Xandra: I wrote this my junior year for an English assignment, but I always liked the idea. I'm considering turning it into an actualstory, if not a novel, but for now, it's a short one-shot, to make you think. (And to help tide my waiting readers over while I work on updates.)It might seem a little unfinished, but I had a limit to work to when I wrote it. Read, review, and enjoy.

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The Meaning of Sanity

By Xandra

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Sanity is defined as soundness of mind, but tell me, is anyone really sane? Of course, many of you might instantly think, “Of course I am!” But really, how do you know? What really makes someone sane? The way they act or function, the way they think? Well, when one works in such a field as I do, one learns to question things, especially the meaning of sanity.

My name is Tobias and I work as an orderly at the Collington Asylum. That’s right, I work in a psycho ward. I’m studying to become a psychologist, so one of my higher-ups thought it would be good for me to be exposed to some of the less-fortunate and dysfunctional members of society. Actually, it makes sense. Better that I had a small glance at what I would be up against when I got my degree, to bolster my understanding.

Still, I must admit, it can get pretty scary working here. On my very first day, I was called in to help stop one of the patients (or prisoners, as I tend to view them) from strangling one of my fellow orderlies with a bed-sheet! These were not the most pleasant working conditions.

Luckily for me, I was assigned a safer and more interesting job not long afterward. One of the many psychologists working here at Collington, Dr. Elizabeth Arcana, asked that I become a sit-in orderly for her counseling sessions. Unlike the cocky doctors and airheaded nurses on our payroll, she actually cares about the people confined here and honestly wants to help them. She assured me in private that she didn’t really need a sit-in, because her patients never got violent with her, but she believed it would do me a lot of good. I was reluctant to believe her. Silly me.

Dr. Arcana is in charge of some of the all-time strangest and scariest people in existence. Being that Collington is an asylum, the people housed here range from all types of nuts, from mild to extreme. I’ll share with you some of the most memorable patients I’d been in contact with.

Caine Streader is one of the less scary ones. He suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. A friend—whom I believe was actually his wife—brought him in a few years ago for his own safety, because he was becoming unstable. Often times, you’ll pass his room and look through the window set in the door, and you’ll see a skinny, twenty-five-year-old man running around inside, cleaning things. He has a big thing with cleaning. Obsessive complusiveness of his caliber makes him insane for perfect order. Having one thing out of place sends him into hysterical, ranting fits. He spends his counseling sessions pacing Dr. Arcana’s office, counting the books on the shelves, the pictures on the walls, the chairs in the room and everything else, and if any one thing is missing, he rants about it. On the surface, he seems really straight-laced and polite, and he’s quiet, but there’s something strange in his eyes that makes him look like a maniac at times. Please note: he’s the least scary.

Sara Burgess is not so nice as he is. She has MPD—multiple personality disorder. On a good, normal day, she’s dead silent, sitting on her bed without making a sound, but sometimes she just bursts out screaming at the top of her lungs. She blames it on the personality she calls “Amanda”, a violent one known for beating some of the bigger orderlies black and blue when she’s in control. Some of the things she says in Amanda-mode are the most profane things I’ve ever heard, especially out of a thirty-year-old woman. They’re vile for anyone, for that matter. Amanda sessions are loud, and she’s usually complaining about the food they serve here. Sara complains about Amanda. It was like two sisters in one body.

A less dangerous and more pitiful case is that of Vanessa Walton. She’s eighteen, the youngest person here, and she suffered some sort of mental regression before coming to us—to the point that she’s like a young child. She can’t read or write anymore, and she sleeps with stuffed animals and a nightlight, because she’s afraid of the dark. She tells the doctor about her dreams, and how she wants to be a movie star when she “grows up.” Her boyfriend, a guy named John, brought her here last year. She’s always saying how he’ll come back to get her and they’ll get married and be happy together, but John hasn’t visited for about three months, so I really doubt that’s a possibility. She’s so lost in herself that it hurts me just thinking about her. Talking to her is worse.

But, most feared of all the patients in the whole asylum is Richard Mars, better known as Ric ‘The Ripper’ Mars. He’s here because he was convicted as a serial killer. Ric was shipped to Collington back when I was still new to high school, because he was deemed guilty by plea of insanity after having killed thirteen middle-aged men, all with instances of domestic violence on their records. He’s thirty-nine now and still more dangerous than anyone else on the premises, whether by choice or not. His cell is in the maximum security wing, isolated from everyone else except his guards. Remember the patient that almost killed an orderly my first day? That was Ric. Somehow, he’d escaped his cell and taken the poor guy hostage. None of the orderlies could get near him. Scary part? It was Dr. Arcana that convinced him to let him go. Once he’d been caught, the orderly retaliated by decking him, but luckily for everyone, the guy ran fast and the rest of us were there to stop the escaped patient from adding another murder to his list.

