Mary
They’ve taken me. I suppose I knew they would one day, but it’s not like before, not like those other places. There are no White Coats here, no square-jawed nurses lurking with their sharp eyes and soundless shoes, no random screams ringing in the halls. And yet it isn’t altogether different.
The room they’ve put me in is small and stark—all curling linoleum and naked white lights, familiar in a way that makes me queasy. Something to do with the smell of the place, I expect—coffee and anxiety, mixed with disinfectant. I heard the cold scrape of the lock when they left me, an echo of old nightmares. You’re here, it said mockingly, for as long as it pleases them to keep you.
Sweet mother of God, my insides clench to think they might actually keep me here.
Confinement.
It’s the nice word for locked up, a pretty word they liked to use at the hospital. But then, there are so many pretty words for the grisly things in life, words meant to sound like something else, sanitized of their awkward, uncomfortable truths. Melancholia is another of those words, like music with all its small, fragile syllables, or the name of a flower one might pluck from a country garden. Not a hint of grief in it. No misery. No sorrow. Sorrow and grief are unseemly, you see, and terribly inconvenient for those who must witness the suffering—and we mustn’t be inconvenient.
The urge to laugh is suddenly overwhelming, bubbling up into my throat—from where I do not know—until I fear it will choke me. Hysteria, I believe they call it. There, you see, another flowery name; this one meant to pretty up good old-fashioned panic. But there’s nothing pretty about it. I see that plainly as I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the small plate-glass window, a blind window that looks out on nothing at all. There are eyes behind it. I feel them watching. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe that was before. I can’t be sure. Suddenly, terribly, it’s as if time has rewound itself, has wrenched me back to where it all began. Or perhaps I should say where it all ended.
I watch the black-and-white clock above the door, the agonizing sweep of its bloodred second hand, and wait for something to happen. I’m aware of a slow, creeping numbness, an insidious blurring of the then and the now, as if my past and present have somehow overlapped. It’s how my life is defined, you see, before my confinement and after—then and now. Is this to be a new beginning, then—the start of a new confinement? When I’ve done nothing wrong? I stare a moment at my hands, quiet in my lap, harmless now after so many years of penance and confession. I haven’t done anything wrong, have I—nothing new, I mean?
I wish I could be sure.
When the lock turns again I look up. There are two of them staring at me, their eyes full of pity, and something else I don’t like the look of. I know what they’re like, these hard men with their soft eyes, always dredging up the wreckage and making you look at it, all the bits of your life that have washed up on the rocks, shattered almost beyond recognition. And then they tell you it’s your fault, again and again, until you almost believe them. Only it isn’t true.
It isn’t real.
But no one will listen. Then, after a while, you stop telling them. You let them believe what they want, and you let them think you believe it, too—even when you don’t, and never will.