Lesson 4: When the local hospital can’t do anything for you and you’ve already got one incompetent triage nurse mightily pissed at you for speaking the truth, they’ll ship you upstate. Every state has a hospital for non-Normies. Maybe it’s tucked away among oaks or pine trees or not far from the beach, but every state except Delaware has a place for people like me. They have a spot reserved for you, too, if you aren’t careful.
I’m not saying every person in charge of the mentally ill really knows the secret. Denial is a powerful thing. Denial can assure parents their son isn’t gay so they won’t have to disavow him. Denial lets us sleep at night when we could be acknowledging that the hey day for the human race is over and things are getting worse. However, some people know the truth and if you ever want to get out of those godforsaken green-tiled hospitals, you’ll pretend to deny the truth, too. Don’t be a whistleblower. You won’t like it and I’ll tell you why. The Powers That Be also fill those hospitals with genuinely crazy people. Before there were tinfoil hats, what did crazy people do to stop the command signals from the government, sentient reptiles and aliens from Alpha Centauri? Medicament’s doctors diagnosed me as so crazy I’d need a tinfoil sombrero.
Then the well-meaning doctors of Medicament, Iowa sent me to Shibboleth Mental Hospital in Mason City. The admitting nurse was a nice woman named Sherry. Sherry’s advantage, in my eyes, was that no dead people stood behind her, blaming her for their death.
My first roommate chewed her slippers to make them soft. She had bony tumors in the soles of her feet — yes, that’s a thing — and she was convinced she’d be cured if she could just chew her shoes soft enough.
That was pretty benign compared to my other roommate. She had wild, tangled hair and wore no clothes and she stood against the wall, her arms up as if nailed in crucifixion. She never spoke. The dead are rarely overly chatty.
As soon as I walked into the room with its puke green, flaking paint, I knew this hospital was very old. I saw Petra and I froze. Just looking at her, I knew her name was Petra. She was Polish and no one on the staff had understood her. I don’t understand how I knew, but she’d been placed in this hospital by mistake in 1972. Petra wanted to go home. She wanted her mama, too.
I also knew a secret was hidden beneath the drywall and buried behind the plaster. The old stone wall, back there in the dark, still bore the marks of where the chains were driven into the walls with huge flat spikes. This is where Petra was chained to a wall and raped by a young doctor named Moorely.
Lesson 5: when the man who raped a former patient turns out to be your doctor, you must escape that hospital. If flight isn’t an option, that leaves fight.
3
The solution seemed simple. I told everyone my psychotic break from reality was over. Ghosts? Zombies? Ghost zombies? What are you talking about? Who me?
I thought I had a nurse on the hook, but Mama started crying and said, “Nobody’s buying it, Tammy. You just don’t want to be here. And I don’t want to leave you here…but it’s the right thing to do. I want you cured, okay? I want you safe. I love you so much, baby girl.”
Mama’s a strong woman. She left me in my room, despite me pleading to go back to Medicament and my dead armless boyfriend. When I called down the hall after her, Mama’s last words to me were, “I’m from Amarillo.”
Mama wouldn’t have thought leaving me at Shibboleth Mental Hospital was such a good idea if she could see the naked girl reenacting the crucifixion.
The roommate who chewed her slippers told me everything would be okay and tried to stroke my hand. Her fingernails were dirty and bitten and chewed and wet. “I’m Rebecca Swift, but everybody calls me Becks,” she said. “Everybody calls me Becks because they say I shoulda, woulda, coulda been a Spice Girl.”
I soon found out no one called her Becks.
Then Rebecca lifted her bare feet to show me the bony tumors in the soles of her scarred feet again. “They cut ’em out and them little bones keep coming back.”
You know your roommate is weird when you and the naked, dead, ghost girl give your roomie with foot tumors the same queasy look. I swear to God, when I caught Petra’s eye, I almost laughed.
