I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (16 page)

Mary (who has Dr. Fiorentini): “I’ve contracted a social disease from the socialists!”

Mary (who has Dr. Dowben): “Murder and fire! There’s a fire!”

Carla, who was going to go to the movie in town, needed special permission, being a “D” patient, and money. Miss Coral, starting at the bottom of the
via dolorosa,
was there to ask for some basic ward privilege.

The doctor arrived on the ward, and the requests and answers flew back and forth. When Deborah asked for the notebook, he looked at her quickly, measuring her.

“We’ll see,” he shot back over his departing shoulder, and went his way.

That afternoon Dr. Adams came on the ward to see Sylvia. When she left, she was missing a copy of
Look Homeward Angel
that she had been carrying with her. Later in the day one of the student nurses looked in vain for her lecture notebook. The written pages turned up two days later in the elevator outside the Disturbed Ward, but the half of the book which was blank had disappeared.

Deborah began to bother Helene for remembered poetry, and Helene obliged by giving her some of
Hamlet
and
Richard III,
dredged up, to her own amazement, from some distant but still-living source. Greek words were dutifully copied and then Latin;
Look Homeward Angel
became an agony under Deborah’s mattress, but she read and reread it until Dowben’s Mary got ahold of it and ate
it, leaving only the binding. Carla had read the novel once and for a while they talked about it.

“If I can learn these things …” Deborah said, “… can read and learn, why is it still so dark?”

Carla looked at her and smiled a little. “Deb,” she said, “who ever told you that learning facts or theories or languages had anything to do with understanding yourself? You, of all people …” And Deborah understood suddenly how the precocious wit, though it had supported her sickness and was part of it, acted for her independently of the troubles that clouded her reality.

“Then one may learn, and learn, and be a schizo.”

“At least it may be so in Deborah,” Helene said caustically.

Deborah put her notebook behind the dormitory radiator and lay down on her bed. She stayed there for the next three months, getting up only to be let into the bathroom or to be taken off the ward to see Dr. Fried. The darkness seemed complete. Phases of Yr came and went, the Collect met and dispersed, but outside the sessions with Dr. Fried she did not fight any of it. Carla sometimes came in and talked to her, telling the ward gossip or the little happenings of the day. Deborah was incapable of saying how much these visits meant. They were sometimes the only human contacts she had for days at a stretch, for her lying mask gave forth looks that hurried the attendants away; they would give the tray or put out the clothes and leave without a word or a nod. Because she began to have bad dreams and loud, hard awakenings, she was moved out of the noisy and populous front dormitory and placed in a small room in the darker back hall with two more of the living dead. The coming of daylight shut their mouths and cut off their vision a foot or two beyond their eyes, but their dreams burst from them in screaming shards that shattered the brittle crust of drugged sleep for which the other patients fought. It was considered better to have the three of them waking one another than to have the whole ward upset,
so they were immured together and left to themselves. Some of the nights seemed like imitations of the dramatic-fantasy Insane Asylum that Deborah still carried somewhere from her childhood store of nurses’ threats. Often she would wake with one of the roommates standing over her, arms upraised, or the other hitting her in a sleep-blind anger. One night she thought suddenly of her father and that other facet of his love, which was human need, and to the fat one, whose pounding had awakened her, she broke the mold of silent terror. “Oh, Delia, for God’s sake go back to bed and let me get some sleep.”

Delia turned away and Deborah found herself happier than the mere success of her command would warrant. One night Helene herself—an angry, brutal Helene—played the apparition. Thinking that it was only one of the roommates Deborah snorted in what by that time had become standard form.

“Get away, damn you. Beat it!”

“I’m insane,” Helene said, menacing closer in the darkness. “I’m insane….”

Deborah recognized the voice and knew the tremendous strength of violence in Helene, but now laughter came welling up as naturally as if she had always had it as a friend.

“Do you think you could compete with my smallest nightmare on its dullest day?”

“I could be capable of anything …” Helene said, but Deborah thought she heard more hurt pride in the tone than savagery.

