Lights On, Rats Out

by Cree LeFavour

  Do you know, Engineer, what I mean by being lost to life? I know it. I see it here every day. Six months at most after they get here, these young people—and they are mostly young who come—have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature. And if they remain a year, they will have lost the power of grasping any other; they will find any other “cruel”—or more precisely, ignorant and inadequate.

  It’s the very seduction I fear.

  Never before and not since has a single diagnosis spiked as MPD did in the early 1990s, providing a fertile field for ambitious doctors, not to mention long hospitalizations; there were articles, books, and even fame to be had. Sheppard Pratt was called an “MPD mill” by some. There were empty beds to fill. Thank you Gaslight, Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve, The Bird’s Nest. You’ve done your work. I want nothing to do with the dominant sickness here on B-1. The diagnosis of MPD at Sheppard Pratt is contagious—as if the cholera bacillus flowed from the unit’s water fountain. The sanest part of me, the part that called Dr. Kohl to tell on myself and give up the razors, is desperate to leave before I drink too deep.

  CHAPTER 29

  Carnival Lights

  It’s Carl who divulges the cruel Sweetie details. He’s informed. He’s a regular. He has his sources. He’s the only patient I befriend, the only person I have more than a five-minute conversation with—other than the staff—for the entirety of my stay. However unbalanced his paranoid schizophrenia makes his mind, we understand one another enough to become coconspirators who can share a few secrets.

  Sweetie. A white sheet, as long as a standard twin bed. I imagine her with it wrapped around her body, sneaking it into the bathroom under her loose clothes, a hidden shroud wound tight around her airy anorexic form. Once she’s there she knows where to go. She’s been flirting with that pipe for weeks—possibly months. It’s been taunting her with its easy availability, offering itself up to her, seductive as a dreamy poster boy who doesn’t think she’s fat. All better now.

  Stringing the sheet up around the cold smooth metal isn’t difficult if you stand on the sink. There’s time during lunch. There’s time when the hall falls quiet and everyone else eats—the nurses busy in the nest with thermoses of chicken soup, turkey sandwiches on rye wrapped in foil, cute little bags of chips manufactured to fit neatly into Kraft paper bags. There’s time.

  First, I bet she pulls her seventy-four pounds up onto the rim of the white American Standard sink with its perpetually toothpaste-gummed spigot. She then tosses the two ends of the sheet over the pipe and passes the ends through the looped center. Next she ties the two ends together with double square knots, one on top of the other. To tighten them, she leans her weight on them without closing the loop.

  The sheet, pulled from her unchanged bed, smells of her—traces of oily scalp sebum and generic drugstore body lotion. The knot secure, she puts her head through the loop and tests to make sure it slides. She edges the sheet along the pipe toward the center of the room, calculating where her feet will dangle from the new position—well off the floor and just far enough beyond the rim of the sink to prevent regaining it.

  She’s done this trick before and she knows her feral instincts are stronger than her will to die. She will struggle to regain the sink. She will frantically pull at the noose that’s held tight by her own weight. But this time will be different. This time will be a win. She’s ready.

  Leaning precariously, she balances to tie the laces of her sneakers together in an impossibly tight mess of knots. Her feet are cuffed. Even if her mechanical instinct, stupid and stubborn, tries to save her, frantically struggling back to safety, her awkward, useless feet will slip as one and the pushy will to breathe will be fucked for good.

  It’s just her hands that are the worry now. Gripping the sheet, reaching for the laces. She’s weak but the will to live is tenuous—even when it’s not. The knots holding the sheet to the pipe are impossibly tight. Her own weight, insignificant as it is, will do most of the work as the noose tightens fast and hard. There won’t be any way to take herself down even with her hands free to grab at the fabric, her neck, or the pipe. It will be over too quickly. She’s almost sure this time she’ll get it done right.

  Wanting nothing more than to stop time, weary, half eager, she readies herself and yet I bet she pauses. The tiniest splinter of fear prevents movement. Maybe a full minute passes. Standing. Noose slack as a fashionable French scarf draped around her neck.