The next day I was ushered into a small office to meet my doctor. One side was lined with filing cabinets. The Venetian blinds were closed to sunshine and the man behind the battered metal desk sat in silhouette. A ring of smoke hung about his head. A small brass desk lamp cut through the smoke to make a small, nicotine-yellow circle of light on the papers that littered his desk.
“Miss…Smythe?”
“Tamara, yes.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“Hardly at all.”
“No one does. Not the first night. Tell me what brings you here.”
I glanced at the open file spread before him. “I’m sure you’ve heard strange things. I thought I saw some things, but I was wrong. I had a rough time, but I’m better now.”
“Well…you should pack your bags and go home, then, hm?”
“Really?”
“No.”
Another silhouette appeared behind him. Her arms were at her side, but I couldn’t miss that wild hair. Petra had been a pretty girl. Her head was cocked toward the man behind the desk. I knew who he must be.
The man leaned forward so the light from the desk lamp turned his eyeglasses into two yellow oval mirrors. “I am Dr. — ”
“Moorely,” I said.
“Yes. I am Dr. Jonathan Moorely. I’ll be your psychiatrist during your stay with us. I only have two rules here. You’re going to have to be honest with me and you must comply with my treatment plan, Tammy. I must insist. Do you understand?”
Past seventy now, with heavy bags under his red rimmed eyes, he sported a scraggly gray beard. He was the same man who raped Petra and he dared to demand honesty.
There were a lot of things I wanted to tell him, but none of it about me. I wanted to say, “I know what you did to Petra in 1972 in my room. It was before all the renovations were complete. The stone was cold on her back as you grabbed her hips. That was the last room untouched after they rebuilt, after the fire. That room should have been a museum piece, a tribute to psychiatry’s dark history. Instead of disgusting you, those chains on the wall excited you. You wanted to use them before the reconstruction removed the old chains and covered up the sin.”
“Miss Smythe? Cat got your tongue?”
“I’m fine, really.”
“You seem distracted. Do you see your dead boyfriend in this room?”
“No. That would be crazy.” I wanted to say, “You used those chains eighteen times, Dr. Moorely. You kept abusing her until that night, as you unchained her, after you were done, she smashed your glasses. There was a storm that night.” I saw the lightning flashes strobe them as his fist rose and fell on her head, again and again.
“You beat her and she scratched you. As you stumbled away, she ate the broken glass. It took Petra three days to die.”
“Miss Smythe? Do you hear voices? Do you have a plan to do harm to yourself or others?”
“No. Of course not.”
You, I thought. I will harm you.
“Very well. I’m going to give you some more time to settle in. I’ll also prescribe an anxiolytic.” He wrote a note in my file.
“An anxio — ”
“It will help calm you.”
“I’m calm.”
“You’re sweating profusely although the room is cool. Your respirations are far too fast and the pulse in your lovely neck is racing. When you speak, you are almost breathless. Clearly, you are lying. I require honesty from my patients. We have to establish a therapeutic relationship and that is based on trust and open communication. Do you understand?”
“I guess.”
“Guessing is not good enough.”
“I do,” I said.
I was supposed to say, “I do,” to Brad. And now I was saying it to a rapist. My eyes were wet when an orderly came to lead me awa
y to the common room.
I wondered how many helpless women he had abused over the years. Petra’s eyes told me I wasn’t the only one. Worse, her eyes told me I was next.
Dr. Moorely didn’t come for me the first night. He managed to resist his impulses for three nights, as long as it took Petra to die. He came for me on my fourth night at Shibboleth Mental Hospital.
Which brings us to my only private black belt lesson with Mr. Stephen Chang. In case you forgot, we’re up to Lesson Six. This might be the most important lesson and it’s probably not what you’re expecting.
4
I met Mr. Chang when I was eleven years old. I liked Jackie Chan movies and I begged Mama to let me go to his school in the middle of town. Medicament only has one elementary school and one high school. Mr. Chang’s dojang was only a short walk down the street from the schools.
