Headcase, p.12
Headcase, page 12
Diaz stands up, too. ‘Have you prepared something for group this afternoon?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Are you going to?’
I shrug.
‘I think you should,’ she says. ‘Remember, speaking up isn’t just about feeling better. I think the other patients could learn quite a lot by listening to you.’
Stoking my ego. Maybe she thinks I’m a psychopath—they like that sort of thing.
‘See you Friday?’ she says. ‘Ten o’clock?’
She says it like I have a choice. Like I might find somewhere else to be.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘See you then.’
She holds the door open. I walk out, feeling her gaze on my back, and head west towards the communal facilities.
This part of the Behavioural Health Unit reminds me of a high school. There’s a drinking fountain, a brick wall with patchy paintwork and a fern in a glazed ceramic pot. Its fronds wave gently in the air-conditioning.
The only indication I’m in a hospital is the row of wheelchairs, parked like shopping carts near the windows. As with a high school, there are no obvious means of escape.
I’m about to enter the southern corridor, where the patients’ bedrooms are—every day I check if the exterior door at the far end is unlocked—when I notice Nurse Kelly leaning against the wall. He’s short and wide, with bushy brows and a beard like steel wool. He has pecs that imply push-ups, and quads that imply squats. An uninspired snake tattoo coils around one bicep. He looks like Santa’s jailbird cousin.
Down the corridor, someone is screaming wordlessly. It’s a hoarse voice, regularly interrupted by heavy breathing. They’ve been going for a while. Kelly doesn’t look concerned, staring at me with his arms crossed over his broad chest.
‘You all right, Timothy?’ he asks. He talks like he has a cold. Diseases spread like wildfire in this place.
I keep my voice casual. ‘Who’s that screaming?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that.’
‘I wasn’t worried. Just curious. Is it Seamus?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Kelly says again. ‘You always take your medication, don’t you, Timothy?’
‘I don’t have any medication,’ I say. ‘Just talk therapy for me.’
He nods slowly. ‘Right.’
The staff here aren’t well paid. The job therefore attracts a mixed bag of noble people who want to support the sick, and less noble people who enjoy having power over them. Too soon to be sure which camp Kelly falls into, though I have my suspicions.
There’s a pause while we each wait to see if the other is going to say anything else. My gaze creeps down to Kelly’s thick forearms. Seamus’s screams fill the silence.
Kelly dismisses me. ‘Have a nice day.’
My gaze snaps back up. I give a cautious nod and amble towards the communal areas.
The lunch hall is pleasant enough, with a lot of natural light and a few more potted plants. A rainforest mural covers one wall. It’s like they’ve filled the place with vegetables just to mock me. The windows are tempered glass, but they aren’t barred. Some patients are at a table playing Uno. A woman with a pen behind her ear is reading an old magazine with Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover. Being imprisoned in the Behavioural Health Unit sometimes feels like visiting the late nineties, not least because no phones are allowed here.
I stand in front of the lunch counter, waiting for the dented shutter to roll up. I can hear activity behind it, other patients helping to prepare the food. I’ve volunteered for kitchen duty but haven’t been accepted yet. The staff don’t yet trust me enough to let me near the knives.
‘Timothy. Timothy.’
I turn around. A patient hovers behind me. She’s short, twenties, with huge eyes that leave only a little room for her tiny mouth. Too thin to be of much interest.
‘Hi, Dasha,’ I say.
‘How’d you go with Dr Diaz, Timothy?’
‘Fine.’
‘I think she’ll be really good for you.’ Dasha squeezes my arm. ‘You’re such a thoughtful person, and you deserve someone who listens to you.’
I’ve overheard Dasha doing this to other patients. She warms them with the spotlight of her attention so they feel special, valued, connected. Then, once she senses that they’re on the hook, she starts telling outrageous lies.
‘Not like Dr Kobald,’ she adds. ‘You know he used to bring his dog into our sessions—this big German shepherd. He told me that I should try to be more like the dog. He said dogs lived in the moment and were more social animals and so on. Sounds good, right? But then he wanted me to crawl on all fours around his office. He asked me to practise barking. He even wanted me to sniff the dog’s butt.’ She lowers her voice. ‘I think it’s a sex thing for him.’
