The Quiet Room (21 page)

VOICE No. 2: Why so soon? Needs to suffer more. Needs to swallow our presence.

VOICE No. 1: Needs to die! Ha! Ha! Ha! VOICE No.2: To hell!

VOICE No. 1: To hell now! Come to me. Come, you fucking bitch.

VOICE No. 2: Ha! Ha! Ha! You whore. You will be punished and you will go to hell …

I tried to escape. Tried to flee. Tried to punch them, wrestle with them, strangle them. Too late I tried to leave their world, tried to return to the other world, the world of patients, the world of the hospital, and nurses and dinner. I shouted for the Voices to leave me.

“Stop it! Stop it!” I screamed at them. “Shut up! Shut up!” “Ha! Ha! Ha!” they taunted me. “Take the pussy to hell!” one said.

“Not now. No, later. No, later. No, later,” said the other.

“To hell! To hell! To hell! ”

I screamed and writhed and fought with them. I covered my hands with my ears to block out their taunting. It didn't help.

“Come to me … come to me ...” shouted No. 1.

“To hell! To hell!” screamed the other.

“No! No! No!” I screamed. I tried to run. Nowhere to run. Tried to hide. Nowhere to go. Nowhere safe. They're everywhere. A chair. A window. Must break away. Must break. Must punch. And I punched, and I kicked, and I flailed. The shrieking, the tormented, the buzzer sounding, running feet. Cries and shouts. They're coming! They're coming! I can't stop them! I can't stop them!

I must break something. I must hurt something. I must hurt someone. I must hurt myself. Stop! Stop! Stop!

Far from calming me down, the very emptiness of the Quiet Room became the screen on which this terrible fantasy projected itself. The Voices spoke to me through cracks and vents in the walls. The overhead light transmitted messages to me. I couldn't breathe. My skull was coming undone and the Voices became megaphoned until I was sure they would deafen me. I panicked. I had to make them stop. I had superhuman energy, superhuman strength. I literally punched a hole in the wall. I pounded my hands across the safety screen on the windows, opening my knuckles and fingers till the bones showed, and blood ran down my arms.

I was beyond even the Quiet Room.

From far away I could hear the buzzer's blast echoing all through the other units, as the alarm pressed at our nursing station set off lights and alarms all over the hospital. Our staff had called for reinforcements. The big men were coming running. I could hear their footfalls pounding the stairs and halls. I could hear the thumping and grunting as equipment was being dragged into place. I could hear ice cubes rattling in a cooler.

It was going to happen again. I was going to be cold-wet-packed.

Cold-wet-packing was a form of restraint that was only used to calm the most violent and out-of-control patients. Most people quieted down under the influence of other methods. If the Quiet Room wasn't enough to keep patients from hurting themselves, patients were sometimes given tranquilizing shots, and then temporarily put in two-point restraints with their wrists tied. There was also four-point restraints, where wrists and ankles were bound to the bed. Sometimes patients were strapped into Geri—for geriatric—chairs, which were little wheeled contraptions usually used for propping up old people. I broke three Geri chairs by struggling. From experience, the staff knew that only cold-wet-packing would do for me now.

The idea behind cold wet packs was to chill the patient thoroughly. As the body struggled to warm itself, it would use energy. And as the person tired from the effort to get warm, he or she would calm down, ultimately relax, and, it was hoped, fall asleep.

In order for a patient to be cold-wet-packed, a doctor's order had to be signed. As the buzzer was sounding, the staff was paging an M.D. to come to the unit to write the order as quickly as possible. I was so violent that the packing was usually well underway by the time the panting psychiatrist arrived.

When the big men got there, they restrained me while I was being packed. The shot of sodium amytal hadn't taken effect yet. The big burly attendants looked to me just like the horrid rapists of my Voices’ hell. My terror flared. My adrenaline shot up. My strength and power intensified. I could fight off a whole Quiet Room-ful of men. They weren't going to touch me. That I knew for sure. I kicked. I flailed. I bit. Even against a roomful of big men, for a moment it seemed I was winning.

