Страница 20 из 96
She was sitting near the station, hoping to do some little job to cadge cigarettes. As one of the functional patients, she got on with the attendants, except for an evil redheaded racist bitch on weekends, and with one of them, Ms. Fargo, she got on well. Ms. Fargo was close to her in color and size and age, but black and free–as free as any woman making that kind of wage with six kids at home could be called free.
“I like the Ms. thing,” Fargo told her with a big gap‑toothed grin. “‘Cause I got six kids and no man steady, and that puts me ass first to how it supposed to be. Ms. do me fine.”
Fargo talked to her almost humanly. When Fargo was working, she often waited around near the glassed‑in station and sometimes Fargo would ask her to sweep the floor or take a woman to the bathroom or hold a patient for an injection or sit with a patient coming out of electroshock. Then Fargo would give her extra cigarettes.
She hated being around the shock shop. It scared her. Regularly some patients from L‑6 were wheeled out for shock. One morning there would be no breakfast for you, and then you would know. They would wheel you up the hall and inject you to knock you out and shoot you up with stuff that turned your muscles to jelly, so that even your lungs stopped. You were a hair from death. You entered your death. Then they would send voltage smashing through your brain and knock your body into convulsions. After that they’d give you oxygen and let you come back to life, somebody’s life, jumbled, weak, dribbling saliva–come back from your scorched taste of death with parts of your memory forever burned out. A little brain damage to jolt you into behaving right. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes a woman forgot what had scared her, what she had been worrying about. Sometimes a woman was finally more scared of being burned in the head again, and she went home to her family and did the dishes and cleaned the house. Then maybe in a while she would remember and rebel and then she’d be back for more barbecue of the brain. In the back wards the shock zombies lay, their brains so scarred they remembered nothing, giggling like the old lobotomized patients.
On that Wednesday she was sitting there hopefully, but Fargo was deep in gossip with another black attendant. Co
Mrs. Martinez stood almost in front of her but a little to one side and fixed her eyes longingly on the newspaper, met her gaze questioningly, then glanced away. For months Mrs. Martнnez had not spoken. The attendants treated her as a piece of furniture. Many of the withdrawn had their own ways of speaking without words to anyone who was open, and Co
Mrs. Martнnez smiled, her eyes thanked Co
Co
“Sybil!” Co
Sitting quietly, Co
Her last time here they had met, and in the strange twilit childhood of the asylum with its advancements and demotions, its privileges and punishments, its dreary air of grade school, they had twice been confined in the same ward long enough to become friends. Each patient rose and dropped through the dim rings of hell gaining and losing privileges, sent down to the violent wards, ordered to electroshock, filed away among the living cancers of the chronic wards, rewarded by convalescent status, allowed to do unpaid housework and go to dance therapy; but twice they had come to rest on the same step and they had talked and talked and talked their hearts to each other.
Patience was the only virtue that counted here. “Patients survive on patience,” she imagined embroidering on a little sampler, like “Dios Bendiga Nuestro Hogar.” A week wormed through her soul before they let Sybil on the ward.
That morning she sat away from the station for privacy. When Sybil entered, looking tall and drawn, Co
“Hi, old darling! When shall we two meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
“It looks like a good day to me, Sybil, seeing you again.”
“We’re two witches, I mean. With a coven, think what we could do!”
Sybil really did think she was a witch, that she could heal with herbs, that she could cast spells both black and white. They’d had an argument last time about those names. Co
“How long you been in this time? Do you know?” she asked.
“I just arrived. I was hexing a judge.” Sybil held up her bony elegant hands with white marks for the rings she wore, which they always took from her over her roaring protests. “They take them because they sense how potent my rings are. They’re in a microwave oven, being bombarded with rays to destroy the power in them. When I recover them, it takes me weeks to restore their strength.” Gently Sybil touched a lock of Co