The patient undergoing this treatment today is Sun Ravendi. Her illness is extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sun is a danger to herself and others. When she was admitted to the asylum, a neighbor caught her cleaning herself and her daughter with bleach and other chemicals. Her three-year-old daughter was screaming so loud, the neighbors thought someone was being murdered and stormed into the house to check. Their skin was burned and blistered from the hot water and chemicals. They were both rushed to Survivah Medical, but Sun’s daughter did not make it. The autopsy found that Sun had sodomized her three-year-old little girl with objects soaked in bleach.
Now that Sun is locked up for good, they have to keep her under constant supervision. She’s hyperactive with her need to clean herself. Meridei shows a definite dislike for Sun. Thankfully, Meridei is not in charge of this treatment. We are watching a man named Ash conduct it.
He has strawberry-blond hair, a hook for a nose, and a pair of wandering light-blue eyes. At first, I think he may be the only one here that likes the patients. That shows them mercy and hospitality.
Ash seats Sun in the chair centered in the room. He caresses her arms and whispers to her sweetly. She seems unalarmed by his gentle touch and soft-spoken voice so close to her ear.
She has an abundance of wrinkles over her forehead and brow but doesn’t look a day over thirty.
“Sun, I need to know that you understand that when you try to cleanse your body, you have to go through this treatment. Once you stop, the treatment stops. Are we on the same page?” Despite Ash’s message, he has a soothing delivery. He strokes the side of her cheek. She stares off into space, mustering up a small nod.
He smiles and squeezes her thigh once before standing up.
“Eight hours and counting,” he chimes.
Ash takes a long brown rope and ties a knot, binding her by her shoulders to the chair, then wrapping it around her over and over again, as tight as he can make it. Her face begins to wince as the rope gets shorter. He comes to a stop to tie it off. Another rope lies in a pile next to her chair, which he grabs, then starts on her waist. She whimpers while her midsection shrinks up, and then he ties off the lower half of her legs. I can see the blood rush to her face, the tension building.
“She has to sit like this for eight hours?” I ask, troubled by the thought of her legs falling off or her heart giving out.
Meridei smiles and looks at me from the corner of her eye. “Yes. It’s an agonizing process.”
“What good does that do?” I feel myself growing feverish with the lack of humanity in this room.
“It teaches her to ignore her instincts to harm herself,” Ash answers defensively. “The more we do it, the more her brain will remember this pain and associate it with her urges.”
We watch her for another hour, watch her whimper softly, watch her fingers turn purple, watch the whites of her eyes turn pink. I fight my basic instinct to untie her, hold her in my arms.
The rest of the workday is spent in a classroom going over procedural duties in the asylum. On a typical workday, a conformist checks the agenda board in the Director’s room. Our schedules change every day. Sometimes, we spend all day with a patient. We might run them through hours of treatment and then study their response and the results of their behavioral changes, if there are any. I asked if we keep records of their upbringing and evaluate their childhood to see what event might have triggered their current mental state. She laughed at me. She explained that we are taught not to bring up anything in their past. We focus on their future; reverting back to their childhood would cause their mental stability to worsen and reverse any progress they make during treatment.
After class, we walk back to Sun’s treatment room and untie her. I check Sun’s skin and see her bruises and discoloration, noting that her cheeks are stained with tears. Her soul, mangled inside her broken body. I caress her arm and whisper in her ear.
Hold on.
~
Once I’m dismissed for theday, I linger in the hallway after everyone has left.
I see faded glimpses of Scarlett walking in and out of the patients’ rooms. Her long honey hair, splashes of pink on her cheeks, the damage that painted her every expression. She’d watch the suffering with a clipboard in hand while she bit down on her tongue. This dark and disturbing place must have been part of why Scarlett could never heal from the abuse she suffered as a girl. This asylum must have acted as a pair of scissors, cutting open her stitches and making her bleed all over again.
My eyes squeeze shut out of reflex, like I’ve been pushed into a body of water.
The sound of metal clinking behind a wall comes from the end of the hallway, near the thirteenth room. And then another sound, like bolts on a door being unlocked.
The thirteenth door opens slowly, like it weighs two hundred pounds, and Suseas steps out. She closes the door, tightens two bolts, then leans her forehead against the metal. She uses a white handkerchief to dab at her cheeks, making soft whimpering sounds with each breath.
I quietly duck around the corner to keep myself from disturbing her moment’s weakness. But even after I’m several paces down the hall, her hushed cries haunt the walls like a lost ghost, saddened by whatever it is that lies beyond the wall of that thirteenth room.
10. Different Kind of Human
My father’s face as hetowers over me.
The square jaw. The dark tousled hair. His signature brown leather jacket. A boar of a man—a giant to a child.
Blood and sweat drip down across his temples from his hairline. He strikes fear in me, the way the sun rises at dawn and sets at dusk.
And it’s a flash of movement. The back of his hand. A boot plunging into my ribs. His angry tears as he screams in my face. That club violently swinging through the air as it makes contact with the back of my head.
Nightmares have come and gone since I was little. But after Jack took a club to the back of my head, they seemed to linger like an unwanted illness.
