The Back Building (10 page)

Now I was cold, tired, and uncomfortable. This was enough to make a sane person mad. I woke with a headache, but was grateful for the hour or so of sleep I received. An aide came in to undo my jacket. I stretched my arms and tried to loosen the knots beading up in my back and shoulders. I had deep, dark circles under my eyes and wondered how my day at the stables would go. I ate a heaping plate of runny eggs and bacon and reported to work.

Mr. Hamm took one look at me and shook his head. I was certain I looked worse than I felt. My short hair was now sticking up in all directions, I had bags under my eyes, and was still shivering from the ungodly cold. Mr. Hamm gave me a warm cup of coffee and left me to muck the stalls. By eleven I had completed the task, and could now barely keep my eyes open.

“Why don’t you lie down in the hay and get some shut eye?” It was James.

“I couldn’t. I have to do my job, I can’t be caught slacking off or God help me.”

“I’ll give you a warning if anyone is coming.”

“Thank you but…” I still wasn’t convinced he was real.

“Look, I was a patient here too, once. I see the signs…someone is out to get you. Whatever you do, you can’t let whoever is doing this win. If you get to the first ward or the back building, you are as good as committed for life.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They save all the special experiments for the lunatics on the first ward. Those that are taken to the back building are rarely seen again. A few years ago they were extracting thyroids. Then last year they started heavily drugging patients to induce fevers, now they are experimenting with anti-psychotic drugs. The word is that they experiment on the patients who reside in the back building. Ever been by there?”

“No, I don’t even know where it is.” I admitted.

“You’ll know it when you see it. The people there are like walking cadavers, some of them nothing but skin and bones. You seem pretty normal, so I’ll let you in on a little secret. No one here has your best interest at heart. No one. They just want you to be easy to manage, so if you are difficult in any way you will get punished. Now get some rest, obviously you are being sleep deprived.”

I lay my head down in the hay in a corner of the horses’ stable. I fell into a fitful slumber within minutes. Two hours later James woke me and handed me a sack of lunch. He had brushed the horses and tidied up the stalls so that when I was eating and Mr. Hamm came in, he praised my work once more. I was awarded the job of keeping the stables and horses clean at all times. My hours were from eight a.m. to two p.m. I asked Mr. Hamm if there was any other work I could do, but as of now there wasn’t.

At two o’clock I was escorted from the stables, down the hill, across the grounds and back to the recreation center where my attendee and ward mates were scheduled to be. (Nine hundred paces from Chapin Hall to the stables.)

Several women from my ward appeared catatonic. One couldn’t speak English, which didn’t prevent her from trying to communicate with me. Her lips moved at a fast pace and the vowels rolled off her tongue beautifully but I was unable to understand their meanings. Pamela, the nudist in residence, kept disrobing and running up and down the hallways naked as a jaybird. She flapped her arms to mimic flight and sang nonsensical words at the top of her lungs. She was rallied, put in a straight jacket and taken away. She left a stream of urine in her wake.

I had to get out of this place. I had begun to question my own sanity and felt very confused at times about reality. The horses would be my ticket out. I just needed a little time to develop a better plan of escape.

That evening during supper, Patty sauntered past me and reached for my dinner tray. She flipped it over so that all my food landed on the ground. She stepped on my meatloaf and I watched it ooze out from under her shoe. My mashed potatoes splattered across the table, and down to the floor and my string beans were in disarray.

“I wasn’t hungry anyway.” I stood to take my leave, pressing my hand against my growling stomach as I made my way from the dining hall to my room. I would not let this woman rile me.

“Where do you think you’re going without an escort?” Patty chimed.

“To my room, care to walk me?” I asked with sickeningly sweet innocence.

“Jay, take this patient to her room.” She motioned to an imposing black man, who got up from his seat and grabbed my elbow, ushering me to the second ward.

“She got it in for you bad. Here, eat this.” Jay handed me a buttered roll.

“Thanks, Jay. She won’t break me.” I took the roll and crammed it into my mouth before anyone saw.

“She might. I have seen it happen many times, most of those women are now on the first and you don’t want to go there. I’ll see if I can intervene, but I can’t make any promises.”

At least now I had an ally. Of course he could be a delusion, I could have walked myself to my room, but then again Patty wouldn’t allow that so I decided Jay had to be real.

The night torment continued, nurses came and went from my room every hour making sleep impossible. The temperature in our hallway couldn’t have been forty degrees. I was near frozen and half starving. I missed Hetty. I missed her wide smile and boisterous laugh. I missed my family and never heard from them after father’s one letter. They had dismissed me, I was fifteen and on my own in an asylum for the insane. The admission hit me full force. If I could get Dr. Macy to think I have come around and agree I had contrived Hetty and the others, then maybe, just maybe, I could leave. So now I had two courses of action and I would follow them both.

In the morning I attempted to eat but the nurse on duty said, “Because you ate all of Milly’s food from her plate last night you aren’t allowed any food this morning.”

I protested and tried to explain what in fact happened, but she said she was just going by the nurses’ notes that everyone had signed off on.

I got to the farm, starving, parched, exhausted and in no position to do physical labor. Mr. Hamm took one look at me and called me to his side.

“Sit.”

“I can work, please let me work.”

“Not until you’ve eaten. Why haven’t you slept, you have bags under your eyes the size of Texas?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it. You wouldn’t believe me anyway, and if you did there is nothing you could do to change the situation.”

“Maybe not, but I could try. Now what’s happening?” He asked scrutinizing me. Mr. Hamm wasn’t a doctor, he was a farmer and a stand-up citizen. He was rough around the edges, he wore dirty overalls and was missing a few teeth. His hair was thinning and he had quite a belly on him. He always chewed on hay and I decided to trust him.

