Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

I should go to her and touch her on the shoulder and say something, Deborah thought. But she stood still. I should go because it happened to me and no one knows as I do, how it is…. But her feet were in her shoes and her shoes were not moving toward Sylvia, and her hands stayed at her sides and were not moving. In the name of the dark night together when she broke her silence for me, I should go…. And she tried to wrench free of her granite garments and stone shoes. She looked at Sylvia, the ugliest of all of the patients, with her drooling and her pale, waxy face in its frozen grimace, and she knew that if she went to give what she of all people knew was needed, Sylvia might destroy her with silence alone. A fear came up to consume the wish to act. In another moment the subduers of Helene began to come back from the battle and the chance was lost. From the subsiding fear, shame rose. It grew up over her face so that she stood for a long time stone blind and wishing for death.

Later, she stood before Furii in the office and told her what she had seen and had not done.

“I never told you a lie!” Deborah said. “I never told you that I was human. Now you can throw me out because I have a guilt with no apology.”

“I am not here to excuse you,” Furii said, looking up at Deborah from the chair, and lighting a cigarette. “You will find no shortage of moral issues and hard decisions in the real world, and, as I have said before, it’s no rose garden. Let us bless the strength that let you see, and work toward the time when you will be able also to do what you see to do. We have now to work hard on the roots of this burning which you do in your anger at me and at the hospital.”

Almost at once Deborah knew that Furii was wrong about the reason for the burning and the need for it, and most wrong about its seriousness. While it had the semblance of terrible aberration, Deborah felt that this was as deceptive as the quiet slopes of her volcano.

“Do you think the burning is very serious?” she asked Furii.

“Most serious, indeed,” Furii answered.

“You are wrong,” Deborah said simply, hoping that the doctor really believed what she had so often said about the patient trusting her own deep beliefs. There were over forty burns, inflicted over and over again on flesh scraped raw to receive them, and yet they didn’t seem worth the fuss that was being made about them. “I don’t know why, but you are wrong.”

Deborah looked around the cluttered office. For members of the world, sunlight was streaming through the windows, but its goldenness and warmth were only there for her to perceive from a distance. The air around her was still cold and dark. It was this eternal estrangement, not fire against her flesh, that was the agony.

“Restricted or not,” she murmured, “I will do penance.”

“Louder, please, I cannot hear you.”

“Selective inattention,” Deborah said, laughing at the words of psychiatry, whose private language and secret jargon had not the beauty or poetry of Yri. Furii saw, too, and laughed.

“Sometimes I think that our professional vocabulary goes too far, but we speak to one another after all, and not only to ourselves and the falling gods. Was it to them that you spoke just now?”

“No,” Deborah said, “to you. I have decided not to be immoral, because of what happened to Sylvia. If I couldn’t do what I should have done after Helene attacked her, at least I won’t implicate her in my burnings, since you say that they are serious.”

“How do you mean this?”

“She smokes sometimes, but she is forgetful. She has put cigarettes down when I was there to pick them up quickly and be gone. Both Marys smoke like wild women and all I have to do is make sure that no one spots me. They are contributing to my delinquency, aren’t they?”

“I suppose, in a way they are. Actually you are taking advantage of their symptoms.”

“That must not be allowed to happen,” Deborah said quietly. She wondered why Furii had left matches in her waiting room, and cigarettes, too. The nurse who had accompanied her was easily distracted; Deborah wondered if Furii knew how trying those minutes of waiting had been.

When the time was over, Deborah got up to leave, saying, “I am cutting my throat now myself. I won’t steal burning butts from the patients unless they’re left in the ashtrays or are forgotten, and I won’t let you contribute either because you wouldn’t want to.”

Then she reached into her sleeve and drew out the two packs of matches she had taken from Furii’s table and threw them angrily on the paper-littered desk.

When the volcano erupted at last, there was no backfire in the matchbooks that was big enough to stave it off. Deborah had not anticipated anything more unusual than dark-mindedness and howling from the Collect when she began to feel the familiar whip of fear and hear the one-tone whine of accusation from the invisible hating ones. She had been in the tubroom behind the front bathroom by herself because all the seclusion rooms were full. (Often the nurses would unlock the door for her and let her be alone in there until someone needed the toilets up front; for half an hour after the evening wash-up, solitude was almost a certainty.) It had been evening and soon it would be bedtime. She hadn’t wanted to carry her hell to bed with her, kicking the effects of dose after dose of chloral hydrate that kept growing deeper in the glasses and went down like burning celluloid.

She lay down on the cold floor and began beating her head slowly and methodically against the tiles. The black in her mind went red, swelling and growing out of her so far that before she knew it she was engulfed in the furious anger of eruption.

When her vision cleared, it was only enough to see and hear as if through a keyhole. She was aware that she was shouting and that attendants were in the room and that the walls of the room were covered with Yri words and sentences. Ranged around her were all the outpourings of hatred and anger and bitterness in a language whose metaphors used “broken” to mean “consenting” and “third rail” to mean “complying.” All the words were extreme. Uguru, which was “dog-howling” and meant loneliness, was written in its superlative form in letters a foot high the length of one wall: U G U R U S U. The words were written in pencil and in blood, and in some places scratched with a broken button.

There was a look of horror and surprise even on the faces of a hardened D-ward staff, and it was that look which brought the full fire from her. The world’s fear and hatred were like the sun, common and pervading, daily and accepted—a law of nature. Now its rays were focused in their look, waking fire. The words Deborah spoke were not loud, but they were full of hatred and they were Yri.

“Where is what you used to scratch this, Miss Blau?”

“ Recreat,” Deborah said. “ Recreat xangoran, temr e xangoranan. Naza e fango xangoranan. Inai dum. Ageai dum .” (“Remember me. Remember me in anger, fear me in bitter anger. Heat-craze my teeth in bitterest anger. The signal glance drops. The Game”— Ageai meant the tearing of flesh with teeth as torture—“is over.”)

Mrs. Forbes came then. Deborah had liked Mrs. Forbes—she remembered having liked her. The anger was rising steadily and too much of what Deborah said could not wait even for the Yri logic and frame of words, and went sailing off into gibberish with only an Yri word here and there to let Deborah know what she was saying. Mrs. Forbes asked Deborah if she could send the others away, and Deborah, grateful for her courage in offering this, showed the two open hands and tried for form in her speech that was only going further and further into meaningless sounds.