The Quiet Room (20 page)

“Well, if you're hearing voices, you belong in a hospital,” she said coldly, in a snippy, social worker voice.

For his part, my psychiatrist had decided that I could control my behavior but had chosen not to.

“You're not cooperating with your treatment,” he said.

I fought them every way I could. Underneath, far from where even I could become aware of it, the Voices and I were collaborating on a secret mission: to act up so badly that I would be kicked out of the hospital. For just as the last time, I firmly believed I was not sick, and did not belong in a hospital.

The problem was, as I let the Voices gain power over me, I lost all power of my own. I started out not wanting to control myself, and ended up not being able to.

Impulse became action.

At first, I was simply provocative and rude.

At community meetings, I would spray the room with my hostile comments.

“Who's going to miss that big cow anyway?” I'd say when a nurse's departure was announced. “Big deal. A load of stupid cookies and brownies for $37.50. Who cares?” I'd respond to the bake sale announcements.

After a while, my behavior escalated to violence. I threw a backgammon set that other patients were playing with across the room. I banged on the walls and windows. I overturned furniture. I was constantly trying to escape.

Once I ran away to Dr. Rockland's office. It was early evening but the sky was already dark and there were no stars. Someone going in or out of the unit was careless; the door was open a fraction of a second too long, and off I went, down the stairs, down the halls, and then outside the hospital. The ground was cold under my feet. I had no shoes on. The staff had taken away my shoes as a precaution against just this kind of escape. Luckily, I didn't have far to run outdoors. Dr. Rockland's office was just in the old 2 North Annex.

When I arrived, I thought I was in luck. For there, still working, was Dr. Rockland's secretary, Elaine. She was a friend of mine and I was glad to see her. My whole body was trembling. She gave me a cigarette.

I thought we would keep on sitting and talking until Dr. Rock-land arrived. After all, it was what we had done so many times in the past. When Dr. Rockland was late for sessions, many was the afternoon I sat chatting with Elaine while she offered me coffee and candies to make up for his tardiness. I could trust Elaine, I thought.

How wrong I was. She was just like the rest of them. She called the unit. Almost immediately, they came from the unit to carry me back like an animal. Why did Elaine turn me in? I was only trying to get help. If I could only get to Dr. Rockland, he would tell them I was fine and didn't need to be in the hospital anymore. He had put me in here, and he could get me out. I felt like Elaine was a traitor. My Voices were harsher.

“Witch! Bitch! Sorceress!” they shouted at Elaine as the burly staffers lugged me up the stairs and back to the unit.

My Voices egged me on, but they never seemed satisfied. I was never good enough for the rude chanting demons in my head. The only thing that really seemed to placate them was when I hurt myself. At their orders I twisted the cord of my lamp against my neck to try to strangle myself. I unscrewed a light bulb during the dark night hours when no one could see and hid it in my room, intending to break it and cut myself with it. I tried to stab myself with the point of a tiny charm that my father had brought me from one of his trips to Hong Kong.

Finally the Voices commanded me to stop taking my medicine. It was poison they told me. So dutifully I lined up for my daily dose, popped the pills in my mouth in front of the nurse, and then walked away. Around the corner, I spit them into my hand. “Cheeking,” it was called. My idea was to save enough pills to do myself in later.

Without my medicine the Voices went wild. After five days I was nearly out of control with madness. The staff found my stash, realized what I had been doing, and immediately switched me to liquid medication.

Liquid Thorazine, the medicine they used against my Voices, burned deep grooves in my tongue. I hated it and so did the Voices. But the Voices knew what to do. The very next occasion, I dutifully poured the cups of medication into my mouth—and then spit the whole mess into the nurse's face.

The Voices howled with laughter. And I wound up in the Quiet Room again.

The Quiet Room.

I first made the acquaintance of this place back when I was in the hospital the last time. The other patients made grim jokes about it. They called it “Hotel California”—the hotel you could never check out from.

