The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

by Emilie Autumn

  hospital entry 7: checking

  Tonight, I woke to find Dr. Sharp standing over my bed, his face bent down so close to mine that I could feel his breath. When I opened my eyes, he explained that he had been walking by and thought he’d check on me.

  Now, there’s “checking on me” as in suicide watch, and then there’s “checking on me” in a tight t-shirt and jeans instead of his doctor’s uniform, crouching down against the wall and asking me to tell him about my dreams, tell him about my life, tell him about my madness, tell him about the things I’m studying in my books, things which he claims to find “fascinating.” And, in one brief explosion of intelligence, I know exactly what’s going on.

  Upon my next supervised trip to the bathroom, I study myself in the tiny, cracked mirror in the hope of spotting some feature—something in my physical appearance—that could be remotely alluring, so that I can wipe it out.

  I find nothing.

  hospital entry 8: found

  So! I am to be taken upstairs within the hour, though there is one wee complication. I will be going, nay, not to Ward A, the ward for mere suicidal depressives and drug addicts, but to the other ward, Ward B, the ward reserved for honest-to-god violent lunatics. And why? Because Ward B has a bed free.

  One of the nurses had popped in to deliver the happy news—“Aren’t you excited?”—followed by the good Dr. Sharp, who is looking strangely smug.

  He steps up to my bedside and, without a word, hands me a folded sheet of paper. He hovers over me as I open it, and I see something more unexpected, more shocking, than anything I ever could have imagined: I see the lyrics to one of my own songs, “Marry Me.” A true vaudevillian, I generally live by the “never let ‘em see you sweat” philosophy, and, as such, have a ready answer for anything, anytime, anywhere. Right now, I’ve got nothing.

  “Aha,” I manage. “This is my song . . .”

  I fall silent.

  I have no idea how to respond to this.

  Dr. Sharp figured out who I was. He tracked me down. He found my website (“www.emilieautumn.com, that’s you, isn’t it?”).

  He dug through it extensively, which I know because the lyrics to this particular song are hidden within the site; they are not available to the casual visitor.

  My mind races, the rat in the maze.

  Dr. Sharp is looking as though he had uncovered some marvelous secret and now ought to be rewarded.

  “I really liked it,” he says. “You’re a great writer, an incredible violinist, and your voice is . . . intoxicating. But I do have to ask you . . .”

  And here, the doctor takes the paper from my trembling hands, and a red pen from his own breast pocket.

  “Am I mistaken, or is this,” he circles one of the lines, “a sexual metaphor?”

  “Obviously,” I say, trying desperately not to sound alarmed.

  “I thought so,” he says, self-satisfied. “And what about this line?”

  “Yep, that too. Honestly though, Doctor, the entire song is a sexual metaphor, and not a very positive one, as you may have realized. It’s no secret. That’s kind of the point.”

  “That’s impressive, Emilie,” he says. “You’re very . . . clever.”

  Traffic in the hallway is increasing and my wheelchair has arrived. Dr. Sharp hurriedly thrusts the paper into my hands as though he is afraid to be seen with it, but I hand it back to him.

  “I don’t need it,” I tell him. “It’s my song.”

  “Oh, right, of course,” he says, flustered.

  Dr. Sharp stuffs the paper into his pocket, its sexual metaphors circled in red ink for all to see. He goes to the door, then turns back to fix his eyes upon me, collected once again, sure of himself.

  “You know, Emilie, I’ve been thinking a lot about your case, and, well, there’s something I’m pondering that I probably shouldn’t be telling you, but it’s up to you if you’d like to know it or not.”

  I tell him that he may as well just say what he has to say since he’s already set me up to wonder at it if he doesn’t.

  “Well, I was thinking that, perhaps, along with being bipolar, you might also have something called ‘borderline personality disorder.’ It’s a condition that stems back to your childhood, and would explain why you have these fragmented parts of yourself that don’t quite . . . fit together. You know how broken you are.”

  I ask Dr. Sharp if that means I’m schizo just to see what he says, but here’s the truth: I know exactly what borderline personality disorder is, and I also know that I don’t have it. A passing nurse tells me that it’s time to go, and, as I crawl down from my Emergency Ward gurney for the last time, Dr. Sharp finally says what he has really come to say.

  “I do have a private practice, and I could possibly find some time for you, outside of this hospital. Let me help you, Emilie. Let me fix you.”

  Well.

  There it is then.

  That old familiar self-loathing wells up inside of me, and I feel sick.

  I am a fucking fool for trusting this man enough to tell him a single thing about my brain and the person attached to it. I detest myself for ever believing he was here to help me. I hate that he is in control and I am the mental patient, and that, even were I willing to go through the process of reporting him and, inevitably, being called a liar and watching what little is left of my life being publicly ripped to shreds, Dr. Sharp is the department head—there is no one above him for me to go to.

  And so I say “thank you,” and he is gone.

  hospital entry 9: ward b

  BLOODY HELL WE’RE GOING UPSTAIRS!!!

