I got my Psych 1 professor (the course was nicknamed Nuts and Sluts) to help me find a position just for one term. I was hired as a psychiatric aide. That winter, I packed a suitcase and took an empty overheated Greyhound bus to the state mental hospital, where I trudged through blinding drifts of cold and was shown to a small room in a staff dormitory.
Warren
MY ROOM WAS small, the walls a deep pink. In my diary I wrote: I shall cover them with scarves. I had a single bed with an oriental print spread. The lush landscape had pagodas, small winding streams, bent willows. This, I liked. There was a mirror, a shiny red-brown bureau, a tiny refrigerator on a wooden table, a straight-backed blue chair. Blue! My secondary muse — the color blue. I took the refrigerator off the table, and made myself a desk. I put everything away, my long skirts and the hand-knitted turquoise sweater I wore constantly. I’d met none of the other aides yet. There was someone in the next room. The walls were thin and I could hear the other person moving about quietly, rustling the clothes in her closet. There were rules against noise, against music, because the people on the night shift slept all day. My shift would begin at six A.M. So I showered down the hall and dried my hair. I laid my uniform out on the chair, the heavy white rayon dress with deep pockets, the panty hose, the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought at JC Penney.
As always, I woke in time to shut off the alarm just before it rang. I boiled water in my little green hot pot and made a cup of instant coffee. The sky was a pre-dawn indigo. I put on a long, black coat I’d bought at the Goodwill, a coat with curly fur of some sort, like dog fur, on the collar and cuffs. It was lined with satin, and maybe wool blanketing, too, for it was heavy as a shield. The air prickled in my nose, my skin tightened, and an intense subzero pain stabbed my forehead.
I walked across the frozen lawn to the ward and sat down in the lighted office. The nurse coming on duty introduced herself as Mrs. L. because, she said, her actual name was long, Polish, and unpronounceable. She was tall, broad, and already looked tired. She wore a baggy tan cardigan along with her uniform, and a nurse’s cap was pinned into her fluffy pink-blond hair. She was drinking coffee and eating a glazed doughnut from a waxed-paper bag.
“Want some?” Her voice was dull. She turned to one of the other aides coming on and said that she’d had a rough night. Her little boy was sick. They all knew one another, and the talk swirled back and forth for a few minutes.
“What am I supposed to do? Can you give me something to do?” I asked in a too bright, nervous voice.
“Listen to this,” Mrs. L. laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty. None of the patients are up yet.”
“Except Warren,” said the nurse who was going off duty. “Warren’s always up.”
I walked out of the office into the hall, which opened onto a huge square room floored with pink and black linoleum squares. The walls were a strange lavender-gray, perhaps meant to be soothing. The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric blue sky that turned to normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their striped cotton robes, began wandering down another corridor that led into the big room from the left. Everyone looked the same at first, men and women, young and old. Mrs. L. handed out medications in small paper cups and said to me, pointing, “Go with Warren there, and make sure he takes it.”
So I went with Warren, the night owl, an elderly — no, really old—man with long arms and the rope-muscled and leathery body of a farmer who has worked so hard he will now live forever — or certainly past the reach of his mind. His tan was now permanent, burnt into the lower half of his face and hands. There was a V of leather at his neck from a lifetime of open shirt collars. His legs and stomach and chest and upper arms would be deadly pale. He was already dressed neatly — he always dressed and shaved himself. He was wearing clean brown pants and a frayed but ironed plaid shirt and he was starting to walk. He popped the pills down and didn’t miss a step. He walked and walked. He was from Pluto and probably related to Marn Wolde, but she’d never mentioned him. I watched Warren a lot that first day because I couldn’t believe he’d keep it up, but he didn’t stop for more than a breath, filling up on food quickly at the designated times, then strolling up and down the corridors, crisscrossing the common room, in and out of every bedroom. To everyone he met, he nodded and said, “I’ll slaughter them all.” The patients answered, “Shut up.” The staff didn’t seem to hear.
The first day’s schedule became routine. I woke early to record my dreams and sensations, then I dressed, putting a pen and small notebook in my pocket, plus a tiny book I’d sent away for — a miniature French dictionary made of blue plastic. I’d not given up. I noted everything, jotted quickly in a stall on bathroom breaks. At breakfast time I walked down through the steam tunnels to the dining room. My job as an escort was to see that no one hid in the tunnels or got lost. I ate with the patients, put my tray in line and waited to see what landed on it. Farina, cold toast, a pat of butter, a carton of milk, juice if I was early enough, and coffee. There was always coffee, endless, black acid in sterilized and stained Melmac cups. I ate what they gave me, no matter what, ravenous and forgetful. I did the same at lunch. Mashed turnips. Macaroni and meat sauce. Extra bread, extra butter. I began to think of food all day. Food occupied my thoughts. The food began to take up too much of my diary. There was nothing new to say about it in English, so I began to describe the food in French. Soon, there was nothing new to say about it in either language.
I was assigned to an open ward. The patients could sign out if they wanted to walk the ice-blasted grounds. As long as they were not gone past curfew they could go anywhere. There was also a lot of sitting. It was supposed to be part of my job to listen to people, draw them out, provide a conversational backdrop of reality, tell them when they were having fantasies.
Warren talked of the war sometimes, but one of the nurses told me that he wasn’t a veteran. “I was reviewing the troops. They marched by and turned their eyes upon me as they passed. I turned to General Eisenhower and I said, ‘Mentally, you’re not a very good president.’ His aide turned and looked at me. He was in civilian clothes…” And so on. His monologues always ended with “I’ll slaughter them all.” Always the same. I wanted to edit his mental loop, instead I walked with him. He would try to give me money — dollar bills folded fine in a peculiar way. We took a few turns around the halls, always at the same time. I knew everyone’s routine. I knew each person’s delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Lucille, in the patients’ coffee room where snacks were fixed, ate cornstarch from a box by the spoonful.
“We must put that away,” I told her. My voice was changing, growing singsong, indulgent and coaxing, like the other staff. I couldn’t stand the sound of myself.
“I ate this when I was pregnant,” said Lucille. “Did you know I was artificially inseminated nine times?”
“Please, Lucille, give me the spoon.”
“I put all nine of the kids up for adoption, one after the other, but they didn’t like it. Know what they did?”
“They didn’t blow spiders under your door. You just imagined that. So don’t say it, and give me the spoon.”
“They blew spiders under my door.”
“Hey!”
I snatched the spoon and box away. One quick grab and they were both mine.
“Nobody blew spiders under your door.”
“My children did,” Lucille said stubbornly. “My children hated me.”