The Accident
By Mary Barnet

       "No matter," she thought. They had been ushered into an office in the admitting area. She was being admitted voluntarily. The clerk gave her a form detailing her rights. She carefully put it in her purse. Robert stood by smiling a nervous smile, which was meant to be reassuring. She was almost ready to go upstairs. She sat in an alcove while her suitcase and purse were searched for matches, sharp instruments, glass objects and drugs. Her brother, Robert, said good-bye to her; he was glad that at least this part of the ordeal was over. He met Dr. Gordon, who had come to check on his charge. They stood a few minutes talking in the hallway. Carrie felt very alone. Finally the doctor approached he. "We'll get you upstairs and settled down as soon as we can." he said. "An aide will be here soon to take you up."

    It was not strange to her that her son Johnny was not here. For although Robert knew he was vacationing, Carrie believed that she had killed Johnny.

    Carrie had slept fitfully. In her memory father and son were one. She no longer knew the difference between her dreams and reality. Slowly and deliberately she walked to her son's bedroom. This was the room which long ago she had shared with her husband. She pushed the door to the bedroom open and walked very quietly to the edge of the bed. She lifted her arms and placed her hands around his throat. Suddenly the room began to spin and she fell on him. Johnny awakened almost before he felt her hands on his Adam's Apple. Although at this age he had come to expect irrational behavior from his mother, he was still surprised. "Wha-aat!" He pulled his body back from the murderous grasp of his mother. Carrie screamed and then fainted dead away on the floor. Her body shook and then fell quiet. After a few moments he saw that her eyes were open.

    "Mother," he repeated over and over, but she could not be budged. Her eyes focused on some distant, invisable object. Lost as she was in a world of bad dreams, she knew that he was dead. She had killed him! In her mind there was some sort of terrible justice to the fact that she had killed her son. Likewise, what she had loved must, by some cruel reasoning, die as it was born, by her touch.

    An aide came and met her. They entered the elevator. On the fourth floor they passed through a heavy metal door and Carrie could feel what it was like to be on a locked ward as they passed through that portal. Thje aide walked Carrie to her room, leaving her seated on the floor in deep thought. Her charge nurse arrived. She was an attractive blond with a page-boy. She was in her twenties. She opened the door a bit and asked, "May I come in?" She pushed the door aside and entered despite the fact that Carrie had not answered her.

    Johnny had gone abroad. Carrie could barely bring herself to move. She was convinced that her son was dead. She was afraid to touch the world again after her anger had taken it's toll.

    When Johnny's father died, she and her son were alone together. He grew up quickly. They were very close. This son of hers became a man before her eyes. Somehow this seemed wrong; she felt there was a special sweetness to their love. But Johnny was maturing and she was no longer the most important thing in his life.

    What she really wanted was Johnny's father. She came into his room at night to see and remember her long dead husband. That night she awakened from a deep sleep and went down the hall to Johnny's room. She awakened him. In the fleeting memory of this dream, she kissed him. It was as though he was child and man in one moment.

    Carrie could not speak to the nurse. They parted on less than happy terms. Carrie wandered out of the music room. There she sought refuge. Others gathered there, too. The group of patients sat and smoked their cigarettes. Carrie did not smoke but the room served her purpose anyway. The others passed the light from one cigarette to another after one of their company had gotten a light from a staff member. She liked the music room best when night was approaching and in the emptiness of this place she was able to escape from herself for a few minutes.

    It was in the music room that she met with Dr. Gordon. "I want you to know, doctor, that your words are not in vain. I have not abandoned my sanity," said Carrie.

    "Do you know why you are here?" the doctor responded.

    "I accept my guilt. I knew what I was doing when I killed Johnny. I could not bear the pain in his eyes when he looked at me. "

    Her nurse and an aide sat silently on the couch and listened intently. They already knew Carrie's feelings about her son. The doctor expressed a hope they would get closer to the problem.

    "What did he do that was so bad?" asked Dr. Gordon.

    Carrie found him to be too close to her for comfort. She shrunk from her psychiatrist and slowly curled herself into a ball in her chair. A deep sound rose from her throat like a trapped flower trying to escape from within her. At a nod from Dr. Gordon, the nurse and an aide half walked and half carried her back to the room that could only be her temporary lodging; not the path o damnation, but for Carrie, to hell itself.

