Ultraviolet

by R. J. Anderson

  “And as you can see in the file,” he went on, “there were several more incidents of violent and self-injuring behavior during Ms. Jeffries’ stay at St. Luke’s Hospital. She showed little recognition of individuals, and her speech was fragmented and nonsensical. She could obey simple commands and carry out basic self-care with some assistance, but she was unable to speak coherently or show any insight into her situation until she had been receiving regular doses of antipsychotic medication for nearly a week. It is my belief that Ms. Jeffries’ mental state has improved only as a result of the medication, and that if she is allowed to discontinue treatment her mental health will seriously deteriorate, making her once again a risk to herself and to others. For that reason, I would like to continue treating her in the hospital as an involuntary patient.”

  “Thank you,” said Ms. Menard, and turned to my lawyer. “Do you have any questions for Dr. Minta?”

  My lawyer did his best, I’ll give him that. He spent nearly ten minutes quizzing Dr. Minta about various details of my case, trying to poke holes in his reasoning. But his arguments sounded petty even to me, and it was hard to imagine that the board would be convinced by them.

  “Dr. Minta,” asked the community representative, “what makes you believe that Ms. Jeffries is not suited to become a voluntary patient?”

  “Her conversations with myself and some of the nurses indicate that she has an unrealistic view of her own mental health,” said Dr. Minta. “She believes that she has fully recovered from her psychotic episode and does not require further treatment or medication. If she were made voluntary, she would leave the hospital immediately.”

  The community representative looked grave. “Thank you, Dr. Minta.”

  “Are there any further questions?” asked Ms. Menard, after a pause. “No? Very well. Dr. Minta, would you like to call in your witness?”

  My lawyer had warned me about this moment, and I’d done my best to be prepared. But still my lungs constricted and my throat closed tight as an airlock, as the door opened and my mother walked into the room.

  . . .

  The night before my eighth birthday, I went to bed early, giddy with the thought of presents in the morning. It took me a long while to trick myself to sleep, and when I did, it was only to be shocked awake moments later by a thunderclap so loud it shook the house. It couldn’t have lasted longer than three or four seconds, even with the storm right overhead. But to me that terrible noise seemed to go on forever. Pillars of rust and ochre loomed across my vision, threatening to topple and crush me flat. I held my breath, my small body rigid with alarm—but then the sound faded, taking the giant shapes with it.

  I waited a moment, fearfully testing the silence, then tried to settle myself once more. But my head had barely touched the pillow when lightning fractured the darkness, stinging my eyes and searing my tongue like pepper. Then the clouds exploded and the rain came hissing down, pelting my window and my ears with bruising force. I cowered beneath the covers, not knowing which would shatter first, the glass or me.

  Another crash of thunder, then more lightning, while the wind whipped the trees into a leafy froth and the rain continued to pound. I pulled the blankets over my head, wishing with all my might for the faceless giants and the horrible taste in my mouth to go away—but my senses refused to listen to anything but the storm. At last I flung the covers aside, fled down the hall to my parents’ room and collapsed by the foot of their bed, sobbing.

  “Alison?” said my mother sharply. “What’s wrong?”

  I’d forgotten that my father wasn’t there, that he’d gone to a conference and wouldn’t be home until tomorrow. I’d made a mistake, but it was too late to fix it now. “Maman, I’m scared. The storm, it’s so loud—”

  I tasted a buttery rustle of silk as my mother slipped out of bed to kneel beside me. I threw my arms around her waist and hid my face in her lap, hoping that this once she would hug me the way she used to, before I’d talked about gold stars and spoiled everything. But her body stiffened, and her hands closed on my shoulders, pushing me upright again.

  “Alison, calm yourself,” she told me. “Breathe in, deep—like that, yes—and out. And once more. There. Better?”

  It wasn’t. Outside the storm still raged, but I couldn’t bear my mother’s brittle touch any longer. I scrambled back into the corner, hugging myself for comfort. “I don’t want to go back to my room,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  My mother sat back on her heels and looked at me, her fine features drawn with anxiety. “It’s . . . the thunder, yes?” she said. “The noise, that’s all that bothers you?”

  She always sounded so much more French when she was afraid. “Yes,” I lied.

  Her dark head tipped to one side as she thought. “Well, then,” she said, “let me give you something to help you.” She rose and went to the dresser, treading carefully around me as she passed. “This was your grandmother’s,” she said, lifting out a long beaded necklace from the drawer. “It calmed her sometimes. Maybe it will do the same for you.” She let it drop, and as the cross bumped into my palm I realized that it was a rosary.

  “There are prayers to go with it,” she went on as another flash of lightning lit her face, making the strained lines around her eyes and mouth deeper than ever. “But I can’t teach them to you now. For tonight, just hold it in your hand and talk to the Blessed Virgin. She will ask Jesus to calm the storm, and help you not to be afraid.” Then, as I remained silent, “Alison?”

  “Okay,” I said, gulping another breath. My legs trembled as I pushed myself upright, and the thought of walking back to my room alone made my stomach cramp. Still, I knew better than to let my mother see just how upset I was, or give her any more reason to wonder why.

