“You seem to be in a bad mood this morning,” she said.

“You’re just as fucking observant as ever, Doc! All this fucking place needs is a rack and a torturer in a leather mask!”

“That’s rather unusual,” she observed. “It seems obvious that something has set you off. Care to share?”

“Fucking poet, too? That’s all I need! It’s not enough that your asshole guard took my fucking walker and stuck me in a wheelchair, and with fucking footrests to boot! Pun, right Doc? My feet ain’t much, no thanks to the diabetes, but they’re good enough to move me around! But with the fucking fixed footrests? I can’t even feel the floor! And I didn’t need the chair, I got around okay with just the walker!”

“We can’t allow weapons in here, Mr. Willis. You knew that!”

“And just what was I supposed to do when that fucking crazy bastard that refuses to talk or stand up started crawling right for me? And anyway, I didn’t try to hit him, I just put the walker in front of him so he’d turn aside! I wouldn’t have needed to do that if your fucking guard had been paying attention instead of raiding our doughnut stash! Speaking of which, is it possible to get a decent cup of coffee in here instead of that lukewarm piss?”

“You know why we don’t allow hot liquids, Mr. Willis. But while you’re in here where I can watch you, I suppose I can chance it. You’re not going to attack me, are you?”

“Naw, you didn’t put me here, it was my fucking kids! And just as soon as I can talk to a lawyer, they’re out of the fucking will! Crap, this place is worse than jail! At least there, you get to contact a lawyer!”

“Well, you were ... acting erratically, Mr. Willis,” she observed, while watching carefully to see how he reacted. “And no jail I’m aware of provides the food that our cooks serve here, not to mention mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks. No hot coffee, tea, or chocolate, I’m afraid. There have been—incidents—in the past. But if you’re willing to cooperate with me just a little, I think I can at least take the footrests off your wheelchair. The report says you’re unable to walk without adaptive devices, and of course a cane is out of the question. But I’ll speak to the staff and maybe we can do something about the walker, after we review the tapes. But as for the other patient you—blocked—, I’m not sure what we’ll be able to do. He avoids obstacles, so maybe a few cushions to keep him from your space?”

“That would help! Now if you can just bring me my laptop, and provide decent broadband service...”

“That, I’m afraid, is not allowed. Why do you think it would help you?”

“‘Cause I always spend my mornings reading the news on it, and then I check in with my buds on Facebook. You get it for me, I’ll unlock it so you can check everything I do, everything I’ve done on there! And there’s not a single fucking thing on page to make you think I’m crazy! Shit, the crazies are the fucking politicians that are determined to enslave us, and the religious nuts too! Really, it’s all bullshit, and anybody with two brain cells would have realized that as soon as they opened the covers!”

“That’s an unusual conclusion, Mr. Willis. I’m not sure I follow...”

“Well, sorry about that! Have you actually read what you ... make that they ... believe in? Not that they’re willing to do what the book says! Easier to turn it over to a preacher or rabbi or whoever or whatever the fucking Arabs claim to believe! It’s got plenty of do-this, don’t-do-that, or you don’t get no doughnut! But every one of them is convinced that if he just changes his mind at the last second, he’s gonna wipe out a lifetime of ignoring everything! Even the fucking preachers and priests, do they do what they tell everyone else to do? They don’t believe their bullshit any more than the rest do! And why should they? It’s all silly! I mean, after all, why could their local deity even introduce evil if he didn’t expect people to try it? Nope, it’s all bullshit! Ever notice just how similar all those religions are? Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, they all believed—or at least pretended—that their magic critter was so bored he decided to get it on with a human! Maybe the females were all frigid! And by the way, if he could create Adam, why the fuck did he need Mary? Why not just create an avatar and plunk him down?

“I used to be proud of this fucking country, but that was before they stuck that orange-faced asshole in the White House! Twenty years in a green suit, almost half of it waiting for the Soviets to cross the border? A fucked-up war in a place we never should have gone, that killed 58 thousand mostly-young guys who mostly didn’t want to be there? How do I explain all this? Shit, pumpkin-head killed a million Americans by claiming he had Covid under control! And now? He’s still got almost half the country by the gonads! Un-fucking-believable! And the religious nuts, the ones that are slaughtering each other as well as the ones that are determined to take over this country! And you call me crazy?”

“The Constitution guarantees religious freedom, Mr. Willis. Don’t forget that the earliest settlers risked their lives for that.”

“Oh, bullshit! The earliest ones were fucking Vikings, like as not! And they booted the people that owned the place back then, who had their own fucking belief system!”

She stopped for a moment, long enough to enter something into her computer, before turning back to face Mr. Willis. “The treatment program is intended to help you regain control over your life. Removing you from any external pressures ... it appears that instead of doing what we hoped, we may be making it worse.”

“You’re surprised, Doc? No books worth reading, just a TV set that I can’t change the channels on, and nothing worth watching if I could! How would you feel if the only stimulation allowed was daytime TV? And nighttime ain’t much better! The umpteenth version of Survivor, or something equally crappy? Because the fucking executives that run the networks are just as chicken-shit as the ones in charge of the movie studios! Don’t take chances, just the same old, same old comic-book crap, recycled and remixed with lots more computer-generated explosions and car wrecks thrown in! One morning, and one morning only, there’s something worth watching! The BBC has nature documentaries that are ... well, I wish I’d had those available back when I was growing up, but back then all we had was black-and-white TV and I love Lucy! Doc, I’ve just plain lived too long! But on my computers, I’ve got books, YouTube, everything. I used it all, back when I was writing.”

“You were a writer? I’m not seeing it in your admissions record. That’s strange...”

“It’s why I’m here, Doc. They want my money, or what’s left of it. But I fooled ‘em! And pissed ‘em off to the point they claimed I’m crazy! Anyway, my books are published by at least a dozen outlets now. Just google my name, you’ll find ‘em, and every month I get a nice little addition to my bank account. It’s how I paid for the house they’re so fucking upset about!”