“I what?”
“On account of your stomach, hon. Doctor Wrigley put it on the orders.”
She sat on the bed and put the toes of one foot on the instep of the other.
“Do you want some milk?”
“Sure — what are you so hot about this milk for? Something in it?”
“Okay, hon,” the nurse said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
She lay crossways on the bed, pillowing her head on the folded bedding and putting her feet out flat on the floor. An odor of honeysuckle came vividly to her nostrils, floating on the warm dark air of Wheeling, and a gust of the steel mills’ breath. Her entire childhood lay immediately outside this place of walls, if she could only get to it by changing into a thing of hours — because she was understanding things now, understanding about time, about its directions and how to change the way of it, and about the many things that were happening moment by moment unbeknownst to the forest of blind dead human shapes, the forest of wooden men—
“What are you supposed to be?”
Jamie sat up. On the edge of the adjacent bed sat a blond and emaciated woman no older than herself.
“We’re on the Marnie Eisenhower ward,” the woman told her. She wore the standard washed-grey cotton gown, but she’d covered the sleeves, and the front of it, with secret writing.
“I’m under observation,” Jamie said. But an understanding of what this meant temporarily eluded her. She rested her elbows on her knees, her head and hair drooping forward. The design of the floor was six-by-six inch square grey patches with a little copper crown in the dead center of each one.
The woman said nothing. She scratched herself between her legs with the obliviousness of a child. She was thinly beautiful, but her teeth were as yellow as her hair, and tiny blue veins showed around her temples. She appeared in need of fixing. She looked broken and thrown away. Jamie said. “So what’s your story? I mean, what are you supposed to be here for?”
“Me?” the woman said. “I’m nuts.” She began laughing; laughter that sounded like: ratatatata. Jamie liked her, but at the same time she wanted to slap the woman’s face.
She woke from a Thorazine unconsciousness because someone was yelling, “Sergeant!” The ceiling was far away, then inches above her face, and then properly positioned. “Sergeant!” She raised up in bed. It was daytime. The large woman with her hair all chopped off, who always wore a man’s blue boxer shorts instead of a gown, was talking to the nurse. Her face was crimson, her eyes pink. Two male orderlies in white stood a yard back, respectfully, at her either side. “I want to see the Sergeant!” the woman insisted. “Do you know where we are?” the nurse said. “The Sergeant’s not here. There isn’t any Sergeant here.” All the patients were quiet and shiny-eyed, watching this exchange. The big woman put her hands on her hips and began to huff uncontrollably, working her jaw as if trying desperately to dislodge something from her throat. One of the orderlies took her in a hammerlock from behind, and the woman lifted him clear off the floor, his legs dangling like a child’s. The other man wrapped his arms around the two of them, and they all three waltzed monstrously toward the Quiet Room, a chamber made completely of tiny tiles with a drain in the center of its floor.
The bed on her left was empty and silver in the darkness, its bedspread thrown back. Jamie was the only one awake to hear the cries. The old woman who slept there next to her was trudging heavily up and down the aisle between the two rows of beds, and at the far end she was silhouetted against the light from the bathroom, a bent figure of helplessness with her hair in a bun. Several afterimages trailed her in Jamie’s sight, and Jamie shook her head violently but they wouldn’t clear away. The old woman seemed to be carrying something close to her belly. “I lost my Catherine! I lost my Catherine,” she cried in a voice as unstopped and mournfully low as a foghorn’s. Jamie had to shut her eyes a minute, because the bathroom light made them burn. When she came awake again, there were curtains full of light drawn around the next bed, and moving human shapes silhouetted on the curtains. They muttered and conspired in there below the level of her hearing — a black form hurriedly approaching and entering said, “We’ve got to catheterize her,” and the other shapes said softly, “Catheterize, catheterize, catheterize.” Jamie began to shake uncontrollably. She couldn’t find her voice to scream. She turned to the right, as if to summon help from the lumps of unconscious and insane people in their beds. When she tried to blink the handfuls of warm sand from her vision, everything changed and it was morning. The old woman was sitting up in the next bed, looking at the pages of a magazine.
“Volleyball, you guys,” Nurse Helen said.
“Volleyball?” Jamie said, looking at Sally for confirmation.
Sally appeared too starved and weak for games. She lay back on her bed and pulled a fall of her blond hair over her blue-veined face, going into some kind of trance. Volleyball.
“Raphael!” Nurse Helen sang.
“Do I have to go and play volleyball?” Jamie asked her. Last night, until dawn, screams had come out of the tiled Quiet Room. She couldn’t put these screams together in her mind with volleyball.
“Doctor Wrigley doesn’t have you down for sports,” Helen said, and looked up at Raphael, the stocky Chicano orderly, who was just approaching. “She doesn’t like volleyball,” Nurse Helen said, gesturing at Sally on the bed. Together they took Sally — Raphael by the feet, Nurse Helen by the hands — and carried her like a sack from the ward. Sally began laughing, and they did, too.
In a minute the nurse was back, breathing hard. “Hey,” Jamie said, “are we supposed to be crazy, or what? How come people have to play volleyball when they’re supposed to be crazy?”
“Physical activity’s important, Jamie. And I don’t like the word crazy. You’re sick people trying to get well. This is a hospital, right?”
Jamie could feel the back of her neck getting tight again. She knew it was a hospital, for God’s sake.
“I think you should play volleyball, too. I’ll talk to the doctor about it Monday when he comes in.”
Jamie felt angry, because she didn’t want them to figure out that she wanted to play volleyball. She was flustered. She wanted to be out there right now. Why didn’t the nurse just tell her to play volleyball right now?
“Matter of fact,” Nurse Helen said, “if you want to, why don’t you go out there now? Always room for one more.”
“Are you shitting me?” Jamie cried. “Who told you to say that?” She was all pins and needles. She took hold of her own head with both hands. “They’re reading me! What did you do to me?” The enormity of her situation pressed in against her. She didn’t want to face it.
She stood on the bed, balancing with difficulty there, and pointed a finger at Nurse Helen. She wanted to explain something important, but the only word she could think of was, “Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!”
Raphael came in. Some boy in a doctor’s smock came in. She was completely enraged that they thought it necessary to hold her down and give her a shot. Nerves popped in her skull, voices chanted incomprehensibly, and the event accelerated into a white smear.
The doctor sat on her bed with his legs crossed one over the other — a new doctor, one she hadn’t met before. “Just what are we talking about here?” she said.
“Well,” the doctor said, “essentially we’re talking about anything you want to talk about. Anything that concerns you, anything that bothers you right now. Do you want a cup of coffee?”
“Coffee?” she said. “Why are you trying to give me coffee? I’m coughing enough as it is. I have tuberculosis,” she told him, “that’s why I lost all this weight.”