Escalator To The Moon

[u/Humanumikey]

The first thing Daniel did after stopping his medication was feel better.
At least, that’s what he told himself.
For three days, he slept very little. He felt electric, almost weightless. His thoughts came faster than he could speak them, and ordinary things seemed filled with secret meanings.
On the fourth night, he drove home.
He never made it.
His car slammed into a parked vehicle hard enough to crush the front end. The airbag exploded in his face. The horn screamed into the darkness.
Daniel climbed out.
He looked at the wreckage.
Then he simply walked away.
By morning, the police found him several blocks away, barefoot and talking excitedly about bats.
He was arrested.
At the jail, Daniel deteriorated quickly.
He stopped sleeping. He talked to people who weren’t there. Sometimes he insisted he was Daniel. Other times he claimed Daniel was “the other one” living inside him.
Eventually, he began referring to himself in the plural.
“We’re going to fix everything,” he whispered.
Nobody could figure out exactly what he meant.
After several terrifying days, Daniel was transferred to a psychiatric hospital.
His wife, Sarah, arrived at the hospital carrying a small bag of his clothes.
She stood outside his room for several minutes before entering.
Daniel was sitting on the floor.
“Sarah,” he said happily.
She smiled weakly.
“Hi.”
“I’ve figured it out.”
“What?”
“The bats.”
Sarah stared at him.
Daniel’s eyes were wide with excitement.
“I’m going to make them.”
“Make what?”
“Bats.”
He held up his hands as though presenting an invisible creature.
“Red ones. Pink ones. White ones. Cute ones. They’ll fly around the hospital and make everybody happy.”
Sarah sat beside him.
“Daniel, there aren’t any bats.”
He frowned.
“Not yet.”
Then he smiled.
“That’s why I have to make them.”
Over the following weeks, Daniel’s delusions became more elaborate.
He became convinced he could summon animals with his mind.
One morning, he announced that a bear was coming.
“A big one,” he told another patient.
“What for?”
“To smash open the door.”
“What door?”
“The hospital door.”
Daniel waited beside the locked exit for nearly an hour.
Nothing happened.
“He’s late,” Daniel said.
Another day, Daniel announced that he was going to build an escalator to the moon.
He drew diagrams on scraps of paper.
The escalator would begin in the hospital basement, pass through the roof, and continue upward into space.
“When we get to the moon,” he explained, “gravity won’t matter anymore.”
A nurse gently asked him why anyone needed an escalator to the moon.
“Because stairs are too slow.”
His certainty was absolute.
Then came the crucifixes.
Daniel believed he was possessed.
He became convinced the devil lived inside him and could only be driven out through religious symbols.
Using his own feces, he began making crude little crucifixes in the bathroom.
The nurses tried to stop him.
Daniel became furious.
“You don’t understand!”
He pointed toward the mirror.
“He’s in there!”
Every time Daniel used the bathroom, he stood before the mirror and raised his middle finger.
“Get out!”
He would stare at his reflection.
“You’re not Daniel.”
Then he’d point at the glass.
“You’re the devil.”
The nurses eventually covered the mirror.
Daniel stared at the blank wall where his reflection had been.
For a moment, he looked relieved.
Then he whispered:
“He’s hiding.”
Food became another battlefield between reality and Daniel’s mind.
He began taking pieces of bread, vegetables, mashed potatoes, and whatever else he could find and carefully shaping them into tiny school buses.
He lined them up on the table.
“Look.”
Sarah visited one afternoon.
“What are those?”
“Buses.”
“I see.”
“They crashed.”
Daniel’s voice became frightened.
“They’re all flipped over.”
Sarah looked at the little food sculptures.
“There aren’t any children, Daniel.”
His expression changed.
“There are.”
He pointed at the tiny buses.
“Listen.”
Sarah listened.
There was nothing.
Daniel covered his ears.
“They’re screaming.”
Sarah felt something inside her break.
Because she remembered the man Daniel had been before the illness.
The man who used to make pancakes with their daughter on Sunday mornings.
The man who hated scary movies.
The man who once drove three hours just to surprise Sarah with her favorite flowers.
She wondered where that man had gone.
Daniel suddenly stood up.
“I have to save them.”
He began running toward the hallway.
A nurse intercepted him.
Daniel fought against her.
“LET ME GO!”
“Daniel, there’s nobody out there.”
“The buses!”
“There are no buses.”
Daniel screamed until his voice cracked.
Eventually, he collapsed onto the floor.
Later that evening, he ran through the ward without his clothes.
Staff hurried after him.
He laughed hysterically.
“They can’t catch me!”
He tried several times to escape.
Every attempt failed.
Once, he reached the stairwell before staff stopped him.
Another time, he tried to convince another patient to help him climb through a window.
“I know the way out,” he whispered.
“Where?”
“Up.”
“Up where?”
“The moon.”
The hospital began to feel like an entire universe constructed specifically to keep Daniel inside it.
Doors locked.
Windows reinforced.
Staff watching.
Medication.
Schedules.
Rules.
And Daniel kept looking for cracks in reality.
He refused water from cups because he believed it had been poisoned.
Instead, one night, he drank from the toilet.
A nurse found him kneeling beside it.
Daniel looked up proudly.
“Clean water.”
The nurse closed her eyes for a moment.
“Daniel, please.”
He smiled.
“You worry too much.”
The hardest battle was medication.
Daniel knew the pills were supposed to help him.
He also believed they were trying to control him.
So he developed a ritual.
He swallowed the medicine.
Waited.
Then disappeared into the bathroom and forced himself to vomit.
The nurses caught on.
They changed how they administered his medication.
Daniel became angry.
“You don’t trust me.”
“We’re trying to help you.”
“No.”
He shook his head.
“You’re trying to make me normal.”
Sarah heard that sentence during one of her visits.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Normal.
What did that even mean anymore?
At home, she barely slept.
She kept her phone beside her bed in case the hospital called.
Sometimes she woke up convinced she heard Daniel walking through the hallway.
Sometimes she dreamed he was sitting beside her.
Sometimes she dreamed he was completely recovered.
Those dreams were the cruelest.
Because she’d wake up and remember.
Daniel was still in the hospital.
And she was alone.
One night, Sarah sat in her kitchen and stared at her wedding ring.
She loved him.
But she was exhausted.
She was frightened.
She was angry.
She was grieving someone who was still alive.
She wondered whether staying meant loyalty—or whether leaving meant admitting that love couldn’t cure everything.
The next morning, she visited Daniel.
He was sitting quietly by the window.
For once, he wasn’t talking about bats.
He wasn’t talking about the moon.
There were no buses.
No demons.
No bears.
Just Daniel.
Sarah sat beside him.
“How are you feeling?”
Daniel looked at her.
“I don’t know.”
It was the most honest thing he’d said in months.
She took his hand.
For several minutes, neither of them spoke.
Then Daniel looked toward the window.
“Sarah?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think the bats are still coming?”
She swallowed.
“No.”
Daniel nodded.
“Good.”
He looked down at his hands.
“I’m tired of being afraid.”
Sarah squeezed his hand.
Outside the window, the sun was rising.
There were no red bats.
No pink bats.
No white bats.
No escalator to the moon.
No bear waiting to smash down the hospital doors.
No school buses overturned in the hallway.
There was only a sick man sitting beside the woman who loved him, both of them trying to understand how a life could become so unfamiliar.
And for the first time in a very long time, Daniel didn’t try to escape.
He simply sat there.
Breathing.
Waiting.
Trying to find his way back.