Page 45 of The Locked Ward

Every day, every hour, sometimes every minute in this place requires a series of mental calculations.

You eye potential steps you can take like they’re stones across an angry river.

You try to identify ones that seem to promise the sturdiest footing, a momentary reprieve from slipping and being swallowed by the dark, turbulent water.

Your current high-stakes challenge is determining whether it will be safer for you to attend the court hearing on your competency or have a representative stand in on your behalf.

Your fingers itch for a device. You haven’t broken your reliance on having an answer always at your fingertips.

You yearn to research what will happen at such a hearing, and what the odds are of an accused individual being found competent.

It’s agonizing knowing the information is just a few feet away in the nurses’ station behind the wall of plexiglass, where computers and phones are kept.

It’s probably safer to have a representative go, you finally decide.

You have no idea what questions will be asked or what metrics will be employed to gauge your state of mind.

The judge and psychiatrist are experts in this scenario.

You’re an amateur. They might trip you up, and you could be transported to a maximum-security jail in a matter of hours.

You aren’t the first person to try to beat the system.

Yesterday you overheard the nurses discuss the story of a man who murdered his wife in cold blood in Seattle.

The man fled the scene and drove to the East Coast and voluntarily committed himself into a Washington, DC, unit, claiming he had intrusive thoughts of killing himself.

He thought he’d found a safe harbor. But it took the FBI only two days to track him down.

They employed a sting operation, dressing like nurses and telling the man his blood pressure was so high he needed to be checked by a cardiologist on another floor of the hospital.

They knew it would agitate the other patients to see a potentially violent arrest; they were biding their time.

The undercover agents led the man out through the series of locked doors, treating him solicitously. The minute the doors closed behind him, they tackled him to the floor and cuffed him. He’s serving a life sentence now.

You almost threw up after you heard that story.

But there’s another terrifying risk that could emerge from the hearing.

You currently have the right to refuse medication.

But if that right is taken away from you by a court order, you will be forced to take the drugs the nurses continue to offer you several times a day.

They can’t make you swallow pills. But they can—and will—inject medicine into your body through a needle.

You’ve seen them do it a dozen times to others.

Your mind is your only weapon right now.

But it’s more finely honed than it has ever been.

In this surreal place, you’ve found extreme mental clarity.

Devoid of a constant barrage of input, your brain is reorganizing itself, allowing memories tucked in its long-term storage space to float into your consciousness, as crisply preserved as a flower pressed between the pages of a book.

Two more lines from your college psych paper float back to you: Antipsychotics given to a mentally healthy individual can cause the same symptoms they are intended to relieve. They alter brain chemistry and can cause mania, impaired cognition, twitching, and extreme agitation.

In other words, this place can make you insane.

There are no clocks in this facility, but sometimes, at night, you swear you hear one ticking in sync with your heartbeat.

Time is everything to you now, because this will end soon.

And it can only end in one of three ways: You stay in the locked ward until you go insane and die.

You go to jail and die quickly. Or Mandy risks her own life to save you.

You have to call her, today, and show your hand. You can’t whisper this information over the phone; there may be listeners. You need to tell Mandy that the PI you hired to find her worked another job for you recently.

You need to tell her what he discovered.