The Telephone Exchange

As psychiatric issues have been much on my mind recently, I decided to write this short clip of a story. For some background you should know that schizophrenia affects about 1% of the world population. Its cause is truly unknown, although there are some physiological characteristics of the brain, such as atrophy of the frontal lobes related to lower blood and glucose supply, that are linked to schizophrenia. Disorganized schizophrenia (one of five types) is common in the homeless as people with this kind of schizophrenia find it almost impossible to maintain normal social lives and jobs. It is a very unique kind of horror, I would think, to find oneself unable to trust what your mind is telling you about reality.

On a writing note, this is written in first person present, which I normally despise, but it seemed to go well for a stream of conscious thing. If you have any feelings on the matter, post it in the comments.


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   It’s well past the time when I should be asleep, but I can’t stop thinking. They say your brain is like a super-computer, capable of processing on several levels at once, some of them so deep that you don’t even know they’re there. It’s deeper than that, of course, more intricate and so much more complex, but it’s usually the simple explanations that stick with you. My brain, my super-computer, has developed a bug, or caught a virus. I don’t know which term would be more apt. All I know is that it’s not running like it should. It's...going viral? Things that used to make sense to me are coming through slow and garbled. People I should know feel like strangers. I hear voices, a crowd of them, shouting and whispering and talking over each other so loudly that I can’t think. But that isn’t right, because the voices are my thinking, aren’t they?
    I try to listen to just one, hoping that maybe something will get through, something that will tell me how to stop this insanity, how to save myself and reset the system back to factory standard.
    Go on. Get it over with. I don’t know why you haven’t left already. Stop threatening and just go!
    That isn’t how it works. You have to close the top––
    Oh, what’s wrong with you? Just go to sleep already. You’ll be––
    Thirsty, so thirsty. They’re putting poison in the water. All the water. It’s the government. They want us all to die, so they can open us up and steal our computers.
    Don’t worry about him. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. It’s just like––
    ––over the rainbow––
    ––then it will be the best––
    ––she said she didn’t know, but I––
    ––once in a lullaby––
    Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, little baby.
    “Stop!” I scream, but they don’t stop. They go on, chattering away like my head is the new telephone exchange. Get me KLondike 2-5674, please. Quick as you can.
    There are pills I can take, but what good are pills to a computer?
    I blink, wipe the sweat from my forehead, and stare at the ceiling. I’m not a computer. I know that. Computers aren’t creative, not truly. They don’t feel anything. And I feel things, which means there has to be more to me than just a processor. There has to be something else, some core of conscious like a soul. A soul shackled to a virus-ridden telephone exchange that won’t let me sleep.
    Pills can’t fix a soul either. I don’t claim to know much about spirituality, but I know that much. Souls are intangible, ethereal, incorporeal…I can’t think of any other words. The voices won’t stop, and they aren’t saying the right things.
    I wonder how far I would go to give my soul peace, rest, silence. I wonder if I would go to the edge or if I would jump off. Darkness would have to be better than insanity. But what if they follow me? The ghostly telephone exchange of the afterlife. I giggle in the dark, then clap my hand over my mouth. What if they weren’t in my head but in my soul, dug in like maggots?
    Help, that voice is mine. I know it well, even amid all the shouting. I need help.
    I’m telling you this, so if you happen to find me, if you meet me on the street, or maybe in the store, if you see me sitting on a bench talking to the telephone exchange you can help me. You can understand, I know you can, that this isn’t my fault. This was sabotage, a virus, and I need your help if I’m ever going to be well again. If I’m ever going to sleep….