Sometimes Valerie or another nurse tried explaining to Torrey that she could be in Mexico without going to the drugstore and buying amphetamines.
“You haven’t been there,” Torrey said.
In August Torrey’s parents called to announce that they were coming up to get her.
“Taking me home to die,” she said.
“We won’t let you go,” said Georgina.
“That’s right,” I said. “Right, Lisa?”
Lisa wasn’t making any promises. “What can we do about it?”
“Nothing,” said Torrey.
That afternoon I asked Valerie, “You wouldn’t let Torrey’s parents take her back to Mexico, would you?”
“We’re here to protect you,” she said.
“What does that mean?” I asked Lisa that evening.
“Doesn’t mean shit,” said Lisa.
For about a week there was no word from Torrey’s parents. Then they called to say they’d meet her at the Boston airport. They didn’t want to bother with coming out to the hospital to pick her up.
“You could hop out on the way to the airport,” said Lisa. “Somewhere downtown. Get right onto the subway.” She was an old hand at escape planning.
“I don’t have any money,” said Torrey.
We pooled our money. Georgina had twenty-two dollars; Polly had eighteen; Lisa had twelve; I had fifteen ninety-five.
“You could live for weeks on this,” Lisa told her.
“One, maybe,” said Torrey. But she looked less depressed. She took the money and put it in her bra. It made quite a lump. “Thanks,” she said.
“You’ve got to have a plan,” Lisa said. “Are you going to stay here or leave town? I think you ought to leave town right away.”
“And go where?”
“Don’t you have any friends in New York?” Georgina asked.
Torrey shook her head. “I know you people, and I know some junkies in Mexico. That’s it.”
“Lisa Cody,” said Lisa. “She’s a junkie. She’d put you up.”
“She’s not reliable,” said Georgina.
“She’d use all that money for junk anyhow,” I said.
“I might too,” Torrey pointed out.
“That’s different,” said Lisa. “We gave it to you.”
“Don’t,” said Polly. “You might as well go back to Mexico if you do that.”
“Yeah,” said Torrey. Now she looked depressed again.
“What’s up?” said Lisa.
“I don’t have the nerve,” said Torrey. “I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can,” said Lisa. “You just open the door at a red light and tear off. You just get the fuck away. You can do it.”
“You could do it,” said Torrey. “I can’t.”
“You’ve got to do it,” said Georgina.
“I know you can do it,” Polly said. She put her pink-and-white hand on Torrey’s thin shoulder.
I wondered if Torrey could do it.
In the morning, two nurses were waiting to take Torrey to the airport.
“That’s not going to work,” Lisa whispered to me. “She’ll never get away from two.”
She decided to create a diversion. The point was to occupy enough staff members so that only one nurse would be available to take Torrey to the airport.
“This fucking place!” Lisa yelled. She went down the hall slamming the doors to the rooms. “Eat shit!”
It worked. Valerie shut the top of the Dutch door to the nursing station and had a powwow with the rest of the staff while Lisa yelled and slammed. When they emerged, they fanned out in trouble-shooting formation.
“Calm down, Lisa,” said Valerie. “Where’s Torrey? It’s time to go. Let’s go.”
Lisa paused on her circuit. “Are you taking her?”
We all knew nobody could escape from Valerie.
Valerie shook her head. “No. Now calm down, Lisa.”
Lisa slammed another door.
“It’s not going to help,” Valerie said. “It’s not going to stop anything.”
“Valerie, you promised—” I began.
“Where’s Torrey?” Valerie interrupted me. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“I’m here,” said Torrey. She was holding a suitcase, and her arm was trembling, so the suitcase was bumping against her leg.
“Okay,” said Valerie. She reached into the nursing station and pulled out a full medication cup. “Take this,” she said.
“What the fuck is that?” yelled Lisa from halfway down the hall.
“It’ll just relax Torrey,” Valerie said. “Something to relax her.”
“I’m relaxed,” said Torrey. “Drink up,” said Valerie.
“Don’t take it!” Lisa yelled. “Don’t do it, Torrey!”
Torrey tipped her head back and drank.
“Thank God,” Valerie muttered. “Okay. All right. This is it.” She was shaking too. “Okay. Good-bye, Torrey dear, good-bye now.”
Torrey was actually leaving. She was going to get on the airplane and go back to Mexico.
Lisa quit banging and came up to stand with the rest of us. We stood around the nursing station looking at Torrey.
“Was that what I think it was?” Lisa asked Valerie. She put her face up to Valerie’s face. “Was that Thorazine? Is that what that was?”
Valerie didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Torrey’s eyes were already glistening. She took a step away from us and lost her balance slightly. Valerie caught her elbow.
“It’s all right,” she told Torrey.
“I know,” said Torrey. She cleared her throat. “Sure.”
The nurse who was taking her to the airport picked up the suitcase and led Torrey down the hall to the double-locked double doors.
Then there wasn’t anything to do. An aide went into Torrey’s room and started stripping the sheets off the bed. Valerie went back inside the nursing station. Lisa slammed a door. The rest of us stood where we were for a while. Then we watched TV until the nurse came back from the airport. We fell silent, listening for agitation in the nursing station—the sort of agitation an escape provokes. But nothing happened.
