Alice & Dorothy (11 page)

“That’s fine, Alice,” Dr Weller said. “I don’t want you to hurt anyone though, alright? Why don’t you sit down? We can talk about the first thing that pops up. There’s plenty of time for that, though you wouldn’t know time if you met him, right?”

The walls were beginning to melt around her. The clock on the wall thudded in her ears, and when she looked up at it she saw someone had scrawled the word FUCK across the face of it in place of numbers.

“You think I’m a
fuckin idiot?
” Alice shouted at them. She had her hands in fists over her ears, her face contorted in rage. “
A clock that doesn’t show time is fuckin’ bullshit! Stop crawling around inside there!”

THE ELECTRIC CHAIR! THE ELECTRIC CHAIR! THAT’S WHAT THEY DO TO LITTLE GIRLS WITH PRETTY YELLOW HAIR!
The Hater’s lip quivered as he shouted, above Alice, above the Doctor’s soothing cradle voice.

“Alice!” Dr Weller said. He kept his voice firm, to keep her attention, but his eyes were elsewhere. He was looking at the glass on the sides of his door. There were two orderlies just outside in the hall, dressed head to toe in white uniforms, and when he nodded they pushed the door open. One of them handed Dr Weller a syringe.

The other one opened his wolf mouth and licked his yellow fangs with an overly long cartoon tongue. He was staring at her tits and he wanted to eat them.

“We need to sedate you, before you hurt yourself, alright?” Dr Weller said. “It’s just a shot, and you can have a nap while we take turns digging around in your guts with a plastic fork.”

“You don’t understand,” Alice said, almost pleading. “He’s
inside
me. I don’t know how he did it but he’s in here with me and he’s making me say lies.” She pounded a fist against the side of her head to drive the point home. Dr Weller put out his hand and she swatted it away. “
He’s making you say lies too!
”

The two orderlies moved on her, spreading out, talking softly, like they were trying to catch a chicken. Alice backed away from them, kicked over a silk plant by the couch, and slid into the corner.

“It’s alright Alice,” Dr Weller said, stepping in behind him. He popped the cap off his syringe, double checked the dosage. Then he pulled it into his body protectively. “This will all be over very soon. You are having an episode, maybe something left over from your drug use, and we’re going to kill you for it.”

“Ruined the tea party,” Alice said. “Spilled tea and brains all over the dashboard.”

One of the orderlies made a grab for her, and she lashed out with a savage kick. He pulled back, a little too late, and cried out when Alice’s foot connected with his wrist. The other orderly grabbed Alice’s arm then, while she was off balance, and yanked her forward. Alice fell face first, her captured arm jerking behind her back as she fell. Unable to catch herself, she fell hard on her chest, banging her face on the carpeted floor and losing her breath.

“
Oh Fuck,
” she whimpered.

The orderly still holding her arm snapped it cleanly behind her back by the wrist, and then put a knee on the small of her back. The other orderly, still holding his hand, knelt down and put a knee across the back of Alice’s legs.

“This is just going to pinch,” Dr Weller said. “You know how it is.” He knelt down in front of Alice, syringe out.

“Hold her steady,” he said to the orderlies, “so I can jam my cock into her veins.” Alice wasn’t moving though. She could barely breathe with the weight of two men on her back, and she was still reeling from smashing her face off the floor.

Dr Weller stuck the syringe into Alice’s shoulder. There was a pinch of for a moment, and then a soft spreading heat as the drugs took hold. Dr Weller rubbed the spot with a cotton ball.

Look at Time
, The Hater whispered.
He’s getting older by the second.

Alice tried to talk. Her mouth was full of sand.
He’s in here with me still
, she thought. Smashing an hourglass over her face. Pouring dust and broken glass into her eyes. Making them heavy. Her head filled with weighted balloons. Pushed her face in warm water. The Hater walked away from the front of her mind. Took his hat off. Ruffled his sweaty hair with a free hand, his too-big ears poking out under sand and sweat.

Try not to think of the Dormouse
, he said.
Try not to think like that at all.

Alice tried to shake the cobwebs and mist from her brain. They quickly turned to snow. She couldn’t see the Hater anymore. Couldn’t think of him.

Alice
, The Hater said, snuggling up against her brain stem.
Don’t worry dear, I have a plan. I’m going to help you.

Alice’s eyes rolled back in her head, but right before they did she caught sight of Dorothy standing in the doorway, holding her stuffed dog close to her chest, a worried look on her face.

As soon as Alice was unconscious, Dr Weller had the orderlies put her on a neck board and move her back to her room. On his way through the common he passed Dorothy, sitting on her knees looking over the back of the couch at the procession.

“Dr Weller,” she said, putting her hand to her mouth. The other hand was wrapped tightly around Toto, her stuffed dog. “What did you do to her?”

“It’s nothing, Dorothy. We had to sedate her because she was getting really upset. We don’t want her to hurt herself, right?”

“I guess not.” Dorothy balled her hand into a fist and rubbed it against her eye.

Is she crying?
Dr Weller smiled at the girl, and resisted the urge to ruffle her hair. Then he was moving again, past the butter-coloured walls into Alice’s room, where the orderlies had already unstrapped her from the neck board and were sliding her into bed. There were restraints in the small nightstand beside the bed, and Dr Weller moved around the orderlies to retrieve them. He began securing Alice into her bed.

“I need you to double check these,” he told the orderlies. The restraints were nylon straps with buckles and velcro. One for each arm, two for each of her legs, and then two more for the torso. Dr Weller ran one under Alice’s breasts to keep it from sliding down to her throat, another across her hips, and then one across each thigh and shin. When he was done, Alice would be able to breath and move her head, but very little else. Of course, she was going to be out for a couple hours so she wouldn’t be moving at all. In that time, Dr Weller hoped he could get the ball rolling on some kind of diagnosis.

