Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin Read Online Free PDF Page A

that place really sustaining? What was done on the outside? More of the sleeping and eating and lassitude that we were all practicing in there?
    We were a reflection of them and they of us. Hardly different in kind, though surely in quality? You go crazy the way your culture goes sane. We were getting fat, eating junk food and rotting our brains in front of the TV, popping pills to make us palatable, and our lives palatable to us, inanity everywhere and we a party to it, dumbly coasting.
    Contempt. They felt contempt. That was it.
    “You want what? A cup? A toothbrush?”
    Sigh. Lumber, lumber.
    “Just a minute.”
     
    I had gotten through my first night, and the morning and partial day thereafter. I had succeeded all too well in penning myself in. It was done. I was committed. Not just to Meriwether, but to the first leg of my long year’s journey to three psych wards.
    I was scared and—oh, how the magic had worked in one night—I was depressed. More than depressed. Caged. A trapped, too cognizant animal, tiptoeing my way to the clogged toilet, over the foul floor of the women’s bathroom on flagstones of piled paper towel. It was just about as bad as I had imagined, maybe worse because I was there, not imagining, but stuck firm in the hours that dragged on so harsh and idle.
    I looked for comfort in the gurney that I got, finally, only an hour or two before they came to take me upstairs. I lay on it, and then couldn’t, because I didn’t want to be another one of those lumps lining the hallways.
    It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to resemble the rest of them, lying, as they were, face to the wall. It was that I didn’t want to become them, because I feared that lying with your face to the wall in that place could make you into a person who lies with his face to the wall in that place.
    Or was it the other way around?
    Did the people make the place, or did the place make the people? Did the fact that these people were mostly poor, or at least of modest means, and sometimes even homeless, turn the place into a zoo, or did the zoo turn the people into animals? I knew, even in just one night, that the latter was true. You become your environment, and you become what you are expected to be. The lower the standard, the lower the result. The ruder the treatment, the cruder, the more animal, the man.
    But did causality move in the other direction, too? This seemed true as well, even in the outside world. Public places become disgusting because no one cares about them. They belong to no one, even though ostensibly they belong to all. And so they decline. People litter. People piss. They deface whatever they can reach, leaving all those grimy little marks of insignificance that add up to a slum. What is not yours is not your problem, and then it is everyone’s problem, or eyesore.
    Or bedsore.
    Yes, I thought. It goes both ways. Viciously. We shit where we eat, and then we become shit where we are eaten. We write on the walls, and then the writing is on the wall.
    I wore the flimsy johnnies and the Acti-Tred socks, and they wore me. Down and out.
    I lost my pen to the nurse and learned to write legibly with a marker, in fat, loopy, childlike cursive just like Nil’s.
    I went in well and turned ill overnight.
    I was, and I was becoming, a patient at Meriwether Hospital.

I made it up to the ward that afternoon. Day two.
    They took me up in the wheelchair, the same wooden one with the seat belt that I’d ridden to radiology the night before. No walking yourself between wards, apparently.
    You’re sick. You sit.
    I have no idea what happened to Nil. I never saw him again. I didn’t even say good-bye. He was and remains a ghost of that night. I’d almost believe I thought him up, except that I have that torn page from his “notebook,” which, looking at it again now, I see was taken from a 2001 edition of a literary review called Glimmer Train, a publication that you’d be far, far more likely to find in a