“We have the changes and we have the secret world,” Dr. Fried said, “but what was going on in your life in the meantime?”
“It’s hard to get close to; it all looks like hate—the world and camp and school. . . .”
“Was the school also antisemitic?”
“Oh, no, it was truer there. The hate was all for myself, the good, hard in-spite-of-lessons-on-manners dislike. But every time mere dislike turned to active anger or hate, I never knew why. People would come to me and say, ‘. . . after what you did, . . .’ or ‘. . . after what you said, . . . even I won’t defend you anymore. . . .’ I never knew what it was that I had done or said. The maids in our house left one after another, until it was like a continuous procession, and I kept having to ‘apologize,’ but I never knew for what or why. Once I greeted my best friend and she turned from me. When I asked why, she said, ‘After what you did?’ She never spoke to me again, and I never found out what had happened.”
“Are you sure that you are not hiding some truth here—something you needed to do that angered these friends?”
“I’ve tried and tried to imagine, to think, to remember. I have no idea at all. None.”
“How did you feel about this happening?”
“After a while it was just a grayness and the surprise of the inevitable.”
“Surprise of the inevitable?”
“Where there is no law but this awful destruction, coming and always coming closer—the Imorh—the shadow of it is always inevitable. Yet—and why I don’t know—I keep suffering from its oncoming and from being hit and hit over and over from directions which I don’t expect.”
“Perhaps it is only that you are looking to be shocked and frightened in this world.”
“You mean arranging deceits?” Deborah felt the ground beginning to go dangerous.
“But you had to make the deceits yourself, did you not? Or understand nothing.”
A picture came to Deborah from the years when she was only waiting for the end. She had been removed from the antisemitic camp, but the color of life had been set and only the despair could deepen. She was always off by herself sketching, they had said, but she never let anyone see the pictures. She had begun to carry that sketchbook around everywhere, clutching it like a kind of shield, and once, among a laughing, idle group of boys and girls, a picture had dropped out of the book without her knowing it. One of the boys had picked up the paper. “Hey—what’s this? Who dropped it?”
It was an intricate picture with many figures. One by one the members of the group disclaimed it: no, not mine, not mine, no, no . . . down the line, and finally he looked again at Deborah.
“Is this yours?”
“No.”
“Oh, come on—admit it.”
“No.”
As Deborah looked at the boy more closely, she saw that he was trying to help her—that if she would admit the work and take her “punishment” in the laughter of the others, he would defend her. He wanted to be a benefactor, but she did not know at what cost to her.
“Is it yours?”
“It is not mine.”
“You see—” she told the doctor bitterly, “they made me repudiate my art.”
“But don’t you see that the boy was begging you not to repudiate it, and none of the others laughed, really. You were only afraid that they might laugh. You alone made yourself lie.”
She looked at the doctor, angry and fearful. “How many times does one tell the truth and die for it!”
She got up angrily, went to the doctor’s desk, and took a sheet of paper and began to draw an answer to the seeming accusations of all of them: the doctor, who seemed to be blaming her; the Collect and its endless disapproval; the words of so many. She drew furiously for a while, and when she was finished, she handed the picture to the doctor.
“I see clearly the anger, but there are symbols here which you should explain. Crowns . . . scepters . . . birds . . .”
“Those are nightingales. So lovely. See, the girl has all the advantages, all that money can buy, only the birds use her hair for nests and to polish those crowns, and they burnish the scepter with her bones. She has the finest of crowns and the heaviest of scepters and everyone says, ‘Lucky girl, with all that!’ ”
Dr. Fried saw her patient turning and running, turning and running in her fear. Soon there would be no place to go and she would have to meet herself as she planned her own destruction. She looked at Deborah. At least the battle was being fought in earnest now. The old apathy was gone. She began to feel in herself a rising hope and with it an excitement that was like no other—the echo coming out of so deep a place still bore the sound of this girl’s potential health. She withheld the excitement from her face so that Deborah would not see it and damn herself forever by defiantly trying to prove that this Yr of hers was a fact.
“Crown and nightingales!” Deborah was saying caustically. “Keep the thing and you can show it to the learned doctors you lecture to. Tell them that you don’t have to be sane to understand linear perspective.”
“It does depend on the kind of perspective,” the doctor said. “But I think I’ll keep this for myself—to remind me that the creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.”
