Chapter Thirty-Four
I thought I’d done reasonably well. All of the questions whose answers I knew I had answered correctly. I had answered the rest honestly, not necessarily responding with what I thought the doctor wanted to hear. Once or twice I thought he’d blanched. That was probably my imagination as he must have seen and heard just about everything. Overall, I thought the interrogation had gone by without a hitch and relieved, I anticipated going home. Obviously nothing was too wrong. I’d take the pills and get a job. I’d turn it all around.
A short while after the questioning the doctor, who’d left us in a waiting room, reappeared and ushered my father and me into a stuffy little office. “Carmen, we’d like to admit you now. We think we can help you here. What do you think?”
I didn’t know what I thought. I wasn’t even sure I was thinking. I looked at my Dad and I knew what I had to say. “Yes, you can help me all you want; I’ll take all the help you can give.”
“Good,” the doctor said as he stroked his snowy goatee, “that’s very good.”
He rose while putting his paperwork in order and then he checked his watch that seemed suddenly to shine brightly. “Shall we?”
I felt a wave of anxiety – my stomach churned, my face felt very hot and my mouth went dry.
We passed people talking to themselves and others searching for well-endowed cigarette butts in the tired ashtrays that were affixed to the walls of the hallways. Some simply looked weary while others were downright cadaverous. I figured that there was nothing much in their lives to help them fill their days and time proved this to be true.
Some were so reliant on the hospital and its skill in devouring their days that they would never consider leaving. Where would they go? Sadly, there weren’t many places that would tolerate them or that they could survive in. As we walked to where I was to start a new chapter, mean, hard looking men reclined here and there, holding up the walls and speaking with their eyes, their cloaked faces giving away a whole bunch of nothing as they looked us over.
A button was pushed to summon an attendant. The doctor found and inserted a massive key in the lock and he pushed the door inward. “Here we are then.” The orderly approached and I was instructed to go with him. I walked onto the ward, following him like a zombie until I realized I had not said goodbye. I turned only to see the doctor locking the oversized door.
The first things I lost were my clothing and belongings, such as they were. Any dignity I had went with them. I wandered around with my arse hanging out of one of those blue, tie-in-the-back numbers that should be banned.
There was one guy who seemed intent on giving me heart palpitations and sweaty palms. He was a large person who walked around violently banging his left fist into his right hand. Whap, whap, whap.There’s nothing quite like being confined with an agitated and seemingly enraged person to put one’s paranoia through the paces. Still, I had to wonder about the man’s rage, what his story was. Why, I wondered, does this person cultivate such a forbidding presence? Does he even know he’s making all us folk nervous?
I turned to the guy beside me. “Hey, what’s the story?” I received no answer and thought he must be hard of hearing. I tried again, a little louder, “Hey buddy, what’s with that guy?”
A woman’s voice behind me said, “You can talk until the cows come home, he’ll never answer. He never talks to anyone, do you, you stupid son of a…”
Her voice trailed off as she walked away. I never did find out what was going on with the guy and his fist. When I woke up the next morning he was gone.
It was July when I first set foot in the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, the month in which my mother had brought me into the world. I had loved life as a child, however the very world I had loved then, I had grown to become leery of. During that hot July I sweated out life on the ward, which was a slice of humankind unto itself; we were all lost souls in the big bad world, hedged in by medicine and the maze of hallways that made up the hospital. Every which way, we were herded, watched and kept in line. We were protected, kept out of harm’s way for our own good.
Thankfully, the gray and boring world that was ours could not in any substantial way affect the world at large, or nothing would ever be done. Whenever I saw my doctor I hoped he would put me somewhere else, anywhere but where I was. Soon enough I got my wish.
It seemed that what was frowned on as bad behavior in Peterborough was rewarded in Kingston. After only fifteen days on the ward I was transferred to a very large house on the hospital grounds. It was a step in the right direction, something I gladly accepted.
I guessed I was being rewarded for keeping the peace, being of good behavior and taking my meds without any fuss. On the other hand, maybe it was all the time I spent pretending to read that book I carried with me everywhere. If you could read you were sane, right?
Though I enjoyed greater privileges at the group home - coffee or tea at night, my own room and being allowed to rest in my bed, I was still confined to the hospital grounds. I had permission to wander freely on the grounds because I had been given a group three classification. Eventually I was in possession of what was known as group 4 parole and this enabled me to roam anywhere I wanted, on or off of the hospital property. A few of us used to laugh. We needed parole yet had committed no crime other than that of being vulnerable to sickness. Still, I was determined to play along. Rung by rung I would climb the ladder and emerge from the hole I’d dug and jumped into.
Those of us who lived in the big, old building with many rooms, still had to go to the hospital for OT, to eat our meals, get a needle, buy cigarettes, use the library, play pool, see the dentist, (who pulled any tooth suspected of harbouring a cavity), and take care of any other business that, like a lazy cat with nothing to do, stretched itself out in our paths.
