The Window At The End of Ward C

They say the window isn’t real, but I have pressed my palm to its pane so often that I could draw the faint frost-flowers with my eyes closed. It lives at the very end of Ward C’s corridor, past the nurses’ station and the peeling mural of a meadow that someone, long ago, thought would be “soothing.”

Dr. Halvorsen calls it a hallucination. “A projection of desire,” he says, pen scratching in his leather notebook. “You imagine a way out because you cannot face your circumstances.”

I am not so sure. The city that glitters beyond the glass has too many details to be fiction. Trolley cables strung across streets, steam curling from vents, a clock tower with four faces, each frozen at a different time. Why would my mind invent clocks that disagree with one another?

Before I came here—before the white walls and the quiet rules—I taught literature at a university by the river. I remember quoting Shakespeare until my voice was hoarse, dissecting Poe’s obsessions with students who looked at me as if I held the key to mystery itself.

Or perhaps I only dreamed I taught. Perhaps those bright faces belonged to the other patients, or to actors on the small television in the day-room. Memory is treacherous water: smooth on the surface, full of riptides below.

Group therapy meets every Thursday after lunch. We sit in a circle of mismatched chairs while Nurse Lila asks questions in her careful, china-handling voice.

“Name one thing you can trust,” she said last week.

Some muttered ‘my meds,’ others said ‘God.’ When it was my turn, I answered without hesitation: “The view from the window.”

A hush passed around the room. Lila tilted her head, wrote something on her clipboard, and said we would talk privately later.

After group, she pulled me aside. “You know there isn’t a window at the end of Ward C,” she said gently.

I smiled—poor girl, blind to what shone so clearly. “Maybe you can’t see it.”

Her lips pressed together, as if she were sealing away a sigh. “Please stay away from that wall after lights-out. It isn’t safe to wander.”

I promised, though I knew I wouldn’t keep the promise.

Night drapes Ward C in humming fluorescent half-dark. Once the last nurse finishes her rounds, I slip from my room with the notebook hidden beneath my shirt.

The window waits, moonlight silvering its frame. Beyond it, the city breathes: headlights drifting like fireflies, wet cobbles catching starlight. Sometimes a figure stands on the opposite roof, brimmed hat casting his face in shadow. He lifts a hand, not quite a wave, more a summons.

I never wave back. I fear that if I acknowledge him he will vanish—or worse, step nearer.

Dr. Halvorsen says my memories of the classroom are confabulations, patchwork stories stitched from overheard lectures and old books. He claims I arrived here raving about “a door that wouldn’t open.” I can’t reconcile that image with the person I believe myself to be. Still, sometimes my supposed students blur when I try to picture their faces. Even names slip through my fingers.

That is why I keep this notebook. Ink is ballast; it keeps the ship of me from capsizing.

Two nights ago, the figure beckoned again, more urgently. The glass felt warm under my fingers, pulsing faintly—as if the city itself had a heartbeat. Behind me the corridor stretched long and empty. Ahead, the lights of freedom.

I leaned forward, whispering, “Show me.”

The pane yielded like water.

I stumbled through and landed on slick pavement under a violet sky. Carriages—no, taxis—rolled by, their wheels whispering. Steam hissed from a grate. The clock tower loomed overhead, each face insisting on a different hour: midnight, noon, dawn, dusk.

A laugh bubbled from my chest. I was out.

But a hand settled on my shoulder, firm as a lock. I turned. The brimmed man studied me; his eyes were twin mirrors, reflecting everything but himself.

“You’re not ready,” he said.

“Ready for what?”

“For what waits beyond clocks.” He tipped his hat. “Go back.”

And I was in bed, sweat-soaked, morning light spilling across my blanket.

Had I dreamed it? My shoes were still damp.

Halvorsen questioned me that afternoon. “Orderlies say you were found sleepwalking.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“You left wet footprints,” he said, flipping a page. “But it rained last night. Maybe you stepped in a spill.”

I said nothing. Some truths collapse when spoken.

He adjusted his glasses. “We may need to increase your dosage.”

I clenched my notebook so hard its spine bent.

Days blur in here, stirred only by the occasional shout from another patient or the creak of a food trolley. I spend hours at the window, sketching the skyline as best I can. Each drawing differs slightly—sometimes the tower has five faces, sometimes three. Once, there were no hands on the clocks at all.

Yesterday, Nurse Lila confiscated my sketches. “They keep you tied to a delusion,” she said.