As usual, she’s pitched this story perfectly. Outrageous enough to get attention, but still plausible, and told with enough earnestness and detail that even though everything else she’s ever told me has turned out to be false, I’m almost convinced.
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘That sounds awful. What was the dog’s name?’
She’s good. It only takes her a split second. ‘Razzle. Anyway, I wouldn’t do it—sniff the dog, I mean. I told him that enough was enough, and that he had to respect me and my boundaries.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘That’s the thing with these doctors. You have to let them know you’ll stand up for yourself, and that they work for you, not the other way around.’
They work for the hospital, but I don’t argue. ‘Thanks for the advice.’
‘What did you and Dr Diaz talk about?’ Dasha acts like this is a normal thing to ask after a private therapy session. ‘I told her I eat people, but I don’t think she believed me.’ Dasha watches me for a moment and then laughs—a short, jagged sound, like a cat coughing. ‘You’re hilarious, Timothy.’
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘You know who would believe you?’ Dasha turns.
I follow her gaze. The woman in the corner is scribbling in her magazine, maybe doing one of the quizzes. She’s in her forties, Asian, with freckles, glasses and hair pulled back in a way that looks painful.
‘Harmony,’ Dasha whispers. ‘Since her family stopped visiting, she’s really gone off the deep end. There’s no story too ridiculous for her.’
‘Does anyone else visit her?’ I ask.
‘I don’t think so. She’s got no one.’
I’ve noticed that Harmony doesn’t seem to socialise very much, either. She’s isolated. Vulnerable.
The shutter unlocks and rattles upwards. Behind it, another patient—a guy named Bennett—is standing over a tray of sushi rolls. He’s a balding white guy with a sad, Paul Giamatti stare. Two hundred pounds, mostly fat.
‘First in line again, Timothy?’ he says.
‘Yup. Any bacon today?’
‘Sorry. I got chicken or vegetarian.’
A few years ago, Bennett was in a shopping mall parking lot, loading Christmas presents into the trunk of his car, and he got distracted by his phone. While he was checking Twitter, his two-year-old daughter walked behind another car, which reversed over her.
Bennett spent two years in prison on a charge of negligence causing death. When he was released, he still didn’t feel like he’d paid the full price, so he slashed his wrists. Now he’s here. I get the feeling that he’ll try again, when he’s eventually discharged.
I’m not convinced that he’s crazy. Despair seems like a sane reaction to his circumstances—but I’m not a doctor.
‘I’ll take the chicken,’ I say.
‘Okey doke.’ Bennett drops two sushi rolls onto a plate and hands it over.
Other patients file in. I take an empty table and stare gloomily at my sushi roll. The chicken is grey. Not only does it not look human—it doesn’t even look like meat.
I tell myself that I won’t be here much longer.
A man sits opposite me. He’s bulky, but with sharp edges—a square nose, square jaw, square knuckles. Like a background character in an animated movie, not rendered properly. His hands, clenching plastic cutlery, are still dirty from gardening.
‘Eli,’ I say.
‘Timothy.’ He leers at me. ‘How was therapy?’
‘Fine.’
‘What was Dr Diaz wearing?’
Eli is obsessive. He won’t let me get away with silence, or changing the subject. And if I lie to him and he finds out, I don’t know what he’ll do.
‘Tan jacket, black shirt,’ I say.
He smiles. ‘Nice.’
Most of the people in the Behavioural Health Unit aren’t dangerous. If they were rich, they’d be described as eccentric rather than mentally ill. Eli and I are the only exceptions.
As a teenager he had blue eyes, but the right was flecked with brown. Eli hated those flecks. He spent hours glaring into the mirror and was often late to school because of it. He wore sunglasses all the time. He googled laser eye surgery and was disgusted to learn that while it could cure blindness, it couldn’t do anything about eye colour.
When he was nineteen, Eli sterilised a fork in boiling water. He downed a bottle of his father’s whisky and stabbed himself in the hated eye. He managed to wrench it out of its socket before he blacked out.
