“She probably did,” said Lisa. “Locked up in a closet eating Cheerios.”
“You mean kept there by her parents?” I asked.
“Why not,” said Lisa. “After all, they named her Alice Callous.”
It was as good an explanation as any for why, after about a month, Alice exploded like a volcano.
“Lot of energy in that girl,” Georgina observed. Down at the end of the hall, muffled booming and yelling and crashing came out of the seclusion room.
The next day as we sat on the floor under the blackboard Alice was marched past us between two nurses on her way to maximum security. Her face was puffy from crying and bashing around. She didn’t look at us. She was occupied by her own complicated thoughts—you could tell from the way she was squinting and moving her mouth.
Her name came off the blackboard rather quickly.
“Guess she’s settled in over there,” said Lisa.
“We ought to go see her,” said Georgina.
The nurses thought it was nice that we wanted to visit Alice. It was even all right for Lisa to go. They must have figured she couldn’t get into trouble on maximum security.
It didn’t look special from the outside. It didn’t even have extra doors. But inside it was different. The windows had screens like our windows, but there were bars in front of the screens. Little bars, thin and several inches apart; still, they were bars. The bathrooms had no doors, and the toilets had no seats.
“Why no seats?” I asked Lisa.
“Could rip off a seat and whack somebody? I don’t know.”
The nursing station wasn’t open, like ours, but encased in chicken-wire glass. Nurses were either in or out. No leaning over the Dutch door to chat on maximum security.
And the rooms were not really rooms. They were cells. They were seclusion rooms, in fact. There wasn’t anything in them except bare mattresses with people on them. Unlike our seclusion room, they had windows, but the windows were tiny, high, chicken-wire-enforced, security-screened, barred windows. Most of the doors to the rooms were open, so as we walked down the hall to see Alice, we could see other people lying on their mattresses. Some were naked. Some were not on their mattresses but standing in a corner or curled up against a wall.
That was it. That was all there was. Little bare rooms with one person per room curled up somewhere.
Alice’s room didn’t smell good. Her walls were smeared with something. So was she. She was sitting on her mattress with her arms wrapped around her knees, and with smears on her arms.
“Hi, Alice,” said Georgina.
“That’s shit,” Lisa whispered to me. “She’s been rubbing her shit around.”
We stood around outside the doorway. We didn’t want to go into the room because of the smell. Alice looked like somebody else, as if she’d gotten a new face. She looked kind of good.
“How’s it going?” asked Georgina.
“It’s okay,” said Alice. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m hoarse,” she said. “I’ve been yelling.”
“Right,” said Georgina.
Nobody said anything for a minute.
“I’m getting better,” said Alice.
“Good,” said Georgina.
Lisa tapped her foot on the linoleum. I was feeling faint from trying to breathe without breathing in the smell.
“So,” said Georgina. “Well. See you soon, okay?”
“Thanks for coming,” said Alice. She unclasped her knees for a few seconds to wave at us.
We went over to the nursing station, where our escort had gone to visit with the staff. We couldn’t see our nurse. Georgina rapped on the glass. The person on duty looked up and shook her head at us.
“I just want to get out of here,” I said.
Georgina rapped on the glass again. “We want to go back to SB Two,” she said loudly.
The person on duty nodded, but our nurse did not appear.
“Maybe they tricked us,” said Lisa. “Gonna leave us here.”
“That’s not funny,” I said.
Georgina gave another rat-a-tat to the glass.
“I’ll fix it,” said Lisa. She pulled her lighter from her pocket and lit up a cigarette.
Immediately two nurses sprang out of the nursing station.
“Give me that lighter,” said one, while the other grabbed the cigarette.
Lisa smiled. “We need our escort over to SB Two.”
The nurses went back into the nursing station.
“No lighters on maximum security. Supervised smoking. I knew that would rouse them.” Lisa pulled out another cigarette, then put it back in the pack.
Our nurse came out. “That was a short visit,” she said. “How was Alice?”
“She said she was getting better,” said Georgina.
“She had shit …” I said, but I couldn’t describe it.
Our nurse nodded. “It’s not that unusual.”
The ugly living room, the bedrooms stuffed with bureaus and chairs and blankets and pillows, an aide leaning out of the nursing station talking to Polly, the white chalk in its dish below the blackboard waiting for us to sign ourselves in: home again.
“Oh,” I said, sighing several times. I couldn’t get enough air in, or get the air in me out.
“What do you think happened to her, anyhow?” said Georgina.
“Something,” said Lisa.
“Shit on the wall,” I said. “Oh, God. Could that happen to us?”
“She said she was getting better,” Georgina said.
“Everything’s relative, I guess,” said Lisa.
“It couldn’t, could it?” I asked.
“Don’t let it,” said Georgina. “Don’t forget it.”
