“GET YOUR HANDS off me! You’ve got no rum!” I scream as the attendants hoist me onto the table, hold down my arms and legs.
The Unit’s treatment room is identical to the infirmary’s: green-tiled walls, cabinets, and an examination table at its center. But this one contains something more: a box of switches and knobs. Electroshock.
Wallace, now standing at my head, dips a tongue depressor into a jar of viscous gel that smells like iron filings and gasoline. She spreads the stuff on my temples as I squirm.
“Don’t do this!” I say, looking up at her.
“Still fighting it,” Lester says. “A week of shocks hasn’t made a dent in her crazy. Doctor shoulda kept her knocked out longer—”
“Lester, that’s enough,” Wallace says.
Sherman enters the room. “And how are we feeling today, Dorothy—”
“You lied!” I shout, but the doctor says nothing, just takes my pulse and watches me, assessing. “You lied about the protocol! I demand to speak to Paul now!”
He squeezes my shoulder. “Now, you don’t want to do that, dear. You’ll interrupt all the progress you’re making. I’m guessing you’ve already noticed a diminishment of your symptoms.”
The voice has definitely been less present. And my last vision of the future seems a long time ago. But the risks—ending up like Mary Droesch? “I don’t want this—”
“Not to worry. You’re in good hands. It won’t be long before you come to realize that.” He pats my arm and walks over to the ECT control box.
“No! I need to talk to Paul! Once he knows what you’re doing down here, he’ll—”
Lester whispers, “Go ahead, darlin,’ tell us what he’ll do again.”
Again? So this scene has played out before? Jesus.
“Don’t you want to get well enough to go home?” Dr. Sherman asks as he adjusts his dials.
“By inflicting brain damage to remake me?” I lift my head, the only part of me able to move, and level my eyes at him. “My memory’s already in tatters and you’re about to send an electric current through it. What kind of dumbass thinking is that—”
“Lester,” Wallace instructs, and the attendant crams a rubber bit into my mouth, silencing me. Then the nurse fits something padded onto my greasy temples. “We’re ready to proceed, Doctor,” she says.
“Good. I’ll be administering a hundred and fifty volts. Three charges of point six second duration. Note the change in Mrs. Frasier’s chart.”
“But those are full-dose levels,” Wallace says, “and we haven’t finished ramping her up—”
“She’s obviously handling the dosage just fine.”
“But—”
“I don’t recall asking for a consultation, Miss Wallace,” he says as he turns on the unit with a THWICK of a switch.
“Yes, Doctor.”
There’s a second THWICK from the machine.
Followed by a CRACK inside my skull, as a lightning bolt, violet blue and hot, whipsaws me around till my bones are shards and my brain, a fine puree.
I feel it all the time now, the protocol.
There’s a heaviness in me, on me, like a lead apron, and I half expect at any moment to sink through my chair and the checkerboard floor, straight to the center of the earth. And my hand, the right one, it’s begun to curl in on itself … But it’s all part of the process, necessary, Dr. Sherman explained in one of our sessions, if we’re going to truly extinguish the voice. And it’s working, the shocks continuing to weaken her, as Dr. Sherman promised they would. There are whole slices of time now when the voice is silenced completely, giving me a break from her violent urgings.
So, I’m free to drift here in the Unit’s kitchen, contemplate the meal in front of me. Breakfast … dinner? The bowl contains something beige and something brown, pureed then dumbwaitered down in covered pots from the main kitchen above. Definitely corn this time. And the brown? Beef stew? Hard to tell.
At the table with me are Alice and a couple of other silent ambulatories, along with Miss Gibbs, busy feeding Mary, while she stares unseeing through her thicket of overgrown bangs. The catatonic’s a grim reminder of the risks involved in reclaiming my sanity. But Miss Gibbs hasn’t given up on her. As she slots a spoonful of mush into Mary’s half-open mouth, the nurse gently rubs her hand and speaks to her softly. Asks her how she’s doing today and shares news about her sister like the gork is listening.
