HOURS LATER A recovered Lillian and I wait in line in the kitchen’s serving area, the walls of which have been decorated with giant cutouts of Pilgrims and Indians. Up ahead a woman in a hairnet behind the counter doles out food.
Fake Thanksgiving at Hanover.
It’s probably not the best celebration of the holiday feast I’ve enjoyed in my life, but someone’s about to hand me a plate of hot food—and one can hardly argue with that situation.
The kitchen worker loads up our trays—a slice of turkey roll bathed in yellowish gravy, a “holiday medley” of peas, carrots, and corn, and a slice of pumpkin pie.
While we wait for the patient ahead of us to decide what silverware to take, I take in her crude, choppy crew cut. Someone’s shorn off her hair like you would a sheep’s, with little care as to the outcome.
Lillian whispers, “Lobotomy. Dr. Sherman performs them on really sick patients, the difficult ones that nothing else works for. Helps them become more normal. I heard he takes something that looks like an ice pick and hammers it through there,” she says, pointing to the inner corner of my eye, “till he reaches the brain. Then he sort of swings it back and forth to cut whatever it is that’s causing the problem. They say it’s all terribly scientific.” We watch the woman still hesitating over cutlery. “The doctor just needs a little more practice. She’s gonna be a while.”
Jesus. Get me out of this place.
Lillian reaches around the woman and grabs our silverware.
The dining hall is huge, with a soaring ceiling supported by giant wood beams. And loud: the deafening din of a couple hundred highly vocal women almost drowns out the ringing still in my ears. I follow Lillian down its center aisle, passing by rows and rows of tables topped with today’s preholiday art project: construction paper turkeys.
As we sit down at a table near the far end, Lillian warns, “You need to be a bit careful tonight. Normally this dining hall’s just for A- to C-Ward patients. But since it’s Thanksgiving, patients from some down-alphabet wards are here for the holiday celebration. And some of them can be scrappy.”
A woman at the end of the table gazes out through the hole she’s eaten out of the slice of turkey plastered to her face. Gravy drips slowly down it as she speaks to no one in particular: “… so I said to John, you and the kids can make your own goddamn dinner…”
“She’s harmless. It’s those two you need to watch out for. Norma and Carol over there,” Lillian says, nodding to a couple of Paul Bunyan–size women laughing hysterically a few tables away. “F-Ward psychopaths.”
The number of staff overseeing the dining hall is small: Gus, Lester, and Germanic Nurse. Joe, the custodian who lent me his handkerchief earlier, is mopping up medley spillage—peas, corn, and carrots in a blast radius around a table near the center of the room.
Soon Wallace and Gibbs, the doe-eyed nurse from intake, appear, leading a handful of patients down the center aisle. Thin creatures with drawn faces and large, dull eyes, dressed in faded gray gowns that hang limply from their sharp collarbones. They trail with slow, teetering gaits behind the nurses. I see drool glistening on the chin of one.
Nurse Wallace pauses the group near our table, waiting for Georgie, who’s blocking the aisle, to move. While the debutante searches for a table to grace with her presence, I spot a loose hairpin jutting from Wallace’s tightly coiled bun, trying to escape its gravitational force— a potential lock pick.
Wallace grows impatient with Georgie and points to our table. “Sit there, Georgina.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Georgie says with a smile. She plunks down across from me, the smile for Wallace gone, and watches me eat. “Lord, you’d think you hadn’t eaten for days the way you’re tearing through that pressed turkey.”
“Is that going to be a problem for you?” I ask.
“Depends. Will you close your mouth when you chew?”
“Please don’t fight, ladies,” Lillian urges fretfully. “The nurses’ll hear.”
But Wallace and Gibbs are moving on with their charges. As the last one, a middle-aged woman in pointy cat’s-eye glasses, shuffles past Norma, the psychopath leans into the aisle and taunts, “Hey, gork, Gene Kelly teach you those dance steps?”