When he finished double checking the straps, he nodded to the orderlies, and then followed them out into the common room. “Just check on her every half hour or so,” he told the nurse in attendance. He leaned in close and spoke softly because he didn’t like the other patients overhearing him. “She should be out for a couple hours. If she wakes up and is lucid, have the orderlies remove the straps. If she starts having an episode, make sure you let me know at once.”

The nurse behind the desk nodded, and then shot him a tired, resigned look.
You must think I’m the biggest idiot
, it seemed to say. Dr Weller ignored it. He nodded back to her, uttered a quick thanks, and returned to his office. Once there he closed the door, straightened the plant Alice had kicked over, and then sat down behind his desk. He pulled the file marked
Pleasance, Alice
and settled back in his chair.

He was going to have to do a little research, but a tiny worm of suspicion had been digging around in the meat in the back of Dr Weller’s brain. She had been agitated when she came in, nervous about being in therapy. Probably upset about being stuck in the hospital in the first place. It was obvious she didn’t trust any authority figures. Probably had a history of abuse from people caring for her. That was a pretty common diagnosis.

What bothered him was how rapid her episode had occurred. It had actually occurred
mid sentence
, while he was watching her. It was like a light switch flicked on in her head and she began spouting nonsense. Then the light flicked off. Alice had seemed unaware that it had even occurred at first. This was what most concerned Dr Weller. If she had been faking, he would have been able to tell. Most often people’s perception of mental illness compared to the realities of it were like night and day. People in the field of mental health chalked it up to what they deemed “The Hollywood Effect”.

Hollywood lunatics were most often hyper-realistic sociopaths, stark raving mad. They were twisted minds bent on death or sex, and often a combination of both. Anthony Hopkins in
Silence of the Lambs
may have been an interesting and riveting character, but in reality he was far from the sociopathic genius
Hannibal Lector
.

True sociopaths were rarely monsters you knew. They were more akin to playground bullies, tyrants manipulating their little worlds for their own gain and amusement. They were the button pushers of the world; they were con men; they did what they wanted with little regard for other people’s feelings. This was because they didn’t feel things the way people normally did, and as a coping mechanism turned to mimicking the emotional responses in others. They didn’t
act
like they were mentally ill; they acted like other people
because
they were mentally ill.

The episode Alice suffered from had similar hallmarks. There was no halting at the cliff of sanity, she’d simply been walking along and slipped off the edge without noticing. Her confusion was the key to her sincerity. Alice had lashed out angrily because she had been trying to sort out whatever was happening in her mind when the orderlies came in and threatened her physically. It was unfortunate but necessary. Dr Weller couldn’t allow Alice to go through a complete breakdown in his office for the sake of letting her try and work out her problems alone. It was better she was sedated now, and the episode allowed to pass, so that later they could begin working on it rationally. They would be able to discern whether this was an isolated incident or something that had been ongoing in Alice’s life.

If it was isolated, and not the result of an emerging psychosis, it could have been brought on by a specific factor. Her overdose was an obvious one. Perhaps she was suffering from a trauma related stress disorder.

Dr Weller sighed, rubbed his face with his hands. It was a habit he’d picked up from his mother, something she did when the world was big and ugly and messy and stressful. The subconscious act of wiping her face off with her hands
symbolized her need to separate herself from her stresses. Dr Weller smiled inwardly thinking about his own inherited behavior. Human beings really were amazing machines. The clockwork that made them run was more complex than any computer could ever be.

It was a wonder everyone wasn’t crazy. Of course, there were those in the field of psychology who firmly believed everyone
was
crazy to some extent; and that the ideal of well being was long due for an overhaul. No matter what the ideal was though, there was something terribly wrong with Alice.

If she had been repeating something she thought she was hearing in her head, it could be an indicator that she was suffering from a schizoid disorder. Longtime drug addicts often suffered from what was known as
narcotic induced mental illness
, usually schizophrenia, brought on by their heavy dependency and abuse of street drugs. Schizophrenia covered a wide blanket of symptoms, however, and a diagnosis like that might mean long-term care, even institutionalization. Provided there was somebody around to foot the bill. If not she’d be back on the street with a prescription for an anti-psychotic.
Anti-insanitories
, his mind joked, something funny from his university days. Of course, back then the word mostly pertained to beer and shots of tequila.

It was also possible that Alice had some form of MPD. Multiple Personality Disorder. MPD had once been the “in” diagnosis back in the 80s, before a lot of work had been done in the field to really figure out what it was and what caused it. It was generally accepted now that MPD occurred in individuals suffering from heavy physical and emotional abuse as children, and found a way to disassociate themselves from the terrible things happening to them by separating themselves from the act mentally.

Doctors speculated that, the splitting of these actions could, under the right circumstances, actually cause smaller, mini-personalities to appear. Since they were created to deal with only one aspect of a person’s life, they usually only exhibited traits of one or two emotions, and were often tied to cliché personality types. For example, a scared child or an angry old woman. It was these universal cliché’s that made some scientists wonder if MPD was a real disorder at all, and not some offshoot iatrogenic condition.

And although an MPD diagnosis might be difficult because Alice was a drug user, she could have been using drugs in an effort to self medicate an undiagnosed illness. Then,
again
, perhaps the whole thing was brought on by stress. Or perhaps it
was
a heroin-related episode. A leftover opiate particle getting loose in her brain and causing a glitch in the system.