Day Two began the same as Day One.
At 7:00 a.m. the doors to the ward rooms buzzed open.
At 7:05 Nurse Biedermann entered, trailing Assistant Nurse Sanchez, a tray of medications, and a lifetime of resentment.
“Pass,” Riley said, sitting on the hard bed.
Biedermann looked to the nurse. “Make an entry. Patient continues to resist medication.”
“Patient declines medication,” Riley corrected.
Biedermann regarded her with an expression as emotionless and implacable as an Easter Island megalith. “Second notation,” she told the nurse, “patient resists analysis.”
“Well, that’s been true pretty much my whole life, so yeah, that’s fair,” Riley said, and flashed Biedermann a smile.
It was not returned.
Hurrrrrrrrrrrr.
Fifty-five minutes later, Riley was having breakfast with Steve, Callie, and Danny, trying not to be too obvious as she watched a nervous orderly at a nearby table sliding small forkfuls of waffles past Frankenstein’s lips, moving slowly and carefully in case the exposed teeth went for his hand.
“So you two met?” Steve asked, nodding to the ominous figure across the room.
“Yesterday. Just for a minute. We didn’t exactly have a conversation.”
“He doesn’t talk to anyone,” Danny said. “At least I’ve never seen it happen, but then I don’t see a lot of him. Nobody does. Rumor is he found someplace where he can hide from the staff when he doesn’t want to be found. It makes them crazy.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“They used to call it delusions of grandeur, but not every delusion is grand, so they changed it to expansive delusions,” Steve said. “At least that’s what I heard one of the doctors say when they were talking about him, that it was some kind of psychosis, or schizophrenia—”
“No, I mean, what happened to him? Why is he like this?”
“No idea,” Callie said, “and honestly, I don’t care. He’s weird, end of story—sorry, not sorry—and not interested in hearing more. As far as I’m concerned, the less I know and the sooner I get away from all the freaks in this place so I never have to think about it ever again, the better I’ll like it.”
“How about you, Steve? How much longer do you have to stay here?”
“Two months. By then my sister will come into her trust fund and I can go home.”
Riley nodded at the scars on his wrists. “And once you’re out, you won’t do that again, right?”
“No idea. Depends. But I guess that applies to all of us, y’know?”
Riley nodded but didn’t comment as a patient at the other end of the room took two bites of toast, got out of his chair, walked six paces up, six paces back, returned to the table, ate two more bites, then stood and did it all again.
“It’s his routine for everything he eats,” Steve said, catching her look. “If he gets interrupted, he starts screaming and has to begin all over again. Classic pattern behavior.”
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” Riley said.
“Self-defense,” he said. “Know thy enemy.”
“Did you know most patients in mental hospitals want to be psychiatrists when they get out?” Danny said. “Totally true. That tells you a lot about the patients, but it tells you even more about the doctors.”
“So is there any way to make a call around here?” Riley asked. “Even in jail there was a pay phone.”
“Phone privileges for ARC patients are based on the point system,” Danny said. “In theory you can use the landline in McGann’s office if you get enough points, but nobody’s done it, because we figure it’s hooked up to a recorder.”
“Things are a little looser on this side for self-commits,” Steve said. “If there’s someone you want me to tell you’re here, give me their name and number, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Riley hesitated. You seem like a nice guy, but I’m gonna need to know you a lot better before I give you one of my contacts.
Instead, she just nodded and said, “Okay, thanks, let me think about it.” Then she glanced up as Jim tapped her on the shoulder from behind.
“Can I talk to you for a sec?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Once they were out in the hallway, Jim leaned against the wall, his voice low. “I just wanted to say that was a great performance you gave in yesterday’s session, but just so you know, we have a quarantine period for anybody new joining the group before we start to trust them. It’s nothing personal. We just need to decide if you really are who you say you are or something else.”
When you’re incarcerated, everyone there before you will assume you’re a plant or a snitch, her mother had told her, and you’ll assume the same about anyone coming in later. It’s an evil logic, but a necessary one.
“So you speak for the group?”
He shrugged away the question. “I’m just carrying the message,” he said, and went back inside.
And how do I know that you’re not working for the other side and trying to hide the fact by throwing suspicion onto me?