Norma’s sidekick, Carol, laughs so hard she chokes, sending veggie shrapnel into her friend’s face—causing Norma to shift her bullying from Glasses to Carol.
Wallace and Gibbs hear none of it; they’re busy seating their docile charges at a nearby table that’s already been set with spoons in bowls containing what looks like our holiday dinner—if you ran it through a chipper-shredder. Festive. Having settled the last of their patients, the nurses walk away.
I watch Glasses slowly bring a spoonful of turkey mush to her mouth, hand curled tight around her utensil to ensure its safe journey. “Who are those women?” I ask.
“Patients from Dr. Sherman’s Unit downstairs,” Lillian says. The Unit—where Betsy and Mary were sent. “On holidays, the doctor allows anyone who can make the trip to come up here for the special dinner.”
Wonder why Betsy and Mary wouldn’t have qualified. They’re definitely in better shape than these women. Glasses’s spoon is almost at her lips when the food spills out of it. The woman stares at the empty utensil, at a loss.
“Not exactly Quiz Bowl contestants,” Georgie adds, having deemed our conversation worthy of her attention.
“What exactly is the Unit?” I ask them.
Lillian shrugs. “Not really sure.”
“I know. My father told me,” says Georgie. “It’s an experimental facility. Dr. Sherman’s conducting government-funded research down there on how a damaged mind can be rehabilitated. Even made well again. He’s been developing various new treatment regimens on severely ill patients brought in specifically for them. Daddy says it’s all very hush-hush, part of the cold war effort. Apparently, even the patients’ families aren’t told exactly what’s being done.”
The zombies chew slowly, dull eyes down. “What do you think is being done to them?” I ask Georgie.
“Hard to say,” she answers. “They don’t let us anywhere near the Unit patients.”
“They’re afraid we’ll hurt them,” Lillian says.
“Probably for the best,” Georgie says. “Look at them, like baby deer.”
“Oh no, that’s trouble,” Lillian says as she watches Norma heading down the aisle toward the Unit table, dragging her spoon across tabletops as she goes. Wallace and the rest of the staff are preoccupied with some shouting match at the other end of the room. Norma reaches the Unit’s table and starts scooping pureed pie from the helpless women’s bowls into her own mouth.
But when she tries swiping Glasses’s bowl, the woman bats her away with her own spoon.
“Someone’s still got some fight in her,” says Georgie.
Seeing Glasses about to get her ass whooped sparks something in me, and just like in the shower line with Mary Droesch, I feel this urge bordering on compulsion to involve myself. Idiotic, I know, and I try changing the subject in my head to anything else—the weather, Officer Worthy’s clear blue eyes, the suspect mole on Lillian’s upper lip. But now the voice puts the urge into words:
Trust your gut. Go to her.
And I have to admit, she’s awfully persuasive.
As I rise, Georgie puts her hand on my arm. “Let that be.”
“Go along to get along?” I ask.
“Exactly. Do not stick your neck out for anyone here.”
But I ignore her, head for the Unit table, and just as Norma takes a swing at Glasses, I slide between them and block it.
Norma comes after me now, shouting, “Find your own damn pie, Wonder Woman!” But I silence her dessert tirade with a hook kick, raising my knee and extending it outward, then snapping it back till my heel impacts Norma’s jaw with a satisfying thump.
Norma recovers surprisingly quickly and again turns to Glasses, about to grab her by the throat, when I seize her arm, wrap my leg around hers, and pull her to the ground. I’m preparing to flip her when I find myself pausing and checking the crowd, which now includes Sherman, standing in the doorway, observing.
There’s something I’m waiting for but I’m not quite sure what it is—till I see it: Wallace and her loose hairpin heading straight for me, straitjacket in hand. Gibbs, along with Gus, Lester, and a couple other attendants, follow.
I surrender to Hanover’s arithmetic. Don’t resist as Lester and Gus pull me off Norma, and Wallace opens the restraint meant for me. It’s an old one; stenciled on the shoulder are the words HANOVER LUNATIC HOSPITAL. A return address should I go lost.