“The night nurse doesn’t like me, she keeps taking food away from me so she doesn’t ‘feed the devil’. She has my blanket and my sheets too, and she doesn’t let me sleep more than an hour at a time. She says I have evil in me deep and it’s her job to get it out.” Just being able to tell someone felt good and I began to shake as I launched into all that was happening to me.

Mr. Hamm put his hand across my shoulder, “there, there, it’ll be alright.”

“How?” I looked up at him with fearful eyes.

“We will add a few more meals to our list for the kitchen to prepare, you can have breakfast and lunch here, and we’ll give you what we can to take back for your supper. I have a horse blanket you can put under your clothing, but if the nurses are checking you every hour they’ll surely notice it and take it away. I’m afraid that would get you in worse trouble. I suppose you’ll just have to sleep here during your shift. No other way around it. I’ve seen ‘em treat patients in the worst ways possible and it makes no sense to me whatsoever.”

“I can’t tell the doctor because that would make things worse. I can’t be placed on the first ward, Mr. Hamm. I’ll become a case for experiments, be poked, given drugs and worse all day long.”

“I know. My wife, she was a patient here for a short time. She was treated well at first. The doctor seemed to understand her and validated that the loss of our son was indeed traumatic and the cause for melancholy. I was allowed regular visits from day one. That was part of our agreement upon her admission. I would take a job on the farm so that I could see her daily. She was all I had. My wife was placed on the third ward for women with a nurse named Josephine. Josie for short. She was kind and gentle, but then Josie caught diphtheria and could no longer work. A new nurse’s aide took over and that’s when I noticed a change for the worse in my wife. She became more withdrawn and cagey, she lost the sparkle in her eyes. They extracted her thyroid in hopes she would improve but she only got worse. She stopped speaking and became catatonic. She just sat and rocked a baby that wasn’t there, all day. I think being here made her crazier than she was when I admitted her. They asked for my permission to perform a lobotomy, I said no. But a few days later she was dead. I think they went ahead with the surgery but I can’t prove it.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Miriam.” He responded while holding tight to his hat.

“And your son, what was his name?”

“Jacob. He was a sweet little lad of two when he caught influenza. That was years ago. But I will tell you that I saw things. Things I should never have seen, I saw men in cages and others chained to walls. I had hoped the treatment improved but maybe it hasn’t. You seem very normal to me, what is the reason you are here, were you homeless?”

“My parents had me admitted. They claim I am a delusional, disobedient sinner, and Mr. Hamm, I might be. I have had a few imaginary friends that were very real to me. I don’t always know what’s real. This conversation, it feels pretty real, and this hot cup of tea, I know it’s real because it’s burning my hands. Sometimes though I am not sure, and I don’t think being here is helping me. But my parents don’t want me back until I have redeemed myself.”

“I see. Well those horses are real, I can assure you if you get behind a leg and it lands a kick on you, you’ll feel it and have the marks to prove it. I will help you, Iona, if I can. Now curl up and get some rest.”

“But this is my job, I have to work or I’ll be on the ward all day.”

“How will they know what you’re doing up here? No one comes here, except the doctor on Sunday. We will be sure to have his horses ready and we’ll give you the credit. Won’t we, James?” I didn’t know how long James was listening, but he looked ashamed because he was caught eavesdropping.

“Yes, Sir, I will make sure of it,” he replied sheepishly.

James brought me a meal of sausage and toast. Then he found me a blanket and covered me while I slept in a pile of fresh hay. I had trouble at first because I was so used to my sleep being disturbed but eventually I was out cold. At one o’clock James woke me up to eat. I had gotten nearly four and a half hours of sleep.

“Tomorrow you will get more sleep. We’re keeping you here until three from now on.”

“Thanks, James.” I ate my lunch and felt gratitude for these simple, kind gestures. Patty was getting into my head and I was starting to believe I was a sinner, why else would I be here. The kindness brought stinging tears to my eyes.

“I have witnessed what goes on here for ten years. They don’t treat the patients right. They just don’t. The lucky ones have jobs, of course some of the ones with jobs were never crazy to begin with, just poor.”

“It’s a hospital for the insane though, isn’t it?”

“It is, but sometimes they take the elderly or the poor and the sick off the street and give them a bed so they don’t disturb the city.”

“Mind if I ask why you have been here so long?” I knew it was rude to probe but couldn’t help but wonder about how he got to this miserable place.

“It was a long time ago.” He looked into the distance, cleared his throat and gave me a shortened version of his story. “My, uh, father, Henry, was an alcoholic. He came home drunk every night and slept all day. We were poor, so putting food on the table was hard for my mother, Joanna. My father drank away his paycheck giving her only spare change. One night he came home and all we had was one potato to eat, he had been abusive to mother many times in the past but this time he was out of his mind.”

“James, you don’t have to finish the story if you don’t want, I can fill in the blanks.”

“No, it’s okay. I trust you, I don’t know why except that the horses are so calm around you and they aren’t like that with everyone. Besides, I heard you talking to John, I’m sorry for eavesdropping. I suppose it’s only fair if you know my story now. So anyway, he threw my mom against the wall and she fell, hitting her head against the table on her way down. She died instantly. My dad had two of his cronies sign me over to the state claiming I hit her upside the head with an iron. He turned me in, his own son, just so he could keep on drinking. He never visited me once. I have been here since I was nine. I had so much energy when I got here and the doctor at the time took a special liking to me, he thought it would be healthy for me to be working the farm, playing with the animals and far away from the real patients.”

“So, are you still a patient then?”

“No, John took me in years ago. The doctor signed me over to his care because we learned my father died a few years back. I like the farm work and John has been like a father to me anyway so it made sense to stay. We live in Ovid a few miles down the lake. I even took his last name, Hamm as a way to show my appreciation for all that he has done for me.”