Lorna takes the proffered notebook and says, “I don’t think you have to worry about your writing. It’s very clear and vivid and not dull at all. And conscious. It’s really amazing, considering…”
“That I have no formal education? Higher education. Plenty of the lower kind, though.”
“Yes, and it’s remarkable that you’re able to write about that material so…dispassionately,” Lorna says. “Most people, it would take years of therapy to be able to confront all of that abuse, but you seem to have no trouble. That speaks to a lot of psychological toughness. It’s a good sign.”
“Not that good, since I seem to be locked in the loony bin.”
“Well, clearly you do have some problems. My God, who wouldn’t after what you’ve been through?”
The woman gives Lorna one of those searching, discomforting looks. She says, “Dr. Wise, I know you want to help me and I appreciate it, but we might be getting ourselves all crosswise, if you’re looking at my life from that point of view. You’re thinking of all the bad things that happened to me as traumas, leaving psychological scars that grew into a mental disease, which you think I have. I look at them as afflictions sent by God to attract my attention to him. Can I tell you about a dream I had once?”
“Yes, of course, but I’d like to continue our session in the therapy room.”
“Oh, this won’t take but a minute,” Emmylou replies, and her gaze shifts away from Lorna’s face. Lorna follows the look and sees the big man who confronted her in the hallway standing by one of a row of folding wooden bridge tables set up for card playing and the working of jigsaw puzzles. The man is standing over a small woman working a puzzle. His shoulders are hunched and his fists are clenched. Darryla and Ferio are standing a dozen feet from him, watching.
“I dreamed I was getting a guided tour of heaven?” Emmylou says. “I was wearing a jumpsuit and a hard hat and my tour guide, he was an angel, of course, but he looked just like a regular man, dressed the same as I was, and we were in this giant building, kind of an industrial shed like in those boring old movies they used to show us in high school, how they make paper or ice cream. And there was this big huge machine in it, whirring and clanking away, and there was a conveyor belt coming out of one end of it, and on the conveyor belt were rows of golden bricks, but softer: they looked like giant Twinkies, row after row of them, and when they got to the end of the conveyor belt they fell off of it. I looked to see where they were falling to and I saw that there was a big hole in the floor there and through it I could see clouds and blue sky and the earth far below. I asked the guide what the Twinkie things were, and he said they were blessings, and I remember thinking, in the dream, how marvelous is the Lord showering all these blessings down on us. Then we moved on, across an alley and into another big huge shed with the same kind of machine cranking away, the same conveyor belt, the same giant Twinkies falling down, and I said to the guide, ‘Oh, these are more blessings,’ and he said, ‘No, those are afflictions,’ and I said, ‘Oh, but they look just the same as the blessings,’ and he said, ‘Theyare the same!’ Excuse me…”
Emmylou rises while Lorna sits there dumbfounded a little by what she has just heard, and then the dayroom is shaken by a roar. “I knew it! I knew it!” shouts the big undermedicated psychotic, and now he has pushed over the jigsaw lady and snatched up the folding table, scattering like snow the tiny bits of a view of Mount Shasta. He holds the table over his head, bellowing, and smashes it down on the floor. Darryla and Ferio close in warily, Darryla pressing some kind of electronic device as she does so. The man smashes the table down again, and this time the wood shatters and he is swinging one of the table legs, which has a long, sharp screw and jagged splinters sticking out of one end of it. The man is now bellowing in tongues, incomprehensible. The table leg whirs like a fan as he swings it around his head. Now his direst paranoid fantasy becomes flesh as half a dozen orderlies and nurses rush into the dayroom. Theyare all out to get him!
Darryla talks soothingly as Ferio circles around to get behind the madman, but the madman sees him and strikes at his head with his club, and Ferio goes down with a cry, holding his forearm, grimacing in pain. He is gushing blood from a long cut on the top of his skull. Darryla rushes the patient like a linebacker, hitting him in a low tackle, and he goes over onto his back, striking repeatedly at Darryla with the butt of the table leg. One blow connects with her skull and she rolls off him, stunned.
Now the rest of the inmates have joined the fun, screaming, tossing things around, getting into fights and in the way of the reinforcements. Lorna is frozen in place, standing by her chair. She sees the madman and his blood- spattered club, he is on all fours now, roaring like a bear, and there is Darryla, blood pouring from a wound in her temple, trying to rise. Ferio is struggling to his feet, but it is clear that his arm is useless.
