The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, Page 2

  I am in my bed, in my room, in the Emergency Ward, and my stockings are all I have left.

  Before being left alone, I was put through three comprehensive security checks, each by a different guard. While I had no idea that taking all of my sleeping pills would reduce me to the status of common criminal in the eyes of the state, I certainly feel much less suicidal now that three men with guns have gone through my underwear.

  This is the checklist of what I brought with me to the hospital:

  1. Several books (I had figured that, in between all of the marvelously beneficial treatments I would be privileged to, there might be some down time.)

  2. My notebooks (If I cannot relentlessly document my surroundings as though I were witnessing life from somewhere up on the ceiling, I tend to go a bit loony . . . shocking, I know.)

  3. Pens/pencils (In order not only to write but also to sketch properly, I require both.)

  4. Cell phone (Do you really think I’m coming to a place like this without being able to call for backup?)

  5. Two changes of clothes (If we have had the pleasure of even the briefest acquaintanceship, then you’ll know that this is conservative, to put it politely.)

  6. Basic toiletries (Hairbrush, toothbrush, lip gloss, etc.)

  7. The clothes on my back (Long black coat, long black dress, gloves, boots, black rubber bracelets, striped stockings.)

  This is the checklist of what I was allowed to keep with me at the hospital:

  1. Several books

  2. My notebooks

  3. Pens/pencils

  4. Cell phone

  5. Two changes of clothes

  6. Basic toiletries

  7. The clothes on my back (Long black coat, long black dress, gloves, boots, black rubber bracelets, striped stockings.)

  I’m not stupid.

  I know exactly what’s going on, and I’m not fighting it. If I have to go through this, I will glean from it any small benefit I can receive.

  I will not fight this.

  Bring it on. Bring on the cure. Bring on the fucking happy.

  I’m committed.

  hospital entry 2: the red crayon

  I know I said only a moment ago that I would cooperate and trust in the wisdom of the medical community, but I was perhaps a bit hasty.

  When my things were taken, the staff had assured me that they would be brought back to me as soon as I was “settled.” Now that I am naked beneath a flimsy gown that doesn’t close (why do they call it a “gown”? Is it sarcasm?), and lying in a gurney (like a metal slab but less comfortable) with shallow railing on the sides (to keep me from jumping out?), I find that I’ve been lied to.

  I am in a solitary room in the Emergency Ward, and my door must be kept wide open at all times. I have the option of either complete darkness or the harsh fluorescent lighting that triggers my migraines. Scratch that last—there are no choices; upon asking for the light to be turned off, I am told that the guards need to be able to see into my room.

  One of these guards crosses my doorway every few minutes to make sure that I haven’t hung myself with my own hair. I ask him when I will be given my things back, and the anxiety rises in my ulcer-ridden stomach when he tells me, indifferently, that I won’t.

  “But, if I can’t have my cell phone, how will anybody know where I am? How will they know I’m all right?”

  “You can’t use your phone down here.”

  This argument is somewhat desperate on my part since I know that there is no one within a thousand miles who would come to visit me, let alone break me out if I couldn’t take it anymore. But what if something horrible happens to me? What if I need to call 911? Oh, wait . . . I’m already at 911.

  “What about my books? My pencils?”

  “You can’t have pencils in here.”

  “Pens! I have pens!”

  “Can’t have pens either, Miss.”

  “How in the bloody hell can I hurt myself with a pen? Seriously now. I can’t have one pen? It’s fucking felt tip!”

  The guard shakes his head.

  “Nothing longer than it is wide, is that it?”

  Slight chuckle.

  “Just about.”

  “Look, I’m going to go crazy in here . . . wrong word . . . I need just one book, and that’s it. I promise you, Sir, I am going to go completely and utterly mad if I can’t at least read. Give me a manual on CPR or something!”

  I am shamelessly appealing to the guard’s workload, assuming that he wouldn’t want to be in here restraining yet another lunatic if he didn’t have to, but, upon examining his physique, I determine that restraining lunatics is probably what he was bred for.

  “Can’t you at least ask a nurse for me? I’d do it myself but you won’t let me out of this thing.”

  The guard walks away, and I find that my heart is pounding. I have no privacy. I have no contact with the world outside. I have nothing to do except rot under these buzzing fluorescent lights in disgrace, unable to think with all of the screaming, the chaos, the absolute bedlam (pun intended) being rolled back and forth on stretchers outside my door. No one has come to talk to me, nor has the book I begged for been delivered, and I know now that I am in the wrong place. I am not a patient; I am a prisoner. And what’s more criminal? Taking all of your sleeping pills at once, or sending a suicidal girl to a place like this?

  I suspect it must be late evening by now, though I have no real way of knowing. Multiple doctors have come in over the course of the day to ask me how I ended up here, and I wonder that they do not share this information with each other. Or perhaps they do and I’m simply being tested for consistency. In any case, I refine my story a bit each time I tell it, because, not only do I realize that I am confusing them, I’m exhausting myself, and, frankly, I’m tired of hearing my own voice. No one has asked me if I need anything. I’m not allowed to get out of this bed, but I know that I need water, and I still have nothing to do but try not to cry as I wonder how my life went so wrong. No, I will not cry. I have not cried since leaving Planned Parenthood seven days ago, bleeding, barely able to stagger, the old white man with his Jesus cross and cardboard sign bellowing in my face, spitting, calling me a whore, and, even then, I was ashamed of my tears.