The Shadow of the Real
My analyst is dead now. Before he was my analyst, he was my therapist, and I was fond of him. The view from his office on the first floor of the maximum-security-ward building was restful: trees, wind, sky. I was often silent. There was so little silence on our ward. I looked at the trees and said nothing, and he looked at me and said nothing. It was companionable.
Now and then he said something. Once I fell asleep briefly in the chair facing him, after a night full of fighting and yelling on our ward.
“You want to sleep with me,” he crowed.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. Sallow, bald early, and with pale pouches under his eyes, he wasn’t anybody I wanted to sleep with.
Most of the time, though, he was okay. It calmed me to sit in his office without having to explain myself.
But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He started asking me, “What are you thinking?” I never knew what to say. My head was empty and I liked it that way. Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. “You seem sad today,” he’d say, or “Today, you seem puzzled about something.”
Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.
Eventually he said so many wrong things about me that I had to set him right, which was what he’d wanted in the first place. It irritated me that he’d gotten his way. After all, I already knew what I felt; he was the one who didn’t know.
His name was Melvin. I felt sorry for him because of this.
Often on the way from our ward to the maximum-security ward, I saw him driving up to his office. Usually he drove a station wagon with fake wood panels, but occasionally he drove a sleek black Buick with oval windows and a vinyl roof. Then one day he shot past me in a pointy green sports car, which he slammed into his parking place with a squeal.
I started to laugh, standing outside his office, because I’d understood something about him, and it was funny. I couldn’t wait to tell him.
When I got into his office I said, “You have three cars, right?”
He nodded.
“The station wagon, the sedan, and the sports car.”
He nodded again.
“It’s the psyche!” I said. I was excited. “See, the station wagon is the ego, sturdy and r
eliable, and the sedan is the superego, because it’s how you want to present yourself, powerful and impressive, and the sports car is the id—it’s the id because it’s irrepressible and fast and dangerous and maybe a little forbidden.” I smiled at him. “It’s new, isn’t it? The sports car?”
This time he didn’t nod.
“Don’t you think it’s great?” I asked him. “Don’t you think it’s great that your cars are your psyche?”
He didn’t say anything.
It was shortly after this that he began badgering me to go into analysis.
“We aren’t getting anywhere,” he’d say. “I think analysis is in order.”
“Why will it be different?” I wanted to know.
“We aren’t getting anywhere,” he’d say again.
After a couple of weeks he changed tactics.
“You are the only person in this hospital who could tolerate an analysis,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?” I didn’t believe him, but it was intriguing.
“You need a fairly well integrated personality to be in analysis.”
I went back to the ward flushed with the idea of my fairly well integrated personality. I didn’t tell anyone; that would have been bragging.
If I’d said to Lisa, “I have a fairly well integrated personality and therefore I’m going into analysis with Melvin,” she would have made retching sounds and said, “Assholes! They’ll say anything!” and I wouldn’t have done it.
But I kept it to myself. He’d flattered me—he understood me well enough to know I craved flattery—and in gratitude, I acquiesced.
My view, now, was of a wall, an off-white, featureless wall. No trees, no Melvin patiently looking at me while I looked away. I could feel his presence, though, and it was cold and hard. The only things he said were “Yes?” and “Could you say more about that?” If I said, “I hate looking at this fucking wall,” he’d say, “Could you say more about that?” If I said, “I hate this analysis stuff,” he’d say, “Yes?”
Once I asked him, “Why are you so different? You used to be my friend.”
“Could you say more about that?”
I started analysis in November, when I was still on group. Five times a week I joined a herd of patients headed for doctors and led by a nurse. But most doctors’ offices were in the Administration Building, which was in the opposite direction from the maximum-security ward. So being on group was like being stuck on an inconvenient bus route. I complained. And I got destination privileges.
Now my hour began with a phone call to the nursing station to say I’d arrived in Melvin’s office. It ended with my calling to say I was leaving.
Melvin didn’t like the phone business. He squinted while I talked on the phone. He kept the phone close to him on his desk. Every day I had to ask him to push it toward me so I could use it.
Perhaps he complained, because soon I got grounds privileges—only to therapy, but it was something. For other activities, I was still on group.
So it was that in December, when I joined Georgina and some other people going to the cafeteria for dinner, I discovered the tunnels.
We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren’t there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren’t news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I’d conjured them into being.
It was a typical December day in the Boston area: tin-colored clouds spitting bits of rain mixed with flat watery snowflakes and just enough wind to make you wince.
“Tunnels,” said the nurse.
Out the double-locked double doors and down the stairs as usual—our ward was on the second floor for added security. There were many doors in the hallway, one of which went outside. The nurse opened another one, and we went down a second flight of stairs. Then we were in the tunnels.