No, wait, let me save you the trouble.
I don’t.
* * *
On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, the staff unlocked the exercise room from two to four. Riley was first in line when they opened the doors and grabbed an available treadmill, desperate to run the last two days out of her system. She needed to not think about therapy, who she could trust, who trusted her, where she was, or what she was going to do about it.
She had walked and slept and sat and paced for two days. Now she needed to pretend the walls weren’t there, and just run.
She’d barely hit the 1K mark when Lauren stepped onto the treadmill to her right. Riley frowned but kept running. She could’ve gone to any of the others, but no, she picked this one because she’s gonna want to talk to me and I don’t want to talk to her or anyone. I just want to run, can I please just run and not talk or be bothered for two minutes?
“Can I talk to you?” Lauren said.
Right on schedule, Riley thought. “Sure,” she said, but kept her eyes on the horizon that wasn’t there.
“I saw the way you looked at me in session yesterday, and I don’t know what you’ve heard but—”
“I don’t know anything, I haven’t heard anything, I was just—”
“—but I wanted to tell you myself, straight up: yes, I’m doing some things I probably shouldn’t be doing, but—”
“Not judging, just running.”
Lauren slowed, then stopped. “I have a three-year-old son,” she said. “I divorced his father last year because he was always drunk or high, and frankly, I got tired of getting beat up all the time. When they arrested me, the court gave custody of Tommy to my ex. God only knows what kind of conditions he’s living under, because I sure as hell don’t, and nobody will tell me.
“I need to get out of here, Riley. I need to get my son away from that prick, and if the only way I can do that is to fuck every doctor, intern, and orderly in this goddamn place, then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll do it twice if it gets me out of here and back with my little boy faster. So honestly, keep your judgments to yourself, okay?”
Riley sighed and stepped off the treadmill. “Lauren, nobody told me squat about your situation, and if that’s really the reason you’re doing it, I understand—”
“What do you mean, if it’s the reason? I just told you—”
“I’m only saying that whether it’s true is none of my business. I just want to put in my time and get out, same as you. So I apologize if my look offended you, or if you thought I was being judgy, and yeah, maybe I was a little, but now that I know your story, I won’t be.”
“It’s not my story, it’s the truth,” Lauren shot back, as if looking for a reason to be offended. “So go fuck yourself, all right?” Then she stalked out of the gym, slamming the door behind her.
Riley stepped back onto the treadmill. Fuck my life, she thought angrily, and started running again.
* * *
Three p.m. twice weekly was set aside for Peer Group Counseling. Riley wasn’t sure what that meant until she showed up and found only other ARC patients in the therapy room, no doctors or nurses.
“This is where we just talk among ourselves,” Danny explained as he took an empty seat beside her.
“Talk about what?”
“Anything except what they want us to talk about. Big stuff, small stuff, personal stuff, sports, politics—it’s all good as long as it doesn’t get into, like Kaminski said, ‘the things that brought us here.’”
“Good,” Riley said, though she was no more inclined to participate here than she was in the other sessions. The less anyone who’s locked inside with you knows about you, the less they can use against you or trade to someone else for favors. Of course, the more you hold back, the harder it is for the others to trust you, but it also works the other way. If you give them your whole life story, it sounds like you’re trying too hard to win their confidence, and that always bounces back the other way.
There was no one in the entire hospital, including Steve, who she felt she could trust, and since nobody was willing to trust her, she’d decided to go her own way, keep her head down, and stay focused on getting out rather than making any new best buddies.
After the rest of the group had filed in and the door was shut, Danny started the session. Riley was surprised that the authority had fallen to him, but it soon became clear that everyone liked Danny. As much as he enjoyed hearing his own voice, he seemed genuinely interested in what the rest had to say, even Callie, despite their apparent antagonism. A joke Danny told about a farm that raised three legged chickens—“How do they taste? We don’t know, we’ve never been able to catch any of them”—even managed to get a smile out of Lauren, giving her a momentary break from staring knives into Riley’s face.
“So what’s the one thing you’re most looking forward to about getting out?” Danny asked. “And what do you miss the most? Aside from sex, obviously.”
“Danny’s only taking sex off the table because he hasn’t had any since he was an altar boy,” Callie said.