The day got worse after that. It didn’t matter where we were, every place was the wrong place. The TV room was too hot; the living room was too weird; the floor in front of the nursing station was no good either. Georgina and I tried sitting in our room, and that was terrible as well. Every room was echoey and big and empty. And there was just nothing to do.
Lunch came: tuna melt. Who wanted it? We hated tuna melt.
After lunch Polly said, “Let’s just plan to spend one hour in the living room and then one hour in front of the nursing station and so on. At least it will be a schedule.”
Lisa wasn’t interested. But Georgina and I agreed to give it a whirl.
We started in the living room. Each of us plopped into a yellow vinyl chair. Two o’clock on a Saturday in August on a medium-security ward in Belmont. Old cigarette smoke, old magazines, green spotted rug, five yellow vinyl chairs, a broken-backed orange sofa: You couldn’t mistake that room for anything but a loony-bin living room.
I sat in my yellow vinyl chair not thinking about Torrey. Instead, I looked at my hand. It occurred to me that my palm looked like a monkey’s palm. The crinkle of the three lines running across it and the way my fingers curled in seemed simian to me. If I spread my fingers out, my hand looked more human, so I did that. But it was tiring holding my fingers apart. I let them relax, and then the monkey idea came back.
I turned my hand over quickly. The back of it wasn’t much better. My veins bulged—maybe because it was such a hot day—and the skin around my knuckles was wrinkly and loose. If I moved my hand I could see the three long bones that stretched out from the wrist to the first joints of my fingers. Or perhaps those weren’t bones but tendons? I poked one; it was resilient, so probably it was a tendon. Underneath, though, were bones. At least I hoped so.
I poked deeper, to feel
the bones. They were hard to find. Knucklebones were easy, but I wanted to find the hand bones, the long ones going from my wrist to my fingers.
I started getting worried. Where were my bones? I put my hand in my mouth and bit it, to see if I crunched down on something hard. Everything slid away from me. There were nerves; there were blood vessels; there were tendons: All these things were slippery and elusive.
“Damn,” I said.
Georgina and Polly weren’t paying attention.
I began scratching at the back of my hand. My plan was to get hold of a flap of skin and peel it away, just to have a look. I wanted to see that my hand was a normal human hand, with bones. My hand got red and white—sort of like Polly’s hands—but I couldn’t get my skin to open up and let me in.
I put my hand in my mouth and chomped. Success! A bubble of blood came out near my last knuckle, where my incisor had pierced the skin.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Georgina asked.
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of this,” I said.
“Bottom of what?” Georgina looked angry.
“My hand,” I said, waving it around. A dribble of blood went down my wrist.
“Well, stop it,” she said.
“It’s my hand,” I said. I was angry too. And I was getting really nervous. Oh God, I thought, there aren’t any bones in there, there’s nothing in there.
“Do I have any bones?” I asked them. “Do I have any bones? Do you think I have any bones?” I couldn’t stop asking.
“Everybody has bones,” said Polly.
“But do I have any bones?”
“You’ve got them,” said Georgina. Then she ran out of the room. She came back in half a minute with Valerie.
“Look at her,” Georgina said, pointing at me.
Valerie looked at me and went away.
“I just want to see them,” I said. “I just have to be sure.”
“They’re in there—I promise you,” said Georgina.
“I’m not safe,” I said suddenly.
Valerie was back, with a full medication cup.
“Valerie, I’m not safe,” I said.
“You take this.” She gave me the cup.
I could tell it was Thorazine from the color. I’d never had it before. I tipped my head back and drank.
It was sticky and sour and it oozed into my stomach. The taste of it stayed in my throat. I swallowed a few times.
“Oh, Valerie,” I said, “you promised—” Then the Thorazine hit me. It was like a wall of water, strong but soft.
“Wow,” I said. I couldn’t hear my own voice very well. I decided to stand up, but when I did, I found myself on the floor.
Valerie and Georgina picked me up under the arms and steered me down the hall to our room. My legs and feet felt like mattresses, they were so huge and dense. Valerie and Georgina felt like mattresses too, big soft mattresses pressing on either side of me. It was comforting.
“It’ll be okay, won’t it?” I asked. My voice was far away from me and I hadn’t said what I meant. What I meant was that now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.
Dental Health
I was sitting in the cafeteria eating meat loaf when something peculiar happened inside my jaw. My cheek started swelling up. By the time I got back to the ward I had a Ping-Pong ball on the side of my face.
“Wisdom tooth,” said Valerie.
We went over to see the dentist.
His office was in the Administration Building, where long ago I’d sat quietly waiting to be locked up. The dentist was tall, sullen, and dirty, with speckles of blood on his lab coat and a pubic mustache. When he put his fingers in my mouth they tasted of ear wax.
“Abscess,” he said. “I’ll take it right out.”
“No,” I said.
“No what?” He was shuffling through his tool tray.
“I won’t.” I looked at Valerie. “I won’t let you.”
Valerie looked out the window. “Could control it with some antibiotics for the moment,” she said.
