I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (7 page)

Yr was massed against her when she got back to the ward. Sitting on a hard chair, she listened to the cries and screams of the Collect and the roaring of the lower levels of Yr’s realms.
Listen, Bird-one; listen Wild-horse-one; you are not of them!
The Yri words sounded an eternity of withdrawal.
Behold me!
Anterrabae fell and said,
You are playing with the Pit forever. You are walking around your destruction and poking a little finger at it here and there. You will break the seal. You will end.
And in the background:
You are not of us,
from the cruel-jawed Collect.

Anterrabae said,
You were never one of them, not ever. You are wholly different.

There was a long, profound comfort in what he said. Quietly and happily, Deborah set out to prove the distance across the yawning gap of difference. She had the top of a tin can, which she had found on one of her walks and picked up, both knowing and not knowing what she expected of it. The edges were rippled and sharp. She dragged the metal down the inside of her upper arm, watching the blood start slowly from the six or seven tracks that followed the metal down below the elbow. There was no pain, only the unpleasant sensation of the resistance of her flesh. The tin top was drawn down again, carefully and fastidiously following the original tracks. She worked hard, scraping deeper, ten times or so up and back until the inside of the arm was a gory swath. Then she fell asleep.

“Where’s Blau? I don’t see her name here.”

“Oh, they moved her up to Disturbed. Gates went in the room this morning to wake her up and saw a real mess—blood on the sheets and on her face and an arm all cut up with a tin can. Ugh! A tetanus shot and right up in the elevator.”

“It’s funny … I never figured that kid was really sick. Every time I saw her I thought: There goes the rich girl. She walked as if we were too low to look at. It was all beneath her; and the sarcastic way she said things—not what she said, really, but the coldness. A spoiled little rich kid, that’s all.”

“Who knows what’s inside them? The doctors say that all of them are sick enough to be in here and that the therapy is damn hard in those sessions.”

“That snooty little bitch never did anything hard in all her life.”

She was terrified of the Disturbed Ward, from which all pretensions to comfort and normalcy had been removed. Women were sitting bolt upright in bare chairs, and sitting and lying on the floor—moaning and mute and raging—and the ward’s nurses and attendants had big, hard, muscular bodies. It was somehow terrifying and somehow comforting in a way that was more than the comfort of the finality of being there. Looking out of a window barred and screened like a fencer’s mask, she waited to find out why there seemed to be some subtle good about this frightening place.

A woman had come up behind her. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Lee.”

“An attendant or something?”

“Hell no, I’m a psychotic like you…. Yes, you are; we all are.”

The woman was small, dark-haired, and troubled, but she had looked out of herself far enough to see another’s fear, and, being a patient, had all the direct and immediate access that no staff member could attain. She has courage,
Deborah thought. I might have belted her one, for all she knew. And Deborah suddenly knew what was good about D ward: no more lying gentility or need to live according to the incomprehensible rules of Earth. When the blindness came, or the hard knots of pain from the nonexistent tumor, or the Pit, no one would say, “What will people think!” “Be ladylike,” or “Don’t make a fuss!”

In the bed next to hers was the secret first wife of Edward VIII, abdicated King of England, who had been spirited to this place (it was a House of Prostitution) by the Ex-King VIII’s enemies. When the nurse locked Deborah’s possessions in the small built-in cupboard, the woman—who was sitting on her bed discussing her strategy with the invisible form of the Prime Minister—rose and came to Deborah, her face full of pity. “You’re so young to be in this evil house, my dear. Why, you must still be a virgin. I’ve been raped every night since I came.” She went back to her discussion.

“Where will I meet you alone here?” Deborah cried to Lactamaeon and his others.

There are always ways,
Yr echoed.
We will not crowd or overcrowd the guests of this unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England!
Yr rang with laughter, but the Pit was very close.

“Escorted?” the doctor asked Deborah, looking quizzically at the attendant standing beside her.

