Abnormal

Ilana Folk

Grade 10, Alcuin College

Zack wasn’t normal. He’d known that for quite a long time now. Honestly, he’d known for as long as he could remember. Granted, that only went back about… say… Five years? Yet, it was enough for Zack to know three things. 

1. If you don’t have proof, you don’t have anything 

2. No matter how much people want to help, they will never believe you 

3. You are not the same around different people, no matter how badly you try 

It was that third fact that resonated most strongly with Zack. He knew he had different personalities with different people, probably over twelve since his last count. 

Whenever he had looked into it, tried googling the symptoms, always the same results came up. Bipolar disorder or multiple personality disorder. 

Zack just knew these weren’t right. He knew who he was, he knew when he acted differently, and he knew all of the differences. It wasn’t any type of disorder or illness, but he just was incapable of being the same friend to all people. Maybe that didn’t make sense. 

Zack had tried to describe it to his therapist like this: “Say you have two friends. Ben and Mark. Ben is shy, leaving you to fill in most of the conversation. He’s a total bookworm. Mark is very similar; he's also quite a bookworm, but his recommendations will come from the internet. He doesn’t read just anything” The therapist, she hadn’t understood. 

“Around Ben, you two talk a lot more, mainly you though. You’ll talk about your book in a different way. It would be in an insightful way, as if when you two read together you always read between the lines of your books. It’s peaceful. Mark, on the other hand, when the two of you are in the same reading area, you talk together, only spending about half of the time reading and the other half filling the other in on what they read. It’s here that you’ll use an over-excited tone. So far, this is just matching the mood, right? Perfectly normal?” Zack’s therapist had tried to stop him right then, but he just kept going. 

“Imagine you’re in a room with both of them, and one talks to you. It’s Mark, and you talk just as happily back. Five seconds later, it’s with Ben and you’re back to being a calm and insightful person.” Zack said, and what he had been too nervous to say was It’s not fake personalities either, but it’s this feeling of masking a certain part of them. 

It was that precisely. This feeling of forcing certain aspects of your life to the surface, a tiring juggling act around people that sometimes has to be thrown around. It was the panic that came when he mixed up your emotions and people got confused at the shifts in demeanour. It was the terror that maybe what Zack had been doing was in fact, being fake. That he was not honest with them; his closest friends. All he wanted was for them to know he cared, and he wanted to be there with them, but what could he do if he couldn’t just be one person? 

Yeah… Zack had known for a long time that he wasn’t the same person, that he had a type of fluidity that allowed him to shift from person to person, but the person he was being made to act like right now?

This was new. Unknown. Unexplored. This was Zack, alone, but in a possible confrontation with a past he couldn’t remember… 

He stared down at the barrage of files just awaiting his eyes. How many secrets were hiding within them, clues to give solace to countless families? But these files weren't the ones he cared about. He wanted his files. He wanted to see proof of what had happened to him. Wanted there to be any proof of what happened to him. He wanted to be believed, but how could that happen when he himself couldn’t remember it? 

When he’d been asked questions, he couldn’t give any answers. He knew it had happened, but every memory was blurry. When he pushed his mind, trying to find it, it just discovered himself more. Zack would burst up, shaking from n nightmares, but couldn’t remember what was happening inside of the dreams. 

There was one of two looks that Zack got whenever he tried to talk about what happened. He’d get sympathetic looks, like the one his therapist gave him when she tried to prescribe him chlorpromazine (a drug to help schizophrenics which he still refused to take), or he’d get doubting looks. People would give him drastic side eyes, or roll their eyes when he tried to get anyone to believe him. 

Why didn’t anyone believe him?! 

He knew he wasn’t making it up. Why would Zack do that? There would be zero benefits to it. 

But now he had proof. Somewhere in this mess of beige folders was one that proved he’d never lied. That everything had been true. 

If Zack had been a better agent, he would have read into every single folder, taken the evidence that had been missing for years and used it to vindicate the poor hurt souls. 

Zack was not a better agent. He wanted, no, he needed proof. People just had to believe him, and once they saw it, they would regret every minute that they doubted him. 

He could finally get some help; so he opened the very first file. In it was a Jane Doe, a gun wound in her head, and less than half of a page of details on her. Zack threw it aside. He opened the next, another Jane Doe. Ten files later, ten more Jane Doe’s, John Doe’s, and even a few named victims. None of them were Zack. 

Ten files was hardly a scrape off of the top of the files, so he didn’t give up. Instead, he brewed a cup of coffee and took a seat at the table. This was going to be a long night, but there was a distant light at the end of the tunnel. The same thing he’d told himself a million times. Proof. 

Zack looked through more and more files, and as the contents became thicker he started to flip through each and every file. He couldn’t risk missing the evidence, couldn’t lose his victory because he was going quickly. It was a well known moral, slow and steady wins the race, no? Zack had many continuity issues with said story, but this was not the time for that. 

Instead of a happy little story in his head, Zack’s eyes kept latching until individual phrases on the reports. 

Toxicology report displays clear signs of light cyanide poisoning. Not enough to be fatal. 

Cause of death: repeat asphyxiation. 

Lashes across stomach, along with healing progress, show no internal organ damage. Cause of death still unknown. 

Perhaps one of the creepiest parts of this was the fact that, if Zack hadn’t known who wrote these, they could so easily have been written by usual law enforcement. The fact that the supposed “good guys” used just as much apathy as the criminals who essentially employed those in criminal justice. 

Subject submitted immediately, leading to unproductive research gathering for pain index 

Subject passed prior to revealing required information 

Cause of death: blunt force trauma 

Cause of death… 

Cause of death… 

Cause of death… 

Every file had those words printed on it. Not one subject survived the procedure, and instead ended up thrown away, as if they’d never existed. It shook Zack to his core that he could have been one of the John Doe’s… that shook him. He couldn’t remember much, but he knew there had been a chair… and a collar. 

What had that collar even done? 

Zack just shivered at the thought of the collar, no idea why it stuck so persistently with him. But he had to keep looking. If he didn’t find anything… he was worried he would start to doubt himself. He worried that he would submit himself to his therapist, let her pump him full of drugs. 

He didn’t want to become a listless zombie like so many people he’d seen in his job. People who got too invested into the medications and just couldn’t stop. So he kept looking. File after file, until, about two thirds of the way through his stack, there was a new John Doe. The date was perfected, the lacking image was evident, and Zack knew who was supposed to be seen there.