I think I'm the only one in here whose first time it is. I already know everyone's name in here.
I'm making friends fast. Twenty great friends, talking about deep stuff. But unlike any normal situation, we may not remember each other later.
Haleigh says they made her orthodontist take out her braces so she could have electroconvulsive therapy (hardly any metal is allowed on your person when you have the procedure for probably obvious reasons) and she's been having ECT for two years now and now her teeth are all screwed up.
Redheaded Stanley said they didn't give him enough sodium pentothal and so he felt the shock but was paralyzed by the other drug they gave him, a drug given so that your bones don't break and your muscles don't tear during the grand mal seizure you're supposed to have. His foot wasn't paralyzed, as it was tied off to show seizure activity, and he tried to communicate with his foot that he was awake, but they just assumed that was part of the seizure. In retaliation to his complaint, they gave him even less pentothal the next time and branded him a liar in his file.
Alisha bitches about having to take out her lip ring, when she's been told people had ECT with the odd ring or bobby pin and it was just fine. “It's just about stupid fucking control, again,” Alisha says.
Randolph has a guardian so he isn't allowed to talk on his own behalf and tell the press what is happening. His guardian is forcing ECT on him, just to make him more docile and manageable.
And the judge is friends with the guardian. Then they went and said he was a drooling idiot who couldn't manage his affairs and continued to need a guardian and ECT. But that drooling slowness was caused by the ECT! The guardian just wants his money. Randolph has a lot of money. He was a male stripper. One who hung out with druggies and prostitutes, mind you. Then the guardian's stupid friend had said that made him a danger to himself, and put him in the hospital, where the guardianship process had begun.
Elspeth has a tattoo of a dagger between her eyes, to show that her head is in constant pain from the treatment.
Since they claim Bob shat on himself during his last session, they stuffed his rectum with cotton for this one just like they did to John Spenkelink before he went to the electric chair. Bob doesn't believe he shat on himself. They just don't like him, he says, because he called the bomb squad to get everyone out of the building in an attempt to escape, then another time he pulled the fire alarm for the same reason, then he physically fought them, throwing an ECT machine at the doctor. The cotton balls up his ass is their revenge.
They take us one or two at a time.
Selene is totally emaciated with all her bones showing and never talks and looks totally out of it, sitting there in a wheelchair with her hair matted all the way down to her waist. But when it's her turn and they grab her, she screams “Please NO!” and keeps screaming all the way down the hall and through the door at the end, and down the hall beyond there.
I'm full of questions. Like “Has anyone's head ever caught on fire like in The Green Mile?” I forgot to ask that one.
Roscoe is the only person in the room who's having ECT voluntarily. “Screw this,” he says quietly. “After hearing these stories, I'm going.” He gets up to leave.
The nurse behind the desk says, “Excuse me, sir, but you can't leave. We have to buzz you out. The restroom's over there if that's what you're looking for.”
Roscoe approaches the desk. “Excuse me... I changed my mind. I don't want ECT any more.”
“Why not?”
“I just heard a bunch of horror stories,” he says forthrightly.
“It's too late to change your mind,” another nurse says. “You had the chance when we explained it to you and showed you the video. You signed the consent form knowing what you were getting into. I think you're just a little scared and should sit down and relax. Would you like a PRN?”
“You didn't tell us about the bad stuff!” Roscoe says. “And it says on the consent form that I can revoke my consent at any time!”
“FIRE!”
A voice in the distance.
Pardon me?
“FIRE! FIRE! EVERYBODY OUT! FIIIIIRE!”
Coming closer.
“GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”
Closer.
The door from the outside that Roscoe wasn't allowed to open swings open and an oppressive heat I'll never forget blows in. And then I know.
It's real this time.
What is worse? ECT or dying in a fire?
“Where?”
“WHERE?”
“Down the hall! The file room is half on fire! So are a few offices!”
So we all crowd out the single door, straight into the oppressive heat, and head up the hall instead.
Down the stairs, outside. I'm conscious that I'm holding someone's hand and they're gripping mine, but I don't notice who it is. I know it's a friend, that's all that matters right now. I'm not alone in this burning building.
The other buildings in the complex are being evacuated too, probably because the fire could spread through the tunnels between the buildings. Everyone's running. Nobody can tell the difference between voluntary or involuntary, patient or staff or visitor or student or volunteer, except for some staff's visible name tags.
Across the field. Across the grounds. Off the grounds. Down the street to the triangle of grass with park benches and city bus stops around it, some with buses parked there with people getting on or off.
“We're getting on that bus,” Charlie instructs. “All of us. It's going downtown. I know patient people. They have an apartment.”
“I don't have bus fare!” Pia says. “I drove here and left my money hidden in the car!”
“I've got some extra,” I say, giving her some coins from my pocket.