“I neither confirm nor deny. Jim? How about you? What do you miss?”
“Oh, man,” Jim said, rubbing his high-boned cheeks, “Gaming. Especially VR. This past summer I bought a whole new VR system just so I could play Star Horizon. Got hooked when I was a kid, playing Skyrim, Half-Life, No Man’s Land, Superhot—all of ’em. My dad did beta testing for one of the big gaming companies, which meant we always had everything first, so you can guess whose house everybody came to after school. As a black kid in a small town in Wisconsin that was ninety-nine point five percent white, that shit made all the difference when it came to making friends. Doesn’t matter if you’re the black kid, the Hispanic kid, the nerdy kid, the weird kid, or if you’ve got two heads, feathers, fangs, and fur, if you’ve got a game before it hits the stores, you’re golden, and I liked that feeling a lot.
“Funnily enough, that’s also what put me on the road to poli-sci. I’d play these games about exploring other worlds, and while everybody else was busy blowing shit up, I’d look at those places and wonder what sort of people lived there. What kind of clothes did they wear? What language did they speak? What form of government did they have? After a while I started making up whole civilizations, just to amuse myself. Then I found out that if you got a degree in poli-sci, you could actually make a living figuring that stuff out, so I was like, hell yeah, sign me up!”
A hand shot into the air, belonging to Angela Chao, one of the names Riley hadn’t heard when she shut down the world during their earlier session. She had a broad face that never seemed to run short on smiles, even when she was sitting by herself. “Pizza!” she said. “I miss pizza! The frozen pizza we get here isn’t the same as a fresh pizza with real cheese and sauce that somebody made with their own hands and pulled out of the oven two minutes ago.”
“Pizza I can definitely get behind,” Danny said.
“Lots of pizza up front too,” Callie said.
The group laughed as Danny sucked in his gut. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. This is a six-pack stomach, and I was pleased and proud to get it in a two-for-one sale.”
“I miss my brother,” said Hector, the only member of the group who seemed to say less than Riley. “We were tight, you know? Like two ends of the same thought. He was there with me the whole time I was in court, never even thought about walking away.”
“Didn’t you say he was going to talk to a new lawyer for you?” Angela asked.
“Off-limits,” Danny said.
“No, it’s okay,” Hector said. “When I signed the papers, he said he knew a guy who’d take the case for free because it’s a complete violation of my civil rights. Gonna file papers any time now, so we’ll see how it goes. My bro, man, once he gets going, he never ever lets up.”
“How about you, Riley?” Danny asked. “You got any relatives outside fighting the good fight?”
“Not really,” Riley said, choosing her words carefully to avoid giving anything away. “My folks are dead, like Kaminski said, and they didn’t have any other kids. I’ve been on my own for a while.”
“Must be hard,” Angela said. “I don’t know what I’d do without my family being there for me through all this.”
Riley shrugged. “I guess you get used to it after a while.”
“What were they like?” Danny asked.
“They were okay,” Riley said, trying to be casual despite the heat coming up behind her eyes. “They were, you know, my folks. We got along.”
“She doesn’t trust us,” Lauren said, glaring at Riley from the other side of the circle. “Like we’re gonna run to McGann and tell him what her parents were like when nobody gives a shit, when for all we know she’s the one we need to worry about.”
“C’mon, Lauren, go easy,” Callie said. “This is just us, okay? Besides, I remember when you got here, you were the same way.”
“Bullshit,” Lauren said. “I was shy for a few days, that’s all. I think when somebody comes into the group and doesn’t say anything and just listens all the time, it’s worth asking if she’s doing all this listening for herself or somebody else.”
“Go ahead and ask,” Riley said, her cheeks flushing angrily. “If you’ve got something to say, say it, otherwise back it the fuck up.”
Lauren feigned indifference. “Maybe later.”
“Okay, I’m gonna call a ten-minute break,” Danny said. “Give everybody a chance to cool down. Then let’s come back and talk about other stuff, all right?”
“Sure thing,” Lauren said, smiling broadly and fraudulently.
Riley closed her eyes and tried to make it all go away. I’ve so got to get out of here.
