Pray It All Away: Ongoing Fiction About Hettie Masterson

When I visited my sister in the psych ward, people thought I was the patient.

This bothered and still bothers me to no end. I’m better than those people. I’m no psych patient. I’m never going to be that stupid, that incompetent, that crazy and uninhibited and evil and senseless and disgusting and shameful. I’m better than my sister and I’m not ashamed to think it, though of course I’m ashamed to say it, because I’d get some backlash if I said it.

I recognized Berele the moment he opened his mouth to say hi, and not a second later. He was followed by Erik, then finally Pierre passed through the metal detector and grabbed his stuff off the smallish conveyor belt on the other side of the baggage x-ray machine, and the three of them headed right over to me.

“What are you doing here? Not feeling so good?” Erik said.

“It’s not me,” I said without even saying hi or asking why they’re there. “It’s my sister, Orla.”

“Orla’s in the hospital?” Berele said.

I lost my temper. “Why did you think it was me? And what are you doing here? Are you in the fucking hospital? Why did you think I was?”

I noticed Pierre, looking redder and redder by the second. Then I noticed the fresh cuts on his arms. He was obviously the patient, come here for some mental health help. “Oh, Pierre, I’m so sorry,” I said. But I didn’t mean it.

I was there on an errand from my father, to bring Orla some of her stuff and ask her how to make her famous broccoli cheese rice.

I told Pierre, Berele and Erik so as soon as I could.

Then a security guard motioned me to follow him and I, embarrassed, hoping to God they or anybody else didn’t think I was a patient there, headed up to Orla’s unit.

“Hettie! What’s happening?”

I drop my watering can and feel stupid. Normal people don’t drop watering cans. Normal people don’t look like something’s happening. And normal people pay attention to what they’re doing when they’re doing it!

I look at my plants; I over-watered them. They’re swimming in water. I realize I emptied a four-gallon can of water into four pint-sized pots, each with a tiny plant in it.

“Oh, shit!” I blurt out. I pour out some of the water, onto the ground, onto Desiree’s shoes.

“Oh, sorry, Desiree!”

“You okay?”

“Yes. I was—daydreaming.”

Why do I sound so anxious? A normal person would just make a joke about it and MOVE ON.

You’re not normal, something in my mind says.

I’m not. I’m just like Pierre. Only I don’t cut myself. At least not physically. But mentally, I flog, bash and slash myself to ribbons on a minute-by-minute basis. But I deserve it. Because I’m not normal.

“Hettie, do you have a moment?” It’s Laurene, come up behind Desiree.

When me and Laurene are in the office here at the Davis Mental Health University Institute greenhouse, she says, “What is going on! If something’s up, tell me now.”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. First you rip a tree right off its roots in the ground, and you looked angry when you did it. Then you left the garden hose on and flooded the gazebo. I think you need a break.”

Don’t remind me. Please, please don’t remind me of my screwups.

“Do you want me to call your social worker?”

“I’m good,” I say.

If my social worker knows, so will my doctor. And then there will be questions. They’ll ask me if I’m eating. I’m not, but something keeps telling me I am too much. They’ll ask me if I’m sleeping. I’m not, but I need to stay awake not to lose sight of how much of a crazy, lazy, stupid, ugly, fat fuckup I am and how I need to try my best, though, of course, my best isn’t good enough. The best I can do is damage control.

They’ll ask if I’m taking my meds.

No, I’m not. They made me dysfunctional. So I went off them.

“Look, Hettie, you need to come to terms with the fact that you’re mentally ill. Why is that so hard to do? If I can do it, so can you.” Orla is standing over me.

I choke on my ramen noodles, sitting right there at the table. Why won’t she just leave me alone?

Orla’s face changes. “Who’s ‘she’?” Orla asks.

I realize I said “Why won’t she just leave me alone?” out loud.

“Sorry. Uh… just this girl who was hitting on me at the greenhouse.”

Of course, there is no such girl.

“Nobody’s hitting on you at the greenhouse. Who do you think is hitting on you? Desiree? Heidi? Laurene? I assure you, all those girls are straight as a ruler. None of them are interested in girls. And I thought you knew that. You talk about guys with them all the time. So are you telling me the truth?”

I get up and make a beeline for the door out of the kitchen. “One sec,” I say.

“Where do you have to go? Nowhere.”

She’s got me trapped. It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it: “Why are you doing this? Backing me into a corner!” I explode.

“Because I care.”

“Well, stop caring! I’m not mentally ill! And you’re causing problems for me psychologically; you’re going to make me mentally ill!”

“Hettie—you need to start admitting it and coming to terms with it. You need to let your social worker refer you to a psychologist, maybe he can he—“

“I don’t need help!” I shout.

I need to get out of here. My whole fucking family. Trying to drag me down by saying I’m mentally ill when Orla is the one who’s been hospitalized, my brother Jude is the one who’s in rehab, my uncle Joe is the one who’s on the street, my aunt Lindsay is the one who committed suicide, my mom is the one who abuses her meds and my dad is the one who has fourteen diagnoses and is on eighteen different medications at once!

I run into my room and lock the door. I grab some clothes and my journals. The journals take up almost my whole duffel bag; I only have room for two changes of clothes and my wallet containing my passport and my bank card and my bus pass and my medicare card. I wait for my family to go to bed. I don’t want to be secretive about leaving, but I don’t want them causing a stinking scene about me supposedly leaving because I’m supposedly mentally ill.

But when I open the door, duffel bag over my shoulder, at four in the morning, I find myself face to face with Orla, who is holding two plates of food. Damn! I should have listened at the door before opening it, then checked to see if the coast was clear outside! Maybe I am mentally ill! I’m so impulsive! I never think about what to do and how to do it before I do it! I’m so retarded, so executively challenged, so stupid, so simple.

I hate myself.

“Where are you going?” Orla and Dad ask at the same time. I realize Dad is behind her.

“None of your damn business!” I snap. Damn! That’ll arouse their suspicions! I should have just said “To a friend’s house!” Why couldn’t I have said that! So I say it: “To a friend’s house!”

“What friend?” Dad asks.

“Someone invited you over?” Orla asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “This guy I met at the Davis.”

“Who? Who is this person?” Dad asks.

“Samuel,” I say. Then I realize there was a Samuel in that Biblical movie we were watching last night. Why am I so bad at lying! Maybe I am stupid. Maybe I am dysfunctional… or just non-functional. Maybe I am mentally challenged and defective and ignorant and slow, foolish and useless and careless and sloppy. All at the same time, of course. The bad things just feed into each other, making each other worse.

“Who’s Samuel?” Orla asks.

“You’re not a convincing liar,” Dad says. “Use another name, at least!”

“It’s none of your business,” I say. I push past them, through the hallway and the kitchen, out the door onto the fire escape balcony.

“Hettie, where are you going! Where’s she going?” Mom is here now.

“Nowhere!” I shout.

A city bus comes rumbling up the street. I run down the rest of the fire escape, sure they’re following me. The bus driver sees me and stops a few feet before the bus shelter I’m headed toward, because he sees I have a heavy-ish load and there’s no one at the bus shelter.

“Hettie!” Orla screams.

I get on the bus. I look out the door just in time to see them standing at the bottom of the fire escape, their faces full of hurt, full of confusion, full of anger but at the same time full of worry and love. I feel bad; I really do. But I have to do what I have to do, to save myself from being seen as mentally ill.

I don’t know where I’m going to go; I just got on that bus to get away from my family. Maybe I’ll go to the Swiss Alps. I’ve always wanted to visit the Canadian ambassador there, to visit the bear pit in Berne nearby, go skiing, parasailing, bungee-jumping. Well, actually, I haven’t. I’ve always been too scared to. But now I’m not. Out with the old and on with the new. I am not going to be scared any more. I’m going to show them that I can do anything and everything I want to do, that I’m confident and powerful.

That I’m not mentally ill. JUST confident and powerful.

Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam. I’ve always wanted to live in a houseboat; maybe someone will rent one to me. I’ve also always wanted to see Anne Frank’s hiding place. Maybe I’ll feel her presence when I go there. I’ve always wanted to go to the Rijksmuseum too, see what’s there. And maybe rent a narrow little Dutch rowhouse along the canal with a narrow door and belled rooftop, and get a job cleaning houseboats or at a pizzeria or something, and bicycle to and from work.

Maybe I’ll go to Rome. I’ll take day trips to Florence while there and shop at the little street markets. In Rome, I’ll stay in a cheap little apartment that nevertheless will have a bidet in its bathroom. I’ve always found the lack of bidets in Canada so disgusting. Food is dirt cheap in Rome too, so it’ll be good. I’ll get a job cleaning houses, or mowing the grass at the Coliseum or something.

I’ve always wanted to visit the Vatican, have religious debates with the people there, and get lost in the catacombs (though I doubt they’ll let me do that).

Maybe I’ll go to Poland. I’ve always wanted to be a tour guide at Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto, and I know enough about both those places to do so potentially.

Maybe I’ll go to Germany. I’ll be sure to buy a cuckoo clock in a clock shop, a Swiss Army knife with eighty extensions in a knife shop, everything else in their uber-specialized shops, and a crate of German beer and some German sausage. I’ll visit the castles and cathedrals. And the beer hall. Maybe I’ll meet a nice normal German guy there and he’ll take me home with him.

I want to go to Austria and visit the town of Saltzburg, where The Sound Of Music takes place. Maybe go into the city of Vienna and dance in one of their ball halls or whatever they call it. I’ll meet a nice normal German guy there if I don’t at the beer hall.

Fuck it. I’ll go EVERYWHERE in the Eurozone. I’ll just get a Eurailpass. Then I can go everywhere in the Eurozone on the train.

But right now, I’m still in Montreal. I take the bus to the metro called Verdun, in the borough of Verdun.

That’s where I run into Allissa, my old friend from that group I went to at the Davis. I shouldn’t be surprised. Verdun is full of people from the Davis. People think nothing of someone talking to themself or crawling on the ground or panhandling or smoking pot or looking odd or yelling in the street here in Verdun.

She’s outside the metro smoking a cigarette.

“Hettie! Come over here! Unless you’re in a hurry. Where are you going?”

“To Europe,” I say. Then I get more confident. Confidence is key, not anxiety. Fuck anxiety.

“Wanna come?” I blurt out.

She looks at me like she isn’t sure whether I’m joking or not. Then she looks concerned.

“Seriously. Where are you going?”

“To Europe,” I repeat. “On a trip. Are you coming?”

“You want me to come?” She looks at me suspiciously, but not in a bad way. And that kills me. I wish she’d think I had some sort of ulterior motive, rather than her just thinking I’m mentally ill. I’d rather be bad than mad. Bad can be turned around with a little effort. But mad is out of your control. Bad is due to things that happened to you. Mad is due to things that are wrong with you. Or so I think.

“Remember in group when they asked us in what way we wanted to be informed when we were manic or depressed?” Allissa says.

“What’s your--?”

“Well, I’m going to inform you that you might be manic, and to be careful. Because if the shoe was on the other foot, I’d want you to do that for me.”

“I’m not mentally ill,” I say, glowering as hard as I can at her.

She looks like she wants to say “Yes you are,” but doesn’t have the guts. Instead she says “Hettie, you can be whoever and whatever you want to be. I think you’re really intelligent, and cool, and awesome, and sweet and kind. But you are bipolar. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

She sees how angry I am and stammers a little before continuing. “I’m bipolar too. I get manic and I get depressed. Do you have plans for Europe? A place to stay? A job? Friends there? Enough money? A plane ticket, even?”

“That’s none of your damn business,” I blurt out nastily. Then I say “Oh my God—I’m so sorry.”

But she doesn’t buy it. And I don’t blame her. I’m only sorry because she’s mad at me, not because I hurt her. She blows a stream of cigarette smoke out of her mouth angrily, haughtily, and stomps off. “Fine, then,” she mutters.

I’m on the metro, on my way to the Lionel-Groulx metro station, where I can catch the 747 bus to the airport. I’m feeling good, though rather guilty and bad about how I treated Allissa. I’ll have to call her and see how she’s doing and apologize. I forget the number for her group home, though. Oh well, there’s always Facebook.

The doors open at the Lionel Groulx metro station and I step out, and my heavy bag full of mostly books goes right in a skinny guy’s face and knocks him down.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“Hey! You watch where you put that!” the punkish-but-prissy-looking girl with him says. “You got him right in the face!”

My anger explodes. I haul off and punch her in the face. Then I grab my stuff and run, with them running after me yelling at me. Then security is here, talking to them, and they’re pointing at me as I get on the escalator and run up it with my bag. I need to get out of here. I need to get out of here. I run up the next flight of stairs; there’s no escalator. Then up the next escalator. I make it out the doors of the metro and over to the nearest bus. It’s the 191, not the 747, but who cares. I get on it. But then I see the screen thing at the front of the bus; it says the bus is leaving in five minutes. I can’t wait five minutes! I need to leave now!! Or they’ll catch me! And arrest me! Or worse, and more humiliating… they’ll take me to the Davis! Oh God, I can’t breathe. What if I have a panic attack in front of everyone on the bus?

Just do what they told you in group at the Davis. It’ll be fine. Breathe normally, and remember that it’s just a panic attack, and you aren’t going to die. Remember—

Remember you’re ugly, stupid, fat, incompetent, mentally ill, evil, crazy—

NO! STOP THAT! I need to stop remembering what I was thinking at the greenhouse yesterday!

If only I hadn’t taken that job at the greenhouse at the Davis. I only took it because I’m too lazy to get a real job, and can’t because of my executive dysfunction—NO! Don’t think like that! You can get a job! You can!

Even if it’s just cleaning houseboats in Amsterdam.

The bus pulls out. Just then, some officers from the STM (the transport society of Montreal) come running, and they get on the bus to check that everyone has a pass or a ticket. They want to make sure everyone paid. They get to me and check my pass.

It’s expired. Oh, right, it’s after midnight now and it’s the second day of the month, which is when the bus pass expires, which means this bus pass loaded onto my Opus card doesn’t work any more.

They give me a ticket. Not a bus ticket… a ticket as in a fine. And I have to get off the bus.

Well, that’s okay… I’ll just withdraw some cash and go to the airport on the next 747 bus.

I don’t want to go back into the station and use my ATM card there, so I walk many blocks up the hill to Cabot Square, up one block to the busy Sainte-Catherine street, and ten or so blocks (with all my heavy stuff, but it feels light to me today for some reason) to the nearest Toronto Dominion bank. But when I try to use my ATM card, it doesn’t take it.

But I just got that bank card the other day; I lost my other one and got a new one. And I used it just fine for the last few days. What is going on?

Then it hits me… my family. Orla and them.

My family once hid Orla’s bank card when she was manic. It didn’t matter; she went to the bank and got a new one.

What if my family called the bank pretending to be me and canceled my bank card because they think I’m manic?

Anger wells up in me.

Well, I’ll do what Orla did. I’ll get a new one.

But the bank is closed right now (I just tried to use the machine in the entrance). Oh well, just a few hours until it opens at six or eight or whenever. I’ll go for a walk. Nah; I’ve got too much stuff to walk far with. I’ll just walk over to Place Alexis Nihon and sit in the open-all-night McDonald’s and write a little. The McDonald’s is the only thing open in Alexis Nihon right now. Or anywhere.

So I go sit in the crowded McDonald’s. Nobody notices me because there are so many people. Good. I just need to wait till I can go to the bank and get a new bank card.

Suddenly, anger wells up inside me again. How dare they pretend to be me and cancel my bank card! I know they did it… they did that to my aunt Lindsay once too, when she was manic! They think I’m like her! They think I’m manic!

Those interfering BASTARDS.

Suddenly, I find myself at the payphone near one of Alexis Nihon’s side doors, calling them.

“Where are you? Come home!” is the first thing my mom says when she answers the phone.

