“Do you make her have hallucinations or smell things that are not there? Do you make her doubt her own sanity or reality?”
“No,” Deborah said. “The illness is not seeing or hearing things—the illness is underneath those. I never gave her symptoms. The illness is the volcano; she will have to decorate the slopes herself.”
“Are you still cold?” the doctor asked.
“Yes, ever since these rains began to fall and the icy fogs settled. On the ward they never turn the heat on.”
“Well, in the outside—the world—it is August. The sky is clear and the sun is very hot. I am afraid that the cold and the fog are inside you.”
The tumor woke, angered that there were other powers contending for her allegiance, and it sent a sharp bolt through its kingdoms to remind them that it was still supreme. Deborah doubled up, gasped with pain, and began to tremble. I warned you, the Censor said. The heavy smell of ether and chloroform came to her and she heard her heart pounding. “I tried to kill my sister when she was born,” she said. She was surprised that the information did not come out any louder than her own voice. No cannon boomed.
“How did you do this?”
“I tried to throw her out the window. I was almost ready to throw her when mother came in and stopped me.”
“Did your parents punish you?”
“No. No one ever mentioned it again.”
She felt a slow, fearful gratitude to her family, who had lived with a monster and treated it like a person.
“After the operation …” the doctor mused.
“We were in the sunny house where we had moved for that one year. No matter what they gave me, you see, no matter what they did for me—” She was near tears for a moment, until the sickness remembered that tears were human. You are not of them, Yr said, and the tears drew away as suddenly as if they had never approached.
“Did you just think about killing her?”
“No! I had her in front of the window all ready to go.”
“And your parents never spoke of it or asked you about it?”
“No.” Deborah knew that they must have taken the naked fact and buried it hurriedly somewhere, like carrion. But she knew well how the stench of a buried lie pursues the guilty, hanging in the air they breathe until everything smells of it, rancid and corrupting. Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.
She had said, What is that awful stench?
Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.
Deborah began to laugh, so that the doctor leaned toward her. “What is it? Take me along with you.”
“Pity,” Deborah said, “pity. Somewhere there is a thief who has heard that people bury and hide their gold and jewels. Can you see the expression on his face when he comes on what I have buried!” For a moment they both laughed.
chapter eleven
When the evening shift came on, Helene placed herself in front of the nursing station and began stamping her feet heavily. The noise soon brought an attendant out.
“What’s that matter now, Helene?”
“Case closed,” Helene said. “I’m stamping Mr. Hobbs’s case closed.”
She was smiling archly, so that the attendant’s face tightened. It was supposed to be a big secret that the night before Mr. Hobbs had gone home after his shift, closed his doors and windows, turned on the gas, and died. In the nun-prisoner-pigmy confinement of Ward D everyone knew, even the unknowing.
As lunatics, crazies, screwballs, nuts, the patients felt no responsibility to be decent and desist from speaking ill of the dead. Where deformity of the body was regarded with certain mercy, death and its conventions were heaped with scorn. Helene had once said, “A nut is someone whose noose broke,” for they had all wanted to kill themselves, they had all tried suicide more or less diligently, and they all envied the dead. Part of their illness was that they saw the whole world revolving around themselves, and so what Hobbs had done was to stick out his tongue at them from a place where they could not get at him to slap his face for it.
The evening shift was here, and the patients were all waiting to see who would be taking Hobbs’s place. When those at the head of the hall saw, they carried the news back.
“It’s a Nose—a new one—a new Nose,” and there was an almost palpable groan. Noses were Conscientious Objectors who had selected to work in mental hospitals as an alternative to prison. Lee Miller had originated the name “Nose” a long time ago by saying, “Oh, those conchies, I hate them. They won’t fight, so the government says …We’ll rub your noses in it for you! It’s either prison or the nuthouse!’ ” Helene had laughed and someone else had said, “Well, they’re the noses’ and we’re it.”
Now Carla only murmured, “I like being somebody’s punishment; it makes me feel needed,” and she laughed, but with a bitterness that was rare for her.
The Noses usually came in pairs. “I suppose we should call one of them a Nostril,” precise Mary said, rubbing the blood from invisible stigmata. The patients laughed.
“Maybe he’ll be all right,” Carla said. “Anything’s better than Hobbs.”
They watched the new staff member go his first long and hard walk down the hall. He was terrified. They saw his terror with feelings caught between amusement and anger. Constantia, in the seclusion section, began to scream when she saw him, and Mary, hearing it, said, “Oh, my God, he’s going to faint!” laughing and then hurt: “She’s only a person, you know.”
“He’s afraid he’ll catch what we have,” Deborah said, and they all laughed, because Hobbs had caught it, and died from it too.
The expedition neared them.
“Get up off the floor, will you please?” the head ward nurse said to the group of patients sitting against the walls of the hall and corridor.
Deborah looked at the Nose. “Obstacle,” she said.
