A Good and Happy Child (14 page)

“George?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s true.”

He made a note.

“Let’s talk about alcohol,” he said.

He asked me a lot of questions. Was that my first drink? Why did I drink? It went on and on. Finally, I interrupted him.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“Who?”

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“Tom Harris. I mean, he didn’t . . . he didn’t die or anything?”

“No,” said Dr. Gilloon. “No, I don’t think there is any danger of that.”

I nodded.

“Last question, George.” He referred to his notes again. “I spoke to your mother on the phone this morning. She indicated your father had experiences similar to the ones you’re describing. Seeing and hearing things. Were you aware of that?”

I felt my eyes go wide. My father?

“Mmm . . . ,” I slurred, my mouth unable to catch up with my thoughts. “Mmm . . .”

Dr. Gilloon responded briskly, as if to show his complete comfort with my disability. “You may be experiencing some difficulty speaking and moving this morning. Last night you received 100 milligrams of Thorazine. Thorazine is a drug. It controls the impulses caused by your condition. We’ll probably keep you on it while you’re under observation. Okay? Best to give yourself a little extra time to do things. Like talk,” he concluded flatly.

But I didn’t care about the drug. I closed my eyes and concentrated, and the words at last popped out. “My father!” I exploded. “My father didn’t see things.”

Dr. Gilloon stared at me.

“Mmm . . . my mother said my father saw things?” I persisted.

“She said he experienced some hallucinations.”

“No,” I said. “No!”

“That’s fine. I didn’t mean to upset you. All I care about is the similarities between your symptoms, that’s all. You can forget I brought it up.”

“He didn’t have . . .
hrm . . . hrm.
” The word
hallucinations
died on my tongue. But my mind whirled. That couldn’t be true. Why would Mom say that?

Dr. Gilloon made a few notes. “Now, George, try and remember those three words I told you before. Can you do that?”

“Radio, pencil . . . butterfly.”

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He snapped his pen onto his clipboard. The interview was over.

“Thank you, George. The therapy aide will show you where to go next.”

A nurse scooped my clipboard from its shelf bracket on the examining room door. A heavyset white woman in her fifties, with artificially ashblond hair in loopy, heat-curler curls, she moved with the certainty and swiftness of a sergeant. Her black name tag read PHYLLIS.

“Come on,” she twanged, too loudly, as if I were hard of hearing. I rose obediently.

At first glance, the long corridor had the knockabout appearance of a regular hospital—bustling nurses, scuffed paint, hard-tile floors, foam-tile ceilings with fluorescent lights—but the paraphernalia of actual treatment were missing: stretchers, cardiograms, latex glove dispensers. Instead the place possessed the creepy feeling of a hotel, or dormitory, invaded by the sorrows and the sterile controls of medicine. Instead of brochures of local attractions, wall brackets held colored pamphlets on depression (green: stick figure with frowny face); speech therapy (orange: stick figure with open mouth); choking victims (red: stick figure clutching throat). A lanky teenage boy with shaggy hair walked methodically along the corridor. When he reached the end, he turned and repeated his course, as if he were circling a track—or pacing a cage. I wondered why the boy did not just go outside for a real walk. Then I saw a man in scrubs reach the end of the hall and yank from his pocket a jangling, five-pound ring of keys from a nylon cord. The great double doors at the end of the hall, I finally noticed, were the same bolt-locked, steel-plated kind you see on the
outside
doors at most institutions—only these just fed to another part of the hospital. We were securely locked in.

“School goes till 12 noon. Then lunch. Therapeutic community till three,” Phyllis bellowed, still seeming to assume I was deaf-mute.

“After that you’ll have a shift of night nurses, an’ medication. UNDERSTAND?”

“Yes.”

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The corridor opened into COMMON AREA A—as it was dubbed on a cork bulletin board in orange stencil letters—a broad room divided by columns. A television had been bolted to the ceiling on one end. It was surrounded by soft chairs. Next to it spread a play area: bookshelves crammed with old board games and ragged storybooks. Breakfast had been laid out. But the benches were empty, the tables deserted.

“Where in the heck . . . ?” exclaimed the nurse.

