Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Deborah did not know what look she was carrying in front of what self, but she was greatly relieved. Help was coming by virtue of some of the misery which was apparently leaking through the mask. “Out at the eyeholes, maybe …” she murmured to the people who came after a while.

When she rose again, it was in the darkness. She came like a great whale from the benthic depths—another element with other rules and climates. The earth came back to a night outside another window than the one which had measured the early dusk, and there were now two beds, and full, starred darkness beyond—the glass barred, bars screened, screens tightened. It was a beautiful night, with the stars piercing clear, even behind the triple-masked window. There was a low sound from the other bed. “Who’s that?” Deborah asked.

“Our Lady of the nose-itch,” Helene answered. “Venus de Milo with nose-itch.”

“Were you ever in a pack and had a hair get in your eye?” Deborah asked, remembering the struggles she had had sometimes with hairs or fluff or itches, little devilish mites of annoyance that seemed to be the whole world when you could not reach up and push them aside.

“I am a hair in my eye,” Helene said coolly, “and so are you.”

So Deborah lay quietly, resting from the eternal apocalypse. She could see clearly through her mind, and for a while she thought about Helene, lying like a twin in the other bed. Although Helene was bitter and usually angry, Deborah respected her intellect and also that she, too, in her thorny and unconceding way, had ceased her persecution of the martyred Mr. Ellis. Most of the time Helene was out of contact and not to be reached; sometimes a bitter sentence or two broke like glass, sudden and brittle, and sometimes an attack as hard as it was surprising, but Deborah knew in the quiet, unspectacular way of her clear moments that Helene, as desperately ill as she was, had the unknown quantity of strength or will or something that it took to get well. Helene, she knew, could make it. Because of this, her feelings toward Helene were a texture of envy, respect, and fear.

Once, she had been cruel to Helene; she had told her that she thought she could get well and had seen the terror build in the muscular body. Deborah had not realized fully her own tormenting then. Helene had told her in a fine and reasonable voice that if she, Deborah, didn’t move away and fast, she, Helene, would break every bone in that dung-stinking head. Deborah had complied.

The light went on and both of them groaned softly at the revelation of the lurid spectacle of themselves and each other after the beauty of the star-darkness. Ellis came in alone, and walked swiftly to Helene’s bed to take her pulse.

Normally the nurses and attendants spoke as they entered, in order to introduce slowly the presence of the world, of which they were representatives, to those who might be midhung and confused, and usually they waited for their presence to be acknowledged even by an eyeblink. The suddenness of Ellis’s coming was too much in so vulnerable a place; when he went for Helene’s head to capture her temple-pulse and force from it a number for his report, she pulled hard away from his hand. Movement of the head was a person’s whole repertoire in pack; Ellis grabbed Helene’s face and held it with one hand while he tried to catch the bird-pulse with the other. Again she fought away. Then he straightened a little, riot angry, only deliberate, and began to hit her in the face. The blows landed sure and hard. She spat up at him, a diffused and angry spray, and Deborah, watching, saw what would be to her forever after the symbol of the impotence of all mental patients: the blow again, calm and accurate and merciless, and the spitting back again and again. Helene did not even reach him, but after every attempt he met her at the end of his arm with full force. There was no sound except the pursing sputter of the now dry lips, her labored breathing, and the blows falling. They were both so intent that they seemed to have forgotten everything else. When he had slapped her into submission, he took her pulse and Deborah’s and left. When he went out, Helene was coughing a little on her blood.

The next day Deborah became her own Yri enemy—a voluntary sharer, an eyeless-and-utterly-naked, which Yri called nelaq tankutuku. She went to the nurse and asked to see the ward doctor when he came to sign the orders for the week.

“Why do you want to see him?” the nurse asked.

“I have something to tell him.”

“What is it?”

“That a pacifist is one who uses his open hand.”

Nurse gave way to ward nurse. The theme again. Ward nurse to head day nurse; the theme again. The cloud was beginning to darken under the ceiling, lowering toward Punishment, but Deborah had to tell the doctor somehow and get it off her own conscience that she had been a witness and thus, in some obscure way, a sharer in the experience of both victor and victim. The nurse was skeptical and Deborah had to plead, with the cloud pressing closer and the wind coming up. At last she got permission to see the ward doctor. She told, sparely and dryly, what she had seen, trying for the world’s semblance of sanity so that he would believe her. She did not use the expense of the telling to show him how important it was, nor did she speak of Ellis’s propensities, which she knew were secret simply because he had the keys and the patients didn’t. When she got finished, the doctor sat looking at her, watching her hair grow. She knew from long experience that he did not see the cloud, feel the dark wind, or sense the Punishment. He sat in another season—springtime, maybe—beneath a separate sun whose rays ended at the periphery of her eyesight, her reality, and her kingdom.

At last he said, “Why doesn’t Helene tell me this?”

“Helene left right after it happened.” She was about to add that it was like Helene to blank out and leave her holding the bag, her way of getting even for the time when she had told Helene that she saw the possibility of wellness in her. She saw that this was unwise, but the realization stopped her mind on it, like cloth caught on a nail, and she could say no more.

“We are interested in stopping any brutality going on around here, but we can’t take something without proof. You were in pack because you were upset, you know. Something perhaps you believe you saw …”

“Ask Ellis at least. With his Soul … he’s going to have trouble with it anyway if he has to lie.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” the doctor said, making no move toward his ubiquitous notebook. He was clearly giving her what Lee Miller called Treatment Number Three: a variety of the old “fine-fine,” which went, “Yes, yes, of course,” and was meant to placate without changing, silence without comprehending, and end friction by doing nothing. As she looked at him, Deborah thought about her sedative order. She had wanted an increase in her sedation and she knew that if she asked now he would give it to her. But she didn’t want to buy sleep with Helene’s swallowed blood, and she let him go, murmuring, “Chloral hydrate generosity, and charity in cc’s.” She watched the worms that were dropping out of the cloud. The doctor left. Never mind; she would tell Dr. Fried, The Fire-Touch, about it.

Furii, or Fire-Touch, was the new Yri name for Dr. Fried; it recalled the fearsome power that had seared Deborah’s arm with an invisible burning.

“Did you tell the ward doctor this?” Furii asked.

“Yes, and he gave me the Number Three With Smile: …yes-yes.’” She felt ridiculous in her honorable abstinence from the heavier sedation that she had wanted. She wished that she had at least got something from what was bound to be so costly.