“Nowhere,” I say. “Hey—you got any confessions to make? Like what you did to my bank card? Because I’m getting another one regardless of whether you did that to me!”

“I don’t know what—” she says.

Then I hear a voice over hers, from the background. “I called and cancelled her bank card. I said it was stolen. I was afraid of what she’d do.”

That was Orla. How dare she be so interfering! “Let me speak to her,” I say.

“If you’re just going to abuse her—”

“Let me speak to her,” I hear Orla say. She grabs the phone from my mom. “If you aren’t going to tell us where you are, that’s fine, but at least tell us what you’re doing.”

“Moving,” I say. “I obviously can’t say where.”

“With who?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Why?”

“Because you guys are—smothering. You always think I’m having an episode.”

“No, we don’t! We just always LATELY think you’re having an episode.”

Click. I hang up on her. Maybe she hung up on me too, but I doubt it; she wants me to go home.

I’m glad I don’t have a cell phone they can track. Or that they can get the police to track.

Back in McDonald’s, I run into Leah. Leah is another person from the Davis; someone I was in another group (the social anxiety group) with. (Allissa was in the bipolar group.) Leah says she’d invite me back to her place, a supervised apartment building on Tupper Street close to here, but they aren’t allowed to have visitors after hours when the staff aren’t there.

“Where you headed? Are you homeless right now?” Leah asks, concerned.

“Nope. I’m going to Europe.”

After Leah, who’s a lot of fun, earns my trust, I tell her all about all the horridness that happened this week (including how I got high on my Ativan to stop being so nervous and thus executively-dysfunctioned, and then ran out and became suicidal and took an overdose of gabapentin, only to see double for a few hours but have nothing happen to me), and also what happened yesterday and last night and this morning that just begun. So she keeps me company in McDonald’s until nine, when the staff get in at her place, and then tells me I can hang out with her, leave my stuff at her place, and go to the bank and get a new card and then pick up my stuff and move on if I want to.

I want to ask her to come to Europe with me, but I doubt she would want to start all over and lose her place where she lives.

So we go to her place, which is a nice four-story end rowhouse with a common room in the basement, two community kitchens and individual one-room apartments with kitchenettes and bathrooms.

“Can I introduce you to my friend Vera?” she says.

“Sure,” I say, anxious to meet new people and start my adventures.

She leads me up a stairwell to the second floor and knocks on the door to apartment 8. I notice a notice on the wall saying Vera is peer support for the house. I think nothing of it.

“Hi! Who’s your friend?” Vera says to Leah. “Are you new here?” Vera says to me.

“No, I’m just a friend of Leah’s,” I say.

“From a group at the Davis,” Leah says. “The social anxiety group. We had fun in that group, didn’t we, Hettie?”

“Sit down. I’ll make coffee,” Vera says. We sit down at her table.

“I’ll be back… I gotta go to the bathroom,” Leah says.

“You can use mine, hon,” Vera says.

“No… I also want to… to get something. My writings, to show you guys.”

“I didn’t know you wrote; that’s fantastic!” Vera says.

Leah leaves.

“So tell me about yourself,” Vera says.

There’s something fishy going on. Leah isn’t acting right. She never told me about these writings, even when I told her about mine. And why even use the bathroom excuse to leave if she was really leaving to get her writings?

“Are you alright?” Vera asks cheerfully. “Would you like something to eat?”

Suddenly, Leah comes in with another woman. I can tell just by the way she walks that she has some authority. “Hi, you must be Hettie. I’m Evangeline. I’m an intervention worker here. Leah told me all about you and about your difficult situation and how you’d like to come live here, is that right?”

Leah is tomato-red and she won’t look at me.

“I—well, not right now,” I stammer. “But I just came here with Leah to hang out and look at the place.”

I hear footsteps outside. “This the room?” someone outside says, a man. And then the cops barge in and arrest me under the Mental Health Act.

That was fast.

I’m in the Davis emergency, locked up. A girl is laughing her ass off. A woman is crying her eyes out. A man is talking up a storm to an imaginary person. A young guy is yelling everyone’s ears off.

There’s a phone in this room, but someone’s on it. A teenage girl, in a private-school uniform (a kilt, blouse, cardigan and tights and penny loafers). She suddenly shouts “I don’t care if you’re the principal of my school, and I don’t care if I get expelled! You treated me like shit! Goodbye!” and she hangs the phone up so violently loudly that the four others who are in this room making noise (yelling, laughing, crying and talking) all look up.

A stark-naked guy suddenly comes barreling into the room from the hallway, and jumps onto one of the tables (which, along with the chairs, are fixed to each other and the floor). He starts rubbing himself while standing up there and two staff come running, telling him to please get down. I can’t stop looking; this is too outrageous. Why am I locked up with such a person? Looking away would mean admitting I’m locked up with such a person. Suddenly, he takes aim and squirts a load of semen onto the head of the old lady who’s crying. She doesn’t even stop crying or yell or even change her tone or body language. She doesn’t get up. She just sits there and continues to cry and two more staff come and ask her to get up, telling her with a surprising smile and a sense of humor that she’s been “slimed”, then when she doesn’t they get her up and lead her away down the hall.

They manage to drag away the naked guy that “slimed” her. They take him right off the unit, probably to one for sexual predators, if there is one like that.

“It was so boring yesterday. But when it rains, it pours,” one of the PABs passing by says to another.

I look at the phone, which is available now. But who do I call? Not my family. And I never got the number for the place Leah is staying at. Anyway, Leah betrayed me. Not Allissa; she thinks I’m mentally ill. Not anyone from the greenhouse; they think I’m mentally ill.

I can do without them. I will get out of here, even if I have to go to court. And when I do, I’m moving to a different city!

The psychiatrist stares down his nose at me.

“You need to understand,” he says, “That you have been arrested under the Mental Health Act and therefore cannot just leave at this point in time.”

“Then I’ll see you in court,” I say. I guess that’s the end of that. I get up and walk out of the office, nothing more to say to him.

As if on cue, a bailiff is waiting for me outside the door with a big envelope full of papers. I know what it probably is even before he holds out the papers to me and says in a mixture of English and French,“You’ve been served. J’ai desole, madame.” I’m sorry, ma’am.

Back in my room, I lay in bed reading the papers. The petitioner is the hospital and the doctor, Dr. Aldous Casey. In his petition he mentions my whole family and the police and Leah and her social worker.

Then I see it.

Not only does it say that I’ve got to stay in the hospital. It says I’ve got to get treatment. Medication. He even specified what medication in the papers… Abilify.

I’m not psychotic! That’s an antipsychotic! I know the commercials say it’s for bipolar and not just psychosis, but I’m not bipolar either! They just for some stupid reason think I am!

I was on lithium (before I went off it because it dulled my senses). That was bad enough. But THIS… THIS!!!

It really takes the cake.

Lithium made me shake and break out and drink lots of water. Lamictal, that other mood stabilizer I was on before, made me break out in hives. Celexa was okay, it was an antidepressant. But I don’t need an antidepressant. I’m not depressed… or, rather, this place will MAKE me depressed.

Abilify, I hear, causes tardive dyskinesia.

I’m going to get tardive dyskinesia! My face will contort and then my hands will shake and my whole body will contort and my feet will bob up and down and my mouth will contort something awful. I’ve seen videos of people on YouTube of people with TD. I’ve also seen people with TD. At the metro stations in Verdun. On Wellington Street. All around the Davis.

“…it’s called akathisia, and it’s horrible,” someone is saying to someone else outside my room. “And Cogentin isn’t working on him at all.”

It’s a staff member talking to another staff member.

I gather up my papers, get up out of bed, and head over to the phone to call Legal Aid. Then I realize I don’t have the number. I don’t know what patients will know the number. I’m too scared to ask the staff; what if they lock me up for calling my lawyer? I’ll have to just strike up some conversations with other patients and ask them if they have lawyers and what number to call. Or I can just call Information, 411. I do that. They give me the number for Legal Aid.