  I would gladly have walked on my own two stocking feet, but, when I tried to stand, a guard pushed me roughly back down into the wheelchair, barking, “Nope, not allowed.” After a lengthy trip through the building marked by stops and starts and elevators, I was at last rolled past the double doors—heavy black iron, and painted in white with these welcoming words:

  PSYCH WARD

  Yes. They actually do call it that.

  In the center of the Psych Ward stands a single booth like a watchtower, encased entirely in glass windows that appear to be bulletproof. Nurses and other staff members, engaged in their coffee-drenched gossip, loiter inside of this protective chamber. I note that there is no such structure for the protection of the inmates in what, I am truly astonished to find, is a shared male/female ward.

  A morbidly obese “counselor” (is this summer camp?) grasps my arm and pulls me from the wheelchair. She leads me to a dingy area that is introduced to me as the Dining Room. Forcing me into an orange plastic chair, the counselor sits opposite, and I am ready for my inquisition. I will try, I tell myself, to make it quicker this time; I’ve had enough practice by now to know that telling the whole story never helps, and only confuses the brilliant minds that are in charge of the health of mine.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Even my edited version appears to have a few too many twists and turns for the counselor. She glazes over, and I force myself to stop talking.

  After making notes, she gives me a two-sentence summary of “what she is hearing from me.” She’s so way off it’s almost funny, and proves that she either wasn’t listening at all, or she knows I’m crazy and so it doesn’t matter what the problem is just so long as I am here under lock and key of the state.

  I am shown into a large room at the end of a long hall and behind two more industrial iron doors that look as though they ought to open out onto some back alley where a dumpster awaits housing hungry rodents. This room is to be my sleeping quarters.

  The room itself is stark and cold, a sterile cell filled with numerous beds, bars covering the small, high windows. I must truly be a horrible, dangerous, psychotic person who should never be allowed contact with civilized society, for I have actually succeeded in getting myself thrown into prison.

  And it is a prison.

>   It looks like a prison, it smells like a prison, and it all makes sense: Attempted suicide is attempted murder. I committed a crime. And I am here to be punished.

  hospital entry 10: on to you

  I would like to think that Dr. Sharp performs bedside service for every patient he sends to Maximum Security, but the startled expressions etched into the waxen faces of the nurses exiting my room as he enters indicate that he does not.

  My intruder picks up the book set upon my hard, thin mattress, the one about the plague, and flips through the pages—the pages I’ve filled with red wax.

  “I’m on to you,” he says, too coy for his age. “You’re here to do research. You’re writing a book.”

  Oh . . . my . . . god.

  I have crawled through the very depths of hell on my fucking knees, enduring horrors which I don’t dare write upon this page; I have suffered through so much that it had become unbearable, and, finally, as a simple act of mercy, I attempted to take my own life, a choice I sincerely regret the failure of. Now, I endure the judgment and the stigma that follows and will continue to follow me for the rest of my days upon this earth. For anyone to even suggest, as a joke or otherwise, that I committed myself to a mental hospital needlessly, and, worst of all, for the sake of “research,” is unfathomable. For a doctor, a psychiatrist whose job it is to get me through this mess alive, it is simply criminal.

  A nurse arrives to inform me that I will be required to dine with the rest of the patients tonight, and Dr. Sharp makes his prompt departure, confirming my suspicion that he is not supposed to be here.

  hospital entry 11: dinnertime

  What am I doing here?

  I am humiliated—a shred of a person.

  I am looked at just like everybody else in the Maximum Security Psych Ward. The staff has received no memo telling them that I am only here because there wasn’t room in Ward A; as far as they are concerned, I am a violent lunatic, and, as such, deserve to be in this prison—society’s revenge upon the unhappy.

  An alarm screams through the stale air, scraping my ears with static. This is the dinner bell.

  We inmates creep from every corner of the building, some of us looking as though we are walking to our deaths, others looking too far-gone to know the difference. Entering the Dining Room, I observe the procedure: Wait quietly at the cheap plastic table of your choice (and choose wisely, or else . . . ) until the grizzled cafeteria mistress calls your name, then go to the hole in the wall and pick up your tray.

  The broken tables are crammed with lunatics who may or may not have remembered to tie their hospital gowns closed, and I choose a seat in the corner by the half-smashed-in piano and next to an older lady called Violet who mutters to herself constantly, and seems ever on the verge of exploding. A behemothic man lumbers toward us—a hulk of a beast with a substantial hump rising from his back. As I am occupied in calculations of just how easy it would be for him to snap my neck without even trying, the man reaches my table and begins to lower his tray. Without warning, Violet begins to scream at him. She starts off quietly, but with all the intensity of an erupting volcano.

  “How dare you sit down without asking! Get away, get away, GET AWAY!!!”

  Bingo.

  Here sits a woman who has obviously been sexually traumatized, a fact that was suggested when she first introduced herself to me, adding, “Platonic. That means no sex.” I assured her that she was safe with me. But the wardens? Not so much. They clearly haven’t diagnosed her profound issues with males being in her physical space. They haven’t diagnosed mine either.

