by Torey Hayden
“So, what’s happening?”
A long silence followed.
Cassandra picked at the edge of her robe, pulling little threads out of the terrycloth. “You weren’t here today,” she finally said in a tiny voice.
“No, I’m sorry for that. I had to be away today. I mentioned that yesterday. Do you remember? But I’m sorry. I can see you’ve had a hard day.”
She nodded.
Again silence. I listened into it. There wasn’t much to hear in the little room. The ventilation system, mostly. And Cassandra’s breathing, which was a bit noisy.
“Can you tell me what’s happening?” I asked again, very gently.
“I want to die.”
“Yes. I can tell that. Why?”
“My head’s too confusing.”
“How do you mean? Can you tell me more about that?”
She shook her head.
“Okay.”
Two or three moments of just sitting together.
“I’m too tired,” she said.
“Yes, the medicine will make you feel sleepy. When you get really sleepy, we’ll go in your room.”
“I don’t want to go in my room.”
“I see.”
“Everything in my head’s confusing. It’s like it’s arguing in my head.”
“Different voices?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
A small pause.
“Like voices. But not voices. Like everybody is talking at once. Arguing at once.” She snuffled. “I don’t want to be like this. It hurts too much.”
“Yeah. I can understand that,” I said.
“I just want it to go away. I want it to be like it was before.”
“Before when?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Just before. Before now. Before today. Or yesterday. Before I started thinking about all this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see where thinking about all this must hurt.”
Cassandra nodded and pressed closer yet to me.
A silence came then, deep and a little sleepy. I was aware of a faint saline scent as I sat there. I think it was embedded in the padding of the cell and not coming from Cassandra herself. It was a profoundly human scent. Of tears, I think.
“I’m going to do something,” I said. I twisted around enough to fish in the right pocket of my jeans because I knew I’d stuffed a felt-tip pen in earlier when I was with Lucia. Taking it out, I uncapped it.
All the movement had meant I’d had to shift away from Cassandra, who had been leaning against my left side. She crooked her head to see what I was doing.
“These thoughts you’ve got in your head,” I said. “I want you to give them to me for tonight. So you can go to sleep.”
She looked at me, her expression quizzical.
“What are they? Let’s make a list of them.” I looked at her. “I want you to go inside your head. Listen to what all this arguing is about in there and tell me about it. What’s one thing you hear being said?”
“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” Cassandra replied.
“We’re going to make a list of those things you keep hearing so that I can take them home with me. I’ll take care of them for tonight. Then you won’t have to think about them anymore, because I’ll have them safe. That way you can sleep.”
“We don’t have any paper to make a list.”
“We don’t need paper. You just tell me what you hear inside your head. Everybody’s arguing. What are they arguing about? Tell one of the things.”
“They’re not arguing. It’s just mean voices. Scary voices. I dunno.”
“Okay, but what are they saying?” I asked. “Tell me one thing.”
“I don’t understand what we’re doing.”
I smiled gently. “Everything feels really confusing to you right now, doesn’t it?”
Cassandra nodded.
“You know the bulletin board out by the nurses’ station?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen it. It’s got, like, a million pieces of paper stuck up on it, doesn’t it? And everything stuck up there is stuff people want to remember. Like what the menu for the week ahead is. Or when events are or which people want to go on special outings. Or when someone has an appointment to go somewhere off the unit. Yes? Do you understand that?”
Cassandra nodded.
“Well, in your Troubled Place, you’ve got a bulletin board, too. Stuck up on that one are all sorts of different really yucky, nasty thoughts. And because nobody wants to keep seeing yucky, nasty things, it’s understandable you’ve tried never to go in there to look at that bulletin board. But what’s happened is that we’ve opened up the Troubled Place now by talking about Uncle Beck, and you can’t miss seeing all these scary thoughts are tacked up in there.”
“Yeah,” Cassandra said.