“I need you around the pharmacy, girl,” Mama said. “Besides, what do you want to do? Hurt people?”
“No. I want to avoid getting hurt.” That’s what changed her mind about letting me learn Hapkido.
Mr. Chang was an accountant when he wasn’t teaching martial arts. His mother was Korean and his father was Chinese. “Some Chinese people and Koreans, historically, hate each other,” he said. “But any conflict can be resolved when people are willing to listen to and respect each other. However, when someone is unwilling to respect you, that’s why we learn Hapkido.”
“To kick their ass?” a boy asked on the first day of class.
Mr. Chang laughed. “No. To blow off steam through useful physical activity so we won’t feel we have to hurt them. We focus a lot here on conditioning before all else.”
He lost a few prospective students that day. Those kids went to the edge of town to a karate studio in an industrial park, the one with all the tall golden trophies in the front window. I think his peaceful approach was one way Mr. Chang screened his students. He wanted the smart kids who didn’t plan on bullying anyone with what he could teach them. “You can hurt someone with a throw. You can control someone with a joint lock. You can discourage them with kicks and punches. But use soft words first.”
Sounds pretty Mr. Miyagi Karate Kid vanilla, doesn’t it?
That’s why my private lesson with Mr. Chang surprised me. One week after I was awarded my black belt, Mr. Chang told me to meet him at the dojang early on a Sunday morning. Brad’s horrific death was still a couple of months away and I was pouring over college brochures, waiting to hear about scholarships from the universities Mama couldn’t afford to send me to. My safety schools had already accepted me, but I was hoping for Northwestern.
Brad said I shouldn’t go so far that he couldn’t visit. He applied to universities in the same cities I did. He was going to take business and agriculture. We didn’t think anything could stop us then. We hadn’t counted on the hay baler. Nobody counts on the hay baler.
Mr. Chang greeted me at the door to the dojang. “Good morning, Ms. Smythe. Did you bring your sneakers?”
When I said I did, he pointed to his feet. “Me, too! Ready for a run?”
Mr. Chang often ran with his students to warm up when the weather was good. The weather that early spring day was a cold, hard rain. He caught my glance out of the school’s front windows. “We won’t melt,” he said.
“I was thinking we would freeze,” I said.
“Not for a while. Not if we run hard enough.”
And so we ran, first through town and then to the edge of Medicament. We kept going, side by side. If he had a destination in mind, he didn’t tell me. After an hour, we were both drenched in sweat though the rain had soaked through our clothes. My breath was coming shallow and hard. Mr. Chang did not speak and gave no hint that he planned to slow the pace. The rain began to pour harder, bouncing off the macadam.
After more than an hour of hard running with lightning flashes in the distance, I finally asked, “Shouldn’t we head back, sir?”
He stopped and signaled for me to rest. “Keep moving though. Your muscles will lock up and get hypothermic if you stop altogether. We probably should have headed back forty minutes ago.”
My laugh was ragged. “Then why didn’t we?”
“I was waiting to see how long it would take you to say we should turn back. You’re a stubborn one. Do you know when to give up?”
“Mama’s from Amarillo. She doesn’t approve of giving up.” I panted and swallowed thick phlegm. “Is this another test?”
He shook his head. “You passed black belt and earned it. It was a fine achievement. You are a very good student, Ms. Smythe. You put your all into the training. I fear you don’t know when to quit, but perhaps there is a lot of Amarillo in you, as well.”
“Thanks, sir. I think.”
“I have few female students. I always have one private lesson with my female students after they achieve black belt. We need to talk about your most important lesson.”
I was wary. “Okay.”
“Come. Let’s walk a while before the sprint back to the dojang.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your boyfriend seems nice.”
Mr. Chang often speaks in non sequiturs so I wasn’t thrown. “Brad is nice.”
“Good. When my mother brought my father home to meet her parents for the first time, my grandmother asked her, ‘He treat you nice?’ It seems like it should be an outdated question, doesn’t it? I think young women better understand their worth now compared to my parents’ time.”
