Mercy Gene by JD Derbyshire

Author:JD Derbyshire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773102955
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Once you’ve gone mad, you know the way

It was 3 a.m., and they did ask, but still, going through the Timmy Ho’s drive-thru to grab doughnuts and coffees with the paramedics driving me all the way out to the Chilliwack hospital because the psych ward at St. Paul’s downtown was stacked to the brim with nutbars and loony tunes was unnecessarily surreal. I mean, come on, there’s a time and a place for double-doubles and chocolate glaze, and it’s probably not when you’ve got a suicidal basket case shelved on the gurney in the back. What’s true is that they likely couldn’t have considered such an early morning snack with any other kind of patient rattling around in the back, and they were sock-monkey tired — five overdoses and one ridiculous car crash already that shift — and I was like a free ride. And also, for the record, I was saying over and over again, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” They didn’t get that I was saying it to try to keep the voices calm and carry on because I was scared shitless, thinking a person like me doesn’t want to end up in a place like Chilliwack, which is more or less exactly what the physiotherapist said to me when she shook me awake to throw the medicine ball around with the other caw caw cawrazies at 6 a.m.: “A girl like you doesn’t want to end up in a place like this.” Then came breakfast: porridge, Tang, and a prayer led by the hospital chaplain, who went from table to table, insisting that everyone hold hands to better connect with the Saviour. It turned out to be good preparation for my first appointment with the born-again Christian psychiatrist, which also took place in the cafeteria. He wore one of those little ten-week-old-baby-feet anti-abortion pins on the lapel of his serious grey suit and told me a story about a woman he knew who found Jesus and wasn’t bipolar anymore. He asked, “Do you want to be bipolar anymore?”

The voices were screaming in my head, and I was wondering how much Jell-O I could get stuck in my throat. For the first time, I felt in more danger inside a hospital than out. Through the windows I could see snow-capped mountains that glowed with an unnatural light, an eerie purple, bouncing from the hundreds of neon crosses topping the spires of churches that seemed, from this view anyway, to outnumber the houses. A gaggle of nurses walked by in company with the physiotherapist, and they all gave me a well-practised stink eye, twitching quickly — north-east-south-west — that I later came to remember was actually them making the sign of the cross with their eyeballs. I didn’t give the psychiatrist an answer to his question “Do you want to be bipolar anymore?” mostly because it’s hard to wrap your head around clumsy grammar or anything else requiring thought when the voices are screaming. I tried to stay

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