  At last, a nurse arrives, and I ask her if I can have my books back. It is clear that neither she nor anyone else received my request of hours ago, but nothing surprises me anymore, and I resume my begging.

  Some time later, she returns with a large plastic bag branded with the hospital’s logo and containing all of my belongings, as if to taunt me with its entire contents when, as she now informs me, I may keep but a single item. I select one of my favorite history books on the resurgence of the bubonic plague in the nineteenth century. Then, in my most heartrending—or so I hope—tone, I ask the nurse if I couldn’t keep just one of my notebooks and pens as well. She refuses, adding that I’m not even supposed to have the book—I should be resting, not reading.

  Seeing that none of my charms could ever hope to penetrate this soulless shell of a woman no doubt hardened by years of attending to violent or, worse, annoying patients, I surrender.

  I unpin my hair, shaking the flaming red strands (flaming, did you like that? A little dramatic, but effective, no?) from two twisted coils perched atop my head like mouse ears, then smooth it back, attempting to look more dignified than I feel.

  Changing my mind, I decide to leave it loose; I even tangle it a bit so that I look half as crazy as I’m being treated. I imagine that this is what Ophelia looked like—sane but crazy, crazy but sane.

  The nurse makes one final pass around the room, checking for hidden pens, shoelaces, and other deadly weapons, and I smear the painted heart upon my right cheek, black and red coming away on the back of my hand.

  “If one is not allowed to read, write, communicate with anyone, or even walk around one’s own room, what, then, is one supposed to do here?”

  The nurse
comes to my bedside and snatches up the hairpins lying in my lap before turning to leave. She glances back at me from the doorway.

  “Sleep,” she says.

  My first night in the Emergency Ward, and, in the antiseptic glow of the bustling hallway outside, I can see that the night staff is a bit younger than the day-shifters. Figures. Who would want the graveyard shift if they had the seniority to choose otherwise? And why is it called the “graveyard” shift anyway? Is that a throwback to Victorian times when cemetery staff would watch over the freshly buried bodies at night to prevent grave robbers from digging them up? Are we the freshly buried bodies?

  In any case, the attitude of the night staff is a bit softer as well; they haven’t yet had the time to become harsh.

  A young nurse with an Alice band and quiet, brown eyes comes to administer my sleeping pills (really?) as well as another handful of drugs (a few extra as I am now in such a state of anxiety that my entire body is trembling uncontrollably). I ask this new nurse, “girl to girl,” if there is anything I can write with—anything at all on the premises that I could be allowed. She looks doubtful, yes, but I can’t let this opportunity slip, so I exclaim, “A Sharpie! What about a Sharpie? I couldn’t possibly do anything dangerous with that, could I?”

  The young nurse’s brow furrows and I see that she has not altogether ruled it out.

  “I’ll go check.”

  I fall back upon my pillowless bed and exhale for the first time in months. It is only one breath, and I know it won’t last, but I want just one selfish moment to bask in the warmth of someone doing something nice for me.

  A few breaths later and my nurse is back, a grin puffing her freckled cheeks. She holds up for my inspection a single red crayon. I burst out laughing, and, once I start, I can’t stop.

  “So this is what it’s come to!” I gasp, through hysterical tears.

  “I couldn’t find a Sharpie,” says my nurse, “but I did find this crayon from one of the children’s rooms. Will it be useful at all?”

  Snatching the crayon from her hand before she can change her mind, I tell her it’s perfect.

  And it is.

  Because I’m writing all of this down in the margins of my book about the plague, and everyone knows . . . EVERYONE KNOWS . . . that you can’t erase crayon.

  hospital entry 3: the bed

  Early-morning vitals having been taken, and another handful of pills having been choked down, I am again left alone.

  Having made it through my first night with a bit of drug-induced sleep, I am feeling just as miserable, but slightly less anxious. Or is that just the fight in me dying? In any case, it doesn’t last, because, when a doctor appears in my doorway and informs me that I will be stuck down here in the Emergency Ward for a few days more while they wait for a bed to open up in the Psych Ward upstairs, the panic sets in again.

  “So, I won’t actually be ‘treated’ until I can be moved upstairs, which means that my seventy-two-hour watch won’t start until that day?”

  “Yes, that’s what we’re looking at right now.”

  That’s what we’re looking at right now.

  “But I was forced to come here on the condition that it was seventy-two hours, with good behavior. Nobody told me that I’d be waiting for god knows how long before my time card is punched. Besides, it’s not my fault that you don’t have a room. Somebody should have told me that ahead of time—if not before I showed up, then as soon as I checked in, or, at the very least, before my fucking ride took off.”

  “We can’t legally discharge you once you’ve checked in, so there’s absolutely nothing we can do until a bed opens up.”

