpetuated unrealistic body image perceptions, domination of women and inaccurate portrayals of typical sex between consenting adults. Greendale only offered videos of real-life people who had volunteered to be filmed during the normal course of their relationship or dating.

Chester masturbated to the videos so he could preemptively dry the wet dreams that would otherwise disrupt his sleep. What interested him most, however, were the couples featured in the content. He wondered how they had met, what their lives were like, why they had decided to participate in the series.

Since he was a child, he had been fascinated with stories. He was afraid of people but obsessed with their origins.

When he researched Blake Griffin, he saw Griffin was biracial, born to a Black father and white mother. Chester had assumed he was part Black, but he had not visualized possibilities of his own origin. The photo on the image search tab fueled his imagination. He envisioned a Black man and a white woman meeting, perhaps in college. They would go on dates and deal with the disapproving looks, the eventual awkwardness of mixing cultures and families.

For a moment Chester wondered if he was related to Griffin. They had similar stature, skin tone and freckles. Upon closer examination, however, the connection seemed unlikely. Chester’s nose was narrow and long, with a slight bend in the middle. His head was more rounded, his forehead was small, and his hair was straight.

Despite his longing for parents, Chester did have some semblance of familial love in his life. Felix was his adopted little brother, and Janet was like a surrogate mother. He loved them and was hoping he could work up the courage to say so before he left Greendale for the pre-college facility. Now that his sophomore year was days from ending, the move was imminent. When the change was not filling him with anxiety and dread over losing his routine, he thought about how much he would miss Felix and Janet.

Occasionally Chester thought he might be biologically related to Felix. There was little evidence to support the theory, though. Felix had smooth black skin and thick,