  “The storm will be over soon,” she told me as she guided me out into the hall. “And tomorrow will be a beautiful day.”

  I waited until her door had closed at my back, tongue sliding into the latch with a reproachful click. Then I ran back to my bed and dove beneath the covers. The rosary beads pressed against my palm, cold and comfortless, while outside the storm roared on.

  I didn’t pray that night. I just clutched my grandmother’s rosary, and cried.

  . . .

  For the next twenty minutes she was the star of the hearing— Suzanne Jeffries, forty-three years old, neatly groomed and professionally dressed, a slight redness around the eyes her only sign of emotion. She told the board that even as a child, I had experienced hallucinations and shown signs of being unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. I was intelligent, but found it difficult to concentrate in class and frequently had to do extra work at home to catch up. I had few friends—really just one, she said—and spent most of my spare time alone in my bedroom, playing my keyboard and reading “strange” books about other worlds.

  Dr. Minta nodded soberly, as though this was just what he had expected. “Did you have any other reason to be concerned about Alison’s mental health?”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “There were a number of times when I expected Alison to be up set by some news she had heard, or something bad that had happened to her. But she showed very little reaction, or none at all.”

  Then Dr. Minta asked my mother to describe the state in which I had arrived home on the afternoon of June seventh, and in her low, faintly accented voice she told the board every detail. How I’d burst through the front door with blood on my hands and collapsed on the doormat, sobbing that I’d killed Tori Beaugrand. She’d tried to help me up, but I’d swatted her aside. I’d screamed when her cell phone rang, then grabbed it off the table and hurled it through the living room window. Then I’d attacked one of the police officers who’d come to investigate, and it had taken two of them to handcuff me and drag me outside, shrieking all the way.

  “Would you say, Mrs. Jeffries, that Alison’s behavior made you fear for your own safety?” asked Dr. Minta.

  “Yes,” my mother replied, wiping her eyes wit
h a tissue. “Very much so. It was . . . terrifying.”

  “Did you believe at that point that she had physically harmed another person?”

  “I—I didn’t know what to think. When she said she’d disintegrated Tori with her mind—I knew that couldn’t be true, but . . .”

  “Do you have any other children besides Alison, Mrs. Jeffries?”

  “I have a son, Christopher.” She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “He has—he is eleven years. Old.”

  My mother always forgot her English grammar when she was nervous, probably because my grandmother used to punish her for speaking anything but French in her presence. I didn’t know a lot about Grandmère; she’d died before I was born. But I knew she hadn’t been an easy person to live with.

  “And would you be concerned for Christopher’s safety,” Dr. Minta asked my mother, “if Alison returned home?”

  She lifted her head then, and those dark, haunted eyes met mine. I returned the look without flinching, though it wasn’t easy. Please don’t do this to me, I begged silently. I would never hurt you or Dad or Chris. You have to know that.

  My mother bit her lip, and for a moment I thought I’d convinced her. But then she averted her gaze and said, “Yes. I would be concerned.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jeffries,” said Dr. Minta. “I have no further questions.”

  . . .

  The hearing went on for another twenty minutes, but it might as well have stopped right then. I’d been planning to testify on my own behalf, but what good would it do? I couldn’t deny I’d done all the violent, crazy things my mother and Dr. Minta had described, even if I had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I’d done them. Like how the high, wheedling ring of the cell phone had sounded, for a horrible instant, like Tori’s Noise. And the psychologist’s tie had been so orange-pounding-loud that it hurt me, and I’d only been trying to make him take it off.

  My lawyer put up a good fight, but the leaden feeling in my stomach told me we’d already lost the battle. And when the board thanked us and asked us all to leave so they could make their deliberations, I felt as though I were staring down a long, dark tunnel with no end in sight. Disembodied voices murmured in the back of my brain, mocking my failure, and suddenly I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. I gave a limp handshake to my lawyer, and headed for the door.

  “Alison,” said my mother, catching my arm. “Please, try to understand—”

  I stopped and looked at her, knowing what she would see in my face: the expressionless mouth, the dead eyes. “Dad can come to visit me anytime he wants,” I said. “But not you. I don’t want to see you again.”

  Then I pulled myself free of her and walked out.

  . . .

  The Consent and Capacity Board delivered their verdict later that afternoon. In their judgment, I was not competent to make my own treatment decisions, nor was I suited to become a voluntary patient. So for the next four weeks at least I’d have to remain at Pine Hills, and submit to whatever treatments Dr. Minta prescribed for me.

  It wasn’t exactly a shock, but the news still hit me hard, and I spent the next two days in a state of hollow-eyed despair. For the first time in my life, the thought crossed my mind that I might be better off dead. Not that I had any real intention of committing suicide—in fact the idea had barely occurred to me before I shoved it into the dustiest, most cobwebby corner of my mental attic. But it made me realize that if I didn’t find something to do with myself soon, I’d end up falling into a black hole of depression from which I might never escape.

  It wasn’t easy to stop brooding over my failure and start thinking about how to overcome it, but once I did, it wasn’t hard to figure out where my appeal had gone wrong. I’d thought my best chance of getting out of Pine Hills was to convince the board that Dr. Minta was mistaken about me. Only now did I realize that the person I really needed to convince, the one I should have been working on all along, was Dr. Minta himself.

