BRIAN BELMONT

A Short Story by Adriel Mohammed

EPISODE 1

"Some deaths must be better than others." He thought to himself with his eyes still closed and his head pounding like a caged animal against his skull. "Another day another migraine." The kind of migraine where simply opening your eyes was painful, where there seemed to be a bitter metallic taste as if he were bleeding from the throat and was tasting the blood on his breath. 

BRIAN BELMONT 1.1

The world emerged in vivid grayscale, the raw light of the morning sun streaming in, bleaching everything it touched. Still, he noticed the general shapes of the murky clean white walls, white flooring with occasional stains here and there. As his sight readjusted to the unfiltered morning light, he registered the age of the room around him and also the humidity, a little longer he would've woken up in a puddle he thought. Coming into focus were the fumbling figures milling about the room, "people" he thought his mind moved faster than his body on account of the constant beating of the migraine. 

"Is this a hospital?"

The smell of latex and iodoform, the unyielding stiffness of his bed with worn railings and the general worn-out purity of the room cemented that thought. There was both a lot and little sound in the room in that he knew there were many pockets of conversation but he couldn't hear any of them to hear what was being said. The most prominent sound thought was a large clock that hung over what he supposed was the entrance, and exit of the room as he couldn't see any other exits. The clock banged in unison with the blood rushing in and out of his skull creating painful and constant pressure on the inside of his head. 'Tick…..Tick……Tick.' he swallowed the taste of blood and tried to settle his thoughts again to make sense of what was around him. 

After the larger part of eternity what came into the focus was something that both soothed and disturbed him. To his left, the second opening to the large room with beds lining each side was an open window with metal bars forming crosses and glass panels pushing outward, it was the scene that was framed by the windows that caught his attention. The vibrant appeal of what lay beyond and the timing of his vision coming back captivated the patient. A beautiful damp green valley against the fresh morning sky, the dark green trees seemed to bear diamonds in the way the morning light caught the large drops of dew on their leaves. There were also poinciana trees with their bright red flowers which gave them an almost artificial look. There were also larger trees that showed their age by the ecosystems they supported in the form of large parasitic plants growing between branches, vines that grew maybe 50 feet and some almost long enough to touch the ground, everything outside seemed to grow undisturbed. 

Just outside the frame of the windowpane, periphery to the calming effect of everything else was one much larger and older tree whose branches grew large enough to block the sunlight of early morning, they cast an ominous shadow over the patch of land directly beneath its shade within the constant darkness stood one building. He swore he almost heard the faint sounds of a scream. The patient concluded that this was also the type of building he was in, the fretwork and trimming of the building placed it as an old colonial plantation.

The building had a second flood and a high pointed roof suggesting there was an attic, everything about the building itself was beautifully built and well maintained. Something about all of it bothered the patient, none of the hospitals in Trinidad was in a valley with this style of building. Furthermore, what also bothered him was while it seemed that he had been in this white room for some time nothing seemed familiar….

"So, you remember your name?" 

A dry impatient voice sucked the patient out of the valley beyond and back into the room with its dirty white walls and grey. It was a female nurse with a form in her hand. 

"What?"

Genuinely confused both by the question and the constant pounding of his migraine he quietly thought to himself, "Who wakes up and thinks about their name when there's so much going on around them?" Slowly a lump grew in his throat because every time he tried to humour himself and reply to such an arbitrary request, he drew a blank, once, twice as if every time he was about to say what he knew his name to be no sound was heard and that both his voice and name had been erased from the face of the earth itself. 

"Uhh"

He stalled trying to dig deep within himself to remember his name and reply to the nurse. 

Just then a younger woman in her early twenties, a nurse or doctor the patient couldn't tell as she came in wearing casual clothes walked past his bed on her way to the nurse's station on the right of his bed. It seemed the patient and the nurse had some level of rapport despite him drawing a blank on who she was as she smiled as if some sort of inside joke hung between them. 

"Brian, you still in bed?" 

She said before disappearing to the small office behind the nurse's office. 

The older, seemingly more experienced nurse paid no mind to the other woman and just held her pen over the clipboard supporting the form barely looking at Brian the entire time. A moment ago, Brian didn't know his name and he wondered what would have happened to him if he forgot it, would he sign over his right to being a person and would be stuck in this ward with this not particularly unpleasant nurse as his new God directing his life from that moment forward? 

"Brian….my name is Brian. Nurse, I have a really bad migraine." 

Scribbling quickly she lets out a sharp sigh. 

"Organize your bed area wash up if you want to, it's optional on mornings, you'd get something for the…...migraine at 10."