I get lost and pull off the side of the road into short grass with deep tire ruts from tractor tires, the car bumping up and down. I keep the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning cranked up on maximum. I study the map for five minutes. Map reading has never been my strong suit. I trace over the lines with my finger wishing my wife was here because she’d ask one of the farmers for directions. Whenever we went anywhere new, I’d drive and she’d read the map and Emily would sleep in the backseat and it was a dynamic we were all happy with. I take an educated guess at where I might be on the map but am probably better off just flipping a coin. I carry on driving. It takes me another fifteen minutes driving over unpaved roads to find the place. I figure if you weren’t crazy when the courts or doctors committed you to Grover Hills, you certainly would be after the drive.
The start of the driveway has a couple of big oak trees acting as sentries, then dozens of silver birches lining the way, their branches thin and twisted and silent in the still air. I park out front and step out and dirt and dust settles behind me and covers the car. It follows me as I walk up to the building. Grover Hills is run-down and nature is trying to reclaim it. Most of the grounds are knee deep in wilted grass and overgrown shrubs that look like giant weeds. The building started out white last century and may have been painted once or twice since then, but certainly not since the moon landing. It’s a giant building that wouldn’t look out of place on a plantation, lots of clapboard and small windows and plenty of rooms. Some of the boards are twisting and others are rotting but all in all the building looks to be in pretty good condition. Abandoned, no doubt about it, but certainly habitable. One whole side of the building is covered in ivy, streamers of it climbing up the walls and entwined in the clay roof tiles. The amazing thing is that nothing has been vandalized. People in this country have a habit of finding places no matter how hidden in the middle of nowhere they are. They find them and smash the windows and knock holes in walls and spray paint giant penises all over them.
The rental car is the only thing out here making a sound. No breeze, no birds, just the car engine pinging as it cools down. It’s eerie. It’s like I’ve gone way off the map and into a different world, crossing over some Star Trek alternate reality barrier along the way. In prison there was always sound. The humming of the fluorescent lights. A toilet somewhere being flushed. Snoring, coughing, yelling, laughing, footsteps and fighting, air-conditioning. It became white noise, one sound canceling out another. But out here there’s nothing. I take a few steps forward, expecting my feet to make no sound, but they do, they pad against the ground and make exactly the amount of sound I’d expect them to make anywhere else, and the magical spell of being transported to another land is broken.
I start by walking the perimeter, the gun firmly in my hand. Out front the ground is mostly stone and dusty dirt and some areas of sand; nothing but weeds poking through it every few meters or so, there’s a path that’s broken up by nature and time, triangle corners of cement broken and pushing upward like merging tectonic plates. There is absolutely nothing to suggest it rained last night. Off the path and I start treading carefully, not wanting to step into a rabbit hole and disappear or break my ankle. The grass gets thicker and scratches my legs. I do a circuit of the house. Behind it there’s even more vegetation than out front. There’s plenty of mold all over the walls. The dirt is softer. I make it back around to the front without seeing anything of interest. No people, no cars, no graves, just two lines of compacted stones and dirt in the driveway where cars have come and gone, no way of knowing when the last one was here. There’s a block of trees about a hundred meters away that is the start of a series of woods.
I keep the gun pointed down as I walk. Grover Hills feels empty. I have the feeling you get when you knock on somebody’s door and you know nobody is going to answer. But I still keep the gun out. The front entrance is a pair of wide double doors. I step up onto the wooden porch and try them. The left one swings open noisily, the hinges like that of an opening coffin that’s been unearthed. The sun is so high that the angle stops it from gaining entry through the doors because of the veranda. It’s dark inside. Not nighttime dark, but the kind of dark you’d get stepping into a boarded-up church. The air inside is dry and a little cooler the further inside I go, but not much. It doesn’t feel like anybody is here, but the building doesn’t quite feel abandoned either. It feels like something, not somebody, is here.
It doesn’t look like the kind of building you’d expect an institution to be. It doesn’t have long white corridors with doors locking them off every fifteen meters. Instead it looks like a giant farmhouse, lots of wood everywhere, a very New Zealand version of what we must have thought mental institutions looked like back then. The windows have wire grills over them. There are lots of rooms, and I can see that each one of them has a lock on it. There’s a staircase leading up to a second floor. I haven’t had much luck with staircases lately so I start with the ground floor. I follow the path of the hallway, opening doors and looking into bedrooms on my way to a large communal area where maybe there was a TV set and a Ping-Pong table. There are still couches here, all of them in poor condition, some of them facing the windows overlooking the fields. There’s a door that leads to the kitchen. There is no sign of life, but there is the feeling of being watched. It’s creepy. I can’t shake the feeling that all the dark thoughts from the patients who were locked up out here have formed some malevolent entity that’s haunting the soul of this building, and if that entity came forth my gun would do me no good. In the kitchen there’s a large fridge that looks a hundred years old. I open it up and it’s empty except for layers of mold and no light comes on. I flick one of the kitchen light switches and nothing happens. No power. There’s a long stainless-steel bench with two sinks in it, there are clearings in the dust, circles and lines where objects have been placed and then moved very recently.
I open the rest of the cupboards and drawers and find them empty except for a dead mouse. I head back to the staircase. It’s not soaking in petrol so I take it. On the top floor I find pretty much the same as the ground floor, same layout, same kind of communal area, but no kitchen. There are lots of spiderwebs caught in every available corner and nobody tied up anywhere. Mouse shit against the edges of the walls. Sunlight angles through the windows and lights up the dust raised by my footsteps. Most of the rooms still have some furniture left in them, single beds with old foam mattresses, some chests of drawers scarred by scratches and stains. The bathrooms are full of hard enamel edges with external pipes lining the walls. One of the bedrooms is cleaner than the others, no dust on the drawers. Walking around the place it’s impossible to sense anything good ever happened here. Impossible to know how much help those who needed it really got once they came here.
The bedrooms on the north side of the building are hot, enough sun coming through the narrow windows to heat every room, but on the south side the rooms are cold even though it’s heading up to one hundred and ten degrees outside. There are other rooms, two of them with doors that have latches on the outside of them. I open them up, the walls and ceiling and floor inside are padded.
I head downstairs. I take the hallway in the opposite direction from before. More bedrooms. More bathrooms. I open up a door that leads into a basement. The stairs are poorly lit, and I reach out and swipe at the light switch on the side of the brick wall more out of habit than hope, and nothing happens. The stairs seem to lead down into a pit, the only light to hit them coming from behind me, my body casting a shadow. I start down them, expecting my feet to disappear in darkness, but instead my eyes slowly adjust to the gloom.