“Could,” he said. He looked at me. I bared the rest of my teeth at him. “Okay,” he said.
On our way back Valerie said, “That was sensible of you.”
It had been a long time since I’d heard myself called anything as complimentary as sensible. “That guy looked like a pimple,” I said.
“Have to get the infection under control first,” Valerie muttered to herself as she unlocked the double doors to our ward.
The first day of penicillin the Ping-Pong ball turned into a marble. By the second day the marble had turned into a pea, but there was a rash on my face. Also I was too hot.
“No postponing it now,” said Valerie. “And don’t take penicillin again, ever.”
“I won’t go,” I said.
“I’m taking you to my dentist in Boston tomorrow,” she said.
Everybody was excited. “Boston!” Polly wiggled her striped hands. “What are you going to wear?” “You could go to a matinee,” said Georgina, “and eat popcorn.” “You could score something for me,” said Lisa. “Down near Jordan Marsh there’s this guy with a blue baseball cap—” “You could jump out at a red light and split,” said Cynthia. “His name is Astro,” Lisa continued. She was more realistic than Cynthia; she knew I wouldn’t split. “He sells black beauties cheap.”
“I look like a chipmunk,” I said. “I can’t do anything.”
In the cab I was too nervous to look at Boston.
“Lean back and count to ten,” said the dentist. Before I got to four I was sitting up with a hole in my mouth.
“Where did it go?” I asked him
He held up my tooth, huge, bloody, spiked, and wrinkled.
But I’d been asking about the time. I was ahead of myself. He’d dropped me into the future, and I didn’t know what had happened to the time in between. “How long did that take?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said. “In and out.”
That didn’t help. “Like five seconds? Like two minutes?”
He moved away from the chair. “Valerie,” he called.
“I need to know,” I said.
“No hot liquids for twenty-four hours,” he said.
“How long?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
Valerie came in, all business. “Up you get, let’s go.”
“I need to know how long that took,” I said, “and he won’t tell me.”
She gave me one of her withering looks. “Not long, I can tell you that.”
“It’s my time!” I yelled. “It’s my time and I need to know how much it was.”
The dentist rolled his eyes. “I’ll let you handle this,” he said, and left the room.
“Come on,” said Valerie. “Don’t make trouble for me.”
“Okay.” I got out of the dentist’s chair. “I’m not making trouble for you, anyhow.”
In the cab Valerie said, “I’ve got something for you.”
It was my tooth, cleaned up a bit but huge and foreign.
“I snitched it for you,” she said.
“Thanks, Valerie, that was nice of you.” But the tooth wasn’t what I really wanted. “I want to know how much time that was,” I said. “See, Valerie, I’ve lost some time, and I need to know how much. I need to know.”
Then I started crying. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it.
Calais Is Engraved on My Heart
A new name had appeared on the blackboard: Alice Calais.
“Let’s guess about her,” said Georgina.
“Some new nut,” said Lisa.
“When is she coming?” I asked Valerie.
Valerie pointed down the hall toward the doors. And there she was, Alice Calais.
She was young, like us, and she didn’t look too crazy. We got up off the floor to say hello properly.
“I’m Alice Calais,” she said, but she said callous.
“Cal-lay?” said Georgina.<
br />
Alice Calais-Callous squinted. “Hunh?”
“You say it callous,” I told Georgina. I thought she was rude to imply that Alice didn’t know how to say her own name.
“Cal-lay?” Georgina said again.
Valerie came over at that point to show Alice her room.
“It’s like Vermont,” I said to Georgina. “We don’t say Vayr-mon like the French do.”
“Phonetics,” said Lisa.
Alice Calais-Callous was timid, but she liked us. She often sat near us and listened. Lisa thought she was a bore. Georgina tried to draw her out.
“You know, that’s a French name,” she told Alice. “Calais.”
“Callous,” said Alice. “It is?”
“Yes. It’s a place in France. A famous place.”
“Why?”
“It used to belong to England,” said Georgina. “A lot of France did. Then they lost it in the Hundred Years’ War. Calais was the last place they lost.”
“A hundred years!” Alice widened her eyes.
It was easy to impress Alice. She knew almost nothing about anything. Lisa thought she was a retard.
One morning we were sitting in the kitchen eating toast with honey.
“What’s that?” asked Alice.
“Toast with honey.”
“I’ve never had honey,” Alice said.
This was stunning. Who could imagine a life so circumscribed that it excluded honey?
“Never?” I asked.
Georgina passed her a piece. We watched while she ate.
“It tastes like bees,” she announced.
“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.
“Sort of furry and tingly—like bees.”
I took another bite of my toast. The honey just tasted like honey, something I couldn’t remember tasting for the first time.
Later that day, when Alice was off having a Rorschach, I asked, “How can a person who’s never eaten honey have a family that can afford to send her here?”
“Probably really incredibly crazy and interesting, so they let her in for less,” said Georgina.
“I doubt it,” said Lisa.
And for several weeks Alice Calais-Callous gave no evidence of being either really crazy or interesting. Even Georgina got tired of her.
“She doesn’t know anything,” said Georgina. “It’s as if she spent her life in a closet.”