She meant that she and the other patients with feet stuck out before the terrified man were like the contrivances in the obstacle courses that men must run through in their military training, that she and they understood their substitution as “the horrors of war,” and that they would try to fulfill the Army’s desire that this man’s training be rigorous. But the nurses neither laughed nor understood, and passed by with another admonition about getting off the floor. The patients all knew that it was merely form. Everybody always sat on the floor and it was only when guests came that the nurses, like suburban wives, clucked at the dust and wished that “things were neater.”
Constantia was beginning to work herself up into an all-night howl, when the ward door opened and McPherson let himself in. Deborah looked hard at him, saw everyone suddenly go easier, and said meaningfully, “They should have changed the lock.”
She was thinking that McPherson’s key-turn and incoming was of a completely different order from the one which had preceded it—as different as if there had been different doors and different locks. She felt obscurely that the words had somehow done her injury, and so she went over them, seeking the culprit.
“They … should … have … changed … the … lock.”
McPherson said, “I don’t like this key business anyway.” Carla looked around, as Deborah had just before, knowing that no one understood, but with McPherson, not understanding carried no penalty of scorn or hatred. She sat back quietly.
They were all glad that McPherson was there, and because feeling this meant that they were vulnerable, they had to try to hide it. “Without those keys you wouldn’t know yourself from us!”
But McPherson only laughed—a laughter at himself, not at them. “We’re not so different,” he said, and went into the nursing station.
“Who is he kidding!” Helene said. There was no malice in her statement; she was merely hurrying to rebuild the wall that he had breached. She turned and disappeared
into her limbo, and because McPherson’s afterimage still hung in the air there were no catty remarks about her fadeout. But when the procession of magi passed by once more, bearing with them the Nose, rigid and clamp-jawed with fear, no one could withhold the cruelty which seemed to each her true and natural self. Helene shuddered as he passed; Carla looked blank; Mary, always inappropriately gay, trilled laughter, saying, “Well, Hobbs’s bodkins, here comes another gas customer!”
“Let’s call him Hobbs’s Leviathan, because he may be a whale of a lot worse!”
“Their religion doesn’t permit them to commit suicide,” Sylvia said from her place against the wall.
The ward was suddenly silent. Sylvia had not said anything at all for over a year and her voice was so toneless that the sound almost seemed to come from the wall itself. The silence hung in the ward as everyone sought to make sure that there had really been words and that they had come from the frozen and mute piece of ward furniture that was Sylvia. They could all see each other checking for symptoms—did she say it or did I only hear it? Then Lee Miller broke from inaction and went to the closed door of the nursing station. She pounded on it until the nurse opened the door and looked out in annoyance, as if confronted by an unfamiliar salesman.
“Call the doctor,” Lee said tersely.
“Sylvia talked.” “The ward report is not finished,” the nurse said, and closed the door. Lee pounded again. After a while the door opened. “Well …?”
“You’d better get that doctor, because if you don’t, it will be your fault and not mine. Adams will come—she always does. She came last time at three in the morning when Sylvia talked!”
“What are you all excited about, Miller?” the nurse said. “What did she say?”
“It doesn’t matter and it wouldn’t make sense to you because it was part of the conversation.”
“About what?”
“Oh, Christ. Please!”
Standing between Sylvia and the excited Lee Miller, Deborah saw how stupid any fragment of the conversation would sound. Sylvia had extinguished her brief, faint light. Lee had an aura of dark light around her, the Yri sign for one who was tankutuku—Yri for unhidden—open to the elements and far from shelter. Lee had put herself in this horrible state for someone else, who would never praise her for it or feel gratitude. Yri had a word for this, too; used rarely, it was nelaq: eyeless. Deborah now wanted to thank Lee for being eyeless and unhidden. Yr praised Lee, but Deborah could not speak the necessary words.
She had to do something. Lee was all alone in that hideous place called “Involvement” or “Reality” and no one could help her. Locked in a motionless body—as motionless now as Sylvia’s—mute in English, Deborah began to tremble. In fear she made another headlong dash for Yr; the deeper the better, but the flaming Anterrabae laughed. How dare you cast with the world! You will be punished, you traitoress! The way to Yr closed before her.
No! No! If you do that I will go insane! she cried to them.
You admire the nelaq tankutuku, do you? Well then, there is the world. Take it!
A black wind came up. The walls dissolved and the world became a combination of shadows. Seeking for the shadow of firm ground on which to stand, she was only deceived again when it warped away like a heat mirage; she looked toward a landfall and the wind blew it away. All direction became a lie. The laws of physics and solid matter were repealed and the experience of a lifetime of tactile sensation, motion, form, gravity, and light were invalidated. She did not know whether she was standing or sitting down, which way was upright, and from where the light, which was a stab as it touched her, was coming. She lost track of the parts of her body; where her arms were and how to move them. As sight went spinning erratically away and back, she tried to clutch at thoughts only to find that she had lost all memory of the English language and that even Yri was only gibberish. Memory went entirely, and then mind, and then there was only the faster and faster succession of sensations, unidentifiable without words or thoughts by which to hold them. These suggested something secret and horrible, but she could not catch what it was because there was at last no longer a responding self. The terror, now, could have no boundary.