I’m already proud of myself. See? I’m not crazy. I can defend myself. Crazy people can’t do that.

I call Legal Aid and nobody’s there. Oh well, later. I try not to panic. Don’t panic, and for fuck’s sake don’t give up.

I’m sitting at a table eating lunch with the girl in the private-school uniform, an older man who clearly has tardive diskinesia, and a hypertalkative, hyperactive, hyper-annoying girl a bit older than the private-school girl.

“Good day, how are you doing?” the older man asks me.

“Just peachy!” I exclaim. “I just got served papers from the court saying they’re gonna force me to take meds!”

“I’m on Clozaril,” the older man says.

Another shabby-looking older man wanders over to us. Holds out his hand. Says “Hi, my name is Ralphie. What’s your name?”

Why am I the one getting all the attention from the wierdos? Maybe it’s because the talkative girl and the private-school girl are busy talking amongst themselves.

“My name is The Girl Who Doesn’t Belong Here!” I snap.

“Oh, I forgot to introduce myself. Hi, I’m Van,” the older man with tardive dyskinesia says.

“I’m Hettie Masterson, nice to meet you!” I snap.

“What are you in for? Are you angry to be in here?” Van asks.

“Yes, sir!”

“I’m so angry to be in here too!” the talkative girl suddenly says to us. “My fucking dad, man, he thought I was drowning myself in the pool when really I was just trying to drown the voices. He called the cops and they dragged me out of the pool and brought me here.”

These stories do nothing but make me mad. But then, why should they make me mad for these people? These people are actually mad, as in, crazy mad. And I’m not. I don’t belong here. If anyone has the right to be mad, it’s me.

“What brings you here?” the talkative girl asks, smiling. “Oh, and by the way I’m Clarissa.”

“I’m Breanna,” the private-school girl says. “And I just got expelled from school.”

“Why?” I ask. “For being crazy?”

“Sorta.”

I’m mad she isn’t getting offended. I want her to hurt as much as I’m hurting. I want to make them all feel as bad as I feel. Nobody gets to have fun while I’m stuck here in this shithole. Nobody.

“I’m bored,” a guy who looks to be just out of high school says.

I’m sitting at a table reviewing my court papers.

“Then find something to do!” I snap. “I don’t wanna hear about how you’re bored! I wish I was fucking bored! I’m being stalked and harassed by my so-called family who want me locked up with my rights taken away! Nobody will help me except my Legal Aid lawyer! I’m not even mentally ill!”

“Hettie, if you want to talk to me in private, we can go into that office over there and talk,” that young shortish pudgy male PAB says to me.

This floors me. Catches me off guard. Shocks the shit out of me.

Firstly, I didn’t upset them. Secondly, they’re actually being nice to me and want to listen to me.

“What? Are you sure?” I can hear my voice changing, and I hate it, because it sounds like I’m changing my mind about needing to be here, like I’m telling them it’s open for debate, and it’s not. I don’t need to be here, and that’s all there is to it!

“Come on. Let’s talk. Garth, you good?” he asks the guy I shouted at.

“I’m good. Have a nice talk,” Garth says.

Then he smiles at both of us.

Both of us.

Shouldn’t he be hating me?

So we go into the office I met the doctor in before, and we talk about bipolar disorder. About my family. About my so-called friends from the greenhouse who betrayed me, calling my doctor on me. About meds.

“Well, maybe you’ll like the Abilify,” the guy, whose name is Hollis, says. “Abilify is very stimulating, and has some side effects for some people, but that can be managed with Cogentin or Inderal or something else.”

“I just heard someone earlier saying Cogentin didn’t work on someone. And I don’t even need medication.”

“Well, maybe you’ll just like it. You don’t need to need it. And if Cogentin doesn’t work, there are other drugs. That is even if you get akathisia-like symptoms.”

“I’ll try it just to get out of here. Then I won’t take it any more,” I confide in him.

“Maybe you’ll like it,” he says again.

I hear my name being said.

“Hettie Masterson and Garth McDougal and Clarissa Cormier are slated for the CBC News tomorrow morning,” some guy seems to be saying to some girl in the staff station.

What did he say? The CBC News?

I’m going to be on the NEWS?

“What’s wrong?”

It’s Hollis again.

“They said I’m going to be on the CBC News!”

“No, no, they said you’re going to CPC 2. That’s a unit in this hospital.”

“Oh.” Sigh of relief.

Well, that makes more sense anyway. What am I, mentally ill? I should have known they weren’t saying that we would be on the NEWS. Why would we be? We didn’t do anything newsworthy. And I didn’t even do anything crazy.

A PAB comes to escort us to our new unit. Great; a back ward; where they can just forget about us. I’m going to admit something right now… I’m scared.

They unlock the doors and the female PAB leads us off the unit and down another hall to a stairwell.

I should make a run for it!

The PAB won’t want to abandon the other two patients to go after me.

But then I see something dangling from her belt… what’s that? Oh. It’s a button of some sort. A panic button. And a colorful card showing all the colored codes, like code blue for someone dying and code red for fire and code white for violence and code yellow for missing patient.

They’ll call a code yellow, maybe even a code white if I leave. And maybe throw me in a seclusion room. And give me electric shocks. I can’t leave.

Fuck me; what am I going to do!

The tunnels are long and narrow. Once we almost get mowed down by a guy on a go-kart-like contraption pulling some food trolleys behind him, hooked to each other and to the back of the go-kart.

Finally, we get to an elevator with a sign beside it that says

CPC 2

CPC 3

Into the elevator we go, and up to CPC 2, the second floor.

I can hear people shouting, clapping, cheering and banging things somewhere upstairs. There are three security guards in the elevator with us. One of them is telling the PAB who’s with us, “Stay off CPC 3. There’s a riot going on.”

“A what?” I ask. This is ridiculous! I feel like I’m in prison!

The elevator arrives on CPC 2. “In you go,” the PAB says, and the three security guards hold the elevator door open while we crowd out of the elevator. Then a man who has the same kind of color-coded card and panic button, but on a breakaway chain around his neck, says “Hello, guys. Welcome to CPC 2. Follow me.”

What’s next… a strip search?

But no… we stop at a desk and a woman nurse slips each of the three of us some pamphlets and papers under the ceiling-high plastic window. I look at it. It’s all in a folder that says WELCOME GUIDE. Inside is a bill of rights, their code of ethics. Also there is a bunch of other information about the facility.

Make no mistake, I’m going to read that bill of rights.

I’m sitting at a table in one of the day areas, thumbing through the bill of rights. I shouldn’t have to do this. I shouldn’t be here. I should be in Amsterdam on a houseboat, or lecturing tourists at Auschwitz in Poland about Anne Frank, or feeling the presence of Anne Frank at her hiding place in Amsterdam, or getting close to God at the Cologne Cathedral or the Vatican.

But not here. Anywhere but here. Even the Regent Palace Hotel in Picadilly Circus in London, with all its cockroaches and disgusting shared bathrooms, that Orla described when she went there on a class trip, is better than here.

Welcome to the Hotel Davis. Such a lovely place that’s so overcrowded that two people on my unit are sleeping in the hallway and they put a fourth bed for me in a room meant for three. Where the bathroom floor is made of a textured, slip-proof plastic that gets filthy and is hard to clean. Where a girl sneaked in pills and tried to OD. Where a guy just tried to drown himself in a glass of water, literally. At least it’s not World War Three like at the shelter I was at when people want to watch different shows on TV, as there are two TVs in two living rooms and two more in the dining area.

“Reading the rights guide?”

I look up. It took a moment for me to realize the person was talking to me. It’s a girl. The girl that tried to OD and then they had to pump her stomach in a huge spectacular scene in the room she, me, and two others share, that involved the firemen and the paramedics and the police.

“We share a room. Can I sit here?”

“Sure.”

I don’t normally want anything to do with hospitalized patients, because there’s something wrong with them, and nothing wrong with me, but she feels right now the way I did before… like killing herself. So she and I kind of have something in common.

“They don’t give a shit about our rights in here,” the girl says. “Oh… and I’m Allie.”

