“We’re in the oldest part of the building now,” Fred says.
“You must want to get Judy out of here as soon as possible.”
“Well, sure, soon as Pat Skarda thinks she’s ready. But you’ll be surprised; Judy kind of likes it in here. I think it’s helping. What she told me was, she feels completely safe, and the ones that can talk, some of them are extremely interesting. It’s like being on a cruise, she says.”
Jack laughs in surprise and disbelief, and Fred Marshall touches his shoulder and says, “Does that mean she’s a lot better or a lot worse?”
At the end of the corridor, they emerge directly into a good-sized room that seems to have been preserved unaltered for a hundred years. Dark brown wainscoting rises four feet from the dark brown wooden floor. Far up in the gray wall to their right, two tall, narrow windows framed like paintings admit filtered gray light. A man seated behind a polished wooden counter pushes a button that unlocks a double-sized metal door with a WARD D sign and a small window of reinforced glass. “You can go in, Mr. Marshall, but who is he?”
“His name is Jack Sawyer. He’s here with me.”
“Is he either a relative or a medical professional?”
“No, but my wife wants to see him.”
“Wait here a moment.” The attendant disappears through the metal door and locks it behind him with a prisonlike clang. A minute later, the attendant reappears with a nurse whose heavy, lined face, big arms and hands, and thick legs make her look like a man in drag. She introduces herself as Jane Bond, the head nurse of Ward D, a combination of words and circumstances that irresistibly suggest at least a couple of nicknames. The nurse subjects Fred and Jack, then only Jack, to a barrage of questions before she vanishes back behind the great door.
“Ward Bond,” Jack says, unable not to.
“We call her Warden Bond,” says the attendant. “She’s tough, but on the other hand, she’s unfair.” He coughs and stares up at the high windows. “We got this orderly, calls her Double-oh Zero.”
A few minutes later, Head Nurse Warden Bond, Agent OO Zero, swings open the metal door and says, “You may enter now, but pay attention to what I say.”
At first, the ward resembles a huge airport hangar divided into a section with a row of padded benches, a section with round tables and plastic chairs, and a third section where two long tables are stacked with drawing paper, boxes of crayons, and watercolor sets. In the vast space, these furnishings look like dollhouse furniture. Here and there on the cement floor, painted a smooth, anonymous shade of gray, lie padded rectangular mats; twenty feet above the floor, small, barred windows punctuate the far wall, of red brick long ago given a couple of coats of white paint. In a glass enclosure to the left of the door, a nurse behind a desk looks up from a book. Far down to the right, well past the tables with art supplies, three locked metal doors open into worlds of their own. The sense of being in a hangar gradually yields to a sense of a benign but inflexible imprisonment.
A low hum of voices comes from the twenty to thirty men and women scattered throughout the enormous room. Only a very few of these men and women are talking to visible companions. They pace in circles, stand frozen in place, lie curled like infants on the mats; they count on their fingers and scribble in notebooks; they twitch, yawn, weep, stare into space and into themselves. Some of them wear green hospital robes, others civilian clothes of all kinds: T-shirts and shorts, sweat suits, running outfits, ordinary shirts and slacks, jerseys and pants. No one wears a belt, and none of the shoes have laces. Two muscular men with close-cropped hair and in brilliant white T-shirts sit at one of the round tables with the air of patient watchdogs. Jack tries to locate Judy Marshall, but he cannot pick her out.
“I asked for your attention, Mr. Sawyer.”
“Sorry,” Jack says. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so big.”
“We’d better be big, Mr. Sawyer. We serve an expanding population.” She waits for an acknowledgment of her significance, and Jack nods. “Very well. I’m going to give you some basic ground rules. If you listen to what I say, your visit here will be as pleasant as possible for all of us. Don’t stare at the patients, and don’t be alarmed by what they say. Don’t act as though you find anything they do or say unusual or distressing. Just be polite, and eventually they will leave you alone. If they ask you for things, do as you choose, within reason. But please refrain from giving them money, any sharp objects, or edibles not previously cleared by one of the physicians—some medications interact adversely with certain kinds of food. At some point, an elderly woman named Estelle Packard will probably come up to you and ask if you are her father. Answer however you like, but if you say no, she will go away disappointed, and if you say yes, you’ll make her day. Do you have any questions, Mr. Sawyer?”
“Where is Judy Marshall?”
“She’s on this side, with her back to us on the farthest bench. Can you see her, Mr. Marshall?”
“I saw her right away,” Fred says. “Have there been any changes since this morning?”
“Not as far as I know. Her admitting physician, Dr. Spiegleman, will be here in about half an hour, and he might have more information for you. Would you like me to take you and Mr. Sawyer to your wife, or would you prefer going by yourself?”
“We’ll be fine,” Fred Marshall says. “How long can we stay?”
“I’m giving you fifteen minutes, twenty max. Judy is still in the eval stage, and I want to keep her stress level at a minimum. She looks pretty peaceful now, but she’s also deeply disconnected and, quite frankly, delusional. I wouldn’t be surprised by another hysterical episode, and we don’t want to prolong her evaluation period by introducing new medication at this point, do we? So please, Mr. Marshall, keep the conversation stress-free, light, and positive.”
“You think she’s delusional?”
Nurse Bond smiles pityingly. “In all likelihood, Mr. Marshall, your wife has been delusional for years. Oh, she’s managed to keep it hidden, but ideations like hers don’t spring up overnight, no no. These things take years to construct, and all the time the person can appear to be a normally functioning human being. Then something triggers the psychosis into full-blown expression. In this case, of course, it was your son’s disappearance. By the way, I want to extend my sympathies to you at this time. What a terrible thing to have happened.”
“Yes, it was,” says Fred Marshall. “But Judy started acting strange even before . . .”
“Same thing, I’m afraid. She needed to be comforted, and her delusions—her delusional world—came into plain view, because that world provided exactly the comfort she needed. You must have heard some of it this morning, Mr. Marshall. Did your wife mention anything about going to other worlds?”
“Going to other worlds?” Jack asks, startled.
“A fairly typical schizophrenic ideation,” Nurse Bond says. “More than half the people on this ward have similar fantasies.”
“You think my wife is schizophrenic?”
Nurse Bond looks past Fred to take a comprehensive inventory of the patients in her domain. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Mr. Marshall, but I have had twenty long years of experience in dealing with the mentally ill. On the basis of that experience, I have to tell you, in my opinion your wife manifests the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. I wish I had better news for you.” She glances back at Fred Marshall. “Of course, Dr. Spiegleman will make the final diagnosis, and he will be able to answer all your questions, explain your treatment options, and so forth.”
The smile she gives Jack seems to congeal the moment it appears. “I always tell my new visitors it’s tougher on the family than it is on the patient. Some of these people, they don’t have a care in the world. Really, you almost have to envy them.”
“Sure,” Jack says. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Go on, then,” she says, with a trace of peevishness. “Enjoy your visit.”
A number of heads turn as they walk slowly across the dusty wooden floor to the nearest row of benches; many pairs of eyes track their progress. Curiosity, indifference, confusion, suspicion, pleasure, and an impersonal anger show in the pallid faces. To Jack, it seems as though every patient on the ward is inching toward them.
A flabby middle-aged man in a bathrobe has begun to cut through the tables, looking as though he fears missing his bus to work. At the end of the nearest bench, a thin old woman with streaming white hair stands up and beseeches Jack with her eyes. Her clasped, upraised hands tremble violently. Jack forces himself not to meet her eyes. When he passes her, she half-croons, half-whispers, “My ducky-wucky was behind the door, but I didn’t know it, and there he was, in all that water.”