Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Deborah remembered her first meeting with Mary and laughed. She had said, “I’m Deborah,” and pointed to her bed, “over there.” Mary, with her omnipresent mirthless grin, had replied, “I’m bedlam as seen by Walt Disney.”

In the evening Deborah felt a need and got up to scout the ward for fuel for another backfire.

For Deborah, the backfires became the only way of easing the pressure of the stifled volcano inside her. She continued to burn the same places over and over, setting layers of burns on top of one another. Cigarette butts and matches were easy to obtain, although they were supposedly guarded with great care; even D ward’s precautions were no match for the intensity of her need. Because the effects of the burnings lasted only an hour or so and because she could only bear the building up of pressure for three or four hours, she had to have a large supply of used cigarettes and the matches to relight them.

For a few days the wounds remained secret, even though she had to change the site of the burning when they began to infect and drain. She was amused but not surprised at how oblivious the nurses and attendants were. The wounds drained and stank and no one noticed. She thought: It’s because they don’t really want to look at us.

At the end of the week, the new doctor came up to the ward again. “You look a lot better,” he said, stopping by Deborah in the dayroom.

“I ought to,” she said a little acidly. “I’ve had to work like hell to keep it up.”

“Well, with such an improvement, you should be ready to go back to B ward very soon.”

When she heard this, she realized that B ward, with its unprotected time and free matches, was a perfect chance for the death she thought she wanted. Then she noticed that she was terrified, and wondered why. If he was letting her die as she wished, why was she angry?

“I have some more burns,” she said simply.

He looked shocked, recovered quickly, and said, “I’m glad you told me.”

She began to pull on her sweater, twisting it like wet laundry in her hands. If I want to die, what am I saving myself for? she demanded, still angry at the mental image of him permitting her to burn herself to death on B ward.

You told him because you are a coward! the Collect said. They began the old jibes again.

“How is the old sore?” the doctor said, loosening the bandaged place. She did not answer him because he was seeing for himself. The burn was stubbornly refusing to heal. “You haven’t done any more to this?” he asked, a little bit accusingly and afraid to make it stronger.

“No,” she said.

“We’ll try another kind of bandage. Let me see the new burn.” He looked at the other arm. “How many times did you burn this?”

“About eight.”

He bandaged both places and left, no doubt to scold the nurses about the carelessness of leaving dangerous, firemaking materials on the ward. The burning cigarette he left behind him in the dayroom was long enough for two series of burnings.

When the lawgivers of D ward discovered that its patients were not so safe as they had thought, they swept the ward up and down with reforms to widen still further the distance between themselves and the patients. The fork that had been introduced on “D” a year before was now rescinded. The Age of Metal gave way to the Age of Wood and fire prevailed only within the precincts of the nursing station, the modern era. In the Pleistocene beyond, Pithecanthropus erectus shambled and muttered gibberish, ate with its fingers, and wet on the floor.

“Thanks a lot, kid,” Lee Miller said sarcastically as she walked past Deborah into the lighted place where Modern Man supplied the patients with his status-symbols—cigarette and match.

“Go to Hell,” Deborah answered, but her tone lacked conviction. Later the Wife of the Abdicated accused her of being a spy and in league with the Secretary of the Interior, and as Deborah already knew, the Secretary of the Interior was one of the worst Enemies.

Getting matches and butts now became difficult, but by no means impossible. Modern Man was careless with the fire-tipped cylinders he burned and breathed, and waiting beside him was a fire-hungry primitive whose gray and flat world magically included the cigarette in sharp focus, color, smell, and three dimensions of form.

But firing back at the volcano did not change its surface, its granite garment, as Anterrabae called it. And gods and Collect and Censor were wildly and inexplicably free with the Punishment. Even the logic of Yr seemed to have been erased and the laws overturned. Deborah began to believe that the volcano would erupt and explode. She remembered that the Last Deception had not yet come.

The days had long since become an Earth-form that was only a grammatical nicety. She woke up in one of them and found herself in pack, as so often before. A key turned in the lock of the door and a nurse entered. Behind the nurse, looking unbelievably different because she had not changed at all, stood Furii.

“All right,” she said, and came in. The nurse brought a chair for her, and Deborah began to wish that she might escape the woman’s face and the disgust she saw in it. Furii looked all around, sat beside the bed, and nodded with a kind of awe.

“My goodness!” “You’re back,” Deborah said. The self-hate, terror, shame, pity, vanity, and despair never crossed the stone surface. “Did you have a good time?”

“My goodness,” Furii repeated. “What happened? You were doing very well when I left, and now, back here. …” She looked around again.

Deborah was afraid of the joy she felt in seeing Furii alive. She said, “You’ve seen this … awfulness before; why are you so shocked?”

“Yes, I have seen it. I am only sorry to see you in it, and suffering so much.”

Deborah closed her eyes. She was stricken with shame and she wanted to escape to the Pit, to be dark and blank, but Furii was back and there was no hiding place. Her mind held. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“It is the day I said I would be back,” Furii said.

“Is it?”

“It is, and I think maybe you got in this bad shape to tell me how angry you are that I went off and left you.”

“That’s not true—” Deborah said. “I tried with Royson—I really did, but you were dead—at least I thought you were—and he wanted only to prove how right he was and how smart. I forgot that you would come back….”

She began to thrash again, even though she was exhausted. “I’m all stopped and closed … like it was before I came here … only the volcano is burning hotter and hotter while the surface doesn’t even know if it is alive or not!”

The doctor moved closer. “It is one of these times,” she said quietly, “when what you say is most important.”

Deborah pushed her head hard into the bed. “I can’t even sort them out—the words.”

“Well then, just let it come to us.”

“Are you that strong?”

“We are both that strong.”

Deborah took a breath. “I am poisonous and I hate it. I am going to be destroyed in shame and degradation and I hate it. I hate myself and the deceivers. I hate my life and my death. For my truth the world gives only lies; I tried with Royson time after time, but I saw that all he wanted was to be right. He might as well have said, …Come to your senses and stop the silliness’—what they said for the years and years when I was disappointing them on the surface and lying to them with the inmost part of Yr and me and the enemy soldier. God curse me! God curse me!”

A soft scraping sound, a breathed rasp, came after, as she tried to cry, but the sound of it was so ridiculous and ugly that she soon stopped.