It's pandemonium. The driver wants to know why we're so panicked and almost doesn't let us on the bus. We tell him there's a fire at the hospital and we're trying to get away.
We say nothing on the bus. We get off in a section of Verdun where nobody knows or cares where we just escaped from. Through a door next to a corner store, up steep steps, into an old apartment. Gregory and Donnie welcome us, saying they're patients on the run too.
Only they're just running from a group home. Us, we're running almost for our very lives.
Everything calms down within ten minutes. Now we're all twenty-two of us sitting or standing around the living room, with all the blinds in the apartment drawn, drinking coffee and tea and ice water, debriefing or rehashing or reminiscing or whatever else you want to call it.
Then Alisha holds up her phone, with a picture of a young guy showing on the screen. “This is my friend Horton Campbell,” she says. “He didn't make it out. He was in the ECT room getting shocked when we were evacuating. They just left him there. The staff. They just ran.”
“How do you know he's gone?” Paulo asks, looking around to see if he might be in here after all.
“I heard the firemen pronouncing him dead, outside,” Alisha says. “I was a bit slower than you guys. I sprained my ankle not long ago. Luckily the bus waited for me.” She pauses. Then:
“Horton was such a great musician. He liked hanging with his friends but it was always his girlfriend, Lorna, first. He was great at drawing too, wanted to be an architect. And he was an activist, against ECT, for MindFreedom and the Icarus Project and ZapRap.org. I think that's part of why they just left him there.”
It's funny how those who get plucked first are the prettiest, and it's survival of the shittiest. I love that expression.
“I started the fire,” Wilhelm says quietly. “I became a staff member.” He shows us his badge, which before was hidden on a breakaway chain around his neck under his shirt. “At the Davis just so I could do this, because I was so against it, because it happened to my brother. I became an archives guy. I started the fire in the file room. It spread fast.” He's crying now. “I thought the fire alarm would get everybody out of there.”
“Not someone who's passed out on drugs about to get shock treatment!” Shayla shouts. “They just left him there and ran!”
And then the brawl. They beat him until the blood runs and his head is a bloody mess. They beat him until he's spitting blood and both his legs are mangled. And then the cops come, find out where we're from (turns out they were able to triangulate some of our cell phones) and I can feel the end with a sickening knot in my stomach. Out comes the coffee I drank, mingling with the blood on the floor.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The elevator door opens and I get my first glimpse of the inpatient unit. I'm so happy when the first thing I see is a big hard plastic bill of rights bolted to the wall that I cry. But then I remember it means nothing here. And I have never been inpatient before. What can I expect?
“Miraleh!”
That voice sounds like...
“Bob!”
“I got you, Miraleh, I got you,” he says, holding me tight as I sob and he cries too. “The others, they're all here too. Let's go and sit with them.”
“The ECT building...”
“It didn't burn all the way down, but it burned badly enough where they can't use it for a while, till they fix it. The police are taking us in handcuffs to that other hospital, what's it called? For ECT in the meantime.”
“How is everyone? Will they remember everything? Do they remember anything?”
“Everyone remembers the big things that happened. We remember each other. When there's a detail someone doesn't remember, the others remind them. Some don't remember their phone numbers or what electives they took in high school, or what their occupation is, or what they ate for dinner today, or whether they had dinner today, but there's hope. There's something called cognitive remediation. It takes years, but we get to find out how and how much our brains were damaged. And they didn't split us up. I guess they couldn't. We may be going through hell, but we're together.”
“Let's go find the others,” I say, and we do. And together, we tell the voluntary patients here of the real nature of this place, and how they can so easily go from that to an involuntary nightmare like with us, and when they leave, they never come back.
But that doesn’t mean I never see them again.
When Bob and I are finally released from the hospital after our brains are basically destroyed, we can’t work. We spend our days at a day center for the mentally ill, trading stories with other ex-patients. Some of them I know from the unit, and others I meet-- Hettie and Mike-- were in the same facility but on a different unit.
That’s when I learn exactly who put Wilhelm up to burning the building.
And that’s when I get invited to join a commune.
“This is pretty cool, isn’t it.”
The lady next to me picks up a pamphlet off the table in the high school parking lot.
“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome,” I agree.
Even her two kids are excited. I notice there’s no man with them.
“I’m Ruth,” she says, sticking out her hand.
“Miraleh,” I say, shaking the hand.
“How did you find the Initiators?” Ruth asks. “For me, it was at a women’s shelter. Hettie and Mike came and did a group about neurodiversity and they had pamphlets and I sort of called the number on the pamphlet.” She laughs.
“I went on the internet, and BAM! Hettie messages me,” I say. We both giggle like excited little kids.
I look at the pamphlets. There are pamphlets on neurodiversity, on the neurodiversity movement, on our camp and on the Initiators.
A quiet understanding reaches us all at the same time as we crowd around the table looking at the pamphlets.
For better or for worse, a new day has come.
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