“I’m Hettie.”

“Let’s be friends,” Allie says. “We have each other. That’s all we have. You know that, right? If we don’t stick together we have no one. Brahm tried to rape me once, and then he did rape me. None of them care,” she says, waving her hand at the staff station.

“They didn’t believe you?”

“They—“

“And who’s Brahm? And sorry, go on.”

“Brahm is my boyfriend.”

“So it wasn’t consensual?”

“He… wasn’t my boyfriend any more. But now he is again.”

“But why would you want him back if he raped you?”

“He… he’s so sweet.” She starts to cry. “I want to give him another chance.”

They’re all bonkers, like I said. They deserve to be in here. I don’t.

“Is Brahm a patient in here?” I say.

“Yeah. He’s that guy over there. Look. The one in the green shirt.”

I look over at him; he’s at a table on the other side of the room, chatting fifty miles a second with another guy who’s also talking fifty miles a second. He’s quite ugly, with a big nose and bulging eyes and a pout. He looks kind of brain damaged, actually. Like I said, these people are bonkers. She’s bonkers to want to stay with a brain-damaged rapist.

“You can do better than him. He raped you,” I say. Why am I even trying? Why do I even care? Is it because she tried to kill herself like I tried to kill myself, so she’s automatically my soul sister?

“I made a promise to him. I promised I’d be with him forever, despite what he does. That’s true love. Unconditional love.”

“Fuck your promise. Did he keep his promise not to hurt YOU?”

“He promised to try.”

This is difficult. I pause to think, then say “Well, you’re doing more trying than he is.”

And I still don’t know why I care.

It’s nighttime; I can barely see the parking lot from where Allie and I are sitting at a table by the window. Suddenly, a fight breaks out. Three staff members are all over a drunk-looking, muscular Germanic guy wearing a t-shirt depicting a bottle of Bitburger, with what looks like dried beer sloshed down it.

“You need to sleep it off, man! You need to calm down and sleep it off. Come on, let’s get you something to calm you down. Are you willing to take some medication orally?”

The German suddenly spits on the guy that said that.

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You just spat on me, do you realize that? If you don’t take some medication orally, we’re gonna hafta give you an injection. Your choice.”

“Why are they giving him depressives when he’s already drunk?” someone says.

“Maybe they’re not giving him depressants,” an older woman in a flowery dress and a pale pink cardigan, with white hair in ringlets, says.

“They have all kinds of antipsychotics, true,” a goth-ish girl of about nineteen with dyed-black hair wearing a ripped and torn black dress and black nail polish and black lipstick says.

“Let’s go… come on, Dieter…” and two of them haul him down the hall into one of the bedrooms, while a third follows cautiously, his hand on the panic button dangling from his belt loop.

“Let’s keep together,” Allie says. “We’ll be the depressives club. Me, you and Andrea.”

“Andrea?”

She waves her hand towards a girl coming up the hall. “This is Andrea. Hey, Andrea! Come over here!”

Andrea is a mousy little girl with greasy hair and glasses. “Hi,” she says shyly.

“Hi, Andrea. What you in for?”

Well, I had to ask. I don’t want to hang around with anyone who’s schizophrenic or something.

“Depression,” Andrea says.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. Allie said we were the Depressives Club. Of course.

I know they have lifers’ clubs at some jails. So we might as well have a Depressives Club, I guess.

At 10:30 PM, a nurse comes with our meds. Allie takes hers, swallowing them as the nurse names them… “This is your Celexa, twenty milligrams… here’s your Abilify, forty milligrams…”

“You’re on Abilify?” I ask Allie. “How do you find it?”

“I like it alright,” Allie says, gulping some water.

Then the nurse turns to me.

She takes another plastic pill cup off the tray.

Oh, no.

No, please, God, don’t let that be mine.

But it is.

“You’re new here. You’re Hettie, right? I’m Dodie, and I’m going to be your nurse for tonight. Here. Celexa, forty milligrams. Abilify, fifty milligrams.”

“FIFTY? Why? She’s only on—” and then I catch myself. I was about to say about Allie, “She’s on less of both Celexa AND Abilify and she just attempted suicide in this joint and I didn’t, not here!”

Allie, I’m relieved to see, looks unperturbed by my rudeness.

“What if I don’t take it?” I say. “My court date is on—”

“Well, that’s your right,” Dodie says. “Are you sure you don’t want to take it?”

“No, thank you!”

“I’ll have to write that down. Is that okay?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

She smiles, nods and walks away. I wait for more staff to come and try and make me take my meds, or drag me off to inject me, but it doesn’t happen.

I guess I just got lucky tonight. I guess they were busy.

At 11:30, they shoo us to our rooms and dim the lights in the common areas. There are less staff here now, just three of them.

I toss and turn on the folding wire cot, the fourth bed they put in the room for three. I’m anxious. Will they forcefully medicate me eventually? Will I win my court case?

“Are you okay? Do you need something to help you sleep?”

It’s Dodie, with a flashlight, aiming it at the floor rather than my face though, thank God.

“I’m good,” I say. I could never take drugs to help me sleep. I never have. I don’t want to end up a zombie with any lasting effects.

When Dodie is gone, Allie whispers to me, “Are you scared?”

“Yes,” I whisper back. “I’m fucking scared.”

“Don’t be. I’ve been places way better than this when I was dead. It goes uphill from here. Not downhill. Uphill. We’ve hit rock bottom. If we go any further, we’ll burst through the other side and start going up again, but in a different direction as the normal up. We’ll be in a better place, but not the normal better place. So don’t be scared they’ll kill you. Like with the meds or whatever. I’ve been on the other side. It’s a pleasant surprise.”

Fucking crazy bitches in the fucking psych ward!

“Are you suicidal?” I have to ask.

“Not any more. My attempt actually cured me of my need to kill myself. Because I think, ‘I can go on a little longer knowing I can do it if things get too bad, and end up in a better place any time I need to. And that actually gives me incentive to try just a little more, one more day. Because I know I can just say no and die at any time.”

“But they won’t let you. They pumped your stomach and revived you. And here you are still here, taking their meds.”

“Come.” She motions me over to her, then gets up and opens her dresser drawer with a small key on a piece of string around her wrist.

What is she about to show me? A gun? A knife? More pills?

It’s a gun.

“Is that real?” I mouth.

“Sorry… I can’t hear you.”

I’m scared the other two girls in the room, though both snoring, might hear me.

“Is that a real gun?” I whisper in her ear.

She nods.

“Are you going to kill yourself with it?” I ask.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Can I use it? Or can you use it on me if I ask you to?”

“Only if I’m going to use it on myself. I don’t want to end up in jail.”

“Fair enough.”

We stare at each other for a second.

“How did you get it in here?” I ask.

“I smuggled it in inside a stuffed animal when I went home on a weekend pass and then came back.”

“You were suicidal but they gave you a weekend pass?”

“That was before my attempt. Now I’m pretty much stuck here.”

“For how long?” I want to know how long I’ll be here.

“Who the fuck knows.” Now she’s grinning. “Well, at least I have a plan. You’re not gonna tell anyone, are you?”

“Does that other girl, what’s her name, know?” I ask. Because this is ridiculous. I am going to tell on her. Just not now, while she stands there fondling a gun in her drawer. But I’m no good at lying with a straight face, so I can’t just say “No, I won’t tell.”

“Even Andrea doesn’t know,” she says, wrapping the gun in a facecloth and sticking it right up the ass of a stuffed polar bear before closing and locking her drawer and flopping back down on her bed. “Now please… are you going to tell?”

“No,” I say.

“Good. I didn’t think you would. Are you sure?”

“No. I’m in the same boat as you. It’ll be our secret.”

I’m angry at Allie. Why should I be responsible for either telling or not telling? I’m not responsible for her, her mental health, or her life. I wouldn’t bother to tell, but she’s putting us all in danger with that gun. What if she flips out on us and kills us all? And there’s my life.