    It was early a.m. and patients were lined up outside the examination room waiting for blood tests. Some were new patients and some were on Lithium, a drug for which frequent blood tests were required. Carrie knew by their presence that it was either Tuesday or Thursday. The old woman who had questioned Carrie the evening before was there. It was early and most of them were too sleepy to talk much, but they spoke to one patient in particular, a young girl. It was a long wait, as usual, but as this girl finally entered the examination room, the women began to chatter about her.

    "If she fixed herself up she would be lovely."

    Another said, "She needn't wear make-up. I have never worn make-up in all my sixty years. It's bad for the complexion."

    Carrie had sat down with these patients in the hallway, but presently got up and walked away. She went into the music room. A group of patients waited there for ECT, or Electoshock Therapy.

    The aide in charge saw Carrie and exclaimed, "So there you are. Where were you? I was looking all over for you."

   She reached out to Carrie and pushed her down into a chair. Half-asleep, most of the patients, so rudely awakened, glanced about the room fearfully. The shock treatments were not pleasant and everyone was afraid. Carrie was terrified for the first time and now began to be ever more fearful.

Part II

    They went upstairs in the elevator, carefully guided and guarded by two aides. She entered the room and, as an aide motioned to her, she lay down on the bare table, She was given a shot of sodium pentathol and immediately lost consciousness.

    When she awakened she was sore and she soon became black-and-blue where the pads had been that held her down. She had been wrenched by the shock of the electricity passing through her body. She had expienced a convulsion which seemed as long and lost and painful as the rest of her life. Carrie reached a plateau of existance where one need not think or even be awake; and she need not remember her emotional pain. She was lost in a struggle purely of her cells and muscles, hoping, daring to wish at last that she might live.

    The treatment made her forgetful but did not obscure her longterm memory. Carrie lay on a bed emerging into the daylight from out of the mist. Once again he was alive, the husband who died so long ago. Although it wasn't true, she remembered him as looking, when he stood over her, looking like her father atsnding over her bed. She didn't remember more. There was pain here somewhere deep. She did not remember her father. Not quite consciously, Carrie declared out loud:"I do not remember him."

    Her father died when she was eleven. She thought it was her evil fear and her wish for that drunken man to die that killed him.

    Carrie rose from her bed and wandered out into the hall. Jeanette wisked by her. Jeanette was singing; she always sang. She was only a child really, about 17 years old. But her singing bothered the rest of the floor - those who were rational enough to be bothered by it. One man complained. The head nurse put Jeanette in Isolation: a barren, dark and dirty little room. There was a soiled matress on the floor, but no blankets or sheets or pillow. There was no furniture. Obviously many people had spent part of their time in hell in this room. The head nurse explained that besides disturbing Jim, Jeanette was over-stimulated and was hallucinating. Some of the patients said that the head nurse was a sadist. Perhaps this was more visable in attitude than in action. The fact is that he was a sadist, but was often quite nice to those patients he favored.

    That night Carrie heard Jeanette call out through the door of the Unit, as Isolation was sometimes called. Carrie did not pause, but passed her by. She felt that this would never happen to her. But the dark time came, when the light of the world as we know it retreated and Carrie fell into a world totally her own. She felt that the hospital was a prison camp and was afraid that she would be killed. She was genuinely afraid for her life. She could not think of a way to get help until she noticed the fire alarm on the wall in the hall for the first time. She rang it in a loud call for help. But she was seen and then put in Isolation, She bolted when they called her but a male nurse caught her when she tried to run.

   Alone in Isolation, a great fearful darkness gathered around her. She called for help again and again. An aide sat expressionless beside the door as she lay and called out underneath it. Finally a nurse came.

    "I don't want to play games," the nurse said. "Just lie still and I will give you another injection. It is medicine. It will make you feel better."

    Carrie lay still. Who would help her? No one she realized. She was truly alone and helpless. As the medication took effect, Carrie's heart slowed and then she drifted off to sleep.

    Carrie dreamed that her father chased her and that she could not hide but instead jumped from a high window headless of the fall. She remembered even now that her great fear, as she fell, was that someone would see that she was naked. Carrie accepted the guilt even for things that were not her fault. As her son's youth passed into adulthood she felt that even this was her fault.

    After the incident with the fire alarm, the doctor decided to have Carrie see her son.Robert had been forced to explain to her son the nature and scope of her illness.

    That afternoon Johnny sat in the psychiatrist's office with the doctor as his mother was led in by an aide. Robert waited outside. He was very positive and wondered out loud why they had not tried this tack before.