Deborah was sitting on the floor of the ward, idly waiting for a meeting with Anterrabae, when she saw Carla coming toward her down the hall. “Hey, Deb . . .”
“Carla? I didn’t know you were up here.”
Carla looked very tired. “Deb—I had enough of hate all boxed in. I decided to come up here where I can yell and yell until I get hoarse.” They looked at each other and smiled, knowing that “D” was not the “worst” ward at all, only the most honest. The other wards had “status” to keep up and a semblance of form to maintain.
The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular. So wards A and B whispered their little symptoms and took their sedatives and were terrified of loud noises or overt agony or towering despair. Women’s Disturbed rocked like a boat sometimes, but its inmates felt free of the subtle, treacherous currents of secret madness.
Sometimes the patients talked to one another about their lives before, or shared information from the grapevine. Such was the instinct of the idle and displaced for some union with the world, however they wished to deny it. Now their world was peopled with psychotics and bounded by walls and wards.
“Where were you before?”
“Crown State.”
“Jessie was there. I knew her in Concord.”
“What ward in Concord?”
“Five and Eighteen.”
“I had a friend on Seven. She said it was a real bughouse.”
“Hell, it was! Hesketh was head of the place. He was nuttier than the patients.”
“Hesketh . . . ?” Helene, passing by them, started from her trancelike procession down the hall. “Short and kind of thin? Blue eyes—a slurring of his r’s? Did he turn his head up like this?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“The bastard! I got beaten up by him at Mount Saint Mary’s.” And she continued on, moving away from them and back into her trance. Lee Miller rubbed her ear reflectively. “Mount Saint Mary’s . . . I remember . . . Doris was there, Doris Rivera.”
“Who the hell is she?”
“Oh, kid, she was before your time, a veteran of every treatment I ever heard of and she was as crazy as a bedbug. She was up here for three years.”
“Where did they send her then?”
“Nowhere. She’s living outside now and working.”
They were incredulous. Did someone really know? Could someone really name the name of a success—one for whom this place had been means and not end? They deluged Lee with questions until she said, “Listen, I knew Doris when she was up here on ‘D,’ but I don’t know her formula for success and I haven’t seen her since she left! All I know is that she’s out and has a job. Now damn it, leave me alone!”
The patients turned and began to scatter to the dayroom, the bathroom, the far end of the hall, and their beds. The evening went into night. The Wife of the Assassinated made one of her monthly breaks for freedom—a headlong, blind dash to the closing ward door as the dinner trays left.
Deborah stood listening to the endless recitals of her wrongs in the chant of the Collect, and into the middle of their noise Anterrabae cried, See if you can ever go out and live. See if you can ever go out and work and be a person! The threat made her dizzy with fear. The outside world and its beings were as foreign to her as if she had never eaten at the same tables with them or been caught in the up-current of their death-dealing and unfathomable lives. All the simple-looking actions that she could not counterfeit, she saw again, flatly, like a series of still pictures. Young girls saying hello, walking together, going unafraid to school, the pretty girls, courting and marrying. She remembered Helene and the anguish which had made her wish to obliterate the face that had seen and understood the picture of a pretty college friend.
You are not of them! Lactamaeon screamed out of Yr, trying to protect her.
All the other mothers are proud of their young girls! the Collect was saying in the acid, mocking tone it took when things were worse than usual.
Walk out of this with that famous doctor of yours! the Censor roared. Do you think you can go telling secrets and be safe forever? There are other deaths than death—worse ones.
Now it is time to hide and be hidden . . . whispered Idat, rarely seen god who was called the Dissembler.
From the endless-sounding embroilment, the flashing-by of gods and faces of the Collect, Deborah saw, like a cartoon, flat and unforeshortened, the figure of McPherson walking down the hall of the ward. I’m going to call him—to get help, she said to all of it. Go ahead. Anterrabae laughed. Try. And he passed by with a whiff of the smell of his burning. Fool!
McPherson was passing by. Soon he would be gone. Deborah got closer to him but couldn’t speak. Gesturing a little with a hand, she tried to get his attention, and he saw her out of the corner of his eyes, arrested by the intensity of her look and the strange, almost spastic motions of her hand, twisted by tension into an odd position. He turned.
“Deb? . . . What’s the matter?”