The thought frightened me. Where was this place? What did someone have to do to get there? Then one day I saw someone, one of the staff, sitting on a bar stool looking through the window of a closed door. He didn't seem to be having a particularly exciting time, or to be even particularly interested in what he was looking at. The next time I walked the hall, there was no bar stool, no person, and the door was ajar. I peeked my head in. All I saw was a room, empty except for a green vinyl mattress on the floor. The window to the outdoors was covered with a heavy, industrial-quality mesh. Between this mesh and the window was a fan. In the corner of the ceiling there was a mirror tilted so that the person on the outside looking through the window had a complete view of the inside of the room. So this was the Quiet Room.

The Quiet Room was supposed to be a safe and tranquil place, a place where patients could be alone, free to relax and calm themselves down during or after a crisis, or hopefully before one occurred. Some people liked it. It made them feel safe from whatever was tormenting them. Some people walked in there voluntarily, and stayed until they felt in enough control to come out.

Me, I was usually carried there. I hated it. It was almost a routine. I'd hear the Voices, would feel the need to do something, would immediately carry out some destructive act, and be sentenced to the Quiet Room. One or two staff members escorted me there, down the long hall past the other patients, who looked on at my humiliation. I was agitated and jumpy, on the verge of losing control. I struggled with the staffers, trying to keep from having to go back in.

At the door, a two-step routine: A dose of sodium amytal, a big-time tranquilizer, to calm my agitation. Then staffers took everything away from me—jewelry, shoes, anything in my pockets. Thus stripped, no matter how desperate I was to hurt myself, there was very little I could do about it.

Once inside there was nothing to do at all. When I was really agitated, I paced. Eight paces forward. Eight paces back. Sometimes when I was calmer, I lay on the mattress and thought. Sometimes I lay on the mattress and slept.

The worst part of the Quiet Room was how lonely it was. Two patients were not allowed in the Quiet Room at the same time, and staffers usually only entered to bring medication or to check vital signs. If the Quiet Room was successful in stripping me, for the time being, of my Voices, then the silence itself became overpowering. If not, then there I was, all alone with my tormentors.

The idea was to lower my stimulation, to calm me down when I became too hyper. I'd stay there for a while and when I was finally deescalated and back in control, I'd be allowed to return to my room.

But I thought of the Quiet Room as the Punishment Room. And so did my Voices. They taunted me, and teased me, and threw my confinement in my face. No sooner had I quieted down enough to leave, they would begin to torture me again. I wanted to put an end to their torment, so I lashed out again. And back I'd go to the Quiet Room again.

It was as if I was stuck and unable to break myself from the chain of commands of the Voices. Within several hours, the pattern repeated. Sometimes even on my way from the Quiet Room back to my own room I would fall apart and have to turn right around and go back. Over and over the cycle repeated.

I began getting more and more sodium amytal, sometimes several doses a day. Soon, the oral doses were no longer working fast enough and I had to receive the drug by injection.

My Quiet Room visits stretched longer and longer. After a while I lost track of time. I could see through the screened window if it was night or day outside, but sometimes even those distinctions blurred. The Quiet Room had to be kept lit even at night, so the staffer on the stool could see inside. I could count the meals brought to me on plastic trays, but usually I was too agitated to keep track. It seemed as if I were captive in there for weeks at a time, left alone to face the Voices that were rising up to consume me like water in a sponge.

It seemed so strange that my fellow patients could enjoy the Voices they heard in their own heads. On my unit one young man had Voices who told him he was the Messiah. Another young woman always sat by herself, laughing happily. Once I asked her what she was laughing about.

“Hubert is telling me jokes,” she said. She called him her playmate, and often talked about how much she liked him.

I was jealous. There was nothing about my Voices that was friendly. I had tried to make them my allies against the hateful staff. But in reality the Voices terrified me. Sometimes I told the staff they were gone, but I was lying. The Voices were with me when I awoke. They were with me when I got dressed. They were with me when I ate. They were with me when I sat around the day room, trying to think of something to do. I could not even find relief in sleep. The Voices yelled so loud they woke me up, leaving me shaking and frightened.

The closest I ever got to a friendly Voice was that of the Narrator. He described my actions instant by instant, not leaving out even the tiniest, most insignificant thing. A hundred times a day, he commented on my movements.

