Who I am (standard:Psychological fiction, 1376 words)
Author: Lev821	Added: Mar 25 2008	Views/Reads: 4177/2389	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A student waiting for Mr Right. A pensioner wishing he could go back in time. Their connection can have very serious consequences.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

much because of their usual lack of understanding about that which they 
have no clue about. Sorry, there I go again. Anyway. I say I have four 
patients under my supervision, I am concerned about one in particular. 
Patient B we call him, because when he was admitted, he had so many 
names that we didn't know which one to call him. You see, he had so 
many personalities. 24 we managed to estimate, but now through various 
treatments and therapy, we've managed to get it down to two. Sometimes 
his name is Sharon Hazel, and sometimes it is Oliver Grayson. These 
‘people' actually did exist, and maybe somewhere they still do. 
However, Patient B was at one point, before schizophrenia confused his 
mind, a civil service economist who was very good at computers, and 
utilised that to the extent that he could obtain data from various 
sources regarding different people. He would steal their identity and 
commit online fraud to the total £446.021. When one of the persons was 
similar to him, he would sometimes visit the area where they lived and 
pretend to be him, because they would not have known what he looked 
like when ordering hardware from electrical shops and booking hotels. 
After six years, and 24 personas, he never went back to who he was as 
he ‘became' these people, believing he actually was them, until his 
mind flicked a switch, and he instantly became somebody else. Now, 
locked away in a padded cell, in a straight jacket, slouched in corner 
and talking to himself, patient B resides. Why he is like that I am not 
sure. He has never been violent, nor shows any inclination of it. I was 
not the one who was originally assigned to him. That was Brendan Kyle, 
and he resides in the cell next to him, in a similar state. You see, 
this form of schizophrenia has mutated into what seems to be an 
airborne viral form. Brendan had managed to get him down to 16 personas 
when he could take no more, and started forming personalities of his 
own, until the real him vanished. Now there are five people whom he is. 
A charity events organiser in Southampton, a Welsh widow, a London 
sewage worker, a female homeless alcoholic, and an assembly operative 
in Maidstone. As I sit here, on a bench out in the hospital gardens 
contemplating what I am going to do, I realise the implications of what 
my patients have become, and know that to bring them back to who they 
were is an arduous task that I cannot do alone...........Mother, is 
that you? Is that you? Please let me out, it's dark in here. I won't do 
it again. I promise I'll be a good boy.


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