And then they were back in control. It was just as the Voices had shown me. It was just like the rapes in hell. Big strong men held me down while unseen hands stripped off my clothing. Off came my high-tops. Off came my favorite blue sweatshirt with the green frog on it. Off came my only pair of jeans that fit. Off came my socks one after the other. How was I going to cause any problems by keeping my little socks on my little feet? And then finally off came my bra. My undies were all that stood between me and the rape that my imagination had fabricated. I was truly terrified.

And then came the real horror. They hoisted me onto the elevated bed that had been set up for me in the kitchen, or in a special room off the short hallway, or in the hall itself, or wherever they could get set up fast before I totaled the place or hurt someone or myself. With strong hands holding me flat, others began wrapping me securely in sheets that had been soaking in ice water.

They wrapped me tight as a mummy, arms and hands at my side. All that was left uncovered were my feet and my neck and head. And there they left me, with a single attendant by my now helpless side.

I was laughing hysterically. But there was nothing funny about it. It was cold, freezing cold. My teeth began chattering frantically as if they were the Voices speaking. I was going to die a shivery Arctic death and the Voices were going to have the last cold icy laugh. My whole body was frozen.

Cold-pack protocol mandated a full two hours as this freezing mummy. The attending person sitting by my side regularly checked my vital signs on my feet or on my neck. I tried to refuse to let anyone take my temperature. It was my final effort.

As the sodium amytal began to take effect, and the shivering to wear me out, I did begin to calm down enough to complain. I had been bound with my elbow digging tightly into my side. Too bad. No one was going to unbind me before my two hours were up. I found myself thirsty. All I could have was sips of water or juice from a straw the attendant would hold to my lips. What if I had to go to the bathroom? That's tough. If I needed to go badly enough, I just had to go right where I was, and feel the warmth spreading out underneath me against the icy cold sheets.

When two hours were up, a decision had to be made. Was I calm enough to be unpacked? If not, an order had to be signed for an additional two hours. If I was deemed calm, then female staffers had to be called. The men were there for their strength during emergencies, but it was women who had to be there when I was un-cocooned. It was one thing I was glad of. After the two hours were up, I had usually recovered enough of myself to be self-conscious about what had transpired, and modest about my nakedness.

So two female staffers would have the honors of demummify-ing me. I'd be freezing, wet and cramped, and feeling embarrassed, degraded and demeaned by the whole process.

But the most amazing thing was how truly calm I felt. Never again, I'd say.

17

Steven Schiller Baltimore, Maryland, January 1986-March 1986

Visiting Lori in the hospital this time around had been so much easier than it had been the first time. It wasn't that she was better. If anything, she was much sicker than before. It's just that I had changed so much.

When she was hospitalized the first time, I was not quite seventeen, an awkward, lonely teenager just growing out of my baby fat. Three and a half years later some people had a hard time recognizing me: I had spurted up so that at twenty I was six foot three and lanky. The first time she was hospitalized I was in high school. This latest time I was in college.

When I set out for college in September of 1983, Lori had already been out of the hospital for six months. She and Dad drove me down to Baltimore. Dad and I sat in the front. She sat in the back, quiet and pensive, smoking heavily.

We hadn't exactly been hanging out while she was living at home. But as I was leaving for college she gave me a piece of advice.

“Enjoy yourself at college,” she said. “It's the best time you'll ever have. It gets a lot worse after that.”

It made me sad to think how true that must be for her.

When we got to Baltimore, I bounded out of the car, and leaped off to my dorm room without even much of a goodbye to my father or Lori. I wasn't really worried about what people would think of her. I was more focused on my new life and what people would think of me.

I spent my freshman year trying to adjust, trying to make friends. It was tough. Johns Hopkins is a very serious school, very scientifically oriented. And here I was, a political economics major, thinking I would prepare myself for a law career. I began thinking I'd made a terrible mistake. I've come to the wrong school. I'm not going to be a doctor or an engineer like everyone else here. This is all wrong.

