Lisa had run away again. We were sad, because she kept our spirits up. She was funny. Lisa! I can’t think of her without smiling, even now.
The worst was that she was always caught and dragged back, dirty, with wild eyes that had seen freedom. She would curse her captors, and even the tough old-timers had to laugh at the names she made up.
“Cheese-pussy!” And another favorite, “You schizophrenic bat!”
Usually, they found her within a day. She couldn’t get far on foot, with no money. But this time she seemed to have lucked out. On the third day I heard someone in the nursing station saying “APB” into the phone: all points bulletin.
Lisa wouldn’t be hard to identify. She rarely ate and she never slept, so she was thin and yellow, the way people get when they don’t eat, and she had huge bags under her eyes. She had long dark dull hair that she fastened with a silver clip. She had the longest fingers I’ve ever seen.
This time, when they brought her back, they were almost as angry as she was. Two big men had her arms, and a third guy had her by the hair, pulling so that Lisa’s eyes bugged out. Everybody was quiet, including Lisa. They took her down to the end of the hall, to seclusion, while we watched.
We watched a lot of things.
We watched Cynthia come back crying from electroshock once a week. We watched Polly shiver after being wrapped in ice-cold sheets. One of the worst things we watched, though, was Lisa coming out of seclusion two days later.
To begin with, they’d cut her nails down to the quick. She’d had beautiful nails, which she worked on, polishing, shaping, buffing. They said her nails were “sharps.”
And they’d taken away her belt. Lisa always wore a cheap beaded belt—the kind made by Indians on reservations. It was green, with red triangles on it, and it had belonged to her brother Jonas, the only one in her family still in touch with her. Her mother and father wouldn’t visit her because she was a sociopath, or so said Lisa. They took away the belt so she couldn’t hang herself.
They didn’t understand that Lisa would never hang herself.
They let her out of seclusion, they gave her back her belt, and her nails started to grow in again, but Lisa didn’t come back. She just sat and watched TV with the worst of us.
Lisa had never watched TV. She’d had nothing but scorn for those who did. “It’s shit!” she’d yell, sticking her head into the TV room. “You’re already like robots. It’s making you worse.” Sometimes she turned off the TV and stood in front of it, daring somebody to turn it on. But the TV audience was mostly catatonics and depressives, who were disinclined to move. After five minutes, which was about as long as she could stand still, Lisa would be off on another project, and when the person on checks came around, she would turn the TV on again.
Since Lisa hadn’t slept for the two years she’d been with us, the nurses had given up telling her to go to bed Instead, she had a chair of her own in the hallway, just like the night staff, where she’d sit and work on her nails. She made wonderful cocoa, and at three o’clock in the morning she made cocoa for the night staff and anybody else who was up. She was calmer at night.
Once I asked her, “Lisa, how come you don’t rush around and yell at night?”
“I need rest too,” she said. “Just because I don’t sleep doesn’t mean I don’t rest.”
Lisa always knew what she needed. She’d say, “I need a vacation from this place,” and then she’d run away. When she got back, we’d ask her how it was out there.
“It’s a mean world,” she’d say. She was usually glad enough to be back. “There’s nobody to take care of you out there.”
Now she said nothing. She spent all her time in the TV room. She watched prayers and test patterns and hours of late-night talk shows and early-morning news. Her chair in the hall was unoccupied, and nobody got cocoa.
“Are you giving Lisa something?” I asked the person on checks.
“You know we can’t discuss medication with patients.”
I asked the head nurse. I’d known her awhile, since before she was the head nurse.
But she acted as though she’d always been the head nurse. “We can’t discuss medication—you know that.”
“Why bother asking,” said Georgina. “She’s completely blotto. Of course they’re giving her something.”
Cynthia didn’t think so. “She still walks okay,” she said.
“I don’t,” said Polly. She didn’t. She walked with her arms stuck out in front of her, her red-and-white hands drooping from her wrists and her feet shuffling along the floor. The cold packs hadn’t worked; she still screamed all night until they put her on something.
“It took a while,” I said. “You walked okay when they started it.”
“Now I don’t,” said Polly. She looked at her hands.
I asked Lisa if they were giving her something, but she wouldn’t look at me.
And this way we all passed through a month or two, Lisa and the catatonics in the TV room, Polly walking like a motorized corpse, Cynthia crying after electroshock (“I’m not sad,” she explained to me, “but I can’t help crying”), and me and Georgina in our double suite. We were considered the healthiest.
When spring came Lisa began spending a little more time outside the TV room. She spent it in the bathroom, to be exact, but at least it was a change.
I asked the person on checks, “What’s she doing in the bathroom?”
This was a new person. “Am I supposed to open bathroom doors too?”
I did what we often did to new people. “Somebody could hang herself in there in a minute! Where do you think you are, anyhow? A boarding school?” Then I put my face close to hers. They didn’t like that, touching us.
I noticed Lisa went to a different bathroom every time. There were four, and she made the circuit daily. She didn’t look good. Her belt was hanging off her and she looked yellower than usual.
“Maybe she’s got dysentery,” I said to Georgina. But Georgina thought she was just blotto.