* * *
Patients were allowed two hours of unstructured time before dinner, and Riley used hers to continue scoping out the hospital for details she could add to the map she was drawing on construction paper she’d liberated from the art room, now carefully hidden in her room’s air vent. As the sun began to set, she found herself back in the solarium. She left the lights off and approached one of the big windows that looked out over a residential area on the other side of the hospital’s parking lot. Long shadows stretched across houses where dinner would be served soon, as kids lingered in front yards, calling for a hoped-for Ten minutes more, Mom, c’mon!
So near and yet so far.
The solarium was so dark and quiet that it took her a moment to realize she wasn’t alone.
Turning her head slightly to the right, she saw a familiar figure dressed in black standing with his back to her as he gazed out a window at the other end of the room, his silhouette outlined by streetlamps. She didn’t know if he’d been there the whole time or if she hadn’t heard him come in; it was as if he’d simply materialized.
Rumor is he found someplace where he can hide from the staff when he doesn’t want to be found, Danny had said.
Riley considered backing out quietly and leaving him to his carefully sought-after solitude, then pushed the thought down hard. Then I’ll be just like everybody else, walking around him or pretending he’s not there.
She gave it another minute to see what he’d do, then started moving slowly in his direction, gaze turned toward the street to avoid making direct eye contact or appearing threatening. Like I could do anything to hurt him, she thought, he’s twice as big as me.
She stopped a few feet away, in case he made a grab for her, and remained there for several minutes, standing side by side in the shadows, staring out at absolutely nothing.
Screw this, she thought at last.
“You’re doing this wrong, you know that, right?” she asked.
No response. Dead eyes piercing the night.
“Because here’s the thing,” she said. “My dad was a big horror fan. I mean, huge. You name the book or the movie, and if it’s got monsters or demons or anything that wants to eat your brains, I guarantee he saw it or read it. When he was a kid he wanted to be a horror writer, like Poe or Lovecraft or Stephen King, but as he got older he could never quite get there because he was always busy working construction and chasing off-the-book jobs to fill in the gaps, so there wasn’t time to learn the stuff that I guess you have to learn before you can start writing words that anybody’s gonna want to read. But he never stopped loving horror, so by the time I was eleven I’d seen every George Romero movie ever made, and all the Universal horror movies about Dracula, the Mummy, the Werewolf— ”
She paused. You started the sentence, now finish it.
“—and Frankenstein.”
She looked over to gauge his reaction, finding only silence punctuated by the whisper of his breathing.
“Anyway, not only did I see all the movies, I read all the books, and that’s why I said you’re doing this all wrong. In the book, Frankenstein’s creature . . . I don’t call him a monster because when you really come down to it, Victor Frankenstein was more of a monster than what he made . . . the creature is smart. He reads a lot, and talks a lot, like a lot a lot. He knows Latin and poetry and mythology and philosophy . . . honestly, he would have done better in school than I did. Probably would’ve ended up giving the valedictorian speech.”
A small voice in the back of her head said, You’ve just used more of your words in the last thirty seconds than the whole time since you got here. And you never talk about your folks to strangers. So what’s the diff ?
Maybe because unlike everybody else in this place he’s not trying to pry it out of me, because he doesn’t give a shit.
“My dad used to say that the Frankenstein in the book was the real one, and that the only reason the movie monster spent most of his time grunting at people was because nobody back then was really sure if Boris Karloff could act. He’d only done small parts before that, so they didn’t want to risk giving him a lot of dialogue. They never really believed in him, which is why every time they made a new Frankenstein movie, it ended the same way: after the creature destroys whoever’s trying to destroy him, he goes over a waterfall, gets burned alive in a windmill, or frozen in a lake. End of story, end of franchise, end of Boris, except the creature wouldn’t stay dead, and neither would the movies. So after a while they finally let him talk a little, like in The Bride of Frankenstein, right before the castle blows up, when he tells the guy who made him, ‘We belong dead.’ Cool moment, long overdue.”
He straightened a little at her words. Okay, he’s definitely seen that one for sure.
“So in my opinion, which is totes subjective, if you really want to be Frankenstein, then you need to, y’know, talk to people, maybe read some books. That way we can sit around discussing poetry and philosophy and stuff like that. What do you think?”
He stared out at the night.
He stared out at the night.
He stared out at the night.