When she came from the Punishment she was looking at her fingernails. They were blue with cold. It was the summer of a certain time and there was sunlight outside, and greenness, but she dared not use her mind to fix the time lest the Punishment return and take it away again. She got up from somebody’s bed, where she found herself lying, pulled a blanket from it, and, still chattering with the cold, walked into the hall. She didn’t recognize anyone, but at least she knew to a reasonable extent that she existed and that she was looking at three-dimensional solids, called people, who moved in an element called time. She went up to one of them and asked an irrelevant question: “What day is it?”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Oh, then, what day was it?” The person didn’t understand, and since she was too confused to pursue the point, she walked away. Behind her the three-dimensional solids were complaining about the heat. They fanned the air of their time in front of their faces.
She felt nauseated by the freezing cold, so she went back and lay down on a bed, desperately grateful that she recognized it as hers.
You see what it is … Anterrabae said genially. We can really do it. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we can do it up, down, and sideways. You thought all those descriptions were metaphors: lost one’s mind, cracked-up, crazed, demented, lunatic? Alas, you see, they are all quite, quite true. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we are protecting you. When you admire the world again, wait for our darkness.
Later, Dr. Fried asked her what she had found out since their last session.
“I found out about being insane,” Deborah said, and remembering with awe the immensity and power and horror of it, she shook her head. “It really is something. Yes, it sure is something.”
The struggle between the Nose, Hobbs’s Leviathan, and the patients went on. His rigid fundamentalist beliefs made him see insanity as a just desert for its victims, as God’s vengeance, or as the devil’s work, and sometimes as all three at once. As the days passed, his fear waned and the time of his righteous wrath was at hand. He saw that he was suffering persecution for his faith.
Against his loathing, the sick fought in their sick way. The literate rewrote the Bible or ridiculed its passages to make him horrified. Constantia made flagrant sexual advances to him. Helene took the towel he brought her with a little curtsy, saying, “From Paraclete to Paranoid. Amen, amen.” And Deborah made a few pointed observations about the similarity between psychotics and religious fanatics. McPherson sensed the anger and violence blowing like a wind over the ward and wondered what he could do about it. There was not enough staff anyway. The two other new conscientious objectors were doing well on different wards, and one of them was showing signs of ability at working with mental patients. He didn’t like the new man on ward D, Ellis, much himself, but he was sympathetic toward him. Ellis was not suited for the work at all; he feared and hated the patients, and looked upon the government which had punished him as the early Christian martyrs must have looked upon the Roman procurators. Because of this, Ellis had to drag the dead Hobbs after him in the nickname the patients had given him. The worst of it was that Ellis’s religion could not see suicide as anything but a sinful horror, monstrous in nature.
So, Ellis dragged a dead and stinking whale, and McPherson mused that there was no hunter in the world as clever or merciless in placing barbs in a weak place as these sick people. Sometimes he wondered why Hobbs had been attacked and never he; why Ellis, now, and not he. Never was Helene’s tremendous store of knowledge used to damn him; never did the hard-faced Deborah Blau set her knife-edged tongue against him. He felt somehow that it might just be more than luck, but he did not truly know how or why he escaped the bitterness and unhappiness that vented itself all around him.
Now he watched the patients as they stoo
d, waiting for dinner, waiting for darkness, waiting for sedatives, waiting for sleep. Blau was standing near the barred and screened radiator, staring out at something beyond the wall. He had once asked her what she was looking at and she had answered him from her otherness, “I’m the dead, reckoning.”
Constantia was out of her seclusion room, but in seclusion still, muttering quietly in a corner. Lee Miller was clenching and unclenching her teeth; Miss Cabot from the dormitory insisting, “I’m the Wife of an Assassinated Ex-President of the United States!” Linda, Marion, and Sue Jepson, and all the rest were doing what they usually did. Yet there was a lingering sense of dangerous unrest—more than the sum of the parts of unrest. Ellis came out of the nursing station where he had been writing up the medication reports. The badgering began.
“Thar he blows—it’s Hobbs’s Leviathan!”
“Get thee behind me, Satan!”
“Hobbs committed suicide and the army committed him!”
“He got a commission, but not the kind that gives you eagles on the shoulder.”
“With his commission they give bats in the belfry!”
“What’s the latest from Hell today, Preacher?”
“Don’t ask him now. Let him look over his holdings first.”
There was a radio built in behind a heavy mesh screen in the wall. It was supposed to be on only during certain hours of the day and tuned only to certain innocuous semi-light music, but now McPherson went to the screen, unlocked it, and turned the radio on good and loud. Into the ward poured the tinny sounds of romantic-love dance music, pathetically, even hilariously, incongruous in the heavy urine-and-disinfectant atmosphere that permeated the ward. When the announcer’s moist voice bade them “Good night from the Starlight Roof,” Carla replied in a parody of romantic wistfulness, “A farewell flutter of my restraints, delicately, good night … good night …”
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Page 9