Then she spotted them: the children had crowded into a corner, in a kind of huddle. Their backs were to us.

“What is going on?” The nurse left my side. She charged toward the corner.
“What is going on?”

The group turned. They were eight-year-olds to teenagers. Each of their faces bore an emotion ranging from boredom to thrilled curiosity.

“Kimberly’s got something around her neck,” one boy said flatly. The nurse barreled through the group like an All-American fullback. The bodies parted for me to see a twelve-year-old girl, with blond hair cut in bangs, standing in the corner. Her neck and face had grown a shade of blotchy purple and had begun to swell. Her right hand hung in the air over her head. It took a moment to realize she held something in her hand—a thin cord—and that she was pulling this cord, and that the cord was wrapped around her neck. She wore a morbidly amused expression that is difficult to describe—a kind of vengeful, wry,
so there
face—rendered all the more uncanny for the fact that it was intelligible through her increasingly bloated features.

“Why didn’t you say nothing?”
raged the nurse as she dove at the girl. In an instant, the situation spun out of control. The girl dodged her. The nurse knocked into a table, its legs screeching against the floor. Kimberly bumped into a bookcase. Whereupon Kimberly began to gag, loudly.

Two therapy aides and a nurse sprinted over. Each one grabbed a limb. My nurse went for the cord. Kimberly gurgled in protest.

“Oh lordy,” groaned the nurse. “It’s under the skin.” She stepped away from the struggle and bellowed, “We gonna need shears!”

Soon a voice came over the PA:
“All available to House Four.”

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Kimberly began to writhe—wild kicks, elbows cutting mean arcs. She caught one therapy aide in the nose and he buckled. He covered his nose and blood dribbled through his hands. More figures appeared—

therapy aides in scrubs, nurses in smocks—from every direction. They surrounded the girl, multiple restrainers for every limb. But as they held her, she gained traction. Every twist lifted her higher in the air. Kimberly gasped and thrashed as if she were drowning in a sea of hands. Then a stocky, white-haired doctor arrived, scowling, and bearing a needle.

“Hold her. Hold her please,” he said coolly.

The crew now went about trying to tame the girl’s flailing limbs long enough for the doctor to find a target of bare skin. Over the girl’s white forearm the needle tip wavered—an uncertain, dripping stinger. The doctor took aim, then plunged the hypodermic into the flesh. The girl stiffened. The shears appeared. They quickly snipped the cord.

“Get her to the quiet room,” commanded the doctor. Nurses began shepherding away the onlookers, but somehow I ended up opposite the other children—between Kimberly and her destination. The therapy aides carried her, now screaming, past me to a small side room whose official name—“locked seclusion”—I learned later. Its euphemistic nickname seemed more fitting. The quiet room’s walls were white and scuffed; the fluorescent tubes above were covered with protective mesh; a layer of bare mattresses on the floor protected inmates from themselves. Into this place the therapy aides carried Kimberly and dropped her with the efficiency of a porter plopping heavy luggage into a suite. The door was locked; the stocky doctor placed himself at a small, mesh-protected observation window. He folded his hands behind him and gazed impassively.

“Go join the others,” he said to me, with scarcely a glance. But I stood immobile. I watched the doctor as the doctor watched the girl. A moment later, a nurse called him away to sign an incident report. My heart beat loudly. True, he was only a few feet away—right there, really; he could return to the window in an instant—but the girl
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had been heaved into the quiet room in a suicidal rage.
Something might
happen to her.
Terrified, I tried to speak:
Don’t leave her alone.
But thanks to the medication, the message was never delivered. I moved to the door of the quiet room. I stood on tiptoe and peered in the window. The girl had not slit her wrists or hung herself. But something was happening. It took me a moment to comprehend what I was watching. A maniacal game of tag? Some primal dance? Then I understood: like a modern-day Jackson Pollock feverishly circling a canvas, the girl had removed her pajama bottoms and now scurried from corner to corner of the quiet room in an attempt to smear all four walls with her own feces. r r r

At 3:00 P.M. sharp came the passing out of medication. The children slumped around Common Area A. The therapy aides, or “TAs” as we called them, unhurriedly shuffled back and forth from the nurses’ station to each child’s seat. On each trip they bore a plastic cup of water and a small paper cup containing pills. The other kids—a porky white girl wearing hair scrunchies, a lanky black teenager sprouting, to my eye, the mustache of a grown man—swallowed the medication with dead eyes. My name was called. I timidly raised a finger. The aide, a woman with a mountainous bosom, approached me with the two cups.