“Hurrrrrrrrr,” he said at last.
“Okay, I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, and turned her attention to the world outside the window, allowing the soft safety of silence to sneak back into the room.
* * *
“I want to talk about rage,” Kaminski said.
The group said nothing, waiting to see where this would go.
“We touched on the subject the other day, when Riley joined our merry band of misfits, but I want to do a deeper dive into the subject because I think that for many of you, this is the heart of the problem. Rage brought you here by making you vulnerable to people who could weaponize that anger for their own purposes.”
“I’m not mad at anybody about anything,” Jim said. “I’m the happiest man I know.”
“People who are happy with their lives don’t spend all their time joining angry crowds and telling the world how terrible things are.”
“So you don’t think people should get upset if their government is doing something wrong?”
“Of course they should. And there are civil, appropriate, healthy ways to address that. Rage is unhealthy, self-destructive, and almost always springs from something in our personal lives that has nothing to do with what we say we’re upset about. The technical term for that is transference. You can’t strike back at A, so instead you take it out on B. Like the guy whose boss is a jerk, but he can’t quit or tell the guy off, so when he comes home his family inherits all that repressed anger through domestic abuse. We saw that sort of transference with Riley the other day. Her parents were killed in an accident with a shipping truck, but she can’t take revenge against the driver, so she transfers that anger to the company and the system that sent it out on the road that day.”
“Not true and leave me out of this,” Riley bristled.
“All right,” Kaminski said, “if you don’t want to discuss it, then let’s talk about Hector.”
Hector straightened, surprised at being ricocheted into the conversation. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m with Jim. Mister Quiet. Peace out, twenty-four seven.”
“But is that really true, Hector? Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to share with the group?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Kaminski shook his head and sat back in the chair. “I’m disappointed in you, Hector, I truly am. I thought we were making real progress.” He flicked through the screens on his tablet until he found what he was looking for. “Who is Domingo Ramirez?”
Hector stared down at the carpet.
“Tell the group who Domingo Ramirez is, Hector.”
“My brother.”
“Ever since you got here, you’ve been telling everyone that you and he are tight, and that he’s working hard to get you out of here. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, so?”
“It’s just that, as I understand the situation, you haven’t been in contact with your brother for months.”
Hector’s face tightened, but he didn’t respond.
Kaminski glanced down at the tablet. “According to this police report, a few days before the incident that brought you here, there was an altercation between you and your brother that sent him to the hospital. What was that about?”
“You don’t have to tell him shit,” someone said, and Riley was as startled as the rest to realize that it was her.
“Yes, you do,” Kaminski said without looking at her, his voice low and firm. “Assuming you want to get out of here when your observation period expires.”
“Yeah, we had a fight,” Hector said at last. “He was pissed that I dropped out of college.”
“Was he mad at you because you dropped out, or because you didn’t tell him?”
“Because I didn’t tell him.”
“So you lied to him.”
Hector shrugged, absently rubbing his fingers against the back of his left hand. “I guess. Yeah.”
“Is it I guess or is it yeah?”
“Yeah. I lied to him, okay?”
“And when your brother confronted you, you became enraged—not because he was wrong, but because he was right.”
“Yes.”
“You lashed out at him because he caught you pretending to be something other than you actually were, because you didn’t want to admit the truth, and because you’re afraid of the truth, which is why you lied to the members of this group, people you consider friends, when you said your brother was still in your life.”
“Yes,” Hector said, and there was shame in his eyes.
Don’t let him inside your head, Julian had warned Riley, and now she was beginning to understand why he didn’t finish saying which movie Kaminski belonged to. He didn’t want to scare me by saying he’s Hannibal Fucking Lecter.
“And when your brother figured out that most of the money he’d loaned you for school was actually being spent on weed, beer, and parties, he tried to throw you out of the house where you had been living rent-free.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s when you broke his arm.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened the day after you were thrown out of the house?”
“I went to a protest.”
“And?”
“I got in a fight.”
“You picked a fight. With the police. By torching a patrol car.”
“Yes.”
“Because?”
Soft wetness moved down his cheeks. “Because I was in a bad mood.”
“You were angry.”
“Yes.”
“At your brother.”
“Yes.”
“Because he was right.”
“Yes.”