“Listen, Helene. You are bound to the same laws that I am, and there is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn’t do to me smarter and faster and better and good night, Helene, go back to bed.”

Without a word, Helene turned and went back across the hall, and Deborah for the first time permitted herself to speak a small word of praise for the good light in her own mind.

During the dark months spent lying on the bed, she sometimes thought about the half-mythical person, that Doris Rivera, who had been in these rooms, had suffered these fears, had seen the subtle disbelief in those around her that she would recover, and yet had gone out, well, and taken the world.

“How can she stand it, day after day—the chaos?” Deborah asked Carla.

“Maybe she just grits her teeth and fights every minute, waking and sleeping.”

“Does she have a choice? Can she be sane by willing it?” Deborah asked, seeing Doris in her mind as a listless frozen ghost bending her every energy to the Semblance.

“My doctor says we all choose, really, these different ways.”

“I remember …” Deborah murmured, “… the years I lived in the world …” She thought of the Censor again.
(Now take a step
—
now smile and say, “how do you do.”)
It had taken extravagant energy to afford a Censor for the Semblance. “I gave up because I just got tired—just too tired to fight anymore,” she said.

Furii had told her that sanity had to do with challenge and choice, but challenge as Deborah knew it was the shock-challenge that Yr created for her in snakes dropping from the walls, people and places appearing and disappearing, and the awful jolt of the collision of worlds.

Furii had said, “Suspend experience; you may not know what it is like to feel, even remotely, what mental health is. Trust our work together, and the hidden health deep inside yourself.”

But in the shadows a huddled, skinny shape waited for her thoughts to come to it: Doris Rivera, who had gone into the world.

Finally, one afternoon, Deborah, for no reason that she knew, got up from her bed and walked the length of the hall to the ward door. She had come out. Her grayed vision was still severely limited, but it seemed to matter less.

Miss Coral was sitting on the floor near the door, smoking a carefully attended cigarette, and seeing Deborah she smiled her completely disarming little-old-lady smile.

“Why, welcome out, Deborah,” she said. “I’ve been remembering, if you still want to share it.”

“Oh, yes!” Deborah cried, and went to the nursing station, borrowed one of the “official” numbered pencils and a sheet of paper, and spent the time until dinner racing after Miss Coral and Peter Abelard and thick gusts of Medea. It had never occurred to her that Miss Coral would be happy to see her, or that Carla, when she saw her on the hall, would smile and walk up to her. “Well, hi, Deb!” It was brave of Carla to do this right off. It showed trust and a very touching loyalty, since it was usually far safer to wait to see, in anyone’s change, how the change ran before coming over and showing recognition. Deborah could think of no special reason for Carla’s courage and generosity. She wondered for a moment if it might not be that Carla was simply glad to see her. Could there be a world, really, beyond her walled eye?

Suffer, victim,
Anterrabae said gently in the metaphoric Yri words of greeting. In obedience to him and his command the range of her vision grew, and with it, something like a potential for color, although the color itself was still not present.

“I’m glad you got out today, Deb,” Carla said. “I was going to come in and tell you: I’m set to move down to B ward tomorrow.”

You will not listen, will you, Bird-one?
Anterrabae said softly.
They plant the seed and call it forth in rich soil. Sun and water and food are all given. They coax it forth from its casing, crying, “Join us; join us.” Sweet singing and the feel of warmth. The first green beginnings come, and they stand over the shoot with a dropper full of acid … waiting.

The awful truth began to dawn on Deborah that Carla had become her friend, that she liked Carla, and that the scarred befriending part of her still had the power to feel.

The Censor began to roar with laughter, and Anterrabae fell faster away. He was teasing her with his great beauty; his teeth were fire-struck diamonds and his hair curled with flames. Deborah became aware that she had neither commented nor moved one plane of the mask.

“Oh,” she said, and then because she wanted it, to make herself suffer, and the only way she knew how was by telling the truth, she said, “I’ll miss you.”

The terror of the statement brought a cold sweating through her and she began to shiver with it. She got up and went to huddle with those of Dante’s third circle before the fickle mercy of the radiator.