“She’s upstairs now, on D ward,” the attendant answered evenly, and then posted herself outside the normal-looking, booby-trapped, civilized office.

“Well, what happened?” The doctor saw the lostness and the fear and its mask of truculence on Deborah’s face. Deborah sat down, hunching over the vulnerable abdomen and the lower area, where waited the easily awakened tumor.

“It was something I had to do, that’s all. I scratched my arm a little—that’s all.”

The doctor looked at her intently, waiting for a sign of how honestly she might be ready to search. “Show me,” she said. “Show me the arm.”

Deborah undid the sleeve, burning with shame.

“Wow!” the doctor said in her funny, accented colloquial English. “That’s going to make a hell of a scar!”

“All my dancing partners will wince when they see it.”

“It is not impossible that you will dance someday, and that you will live in the world again. You know, don’t you, that you are in big trouble? It’s time to tell me fully what brought you to doing that business there.”

She was not frightened, Deborah saw, or horrified, or ridiculing, or making any of the hundred wrong expressions that people had always shown in the face of her trouble. She was only completely serious. Deborah began to tell her about Yr.

At one time—strange to think of it now—the gods of Yr had been companions—secret, princely sharers of her loneliness. In camp, where she had been hated; in school, where strangeness set her apart more and more as the years went on, Yr had grown wider and wider for her as the solitude deepened. Its gods were laughing, golden personages whom she would wander away to meet, like guardian spirits. But something changed, and Yr was transformed from a source of beauty and guardianship to one of fear and pain. Slowly Deborah was forced to assuage and placate, to spin from the queen-ship of a bright and comforting Yr to prison in its darker places. She was royalty among gods on the days of the high calendar, debased and wretched on the low. Now she was also forced to endure the dizzying changes between worlds, to bear the world’s hatred voiced in the chanting curses of the Collect, to be subject and slave to the Censor, who had been given the task of keeping the world of Yr from blowing its secret seeds to ground on Earth, where they would spring up wide open to flowering lunacy for all the world to see and recoil from in horror. The Censor had assumed the role of tyrant over both worlds. Once her guardian, the Censor had turned against her. In her mind, the proof of Yr’s reality had become its very cruelty, for it was like the world, whose promises were all lies and whose advantages and privileges were, in the end, evil and
agony. A sweetness turned into a need, the need into a force, the force into total tyranny.

“And it has a language of its own?” the doctor asked, remembering the alluring words and the withdrawal that came after them.

“Yes,” Deborah said. “It is a secret language, and there is a Latinated cover-language that I use sometimes—but that’s only a screen really, a fake.”

“You can’t use the real one all the time?”

Deborah laughed because it was an absurd question. “It would be like powering a firefly with lightning bolts.”

“Yet you sound quite competent in English.”

“English is for the world—for getting disappointed by and getting hated in. Yri is for saying what is to be said.”

“You do your drawing with which language—I mean when you think of it, is it in English or Eerie?”

“Yri.”

“I beg your pardon,” the doctor said. “I am perhaps a little jealous since you use your language to communicate with yourself and not with us of the world.”

“I do my art in both languages,” Deborah said, but she did not miss the threat of the doctor, and the claim she was putting on the communication.

“Our time is over,” the doctor said gently. “You have done well to tell me about the secret world. I want you to go back and tell those gods and Collect and Censor that I will not be cowed by them and that neither of us is going to stop working because of their power.”

The first secret had been given, but the day was still there when Deborah and the attendant went back through it to the hospital. No lightning or growl from Yr. The last ward door was locked behind her, and they were beginning to serve lunch. There had been a change of head nurses on the ward, and the new one was giving metal spoons instead of wooden ones. There were two missing in the count. As the search grew more earnest, Doris, a new girl, began to laugh. “Keep calm,
everybody! Keep calm!” For Deborah, those were the last clear Earth-words for a while; there was a pleat in time.

Ward D’s administrator was saying, “What are you feeling like?” Deborah couldn’t speak without great difficulty, so she drew with her hands—a surging. She had trouble seeing.