“And you took it out on the first badge you saw.”
“. . . yes.”
“Yes.”
Kaminski looked to the others. “This is how we achieve progress. We face our rage and insecurity, and acknowledge the ways it’s ruined not just our lives but the lives of others.
“Hector’s not the only one who’s fallen victim to this kind of thinking. All of you have issues that put you into the street but have nothing to do with protests or police or whatever the government just said about something. You chose, consciously or otherwise, to go to war with the government over misdirected anger because that’s easier than confronting the things that are really causing you pain. And that puts you in exactly the right place to be preyed upon by people who want to use your anger for their benefit.”
He turned back to Hector. “If your brother were here right now, what would you tell him?”
Hector backhanded tears. “What do you think I’d do? I’d tell him I miss him. I’d tell him I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean it, and I love him.”
“Would you tell him you were wrong? Would you tell him all the ways he’s been a good brother?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“And what if I could arrange that?”
Hector’s mouth worked for a moment before managing, “Are you serious?”
“I don’t have ultimate authority to make that decision, but it’s definitely within my authority to make such a recommendation if I feel it would do you some good. Giving you closure in one area might give you room to address some of the others without letting old tapes and grudges get in the way. Would you like that?”
“Yeah, yeah, I would,” Hector said, and Riley saw the light of hope in his eyes.
“What about the rest of you?” Kaminski asked. “There are people in your life who you’ve inadvertently hurt, friends or family you miss . . .would you support the possibility of having them come for a visit?”
The others smiled and nodded. A few cried.
Riley waited for the hammer. I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.
“Okay, then let’s do this thing.” Kaminski reached into his briefcase and pulled out a clutch of pencils and blank pages. “Take one each and pass the rest along.”
“Now here’s what I want you to do,” he said once everyone was settled. “On one side of the page, I want you to list all the things you love about the person you want to come for a visit, all the things you did that were wrong, where you were mistaken or acting out of misplaced anger, and how much you want to make things right. I’ll make sure this gets filed and sent to your loved ones. If they’re open to it, I’ll do everything I can to get them in here for a visit.”
Everyone grinned. Even the usually sedate Becca.
Around the circle, pencils touched paper.
“And on the other side of the page,” Kaminski said—
Here it comes, Riley thought.
“—on the other side,” he repeated for emphasis, “I want you to do the same thing for this administration.”
“Sorry?” said Angela.
“All of you have said that you love this country, that there’s a lot of good about it, that you’re trying to save it. Well, here’s your chance to tell us what some of those good things are. Does the mail come on time? Do the streetlights work? Are the schools still open? I’m not asking you to address the things you don’t like, just acknowledge the things the government’s doing that you do like, that are working.
“Once that’s done, you can add anything about your participation in these protests that, in retrospect, were wrongly motivated because you were acting out of anger at something else entirely.”
Bam, Riley thought. There it is. The confession.
“Just to be clear, you are absolutely within your rights not to fill out the other side, if that’s your decision” Kaminski said, “but you have to understand that, just as every argument has two sides, every sheet of paper has two sides. It’s impossible to turn in one side of a sheet of paper without turning in the other side, that’s just physics, so if you choose not to turn in one side, then neither side can be turned in. So it seems to me that if you want us to read what you want on one side of the paper, then you have to write down what we want on the other. That seems fair, doesn’t it? It’s just words on paper. Where’s the harm in that?
“So I leave the choice to you, and to how much you really care about seeing your loved ones.”
Looks were exchanged around the circle, and slowly, one by one, they began writing, the sound of pencils scratching on paper the only noise in the room—
—until they looked up at the sound of Riley folding the sheet of paper in half, then carefully running a fingernail along the edge to create a perfect crease.
Moving with precision, she tore the paper in half along the crease, folded the two halves together, and repeated the process, the sheets becoming incrementally smaller. When they were the size of playing cards, she stacked them neatly in a pile.
“Done,” she said, smiling her friendliest smile and looking to the others on the assumption that they would do the same.
They looked down at the pages and, one by one, continued writing.
Kaminski smiled and closed his eyes, listening to the scratching of pencils on paper as if it were the most beautiful music in all the world.
The Surrender Sonata.