  I am really starting to not like this phrase “until a bed opens up,” or, “as soon as a bed opens up,” or, “there are no beds available right now.” It’s creepy, and it implies that the only thing I’m really here for is a bed, that the bed is the treatment, that I am here to lie down and stay down like a lobotomized fucking invalid, and I’m not liking this one bit. I’m starting to shake again. I move to sit up in my gurney, and the thin sheet they call a “blanket” falls away from my left thigh. I quickly cover the cuts with my hand.

  “I can’t quite process this,” I say, unable to give up until I either get my way or receive an answer that I can understand. “I didn’t hurt anyone but myself, which, as far as I’m concerned, is my right to do, but, see, now that I’ve said that, you’ll probably add more days onto my sentence, right?"

  "Ms. Autumn—"

  "I didn’t hurt anyone else. I’ve done everything I was told. The deal is not at all what I was led to believe, and now you’re telling me that I am here indefinitely? Have I been tricked?”

  “No, you haven’t been tricked. This is the way it works, Emilie. For everybody. And, judging by your behavior, I’d say this is exactly where you should be right n—”

  “If I can’t leave,” I interrupt, “can somebody come and get me?”

  “No,” he flatly says, walking toward the door.

  “What if I promise to come back? I’ll sign something! I’ll come back when you have a fucking bed free!”

  The doctor exits my room and I hear his footsteps travel down the hall, away from me and my pleas.

  It is at this moment that I know my freedom is gone.

  hospital entry 4: voices

  Walls are thin here, and all doors are as wide open as mine. I can hear everything. I am surrounded. A shrieking, swearing crack addict has been delivered to the ER, and I take it as a personal attack when the nurses roll her into the cell right next to mine. Don’t they know that you ought not to put someone who throws terrifying tantrums next to the suicidal girl?

  In the cell to my other side, a young man is being restrained; he won’t stop screaming, and is physically threatening the staff when they get too close. This is just what the voices in my head sounded like when I was a child . . .

  How long until I snap?

  Or have I already?

  My cellmates may have taken a lot of drugs, but I tried to kill myself. Which is more insane?

  Every hour (I’m counting seconds to count minutes to count . . . ), a new doctor will enter my room and ask me if I’m still feeling like “hurting myself.”

  I can’t take this question seriously anymore.

  hospital entry 5: dr. sharp

  During the interminable days that have gone by, I am forgotten by all but the chief resident psychiatrist, Dr. Sharp. When he arrived to examine me on my second afternoon here, I couldn’t keep from giggling as we shook hands.

  “What?” he asked, looking almost offended.

  “Oh, nothing, just your name, in a place like this . . . it’s right out of a movie . . . I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m in the insane asylum and everything that isn’t funny at all suddenly is. Like at weddings and funerals, you know?”

  “Ah, I get it,” said he. “Well, the truth is that I’m not the one doing the pricking around here—I deal more with the . . .”

  At this, he tapped his fingertips to his head, twirling his forefinger in the international symbol for “crazy,” which I thought was overstepping the boundaries just a wee bit, but then what are the boundaries in a place like this? I suppose that, if there are any, they are erected by the doctors and not the patients, so there.

  I wasn’t laughing anymore, so Dr. Sharp took a step closer to my bed, speaking intimately as though we were old friends and I wasn’t crazy at all.

  “Besides,” he said, “just between you and me, I was never comfortable with the whole ‘injection’ thing . . . I’m not really into blood.”

  As he said this last, the doctor touched his hand to my arm, playfully pretending to administer an injection. Instinctively, I pulled my knees to my chest—not in modesty but because, if Dr. Sharp was afraid of blood, then he would surely not wish to see the scarlet lines covering my thighs�
��lines I’d carved with tools ranging from razor blades to safety pins.

  Remarkably, no one has yet noticed the cuts, but then I still wear my inexplicably allowed striped stockings, and they are tall enough to hide most of my self-inflicted wounds. Most.

  I have begun to feel somehow protected by my leg-wear. I am reminded of a true accounting of a young girl in the nineteenth century who was the victim of a serial killer. The villain lured the girl up to the attic of her own house where he raped (how original) and murdered her, then set the house on fire in order to destroy the evidence. The strange bit was that, the next day, the house was burned to bits, as was the girl’s body, with the exception of her legs, which remained completely unmarred beneath her striped stockings. No explanation could be found for this bizarre phenomenon, but, due to this physical evidence, the killer was caught and hanged. I would very much like to have those stockings.

  hospital entry 6: watched

  Every time Dr. Sharp enters my room, my stomach clenches involuntarily, and I find myself pulling my gown more tightly around my body.

  There is something . . . wrong . . . about him.

  His general strangeness of comportment, his noiseless arrivals, his prolonged visits . . .

  In fact, he’s watching me right now, from just outside my room, as I write these words in crayon over the text of my precious book because I have already filled the margins. He is always watching me. And he thinks I don’t know, but I know. I always know.

  I can smell him.

  I’ve become so nervous that I don’t feel hunger anymore, and have stopped eating. My body is now eating itself.

  The stale white bread I am given is not going to waste, however; twice now have I spotted what I believe to be a rat scurrying about my room when the lights go out, and I have been tossing breadcrumbs into the corner in the hope that it will stay with me.