  Emboldened by a sound in the hallway, maybe she suspects post-lunch-hour movement, a nurse with a hint of onion on her breath to foil her careful work. Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. Instinct makes her close her eyes as she pushes up off the sink as if jumping to clear a cliff as she drops into a swimming hole, arms up. Her body falls through the close air of the bathroom until the tension of the noose completes itself, gripping her neck on all sides. She can’t breathe, so her mind and body join in a rush of adrenaline-fueled panic. Her dumb body flails wildly, writhing to find a way to breathe, just as she knew it would. The room dulls to gray as her oxygen-depleted vision fades. In time her body stills, dangling with something like cruel grace, the peaceful spin not quite a dance.

  When they find her it is, as they say, too late. Was it too late? Too long? Too smart? Too careful? The hall alarm sounds shrill as the nurses rush to take her down. To save her. Not too late? Ghoulish gawking patients are herded like confused extras back to their rooms.

  Lockdown!

  The Sheppard Pratt paramedics arrive, gangly legs of the stretcher bouncing like a grasshopper’s down the hall. Sitting on my bed, through the crack in my door I see her go. Out into the world. She’s found her true winding sheet now.

  Reports of Sweetie’s fate filter through the patients on the ward; the consensus of the gossip is that she did it. Nobody seems entirely sure of the truth. Everyone should have known better. As Board Secretary Mr. Joseph Grape noted after the first suicide of a patient at Sheppard Pratt way back in 1892, “It is well known that insane people … possess abnormal cunning … and they outwit the most wonderful care that experienced foresight can devise, short of cruel restraints.” Judging from the nurses’ demeanor, from their grim silence and humorless movements, judging from the emergency hall meeting called especially for the occasion, I think she’s won. They don’t want to talk about that. They won’t talk about it. They want to discuss how we, the remaining patients, feel about what happened. There aren’t a lot of hands up volunteering thoughts, feelings, or complaints. All the sensible talk I expect to hear hovers, eventually settling down mutely, practically touching the carpet. Above it, still aloft in the oxygen we share, the word “copycat” gleams as obvious and impossible to ignore as the disembodied grin of the Cheshire cat. That’s the real reason we’re all sitting here; that’s the damage good Dr. Simons wants to contain.

  B-1’s routine churns almost indifferently to life within hours but I’m cowed. The nest ramps slowly back up to its customary vitality with the filtered sound of chatter, phones ringing, and calls for coffee. One of the nurses freshens the communal candy bowl—tiny Mr. Goodbars, Hershey with Almonds, Krackel, and plain Hershey bars no bigger than matchboxes. Shiny silver foil minnows school in the trash can as the sugar makes it almost okay.

  But I can’t shake the moment the sheeted body sashayed on its wobbly litter down the hall and out the locked B-1 exit door. Seeing it go, I knew this wasn’t the place to toy with minding such a hapless misery as mine. A waiting ambulance; carnival lights red, white, and blue spilling garish beams onto cut grass; a sheet hanging in a bathroom three feet from a stinking toilet. There has to be a more stylish way to wind it all down.

  Surely I’m not alone. The Sweetie event must force every patient to savor the balm of a tenderly nursed antipathy toward life. I question the leakage of time and how I find myself mired in it again and again. The event prods to life a communally held immoderation as the electricity of death surges through B-1. No longer an abstraction or an easy
acronym, its newly made gloss of reality practically glows. You can die here.

  CHAPTER 30

  A Splendid Woman

  Grief has slipped on her best kidskin gloves to tilt the hall a degree or two off balance. The place feels screwier than usual when I find something new mixed with the usual morning routine. Amid the early swishing gurgles of water running and toilets flushing and the commotion of shift change I spot Juliet walking in the hall, eyeing vulnerable accomplices, teasing me with her youthful beauty and flashes of a shiny dagger. She’s alert, listening, repeating over and over, “Yea, noise. Then I’ll be brief.”

  As I pass their station the voices of the night nurses mix with Ophelia’s almost inaudible whisper, an echo of the previous day, telling me that it’s time to seek the bending willow, begging me to gather “crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.” The nurses, puffy-faced from dozing all night in an office chair, gather their purses, empty Tupperware, and go-mugs while communicating the overnight status of the hall to the perky, freshly painted faces of the incoming crew of day nurses. They don’t seem to notice a thing.