I need to tell! I want to die, but not in the psych ward… I’m realizing that. It would be too humiliating to die in a psych ward with all the crazies, treated like I’m crazy, with no rights and no dignity. And no reputation to speak of. At least no more reputation for being a sane person.

I need to tell as soon as I get the chance. I hope Allie doesn’t follow me around like a lost puppy. I make sure Andrea isn’t around either; she could actually know and be spying for Allie, and maybe Allie lied to me about that to have her spy on me to see if she could trust me.

I duck into a bathroom stall. But then the person in the next stall coughs, and I recognize that cough. It’s Allie. Fuck!

I flush the toilet to pretend I was really using the bathroom and rush out of the stall and out of the bathroom. But then Andrea comes up the hall. She grabs me. Drags me into a bedroom.

“Is she going to kill herself?” Andrea asks.

“Can I trust you?” I blurt out. “Are you going to kill me?” I look at her; she doesn’t look like she’s got a weapon; she’s wearing tight clothes with no pockets and her hands are empty and her hair is thin and obviously has no weapons in it.

“Did she threaten to kill you?”

“No. But she offered to. But only if she decides to kill herself.”

Andrea looks horrified. “So she brought in the gun? Did you see it?”

I nod. I’m scared. What if she kills me? I say so. “I’m scared. What if she kills me?”

I don’t want to die on a fucking psych ward! The humiliation! The indignity! The embarrassment! Everyone would know! It would be on the news, that there was a shooting and that I was the victim! And that I was a patient.

“We have to go tell them,” Andrea says. “She needs help.”

I’m glad she said that. Really glad she said that. But then I remember something.

“She might kill them if they try to stop her. Then she’ll kill herself. Or she’ll just kill herself.”

“We have no choice… we have to tell. They’ll just check her drawer without her knowing and confiscate the gun and get her some help hopefully.”

“What if they take her somewhere—oh well, at least she won’t be dead.”

I go to tell a staff member. Andrea goes to tell another staff member. I feel like such a rat.

I’m about to mention a gun. I’d better keep my hands in their range of sight. I put my hands on the desk where the staff can clearly see them.

Dodie comes over. “Would you like a PRN?”

“No… I just need to talk.”

Dodie seems nice enough.

“Sure… come with me.”

I knew she would say yes!

We go into an office.

“Allie has a gun in her drawer,” I say.

“WHAT?”

“Yes. I saw it. She showed it to me. It’s hidden inside a stuffed polar bear.”

Suddenly a shrill alarm-like noise pierces the air. It’s someone’s panic button, no doubt. I guess Andrea managed to nab a staff member before I did, and told. Or maybe something else is happening.

“Code white, CPC 2. Code white, CPC 2.”

Then the police are here. We’re all herded like cattle into the activity room, which is at the opposite end of the unit as the bedrooms. Yup. They’re going right for our room.

Then the cops are leading Allie away in handcuffs. “Where are you taking me!” she cries.

“Pinel,” one of the cops says. He means the Philippe Pinel Institute for the Criminally Insane, if it’s still called exactly that.

She sees me. I see her. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She spits at me, hatred on her face. It lands on the floor in front of me; she’s too far away, but she was aiming for my face.

The cops hurry her away.

I go over to Andrea, who’s crying. “Are we still going to start that depressive club?” I ask her.

I try to call Allie at Pinel. I don’t know why I care. But they say she’s not there. At least not yet.

“She’s probably on her way though, or they changed their mind and took her to Tanguay,” Andrea says. (Tanguay is the women’s jail in Montreal.)

Finally, we’re able to have our breakfast, which has arrived by now. I look on the cart, find the tray with the paper with my name on it. Andrea finds hers and we find a table together and sit down.

“Hey, I heard you were in on the action,” the guy that was talking fifty miles a minute to the ugly guy that raped Allie says. “Hey, by the way, I’m Salvador.”

“I’m Hettie. And your friend raped my friend and that’s why she brought in a gun,” I snap. Wow. I’m already calling Allie my friend. I’d better be careful. She’s a nutcase; why would I want a friend like that? But we have something in common.

I’m so confused.

“I’m really sorry for what happened,” Salvador says. I’m shocked. “I—I don’t talk to Brahm any more.”

“Good,” Andrea says, though her caring is of a sarcastic nature. “Bravo. I’m proud of you.”

“We should have group therapy to talk about our relationships on the unit and that,” Salvador says. “And our general problems.”

“We were supposed to start a depressives club,” I blurt out.

“I’d join that,” Salvador says.

“Let’s do it, then,” Andrea says, surprising me a little, because a moment ago she was so rude to Salvador.

“We should ask the staff to bring in a counselor to do group therapy with us,” the older woman with the ringlets says.

“They already said no,” the German guy, totally sober now, says. “I started a petition to bring in an occupational therapist and they said no can-do, so I don’t think they’d do this either.”

“Well then we’ll just start the club ourselves,” I say. Why do I care? Is their craziness rubbing off on me?

So me, Andrea, Salvador, Dieter the German guy, the ringlet lady, and now the goth girl all head together into the activity room, drawing some stares by staff who wonder what such a big group is doing together. They probably think we’re going to beat someone up.

But we sit down around the long table.

“Alright,” I say. Why am I suddenly acting like a leader? “So what should we talk about?”

I need to stop acting like a leader, before they start treating me like one. Gotta nip this in the bud.

“Let’s have a vote,” Dieter says.

“We’ll write down what we want to talk about, and then we’ll have a vote,” I blurt out, screwing myself further. Apparently, I can’t help myself.

So we grab some pens and paper from the shelves behind where Dieter is sitting and we each make a list. Dieter wants to talk about alcoholism and PTSD. Andrea and I also want to talk about PTSD, as well as suicidality and stigma. The old lady, Brigitte, wants to talk about the loss of her husband and ECT treatments. And the goth girl, Stella, wants to talk about bipolar disorder and her borderline personality. Salvador wants to talk about bipolar disorder too, particularly mania.

“So what’ll we talk about first?” I ask. I might as well go whole hog and facilitate the group. I’m beyond caring about whether I care or not.

“I got drunk on the hand sanitizer last night,” Dieter supplies. “First I went out and had a few beers behind the Baryshnikov pavilion with my friend from there; he got a case of beer from the dep.” (The depanneur is what the Quebecois French call the corner stores.) Dieter continues: “Then I came back and felt withdrawal setting in so I drank the hand sanitizer.”

“And why did you get drunk? To drown out the memories?” I ask.

“More like to immobilize myself, so I don’t commit suicide. If I’m drunk out of my mind I’m passed out or angry, so I don’t think about or have the right—energy or mindset—to commit suicide.”

“But you’re in here. You can’t kill yourself in here,” Stella says.

“I’m allowed outside, so I can. And anyway, even if I wasn’t, you’d be surprised what shit gets sneaked in here. You don’t wanna know how I sneaked in some tea bags two days ago,” Dieter says.

“How would you do it?” Stella and I ask together, at exactly the same moment.

“I’d go to the lake across the street and slit my veins wide open with a knife.”

“That sounds gross,” Brigitte snaps.

“Sorry,” Dieter says, a bit offended and disappointed in the lack of empathy.

“Hey, is there a group going on? Where’s the staff? Who’s facilitating the group?” It’s a nerdy, skinny young boy with square glasses and a cowlick. “Can I join?”

“Yeah, sure,” I say, pulling up a chair for him next to me.

“We’re just doing it on our own,” Salvador says.

“Are we allowed?” the boy asks.

“What’s your name?” Andrea asks.

“Larry.”

“Hi, Larry,” we all say.

Then two staff are here, unmistakable with their name tags hanging from their necks or belts, the name tags with the color-coded guide on the back. One of them, a girl my age, has a bunch of binders in her arms and is probably a social worker. The other is a guy in his forties with a graying beard and wild shoulder-length grayish-brown hair. “You guys are doing a group?” the guy says. “You should probably—I ‘m just saying, maybe I can facilitate the group when I have time.”

“We want to do it now,” I blurt out.