I wanted to tell her that the sketches anchor me to something real. But perhaps I could not convince even myself.

That evening, the man in the hat returned. He beckoned, and this time I stepped through without hesitation.

Rain licked my cheeks. The city smelled of ozone and burnt sugar. “Why do you call me?” I asked.

“Because you asked to leave,” he replied. His voice was many voices layered together.

“I asked?” My memories fluttered like loose pages.

He gestured toward the tower. “Climb, if you dare.”

The stair inside spiraled endlessly upward. At each landing, a door opened onto fragments: a classroom where students with blank faces waited for me to speak; a lecture hall filled with applause; a dark hallway, blood gleaming on tiles.

I recoiled. “That isn’t mine.”

“Isn’t it?” the man murmured.

Higher still, we emerged on the tower’s roof. Four clocks surrounded us, each hand spinning in wild directions.

“Time,” the man said, “is the story you tell to cage yourself.”

“Then who are you?”

“I am whoever you let me be: warden, guide, memory, delusion.”

Wind roared. Below lay Ward C’s roof, dull and rain-slick. Through its ceiling I glimpsed my narrow bed, the mural, Nurse Lila reading a chart.

“Which is true?” I asked. “The ward or this?”

He removed his hat; beneath it was my own face, older, lined. “Truth is only what you choose to hold.”

When I woke, dawn painted the ward pale gold. My notebook lay open on my chest, words scrawled in a hand that trembled but was mine:

Clocks are cages.

Step carefully.

That day, I decided to test the limits. I touched the wall where the window should be—in daylight, nothing but paint. But as soon as I closed my eyes, the faint chill of glass returned.

Weeks pass—or hours; the clocks won’t agree. Halvorsen grows sterner, warning that obsession with “escape fantasies” undermines my recovery. Yet sometimes, as he speaks, the city flickers behind him like a double exposure.

I have begun to suspect that he may not be reliable either.

Last night was different. The corridor beyond the window burned with amber lanterns, not moonlight. I stepped through and found myself in a library that smelled of dust and rain. My own books lined the shelves, spines bearing titles I half-remembered teaching. A chalkboard leaned against a wall; scrawled on it was a sentence:

You locked yourself in.

I turned to the man—myself—in the hat.

“Why would I do that?”

“To keep what you saw from following.”

A memory shivered loose: a lecture interrupted by screams outside, sirens, a door slammed, then darkness. My pulse thundered. “I hurt someone?”

“Not as you think,” he said, but offered no more.

Today Halvorsen told me they plan to move me to another ward. “You’re fixated,” he said. “Environment changes can break cycles.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps they mean to wall up the window for good.

Tonight may be my only chance.

I wait until the ward falls silent, then creep down the corridor. The window glows softly, as if aware. I open the notebook, read the warnings I’ve written, and place it on the floor—proof that I existed, in case I don’t return.

Then I step through.

Rain lashes the tower square. The man—my double—waits by the base of the clock tower.

“You understand now?” he asks.

“I think so,” I whisper. “The city… it’s the shape my mind gives to what I can’t bear.”

“And the ward?”

“Another shape.”

He smiles, weary. “You may climb, or you may rest. But choose.”

I look up. The clocks have stopped; hands point inward, toward their centers.

I climb.

At the summit, mist swirls around a doorway without a frame. Beyond it lies either release or ruin. I pause, feeling both alive and untethered.

I take a breath and step forward—

…and wake once more in Ward C.

Sunlight slants across the floor. My shoes are dry. The notebook lies on the nightstand, though I’m sure I left it by the window. A single new line gleams in ink I don’t remember writing:

Not yet.

Nurse Lila enters with a breakfast tray. “Good morning,” she says. “How did you sleep?”

I almost tell her everything, but her kind eyes frighten me. If she doesn’t believe, they might take away the last thing that is mine.

Instead I smile. “Better, thank you.”

She leaves. I turn toward the end of the corridor. The window waits, faintly luminous even in daylight.

Maybe tonight will be the night. Or maybe I’m only ever pacing a painted wall, scribbling stories to console myself.

I don’t know which is true.

But the city gleams, and somewhere above its roofs a man wearing my face tips his hat.

I write these words quickly; orderlies make rounds soon. If someone finds this notebook, know that everything I’ve written is honest, even if honesty is not the same as accuracy.

If I vanish, look at the end of Ward C. Put your palm flat against the plaster and close your eyes.

Tell me if you feel the glass.

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