Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Walk out of this with that famous doctor of yours! the Censor roared. Do you think you can go telling secrets and be safe forever? There are other deaths than death — worse ones.

Now it is time to hide and be hidden … whispered Idat, rarely seen god who was called the Dissembler.

From the endless-sounding embroilment, the flashing-by of gods and faces of the Collect, Deborah saw, like a cartoon, flat and unforeshortened, the figure of McPherson walking down the hall of the ward. I’m going to call him — to get help, she said to all of it. Go ahead . Anterrabae laughed. Try. And he passed by with a whiff of the smell of his burning. Fool!

McPherson was passing by. Soon he would be gone. Deborah got closer to him but couldn’t speak. Gesturing a little with a hand, she tried to get his attention, and he saw her out of the corner of his eyes, arrested by the intensity of her look and the strange, almost spastic motions of her hand, twisted by tension into an odd position. He turned.

“Deb? … What’s the matter?”

She could not tell him. She could do no more than gesture feebly with her body and hand, but he saw the panic she was in. “Hold on, Deborah,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She waited and the fear mounted as her other senses closed to her. She could only see in gray now and she could barely hear. Her sense of touch was also leaving, so that the reality of contact with her own flesh and clothing was faint. The mumbling out of Yr went on, and after a while the smell of people in the heavy ether-and-chloroform stench of the Pit made her think that she should try to see them. Everything was white—it must be nurses or the winter snow.

“Deborah. Can you hear me?” It was McPherson’s voice. Someone in the background was saying, “What’s the matter with all of them tonight?” McPherson was still trying to talk to her. “Deb—don’t be afraid. Can you walk?”

There was not much direction to the walk. She shambled and had to be taken, leaning on someone, to the end of the hall where the open pack was waiting. She collapsed on it almost gratefully, not feeling the first cold shock of the wet sheet….

A long time later she came up clear again, and after a period of breathing and listening to herself breathe, she gave a long sigh. A voice beside her said, “Deb? Is that you?”

“Carla?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Carla said. “I’m a stranger here myself, but the ward is sure going nuts tonight.”

“Going!” They laughed a little.

“How long has it been?” Deborah said.

“You hit just a little after I did. Helene’s in the next room and so is Lena, and Lee Miller is having hysterics.”

“Who’s on the night shift?”

“Hobbs.” The tone of dislike was plain. “I wish it was McPherson.”

They talked for a while, letting the real world in slowly, being pleased to talk to each other but not daring to admit that they were, in a small sense, friends. Carla told how she had listened to one of Helene’s hours with her doctor. The sessions were held on the ward because of Helene’s violence. “Silence is murder,” Carla said. “Old Craig just couldn’t stand all that silence. He began to talk himself and soon he was getting louder and louder and more and more upset. Any minute I expected Helene to say, …Calm down, Doctor; I’m just here to help you.’ When he came out of there, he looked … like one of us!”

Deborah, fully conscious, began to stretch, feeling the now-familiar bone-ache of restricted circulation in her feet and ankles. She could see the motionless mummy-hump of Carla in the bed near her.

“Deborah … Deb … I know what it was—what happened to us.”

“What?” Deborah said, wondering if she really wanted to know.

“Doris Rivera.”

Somewhere inside Deborah an awful ache rose, a recent but now familiar ache which she had begun to identify with Yri words—an ache hiding the ancient and fearsome English word: Truth.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was,” Carla said, gaining conviction. “She got well and went out and she’s working, and we got frightened because we might someday … have to be …well’ and be in the world; because there’s a chance that they might open those doors for us, on … the world.” Carla’s voice was cut with the knife of her panic.

Inside the motionless white casing Deborah’s heart had begun to pound and her stomach to heave. She began to tremble hard and the tremor took her whole body. My God, she thought, I am now what I was in the world—a motionless mountain whose inner part is a volcano.

“Go to Hell!” she cried at Carla. “Just because your mother was insane and killed herself, you think you have more reasons to be crazy than I do!” She heard the sharp intake of breath from the other bed. The spear had gone home, but her cruelty had given her no protection. She pushed her head hard against the ice pack pressing like reality at the back of her neck.

At that moment the light went on over them and they blinked, trying to shield themselves from the glare.

“Just checking,” Hobbs said. He came and felt Deborah’s pulse at the temple. “She’s still pretty high,” he said to the attendant who had come in behind him. “This one, too,” he said as he straightened up over Carla. They left and the light went out.

In shame, Deborah turned her head away from Carla’s bed.

“Is the meat done?” Carla said bitterly. “No, give it another twenty minutes.”

“We are not of them,” Deborah murmured, and the comfort of Yr in this new context seemed almost shocking. “Carla …” The words were coming hard. “I’m sorry for what I said. I did it for me and not against you. I didn’t want to hurt you—to make you sicker.”

There was quiet for a while; the only sound was their breathing. Then Carla’s voice came, not rancorous or arch, although Deborah was listening for rancor. “My sickness … is a glass that’s full and running over, and your little drop is lost by now in all the overflow.”

“What you said about Doris Rivera maybe … is true.”

The bone-truth hurt, but a little less this time.

“I know.”

Deborah began to fight the reality, the pack, the questions. She struggled against her restraints, half-crying.

“What’s the matter?” Carla said in the darkness.

“You could have hurt me—and you didn’t!” And because Deborah could not understand why Carla had spared her, she lay shaking and gritting her teeth in cold, bare terror.

The Blaus sat at dinner. Esther was tired, Jacob angry. There had been another report, and Jacob had read it. It was general and noncommittal as usual, but it seemed to him to say that certain hates, violences, and terrors that had been deep inside his well-beloved daughter had erupted. She had been transferred “to greater protection.” What it meant to Debby he did not know. His inner eye saw only that high, barred, and screened place; his inner ear heard only the madhouse scream which had come from high up, where “the violent ward” was, to torment night after night of his sleep. To that porch, to that screaming they had taken his Debby. Esther had known that she couldn’t keep the truth from him forever. She had equivocated and hidden the reports and misread them as long as she could. Now Jacob knew also and all she could do was to try to calm him, using over and over the carefully neutral words of the new ward administrator.

“They say that she’s better in some ways,” Esther explained, but Jacob didn’t believe her and she wondered if she believed herself after all.