“So what I want you to do is take them down and give them to me for tonight, so that I can take care of them and you don’t have to keep looking at them. Someday, further down the line, we’re going to throw all those nasty, scary thoughts away, and how we do that is by getting all of them out and looking at them and talking about them until they get really boring and aren’t a big deal anymore. When something isn’t a big deal anymore, then it’s easy to throw it away. So that’s what’s going to happen in the future to all that yucky stuff, but we’re not quite there yet. Everything still feels like a big deal. It’s still scary. So, for now, I just want you to give these yucky thoughts that are bothering you to me. I’ll take them home with me, because they can’t hurt me. I’m a grown-up. I’m really strong. And if I have them, then they can’t hurt you.”
Cassandra’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand how to do that.”
“That’s okay. I’ll help. And we’ll go one at a time. One yucky thought at a time. So you listen right now to all that arguing in your head. And tell me one yucky thing you hear. Just one thing.”
An inward expression came to her face and she cocked her head, as if listening. She shrugged slightly, as if in response to something, and then, without moving her head, she looked at me. “Uncle Beck is going to come get me.”
“Okay, good. That’s one scary, yucky thought, isn’t it? I bet it’s been hanging around on the bulletin board in your Troubled Place for a long time, huh?”
Cassandra nodded.
“So,” I said, “here’s what I do: ‘Uncle Beck is going to come get me.’” I took the felt-tip and wrote that on the palm of my right hand.
“Wow!” Cassandra said in amazement. “You’re writing on yourself!”
“Yes. Because I’m going to take these thoughts away with me when I go. So there’s one. Take down another one from the bulletin board in your Troubled Place and give it to me.”
“That Uncle Beck’s going to put a turd in my mouth.”
“Okay. I’ll write that here.” I wrote the words along the inside of my middle finger.
The novelty of seeing me write on my own hand captivated Cassandra. She leaned over to examine my finger. “Look! You wrote ‘turd’ on yourself. You really did.”
“Yup, because I’m going to take it away with me.”
She was almost her old self in that moment, grinning up at me with rather lascivious pleasure at the dirty word.
Part of me was glad to see the old tricky Cassandra still there. On the other hand, I didn’t want what I was trying to do to get derailed, so I said, “Okay, can you get something else from the bulletin board?”
“I want my mom to know how I’m doing,” she said.
She said it so convincingly that I thought for a moment she meant now. I thought she wanted her mother to know she was in seclusion and feeling so bad she was suicidal. I looked over, catching her dark eyes and searching them.
Cassandra shook her head in answer to my unasked question. “That’s something from my bulletin board. What I mean is, I wanted my mom to know. When I was with my dad. I wanted her to know how scared I was. I wanted …” Her
words floated off.
I nodded. “Okay.” I wrote “I want my mom to know how I’m doing” on the underside my ring finger.
“And another one is: ‘I’m really scared.’”
I wrote that on the underside of my small finger.
“’Cause that was how it always was. I was always really scared and so that’s in my Troubled Place. On the bulletin board. Because maybe I’m going to be that scared again. And I’m scared of that. Scared of feeling like that again.”
I nodded.
“And I’m scared to go to sleep. That’s different. Put that on that finger, but that’s not the same as that one.” She pointed to the words on my little finger. “If I go to sleep, I’m scared I’m going to hear the voices. That’s now. That scares me now. But then, back then, I was scared to go to sleep because maybe Uncle Beck would come in. Or maybe Daddy would forget to come home and a burglar or something might come in. Maybe a burglar would abduct me. ’Cause that happens. And I thought it might happen to me and then no one would ever, ever find me. So put that on that finger, because, really, that is a big, big thing stuck on my bulletin board.”
And so we continued on, listing more and more worries. The final few were probably a bit of a stretch. I suspect Cassandra had gotten caught up in wanting to see my hand completely covered in ink, but it involved her and, in the end, relaxed her enough that she was chatting playfully and giggling about the state of my hand.