And suddenly Emmylou Dideroff is crouching in front of the madman. Lorna sees her mouth moving. Saliva drips from the madman’s mouth. Emmylou places a hand on either side of the man’s face, and then from his open mouth issues a sound Lorna has never imagined coming from the vocal machinery of a human being, a roar- scream-howl-sob of such intensity and pitch that for an instant everything in the room seems to freeze.
Emmylou falls away from him, down on her back, Lorna can hear above all the other racket the clunk of her skull against the linoleum, and she goes into what looks like a grand mal seizure. Lorna starts moving now, but Darryla is there before her, fitting the padded tongue-depressor she always carries into Emmylou’s champing frothing mouth. A drop of blood falls from Darryla’s head onto Emmylou’s forehead. Lorna swallows, fearing that she is going to faint.
Meanwhile, the psychotic is swarmed by many orderlies, although he has quite ceased to struggle. Lorna happens to look at his face and sees that it is the face of a confused man, a fellow caught in an embarrassing situation that he hopes will soon resolve itself, but the madness has gone from his eyes. Nevertheless, a hypo is slammed into his butt, a gurney is fetched, and he is strapped down to it and rolled away.
They shoot up Emmylou as well, and the spasms disappear into deep sleep. After she too is rolled off on her gurney, Lorna finds that her limbs are trembling uncontrollably. Instructed by the movies that violence is of long duration, balletic, and easily followed, she is unprepared for the way it really is. From the first psychotic roar to the takedown, perhaps forty seconds have elapsed. A heavy hand lands on her shoulder and presses her into a chair. “You okay, dear heart?” asks Darryla. “Look at me. You all right?”
Darryla is holding a gauze pad to her own temple. It is soaked in blood, as is the front of her green scrubs. Lorna locks eyes with the nurse, nods, and then a wave of nausea rises, with cold sweat breaking over her face. She drops her head between her knees until the worst passes.
“Wow, I wasn’t ready for that,” she says. “How areyou?”
“Oh, I’ll survive,” the nurse replies, and her face creases up in a grin. “I been cut, bruised, abused, and misused, dear heart. Just another day on the lock ward.”
“I don’t think so,” says Lorna. “What happened? Who was that man?”
“Oh, Horace Masefield? Horace killed his wife some years ago, mashed her up with a meat cleaver. It was a big deal on the TV, the Hialeah Hacker. He did five years up in Chattahoochee, and he got out all cured of his mental disease, and then he married a woman who probably didn’t pay much attention to the local news and guess what? He used a hatchet this time, which is why he’s here. He’s carrying a load of Haldol that’d stun a Brahma bull, but like you just saw, he still got his attitude going.”
“But whathappened, Darryla?”
“Oh, that. Well, dear heart, I got myPDR, and myDSM, and I attend the Sunset Park A.M.E. church on Sundays, and that all’s what I believe in. If we was living in Bible times, I’d say we just saw an unclean spirit driven out, but that ain’t what I’m going to put down on my violent incident report form. Uh-uh!”
Now a searching professional look. “You sure you’re okay? You want some water? A Valium?” Lorna tells her no; with a final grin and a hug, Darryla lumbers off to her duties.
Emmylou’s notebook is still clutched under Lorna’s arm. She gathers up her stuff and the bag that Emmylou has left, and drops this last off at the nurses’ station on her way off the ward. As usual, she has a review session scheduled with Mickey Lopez, who, the moment she walks into his office, asks, “What happened?”
She collapses into a chair and has a little weep, which she thinks is allowable in the circumstances, and after some heavy Kleenex work she describes the events in the dayroom, but she cannot bring herself to convey the part that Emmylou Dideroff played. Or seemed to play, for by now the concrete sense memory of what she saw has fought against her belief system and her training, and has predictably tossed in the towel. Itcould not have happened like that, thereforedid not. She says instead that their patient had another epileptic fit in response to the violence, and Mickey nods sagely and says that such a thing is not unusual and actually a confirmation that there is a physical trauma at the root of Emmylou’s problems. They agree that an MRI scan is warranted and discuss for some time how this is to be paid for under the labyrinthine budgetary relationships among the university, the hospital, the county, and Medicaid.
Now she summarizes the information in the first notebook and then adds the material from the morning