One morning in May we were eating breakfast when we heard a door slam. Then Lisa appeared in the kitchen.
“Later for that TV,” she said. She poured herself a big cup of coffee, just as she used to do in the mornings, and sat down at the table. She smiled at us, and we smiled back. “Wait,” she said.
We heard feet running and voices saying things like “What in the world …” and “How in the world …” Then the head nurse came into the kitchen.
“You did this,” she said to Lisa.
We went to see what it was.
She had wrapped all the furniture, some of it holding catatonics, and the TV and the sprinkler system on the ceiling in toilet paper. Yards and yards of it floated and dangled, bunched and draped on everything, everywhere. It was magnificent.
“She wasn’t blotto,” I said to Georgina. “She was plotting.”
We had a good summer, and Lisa told us lots of stories about what she’d done those three days she was free.
The Secret of Life
One day I had a visitor. I was in the TV room watching Lisa watch TV, when a nurse came in to tell me.
“You’ve got a visitor,” she said. “A man.”
It wasn’t my troublesome boyfriend. First of all, he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. How could a person who was locked up have a boyfriend? Anyhow, he couldn’t bear coming here. His mother had been in a loony bin too, it turned out, and he couldn’t bear being reminded of it.
It wasn’t my father; he was busy.
It wasn’t my high school English teacher; he’d been fired and moved to North Carolina.
I went to see who it was.
He was standing at a window in the living room, looking out: giraffe-tall, with slumpy academic shoulders, wrists sticking out of his jacket, and pale hair that shot out from his head in a corona. He turned around when he heard me come in.
It was Jim Watson. I was happy to see him, because, in the fifties, he had discovered the secret of life, and n
ow, perhaps, he would tell it to me.
“Jim!” I said.
He drifted toward me. He drifted and wobbled and faded out while he was supposed to be talking to people, and I’d always liked him for that.
“You look fine,” he told me.
“What did you expect?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“What do they do to you in here?” He was whispering.
“Nothing,” I said. “They don’t do anything.”
“It’s terrible here,” he said.
The living room was a particularly terrible part of our ward. It was huge and jammed with huge vinyl-covered armchairs that farted when anyone sat down.
“It’s not really that bad,” I said, but I was used to it and he wasn’t.
He drifted toward the window again and looked out. After a while he beckoned me over with one of his long arms.
“Look.” He pointed at something.
“At what?”
“That.” He was pointing at a car. It was a red sports car, maybe an MG. “That’s mine,” he said. He’d won the Nobel Prize, so probably he’d bought this car with the money.
“Nice,” I said. “Very nice.”
Now he was whispering again. “We could leave,” he whispered.
“Hunh?”
“You and me, we could leave.”
“In the car, you mean?” I felt confused. Was this the secret of life? Running away was the secret of life?
“They’d come after me,” I said.
“It’s fast,” he said. “I could get you out of here.”
Suddenly I felt protective of him. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for offering. It’s sweet of you.”
“Don’t you want to go?” He leaned toward me. “We could go to England.”
“England?” What did England have to do with anything? “I can’t go to England,” I said.
“You could be a governess,” he said.
For ten seconds I imagined this other life, which began when I stepped into Jim Watson’s red car and we sped out of the hospital and on to the airport. The governess part was hazy. The whole thing, in fact, was hazy. The vinyl chairs, the security screens, the buzzing of the nursing-station door: Those things were clear.
“I’m here now, Jim,” I said. “I think I’ve got to stay here.”
“Okay.” He didn’t seem miffed. He looked around the room one last time and shook his head.
I stayed at the window. After a few minutes I saw him get into his red car and drive off, leaving little puffs of sporty exhaust behind him. Then I went back to the TV room.
“Hi, Lisa,” I said. I was glad to see she was still there.
“Rnnn,” said Lisa.
Then we settled in for some more TV.
Politics
In our parallel world, things happened that had not yet happened in the world we’d come from. When they finally happened outside, we found them familiar because versions of them had been performed in front of us. It was as if we were a provincial audience, New Haven to the real world’s New York, where history could try out its next spectacle.
For instance, the story of Georgina’s boyfriend, Wade, and the sugar.
They’d met in the cafeteria. Wade was dark and good-looking in a flat, all-American way. What made him irresistible was his rage. He was enraged about almost everything and glowed with anger. Georgina explained that his father was the problem.
“His father’s a spy, and Wade’s mad that he can never be as tough as his father.”
I was more interested in Wade’s father than in Wade’s problem.
“A spy for us?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Georgina, but she wouldn’t say more.
Wade and Georgina would sit on the floor of our room and whisper. I was supposed to leave them alone, and usually I did. One day, though, I decided to stick around and find out about Wade’s father.
Wade loved talking about him. “He lives in Miami, so he can get over to Cuba. He invaded Cuba. He’s killed dozens of people, with his bare hands. He knows who killed the president.”
“Did he kill the president?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Wade.
Wade’s last name was Barker.