In the hospital, he claimed the injury was accidental. He said he’d had a seizure while he was eating in front of the TV. This story might have seemed implausible, except he’d researched epilepsy ahead of time and knew exactly how to describe his invented symptoms. The overworked doctors accepted his explanation, since he was cheerier than any of their self-harming patients. If his parents suspected what he’d done, they didn’t admit it.
Eli’s happiness didn’t last. When the bandages were removed, he found the lack of symmetry in his new face off-putting. He started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the empty eye socket was even worse than the brown flecks had been. He got an ocular implant and attached various prosthetic eyes to it, but none was a good match. In some the colour was too flat, in others there appeared to be too much texture. He became angry.
One day he was on a bus to college. His driver’s licence had been revoked, not because of his monocular vision, but because of the fake epilepsy. Another passenger got on—a woman with two beautiful blue eyes, exactly like Eli’s remaining one. He was mesmerised.
Later, Eli told the police that he wasn’t crazy. Obviously he knew that he wouldn’t be able to see through the eye he’d stolen, and obviously he knew that it would decompose after a while. But how could he let an opportunity like that slip past? ‘Those eyes,’ he kept saying. ‘They were two in a million.’ This was why, he insisted, he should be released. It was incredibly unlikely that he should ever see such perfect eyes again. Therefore he wasn’t a danger to the community.
The judge didn’t buy this logic, but to be fair, Eli has been at the Behavioural Health Unit for almost a decade and hasn’t attacked anyone in all that time. Nor has he managed to convince any of the psychiatrists that he’s sane, though. He’s stuck here until a sufficiently gullible doctor comes along.
When I got here, the other patients all assumed that Eli and I would get on, because I had one arm and he had one eye. Apparently, that’s enough basis for a friendship. Eli seemed to make the same assumption—he sits near me every day. Right now, he has a prosthesis in. An acrylic blue eyeball, too white around the edges. He keeps selfconsciously touching it.
‘I told Dr Diaz that she should wear warmer colours,’ he’s saying. ‘I have a good eye for that sort of thing.’
This might not be a joke, so I don’t laugh. I just chew my sushi roll, looking for patterns in the scratch marks on my tray.
Eli doesn’t start eating. ‘Hey, did you hear what happened with Seamus?’
I shake my head, my mouth still full.
‘He wouldn’t take his antipsychotics. They had to sedate him.’
‘Ah.’ This is what passes for gossip in a madhouse.
‘Thank God someone realised. He could have snapped. Killed us all.’
The way Eli says this makes me wonder if it was him who told the nurses that Seamus hadn’t taken his meds.
Seamus has schizophrenia. He tells stories that don’t seem to go anywhere, and when you ask him a question, he typically answers a different one. But, like every other schizophrenic I’ve ever met, he’s never shown any sign of violence.
‘Yeah, lucky.’ I point at Eli’s untouched sushi roll. ‘You gonna eat that?’
‘Yes,’ he says, but doesn’t move. Just clenches his fork like a mad king, meeting my gaze—or perhaps examining my eyes. They’re blue, like his.
‘Enjoy it, then.’ I get up and walk away, slowly enough that I don’t appear to be fleeing in terror.
•
‘Milla still hasn’t written to me,’ Casey says.
For group therapy, we sit in a circle on chairs with worn-through rubber feet and popped stitching in the cushions. The circle is deformed, because the people who are reluctant to speak have shifted their chairs back a little, and those who are eager have scooched forwards. I’ve moved back. So has Harmony, who’s to my left, and Eli, who took the seat to my right. We all have handwritten name labels stuck to our shirts. A few people have written their full names in tiny handwriting, like Dr Franklin Anders did. Mine just says Timothy.
In the corner of the room, there’s a chair with a missing leg. Possibly vandalised—it’s hard to see how the damage could have happened accidentally. I feel oddly sympathetic towards the chair. Missing something, unstable, pushed aside, soon to be replaced.
