- (tinieblas) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-04-04 23:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, sam alexander |
Narrative
Who: Sam
What: Narrative
Where: Bellevue psychiatric
When: Nowish
Warnings/Rating: Triggers for all mental health stuff, drugs, suicide, etc. Also misery.
19 North was layers of yellow. Strata, yeah? Pale yellow in the rooms, two beds to each and a window that wasn't a window. Darker yellow in the halls, like the patients there would be fucked enough to mistake it for sunlight under fluorescent lights that painted everything into ugliness. The group areas were brighter still, like the increased pigment could somehow compensate for the sheer amount of fucking insanity sheltered within the walls. But the worst was the doors. Bright canary, and making them impossible to ignore. Locked in, yeah? And the fucking doors screamed it in paint-covered-tin that was dinged from repeated attempts at escape. Yellow, yellow and more fucking yellow, like being insane made a person stupid enough to think they'd actually open or something.
Bellevue wasn't like the private asylums of Las Vegas. Fuck, no. Those places were like the strip hotels, large and lavish and what can I get you, ma'am? They were ornate chess boards in morning rooms, where the sun shone in clean windows, and where rights were something that existed. Those places were filled with people. Human beings. Patients, yeah, ok, but people first. Names, and people gave a shit, and that was the result of someone outside with a checkbook. Visitors on visiting day, and humanity walking through the door with them. Even the straitjackets there were different. Fabric and lining, comfort, yeah? And let's pretend we're not fucking nuts.
Bellevue was different.
Public, mandatory, criminal. No one there walked in on someone's arm, and no one there had a checkbook. The doors to rooms there didn't close, and there was no morning room with chess and visitors. No one went back into the wards but the insane, and they were qualified by their numbers of ailments and shipped off to specific floors based on the level of malady. Pills came in little paper cups, and the place had it's own fucking court, specifically with a supreme court judge that listened to requests not to be involuntarily given meds. Day fucking in, and day fucking out.
Being strapped down was the default.
The walls were all the same, regardless of floor; yellow. And the sounds were the same, too. Screams, tantrums, nonsense. Loud, and there was no way to get away from it. It was endless, and sound carried easily out of the six seclusion rooms that each floor used copiously. Medicate was the mandate, and there were zombies everywhere. In the halls, in the rooms, in group meetings and at meals.
19 North was labeled the "dual disorder" ward. Over fifty percent of the patients had some kind of dependence on drugs or alcohol, but those admitted for that reason and something more ended up there, on the loudest ward in the hospital. From zombie to ranting and back again, heads against walls, and nearly every paper cup contained Haldol. Patients drooled, and supervised outings involved orderlies taking the non-suicidal patients to the roof, where they could walk in a circle as they salivated and breathed in New York's smog.
But Sam, in Bellevue's blue's and with no one she wanted to call to bring her real clothes, wasn't allowed onto the roof. So, she sat in the group room, on one of the green vinyl chairs, knees hugged to her chest, and she listened. She listened to the woman at the window, who cried about wanting to be outside. She listened to the man with HIV in the corner, who screamed about not having a reason to live. She listened to the woman at her side, who told stories of a childhood with a father's hands all over her. She listened as the man at the door insisted he was God. She listened as the woman on the floor of the room was dragged out, kicking and screaming, to seclusion.
Head down against her knees, she'd tried to tell the fucking doctors she didn't need to be there. It was the crack, yeah? The traffic thing, and she didn't like the shit anyway. Heroin, she told them, was her thing, and they informed her that schizophrenics had coke addictions, and bipolar patients medicated with heroin, and she tried to fucking explain, but they didn't listen. They just scribbled when she talked, and the little paper cups kept coming three times a day. And, yeah, ok, she fought at first, but seclusion was barely big enough to stand, and she couldn't fucking breathe in there.
So, she sat quiet, and she listened, and she learned. The girl in the third room from the door, she got to go on the roof, even if she wasn't the right level, and all because the midday orderly liked her. The girl who got the best bacon at breakfast, she was cute and smiled a lot at the cook. The doctors gave more privileges to the patients that were quiet, that didn't cause trouble, and she couldn't blame them for that. Her ward alone housed 40 fucking people, most of them homeless, most of them addicts, and a well-behaved patient stood out. Homeless and addicted, missing teeth and with leathery faces, and a young girl stood out. They were nuggets of gold in a pile of shit, yeah? She sat quiet, and she listened, and she learned.
Because she would get out of here eventually, and she was sure of one fucking thing - just one. She would rather die than come back to this place, than come back to anyplace like it. Here, the monsters in the night were fucking real. Not just the orderlies, not just the fucking janitors or workers, but it was the worst kind of homeless shelter, yeah? It was the exact same fucking people, and life had made them all fucking unhinged. Biology, the shrinks said. Yeah, maybe, but Sam listened to the stories all around her. This wasn't biology; this was life. Life fucking with people, breaking them and setting them back together wrong.
And whatever the fuck happened next, she wasn't ending up back here. She didn't give a fuck what she needed to do. She listened, and she planned, and she smiled often in her Bellevue blues.