"Insanity" Doesn't Quite Cover It (Prologue and Chapter One)

        It would be so easy to tell you that after spending thirty-one days inside of a psychiatric hospital filming a documentary about said hospital, everyone involved in the making of the documentary would walk out of there completely unscathed. Unharmed except for those of us who were effected in mind rather than body.
I said it would be easy. I didn't say that that was the case.
Okay, and technically we didn't spend thirty-one days inside of the hospital. We spent thirty-one days filming. Rather, it's been thirty-one days since we started filming. We've since given up filming anything close to a documentary. We're too concerned with staying alive to really focus on trying to put history onto a camera.
Plus, the cameras are broken. All of our equipment is broken, except for a laptop.
This laptop.
Which hasn't been turned on yet. I'm hoping I can write out thirty-one days of events in the two hours and eleven minutes I have left.
Make that two hours and ten minutes.
Alright, I'm skipping the rest of the “prologue”. Introduction. Whatever this is




Chapter One: Day One

It was seven o'clock in the morning when we started. We all arrived at the psychiatric hospital with stupid grins on our faces. That is, all of us except for Jeff had stupid grins on our faces. Jeff doesn't grin. He doesn't smile. He doesn't even sneer. He just is.
(I'm starting to wonder if he had something wrong with him to begin with or if being so serious just made him crack.)
We were allowed to go into eleven parts of the psychiatric hospital.
Building seven, ninety-three, twenty-one, twenty-two, one hundred thirty-six, one hundred thirty-seven, twenty-nine, ninety, thirty-five, thirty-six, and Potter's Field.
What better place to start than at an old abandoned asylum cemetery?

Potter's Field wasn't your normal cemetery. There weren't any grave stones, just grave markers. Nobody cared about hallowed ground. Except for Jeff. Jeff was superstitious.
(Or maybe he was just crazy. Who knows?)
Jeff refused to step foot into the cemetery. The rest of us (all five) decided that this would be a perfect place to start filming. After all, the ends make the best beginnings. Dramatic effect and all that.
I was easily distracted. There were so many dead people we were walking over. Did they even have coffins? What if they didn't? That would mean we were stepping on grass, which lead to the grass putting the pressure of our feet into the ground, which lead to the ground putting the pressure onto people's faces and stomachs and arms and legs and various other body parts.
I really hope they have coffins. I don't want to give dead people bruises.
“Hayden! Snap out of your daydream and get over here!”
(My real name is Hayley. I don't like the name Hayley. At all. It sounds too much like “hay leaf”. While I'm not entirely sure if there is such thing as a “hay leaf”, I'd rather not sound like a form of vegetation.)
(Also, any time there are parenthesis? It means I'm writing outside of the current chain of events. In case you haven't noticed. People descriptions aren't often touched upon during actual time.)
(I suppose I should let you know what I look like. Sort of the classic archaeologist...I think. Maybe one of the lab technicians instead. Mousy brown braid, black rectangular glasses, ivory-ish skin tone, hazel eyes. About five foot six, relatively medium-sized. Kudos to you if you have a picture of me in your brain.)
(Anyway. Moving on.)
I did mention that I'm easily distracted, right?
Good. Because this was one of those times.
“Would you shut up? I'm coming!”
If I were any sort of not-annoying partner in film-making, I probably would have run over. I think what I did could be described as a mosey, though. Or a lope. I mosey-loped over to where they were, the cameras all set up and microphones ready.
I think they were just missing me. Whoops. Maybe I should pay better attention to detail.
“Took you long enough.”
That was Matthew.
(Matthew's sort of fat. I hate to put it that way, but he is. Six foot one and overweight, black hair and sort of puny brown eyes. Tanned skin. We think he's some sort of Asian. Maybe Philipino. We never really thought of asking him.)
Matthew was the technical guy. He made sure we had power for everything, that frequencies wouldn't get messed up, that everything was plugged in...that sort of thing.
(If I had known that we would end up stuck in the hospital, I would have made bets on who would last longest, and bet on Matthew. He's got enough on him to keep him going for a while.)
“Is anybody doing a voice over for this one?”
That one was Jess.
(She's got really short blonde hair. Blue eyes, too. And freckles. She's sort of classic-looking. About an inch shorter than me, but also a lot skinnier.)
(Her and I are the only two females on this little expedition. She has a bigger rack than I do. I loathe the very fiber of her being for it.)
“Yeah, Hayden is. Otherwise we wouldn't have bothered calling her over.” Matthew.
(Jessica's in charge of microphones. I think. She holds them and makes sure they're clean and set up. That qualifies and being in charge of them, right?)
(To make something that has the potential to be very, very long a lot shorter, we'll skip to the actual filming process. I'm down to two hours and five minutes, and I still have thirty days to write out.)
The filming at Potter's Field ends up being one of those things where you zoom in on a couple of objects and just do an overview of the whole area. I guess it's the lazy way of doing things, but it looks cool. The people would like it.
(They'd like it if there was a possibility of ever seeing it.)
Seeing as we're going without a script, we have to stop sometimes to think about what should be said. It doesn't happen in Potter's Field, though. I can usually come up with something good to say.
Voice overs are usually a lot easier when you can be on camera to do them. But I can't. So I have to try and stand behind the camera without my feet getting in the way while still being able to see what's in the camera view.
We're sort of cheap. We don't even have one of those camera screen viewing...things. The only person who can see what the camera sees is the person operating the camera.
Figures that Brian would be able to see it.
(Brian's sort of really flamboyantly gay. We all love him anyway, though. He's the shortest of the group. Only four foot eleven. He wears designer shirts and designer jeans, and I swear his closet is filled with designer shoes. His cologne smells really good. His hair gel does, too. He usually has his red hair gelled into some suave style, and that's exactly the case for today. He has icy blue eyes. The kind that, on the wrong person, could look really mean, but on Brian? They're really cute. They suit him.)
While we all love Brian, Brian doesn't like talking and being able to be heard in a movie. If he didn't mind, we'd have him doing the voice over right now.
Why doesn't Brian like being heard in a movie?
He doesn't think he sounds feminine enough.
(He has that sort of typical “gay guy” voice. Lisp and a bit high-pitched and airy sounding. But somehow...it doesn't qualify as feminine. He says he wants to sound like me. I say that if he wanted to sound like me, he should speak through a kazoo. He says if my voice was really that terrible, I wouldn't be doing voice overs. I say to shut up and go back to filming.)
The filming of Potter's Field ends up taking a lot longer than any of us really expect it to. It takes about five hours and thirty-seven minutes (according to Jacob...you'll meet him later). By the end of it we're all ready to pack up and call it a day.
So we do.
(So, you've technically met the six of us. Except for Jacob. Jacob's the visual director guy. He supposedly knows what looks good and what looks “atrocious”. He's Jewish. Curly dark brown hair and brown eyes. His nose is so monumental that we named it Oswald.)
(And that concludes day one.)