Sunday's on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly

Author:Christine Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

crime

october 20, 2010

The Lincoln hospital in New York was different from the Pine Rest hospital in Michigan. This was how Jane knew she’d matured.

For instance, at Pine Rest, she’d fallen into jeopardy easily, flashing her chest to the orderlies and the other patients. But she’d only done it because they would tell her to. Usually they were the government workers, who called her on the telephone or through the radiator. Once, through the eggcup in her breakfast. One time her governor called her, and instead of asking her to vote, he told her to sing for the king and queen. She could borrow a coat from James Dean. So Jane started to undress, but before she could even look for the coat, she was in trouble.

Her Pine Rest doctor asked if she ever felt like somebody else, and Jane told her no. Though sometimes she felt so much that her insides could have filled two people. Yes, she could be more than one person, but whatever extra people were also Jane. Jane and a half, she felt like calling herself on those days.

Jane had been scared every day at Pine Rest, but at Lincoln she learned how to carefully differentiate her world from everybody else’s. The Lincoln doctors told her that in everyone else’s world, which was the same, people usually talked only one at a time and never through food or the radiator. And that the government rarely contacted people individually. And that Jane only thought they were contacting her because she had delusions and hallucinations in her brain. Hallucinations were the voices screaming JANE! JANE! JANEJANEJANE! Delusions made her question to whom she would surrender.

The Lincoln doctors told her that she thought it was the government because she was trying to make her world exist with everyone else’s, mark harmony out of the situation. This was how Jane knew how much she’d grown: the doctors told her that some patients never realized this. But she could and would, and things would hurt less soon. Very soon, if she continued to learn and grow and take her cocktails of antipsychotics. Thorazine. Clozapine. Librium. Who decided these medicine names anyhow? The stuff she took with Otis had easier names. You got high, you had a good time or maybe fell asleep, ached for more hours later. That was all. Nobody kept a file on you or approved tailored dosages.

Every time Jane was fed her pills, she’d say pay day to make the nurses laugh, but one day they just stopped laughing. Someone either told them not to encourage her, Jane guessed, or else they just didn’t find her funny anymore.

On good days, her doctor would say, let’s see if we can try a smaller dosage. On bad days, he’d say, I’m sorry, and after supper they’d feed her more of what made her feel like she was made of soft-serve ice cream, more of what made her hibernate for about fourteen hours a night. And on the worst days, Jane could barely speak of what happened.

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