Читать книгу The Blind - A.F. Brady - Страница 9

I’m kneeling on the floor in my office, tying the top of the garbage bag into a knot and squeezing out the excess air as I do it. The maintenance guys always leave extra bags at the bottom of the garbage can, so I can replace this one with a fresh one and just dump the tied-off bag into the bin. I find this is the most discreet way of hiding the rank stench of alcohol when I throw up into my garbage can. I want to believe that my tolerance is high enough that I never throw up, but the truth is, more often than not, I find myself on my knees in my office the morning after.

My name is Sam. I’m a psychologist, and I work in a mental institution. It’s not like the ones you see in Rain Man or Girl, Interrupted. It’s in Manhattan. It doesn’t have sprawling grassy lawns and manicured hedges. It doesn’t have wide hallways and eleven-foot doors like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It smells like a combination of antiseptic and bubble gum because they added bubblegum scent to the antiseptic. The lights are fluorescent and the toilets are always broken. The elevator is the size of an airplane hangar and it’s always full. I’ve been working here for six years and I’ve never been in the elevator alone. Someone pushes the alarm button every day.

The ceiling tiles in the unit have leak stains in the corners. All the doors are painted gray and have oval windows with chicken wire in the glass. Except the office doors. There are no windows on the office doors, and they’re painted pale yellow. They all have paper signs on them saying things like Lunch and In Session and Do Not Disturb. We have to make new ones pretty regularly because patients write stuff on the signs.

It always feels like once you walk through the front doors, the world gets smaller. It’s impossible to hear outside sounds and, even though I’m in the loudest city on Earth, I can’t hear it in here. There’s only one group room that faces the sun and that’s where the plants are, but it’s always dusty and no one likes to go in there.

We have a lot of different kinds of patients here, 106 of them. The youngest is sixteen and the oldest is ninety-three. The oldest used to be ninety-five, but he died a few months ago. There’s one wing where the men live and another wing where the women live, and pretty much everybody has a roommate. If a patient is violent or something, they can get a single room. Once patients find this out, they almost always become violent. What they don’t realize is that a single room is just a double room with an accordion divider running through the middle, and when the room splits, someone loses a window. The institution is called the Typhlos Psychiatric Center and I’ve never asked why.

It feels fraudulent and silly and sometimes even comical, but I’m not any different from anyone else here. The clinicians are supposed to instill hope. We’re supposed to take our talents and patience and hard-earned degrees and apply our education to the betterment of others. We pride ourselves on having it all together. We fancy ourselves the shepherds. We are told that this is noble and upstanding work, and a benefit to society. But it’s all a pile of shit. We’re no different from them. There’s no line in the sand. In the end, we don’t have canyons that divide us. We barely have a fissure. I have a key and an office and they don’t. I came here to save them; they can’t save me. But sometimes, the lines get blurred. People say “If you can’t do, teach.” Well, if you can’t save yourself, save someone else.