Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with their world.
Karl A. Menninger, psychiatrist (1893-1990)
Your tour begins in the basement. That’s where you’ll find the laundromat and cafeteria.
There’s always somebody fighting over the tumbling dryers. “I was here first, motherfucker. Go find your own.”
And the only time there isn’t a ruckus in the dining hall is between ten p.m. and six a.m. when it’s closed to the patients. During service hours, the constant commotion of metal against hard surfaces pierces your ears: a pot or pan or dish slammed on a stove, sink or table; a tray of swill fouling the floor; a chair tossed against a wall. If you weren’t over the edge already, it’s enough to make you crazy.
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You’re in the bowels of the state mental hospital—Western Missouri Mental Health Center— although they don’t like to call it a hospital and instead of calling them patients, they’re called residents because there’s nothing patient about them. What they want, they want now. And what they get is never what they want.
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This has been Mia’s home for the last several months. Resentfully, after being pressed into it by staff, spurned by family, she signed herself in and shares an austere room with a woman twice her age who exaggerates everything and has panic attacks that come on without warning.
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“You have to take the bed by the window. I cannot be near a window. Somebody make her take the bed by the window.”
Mia does not want to be this woman. If Mia were not on the third floor, and if the window opened, she’d shimmy down the impassable bricks on knotted sheets. As it is, she endures the draft and the constant dry cough—in her bed beneath the window.
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There’s been some progress in that Mia is calm, sedated. The manic in her has been domesticated by modern medicine. She remains more inert than depressed, but half the battle is half the battle. She spends most of her time in front of the television. Bureaucracy makes minimal demands. Catherine visits. Every Sunday, in fact, when Michael goes to their mother’s for dinner, he knows without a word from her, that she wants to be taken to one of two places, if not both—the hospital to see Mia and/or the cemetery to be near Silvio. Mia hasn’t forgiven Michael for putting her there but he visits too. He would prefer to wait for Catherine in the car, but then who would guide her through labyrinthine WMMH?
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Visitors are restricted to cheerfully-decorated meeting rooms where they are protected from the worst cases throwing private paroxysms elsewhere. Like the residents, visitors are lulled by the subdued profusion of blue throughout the facility, anything and everything carefully calculated to minimize overstimulation.
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“It looks like a nice place,” Catherine observes. She doesn’t want to touch anything, leaves her coat on, always brings something homemade to eat which Mia accepts but later, lobs in the garbage or intentionally leaves out for her rattled roommate to steal.
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Mia avoids her mother’s eyes because she knows in them Catherine would see the truth.
Their conversation is limited and brief. Are you eating? What can I bring you? Do they treat you good? Mia knows better than to be difficult or negative. They would blame her regardless. It is she who is here, after all, not them.
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Mia permits her mother’s visits only to make her suffer. In the process, however, it is she who suffers more and so, she eventually puts Catherine in the same blame box where she’s put Michael, and refuses any of their future requests to come see her. The staff go along with some resident requests to keep them pacified and to foster the belief that they are their allies, not their enemies, and that they still have control over their own lives, which they do not. Still, no one is fooled.
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By November, Mia hasn’t convinced anybody that she’s ready to leave this prison. Even if she were, she has no place to go. She’d die before she’d return to any of the Marchesis. Her own family—her daughters—are all she wants but Rob won’t permit it. The few friends who’ve stood by her in the past have lives of their own. Her situation is hopeless, loveless.
Until she meets Edward.
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He plants himself in the fourth floor TV room as often and as long as she does, but she’s never noticed him before. Everyone looks alike here after a while: head bowed or shaky; clothes drab and food-stained; eyes glazed, tranquilized.
There’s a TV room on Mia’s floor, every floor for that matter, but she descends to two or climbs the stairs to four to escape the people on her floor, who she doesn’t want to get close to. They’re either mean or touchy-feely, squabbling or attaching themselves to one another, and she wants no fights or attachments. Today, it’s four.
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Sitting behind Mia, Edward lights one cigarette after the other and keeps clearing his throat. The smoke irritates her and the throat clearing distracts her from the dialogue coming from the soap opera channel on the television. Unaccustomed to helping anyone else in need, Mia turns and offers him a cough drop from the supply she hoards in her sweater pocket.
He smiles, “I seen you here before.”
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Edward is a slender, geeky-looking young man. He has soft gray eyes and delicate features, as if he’d been deprived sustenance at an early age, the opportunity to grow and thrive. The hair on his head is thin and while not quite a comb-over, shrouds a high shiny forehead. He seems to favor brown. Brown shoes, brown slacks, brown and yellow flannel shirt. He looks like a shadow of the adult male version of high school Mia.
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She moves to a different chair to get away from him and he follows her. She moves again. He moves again. Others in the room complain; they holler for them to sit down and stay down. “Are we playing musical chairs?” someone taunts. Mia exits the room and heads for the stairs; she vows not to use the fourth floor TV room anymore.
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Edward is behind her. She walks fast. He walks faster. He catches up with her in the stairwell, where they are alone. When he is close enough to touch her, he reaches out.
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Mia screams, “Get away from me!”
Edward is stunned by her reaction and backs off. Sinking to a step, he begins to cry. Two risers above him, Mia turns, staring. She wants to say she’s sorry but the words don’t come.
“I just thought we could be friends,” Edward tells her.
It is the last thing she wants—a friend—but she has to admit the adversary thing isn’t working for her. Besides, a true friend is hard to come by in this place where distrust is endemic. Harder yet to find someone who believes they don’t belong here. Everybody thinks they don’t but Edward and Mia believe. She sits beside him. They don’t have to speak. They empathetically understand one another’s pain.
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