David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘May I ask a question?’

‘Why not just ask the question instead of taking the time to make me say yes you can ask a question?’

‘I see what you’re saying.’

‘So?’

‘Elevating his feet was to help him circulate blood more efficiently?’

‘That’s what you wanted to ask?’

‘Is that not the sort of small, reinforcing question you were talking about?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Rand says. ‘Yes, it’s for circulation. Although at the time who knew why it was. It was believable he had a bad back. He sure didn’t look comfortable. All you could really tell was that this was somebody who was not in great shape.’

‘He appeared frail, especially for his age.’

Sometimes now Rand will every so often toss her head back and to the side a tiny bit, very rapidly, as if rearranging her hair’s feathering without touching it, which certain types of adolescent girls do a great deal without necessarily being aware of it. ‘By the way, he taught me the word etiology. And he explained why the doctors had to be so distant and stiff; it was just part of their job. He didn’t force anybody, but at times it seemed like he picked certain people to talk to, and he made it hard to resist. The nights could be hard, and it wasn’t like watching Maude with suicidal people or people on heavy meds was going to help very much.’

‘…’

‘Do you remember Maude ?’

‘No I don’t.’

‘My mom loved that show. It was about the last thing in the world I wanted to see in there. If her husband got mad and told her “Maude, sit, ” she’d sit, like a dog, and it got a big laugh on the canned laughter. Some feminism. Or Charlie’s Angels, which was just totally insulting, if you were a feminist.’

‘…’

‘The way he started talking to me was in the pink room, which was the isolation room, which is where they put you if you were on suicide watch and the law said you had to be legally observed twenty-four hours a day, or if you acted out in a disciplinary way where they said you presented a danger or disruptive influence — they could put you in there.’

‘Called the pink room because that was the room’s color?’ Drinion asks.

Meredith Rand smiles coolly. ‘Baker-Miller pink, to be exact, because there had been experiments showing that seeing pink soothed mental agitation, and soon every nut ward everywhere started painting their isolation room pink. He told me that, too. He explained the color of the room they put me in; it had a sloped floor and a drain in the middle like something out of the Middle Ages. I was never on suicide watch, if you’re wondering. I have no idea how tripped out you are by any of this, like uh-oh here’s this crazy person, she was in Zeller when she was seventeen.’

‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘What I did was tell a doctor who wasn’t even my doctor, I mean the one my dad’s insurance was paying for, but this was a different doctor who’d come in and cover for the doctor’s cases when he couldn’t come in, they all covered for each other all the time this way, so in like five days you’d talk to three different doctors, and they had to spread your file and case notes or whatever out on the table to even remember who you were — and this doctor, who never even blinked, kept trying to get me to talk about being abused and neglected as a child, which I never was, and I ended up telling him he was a freaking idiot and that he could either believe me when I told him the truth or just stick it up his stupid fat butt. And then that night I’m in the pink room, he’d ordered it, which was bullshit. Not like they dragged me in there and threw me in and slammed the door — everybody was pretty nice about it. But you know, one of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you’re thinking. You feel like it’s OK or maybe even in some way expected to act crazy or uninhibited, which at first feels kind of liberating and good; there’s this feeling like no more smiley masks, no more pretending, which feels good, except it gets kind of seductive and dangerous, and actually it can make people worse in there — some inhibitions are good, they’re normal, he said, and part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalized is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental-health system, and they never really get out.’

‘And he told you that. He warned you about using uninhibited insults with the psychiatrist.’

Her eyes have changed; she puts her chin in her hand, which makes her seem even younger. ‘He told me a lot of things. A lot. We talked for like two hours the night I was in the pink room. We both laugh about it now — he talked way more than I did, which is not how it’s supposed to be done. After a while every night we were in there like clockwork, ta—’

‘You went to the isolation room?’

‘No, I was just in there that one night, and the regular case doctor, I have to admit it, he got the substitute one in some kind of disciplinary trouble for signing me in there; he said it was reactive.’ Rand stops and taps her fingers against the side of her cheek. ‘Shit, I forget what I was saying.’

Drinion looks slightly upward for an instant. ‘“Every night we were in there like clockwork.”’

‘In the conference room, after visits and whoever was freaking out because of something in visits got calmed down or medicated. We’d sit in there and talk, except he had to get up every so often to do checks on where everybody was and make sure nobody was in anybody else’s room, and make whoever was due for meds go to the meds desk. Every night on weekday nights we’d go in, and he’d do this thing he always did of filling up a Coke can with water at the fountain, he’d use a Coke can instead of a cup, and we’d sit down at the table and he’d go, “So shall we go intense tonight, Meredith, or just do some laid-back chitchat?” and I’d almost act like somebody looking at a menu and go, “Well, hmm, tonight I think I’d like to go intense, please.”’

‘Can I ask a question?’

‘Grr. Go ahead.’

‘Should I infer that intense refers to the cutting behavior and your reasons for doing it?’ Drinion asks. His hands are now on the table with the fingers laced together, which for most people causes the back to bow and slump, but with Drinion does not — his posture stays the same.

‘Negative. He was too smart for that. We didn’t talk about cutting often. That wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could come at directly that way. What he — it’s more like he mostly just told me all these things about myself.’

One of Drinion’s interlaced fingers moves very slightly. ‘Not asked you things?’

‘Negative.’

‘And that didn’t make you angry? Presuming to tell you about yourself?’

‘The big difference is the way he was right. Just about everything he said was right.’

‘In what he told you about yourself.’

‘Look, and he did this mostly in the beginning, when he needed to establish credibility. That’s what he told me later — he knew I wouldn’t be there long, at Zeller, and he knew I needed to talk to somebody, and he needed to let me know very fast that he understood me, knew me, he wasn’t just dealing with me as a case or a problem to be figured out for his own career, which he knew was how the doctors and counselors seemed to me, which he said it didn’t matter if I was right about them or not, the point is that I believed it, it was part of my defenses. He said I was one of the most strongly defended people he’d ever seen come in there. In Zeller. Short of the outright psychotics, I mean, who were just about impregnable, but they got transferred out almost right away; he rarely had any one-on-ones with real psychotics. The psychotic thing is just defensive structures and beliefs so strong that the person can’t get out, they become the real world, and then it’s usually too late, because the structure of the brain gets changed. That person’s only hope is medication and a whole lot of pink around him at all times.’