Visit to the Psyche Ward

Not everyone is so good at navigating a parking lot like this, a sprawling building, unless you’ve been many times to the hospital, and know exactly what you are doing. The sliding doors open wide their toothless mouths, you find yourself in a well organized, clean room. Too clean, too cold, too bureaucratic. There’s a bit of hope in this room, and I myself had entered it before, it is admissions, or, where you go to beg for an itemized hundred page copy of a back breaking bill.

If you set out to visit the psyche ward, likely you don’t feel… quit yourself. Maybe fasting, dizzy, carrying an all too hopeful bag of things. Here the clean and grey garbed nurses and other assorted secretaries can point you away, for this door, gaping, right at the front, and centered, is all too obvious.

No, go westward, and northward, to the big red lettered sign, reading “EMERGENCY”, and farther still. Walk around the corner, where the big vans transport people in and out of the yawning garage, and enter there.

Now you will get warmer. Entering this waiting room, this passage way, people crouch holding a cloth to their hands, bleary eyed people stare straightforward, a mother and daughter leaning over, protecting some well known, but to your untrained eye, invisible wound.

The guardians of these doors have tired, wary eyes, else, all too alert. They eye you with suspicion. Who are you here to see today, in the emergency room? Who has been here long enough for a well slept visitor, one with a full face of makeup, her hair washed? On announcing who you come to visit, the eyebrow raises, “What is your relation to this person? Are you on the list? And do they wish to see you?”

Finally the locked jaws spring open, and you are admitted. A young girl sits in a curtained stall, hanging over a stump where her hand had been. Another woman on the stretcher lies scratching her skin urgently, and you approach a sort of central atrium, buzzing with competent looking young men and women, settling over a myriad of screens, conversing among themselves, before rapidly darting here and there, in and out of rooms.

Maybe then you will have arrived. But the name you search for flashes on the screen, he is not yet found, not even here, in this place of torment and purgatory.

This is not the lowest circle of hell. To go where you are going, you will need escorted.

Down the bleary bright hallway, that beeps and mutters and squeaks, you’re led down, til your own personal Beatrice, will give a knock on the door- now you are admitted.

The things you had brought on your journey into the underworld, will need to be examined, weighed in the balance. Here, the caretakers of this much darker section, with men manning the halls like the old Egyptian half dogs, half men, stand about like angels with flaming sword. You are greeted in this command room you’ve entered, walled, unlike other desks, with thick plexi glass. And this lady in charge, is no Florence Nightingale. You can’t tell if you yourself are going mad, or losing your empathy, but you keep reminding yourself, she has had a hard day, after so many hard days, and surely she does her best.

Your voice tightens to a girlish pitch, and you apologize, for perhaps you have chosen a bad day to pay a call to this realm she stands watch over, with her minions, over screens with not just names, no, here, like an angelic compound eye, they look into every room in the ward at once, in relative shadowy darkness. You begin to sweat, and you begin to wish for the blinding lights and beeps and booms of the previous circle, for the jittery nurse running to and fro, for here, they sit in a gloom, and observe. You apologize for the inconvenience, and your heart pounds, for you fear the inconvenience has ran much deeper than a shake down at the gates of hell. Perhaps you, and thousands like you, contribute to the mass heap of causes, traumas, the millions of tiny moments, of wrongs, or thoughtless words, that create the need for this ward. You deserve to be judged and despised.

BUT I WAS A CHILD TOO.

Later, you will see they observe from this Cherubic all seeing eye, to send the guard dogs. For while you can enter these doors of one’s free will, like you yourself, by being on a list. But those who stay, awaiting another all too permanent room, they had to sign away their lives. Precisely sign it away, and for nearly all, this is regarded as an acceptance of a death sentence. And, it’s easy to see why.

Many here believe they are here due to a conspiracy to kill them, but they came anyway, usually, because someone else summoned all the will power left within them to corral them into this grave. Crying, and begging them to “get help” for a “mental illness” so they will become “sane” or at least, “less crazy”, or as a final postponement of death.

The psyche ward doesn’t do much to dispel the workings of a schizophrenic mind, a paranoid fear, a delusion of the subconscious. Every room equipped with a camera trained on the subject, wherein one is watched 24/7, with one bed centered, with no pillow case and no sheet.

The nurse will eye you, and rifle through your things. No, the patient may not have a spiral notebook, only paper, no pen, only a particular pencil. You may not bring a phone charger, or the bible with a string of book-mark glued in. You may however, bring the chess board, but only if you leave with it. You may not bring a glass kombucha bottle, you may not bring the bag.