I have to admit I didn’t believe a word of what Wade said. After all, he was a crazy seventeen-year-old who got so violent that it took two big aides to hold him down. Sometimes he’d be locked on his ward for a week and Georgina couldn’t get in to see him. Then he’d simmer down and resume his visits on the floor of our room.
Wade’s father had two friends who particularly impressed Wade: Liddy and Hunt. “Those guys will do anything!” Wade said. He said this often, and he seemed worried about it.
Georgina didn’t like my pestering Wade about his father; she ignored me as I sat on the floor with them. But I couldn’t resist.
“Like what?” I asked him. “What kinds of things will they do?”
“I can’t reveal,” said Wade.
Shortly after this he lapsed into a violent phase that went on for several weeks.
Georgina was at a loose end without Wade’s visits. Because I felt partly responsible for his absence, I offered various distractions. “Let’s redecorate the room,” I said. “Let’s play Scrabble.” Or “Let’s cook things.”
Cooking things was what appealed to Georgina. “Let’s make caramels,” she said.
I was surprised that two people in a kitchen could make caramels. I thought of them as a mass-production item, like automobiles, for which complicated machinery was needed.
But, according to Georgina, all we needed was a frying pan and sugar.
“When it’s caramelized,” she said, “we pour it into little balls on waxed paper.”
The nurses thought it was cute that we were cooking. “Practicing for when you and Wade get married?” one asked.
“I don’t think Wade is the marrying kind,” said Georgina.
Even someone who’s never made caramels knows how hot sugar has to be before it caramelizes. That’s how hot it was when the pan slipped and I poured half the sugar onto Georgina’s hand, which was holding the waxed paper straight.
I screamed and screamed, but Georgina didn’t make a sound. The nurses ran in and produced ice and unguents and wrappings, and I kept screaming, and Georgina did nothing. She stood still with her candied hand stretched out in front of her.
I can’t remember if it was E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy who said, during the Watergate hearings, that he’d nightly held his hand in a candle flame till his palm burned to assure himself he could stand up to torture.
Whoever it was, we knew about it already: the Bay of Pigs, the seared skin, the bare-handed killers who’d do anything. We’d seen the previews, Wade, Georgina, and I, along with an audience of nurses whose reviews ran something like this: “Patient lacked affect after accident”, “Patient continues fantasy that father is CIA operative with dangerous friends.”
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
Daisy was a seasonal event. She came before Thanksgiving and stayed through Christmas every year. Some years she came for her birthday in May as well.
She always got a single. “Would anybody like to share?” the head nurse asked at our weekly Hall Meeting one November morning. It was a tense moment. Georgina and I, who already shared, were free to enjoy the confusion.
“Me! Me!” Somebody who was a Martian’s girlfriend and also had a little penis of her own, which she was eager to show off, raised a hand; nobody wanted to share with her.
“I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn’t want to force somebody to want to.” This was Cynthia, who’d started talking like that after six months of shock.
Polly to the rescue: “I’ll share with you, Cynthia.”
But that didn’t solve the problem, because Polly was in a double herself. Her roommate was a new anorexic named Janet who was scheduled for force feedings the moment she dro
pped below seventy-five.
Lisa leaned toward me. “I watched her on the scale yesterday: seventy-eight,” she said loudly. “She’ll be on the tube by the weekend.”
“Seventy-eight is the perfect weight,” said Janet. She’d said the same about eighty-three and seventy-nine, though, so nobody wanted to share with her, either.
In the end a couple of catatonics were teamed up and Daisy’s room was ready for her arrival on November fifteenth.
Daisy had two passions: laxatives and chicken. Every morning she presented herself at the nursing station and drummed her fingers, pale and stained with nicotine, on the counter, impatient for laxatives.
“I want my Colace,” she would hiss. “I want my Ex-Lax.”
If someone was standing near her, she would jab her elbow into that person’s side or step on her foot. Daisy hated anyone to be near her.
Twice a week her squat potato-face father brought a whole chicken roasted by her mother and wrapped in aluminum foil. Daisy would hold the chicken in her lap and fondle it through the foil, darting her eyes around the room, eager for her father to leave so she could get going on the chicken. But Daisy’s father wanted to stay as long as possible, because he was in love with Daisy.
Lisa explained it. “He can’t believe he produced her. He wants to fuck her to make sure she’s real.”
“But she smells,” Polly objected. She smelled, of course, like chicken and shit.
“She didn’t always smell,” said Lisa.
I thought Lisa was right, because I’d noticed that Daisy was sexy. Even though she smelled and glowered and hissed and poked, she had a spark the rest of us lacked. She wore shorts and tank tops to display her pale wiry limbs, and when she ambled down the hall in the morning to get her laxatives, she swung her ass in insouciant half-circles.
The Martian’s girlfriend was in love with her too. She followed her down the hall crooning, “Want to see my penis?” To which Daisy would hiss, “I shit on your penis.”
Nobody had ever been in Daisy’s room. Lisa was determined to get in. She had a plan.
“Man, am I constipated,” she said for three days. “Wow.” On the fourth day she got some Ex-Lax out of the head nurse. “Didn’t work,” she reported the next morning. “Got anything stronger?”