  But how could I persuade him that I was capable of making my own decisions? In my mind, he was still the enemy, and he knew it. And no amount of pleading or reasoning was going to change his belief that I didn’t really understand what was best for me, that my thinking was “disordered” and only his magic pills could make it right.

  Then it came to me. The perfect way to prove to Dr. Minta, and my mother too, that I didn’t need antipsychotic medication to keep me sane. It would take time and patience, but since I was going to be stuck here until the end of July anyway, what did I have to lose?

  So when the nurse came around with the medicine cart that evening and handed me the familiar paper cups, I tossed the pills into my mouth and followed them up with a swig of water as usual. But it was only the water I swallowed, and the moment she stopped watching me I spit the tablets back into my hand.

  I’d figure out what to do with them later.

  SIX (IS PURPLE)

  My second week at Pine Hills blurred into the third, and my fellow patients came and went. I’d just managed to talk myself into forgiving Kirk for the chocolate incident when he plummeted into a depressive phase, and started spending most of his free time in bed. Around the same time, Micheline came back to Yellow Ward, but then she found a paper clip in Mr. Lamoreux’s classroom and sliced up her wrist so badly she needed stitches. And a couple of days later, Sanjay sneaked out and got half a kilometer up the highway before anyone realized he was gone.

  But even with all of that going on, I managed to stay out of trouble. Soon I was allowed to walk the halls without supervision and even enjoy courtyard privileges. I was still cutting back on my meds, but carefully—for the first few days I even broke the pills and took half, just to make sure the withdrawal symptoms didn’t get too much for me. Little by little the fog over my senses began to lift, and the world regained its proper shapes and colors. During my sessions with Dr. Minta, I kept my eyes down and said little, but every day I felt a little more alive.

  Meanwhile my father came back to see me as promised, but not my mother, and the Family Counseling part of my schedule remained mercifully free. I had an uncomfortable feeling that Dr. Minta was working on that, though. He’d asked me to write a short essay about my childhood and turn it in by next week, so that we could talk about it at a future session.

  Later that week, I was on my way to the cafeteria when I noticed a stranger standing by the nurses’ station. From the back, he looked so ordinary that I almost passed by without a second glance. But then he turned and I stopped dead, my heart colliding with my ribcage.

  His eyes were violet.

  I’m not exaggerating. They weren’t just blue or blue-gray. They were that deep bluish purple you only see when refracting light through a prism—or when someone is wearing tinted contact lenses.

  And yet the man in front of me didn’t look like he cared about fashion, or had even bothered to make its acquaintance. Not only was his shirt wrinkled and partly untucked, but he’d paired it with a shapeless cotton sweater vest and slacks in exciting shades like Old Filing Cabinet and Dryer Lint. His hair was the color of a thunderstorm reflected in a mud puddle, and looked like he’d cut it himself with blunt scissors several weeks ago.

  And yet he was clean shaven, and the apple-green tang of his scent told me he’d showered recently as well. His face was full of angles and wry humor, and he was younger than I’d thought at first—I guessed mid-twenties, though there was something ageless about him that made it hard to be sure. His gaze met mine directly, and as a smile deepened the corners of his long mouth I surprised myself by smiling back.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” panted a familiar voice, and the man and I turned in unison as Dr. Minta hurried toward us. I braced myself for the inevitable hearty greeting, but for once my psychiatrist didn’t even seem to notice my presence. “Konrad Minta,” he said, gripping the visitor’s hand. “Welcome to Pine Hills. Would you like a tour, or shall we go straight to my office?”

  This obviously ha
d nothing to do with me, so I gave the two men a wide berth and walked on. But I could feel those violet eyes on me all the way to the cafeteria, and as I picked up my tray I couldn’t help wondering who the stranger was, and what had brought him here. To o old for a patient, too young for a parent, too sloppily dressed to be interviewing for a place on staff . . . a journalist, maybe?

  “Hallo, bay-bee,” murmured a lecherous voice in my ear, and I jerked back, spilling iced tea all over my tray.

  “Kirk, I swear—”

  He gave me a look of wide-eyed innocence. “What? I didn’t say anything. It was him.” He pointed to Roberto, who was laboriously tweezing carrot sticks onto his plate. “I know he looks innocent, but when it comes to women, he’s the devil.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And he can throw his voice, too.”

  “A man of many talents,” agreed Kirk. “So where you gonna sit?”

  I shrugged, and headed for the nearest empty table. I was glad to see Kirk acting more like his old self again, but I didn’t want to encourage him too much in case he started bouncing off the walls. “How was Red Ward?” I asked, as we sat down.

  “Suuuuuuucked,” said Kirk in a tone so low it was half belch, and then in his normal voice, “But Ray told me to say hi.”

  No wonder everybody loved Ray. I’d only been in Red Ward for two days, more than three weeks ago, and he still hadn’t forgotten me. How did he do that? Not just remembering the names of all the patients he’d worked with, but the faces and personalities that went with them. It made me feel guilty that I wasn’t more like that myself.