(Read part 1 HERE)
The river was extremely cold, even in this time of the year. The stream was quite strong, I wondered where i would end up at the other side. I remember the physics classes I had at the gymnasium, where the bearded teacher tried to explain the concept of 'force' (with F as a symbol). He did this with the river example. It's incredible which thoughts stream through your mind while you are in a tensious situation. Images of my high school came up while drifting on the surface of a river which could mean freedom or not. I also saw flashes of my old friend telling stories on the war and where he had to hide and how he was helped by farmers, near a river.
Next to the sound of the river i still heard no human or animal sounds and concluded they still hadn't taken action. It's funny, if you make people get used to you, just by showing up regularly at the same places, you build up a kind of relation which generates a certain mutual respect, even if you have different roles or are dependent on them or they on you. If this period is long enough, a certain sharpness tends to wither away and you can start to think about how to use the situation. Especially in a situation which is not pleasing you or even degrading.
The distance between the two sides was bigger than I expected, it looked like I never came across a certain point. My clothes were heavy, luckily I didn't wear shoes, only some soft slippers they allowed you in the hospital. I lost one during the swimming and kicked out the second. The river could have been 80 yards or even broader. I tried to swim faster, but had to spare my power.
Suddenly i heard barking, barking of a dog. I looked around and saw 50 yards back on the hospital side two guards appearing with German shepherd dogs. They didn't seem to see me at first. I decided to try to dive down. Although the water was cold, I was lucky it was May. The river was rather deep in the middle. There were no houses to be seen at the other side, yet, there were a lot of bushes. I had seen, at some distance in the water, there was a little island in the river with some plants growing on it. I decided trying to get there, it was very important the guards didn't see me, the dogs were chanceless as long as the guards didn't see me and could direct the dogs to my direction.
I remembered my swimming leasons when i was a kid. I had all the diplomas, even rescuing diplomas. There I had learned how to breathe and swim 30 yards underwater. Of course my condition had worsened since my stay in the hospital, but since not taking the pills anymore, my mind had sharpened back into the old state and I had started to do exercises at night again. This saved me now, I guess, because I was not that tired as i had expected.
I had to focus, I swam to the surface, breathed in and tried to dive down again. It costed me an enormous amount of power, but I knew to get away I had to succeed now. My clothes seemed to soak with even more and more water, my body getting heavier and heavier. I didn't feel my fingers anymore, stiff as they were from the wetness. I came up again and saw the little island now very close. I had to swim around it not to be noticed by these robotic people. I guess they were from a different mutation, with brains without the will to independence.
Now, thinking back, to that experience and sitting on the porch again, with all that plants and flowers, it was so unreal. I never found out what happened to Carl, I guess he died in some experiment, I am sure he didn't get away like me. Before he collapsed he had walked around in circles around the hospital for months. The doctors held him as a toy. The world is still full of small, little Mengeles, misusing their knowledge and with no message to the oath of Hippokratos. These Mengelitos rule in their little world with the power of a pill. Of course there are nice Mengelitos and of course there are real psychiatric cases not to be treated otherwise than with medicine. But why did I have to meet a Mengelito?
Mengelito was short, hairy and was wearing big spectacles with a brownish frame. Even his hands where covered with hair, on the top of his fingers dark and bushy. His eyebrows in one line from the left to the right eye, that were very blue, dark blue. The sisters were horrible, but this guy had a kind of refined, diplomatic way of killing you softly with elaborately chosen words which were showing his literacy, sometimes even citing Shakespeare mixed up with his professional jargon. His alert eyes showed his cleverness, like little beads, that all people tend to have who have this kind of nerdy intelligence. The problem is that if you give nerds too much power, they tend to cross borders, any borders, just out of curiosity and not taking any human feelings of the people around them into account, because they miss, what I would call, the 'taking the role of the other' chromosome.
That was also what made Mengelito dangerous. Being a nerd with a doctorate, it made him extremely dangerous. In any contemporary organisation you can find these people, mostly at the IT departments and there they are rather harmless. But still, without any consideration they fulfill the wish of management to come up with all kinds of sophisticated control mechanisms of 'fellow' employees, even calculating the total amount of time at the toilet of anybody. Mengelito didn't need this, his control was total as soon as you crossed the border of his territory. Isn't it awkward that this animalistic instinct of creating and fighting for a territory is transformed into the mind of a man with an education into control by specialist knowledge on which he can base and build a kind of sublimated territory?
When political and especially military power relationships change this also has an effect for the Mengelito's. Here I was sitting on the porch of his former dominion. Mengelito already had gone for a long time, maybe sitting in some prison or camp himself or even being tortured by another Mengelito or, in 'the classical way', by some former inmate. I knew guys like Carl were capable of doing this, as soon as they would come out of their prisons they would not stop till they got their former persecutors. Revenge, according to some thinkers an attribute of power, you must be capable of exerting it, not everybody has the refinedness of mind and the planning talents to come up with a master plan. I thought I would be able to. I had come back to develop my plan and to make some of them pay.
This is part 2 of 'Back to the old hospital' of which parts will be published online on this website
