by Jennifer Ostopovich
We reach the rec. room. It’s not much of a rec. room. Just a few battered couches, a bookshelf with some old books, some puzzles that have lost most of their pieces, and a rabbit-eared color TV. There’s a ping pong table, but they took away our paddles after someone used one to bust another patient’s teeth following a dispute over point scoring. Now the table is just used by the orderlies to sit around and play canasta on.
Cassia leans against the windowsill and fishes in her back pocket for a smoke. She brings a shaky hand to her lips and takes a deep drag.
I sit on the sofa and flick through the channels, landing on a Gilligan’s Island rerun. I never really found the show plausible. And not because they’ve got all those fancy inventions either, but because they’re trying to get back here. I mean, who would want to leave paradise to come back to this? I change the channel. A white-haired woman in a shapeless floral print dress is spinning the Showcase Showdown wheel on The Price is Right. She hits the big one and lands square on the buck, right off the bat. Man, some people are just lucky. I keep flipping. There’s some footage of the refugee camps in Cambodia on NBC. All those poor displaced little kids, huddled in those filthy, flyblown camps with their protruding ribs and swollen bellies. Now that’s some bad luck. It doesn’t get any tougher than being born in the middle of a civil war. The worst part of it all is that the Khmer Rouge would never have gotten the support to keep the war going if we hadn’t’ve gone in there and pissed everyone off by bombing the shit out of all those poor civilians. My dad sees it different. Says Nixon had it right when it came to the commies, that he was smart to send all those bombs in and show them who’s boss. When I asked what about all the civilians that died in the bombings, too, his reply was, “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.”
“Hey, would ya mind turning it back?” The ward nurse, who up to this point has been busy applying a thick coat of bubblegum pink varnish to her talon-like nails, hollers from her station. “I just love that show. I wanna see what’s in the showcase.”
I hear footsteps and look behind me. Annie shuffles into the rec. room with an orderly. He walks her over to the seating area and stuffs her into a chair. She’s usually pretty morose, but today she’s different. Her eyes look straight ahead, but there’s nothing really behind them. She’s just absent.
The orderly is talking with the ward nurse. “Her husband was in to drop off the divorce papers today, and I guess she had a little incident in the bathroom. She’s going to be out of it for a while. They gave her the full four hundred volts.” They say that the shock resets the brain, but if you ask me, I think it just puts you in a stupor so you can’t think anymore. I suppose for some, not thinking might be better than the alternative, but it’s only temporary, the effects wear off, next thing you know, you’re right back at square one. All the electroshock therapy in the world isn’t going to do shit for Annie if there’s no one that cares about her enough to give her something to live for.
Cassia has just finished her smoke, she’s looking out the window, her blue eyes pensive. I’m not really interested in watching The Price is Right, and I don’t like the way we left things in the sunroom, so I say, “Hey, how about a game of checkers?”
She perks up a bit at the suggestion. She’s never been one to sulk for long. “Sure, let's go to my room to play, though.” She looks sideways at Susan who’s just come in and is making her way towards the sofa.
Low security patients have “privilege,” which basically means we can hang out in our rooms during rec. hours, so long as we keep our doors open. A single infraction—usually fighting or fornicating—is enough to get the privilege revoked permanently. Cassia was moved to Annie’s room after she and Susan refused to bunk with each other, but Annie doesn’t have privileges on account of her constantly trying to off herself, so Cassia’s room is always empty. I share my room with Marcel; he has pretty bad OCD and never leaves the room except at mealtimes. He doesn’t like anything touched, he has all these rituals he needs to go through if anything is ever out of place. It looks exhausting. I know what it’s like to have your brain work differently than other peoples’, so I try not to bother him too much, mostly I stay out of the room, except to sleep or read.
Cassia sits cross-legged on the bed and unfolds the game board on top of her coverlet. Three of the black pieces are missing and have been replaced with dull copper pennies. She’s got a record playing; it’s an early Pink Floyd album.
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was Syd Barrett’s last real album before the band got rid of him for being too crazy. I mean, he did a bit of work on A Saucer Full of Secrets, but by then the band was already trying to limit him because he was becoming a huge problem.” She chatters on as she sets the pieces out. “He was the genius behind the band’s psychedelic sound, though. After they ousted him, they even made a fortune writing songs about him being this crazy genius. I guess that’s the thing: you need to be a little mad to be real innovative, but too much madness and people think you’re no good no more. When you can’t focus you start to become—what’s that word…?—a liability. But the show must go on, and all that. Ya know?”