  With a grunt, the giant backs away, and Violet stops shrieking. No one on duty comes to find out what went wrong. In fact, the other inmates barely raise their heads, and it seems as though the incident has been noticed by no one but myself. As though nothing had happened, Violet resumes her dinner, which consists primarily of a paper plate overflowing with canned corn kernels.

  I still haven’t been called up to retrieve my tray of god only knows what, and, surveying the menagerie of motley creatures devouring their scraps, I appear to be the only one left.

  Just as I think I’ve escaped unnoticed, the cafeteria lady mispronounces my name and slams a bright orange tray down upon the metal shelf. On said tray is a soggy paper plate piled with microwaved spaghetti to be eaten with—get this—a plastic spoon. Have you ever tried eating spaghetti with a plastic spoon? If you weren’t crazy before, you will be after that.

  I’m trying.

  I’m trying.

  I’m trying.

  My mouth is dry and I can’t seem to manufacture enough saliva to get even a bit of white bread down my throat; it’s sticking in my mouth and I think of how Jimi Hendrix died. I feel someone watching me, and I know it’s Dr. Sharp.

  My throat still burns from the hydrogen peroxide . . .

  hospital entry 12: the first note

  After my first night in the real live Psych Ward, I have new details to recount:

  I am frequently awakened in the night by the sound of my fellow inmates sneaking about, fiddling with electrical outlets, crawling like giant spiders across the empty beds and up the walls as I pull my stiff blanket up to my eyes, staring out into the blackness, barely able to make out the shapes of the night creepers so that I can jump out of my brick-hard plastic-covered bed and start running if they come near my corner.

  But, where could I go?

  The staff secures the doors from the outside during the night. I suppose that, snug in their bulletproof sanctuary, they don’t want to be bothered, so they leave us locked up to fend for ourselves. They can then take an extended coffee and cigarette break, knowing that we’re not going anywhere. I wonder if they can hear us scream? I hope they can. I hope they can. I hope they care.

  Upon rising, we are ordered to assemble in the Day Room. There, we line up to be weighed and are given our first round of pills. I wonder how the nurses are absolutely certain to give each inmate the correct medication, and not mix one’s up with another’s. Scanning the room, we all look so sedated and lost—it probably wouldn’t matter what we swallowed just so long as it keeps us quiet for a few more hours, until the next dose. I am given four pills that I do not recognize, and one that I do: the birth-control pill. Why?

  At breakfast, I attempt to sample the gray eggs upon my paper plate. I’m sincerely trying—I really am—but I simply can’t do it. My digestive system has shut down, and the drugs have made me sick. I do hide a bit of bread in my stocking though, because I’ve seen the rat again.

  Having returned our trays, we are left to our own devices. There is not a single square inch of blank space remaining in my book about the plague, so I leave the Day Room and walk across the hall to the glass chamber where the staff is busying themselves for the morning shift. I lean my forehead against the pane, and, speaking through a small opening just like the ones in banks and movie theaters, I ask a nurse if she would let me have my notebook. Emerging from her sanctuary, the nurse leads me down the hall to a locked closet, swinging a key from a long chain as if she were proud of it.

  As she turns the key in the lock, she tells me that I will be allowed the use of my notebook during the day if I promise to return it at night, and not to let it out of my sight during the hours I have it with me.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The spiral binding” she says, clearly annoyed with my stupidity. “It’s a metal wire.”

  Rolling my eyes (not advisable, by the way), I assure her that I do not intend to kill myself with my own notebook, but her concern is not for me; if one of the other inmates were to get hold of it, what then? I think to propose that this danger could be easily prevented by the separation of my sleeping quarters from those who made a habit of digging into other people’s things, but decide against it—there is no suggestion box in the Psych Ward.

  The door open, the nurse reaches into the dark and pulls a stri
ng. A single bulb dimly illuminates three walls lined with small wooden compartments. I see my boots with the skulls peeking out from an upper compartment, and reach into it before the nurse can stop me. As I slide out my long lusted after notebook, a slip of paper falls from between the pages; I bend to pick it up. Folded in quarters, it appears a bit weathered—wrinkled, and nearly transparent. I can see writing through the backside of the sheet, but I don’t recognize the note, and am about to open it when the nurse, who has been standing over me and scrutinizing my every move, coughs audibly—an obvious demonstration of impatience. I tuck the paper back between the pages of my notebook, and both the nurse and I exit the closet.

  Several hours have passed and I have been watched constantly, leaving me no opportunity to study the note, though it is surely some scrap of my own that I had forgotten . . . lyrics, or a half-finished poem. My stomach flutters nervously, but I don’t know why.

  Finally, I am able to sneak away from group exercise (this is where we are all lined up and herded around the barbed-wire-enclosed roof of the hospital), and find a nurse to let me into the locked bathroom. I know I don’t have much time. Shutting myself inside a stall, I unfold the paper:

  . . . and when I looked out, I saw that we were heading fast upon a series of iron gates set in stone, wickedly arched, and crowned with tall spikes of erratically varying height. But what unnerved me completely lay beyond the gates: a pair of wooden doors—massive, pointed peak towering over us even from afar. Bar-crossed and studded with heavy bolts, the doors were set in a great stone wall protecting whatever waited inside.