Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

She had to do something. Lee was all alone in that hideous place called “Involvement” or “Reality” and no one could help her. Locked in a motionless body—as motionless now as Sylvia’s—mute in English, Deborah began to tremble. In fear she made another headlong dash for Yr; the deeper the better, but the flaming Anterrabae laughed. How dare you cast with the world! You will be punished, you traitoress! The way to Yr closed before her.

No! No! If you do that I will go insane! she cried to them.

You admire the nelaq tankutuku, do you? Well then, there is the world. Take it!

A black wind came up. The walls dissolved and the world became a combination of shadows. Seeking for the shadow of firm ground on which to stand, she was only deceived again when it warped away like a heat mirage; she looked toward a landfall and the wind blew it away. All direction became a lie. The laws of physics and solid matter were repealed and the experience of a lifetime of tactile sensation, motion, form, gravity, and light were invalidated. She did not know whether she was standing or sitting down, which way was upright, and from where the light, which was a stab as it touched her, was coming. She lost track of the parts of her body; where her arms were and how to move them. As sight went spinning erratically away and back, she tried to clutch at thoughts only to find that she had lost all memory of the English language and that even Yri was only gibberish. Memory went entirely, and then mind, and then there was only the faster and faster succession of sensations, unidentifiable without words or thoughts by which to hold them. These suggested something secret and horrible, but she could not catch what it was because there was at last no longer a responding self. The terror, now, could have no boundary.

When she came from the Punishment she was looking at her fingernails. They were blue with cold. It was the summer of a certain time and there was sunlight outside, and greenness, but she dared not use her mind to fix the time lest the Punishment return and take it away again. She got up from somebody’s bed, where she found herself lying, pulled a blanket from it, and, still chattering with the cold, walked into the hall. She didn’t recognize anyone, but at least she knew to a reasonable extent that she existed and that she was looking at three-dimensional solids, called people, who moved in an element called time. She went up to one of them and asked an irrelevant question: “What day is it?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh, then, what day was it?” The person didn’t understand, and since she was too confused to pursue the point, she walked away. Behind her the three-dimensional solids were complaining about the heat. They fanned the air of their time in front of their faces.

She felt nauseated by the freezing cold, so she went back and lay down on a bed, desperately grateful that she recognized it as hers.

You see what it is … Anterrabae said genially. We can really do it. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we can do it up, down, and sideways. You thought all those descriptions were metaphors: lost one’s mind, cracked-up, crazed, demented, lunatic? Alas, you see, they are all quite, quite true. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we are protecting you. When you admire the world again, wait for our darkness.

Later, Dr. Fried asked her what she had found out since their last session.

“I found out about being insane,” Deborah said, and remembering with awe the immensity and power and horror of it, she shook her head. “It really is something. Yes, it sure is something.”

The struggle between the Nose, Hobbs’s Leviathan, and the patients went on. His rigid fundamentalist beliefs made him see insanity as a just desert for its victims, as God’s vengeance, or as the devil’s work, and sometimes as all three at once. As the days passed, his fear waned and the time of his righteous wrath was at hand. He saw that he was suffering persecution for his faith.

Against his loathing, the sick fought in their sick way. The literate rewrote the Bible or ridiculed its passages to make him horrified. Constantia made flagrant sexual advances to him. Helene took the towel he brought her with a little curtsy, saying, “From Paraclete to Paranoid. Amen, amen.” And Deborah made a few pointed observations about the similarity between psychotics and religious fanatics. McPherson sensed the anger and violence blowing like a wind over the ward and wondered what he could do about it. There was not enough staff anyway. The two other new conscientious objectors were doing well on different wards, and one of them was showing signs of ability at working with mental patients. He didn’t like the new man on ward D, Ellis, much himself, but he was sympathetic toward him. Ellis was not suited for the work at all; he feared and hated the patients, and looked upon the government which had punished him as the early Christian martyrs must have looked upon the Roman procurators. Because of this, Ellis had to drag the dead Hobbs after him in the nickname the patients had given him. The worst of it was that Ellis’s religion could not see suicide as anything but a sinful horror, monstrous in nature.

So, Ellis dragged a dead and stinking whale, and McPherson mused that there was no hunter in the world as clever or merciless in placing barbs in a weak place as these sick people. Sometimes he wondered why Hobbs had been attacked and never he; why Ellis, now, and not he. Never was Helene’s tremendous store of knowledge used to damn him; never did the hard-faced Deborah Blau set her knife-edged tongue against him. He felt somehow that it might just be more than luck, but he did not truly know how or why he escaped the bitterness and unhappiness that vented itself all around him.

Now he watched the patients as they stood, waiting for dinner, waiting for darkness, waiting for sedatives, waiting for sleep. Blau was standing near the barred and screened radiator, staring out at something beyond the wall. He had once asked her what she was looking at and she had answered him from her otherness, “I’m the dead, reckoning.”

Constantia was out of her seclusion room, but in seclusion still, muttering quietly in a corner. Lee Miller was clenching and unclenching her teeth; Miss Cabot from the dormitory insisting, “I’m the Wife of an Assassinated Ex-President of the United States!” Linda, Marion, and Sue Jepson, and all the rest were doing what they usually did. Yet there was a lingering sense of dangerous unrest—more than the sum of the parts of unrest. Ellis came out of the nursing station where he had been writing up the medication reports. The badgering began.

“Thar he blows—it’s Hobbs’s Leviathan!”

“Get thee behind me, Satan!”

“Hobbs committed suicide and the army committed him!”

“He got a commission, but not the kind that gives you eagles on the shoulder.”

“With his commission they give bats in the belfry!”

“What’s the latest from Hell today, Preacher?”

“Don’t ask him now. Let him look over his holdings first.”

There was a radio built in behind a heavy mesh screen in the wall. It was supposed to be on only during certain hours of the day and tuned only to certain innocuous semi-light music, but now McPherson went to the screen, unlocked it, and turned the radio on good and loud. Into the ward poured the tinny sounds of romantic-love dance music, pathetically, even hilariously, incongruous in the heavy urine-and-disinfectant atmosphere that permeated the ward. When the announcer’s moist voice bade them “Good night from the Starlight Roof,” Carla replied in a parody of romantic wistfulness, “A farewell flutter of my restraints, delicately, good night … good night …”