Wide eyed, and seeing as there has been a vast misunderstanding, and that your worst fears for this place are realized, you enter still another door that locks behind you. Perhaps you ought to make a friend here, so you can influence people, so you ask the hounds of heaven, “How do ya’ll like this job?” “Well you know, just another day, break time soon,” says one burly fellow. Well, this is news, for it seems hard to comprehend someone could leave this dark hall, with a gal screaming here against the wall, smoke a cig, and return.

For you yourself never imagined it was possible that such rooms and halls existed in any other form than in the public imagination, let alone that you could one day be so desperate as to enter them, and so relieved that the person you seek exists today at all.

And this is where you open a last door, to a startling light. You do not see that there is a light switch. There is a tray of food on the floor and a fly, you have to stare for a moment, to believe something so organic as a fly is buzzing. You are relieved.

This plastic bed holds something so precious as a soul, but it does not take the frame of a six foot three young man so well. Terror grips you like a punch in the gut, you want them to smile at you, but are enraged by this desire. Even the desire for a warm reception is a sick one at a time like this, and in a sense, it would relieve so much guilt if they got up and killed you. I wished that too for a moment, but the well known eyes lifted and settled on me, and filled with tears.

“Rachel, I just needed to sleep more, but they injected me. I can tell the injections will kill me now. But I am at peace, and I am ready to die.”

“Oh baby, I see why you think that. The injections are not so good for you, but I heard they let you sleep for fourteen hours. Soon, we will all help you detox from them, but for now, they let you sleep.”

“I know now you can’t tell me the truth, and that there’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming. What would you do if it was your last hours on this earth?”

“Once I thought I would die too, I asked to see a priest, when I was here. But I lived. Only you can decide what you do before you die, and only you can decide to live.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it matters much what I do now, do you really think there’s a chance that I live?”

“I don’t know everything you know, about the nightmare you are living in, but I believe with my whole heart you will live for you. And I am here to follow you into the dark until you come out, and I know only a great soul can bear to suffer this much, so you are going to be a great man.”

“I do want to live, but I don’t know what I can do. I wish you could call them, and convince them to call it off.”

“I wish I could. I wish I knew who to call. But I am fighting with all my heart for your protection, and I will not leave you alone here, until —- comes, or if you would like me to go.”

“I feel like Christ before he was crucified.”

“You are like Christ waiting in the garden, and I won’t fall asleep. I want to follow you into the dark. Maybe you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, you won’t die, but a part of you may die so you can be reborn.”

“Do you think I am demon possessed?”

“No!”

“Do you believe me then?”

“I believe you, but I think you are missing a part of the puzzle…”

“Just tell me what you know, if they won’t kill you.”

“I have told you everything I know. I think you have to keep walking through hell and soon you will see all your enemies from a new perspective… but only you can take the journey of discovery.”

“This is all a misunderstanding. It’s crazy they went to this length to kill me, bought out the entire hospital, and the police too.”

“If it is true that they did this, it shows how much you are worth, and how much your life is worth living. We are fighting for you to make it out of here, what would you want if you survive?”

“I want a wife… who is sweet and loyal. And children. And a house.”

“What kind of house?”

“I am not really that picky.”

“I think you will have all those things, you just have to keep going.”

“I just needed to sleep more… And get in shape.”

“That’s true. Insomnia is devastating. The only reason I am happy you are here, is that they can help you sleep.”

“We can play chess in the lobby.”

(To my surprise, you can freely walk out of your cell, into a stripped room, where a man sleeps as if in a coma, with an infinite loop of FRIENDS playing, I lose the game within minutes, for my host here, in this lobby, is infinitely smarter than me)

When a person says they feel hunted, and a host has come together to conspire to end their life, do they mean their body? Maybe. They fear a loss of life, so much so they think they have no choice but to take it themselves. But I think sometimes, they are afraid of the loss of their soul, in the annihilation of fragmentation. Maybe in some ways, the death of their soul had begun much earlier, in many pains and rejections, confusions, and a loss of connection to other people. And when they are brought to the psyche ward, to be injected with drugs that numb all feeling to the core, and they believe they are being killed, it’s because the pain was real, and needed to be felt. And the psychosis, driving them to take their life, was just a waking dream, as the subconscious is the only thing left before a fractured ego. And like the strange symbolism they read everywhere, so does the nightmare need to be listened to, heard, and affirmed.

And in this sense, when I left, I promised I would always listen and seek to understand, to all the metaphors.

I will follow you into the dark.