“Oh, we want to talk to you,” the gray-haired guy says. “Come with us.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, no. We just want to do an assessment.”

So I answer their questions, general questions about my life. I answer honestly that I don’t think I belong here and that I shouldn’t even be on medication and can I be released?

“You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that. We’re social workers. We’re here about housing. Here, you’ll have to fill these out.”

“HOUSING?”

“Yes. You need a place to live, right?” the guy says.

I look at the papers. “I’ll get my own place, thanks.”

“Talk to the doctor about it. If he says it’s alright, go for it.”

“Wait… this is illegal!”

“Just talk to the doctor, he’ll be able to tell you more.”

“When do I see him?”

“Today sometime.”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

The police question Andrea, then me, about everything Allie said to us.

Then it’s supper time. I sit with Salvador, Brahm, Brigitte, Stella, Dieter, Andrea and Larry.

“How was the group?” I ask.

“We talked about a lot of good shit,” Salvador says. “Then we asked others if they wanted to join, but they all said no, or they’re all… well, you know. Cray-cray.”

“What did you talk about?”

“…I’m so glad we had that group, that was fun, we should do it again,” Brigitte is saying to Dieter further down the long table we made out of smaller tables.

“Brigitte talked about some issues, like what happened with her kids.”

“What happened with your kids?” I ask her.

“Oh… sorry. Never mind,” Salvador says. “I thought you knew.”

“They told the cops I was abusing my granddaughter. I would never do such a thing! They took me to Pinel for an assessment to see if I’m criminally dangerous. I wasn’t. The doctor even said, even after I knocked a guard out, that I didn’t belong there. They moved me here.”

“That’s horrible,” I say. But for all I know she could have abused that child. I change the subject. “What else did you talk about? Dieter, why do you have PTSD?”

“My friend—well, enemy, really—I was with a bunch of people I thought were friends but weren’t-- threw me in front of a train and the train ran right over me. It didn’t touch me though; it just went over me. But I thought I was going to die.”

“Wow. You’re lucky to be alive. Did they beat you up too?” Brigitte asks.

“They beat me up. And stabbed me. Look what they did to me.” He lifts up his shirt to show some hideous scars that look like autopsy incisions.

And I’m not the only one that thinks so. “That looks like, like an autopsy incision,” Stella says.

“They tried to… dissect you alive?” I say.

“They were sadistic!” Dieter says. “Then they threw me in front of the train when they heard the cops coming, looking for us, because we’d mugged a guy, and the train was coming at the same time. I refused to participate in mugging the guy so they mutilated me as a punishment.”

“So really, you were lucky the train and cops came though, or they’d have continued to dissect you alive.”

“Yep. And I don’t really want to talk about it.”

I notice Brahm is quiet. Everyone else at our table is talking, though. Andrea is saying to Larry, “I feel bad, I really do, but Allie was dangerous. To herself and maybe to others.”

“You did the right thing,” Larry says. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Now she’ll get the help she needs. Hopefully.”

“HEY, LISTEN UP!” someone suddenly shouts. It’s a guy, standing at the front of the dining area. “I want to apologize for the scene I caused by trying to drown myself in that glass of water!”

“Hear, hear!” one guy at another table says, banging his cup of coffee on the table again and again.

“Dylan, sit down, please,” one of the nurses says. “It’s okay. Just sit down. People are trying to—”

“Here’s your supper, Dylan, now go sit,” the male PAB that Dieter spat on yesterday says, handing him a tray and nodding in our direction.

“Come sit with us!” I hear myself say.

“There you go,” the male PAB says.

Dylan sits down at the end of our group next to Andrea, diagonally across from Larry.

“We were just talking about problems. Want to join?”

The nurse that told Larry to sit down approaches us. “I know you guys were having a group… problem-talking session, but not right now, okay? Try to talk about happy things, think happy thoughts. There are people that don’t want to hear about problems all the time, who just want to sit and eat and be quiet and peaceful.”

“Let’s take our food in the activity room and talk in there, then. Then we won’t bother anyone,” I say.

A few of them follow me, getting up with their trays.

“Um, no. You eat in here. There are people in the activity room too who want peace and quiet.”

“But we need a room to talk in!”

“You know why? Wait, look, I’ll explain. If you just talk among yourselves to your friends that’s fine, but we can’t have you doing a therapy group without a facilitator.”

“And when do we get a facilitator?” Larry says. “Why don’t you facilitate the group?”

“I don’t have time for that, Larry. I’m sorry.”

“You say we need to just talk among ourselves to our friends,” I say, “But we’re all friends.”

“Just—not at supper time, okay?”

“But then when can we? There are people ALWAYS who want to just be quiet, in every room.”

“Well, some people are depressed, and—“

“But—“

“I don’t have time to argue with you. Just take a chill pill, alright?”

“We are chill,” Dylan says.

“Dylan— I’m going. Just try to think happy thoughts and say happy things, or say nothing at all.”

“I can’t believe her!” I storm. I’m not chill any more.

“Let’s do it anyway, we just have to be quieter,” Andrea whispers.

“What if they separate us?” I ask. I’m scared. I don’t know why I care, but I do.

“They won’t separate us. Where would they put us?” Brigitte says.

“Don’t worry; they won’t separate us,” Salvador says. “Like Brigitte says.”

I look down, cowering in shame, wondering what to do. For the first time I notice what I’m eating. It’s disgusting slop. “Anyone want this?” I ask.

“Not me. I’m full,” Dieter says.

“Not me. It’s gross,” Stella says.

I drink the milk and eat the slice of bread; that’s all. I don’t touch the coffee because it’s freakin’ decaf. I give away my gross syrupy peaches and pears too.

“So you tried to commit suicide?” Larry whispers to Dylan.

Dylan nods, looking around for people listening in. “Twice. Once with a gun. I guess it’s a good thing I’m such a bad shot.”

“Dylan, no talk about violence, please. It’s a good thing to think happy thoughts,” the same bitchy nurse who’s trying to keep us from getting too close to each other, I guess, says.

“Damn! Be quieter!” Larry whispers.

“Larry, what was that?” the bitch asks.

“Nothing!” Larry says.

After supper, we go to the activity room again. “Do you have grounds privileges?” Dieter asks me.

“Nope. I don’t feel like I have any rights at all. Apparently, not even the right to talk about what I want to talk about.” That’s when I start to cry.

And that’s when he holds me.

“Larry and Andrea are another couple in denial. And I wonder if Dieter and that girl are gonna hook up.”

I roll over in bed. People are whispering outside my door.

“She cried into his shirt for a good half hour, and he let her.” It’s the voice of that black girl I saw skipping around the unit. I think her name is LaTawnda.

“I think they kind of like each other, yeah,” another young girl says.

Last night was magical. I talked to Dieter about how I wanted to go to Germany and other European countries, and that that was actually part of why I’m here. Dieter’s been to Germany, and nearly every European country.

We talked until 11:30, when we had to go to our rooms, then I just sat there looking at Allie’s empty bed, wishing I could tell her the exciting news. Why do I care? I knew her for less than twenty-four hours.

I jump out of bed, anxious to go find Dieter again. Why, I don’t know. I tell myself it’s because I enjoy his company.

I try to pray and think it away. But it won’t budge from the forefront of my mind.

He’s a drunk. A fucking drunk, for fuck’s sakes.

“Hey, Hettie!”

“Hey! I was just thinking of you!”

Oh, shit.

Well, so what? Anyone could say that.

But my “Oh, shit” moment must have showed on my face, because he says “I was thinking of you too.” Why does he look pleased and happy? And I’m so glad he does!

“Come. I want to show you something.”

I expect him to lead me to his room or to one of the common areas, or to ask me if I’m sure I don’t have grounds privileges and then take me outside. But he leads me to the men’s bathroom.

Five men are sitting around on the floor in a circle, playing cards. One of them, a college-aged guy with sparkling eyes, looks up. “Hey, Hettie! How you doing?”

How does he know my name?

“We have a secret to tell you,” another guy, a straight-haired and pale and flat-faced and somewhat dead-eyed guy, also college-aged, says.