“Okay,” I said at last. “That’s it. Here, help me roll my fingers up.” I reached out and took her hand and together we folded the index finger of my right hand in on the palm. I then let her fold each of the other fingers over. Then I made a tight fist of the hand. “There. All the yucky stuff off your bulletin board, huh? All right here.”
Cassandra nodded and smiled.
I rose to my feet. “And I’m going to take them home with me. They won’t hurt me. I’m too strong. And now because I’ve got all those messages, you won’t have to read them anymore. All right?”
“All right.”
“Eventually you’re going to be strong, too. Eventually they won’t mean anything at all. One day they’ll just be garbage, and we’ll throw them away.”
She nodded.
I rapped on the window to get one of the aides to come and let us out. “Think perhaps you can sleep now?” I asked, while we waited.
Cassandra nodded again. “Yeah, I’m really, really tired. I feel like I got glass in my eyes.”
The door opened.
“Okay. Good night, then.”
“Good night,” she said. “And see you tomorrow.”
“Yup. See you tomorrow.”
Chapter
31
When it was time for Cassandra’s session with me the next morning, the first thing she wanted was to see my hand. I’d made no special effort to remove the words; however, normal activities such as showering and washing my hands had caused most of them to fade. Nonetheless, they were still largely readable.
“Look at that,” Cassandra said with satisfaction. “Look, you still got all of that written on your hand.”
“I sure do.”
“It’s lots of stuff. Your hand looks really dirty.”
“Yes, it does.”
“People are going to see it. They’re going to ask what you got all that writing on your hand for!”
“And what shall I tell them?” I asked.
Cassandra grinned. “You’ll have to tell them why you got ‘turd’ written on your hand!”
“I think you get an excited feeling when you consider that,” I replied.
“Yeah, I do,” she acknowledged.
“And you know what? That’s normal. There are certain things the body does, certain words we use to describe those things that make everybody feel sort of excited when they hear about them. Interested feelings. That’s just the way we’re wired up. Everyone is.”
“It’s dirty.”
“Well, see, that’s the problem. One part of us feels it’s dirty to think about things that are sexy or have to do with stuff that comes out of our bodies, like pee and poop. So seeing a word like turd written on my hand makes it seem like I’m doing something dirty that I should be ashamed of. But another part of us finds it kind of exciting to think about things like this. It makes us feel all tingly and interested. So seeing a word like that written on my hand is sort of thrilling, too. What I’m saying is that everybody feels that way. Not just you. That’s because they are normal feelings.”
When I’d first started to talk about this, Cassandra was squirming in a rather aroused way but this seemed to pass. She sat back, well away from my hand laid open on the tabletop.
“You remember when we were doing the exercise with the feelings and the poker chips?” I asked. “That was the point of that. Almost everything we do has got several feelings attached, not just one. And sometimes they are even opposite feelings. If you see ‘turd’ written on my hand, it can make you feel excited and interested, but it can also make you feel ashamed or guilty. You can get both feelings at the same time. Maybe it’s going to make you feel scared as well. That’s why we wrote ‘turd’ here last night, wasn’t it? Because it was one of your scary thoughts. So seeing ‘turd’ written on my hand might remind you of what Uncle Beck did and then you’d feel scared. Or maybe the word would make you feel dirty, because getting something on you that belongs in the toilet makes most people feel like they need to wash.
“That’s why I wanted to do that poker chip exercise. To help make it clear how we often have several feelings at once, because lots of times we don’t realize that. We don’t know it’s normal to have lots of different feelings at the same time, that this happens to everyone, not just to people with problems. It’s important to understand that it isn’t weird or wrong to feel a bit excited about something that might also make you feel ashamed. It’s just the way people are.”
I reached behind me to the shelves and pulled over a couple pieces of blank paper. I uncapped a felt-tip pen. “Here, I’m going to show you something. Show you what happens sometimes.”
