5150

There was a fat guard posted outside the emergency room door.  He had a gun.  I’d told the truth and I was going to the county mental health facility regardless of what I said, did, or wanted.

My wife sat crying in the corner.  I was sitting on the emergency room bed wondering what had happened.  I didn’t have a choice; I was on my way to an institution for the mentally insane.  If I had kept quiet, or lied I would have been on my way home.  The guard had shown up shortly after the social worker left.  What was he going to do?  Shoot me if I tried to leave?  It’s what I wanted, the cold embrace of dark oblivion.  Anything to be rid of life.

I’d had a good job, eight years of school wasted.  I felt like that guy screaming in the painting, just like him.  My mouth was open and my vocal chords hurt from shouting.  But no sound was coming out. It was dark everywhere I looked.  People were looking down at me; they were all shaking their head and tsk-tsking.

I was marched into an unmarked concrete block building; it looked like a prison.  Through double glass doors and into an office with an electric lock door.  The office contained a desk, a computer, three chairs, and a shiny linoleum floor.  No cup of pencils and pens on the desk, nothing in the drawers, no pictures, nothing but a thick reinforced pane of glass in the door.  I sat with my wife.  It was my fault; I was losing me, I had lost me.

If I could have figured out a way to kill myself so that she wouldn’t know I’d have ended my life.  I’d have done so long before.  She knew me too well.  I wasn’t clever enough to find a way that she wouldn’t know I had voluntarily left her.  A woman came in to check me into the asylum.  I don’t remember what she did.  My wife answered all the questions.

I was taken to a closet where they had me empty all my pockets and strip.  My clothes were searched for anything sharp.  My body was searched everywhere, for anything.  They gave me back my t-shirt, no buttons.  I was issued a pair of medical scrubs with a short cord, securely sewn to the waistband and a pair of cheap flip-flops.  I was then moved to the ward.

They took me through a vault door with an electronic and mechanical lock.  It swung shut with a solid thud and two loud clicks, bolts keeping me in.  Then through another door, this door had only an electronic lock, it closed with a solid crack, and another bolt snuggling home, securing hell.  Both doors had thick panes of reinforced glass with bars over them.  Inside it smelled of urine, stale sweat, and fear.  It was my fear.

The ward was a long corridor with flickering fluorescent lights and a dull, scuffed linoleum floor.  There were ten rooms for patients, two to a room.  There was a common eating area with reading materials, like anyone could concentrate long enough to read.  The walls were painted white, dirty white and the paint was peeling.  There was a payphone on the wall, but they hadn't let me have any coins.  Other lost people were milling about, both sexes, aged eighteen and up.  There were no doors.  I was led to my ‘room’ at the far end of the corridor; I had a room to myself; there was a window that overlooked a courtyard.  I wasn't allowed to go there. 

If I had a grip on reality, it was tenuous and I could feel it slipping through my clenched fists.  I didn’t belong there, I told the nurse.  He said he knew I didn't, but that I would be there for seventy-two hours.  When I wanted a shower I could get a towel at the nurse’s station but I would have to give it back as soon as I was done.  There was a curtain across the bathroom door; it hung from a flimsy rod.

There was a small concrete patio completely enclosed in bars with chain link fencing where I could be outside.  It had a nice view of another wing of the asylum, grey dirty concrete with bars over the windows.  Outside my room, at the far end of the corridor there was a window that looked out over a grassy area and then onto a plowed field.  I couldn’t go there either.

I ate dinner by myself, then vomited.

In the morning there was ‘group’, I told them I didn’t belong here; it was a mistake.  They said good, I would only be there seventy-two hours.  A woman left early.  It was time for her shock therapy.  I didn't know they still did that.

I took a shower; they came and got the towel before I could give it back.

I counted the hours by minutes, at seventy-two I told the nurses it was time for me to go.  They said I would have to wait until the next day, the psychiatrist would see me then.

The next day I saw the psychiatrist and told her I was better and I could go home now.  We talked for a few minutes.  She was very nice.  She smiled and said maybe I could go home in a few more days.

The nurse walked me back to my room.  She didn't say anything.