First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with windchill (though in the innocent sixties, windchill, like digital time, hadn’t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths. Here and there, on white tiles embedded in the yellow, were signposts: CAFETERIA, ADMINISTRATION, EAST HOUSE.
“This is great,” I said.
“Haven’t you been down here before?” asked Georgina.
I asked the nurse, “Do these run under the whole hospital?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can get anywhere. It’s easy to get lost, though.”
“How about the signs?”
“There aren’t really enough of them.” She giggled; she was an okay nurse named Ruth. “This one says EAST HOUSE”—she pointed up—“but then you come to a fork and there isn’t another sign.”
“What do you do?”
“You just have to know the way,” she said.
“Can I come down here alone?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised when Ruth said I couldn’t.
The tunnels became my obsession.
“Anybody free to take me into the tunnels?” I’d ask every day. About once a week, somebody would take me.
And then there they were, always hot and clean and yellow and full of promise, always throbbing with heating and water pipes that sang and whistled as they did their work. And everything interconnected, everything going on its own private pathway to wherever it went.
“It’s like being in a map—not reading a map but being inside a map,” I said to Ruth one day when she’d taken me down there. “Like the plan of something rather than the thing itself.” She didn’t say anything and I knew I ought to stop talking about it, but I couldn’t. “It’s like the essence of the hospital down here—you know what I mean?”
“Time’s up,” said Ruth. “I’m on checks in ten minutes.”
In February I asked Melvin, “You know those tunnels?”
“Could you tell me more about the tunnels?”
He didn’t know about them. If he’d known about them, he would have said, “Yes?”
“There are tunnels under this entire hospital. Everything is connected by tunnels. You could get in them and go anywhere. It’s warm and cozy and quiet.”
“A womb,” said Melvin.
“It’s not a womb,” I said.
“Yes.”
When Melvin said Yes without a questioning intonation, he meant No.
“It’s the opposite of a womb,” I said. “A womb doesn’t go anywhere.” I thought hard about how to explain the tunnels to Melvin. “The hospital is the womb, see. You can’t go anywhere, and it’s noisy, and you’re stuck. The tunnels are like a hospital without the bother.”
He said nothing and I said nothing. Then I had another idea.
“Remember the shadows on the wall of the cave?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t remember them. “Plato said everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can’t see. And the real thing isn’t like the shadow, it’s a kind of essence-thing, like a—” I couldn’t think what, for a minute. “Like a super-table.”
“Could you say more about that?”
The super-table hadn’t been a good example. “It’s like a neurosis,” I said. I was making this up. “Like when you’re angry, and that’s the real thing, and what shows is you’re afraid of dogs biting you. Because really what you want is to bite everybody. You know?”
Now that I’d said this, I thought it was pretty convincing.
“Why are you angry?” Melvin asked.
He died young, of a stroke. I was his first analytic patient; I found that out after I quit analysis. A year after I got out of the hospital, I quit. I’d had it, finally, with all that messing about in the shadows.
Stigmatography
>
The hospital had an address, 115 Mill Street. This was to provide some cover if one of us were well enough to apply for a job while still incarcerated. It gave about as much protection as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would have.
“Let’s see, nineteen years old, living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—Hey! That’s the White House!”
This was the sort of look we got from prospective employers, except not pleased.
In Massachusetts, 115 Mill Street is a famous address. Applying for a job, leasing an apartment, getting a driver’s license: all problematic. The driver’s-license application even asked, Have you ever been hospitalized for mental illness? Oh, no, I just loved Belmont so much I decided to move to 115 Mill Street.
“You’re living at One fifteen Mill Street?” asked a small, basement-colored person who ran a sewing-notions shop in Harvard Square, where I was trying to get a job.
“Uh-hunh.”
“And how long have you been living there?”
“Oh, a while.” I gestured at the past with one hand.
“And I guess you haven’t been working for a while?” He leaned back, enjoying himself.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been thinking things over.”
I didn’t get the job.
As I left the shop my glance met his, and he gave me a look of such terrible intimacy that I cringed. I know what you are, said his look.
What were we, that they could know us so quickly and so well?
We were probably better than we used to be, before we went into the hospital. At a minimum we were older and more self-aware. Many of us had spent our hospital years yelling and causing trouble and were ready to move on to something else. All of us had learned by default to treasure freedom and would do anything we could to get it and keep it.
The question was, What could we do?
Could we get up every morning and take showers and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us?
Some of us could; some of us couldn’t. In the world’s terms, though, all of us were tainted.
There’s always a touch of fascination in revulsion: Could that happen to me? The less likely the terrible thing is to happen, the less frightening it is to look at or imagine. A person who doesn’t talk to herself or stare off into nothingness is therefore more alarming than a person who does. Someone who acts “normal” raises the uncomfortable question, What’s the difference between that person and me? which leads to the question, What’s keeping me out of the loony bin? This explains why a general taint is useful.
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