Page 5 of The Locked Ward

Here are the things you cannot do on the locked ward: possess a pen, earrings, shoelace, drinking glass, or pair of fingernail clippers.

You can’t wear your own clothes until you are no longer deemed a suicide risk.

Fabric can be twisted and used as a noose; same with belts.

You can’t drink coffee that is hot enough to burn yourself or others.

You can’t choose your own mealtimes. You can’t have trash bags because you can use them to suffocate yourself or others.

You can’t lock the door to your room because there is no lock.

Here are the things you can do: You can watch a skinny guy with pale, pitted skin raise a fist, yelling that he’s going to kill the man next to him for hiccuping, and see four male aides swoop in and hustle him away.

You can wear green pajamas that identify you as a patient of this floor in case you manage to escape.

During art, you can follow the therapist’s suggestion and use stubby crayons to color a picture of something that makes you happy.

After lunch, you can step into the rooftop courtyard and look up at the lone, skinny tree growing in the center, straight as an arrow, as if it wants to get as far away from this place as fast as possible.

The only other items in the courtyard are two plastic picnic tables with attached benches that are bolted to the ground.

Their bright colors stand out against the dingy cement floor and towering, reinforced metal fences.

You can’t see any other buildings or people on the outside.

You’re as isolated as a bird in a cage in the middle of a desert because this facility was built on top of a hill, originally designated to house tuberculosis patients in the early 1900s.

You learned about tuberculosis in school: It was called the “white plague” and rendered victims listless and pale.

The patients here could be their ghosts, drifting aimlessly through the halls a century later.

You can also lie in bed and count the number of dots in the ceiling tiles, losing your place over and over and going back to the beginning again.

You can feel yourself slipping away, your identity dissolving, as if acid is dripping over it.

There’s no shiny mirror in which to see yourself, only reflective metal.

No journal to jot down your secrets. No smartphone that once held your busy calendar and an album of the cutest ugly dogs you’ve spotted.

You also have no visitors scheduled, even though they are allowed to come.

Your parents wish you didn’t exist; your mother spat those very words at you as you were taken away.

You don’t have a boyfriend or husband, and even if you did, you wouldn’t want him to see you like this.

The press would eat their own families for the chance to get in and shout questions and blind you with cameras flashing like fireworks, but they’re not permitted.

Friends? Sure, you have them, but you can’t endure seeing them.

They’d be a reminder of everything you’ve lost, with their layered gold necklaces and jasmine-scented perfume and wide-open futures.

If they hugged you, you would shatter. Then they would disappear through the series of locked doors that lead to the outside.

And the staff would notice your emotion.

You would be viewed with suspicion. The eyes on you would sharpen.

The only way to survive is to be like the others and fade into a ghost. To embrace the strange rhythms of this place.

To completely lose track of time in the hopes that it will go faster until one day, you can convince the doctors and the judge that you’re rehabilitated and no longer a danger to anyone.

Unless Mandy comes. Then everything will change.

But maybe she won’t. You could spend years here without having a single visitor.

You have reached number 642 of the dots in the ceiling tile when a nurse enters your room.

“Mandy Ravenel is here to see you,” he says.