The Center Cannot Hold by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780345444226
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

chapter thirteen

THE FIRST PATIENT I met once back at YPI was Eric. An Ivy League graduate slightly older than I, Eric, too, had spent time on MU10. “I was there a little over a year ago, but they let me go,” he told me. “I wish they’d made me stay, and then maybe moved me here, like they did with you. I fooled them into thinking I was OK. And I went home. And then I killed my father.”

Surely I’d misheard him. “I’m sorry, you did what?”

He nodded. “I strangled him.”

I was dumbstruck. And horrified. To actually strangle your father? A laying on of hands that actually kills someone? That was very different from having thoughts that could kill. Besides, entities worked through me; Eric, it seemed, was his own agent.

My parents came back from Miami for the first meeting of my YPI care team—doctors, psychologists, social workers, and nurses. When asked about my relationship with my brother Warren, I stopped rocking and humming long enough to correct the inquiring doctor’s grammar. “No, it’s ‘between you and me,’ not ‘between you and I.’” I can only imagine now (but was completely oblivious at the time) that it must have been sheer torture for my mother and father to witness the worsening disintegration of their daughter.

I was placed in YPI’s Intensive Care Program—ICP. My days would be spent in a small room with a staff member and one or two other ICP patients. I would take my meals apart from everyone else (no socializing for me in the cafeteria) and sleep in a locked seclusion room at night. And I was not allowed to wear shoes. That way, if I escaped the building, staff could be certain I wouldn’t get too far. The New England autumn was deepening outside, and it was getting colder every day.

For the first three weeks at YPI, I remained as floridly psychotic as I had been at MU10. My medication was increased, putting me over the maximum recommended dose for Trilafon. No Valium, though—it seemed that staff wanted me on meds that actually helped my psychosis.

Nevertheless, the hallucinations never stopped. Walls were collapsing, ashtrays were dancing; at one point I went into a linen closet and invited the other ICP patients to join me in there for a “housewarming” party, as I laughed and gibbered the afternoon away. Totally lost in my delusions, I warned of the great horrors and devastation that I could inflict upon everyone (most notably the ICP staff ) with the power of my mind.

Incredibly, no matter what I said or threatened, I was never restrained. If I expressed a violent impulse, staff encouraged me to rip out the pages of a magazine; if I kept it up, staff steered me to the seclusion room, away from other people. My behavior was no different from what it had been in the ER, or on my initial visit to YPI weeks earlier, or during my three weeks at MU10. But the hospital’s response to the behavior most certainly was.

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