She could not tell him. She could do no more than gesture feebly with her body and hand, but he saw the panic she was in. “Hold on, Deborah,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She waited and the fear mounted as her other senses closed to her. She could only see in gray now and she could barely hear. Her sense of touch was also leaving, so that the reality of contact with her own flesh and clothing was faint. The mumbling out of Yr went on, and after a while the smell of people in the heavy ether-and-chloroform stench of the Pit made her think that she should try to see them. Everything was white—it must be nurses or the winter snow.
“Deborah. Can you hear me?” It was McPherson’s voice. Someone in the background was saying, “What’s the matter with all of them tonight?” McPherson was still trying to talk to her. “Deb—don’t be afraid. Can you walk?”
There was not much direction to the walk. She shambled and had to be taken, leaning on someone, to the end of the hall where the open pack was waiting. She collapsed on it almost gratefully, not feeling the first cold shock of the wet sheet. . . .
A long time later she came up clear again, and after a period of breathing and listening to herself breathe, she gave a long sigh. A voice beside her said, “Deb? Is that you?”
“Carla?”
“That’s right.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Carla said. “I’m a stranger here myself, but the ward is sure going nuts tonight.”
“Going!” They laughed a little.
“How long has it been?” Deborah said.
“You hit just a little after I did. Helene’s in the next room and so is Lena, and Lee Miller is having hysterics.”
“Who’s on the night shift?”
“Hobbs.” The tone of dislike was plain. “I wish it was McPherson.”
They talked for a while, letting the real world in slowly, being pleased to talk to each other but not daring to admit that they were, in a small sense, friends. Carla told how she had listened to one of Helene’s hours with her doctor. The sessions were held on the ward because of Helene’s violence. “Silence is murder,” Carla said. “Old Craig just couldn’t stand all that silence. He began to talk himself and soon he was getting louder and louder and more and more upset. Any minute I expected Helene to say, ‘Calm down, Doctor; I’m just here to help you.’ When he came out of there, he looked . . . like one of us!”
Deborah, fully conscious, began to stretch, feeling the now-familiar bone-ache of restricted circulation in her feet and ankles. She could see the motionless mummy-hump of Carla in the bed near her.
“Deborah . . . Deb . . . I know what it was—what happened to us.”
“What?” Deborah said, wondering if she really wanted to know.
“Doris Rivera.”
Somewhere inside Deborah an awful ache rose, a recent but now familiar ache which she had begun to identify with Yri words—an ache hiding the ancient and fearsome English word: Truth.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it was,” Carla said, gaining conviction. “She got well and went out and she’s working, and we got frightened because we might someday . . . have to be ‘well’ and be in the world; because there’s a chance that they might open those doors for us, on . . . the world.” Carla’s voice was cut with the knife of her panic.
Inside the motionless white casing Deborah’s heart had begun to pound and her stomach to heave. She began to tremble hard and the tremor took her whole body. My God, she thought, I am now what I was in the world—a motionless mountain whose inner part is a volcano.
“Go to Hell!” she cried at Carla. “Just because your mother was insane and killed herself, you think you have more reasons to be crazy than I do!” She heard the sharp intake of breath from the other bed. The spear had gone home, but her cruelty had given her no protection. She pushed her head hard against the ice pack pressing like reality at the back of her neck.
At that moment the light went on over them and they blinked, trying to shield themselves from the glare.
“Just checking,” Hobbs said. He came and felt Deborah’s pulse at the temple. “She’s still pretty high,” he said to the attendant who had come in behind him. “This one, too,” he said as he straightened up over Carla. They left and the light went out.
In shame, Deborah turned her head away from Carla’s bed.
“Is the meat done?” Carla said bitterly. “No, give it another twenty minutes.”
“We are not of them,” Deborah murmured, and the comfort of Yr in this new context seemed almost shocking. “Carla . . .” The words were coming hard. “I’m sorry for what I said. I did it for me and not against you. I didn’t want to hurt you—to make you sicker.”
There was quiet for a while; the only sound was their breathing. Then Carla’s voice came, not rancorous or arch, although Deborah was listening for rancor. “My sickness . . . is a glass that’s full and running over, and your little drop is lost by now in all the overflow.”
“What you said about Doris Rivera maybe . . . is true.”
The bone-truth hurt, but a little less this time.
“I know.”
Deborah began to fight the reality, the pack, the questions. She struggled against her restraints, half-crying.
“What’s the matter?” Carla said in the darkness.
“You could have hurt me—and you didn’t!” And because Deborah could not understand why Carla had spared her, she lay shaking and gritting her teeth in cold, bare terror.