I’m trying to pay attention, but I’m too busy thinking about that sleaze-ball Dr. Schafer. We really need to get outta this place. My sense of reality is slipping. I’ve got to somehow get away before he pumps so many drugs in me that I can’t tell up from down anymore. And now that I know what a creep he is, I can’t just leave Cassia here alone to deal with him.
“You ever think of running away?” I don’t even mean to say it, it just comes out.
“Ya mean like from here?” She captures two of my pieces and holds them in her hand. There’s the rattle of the plastic as she jiggles them up and down, waiting for me to make my move.
“Yeah, like breaking out and just taking off.” I’ve set the hamster on the wheel and now there’s no stopping it. “I just feel like we’re wasting our lives away in this place. There’s gotta be more to life than this.” I throw my hands in the air and gesture around the room. It’s hardly bigger than a prison cell, and not much more comfortable. “I mean, I’m eighteen years old and I’ve never even been outside of New York State. And once I get outta here, my parents have my next decade mapped out for me. Just once I want to do something because I want to and not ’cause someone tells me I have to.”
She stands up, eases the record off the turntable with nimble fingers, and flips it over to the B side. A moment later, Syd Barrett is singing “Chapter 24” in that great accent of his.
“Ah man. I got away once,” a longing sigh escapes the pale pink purse of her lips. When she looks up at me, there are stars in her eyes. “Not from here, but–well, you know what I mean.” She leans against the wall and lights a cigarette. “My parents, they were real strict. When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to have any friends that didn’t go to our church. Right after high school I got a job working as a cashier at the grocer and that’s where I met Jane. She was one of them price checkers. Ya ever seen ‘em? The ones that ride around on their roller skates?”
“Yeah, sure I’ve seen them.”
“Well, my parents never liked her. We used to go to the bowling alley after work and all the old men would buy us drinks, and then I’d come home and have to pretend to my parents like I just had the flu or something,” she laughs. “It was a real riot, ya know? So, one time after work she says to me that there’s this huge concert all the way down in New Mexico. She says it’s gonna be the biggest thing since Woodstock, that we should hitchhike and go see it.”
Something is taking shape; it’s starting to congeal and solidify within my brain. “I mean, there’s gotta be some way out of this place, right?” If we could just find a weak spot in the security, it wouldn’t be too hard to hitch a ride. The highway is just up the drive; we could make it there in less than a couple minutes and be gone before anyone even realized we were missing.
“Well yeah, sure. People come in and out all the time. Anyway, after work that day, we packed our bags and sat out on the highway with our thumbs straight out in the air. Just like this.” She holds her thumb out sideways to show me. “Took us nearly three days to get there—we stopped and stayed a night in St. Louis with this performance artist guy so we could watch his show the next day. He took us to this back alley club, and he performed this real strange one man show where he remembered all these memories from when he was a kid and cried a lot. It was a total bummer. So, we finally got there and spent three amazing days and nights in a tent out in the desert, just listening to music and watching the stars. That’s where I met Tommy. It was the best few days of my life. It was like I wasn’t just living anymore, I was really alive for the first time, ya know?
“So, if it was so great, why’d you come back?” If I ever got away, they’d have to drag me back in a body bag. My next move leaves me open, and Cassia skips her piece over the board, making a triple jump, winning the game.
“Tommy said we could stay with him—and I thought about staying, I really did! See, Tommy, he has this compound out in California where all his devotees—that’s what he calls his followers, devotees—it’s where they all live together. On the last night of the festival my bag with all my money and clothes got stolen. I got a bit scared. I mean, I’d never been away from home before, and I had no more money left.” She’s picking away at the pilled fibres on the bedspread and collecting them in a little pile on her leg. “I called my parents to see if they’d send me some money and they booked me a flight straight back to New York. Boy were they angry with me when I got home!”
“So, would you do it again? Run away, I mean.”
“Oh sure. Except, only next time? I wouldn’t chicken out and come back.”
I’m getting excited. The words are out before I can even think to stop them. I lean in and whisper, “Let’s do it. Let’s escape.”
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Jennifer Ostopovich lives in Canada with her family and five pets. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Maudlin House, HAD, Scaffold, Apocalypse Confidential and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter/Bluesky @jrostopovich. .