  As I wash my face and brush my teeth, these presences entangle me in their errands. Exacting geniuses wanting their way. There’s Plath beside me as I spit and rinse, asking me to gather rags and towels and bits of cloth; she wants me to dampen them and seal every door. It’s still early; most patients aren’t yet up; we move quietly. Don’t wake the children. Turn the gas to six.

  The noise of the med line follows the return from breakfast in the cafeteria. “Take with food.” The dispensing nurse pushes a Dixie cup of water and a ketchup-at-the-drive-in paper container with the pills in it through the slot in the window. A pale woman stands at the nurses’ station oblivious to the orderly line. Of course, Emma Bovary, “extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom,” begging for the blue jar of arsenic, protesting when the nurses repeatedly ignore her plea. But the nurse can’t hear or see her—she’s all mine. Again and again she tells them she only wants “to kill the rats that kept her from sleeping.”

  Smoke time produces a thick haze that drifts down the corridor to either side of the main room as if we madmen and madwomen built a fire but neglected to open the flue. I smoke my third cigarette in a row and return to my room. The hall goes mute as soon as the trance of my book takes hold, the new location broken only by the sound of the janitor running a vacuum back and forth directly outside my door. I manage to loosen and almost discard my present reality until the noise of the lunch line breaks my concentration.

  I mostly look at my lunch in the cafeteria, where I sit alone at a table. Returning to my room, I nearly trip over the graceful, lanky form on her knees. Anna K. kneels there at the threshold repeating, “What am I doing? What am I doing? What for?” The red bag rests on the carpet next to her as she waits. I yearn to kneel down with her, join her chorus, and feel the vibration of the rail just before the rush of air and metal are upon us. It’s getting crowded, these women appearing wherever I turn. I can’t close the door with Anna blocking it, but even if I could my room isn’t free. Lily Bart has fallen asleep on the cutter’s empty bed. When I wake her she seems to “shrink from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes contract in a blaze of light.” Reaching quickly for a small bottle of chloral next to her she murmurs that she “must take a brief bath of oblivion.” She explains, “Perspective had disappeared—the next day pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to follow.” Yes.

  Anna and Lily reappear in my room now and again but for the most part I remain uninterrupted. The early afternoon sun radiates through the window to warm me. I doze. Restless as the day drags itself forward, I pace the hall only to encounter Bertha Mason banging persistently at the unit’s locked door. Seeking the roof, she’s frustrated and wild with fury. There are no curtains to set alight. I’m far more in sympathy with Eustacia Vye; calm and contained despite Bertha’s rants, she mumbles to herself as she keeps pace with me the length of the hall in her ravishing gray silk gown. “I must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this year, and the year after that as before. How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman …”

  The ghosts and the hours they pass through line up only to fall neatly into the grid. It’s so dull I study the semantics of the blue paper menu hanging on the whiteboard by the nurses’ station: “Dinner: Monday—Macaroni & Cheese, Green Salad, Roll with Butter, Chocolate Ice Cream; Tuesday—Salisbury Steak, Green Beans, Cornbread, Butterscotch Pudding; Wednesday—Spaghetti & Meatballs, Green Salad, Roll with Butter, Vanilla Cake …” only to be interrupted by the calm deliberation of a woman who knows what she wants. Woolf, taking her cane, fixes her hat and turns to me, her eyes pleading for me to help her find stones to fill the empty pockets of her overcoat. The murky bottom of the Ouse wants her.

  Shaking her off, I turn back to the bulletin board. The menu and its meager strip of tape compete for space and attention with notices of minor schedule changes: “The SEPH Pool will be Closed from 5–6 P.M. on Wednesdays for staff use during the month of September”; bleached brochures for hospital-sanctioned halfway houses in the Towson vicinity; times and locations for AA, OA, NA, and ALNON meetings; information about the Maryland Youth Crisis Hotline 1-800-422-0009. I almost amuse myself considering what sort of trouble I might make if I called the Hotline from the pay phone. But whom would I report first?