I was usually in a hurry when it came to meal times because I hated eating in the chaotic atmosphere of the cafeteria, hundreds of mouths munching, a rhythm of bite, chew, swallow that was hard to block out. Conversation was a feat best left to folk who liked to holler and there were a few of those present at every meal.
One day I was trying in vain to crunch a wilted salad while also chewing and swallowing a sandwich. Forgetting everything I’d been taught, I put down the sandwich and pushing away the salad started slurping tepid soup straight from the green, government-issue bowl that was cradling it. I was in the company of a few hundred others who were similarly engaged, all of us using identical bowls, cups, plates and spoons.
When I was almost finished, I looked around and everything seemed right, everything in its place. Things were winding down. People were leaving alone, in twos and threes. The sound of a post meal cleanup could be heard coming from the kitchen. I noticed a guy sitting nearby and looked twice. That’s in poor taste, I thought, there’s no need for anything like that. The misinformed person was sporting a swastika in his ear that was too large to ever go unnoticed
The next day I saw the same man who once again had his earring in and was also wearing a T-shirt with a picture of the first man on the moon putting up a flag, not of the American persuasion, but rather one sporting a swastika.
That misguided shlemiel eventually went elsewhere and I forgot all about him. He wasn’t missed – in his absence there were others eager to get on my nerves, though none of them had his flair for things distasteful.
Speaking of unusual people, there was one woman at the hospital that I would see every so often who definitely had her own way of seeing things, that being over her shoulder. She would be the backwards lady. Everywhere she went, she went hind end first. It would be safe to say that she suffered with some unshakable idea that some type of harm would come to her if she got about any other way. Sometimes she’d lose track of where she was going and someone would have to help her stay the course before somebody got hurt. I admit that she made me laugh sometimes. The last time I saw her that stands out in my mind was when I saw her walking backwards at a fair clip while she puffed away on a cigarette.
Then there’s the rapist. He enters the canteen sheepishly, but there’s no sense in it. He’s not ashamed of himself or made uneasy by what he’s done, that much is quite well known. Actually he thinks he’s getting a raw deal, he thinks people are against him and the staff treats him like dirt. He’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that there’s no good reason for the way others are towards him. The murderers, he says, incredulous, get more respect than he does. He spends his share of time alone and seems as if he doesn’t know why.
It’s odd, in a strange way, when he’s around the canteen the guy’s accepted. It could be that in the hospital nobody wants the boat rocked. Perhaps the people possessing sanctioned authority may have trouble drawing distinctions between guys like the rapist and people with brain diseases like schizophrenia. They might discourage any animosity that might possibly be directed towards a criminal of his persuasion by one with a mental illness who may also happen to have a sister. I’m not necessarily saying the staff was guilty of seeing through blurry spectacles at times, however, if the slipper fits they could try wearing it. Maybe a system that puts convicted felons with those guilty of having a disease needs to be looked at.
It’s said that he raped a woman and then let her go. She went and called the police. When they went back to the crime scene to look around he was still there, just standing, still and docile, looking around at things no one else could seem to see.
And then there’s Willie. Everywhere Willie goes he has one thing on his mind – cigarettes. Willie, he of the perpetual cough, can hardly stop hacking and wheezing long enough to ask for a smoke. His idea of a good time involves a bale of tobacco, some rolling papers, someplace dry and a few clean handkerchiefs. On those rare times when Willie stops coughing, he starts talking. After awhile you start to wonder which is worse. The first time I met Willie he bummed a smoke. The last time I saw Willie he bummed a smoke. Willie had been in the hospital too long. He’d been too long without any money in his pocket.
There goes that girl who breaks my heart. Yeah, she’s pretty and she has a sad way about her that makes me sad too, but that’s not what gets to me. I know I don’t have any right looking into her business and being dismayed, but I can’t help myself. My heart is grieved whenever her coffee cup is empty. I know that when the coffee money runs out she’ll wait until night and go to the basement. There she’ll think of other places while doing things she doesn’t want to do. When she comes back to the canteen the next day she’ll have enough for coffee and cigarettes. She’ll be okay for a while and then she’ll go to work again. People look the other way, “you know, it’s not like she does it every day.” Somewhere, a mother yearns for the daughter she knew. She’d had everything going for her, everyone had always said so.
There I was, convinced that I had no friends, that I didn’t fit in at the group home, in the hospital or anywhere else. There are people who are friendly towards me, but the illness has dug itself in. I’m suspicious of every one – they’re all harbouring animosity, they all look sickly. Some of the people I’ve met like to drink a bit and temptation is nipping at my heels. I hold onto sobriety, at times, as though it’s the last tie to sanity I have. It seems more and more likely that a life of drunkenness will reclaim me and thus destroy my fragile peace.
The hospital grounds can be nice. There are some tall, old trees and the water can look really beautiful in the right light. If you can find a place, where no one will bother you, you can close your eyes and just drift with sounds of the water and the gulls, and then you can escape.