Boyd Ainslie | Red Riding Hood (ex_sanguine300) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2009-12-26 15:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | red riding hood |
Who: Boyd
What: A narrative
Where: Her doctor's office
When: After Christmas
Warnings: If asylums or mental drugs are triggery, might want to steer clear.
For Boyd, Mondays always started in the same way. Dr. Hailburn for pills, then across the hall to Dr. Charles for lies.
Boyd's first visit to a psychiatrist had included a week's institutionalization at a psychiatric hospital, or, as it was deceptively named, a Retreat. She was 10. It had been a posh thing, paid for by her grandmother. The sheets had been pure Egyptian cotton, and therapy included paraffin hand treatments and soothing massages and rooms where the padding on the walls imitated expensive white upholstery, while the straitjackets had designer buckles and didn't chafe and leave marks.
By her next visit to an institution, things had changed considerably. She'd been '1215'ed, or involuntarily committed. She was 13. It was called a Mental Health center but there was nothing healthy about it. It was dirty and scary. The floors were grey-stained linoleum, and the windows had crisscrosses of wire on the outside, and people screamed at all hours of the day. Her voice just blended with the rest. During visiting hours, no one came to see her.
She had started lying.
She'd been terrible at first, but she'd watched carefully, seeing how the others did it during the group sessions in the center. A 1215 meant you couldn't be released until the doctors said you were no longer a threat, and finding the perfect lie was something that was whispered about after the lights went dark for those sane enough to try it.
It had taken her a month.
Getting used to functioning through the fog of the medicines had taken longer. The Clozapine, she only took when the ghosts were being very bad. The Prozac was a daily thing. The Lithium she kept bottles full of in the top drawer, refilling it only in the unlikely event that her doctor might check. The Xanax was her candy.
That particular Monday, she sat down in the plush chair that Dr. Charles reserved for patients - as if the softness of the cushions would somehow improve things - and she was, as ever, cognizant of the levels of the institution just overhead. She thought she could hear the screaming through the ceiling, even though she couldn't. And she was, as she always was, worried that one wrong answer could land her upstairs, instead of out the front door.
"How was your holiday?"
The question he posed was innocuous on the surface, but Boyd knew better. "I had a real nice time. Remember I told you 'bout my cousin Mikey? I went to Midnight Mass with him and his, and then I slept over there and opened presents." A carefully-placed, happy smile as she showed him the earrings she was wearing, the necklace, the shawl. "And I got a real pretty music box. We had stockings in the building I live in too, and I got two tickets to the Nutcracker, which I gotta figure out who to take to before next week, and I got certificates to go to the salon on New Years with a few girls in the building, and some real nice books." She didn't mention France. A single ticket would be too hard to explain.
"Any visual hallucinations since we last saw you?"
She shook her head. "Oh, no. Not a one. I really think this new medicine is working. It's so nice not to be scared to sleep nights."
He hesitated. "And the man you're seeing, what did he give you?"
Boyd knew better than to hesitate, better than to try to narrow her fake 'love' down to any one man in her head. She'd created him when she moved to New York, because healthy relationships always made therapists happy. "Oh, him," An intentionally fond and happy smile lit up her face. "We did gifts on the 23rd. We went skating, you know, down in front of that big tree. And he took me to this place called Serendipity for frozen cocoa. You oughta try it. It's heaven, it really is. And he read me Shakespeare. Have you ever heard sonnet 116? It's real pretty. You should read it to your wife. She'd like that. It's real romantic." Another sweet smile. "And he got us tickets to Paris. I ain't been since my momma was alive." Wistful yearning, this time honest. "I'd love to see it again."
She smiled at him, but he didn't smile back. Instead, he told her warmly to wait right there, and he left her alone in the room. She twisted her fingers in the ends of her shawl nervously, and she let the fabric go as soon as she heard him come back in the room. He handed her another prescription, obtained from across the hall, this time for Ritalin, and he sat down and talked to her about the consequences of lying.
The next hour involved soothing statements and open-ended questions about not living in her fantasies, and about realizing that reality could be better than dreams. They didn't touch on self-destructive behavior or dead things or hallucinations or blood, and she knew she'd be walking out the front door that day. Living in fantasies wasn't severe enough for the state to be willing to finance a stay in their hotel.