There was a man who lived at the end of Weller Street, and no one spoke his name aloud. No one knew his name, in fact. They called him The Patient because every day, at precisely six o’clock, he swallowed a pill from a small cracked jar and sat by his window, waiting for the hour of his undoing.
The Patient was a creature of silence, his boots made no noise against the floorboards and his breath seemed too reluctant to disturb the air. A wound hidden too long grows teeth and devours its keeper. His wound, however, was born with grown teeth; his wound was with him since the doing of time. The wound of the keeper was the keeper. The Patient was the wound, and he patiently waited for the wound’s undoing. Those who knew him—though no one truly knew him—said he had been normal once. Hands steady, laughter simple, but that was before the Incident, which no lips dared name and no ears dared hear. Was the incident the wound? Of course not, for he had caused the incident then he was the wound. None and nothing else.
The first pill he took was blue. His fingers fumbled at the lid yet managed to open them. He placed the tablet on his tongue with utmost amiably towards himself, like a priest offering himself to a silent god. He did not hate himself, no, nor did he hate the wound. That night, he tore the covers off his bed and slept on the bare floor. The neighbors heard the scraping of his nails against the wood, long after midnight. No one asked why. Pain speaks most fluently when no one listens, he thought. Hate and pain were such strong words, he thought once again, and, god forbid, he promised to never use them in his life.
The second pill was green. He swallowed it slower, savoring the chalky bitterness that burned against his teeth. He smiled and opened the window to let the cold in. Inside the room was an altar of ordinary things, a photograph turned face-down; a child’s shoe, dirt-stained and too small; a razor, unused, but placed carefully at the bedside. He stared at these things for hours, sometimes mouthing names that belonged to no one living. Each night, the visions came closer to him. He began to sleep less.
The third pill was white. He did not swallow it immediately. He turned it over in his hand, examining the small engraved letters.
M237. The code for forgetting.
He crushed it between his teeth.
It was then, and only then, that the first memory slithered back: A child, running across a wet street. A car horn. His own hands, too slow. A body, too soft, folding unnaturally. Everything too fast to comprehend.
The fourth pill was red. A deep, blood red that tasted of iron. He washed it down with a bitter swig of gin.
He remembered now—the child was not his own. He had not even known her name. He had simply been careless. A man in a hurry, a man with his mind somewhere else, too heavy with himself to see anyone smaller. Too selfish.
She had died before his eyes could register the truth.
And the parents had screamed his name in court. And the judge had whispered it in the sentence. And he had buried it deep inside himself. He was guilty. He was the wound.
Until only the guilt remained, the girl, of course, didn’t. Nor did the parents. The parents had their undoing done by him.
The fifth pill was black. It was the last one in the jar. He held it in his palm, examining it as one might examine a bullet or a dagger—the end contained in a simple shape.
He hesitated. He had killed, out of spite—all because of a mistake. But he reminded himself, It is easier to carry guilt than to accept mercy. He swallowed. He waited. And for the first time in many years, he wept. And when it touched his fingertips, he smiled a smile no man should see. It slowly held him in its arms and took him. In the morning, the window was open. The bed was empty.
Only the jar remained, upright, waiting for its next disciple.