live in it as if in a vast museum of strangeness.
—Giorgio de Chirico
A Slice in Time
With misgivings, I treated a woman named Amber Taylor for mental illness because she thought she was a time traveller from the 1940's—I say with 'misgivings' because I doubted she was mentally ill—at best, probably confused.
But she was brought into the psych ward by police and formally admitted, so I prescribed a sedative and promised I'd be back to see her and get to the bottom of her troubling experience.
Truth was, it was my anniversary and I made dinner reservations for Tara and me at the Lockwood Restaurant & Bar located in the Palmer House Hotel—ironically, the very place where Amber claimed to work in the 1940's.
I was determined to keep my promise to my wife and enjoy our celebration, but the surroundings and the coincidence of Amber supposedly working there, inspired me to share her story over dinner.
Tara was fascinated. “Surely, the details would be easy enough to check—what about missing persons reports? Maybe the poor girl’s an amnesiac.”
I sipped from my glass of Yellow Tail. “I was thinking the same thing. It should be a relatively straightforward matter of finding out who she is—treating her is going to be the tricky part.”
The evening went well but just as we were preparing to leave, my cell phone buzzed. The hospital needed me.
I dropped Tara off at home, promising to get back as soon as I could, and headed for the Mental Health Facility.
When I arrived on the floor, there was pandemonium. Karen Olmstead, alias Klink, was having a meltdown of her own.
It seems Karen did a bed check just before going off duty. Usually, she’d do a head count first, and then check off each name on her list just to be sure.
Her initial count came out to twenty-nine—one patient short. She did the more detailed checklist and discovered Amber Taylor was missing.
Karen did the right thing and immediately notified security.
The closed circuit video cameras were checked and tthey indicated Amber did not exit the facility. A thorough search of every closet, bathroom and storeroom was conducted, but to no avail. The girl seemed to have vanished into thin air.
“Do we have cameras in the patients’ rooms?” I asked.
Karen was adamant. “Oh no, Doctor Wallace—the privacy act wouldn’t allow that—all the cameras are in the common areas and the doors are electronic and require pass cards.”
“I still want to see all the video footage,” I insisted.
I sat down with Mike Edwards, the head of our security and we scanned through the video recordings—they were time and date stamped and showed absolutely nothing.
I got an idea. I went out into the common area and checked for camera angles and blind spots. There were a few dead zones located in corners or windowless areas—there was no way that Amber could have escaped that way, unless she blasted her way out.
I was baffled. I examined the window in her room, but it only opened a crack—hardly wide enough to get a hand through. I stood in the doorway and scanned the room—nothing. I turned around and scanned the common area outside and looked up and saw the camera.
Then it hit me.
I went back to the video playback. On the video, her door was slightly ajar.
I asked Mike if he could enhance the image and zoom in. He was able to do it and so we ran the tape in slow motion.
We could make out the dim outline of Amber’s sleeping torso, her back toward the door. At precisely, eleven fifteen, her sleeping form seemed to fade into nothingness—she disappeared and the event was unmistakably captured on camera.
I have no explanation for what happened to Amber Taylor.
We found her picture in The Tide, the 1945 edition of the South Coast High School Yearbook. There could be no doubt—it was her all right.
The police located a cousin living in Pennsylvania that reported Amber died of cancer in 2009. Those were the bare facts of the case.
Today, I’m sitting in my office looking at a file and a police report on a woman who died in 2009, but was admitted to our facility in 2014, suffering from bipolar disorder. I also have my own personal handwritten notes.
It’s absolutely impossible for Amber Taylor to have been a patient in this facility. She was dead. Then, I smile to myself—I forgot my own observation—even reasonableness in a psych ward becomes transmuted into something else.
There is no reasonable explanation for the case of Amber Taylor—but then, as I often say, there are no rules to mental illness and one patient is totally unlike another.