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

talking to a diving bell.
    But Sarah still had cracks. Now and again actual thoughts were getting through, thoughts that had not been placed there by others or rooted out by the training. Her face was frequently strained by the effort of appearing remote, professionally cool.
    She wasn’t.
    Early on, when we were alone for a moment, I asked her something about her manner, about what she was learning to do, and how you could really hope to relate to another person as a person if you were practicing the art of galvanizing your own soul.
    A blush spread over her cheeks. Would she learn to repress that later, I wondered, if it came so readily now? What a loss if she did. Sad, because it was such a pleasure to watch her thoughts bloom on her cheeks like hot little pools of appetite. Intellectual appetite. A noticeable idea coming through her ears in waves of sound, landing on her brain as chemical information, a wave becoming a particle, then the information somehow—God, how?—pouring itself into an emotion, giving rise to a physiological response, and then a color in her face. For me, it was the best part, the miracle of the brain that it could take my question not just as language but as implication and turn it to a rush of blood.
    But if Sarah was going to make it in this line, she’d have to learn to check that evidence. Dry up. Cover. Get stupid.
    The unit chief was stupid in that way, I thought. Not genuinely stupid. She seemed bright enough. Doctorly stupid, I mean. Stupid because cut off and rendered arrogant by her profession and her position. She was in charge, and she sat in her sovereignty with unnerving entitlement. But to me, she knew and controlled a lot less than she thought she did. She was catered to, but mistaken, like a fat newborn, thinking her little sphere was all the world and her will the axis it was spinning on.
    She wasn’t like other doctors I’d known in this respect. It wasn’t Baldy’s kind of entitlement, overweening and repugnant. And yet it was of the same strain, because doctors are trained by doctors to be doctors, and part of being a doctor is acting like one. She came off as if her sphincter had been tied shut like a reticule. Baldy was more the type you suspected might have buried people under his house, people like his high school valedictorian, or maybe, from his übermensch period, a landlady or two.
    Who knows. Maybe she was a really nice cuddly lady at home, as tame as they come. But I didn’t see her at home. I saw her on the job, and that is how I judged her, by how I saw her doing her job. It wasn’t really what she said so much as how little she said. It was clear that she knew exactly just how little she needed to say to exert her influence. She sat heavily, like lead in a boat, pulling all the ballast toward her. The others deferred palpably, unthinkingly, as if by force of gravity or instinct.
    Dr. Balkan was a type, too, and does not yield an inspired description, I’m afraid. She wasn’t particularly bad or good. Not singular. Just a yeoman, you might say, doing service day in, day out. Showing up. Trying, but knowing the limitations of talk in a place where most people were too delusional to have what the rest of us would think of as a conversation. She was doing her job conscientiously. She was efficient but not officious. Removed but not too proud. She listened, though maybe a tad hurriedly, during our ten-minute consults each day. She cared, you could see that, and she really did want to accommodate my desire for more therapy and fewer drugs, but there was only so much time in the day. And even if there had been a spare hour, she wasn’t practiced at the long, slow muse, or probably much inclined toward it.
    Anyhow, Sarah was different. She interested me. I almost wanted to save her, cut her free and say, “Go and be a person. Get out before it’s too late.” But then I was hardly a recommendation for that approach, at least in my present condition, or what