Glass Houses at Comox

Gabriel Jeroschewitz, October 20^th, 1981, to October 6th, 2025. Abridged, I started this story in 1981; I’ve only been able to finish it now. It’s a valid account of my various stays in the Comox Psych Ward. I’m putting this in because May is Mental Health Month, but I think every month is Mental Health Month!

Glass Houses at Comox

They say the walls are white. They are not white to me. They are the colour of unwritten apologies—pale, trembling, and always about to confess something. I lie still on my bed, counting breaths like coins, waiting for the night shift to arrive with its tray of pills and hollow smiles. The pills are supposed to make the ghosts quieter. No one warns you that they also make the ghosts better dancers.

I’m Gabriel—or at least that’s what they call the version of me that signs the daily wellness sheet. The other Gabriels, the translucent ones, have stopped signing anything. They linger, waltzing through the fluorescent light like cigarette smoke from an unseen mouth.

The Comox Psych Ward is, officially, a “healing environment.” The brochure says so, complete with a watercolour of a mountain reflected on a lake: serenity printed in four-colour process. But the lake I see isn’t serene—it’s viscous, like mercury stirred by invisible fingers. Every ripple carries whispers. They tell me jokes that should be funny—about the staff, about the smell of disinfectant—but the punchlines always end with blood.

Despite the challenges, I find a way to laugh. My survival strategy in this place is to laugh before the ghosts do.

They crash through my windows nightly. Not genuine windows, of course—plastic panes thick enough to stop a desperate man, but apparently not dense enough to stop whatever lives between waking and sedation. They burst through like disappointed relatives at an intervention, each dragging a different fragrance: paint thinner, sugar, regret.

They have no forms, only intentions. They push limits like a painter might push colour past the lines—smudging balanced psyches, leaving fingerprints across the mind. One of them, a tall blur wrapped in static, calls himself Dr. Hue. He tells me he used to cure civilizations before they learned to medicate themselves. Now he paints hallucinations on my eyelids when I blink. “You’re better this way,” he says, “flat, like a cartoon protagonist who never ages.”

Dr. Hue likes to quiz me. “What colour is pain today?” he asks.

When Dr. Hue quizzes me, I respond with my own unique perspective. “The colour of pain today is burnt laughter,” I say, knowing that ‘ gray ‘ will not satisfy him.

The nurses are kind in the way that frightened people are kind—careful, brisk, eyes never lingering. They talk to us as if we are made of glass. Maybe we are. When I inhale too deeply, I can feel the hairline fractures spiderwebbing under my skin. I tell Nurse Shelly this once. She smiles, writes something on her clipboard, and says, “That’s progress.”

She doesn’t see the ghosts behind her—those insecure beasts gyrating on spiral gradients, twisting themselves into mathematical impossibilities. They look like funhouse reflections of humanity, each trying to perfect the art of being incomplete. They whisper into my ears about the fragile balance between comedy and collapse.

One of them, a thin creature with a voice like a child imitating an adult, asks me to tell a joke. I oblige.

“What’s the difference between a patient and a prophet?”

Pause.

“One of them gets his messages from God. The other one has better medication.”

The ghost laughs until the walls flicker.

Despite the challenges, I find moments of hope. The ghost’s laughter makes the walls flicker, which I interpret as a positive sign.

But the nights… the nights stretch like rubber over broken teeth. My child comes then—the tiny, sleeping version of me. He curls up in the chair by the bed, clutching a stuffed animal made entirely of words. Each word is sharp-edged: failure, fatherless, fraud. The toy bleeds punctuation. I want to pick him up, to promise that it gets better, that one day he will learn to smile without supervision. But I can’t touch him. He’s made of memory, and memory is brittle here.

Once, he looked at me and asked, “Why did you stop dreaming?”

I didn’t dare to answer. I just stared at his closed eyes, wondering what sort of world he saw from behind his eyelids—was it calmer, or did he also have ghosts practicing arson on his thoughts?

He sleeps gently, unaware of the tyrants who play dice with time outside our room.

There’s a rumour among patients: the Comox ward is built on a fracture worldwide. It was not a physical crack but something more profound, like reality snagging its sleeve on a nail and doesn’t know how to sew it back. That’s why the shadows move differently here, why clocks occasionally run backward, and why laughter sounds like a scream half the time.

I told Dr. Craig about it. He said, “You’re experiencing intrusive ideation. Not uncommon.”

I said, “You’re experiencing a lack of imagination. Also not uncommon.”

He didn’t appreciate that. The next morning, my medication dosage doubled.

Now the walls hum.

The humour keeps me sane, I think. I treat every ghost like a heckler and every panic attack like an improv cue. I’ve learned to riff with my hallucinations.

“Welcome to the show,” I tell the phantoms as they gather each evening. “Two-drink minimum, no refunds, tip your invisible bartender.”

They applaud with hands made of cold air and shattered glass. I bow. I feel alive. Then one of them—a featureless mass with a grin too bright for the dark—steps forward holding a meat cleaver carved from light. “We love your material,” it says, “but the ending needs more… disembowelment.”

I tell it that’s a bit on-the-nose. It laughs, swings the cleaver gently through my chest. It doesn’t hurt exactly—it just rearranges my memories into a collage. For a moment, I’m not Gabriel, patient 217 in Comox. I’m my primordial forefather, painting mammoths on cave walls. I’m an ape discovering reflection in a puddle. I’m a child again, choking on my first spoken lie.

Then I’m back, sweating, clutching my blanket, tasting salt and electricity.

Morning comes like a bureaucratic apology—late, pale, unconvincing. I’m served oatmeal and orange juice. The ghosts retreat into light fixtures, sulking. I check on the sleeping child; he’s still in the chair, still clutching his lexicon of fears. I envy how peaceful he looks. I envy his ignorance.

The staff does its rounds. Blood pressure, temperature, dose. The rituals of care. I nod, answer mechanically. They think I’m improving. I can see it in their eyes: hope, or at least its cheaper cousin, relief.

But even as I smile, I feel the slight shiver beneath the floor, the coming crack in the day. The phantoms are regrouping. They’ll be back tonight, hungrier. They always are.

I ask Nurse Shelly for a crayon and a piece of paper. “To draw,” I tell her. She hesitates, then grants the request. I sketch a window on the paper—just a plain rectangle, open to an imagined sky. Then I draw eyes—my own, hers, the child’s, the ghosts’—all around it. Watching. Waiting.

When I’m done, I tape it above my bed. It feels like a promise to myself: Show your eyes. Meet me face to face.

Because even if I am no hero for heartache, even if my psyche is thinner than glass, I want to see them—every monstrous thought, every spectral lie—before they start the next performance.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll laugh first again.