“She is now walking through the door,” the Narrator said. “She's wiping her feet, little ass. Wiping her feet on the rug in the entryway. She's going into the kitchen. Ha! Ha! You fat piece of lard, of lard. Go to hell. Ha! Ha! You look sad. You look like shit. You are shit. She's now walking into the day room. She's going to turn down the TV set. To die, asshole. Ha! Ha! Ha! ...”

The Narrator taunted me, made fun of me, sometimes even threatened me a little. But mostly he just talked about what I was doing. And his manner was less intrusive, his Voice level less loud, and his overall demeanor less scary than the others. I didn't fear him as much as I feared the others. I just wanted his annoying banter to go away.

Sometimes I heard one Voice laughing, a single witchlike Voice that screeched and cackled in derision. Sometimes that Voice would be joined by a second, and then a third. Sometimes they chanted the same thing over and over again, like Voices rehearsing for a play.

“To die!” they chanted. “To die!” I must have heard that a thousand times a day.

Sometimes more and more Voices chimed in, until all the Voices joined into a horrendous crowd, an appalling cheering section that had suddenly turned into a riot. These crowds of Voices were loud, painfully loud. When I heard them coming, I would run for my Walkman. But often it was no use. They would scream and shout over even a rock tape turned up to 10.

But even more than the Narrator and the crowds, the Voices I feared the most were the men who talked to me of hell.

I don't remember thinking much about hell when I was growing up. Jews don't really have a hell, and in any case, my family wasn't religious. My brothers were bar mitzvahed, and I was confirmed. But other than that, my family was what was jokingly known as “twice-a year Jews.” That meant we appeared in temple only on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. No one ever taught me to fear punishment or eternal damnation.

No one before the Voices that is. The Voices taught me about a hell that was beyond all religious beliefs. It was worse than the worst horror movie I had ever seen, worse than my worst nightmare. It was beyond all imagining, beyond all human hope.

And it was completely and totally real. The Voices told me so. And the Voices told me they would take me there.

As I sat in the Quiet Room, the Voice that spoke to me was as clear and real as any other voice around me. In fact, he was more real, because he was both inside me and outside me. He spoke directly to me, in low, gravely tones, hoarse and husky, a true demon from hell.

“Come to me,” he crooned. “Come to hell with me.”

I didn't want to listen. I didn't want to hear. But I had no choice. Where could I go? How could I escape? He seemed to know that. He began to sneer.

“Come to hell, cunt. You whore. You bitch. You asshole. To hell! To hell! ”

Beyond him I could feel the hell of his imagining yawning up to swallow me. There were red and orange devils and smoke and fire everywhere. There were only two kinds of people in his hell, the tortured and the torturers. Everywhere, almost as if on an assembly line, men were having their balls cut off and hung onto wooden poles. Women were being raped by piles of disgusting men at a time. The sounds of that inferno filled my ears, filled my head, began to consume my whole body. There were shrieking, shrilling, squealing sounds of victims in pain, and the hysterical laughter from their tormentors. This was to be my fate. This was my destiny. The infinite pit of hell was reaching out to claim me. And then it got worse.

This Voice was joined by another, and the two began to argue. They shouted angrily at each other, struggling over my fate. I was at the mercy of these Voices. Whatever they commanded would happen. I was totally helpless before their wrath. Their quarreling surrounded me:

VOICE No. 1: She must go to hell.

VOICE No. 2: She will be punished.

VOICE No. 1: She must be punished.

VOICE No. 2: She will be punished, that fucking whore.

VOICE No. 1: She must be punished in hell.

VOICE No. 2: Ha! Ha! Ha! To hell! To hell! To hell, that bitch. No!

VOICE No. 1: Don't cry, little bitch. Hell will come.

VOICE No. 2: Hell will not come.

VOICE No. 1: Hell will come.

VOICE No. 2: There's worse than hell. There's hell's hell, and she will take us there.

VOICE No. 1: She must DIE and we will take that pussy to hell with us. That trash!