The next morning when Carla was ready to leave, she said another short good-by. “I’ll be around. You could even get privileges to come and visit me down on B.”

Deborah turned a puzzled face toward Carla, for with the help of Yr’s codes and magic she had excised the feeling of loss and friendship, and the reality of Carla’s presence. So Yr was still strong; its queen and victim still maintained a shred of power over the world’s will to make her suffer. She went through the day almost gaily, and got Miss Coral to remember Lucretius’s hooked atoms, and gave a hard wit-parry and thrust home to Helene that brought the fleeting mixture of envy, respect, and terror that was Helene’s form of response. It was the first time since Deborah had come up on “D” that she had put on her disguise, consciously striven for in her fear of Carla’s leaving. Doris Rivera had got up and gone; Doris Rivera was semi-legend, and Deborah had mentally cast her as a sort of ghost, unable to live, unable to die, a figure of desperate and pathetic endurance; for Deborah could not imagine meeting the world again on any other terms than those. But Carla, she knew, was alive and responsive, and she was on her first step into the nightmare that people called “reality.” The eye of destruction was drawing closer to where Deborah waited, just out of its sight. Soon it would turn to her. She was eased in her illness
now enough that the disguise of normality was gone. And the eye would focus on her and the hand would pick her up and set her out in the wilderness of reality, without even the thin coat of defenses she had spent her life making and this year in the hospital destroying.

Overhead, in the dimension of Yr, Lactamaeon, tauntingly beautiful, was free in his open sky, enjoying the shape of a great bird. She had once been able to soar with him in that great sweep.
What do you see?
she called to him in Yri.

The cliffs and canyons of the world; the moon and the sun in the same bowl,
he answered.

Take me with you!

Just a moment!
the Censor intervened with his raspvoice. Deborah never actually saw the Censor because he was not of either world, but had a part in both.

Yes … wait.
Idat, the Dissembler, unmale, unfemale, joined him. While they discussed the matter elaborately, parodying the now familiar psychiatric manners and terms, Lactamaeon found a chasm, dove into it with a high eagle-scream of triumph, and was gone.

Somehow, in the interim, it had come to be evening. Miss Coral came up to Deborah, saying, “I guess that the secret of enjoying hospital food is to be too ill to notice it.”

“Mary still has some of those candy bars, doesn’t she? Ask her and maybe she’ll give you one.”

“Oh, but I can’t ask. I never could ask for anything. I thought you knew that. When I have to ask, something happens to me and I … well, I start to fight.”

“I didn’t notice,” Deborah said, wondering if she ever looked at anyone or noticed anything about the world.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Miss Coral said almost shyly. “I’ve found a tutor for you—someone who reads classical Greek fluently—a real Greek student, and if you ask him I know that he’ll be glad to help you.”

“Who is it? Someone here—a patient?”

“No, it’s Mr. Ellis, and he’s here now, on the evening shift.”

“Ellis!” Deborah realized that the episode with Helene and the bitter cost of witnessing and going Unhidden had been before Miss Coral’s time—that since McPherson had spoken to her she had not talked to Mr. Ellis at all and that somehow his sneering and scorn, while still as plain as Anterrabae’s fire, had faded into a part of the undertone of the ward. He spoke little now, and had little to defend. He was no longer new on the job, no longer being tested by the patients, and he was now looked upon by them and himself as merely a custodian of things, some of which were still alive. Perhaps he had been spoken to about beating patients; perhaps not. There might be or might not be those who rose from packs during his hours less convinced of the world than they had been when they went in.

“If you want to learn,” Miss Coral continued gently, “it’s he who holds the key—” She laughed a little at the allusion. “You have all the Greek I can give you.”

Down the hall Deborah could see Ellis unlocking the bathroom for The Wife of the Abdicated. He did not look at his charge or speak as he stood back and let her by him. Without expression he moved back on the corridor, not looking at anything or anyone. As he passed Deborah, the tumor wrenched inside her, doubling her over hard so that she found herself on her hands and knees. The dark sweat took a while to pass, but it was Castle, the new aide, and not Ellis whom she found watching her shaking the dizziness away.