“I hope so.”
“I’ve taught you a lot about defending yourself and you have learned very well. Did I ever tell you why I began teaching Hapkido?”
“You started by teaching your daughter, right?”
“Yes. Sasha. She’s off at college now, not much older than you. Do you know why I started teaching her?”
“Was someone bothering her at school or something? Nothing too bad, I hope.” My mind went to worst case scenaria, of course, and I worried that he was about to tell me some horrible story about an assault on his child.
“She is pre-diabetic,” he said. “Are you familiar with the term?”
“Before diabetic, I guess.”
“She’s not full blown diabetic. Borderline. Many people say that once one becomes pre-diabetic, diabetes is inevitable eventually. I set out to prove that wrong. I didn’t want her to suffer the worry, health issues and expenses diabetes carries for life.”
“So you got her doing Hapkido like your mother taught you?”
“No. I’m an accountant, too. I did research and came up with values for foods and put all the information into a spreadsheet, color coded.”
“Did that help?”
“Some. Not enough. The doctor said that if she was to change her metabolism and get more sensitive to insulin, she must exercise and make sure she sweats when she works out at least 30 minutes each day. I was very concerned for her, so I made her work out two hours a day.”
“How’d that go?”
“She is healthy and is no longer considered pre-diabetic. She has a second-degree black belt now.”
“That’s wonderful.”
He smiled. “My daughter does not speak to me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She did not want to exercise. She did not want to be my first student. I started the dojang purely for her benefit. When I learned Hapkido, I was only interested in learning for my benefit, to protect myself from all the evils of the world. I had no interest in teaching. Then I thought if Sasha had other students with whom to compete and endure the training with, she would embrace the spirit of the trial. It was hard for her. She thinks I am too hard on her.”
“Even now?”
“Over time, the lessons about food and regular exercise became normal for her, but she resented me for being such a taskmaster. She is studying engineering in California now. We talk on her birthday and Christmas. It is…awkward.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not fair to you.”
&nbs
p; “I was very hard on her, much as I am demanding of you,” he admitted. “People talk a lot about what’s fair, Ms. Smythe. They confuse the way they want things to be with the way they are. We must make the world we want. I am not sorry about training Sasha for a better life. I did the right thing. My daughter will live a longer and, ultimately, a happier life because I was willing to do what was necessary.”
“Happier without you?”
“People say that, after a time, we do not miss what is not there. I’m hoping that’s true. I still miss my daughter. Perhaps not enough time has gone by yet. Maybe she will realize she misses me before much longer.” He shrugged. “I do not worry about the things I cannot control and those things that are under my control require no worry.”
A moment of silence passed and I thought he was going to say I was like a daughter to him, or something sappy like that. Again, he surprised me. “You have to be willing to do what others will not do. To make more money, you must be willing to do things others will not. My brother owns a waste disposal business in Austin. His trucks haul away medical waste. No one wants to do that. That’s why my brother owns two houses and a boat. And take me. So many of my clients hate doing taxes. They look at a column of numbers and a pile of receipts and they panic every April. I get the most money out of those who panic. They come in with bags of receipts and I have to figure out what they did all year. Those who lack discipline think they are taking the easy way out, but they always end up paying more one way or another.”
“So, is that the lesson, sir? You want me to keep track of my receipts?”
He laughed and motioned for me to run with him again. A car drove around us and a wide puddle. The driver avoided the opportunity to splash us at high speed and we both waved our thanks to the driver.
“I’m telling you this, Ms. Smythe, because life is hard and you’re young enough to think it isn’t all that bad. To survive, sometimes you must do what others will not. For instance, your kata is excellent. You do the drills, all with precision and power. But you need to know, if you are attacked by a larger person who knows good fighting technique, you are at a distinct disadvantage.”
The Haunting Lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, I Declare a Demon War (The Ghosts & Demons Series) Page 2