“You look pretty frightened,” he said.

The surge began to make noise also. After a while the voice came through again. “Do you know what a cold-sheet pack is? I’m going to have one set up for you. It’s kind of uncomfortable at first, but when you’re in it a while, it may calm you down. It doesn’t hurt—don’t worry.”

Watch out for those words … they are the same words. What comes after those words is deceit, and … The stroke from the tumor made her writhe on the floor. A bursting vein of terror released itself and then there was the darkness, even beyond the power of Yr.

The consciousness that came after a time was blunt. She became aware that she was lying on a bed with an icy wet sheet stretched under her bare body. Another was thrown over her and it was also pulled tight. Then she found herself being rolled back and forth between the sheets while others were wound about her body. Then came restraints, tightening, forcing her breath out, and pushing her deep into the bed. She did not stay for the completion of whatever was being done….

Sometime later Deborah came free of the Pit with perceptions as clear as morning. She was still wrapped and bound tightly in the pack, but her own heat had warmed the sheets until they seemed the temperature of her own exertions. All the anguish and fighting only served to heat the cocoon; the heat, to wear her out. She moved her head a little, tiring from the effort. It was all she could move.

After a while someone came in. “How are you feeling?”

“Yes …” Her voice sounded surprised. “How long have I been here?”

“About three and a half hours. Four hours is standard and if you’re okay we’ll let you up in half an hour.” He left. Her joints were beginning to ache from the pressure of the restraints, but reality was still there. She was amazed that she had been able to come from the deepest place without the anguish of rising.

After what seemed like a long time, they came to let her up. As they were freeing her, she studied the construction of the cocoon. There was an ice pack under her neck and a hot-water bottle at her feet. Sheets were spread over and under the complex of wrappings which made up the mummy case. Over the sheets were three canvas strips, wide and long, which were pulled tightly across her body at the chest, stomach, and knees, and tied to the bed on the other side. A fourth strip was knotted around her feet and pulled down to be tied around bars at the foot of the bed. The wrappings were large sheets that fitted around the body; three of them interlapped like white wet leaves, and one, on the inside, held the arms to the sides.

Deborah was weak when she got up, and had difficulty walking, but her world-self had risen. When she was dressed, she went back to her bed to lie down. The unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England was full of solicitude. “You poor little whore,” she said, “I saw what they did to you for not sleeping with that doctor! They tied you so that you couldn’t move and then he went in and violated you.”

“What a prize!” Deborah answered acidly.

“Don’t lie to me! I am the unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England!” the Wife shouted. Her phantoms flowed to her, and she began to chat with them in a parody of all of gentility’s gossip and rattling teacups. Politeness made her introduce Deborah, from whom the streaky marks of sheet creases were just beginning to fade: “And this is the little tart I was telling you about.”

“Disturbed … what does disturbed
mean
?” Esther Blau said, looking at the report again. She was hoping that the word would change or that some other word would appear to modify it so that it could be transmuted into the pleasant fact she wanted. In its briefly impersonal way, the monthly report counseled patience, but the facts it contained were unambiguous, and the signature at the bottom was that of another doctor, the administrator of the Disturbed Ward. Esther wrote immediately to the hospital and shortly received a reply saying that a visit would not be wise.

With a fear verging on panic, Esther wrote to Dr. Fried. Perhaps she might go down again, not to see Deborah, since the hospital thought it unwise, but to confer with Deborah’s doctors about this change. The answer was the attempt of an honest person to reassure. It, too, counseled patience. Of course, if she and her husband felt it necessary to come, they would be given appointments, but this seeming setback was in itself no reason for anxiety.

Esther remembered the screams from that high, double-barred place, and she shivered. Reading the letter over
again and again, she located the subtle strain of its meaning, like a hidden message. She must not let her fear, or Jacob’s, interfere with what was happening to their daughter. She must wait and endure. Quietly, she put the letter and the report away with the others. She did not look at it again.