First Place for Art Project - $500
Whitney Robinson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA)

Autobiography: “A Darker Sort Of Girl”

BrainDance 2007: A Darker Sort Of Girl

Whitney Robinson

I

            They take my belt, but let me keep my shoelaces. The whole place smells of antiseptic, masking darker smells. All you have to do is breathe to be reminded that this is a hospital. It's only a small part of a larger medical facility, but this is the only ward where the doors lock behind you. “Upstairs,” they euphemistically call it, because psychiatric wards are nearly always located on the top floor to minimize the possibility of escape.

            “You’ll be safe here,” the nurse tells me, emptying my pockets. “The voices can’t hurt you in this place.”

“Au contraire, mon cherie,” they beg to differ.

It is a strange experience, to have someone go through your pants pockets while you’re wearing them. They’re quite professional about it, but it’s still somehow violating, and I grimace as the nurse pulls a tissue out of my back pocket and smooths it out to make sure it’s not concealing a razor blade. It’s not, and she hands it back to me.

            “That’s okay, you keep it.” I mutter. I don't remind her of the places she hasn't checked. She leads me to a stark white room with two beds, one unmade. There is a window, but it is covered with thick wire mesh. The weak March sun is too sickly to pierce the stark gray shadows of the room; it rests desultorily on the horizon. In the hall, a great naked bear of a woman shambles past, carrying a set of soiled clothes to the laundry receptacle.

            “Put on some clothes, Patricia,” the nurse says mildly, as if this is a frequent occurrence. In another room, someone is loudly, violently, and badly singing along to a Linkin Park song.

            “We’ll send you up a tray of supper,” says the nurse, and leaves me.

            “It will be nauseating,” predicts my private demon. He is correct. The promised tray, which arrives some interminable time later, holds some kind of mammal stew and a round cafeteria scoop of mashed potatoes that are oddly smooth and sour.

            You don’t have to be polite, I know you don’t care what I had for dinner in the nuthouse. You want to know what I'm doing here. I have nothing better to do, unless I want to watch Jeopardy in the common room, so I'll tell you. Alex Trebeck may be able to tell you the Latin name of the pygmy marmoset, but I can tell you about something far more interesting. They have a Latin name for it too, or maybe it's German. Schizophrenia, they call it, and whatever language you speak it in, it means shattered mind. No…it means shattered hope, shattered faith. Shattered everything. 

 II

            It was shortly after my eighteenth birthday, when the spiderweb cracks that encircled my consciousness began to splinter. Picture a bleak November day, prior to any of my hospitalizations. I've been superficially lacerating my arms, which has become my teenage-angst reaction to every stress or injustice, so my parents have made an appointment for me to see some Dr. Callahan. Even as a psychology major, I have an intrinsic mistrust of any profession where two people enter a room, and one leaves an hour later after writing a check for a hundred and fifty dollars. I agree to the consultation reluctantly, however, hoping it will restore the silence I have grown to enjoy.

 In the waiting room, two old ladies cut out pictures of food from the magazines. A frugal habit; the bright paper cakes and pies are cheaper than plastic toys for their grandchildren to play with. When I came in they were chirping away like a couple of sparrows on a telephone wire; about the weather, their aching bones, the aforementioned grandchildren. Their eyes are clouded with cataracts, but the opaque swirls over the blue could almost be memories.

“She was a beautiful dog. The children loved her…named her Snowdrop because her ears were tiny and curled like the first little snowdrops of spring. ”

“And they took her sledding on my hill with Arthur, didn’t they? Oh but Chelsea will love this jubilee cake.”

 Then a cold shadow falls across the room, though there is no window and the only light comes from fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. The blue eyes are sharp and cruel now, darting toward me with malice. They still hold scissors and magazines, but the cuts are random- half a Boston crème pie and a sliver of article on perfecting the flambé.

“It’s such a shame about the girl,” says one, and I know she is talking about me. “The Council will not show mercy.”

“Sacrifices must be made,” says the other.

“Sacrifices,” echoes the first, jabbing the air with the scissors. I jump up and bolt from the room. I’m halfway out the door when I run into a tall, slender man in a dark suit and wing-tip shoes. Only psychiatrists and lawyers dress like that, and since this is a mental health clinic I assume he's the former.

“You seem to be in a hurry,” he says mildly. His voice has a pleasant Irish drawl.

I glance back at the old ladies, but they are once again bent studiously over their magazines, cutting away.

“You aren’t Ms. Robinson, by any chance?”

“Yes,” I say, a little breathlessly. "How did you know?"

“I’m Dr. Callahan." He gestures down the long corridor to his office. "Why don’t you come with me.”

Our appointment is brief and useless. Disturbed by my strange experience in the waiting room, and I answer his questions in distracted monosyllables.

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"mmhm…I uh, I suppose it's possible…"

"Could you tell me what you see when I hold up this inkblot card?"

"Um I…I'm not sure. Spilled grape jelly…" his eyes are not approving. "Um…a bat? A bat eating grape jelly?"

The doctor gets frustrated quickly and prescribes me an antidepressant. When I re-enter the waiting room the two old ladies are gone. The magazines I see are whole and undamaged, and I wonder if they were ever there.

 III

            I was walking in the park, the first time I heard Them. You hear that word a lot from people with schizophrenia- ‘Them.’ They, the doctors tell me, are the manifestations of paranoid delusion, caused by anomalies in the dopaminergic neurons of the frontal cortex and striatum. For some people They are government spies, or Nazis, or aliens. For me, They are evil in its purest form.

            That day, the one that began the end of everything, I was wandering in the park behind the playground, where a little stream dumps polluted water into the larger polluted lake beyond. It ends in a waterfall by the center of town, you can see it if you hang over the edge of the bridge, and the water looks like toxic orange juice gushing over the edge. I used to swim in that river with my friends when I was a child. We caught frogs there, until we caught them all and kept them in glass aquariums until they died. That was the end of the frogs, but for years after they were gone I walked along the river’s edge, hoping they had returned, searching for life where we had destroyed it.                                     

            On this particular bleak November day, the water is dark and silent, trickling over a carpet of rotting leaves. As I wander away down the tree-lined path, a couple of squirrels are fighting over a piece of bread. There is a fat, sleek one and a scrawny, diseased looking little thing.

             “The big fellow will win this, but he’ll die before winter," someone says. It's a chilling voice, somehow inhuman, like someone manipulating the vocal cords of something that is already dead. I look around, but see nobody. The fat squirrel runs at the little one with the tattered tail, chattering what are no doubt profanities in squirrel language. The small squirrel drops the bread and scurries to safety.

            Leaving the big fellow to his prize, I crash through the undergrowth to locate the source of that strange voice. But the trees here are only saplings, and there aren't many places to hide. Those words, once spoken, seem to resonate inside me so by the time I have conducted a thorough search of the area, I'm not sure that the voice wasn't entirely in my mind.

            When I return home, I notice a strange smell upon entering my room. Both metallic and sweet, like blood and some kind of exotic flower. My room seems different, too, like someone left hastily and never returned. Papers scattered, pajamas on the floor. I recognize them, but they are no longer mine. I feel like a historian looking at the ruins of an ancient civilization, like the girl who owns these things is long dead. Passing my hand like a Geiger counter over a stack of papers on my desk, I can almost feel the ghost of a foreign touch. Something has been here.