At the top of the paper, I wrote “turd” and drew a little picture of a turd, which amused Cassandra to no end. She laughed and laughed.
“Okay, so there’s a turd. Now, what feelings did I say that a turd caused us to feel?”
“Silly,” Cassandra said, still laughing.
“Yeah, silly.” So I wrote that. “And excited.” So I wrote that word next to “silly.” “What else? What else did I just say?”
“Sexy,” she replied in a hoarse, rather excited voice.
“Yup, sexy.” I wrote that next to “excited.” I then drew lines down connecting these words to the drawing of the turd. “What else?”
“Scared.”
“Okay, good. What else?”
“Ashamed.”
“Good. Any others?”
“Mad.” She looked up at me. “Mad? I mean, maybe, like, if somebody made you eat a turd, you’d feel mad at them, too. ’Cause they shouldn’t do that to you.”
“That’s right. So there’s another feeling. So when we see this turd, we get all these different feelings—silly, sexy, scared, ashamed, mad—and sometimes we feel them all at once. Can you think of any more?”
“Glad,” she said. “Like you’d be glad if you got that turd out of you. If you really had to go. If you were holding it in and no one would let you go.”
“Okay. ‘Glad.’” I wrote that.
“And hurt. Because that’s happened to me. When Uncle Beck would fuck me in my butthole, then afterward, sometimes it would really hurt to poop. Really hurt. Really hurt. Once, this one time, I was just crying and crying and blood was coming out. I didn’t want to poop at all. My dad made me take a laxative.”
“Okay. ‘Hurt.’” I put that down. As with the other words, I drew a line connecting it to the drawing of the turd at the top of the paper.
Cassandra was no longer laughing. She’d sat way back again, a
lmost shied away from the paper, the table, and me. She’d also gone pale and expressionless.
“Now I’m going to show you something interesting,” I said. I drew three stick figures underneath the words. “See these? These little people?”
Cassandra nodded.
“It’s hard to have all these feelings we have written up here at one time. Having so many feelings makes us feel full and confused. Because if you feel, for instance, excited and ashamed and scared all at once, it’s hard to know exactly what you do feel, isn’t it? They are all very big feelings. The kind that shout to get noticed. So if they’re all shouting at once, it’s hard to know how many there are or which one is which.”
“Yeah,” Cassandra said in a heartfelt way, but she still stayed well back from the table.
“Sometimes when our feelings get too much for us to cope with, we start making different people inside us to hold the different feelings. Like, for example, I knew this one girl. She was about your age. Her name was Susan, and she’d been in a very bad car accident when she was five. Her little sister was killed and her mom had been really badly hurt and had to stay in the hospital a long time. Later, lots later, when her mother was completely better and things were back to normal, Susan found it really hard to get angry with her mom, because she kept remembering that she had almost lost her mom. Even though things were just fine, she kept feeling scared that something might happen to her mom again. She also worried that her mom was unhappy because her sister got killed. Susan felt scared that maybe her mom wished it had been Susan who was killed instead. Things like that. So she didn’t dare get angry in case it made her mom not want her or it made her mom go away. What Susan did instead was make a person inside her to hold her angry feelings. This person was named Mrs. Jones. And Mrs. Jones always felt really, really angry. She always did awful, spiteful things around the house that Susan was afraid to do herself. You know what started happening?”
Cassandra shook her head.
“It became a big problem, because pretty soon Mrs. Jones had all the angry feelings. So when something bad happened and the mom would get mad, Susan would say, ‘I didn’t do that. Mrs. Jones did.’ But Susan’s mom couldn’t see Mrs. Jones, since Mrs. Jones was inside Susan. This made her mom just get madder and madder with Susan, because her mom thought Susan was lying. But because Mrs. Jones took care of all the angry feelings, to Susan it didn’t feel like those were her feelings. So she didn’t really think she was lying.”