Casey, a forty-something woman with wispy chestnut hair trapped under a headband, has her own chair pushed way back, so naturally Dr Kobald has asked her to speak first. He can sense that she’s on the verge of a breakthrough.
‘At first I assumed that her publicist was intercepting her letters, or maybe her husband.’ Casey takes a deep breath. ‘But I’ve been considering other possibilities, like we talked about on Monday.’
Casey used to work in a senator’s office. She turned up on time, wore appropriate clothes and bantered pleasantly with her co-workers. For years, there was no outward sign that anything was wrong with her mind.
One day, the senator noticed Casey writing a letter in the break room. He took note, because she seemed to be doing it secretively. Perhaps she was leaking information to a journalist. But when he confronted her, Casey confessed that she had a secret friendship with actress Milla Jovovich, star of Resident Evil and The Fifth Element.
This was surprising, but the senator assumed it was true, until he pressed for more detail. Apparently, Casey had never met Jovovich. Nor had Jovovich ever responded to any of Casey’s letters. But, Casey said, the actress included hidden messages in her Instagram posts—hand signals and code words, designed for Casey and only Casey to understand.
Casey lost her job. It was a tough time, made bearable only by Jovovich’s covert messages of support. Now she’s here.
None of these people seem crazy. We could be anywhere—a classroom, a town hall meeting, a Walmart staffroom. Nothing the patients say or do would be out of place in any of those settings. For a while after I was admitted, I wondered if the doctors had some kind of scam going, filling the psychiatric ward with healthy people for government kickbacks or something.
Now I know better—and it makes me wonder how many people on the outside are deeply, truly mad.
Dr Kobald crosses his legs. ‘What other possibilities have you considered?’
Casey looks uncomfortable. ‘Well, maybe she’s been too busy to write to me. Or she might not even know I’m in here.’
‘Or maybe she doesn’t know you exist,’ mutters Seamus, the schizophrenic.
Dr Kobald raises a hand to silence him, but it’s too late.
‘Or maybe the moon landings were a hoax,’ Casey snaps, ‘or maybe vaccines cause autism, or maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was a stooge for the Mafia. Anything’s possible.’
‘Vaccines do cause autism,’ someone says, apparently offended that their beliefs are being lumped in with conspiracy theories.
Dr Kobald ignores this and tries to take charge of the discussion again. ‘Casey’s right. There are many different explanations for everything that happens to us, and almost all of them are possible. So how do we decide what to believe?’
There’s silence for a moment.
Dr Kobald is Black, fifties, with a trace of a moustache close to his lip. Like always, he’s wearing jeans, running shoes and a polo shirt. In his casual attire he looks more like a patient than a doctor, but he has enough authority in his voice that he can usually keep these discussions from turning into a fight.
‘Question everything,’ Seamus says softly. He’s a compact man in his twenties, with neatly parted hair and green eyes that are usually turned to the floor.
‘That may not be practical,’ Kobald says. ‘When I go to work each day, I need to believe that my keys will unlock my car, that my car will slow down when I touch the brakes, and that I haven’t been fired without my knowledge during the night. If I question all those things, it becomes impossible to live my life.’
‘So we choose to believe people who seem trustworthy?’ someone suggests.
‘That’s one option,’ Kobald says carefully.
‘Some liars are very convincing,’ Dasha puts in. ‘I once met a man who—’
I don’t want to hear another one of her fabricated stories, so I interrupt. ‘We choose to believe whatever seems most likely.’
Kobald smiles. ‘Very good, Timothy,’ he says, not because I’ve been particularly insightful, but because it’s the first time I’ve spoken up today, and he wants to encourage me. Sometimes he sounds like he’s teaching kindergarten.
‘Unlikely things do happen, though,’ Eli says thoughtfully, with no idea that he’s sitting right next to a former FBI cannibal consultant turned CIA asset.
‘They do,’ Dr Kobald says. ‘But as human beings, we need to make sure we’re not giving unlikely possibilities more consideration than they deserve. If I wake up one day with a stiff neck, there’s a ninety-five per cent chance that I just slept badly and a massage will fix it—’