* * *
“Exercise room,” Jim said as they left the therapy room. “Meeting. Right now.”
Two minutes later, Danny closed the door and leveraged his mass against it to make sure nobody walked in on them. The rest of the group stood back in a circle as Jim stalked up to Riley.
“Why did you do that?” he asked. “Why do you keep going out of your way to piss him off ?”
“Because he’s a user and we shouldn’t just give him what he wants.”
“What he wants isn’t the issue, it’s what we want, which is to get out of here. Are they really going to let us have visitors? Doubtful. Was that whole thing just a mind-fuck? Probably. But it doesn’t matter. That’s on them, that’s what they’re doing. What we have to do is show that we’re willing to meet him halfway, and you pulling this kind of crap is just gonna make it harder for all of us.”
“It won’t do any good—”
“Yes it will. I may only be prelaw but I know this stuff, Riley. The laws covering commitment say they can’t hold us past the observation period without cause. Those two words, without cause, are the whole ball game here. They can’t hold us for our attitude, our politics, or what we don’t like about the government or the doctors or anything else. The only way they can keep us here, and justify whatever this program costs, is to prove we’re dangerous, crazy, or both. If we act out or behave irrationally, we give them the proof they need to say they were right to put us here, and keep us here. So the way out is to play it cool, individually and as a group. If we don’t do anything they can hold against us, then every law on the books says they have to let us go.”
“And what about those statements he asked us to sign?”
“They’re not admissible in court, and even if they were, we could say we wrote them under duress. It doesn’t matter.”
“They can still use that point system against us,” Becca started to say.
Jim cut her off. “We’ve already had this discussion. The point system is pure bullshit, there’s no such thing under the law when it comes to mental health observation. The courts would never go along with it. They’re just trying to intimidate us.”
“You mean like you’re doing right now?” Riley asked.
He started to fire off a response when he saw Becca’s hurt expression and bit it back. “I’m just saying that the point system doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t exist under the law.”
“Jim, if these people were focused on doing what’s right under the law, none of us would even be here in the first place,” Riley said. “Do you really think they’re going through all the trouble and expense to drag us in here just so they can let us go in six months? Dr. Munroe said there’s more going on—”
“I had the same conversation with him, Riley. We all did, and it’s just more bullshit. Before McGann showed up, Munroe was the Big Dog on the floor. Now it’s Kaminski, and that pisses him off. So he comes to us saying the only way he could’ve been cut out of the loop is if there’s something big going on. Maybe he wanted Kaminski’s job and he’s just mad about not getting it. Who knows what really happened and why? I don’t. Do you? For reals? Does anybody? No. So excuse me if I don’t take Munroe’s word for anygoddamnthing.
“The only endgame I can see is McGann using this program to make the case in the press that anybody who protests against the government is crazy. Yeah, well, good luck with that once the ACLU, the courts, and the American Fucking Medical Association land on their asses. I promise you, a year from now this program will be shut down and sued into oblivion.
“So look,” he said, lowering his voice to a level that was 80 percent more constructive but 20 percent more patronizing, “I get it. You’re angry at being here, and you don’t want to play along with these guys, and I don’t blame you. We all went through the same thing. But we talked it out, and everybody agreed that we’d do whatever it takes to get out of here. These people want to play games? Fine, we’ll play them right back by bending this to our agenda, not theirs. That means we stick together, and we don’t let anybody go rogue and make the rest of us look bad, and right now, that person is you, so you seriously need to knock it off.”
Riley looked around at the others to see if there was a flicker of support for her position, but they were all busy trying to find something interesting to stare at on the carpet.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” she said at last. “You think the right move is giving these people exactly what they wanted when they put us here. I think we have to fight them every step of the way. We don’t agree, and that’s okay. You do you, I’ll do me, and we’ll see who’s right.”
“You’re being an asshole.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
“Then don’t look to us for help if you get in trouble. Fair warning: whatever happens, it’s on you.”
“Done deal. Can I go now?”
Jim looked like he wanted to argue the point further—poli-sci students never know when to end an argument—then nodded to Danny, who stepped away from the door.
I’m on my own, she thought, feeling their eyes on her as she walked out. Not the first time, pretty sure it’s not gonna be the last.
It didn’t make the long walk back to her room any less lonely.