We're All Mad Here

It only takes 47 steps to walk around the south side of the psych ward at this hospital.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel so much like a void. The walls are so white that I think if I wanted to, I could just disappear into them. They look like vanilla cake batter that has been speckled with blood stains from when Garrett cut himself or when other Garrett, the schizophrenic one, pooped himself and smeared it on the wall of the boy’s wardroom after his mother visited and told him it was his fault that his brother was dead . There is no artwork, no real colour aside from white, nothing. It’s just emptiness. Thankfully the floors aren’t white, not completely anyway. They are scuffed-up and covered in dried blood and crumbs from last night’s snacks.

There was a bathroom close to the entrance that, thankfully, did not reek of excrement, sweat or urine. The boy’s wardroom smelled worse than anything I had ever smelt before; you could always smell it no matter where you were. I guess that that is an unfortunate side effect of a tiny ward with no ventilation and no windows save for those in our rooms that looked out over the broken parking lot. With every lap of the ward, that smell was burned further and further into my brain. Even after I leave this place, I doubt I will ever forget that smell, or the cake batter walls.

Do they ever clean this place? Why are there cheddar cheese bits embedded into the chairs in the T.V. area? Is there something else for me to focus on while I continually lap the ward? Probably. But my brain isn’t working, and walking isn’t helping. They tell us to keep active but how are we supposed to be active in 47 steps?

Mateo and the not schizophrenic Garrett joined me on my 47th lap of the tiny 47 step ward. Clara would have joined us, but she was still feeling the effects of the dinner that looked like meatloaf and vegetables but tasted like dog food, sadness, and water. By the time she had finished gorging herself on the not-food, she was bloated enough to look pregnant and develop a fever. When we passed her room, she looked like she had sweat an ocean into her sheets and the nurses weren’t helping her. If we were allowed to go into each other’s rooms, we’d be doing the nurses’ jobs for them and taking care of her, but she had to suffer alone.

In the days since I’d been here, I’d come to realize just how alone all of us were. Sure, I had visitors every day, but there is a certain kind of loneliness that comes with being severely mentally ill. Only other people who could really understand what it felt like to be so broken, so completely void of literally anything that we wanted to die, were the people that were here. Even then, it was hard to feel together when we were all busy falling apart. That’s why we walked together; if we walked together, we could be alone together and maybe it wouldn’t suck so much.

“Do you think I could run the country when I get out of here? I could be president, and I could be president better than the guy who’s running Canada right now,” Garrett said.

“Canada doesn’t have a president, Garrett,” Mateo said.

“Yeah, but I think I could do it really well,” Garret said. We passed the tiny cafeteria and began another lap.

“They don’t let mentally ill people run a country,” I said.

“Politicians are all psychotic anyway. I could do it, I mean, I’m already president of Earth. It wouldn’t be hard to run a country,” Garrett said. The nurses had already locked him in the psych ward’s solitary confinement area once for cutting himself, calling himself the president and demanding their respect. 38 more steps, and we lapped the ward again. Clara was still in bed, but she looked less soaked now than before and much less like she was dying of something other than suicide and a drug overdose.

We decided to take a break from the endless walking and watch whatever they had decided to put on the tv. Usually it was M.A.S.H, which only the old people on the ward wanted to watch but at least it was something. If it wasn’t this, we could play the old, out of tune piano in the cafeteria that was missing several keys or colour on used up paper with pencils and crayons that were too broken to use completely. We also had the option to read a book, but most of the books were falling apart and missing pages, and half the time the nurses would catch us reading something and take the book away because they had deemed it inappropriate, whatever that meant in a place like this. They didn’t care if Susan stole people’s clothes from the laundry room, and they didn’t care if Clara looked like she was going to burst, but they cared about the words we read.

Every day seemed to blend together. Existence in the psych ward was a smoothie of crap and boredom; wake up, eat stale food, 47 steps, eat lunch that barely qualified as food, watch M.A.S.H, 47 steps, eat dinner and hoard juice boxes so that you could have something to drink later in the evening, colour, go to sleep, be woken up at least 4 times per night by nurses and orderlies shining lights in your face to make sure you aren’t having a psychotic break, repeat. I’m more likely to have a break if I’m being woken up so often that I may as well just take naps instead, but it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t stay up even if I wanted to because lights out was at 11 sharp and anyone caught with their lights on would get yelled at or have privileges taken away.

The more I think about it, the more this place seems like a prison and the more the nurses come out looking like prison guards. They certainly acted like we were inmates rather than people desperately looking for help to stay alive.

On my final night in the ward before I was allowed to go home, Garrett and Mateo joined me for a few rounds of 47 steps. Clara was thankfully feeling well enough to join us for some of them. I didn’t say much, if anything, as we walked.

“Do you think that people are meant to come into each other’s lives for some reason?” Clara asked.

“Maybe? How am I supposed to know?” Mateo said.

“I think we were all supposed to be here, right now, you know. Be together and be there for one another,” Clara said. “You guys helped me.”

“We know,” Mateo said.

“We’re like a gang. You know? Like a group of superheroes. We’re saving each other instead of saving the world. That’s the thing. We’re saving each other. I like that, I really like that,” Clara said.

“Can I have a cape?” Garrett asked.

“I want one too,” Mateo said. I just nodded.

“If we’re a super team, we’ll need a name,” I said.

“The South Side Suicide Squad,” Garrett said. Clara nodded happily before digging some packets of crackers and jam out of her pocket and shoving them down her throat as quickly as she could.

After another lap, Clara was frantically grabbing at her stomach and trying not to vomit. When we passed by her room on our last lap, her stomach had become completely distended again. Either she was about to burst like a bubble, or she was going to give birth to a xenomorph. Either way, I didn’t want to stick around and find out. We tried to flag down the nurses, but they weren’t paying attention, and when we did finally get one who seemed to at least hear us, they did nothing except offer her water and send her to her room. I wouldn’t be surprised if she died down here after I left due to neglect.

They really don’t care about us down here. If they did, Clara wouldn’t be suffering, the floors would be clean, the bathrooms wouldn’t smell like something had died in there thousands of years ago, and the walls wouldn’t be so goddamn white.