As Lester pins my left arm down, he says to Gus, “I swear these women’d eat each other alive if we let ’em. Wouldn’t you, darlin’?” he asks, winking at me.
Gus ignores Lester’s fantasy date musings and concentrates on pinning my legs, allowing Wallace to begin her work. And even though this apparently was my plan, as the nurse deftly thrusts my arm into the stiff canvas of the restraint, a sort of primitive panic starts to fill me. But when she leans over me for the second arm—and I see that loose hairpin so tantalizingly close, I remember what I’m after. I lift my head, try to snag it with my teeth but fail.
Damn. I try again, fail again. She’s now got both arms completely in the long sleeves. Time’s up. But then there’s a scream. Norma’s bitten an attendant. Wallace turns her head toward the noise—bringing her hairpin a shade closer. I try one last time and, hallelujah, my teeth connect with metal.
As I slip the hairpin quickly into my mouth, I sense eyes on me and look up to find Georgie watching. But she says nothing.
When they stand me up and cross my arms, I notice two things: one, that I’ve quietly filled my lungs to capacity. And two, that I’m flexing every muscle in my upper body to its maximum, holding this pumped-up stance as they work.
This new awareness of my intention to be big prompts questions. Did I help Glasses like I tried to help Mary Droesch—and in the process find I could obtain this piece of metal? Or did some cunning part of me see the opportunity, weigh the risks, then engineer this little drama to score it? The person who’d do that is a calculating bitch.
Am I her? Am I a calculating bitch?
Just practical. You saved Glasses and gained the tool that’ll get you out of here.
Don’t overthink it.
The voice is right. I’m a couple picked locks away from escape; I’ll worry about my shady motivations when I’m free.
I smell Sherman’s approaching cologne. “You see what I mean?” Wallace says to him. “Dorothy should be moved to a more appropriate ward—”
Sherman cuts her off. “Seclusion till they’ve calmed down.”
“Yes, Doctor,” a chagrinned Wallace says. After she’s finished securing the last buckle, a trussed-up Norma and I are led down the main corridor. Even though Norma’s from F-Ward, the staff must prefer not to drag riled-up patients all the way back to their own wards. Both of us are taken to A-Ward’s nearby seclusion hall—home of the crappy locks.
Gus takes Norma to her cell while Lester unlocks mine and flicks on the light. The small, low-ceilinged cell is built for claustrophobia. Its padded floor and walls must’ve started out white, but years of women writhing over their surfaces have given them a patina of psycho-beige.
Lester waits till I’ve kicked off my shoes, then pulls me into the cell and draws me close. Odors of cigarettes and menthol compete for supremacy in his mouth as he strokes my cheek.
I so want to bite.
Easy. Keep it together.
“Lester, you coming or what?” shouts Gus from down the hall.
“Killjoy,” Lester mutters, then yells, “Yeah, be right there.”
He shoves me to the floor and exits. When the door locks with a thwock, I put my interlude with Lester into one of my mental drawers, relax my flexed muscles—and find I’ve now got some slack in the jacket.
Time to leverage it. Hairpin clutched in my teeth, I manage to stand up, exhale, and hug myself till I’m as small as possible, then twist around till I’m able to slide my hand up to my shoulder. And I’m about to maneuver the crook of my elbow over my head and shed this garment, when I feel something—
The slightest vibration in my toes. It’s subtle, barely a whisper. So I stop a moment to better define it—and see the most beautiful rainbow halo form around the lightbulb above me. Soon the whisper in my feet grows to a buzz, like tiny ghost bees are trapped inside them. In seconds the buzz has worked its way up my legs and spine, to my head, where it begins to percolate, growing in sound and discomfort till it’s like a thousand jackhammers are drilling into me.
It’s a familiar roar. And a familiar pain.
This has all happened before.
Suddenly, there’s a blinding light, and I shut my eyes against the white roar. Let the hairpin drop. Let the cell fill with my screams.