  Hours slide past before nurses and social workers begin knocking on doors to prompt attendance at Hall Meeting. Forced to participate, I reply with monosyllabic answers to “How was your day, Cree?” “Could you tell us about how you’re feeling? Whatever you’d like to include.” In a corner of the common room, I spot Portia quietly begging for coals, not for warmth but to eat; she will swallow fire. A woman after my own heart.

  When I return to my room, the commotion of the lines for dinner and for meds is louder than the morning version of the same as patients peel away from their center, the frustration and monotony of the day undoing whatever sense of order sleep left them with. Amid it all, I spot Sexton. She has removed her glittering gold rings as if she’s getting ready for bed but she’s sipping a big glass of vodka. She appears lost, confused. But I can’t show her the exit to the garage where her red Mercury Cougar is already running. I step away from the dinner line, making a pretense of helping her look for what I know is not there, sniffing the air for a hint of carbon monoxide, but all I smell is the furniture.

  After the post-dinner lull, the activity of smoke time grows audible for the third time, followed by the changing of the guard from day to night shift. Cheerful chatting among nurses, the reverse of the morning’s, passing clipboards and status updates for each patient. At last the lull of water running in the sinks, toilets flushing, and the dimming of the hall lights signal the end. I push open the bathroom door to brush my teeth, but in the darkness of the room before the light goes on I sense a determined, manic presence passing from one end of the stalls to the other. With the light on I can see her open eyes but she’s sleepwalking, her nightdress trailing behind her over the dirty tiles as she rubs her hands together: “Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” I stand to wash with her, showing her the soap in the hope we can together scrub away our misdeeds.

  If I could “go away” with any of these women, I would. But there’s no romance or glory to be had in dying now—or worse, trying to die—here. To say or think I’m “going away,” as I often have said to Dr. Kohl, is evasive. The phrase masks the terribly enticing fantasy of death by disappearance. When I really think about it, the attraction of death—its drama and romance—comes on like a bright surprise. When it’s on me as it is now I feel the calm of routine interrupted by a chaotic willfulness as the proximity of freedom explodes like a tropical tree in the night to reveal an obscenity of carmine blossoms at first light.

  But there are no geniuses to spare on B-1 and I need to remind myself there’s no
thing cool or romantic about death. Unfortunately, B-1 is haunted and I’m locked inside. My sister, who can’t visit but writes letter upon letter, is furious because she thinks I’ve tried to kill myself—perhaps a mistranslation from my father of the danger of suicide mentioned by Dr. Kohl or of the burning itself read as a gesture toward death. I want to tell her I wouldn’t do that to her—to her of all people in the whole world. She’d be the one I’d stay for.

  I wish I could promise her to keep my life but I don’t exactly feel in control. It’s gotten away from me, sneaking around my conscious mind, having found a better way in. Like the burning it’s not entirely up to me anymore.

  Rather than brood over how sorry I am to scare my sister, rather than encountering more ghosts, perhaps in bed with me, rather than guessing at the painful sources of Sweetie’s despair and what it must have felt like to hang, I conjure a trick of undressing that begins with my pants: taking them down knee to floor, they sit rigid, almost upright, as if I were still in them to hold their shape; hands crossed over my stomach, I grab the hem of my shirt to pull it over my head before dropping it in a shapeless heap; arms backward, fiddling with my bra hooks, I free my breasts, more naked looking than the rest of me, they resemble the pasty skin around the black matted imperfection of hair covering my pubic bone as I slip my underwear down, stepping out of them one leg at a time; insignificant, the undergarments are mere rags on the floor. I stand, nearly done: unzipping my legs they fall away, going somewhere, likely nowhere near the floor; I cast aside my torso with the undoing of pearl buttons stretching from hips to neck before releasing my face with the pull of a ribbon that unravels a bow; only then unbuckling my arms like old-fashioned ski boots. Where my nakedness once stood I find myself gone. I learned the trick long ago all by myself; practiced by necessity, there’s no rehearsal for undressing of this kind.