It was one of Ric’s sessions that changed my perspective forever. Now, considering he’s a psychopath and an ex-murderer, you’d think he would be unsafe to be near, but during his sessions…it’s scary, but instead, he’s perfectly calm and seemingly the smartest man on the planet. I swear. He and the doctor usually spent their daily hour or so discussing philosophy and scientific theory while I stared dumbly at them. This session, however, was different, because Dr. Arcana had gained enough of his trust to safely broach a very tender subject—one that other counselors had hardly gotten away with asking about unharmed, according to his record.

I sat on my stool in the corner of the room and watched as the doctor prepared her notes from behind her desk. Ric was already on the shrink couch, comfortably situated.

“Richard,” she started in that soft, understanding voice she always used, “I’d like to know a little about the men you killed.” She paused. He nodded, visibly unaffected, and she continued. “It says here that all of them were around thirty to forty years of age, fathers, of the same body-type and physically similar. All of them were Caucasian and had dark hair and blue eyes. If I may be so bold, why did you do what you did to them?”

“Because they needed to die,” he said, simply, as if it made all the sense in the world. Their trust was pretty strong, apparently.

Even if he was scary and dangerous, I was considering using Ric as the subject for my thesis paper. He and his accent were both Southern, and he was biracial, mixed black and white. Sitting in on these sessions, I’d wondered what it must have been like for him, growing up in the South as a mixed kid in the sixties. I assumed whatever he’d endured from that might have added to whatever childhood trauma had made him the way he was, what with segregation and all that. It couldn’t just be that, however, considering the consistency of his victims. I was sort of excited, now that the subject was finally being brought to the light.

Dr. Arcana looked up from her notes, lowering her glasses away from her brown eyes. “You seem so certain of this. Why did they need to die?”

“Men like them don’t deserve to live.”

“Did you know what you were doing at the time?” she persisted. “Every time?”

He nodded, dully. “I knew I was killin’ a miserable man.”

Slowly, the doctor removed her glasses, an idea dawning on her face. “…Just one man, Richard?” she asked, gently.

He nodded again. “Yes.”

“Who was it you were killing?”

“My father.” I blinked, quietly, surprised at the statement. “He had to die.”

She shook her head. “Your father died a long time ago.”

“I know that,” he said, his voice somewhat tenser. “But…every time I found someone like him, it was like I forgot. I…I had to make him pay for hurting me all those times. It was my chance—I could finally fight back.”

And there it was.

Later, I asked Dr. Arcana what he’d meant, though I had a small assumption. She smiled, weakly, then took my shoulder. “Walk with me, Tobias,” she said.

I did, and on the way, I leaned some things. All the patients in her care had been troubled children. Ric’s white, dark-haired, blue-eyed father had beaten his mother to death when he was a toddler, then taken to beating him as well, to the point that the hospital became a second home to him. The men he’d killed had all been charged with similar acts, and had looked like him. Caine the neat freak had grown up in a third-rate orphanage, riddled with germs and diseases, where most of the children had died of one thing or another right in the room with him. Sara the schizo had been shut up in a room all her life by her parents, who were too busy for her. Vanessa had brain damage from her drug-addict older brother attacking her with a baseball bat when she was twelve.

All of the maniacs I’d looked down on were here because of what life had done to them, if anything, not because of what was called insanity. So this is why I question, is anyone really sane? Look around you. How many people do you see with perfect lives? Not very many, I’d wager. Sanity is more of a theory than a concept, as far as I’m concerned. Insanity is in everyone, and you could at this very moment be sitting next to a future resident of Collington Asylum. The victims of what we call insanity shouldn’t be locked up and forgotten for the social labels we stick on them, because they aren’t really insane…just hurt. If anything should be taken out of the picture, it’s the things that cause the label to adhere to a person—the things that hurt them in the first place.

So, I ask you to question, is sanity a theory, or just a standard? Is anyone really sane?

Are you sane?

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Xandra: Okay, I know it's short and a little odd, but what do you think? Review, please!