But at the beginning of my sophomore year, everything changed. I was given a psychology professor as my adviser, and that gave me an idea: I would major in psychology. I would become a psychologist like my dad. I would learn enough to discover a cure for Lori.

I threw myself into the psychology classes. I took organizational and industrial psychology. I took cognitive psychology, and dutifully copied into my notebooks all the maps of the brain and neural pathways. Even though I never did very well in any of the classes—and really badly in the more statistically oriented ones— I loved the work. It appealed to my sense of order. My dad always used to say that everything had a reason, that nothing ever just happened. In my psychology classes I began learning just how much we know and don't know about why things happen in people's brains. I began to learn why people do what they do. I became involved in research, studying and investigating conditions like Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease with professors and fellow students.

In addition to studying, I also became involved in people's lives. I was trained as one of a group of peer counselors, who were taught to help identify people who were having crises. We learned to ask open-ended questions, and to find out if people were suicidal.

I never mentioned Lori to anyone, not even to the professor with whom I was working. Still, people began to associate me with psychology, and psychological issues. Friends started to think of me as someone who could help people with their problems. When a friend's girlfriend started seeming depressed, I was asked to talk to her. I made sure that she didn't have an active suicide plan, by asking her about her plans for the future.

With everything I learned, I thought, I was just one step closer to finding a cure for my sister. And in the meantime, I hoped, I would find out more about myself. For the thought that someday I too might be in Lori's place had never quite gone away.

The winter after I came back from my junior year abroad, I visited Lori several times.

Overall, she seemed far more agitated than when I had left. She had big scabs on her hands from where she had cut herself banging on the window screens. She showed me a big hole she had pounded out of the wall. She talked about losing it, and how many guys it had taken to hold her down. At times, she seemed almost in awe of the impressive numbers. Sometimes we sat on the bed and she would suddenly drift off, seeming to retreat into a world of her own. At those times, I now realized, she was hallucinating, and I waited uncomfortably for those moments to pass.

Sometimes she was very drawn, dragging herself around like a zombie. But on other days, she would seem much better. Sometimes we played pool, or listened to music or just talked. On those days, she often focused on her status.

“I have to get my status up,” she said. It was clear that in the hospital everything that related to your quality of life came from your status.

We seemed much closer than ever before. I had spent my junior semester abroad at the same place she had been six years earlier, so we had that in common. While I was in England, I had taken up smoking, because I thought it was European and cool. I brought her Silk Cut cigarettes that I had bought in London. She liked them, and going to the smoking room gave us something to do together, and something to talk about.

She told me her troubles. Sometimes she pleaded with me to get her out of here.

“I can't do that, Lori,” I said. “You know I can't do that.” I tried to get her to focus instead on what I could do to make her life easier. Could I come visit her more often? Call her from school? Bring her anything from the outside?

My psychology studies gave us something else to talk about. I tried to talk to her about the different symptoms she had, the medications she was using, and the side effects she was experiencing. I looked up every drug she was taking, and talked with her about what they did and how. By observing her shaking hands and the involuntary movements she was making with her tongue, I diagnosed that she had some tardive dyskinesia, one of the side effects of the antipsychotic medication she was taking. I wrote a paper on lithium and, as part of my research, talked with her about what effects it was having on her.

I was convinced we were going to find a cure for her. But then one visit something happened that changed my mind about becoming a psychologist at all.

Lori and I were sitting and talking when, all of a sudden, I heard loud voices down the hall. One of the patients was having an argument with one of the orderlies. The patient was an older dark-haired woman, maybe in her late fifties, very drawn, wearing a man's dress shirt that hung almost to her knees. She was wearing socks, but not shoes. I knew what that meant. Lori had told me that her own shoes used to be removed as a precaution against running away.

The woman patient was screaming and shouting profanities. The orderly was speaking calmly and firmly. He was telling her that if she didn't control herself, she was going to have to be put in the Quiet Room. I looked at Lori. She was turning white.