I push the brown slick into the lumpy corn sea with my spoon while I take in Miss Gibbs’s details—her pale, porcelain skin … her delicate-looking hand with the grip of a longshoreman … the splashy drop of dried blood on her white shoe …
“Hun, you should eat something,” Alice says to me. “You’re getting awfully thin.”
“I’m not very hungry right now.” Whoa, my voice. It’s hollowed out, measured, syllables all weighted and pitched the same. How long has it been that way?
They’re taking you apart, piece by piece.
You can’t let that happen.
The voice is awake, my break over.
“Sure am glad this is my last meal of mush,” Alice says.
“Why is that?” I ask in my new monotone.
“Today’s the big day. I’m going home. You know that, silly.”
I do? Facts float in and out of my recall like the tide here in the Unit. I’ll miss Alice. Even with her alarming explanations, she was someone to talk to. But her going home is a good thing. Sure, she’s still a bit too composed and agreeable, still parroting Dr. Sherman, but she seems to be doing fine. Happy, even.
Is that what you want, happy?
Happy won’t solve your problem. Angry and armed, now they might solve your problem—
Shouts and the sharp smell of mustard interrupt the voice’s desperate suggestions. I look up and see Betsy standing a few feet away, swaying unsteadily, the shattered remains of a broken mustard jar at her feet.
But it’s her face that’s of most interest.
A red valley extends from her forehead to her cheek and blood trickles from the gap between the two flaps of skin in a steady drip onto the floor. One shaky hand’s gripping a jagged piece of jar, while the other frantically probes the wound.
Gus enters the kitchen and Betsy shouts, “Teh … teh me wuhrr izzit? Dah teh … teh … transmeh … mehter?” But agitation has only worsened Betsy’s verbal horror show and there’s little chance the attendant understands her words—or cares about her missing transmitter. He’s far more concerned about the bloody shard of glass she’s brandishing in her hand. So Betsy shouts even louder, desperate to be understood. “Nee tah geddih outtah my heh … head—”
But Gus overpowers and disarms her.
As she’s escorted out I can hear her begging to speak to Dr. Sherman, to explain her actions, apologize, like a child seeking forgiveness from a father. Strange.
“What’ll happen to her?” I ask Alice.
“Now that Betsy’s used a weapon, shown she could be an immediate danger to others, I imagine the doctor will go a more traditional route.” Betsy’s going down-alphabet, and I remember what Georgie said that night at the movies: no one plans on becoming a chronic.
Now I see—how hard it could be to leave this place.
That Hanover might win.
A custodian enters, pushing his cart full of cleaners and buckets. It’s Joe, the guy who lent me his handkerchief that first day to clean the blood off my ears, the latest to draw the short straw and have to come down here to clean up after us moths. “It’s a shame the protocol didn’t work for her,” Alice says as we watch Joe begin to clean up Betsy’s debris.
“Betsy’s not protocol,” I say.
“Yes she is, silly. You’re forgetting again.” Betsy’s paranoid horror show is from Sherman’s protocol? “Bill will be here any minute now, so give me a hug goodbye,” she says.
“Buh … but what the protocol did to Betsy—what if—”
Alice takes my hands, her giant eyes behind the glasses fixed on mine. “Hun, when you get near the end, that last, most difficult part, when nothing makes sense anymore, just know you’re getting better—even if it seems they’ve made you so much worse.”
Worse? How much worse? Betsy worse? But before I can ask, Alice is out the door. Gone.
Joe picks up a piece of glass near my feet and tosses it into his wastebasket. Then he points to my Latin medal. “That’s a handsome pendant you have there, miss. May I take a look?” I nod, and he examines it. “Georgetown Country Day Latin Award,” he reads, then turns it over. “Memento Audere Semper.” He looks at me. “‘Remember, always dare,’ right?”
Must be some Catholic school in Joe’s past. I nod.
“That’s a fine accomplishment, miss,” he says.
“Dorothy,” Miss Wallace says from the doorway, “you shouldn’t still be in here. Come, it’s time for your treatment.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answer, and go to her.