    But Carrie was too far gone. Her eyes were glazed and she did not react when Dr. Gordon spoke to her.

    "Your son is here to see you," the doctor said.

    "I knew a man like you, long ago," she said without any expression on her face and only sadness in her voice.

    The psychiatrist looked at Johnny, in whose eyes tears welled up. "At least let me remember her as she was," he said, "She doesn't even remember me. That's not my mother! At least let me remember her as she was. What can I do? The mother I knew is dead!"

    Johnny glanced disdainfully at Dr. Gordon. Together they looked with deep and abiding regret at the empty hull of the mother he only vaguely remembered. Johnny reached out and grabbed the doorknob, which felt dirty and oily to him. He knew it had been held hopefully by many, but he could find no hope but only the utter defeat of the human soul. As Johnny left, Robert saw with an uncle's loving eyes that the young man had given up on his mother.

    The struggle to survive had exhausted Carrie. She slipped deeper and deeper into a fantasy world and into her depression. She no longer hoped for anything. She felt, in fact she knew that her time was passed. She was like someone drowning in a swimming pool when they grasp at the sides but keep slipping away and falling down again and again into the water. She was weary. She no longer knew who or where she was. Even in the nightmares which haunted her sleep nothing was real. Time stretched before her as the bloody diagram of a war that could not be won.

    Carrie was unaware that time had passed but actually it had been three months since she had checked into the hospital. In a few days time the change finally occured. As if the room had been full of smoke and someone opened the window, the air cleared. Carrie was relieved the shock therapy was over.

    "Medication, medication. Please come to the dayroom for your medication," the intercom called out.

    Carrie rose from her chair and went into the dayroom. On a cart with about fifty little drawers, pills were arranged in small cups. She reached out without words - the medication nurse recognized her - and took the cups that were offered her. One had several pills in it and one was full of juice. "The vitamin C will do you good," said the nurse in a cynical but humorous tone.

    Today Carrie did not return to her room to sleep, as she had done so many times in the preceeding months. Dr. Gordon seemed to think that she was returning to health. She had seen him this morning. He felt she could return homee soon.

    Johnny was happy when his mother spoke to him but he kept his distance. He was very uncomfortable with the fact that Carrie had reservations about acknowledging him as her son. Although intellectually she knew he was her son, she still believed she had strangled him. Dr. Gordon was aware of this, but expected her delusions to recede slowly.

    The doctor decided to let Carrie return home to her apartment on West 88th Street in Manhatten. A practical nurse would stay with her for at least a few weeks, or possibly a few months.

    Her brother, Richard came to pick her up. The doctor was there to sign the release. Dr. Gordon shook Carrie's hand and made her feel warm and good. Spring had arrived and that made her feel warm and good too.

    "Johnny will be staying with me," Robert said. "That's one fine young man! Doing well in college too. He asked about you first thing he arrived here," said Robert stretching the truth somewhat.

    Robert had a taxicab waiting and presently they were riding through Central Park. He told her, "The new nurse, Geneva, will meet us at your apartment."

    Carrie hoped that Robert would not call the nurse, Geneva, a fine woman, but he did. She never could stand his disgusting positivity.

    Johnny was glad he would not be responsible for his mother. They had been close in the preceeding years, it was true, but he was more concerned with his new-found life as a freshman at Dartmouth that he was with her. He was a conscientious student. More important he found his mother almost impossible to explain to his new-found girlfriend.

    Once more at home,Carrie settled down. Geneva slept in Johnny's old room. Johnny and Robert both visited her frequently. She did well for awhile, but soon began to feel that Geneva was patronizing her. In rebellion, she began to refuse her medication. She became moody.

    The nurse waited until Johnny was there. She asked him, in Carrie's presence, to insist on her taking her medication. Carrie felt this was a powerplay and lost control of herself.

    "The doctor said that you must take your medication regularly or you will become ill again," Johnny said with weariness in his voice.

    Carrie was panicking already. "You can't tell me what to do! I'm not going back to the hospital." She was edging backward and nearing the window, eight stories up. She acted on impulse. She leaned out the window, daring them to stop her, and show that they cared.

    "I'm your mother. You should show some respect for me!"

    Johnny lunged forward to stop her. As he grabbed her, Geneva grasped her left arm. Carrie was flailing her arms. Losing his grasp on her right arm, Johnny lost his balance. As Geneva pulled Carrie forward, Johnny fell eight stories to the street below.

Mary Barnet