“I don’t think I was assigned anything,” I said.

The TA turned to her friend, amused. “You hear that?
Assigned.
Hm. Ain’t nobody ass-
iiiigned
you anything. You take it like
eev
erybody else.”

She handed me a small white pill and a drinking cup. I held it in my palm, thinking cleverly that when she passed to the next patient I would throw the pill away. Apparently I was not the first to arrive at this brilliant scheme. She stood over me, eyes ever on the pill.

“Go on, it ain’t poison.”

I swallowed it. There were no words of praise or congratulations. She was already ambling back to the nurses’ station to deliver the next dose.

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“Activities” followed. For this, my fellow inmates, heretofore a sulky bunch, came to life. Each kid ran to a position. I guessed they had been waiting for this hour since they awoke and did not want to waste a moment. The most popular activity was cards.

“Hey, new boy,” came a voice. A pasty boy with a massive space between his teeth and a Norman Rockwell crew cut beckoned me. “Hey, new boy,” he repeated. “We need four for spades. You wan’ play?”

“I don’t know how.”

“In fAAAv minutes I can make you a pro,” he declared. I was the crewcut boy’s partner. It was established that my name was George and that I came from Preston. “My name Eustace,” he replied. He savored the word:
Yoo
-stace. “I was born, raised, and I’m ’on die in Crozet, Virginia.”

The rules were explained. Spades were trump. Jokers counted as spades. Each pair estimated the number of tricks they held at the outset. The object was to hit your minimum.

It seemed simple enough. But as Eustace continued, I sank in my chair. Sweat beaded on my lip and brow. My heart raced.
What was hap-
pening to me?

“You got that?” Eustace concluded, after more explanation—all of which I missed due to the throbbing in my head.

“What?”

“Come on, let’s go,” snapped one of the other players impatiently. A point of white light appeared in my vision and bored into my head like a drill bit. I closed my eyes against the pain. It was the onset of the Thorazine. I could not believe this was the effect of something anyone would call “medicine.” The voices of the other kids echoed in my ears. Cards were dealt. I heard Eustace eagerly offering me direction, but it was hopeless. The drugs made me feel like a stowaway on a rocket ship, fighting to keep my head up and my lunch down. We lost hand after hand.

I felt their resentful glances. I felt fat and useless. With the sweat on my face I had trouble keeping my glasses on my nose. Eustace grew frustrated, began slamming his cards down and pouting. “What a fucking
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moron,” said one of the kids with a glance at me, scooping up the debris of another Eustace-George defeat.

Afterward my dejected partner shook his head.

“George, boy, you are effed up. What they got you on, Thor’zine?”

I nodded.

“Thought so,” he said, morosely shuffling the cards.

“You,” I panted, “you take it?”

“Me? Huh-uh.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Lucky? Uh-
aw.
I cheek it.”

“What?”

“Cheek it,” he said, but it came out,
dtheek it,
because at that moment he gripped his cheek and yanked it to one side so I could see the space alongside his gums.

“Thut it light in theh,” he crowed, snapping his cheek back triumphantly. “But you got to be careful. You stay off and you act up?

After a couple weeks here they send you to State. State’s for
long-term
residence.
Compared to that place, this here’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I seen it. My daddy drived by one time? Staunton, Virginia? It’s like a prison. Big buildings. Bob-wire fence. Grown men been in there they whole lives. I reckon they in there chained like a dog.”

I nodded, pretending to understand while I gripped my chair to keep from sliding into a nauseated puddle on the floor.

“Now, I can cheek and I’m awright. That’s because there ain’t nothin’ that wrong with me. I lit a couple fires. But they didn’t hurt nobody—just property damage. If I didn’t come here my daddy’d have to pay a fine. That’s the only reason.”