Then a stall door opens and a guy and a girl come out. It takes me a moment; I’m slow. But then I realize with a slam to my gut that it’s Andrea and Larry.

“We’re having a party at Lerner,” the flat-faced guy says. “Do you want to come?”

“At Le—what?”

“She doesn’t know. She’s new here,” a third guy from the circle on the floor, very young but with a long beard and a mustache, says.

“Lerner. The group home on the grounds,” the first college-aged guy, Mr. Sparkly Eyes, says.

“I don’t have grounds privileges.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll sneak you out. Fatim is in on it.”

“Fat—who?”

“Fatim. You know the PAB? The Muslim guy?”

“No, but what are we going to do at this party?”

“Just chill, hang out, talk. Debate. Talk about this place. Fern from the users’ committee is going to be there.”

I know about the users’ committee, because I read the bill of rights.

“The users’ committee is—“

“I know what it is. I read the bill of rights.”

“It’s not an orgy or anything. I don’t even know if anyone there will have sex. So are you coming?”

Maybe I can get a chance to escape if I go with them. So I say “YES!”

It’s nighttime—after eleven-thirty but before midnight, which is the curfew at Lerner on weekends… and Paul, the male night nurse, is asleep at his desk behind the security cameras. And Fatim knows that Paul always falls asleep watching the cameras. And he offered to organize this event, knowing that.

The five guys from the bathroom, plus Larry and Dieter, arrive at the door in the hallway to that back stairwell, the fire exit, that they’re going to sneak us out of. Me, Andrea, Stella, Salvador, and Dylan are already here.

“Where are Brigitte and Brahm?” I ask. But I’m glad Brahm’s not here. He’s a rapist.

“We asked him not to come. Do you know why?”

“Because of what happened with Allie?”

“Do you know what happened with Allie?”

“He raped her.”

“Exactly. And we’re going to be discussing that. The doctor said he wouldn’t even order a rape exam on Allie because Brahm is already locked up.”

“WHAT?”

“Shhhhh!”

“Sorry.” I pause, then ask, “What about Brigitte? Did she really do that thing to the little girl?”

“No, I don’t think she did. But—”

“Coast’s clear,” someone says. The Muslim guy in the turban, Fatim, opens the door and ushers us all out. We quietly tiptoe into the stairwell.

“This is spooky,” one of the guys from the bathroom, a French guy, says in a French accent.

“Shhhhh!” Stella says.

We take the long way round the grounds to avoid security, not that there’s much here any more. I can hear crickets. We pass by many of the facility’s pavilions, lit up like the Titanic on the Atlantic. Then, after a walk across a particularly big field toward the edge of the grounds, we’re there, on the back deck of Lerner.

Four men of varying ages and two young girls in their twenties or late teens are standing around, some of them drinking beer.

“You guys shouldn’t be drinking,” says a thin girl with a pixie cut. “On your meds like that.”

“Who are you; Patricia?” the guy across the deck from her retorts.

“Patricia works here and is a real bitch,” the pixie-cut girl explains to us.

“Patricia works here now? At Lerner? But I thought she was fired!” one of the French guys from the bathroom says.

“Well, she got her job back. Oh, and hi, I don’t think we’ve met!” She goes around shaking hands with those she doesn’t know and hugging those she does. She hugs the flat-faced dead-eyed guy and says “Hi, I missed you, Lorne!” She hugs the sparkly-eyed guy and calls him Mike. She hugs the young guy with the long beard and calls him Greg.

“I’m Fern. And you are--?” she asks me.

“Hettie. I’m Hettie. You’re Fern from the--?”

“Fern from the users’ committee,” a few people chorus.

“Who’s Patricia and why is she a bitch?” Larry asks.

“We’ll get to that,” Fern says. “Come in.” She opens the door behind her and we trudge into the hallway of Lerner House. Down the hallway, into a dining room. “Take a seat,” Fern says.

“Where are the staff?” Larry asks, exactly what I’ve been thinking.

“We’ve… taken care of the staff,” Fern says. “Now… down to business.”

“Fern…qu’est ce que tu fait avec les staff?” the French guy who asked if Patricia worked at Lerner says, speaking Franglais, a mixture of French and English. He just said, roughly translated, “What did you do with the staff?”

“You really don’t wanna know. The less you know the better. You could get in trouble. Now, down to business.” Fern claps her hands three times. Goes over to the whiteboard on the wall. It says on the whiteboard:

TOPICS TO DISCUSS

Rape on units

Suicide on units

Violence on units

Neglectful staff

Censorship of meaningful discussion on units

“I don’t know how long we have,” Fern says. “But Alain and Flo are coming in a minute.”

“To pick us up?” the flat-faced dead-eyed guy (Lorne) says.

“Yep, to take us to the safe off-grounds facility.”

“Where are we going?” I ask.

I’m getting alarmed.

“You’ll see when we get there,” Mike, Mr. Sparkly Eyes, says. “It’s a really nice place.”

“Where are we going? And can I choose not to go? Can I choose to just go back to my unit?” Andrea is getting alarmed too. I can see alarm on Larry’s face too. And Stella’s. And Dylan’s. And Salvador’s.

“I’m going,” Larry says. “I’m getting the creeps from all this. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Me neither. It was a good idea, until—“ Andrea says, and they head to the doors leading out of the dining room, but then two guys in black with big heavy black guns suddenly step into the room, causing them to jump back in alarm.

“You guys are coming with us, whether you like it or not,” Fern says. “But you’re going to like it. I guarantee it.”

Two more guys with guns come up the hall. They lead us, in a sort of formation, surrounding us, their guns drawn, into the small lobby, past the desk, out the front door. I can hear muffled screaming behind the desk. I look down. There are two staff members on the floor, bound and gagged!

“Out and onto the bus, everyone! Let’s get this party started!” Mike says.

A school bus is waiting for us outside. Behind the wheel of the bus is another guy in black, with a gun in a holster at his side.

They herd us into the back of the bus. Two of the armed guys sit on the seats at the very back to make sure we don’t escape through the emergency door. Two more sit at the very front behind the driver. We (me, Andrea, Stella, Dylan, Salvador, Larry, and Dieter) sit in the middle, and in the front behind the two gunmen sit Fern, Fatim, Mike, Greg and Lorne and the two French guys from the bathroom, and the guys and girls from Lerner.

I round on Dieter. “Did you know what was going on?”

He nods. “I’m so sorry, Hettie.” And then he starts to cry.

“Who are these people?” I ask. Will they have to kill me if they tell me too much? But something compels me to know.

The school bus pulls out, and is soon meandering through the borough of Montreal called Lasalle.

“We’re the International Incident Initiators,” Mike says, his eyes sparkling more than ever. “And we’ve come to rescue you.”

“RESCUE us?”

“Rescue us from what?”

“I want to go back!”

“You don’t have to do this!”

“Are you going to kill us?”

“Are you going to kill those staff you tied up?”

“Would you kill us? If we escaped?”

“No. But we’ll taser the shit out of you.” The sparkling in is eyes doesn’t go away, but changes quality a bit. Something sinister replaces the fun-lovingness in the sparkle.

“YOU!” Larry rounds on Fatim. “YOU WORK at the Davis! How can you let this happen to your patients!”

“They’ve got guns! Shhhhh!” Stella hisses.

“We’re not going to shoot you,” Fern says loudly. “Let me make this clear.” She stands up, gets in the aisle facing us. “Not one of you is going to die. Or get hurt. Nobody is going to get shot unless they try to kill us, and even then only by a taser gun. Understood?”

“Then why the guns!” Larry is raving mad.

“They’re taser guns! Honest!” Fern says. She nods at the two in the back. “Show them.” And one of them shoots the other.

Everyone in my group from CPC 2 yells, screams, gasps.

The guy that was shot yells, “Oh, that hurts! What did you do that for?” but seems alright.

So we can go home, then. We probably won’t get shot.

“Don’t try anything, it’ll be unpleasant… trust me,” the guy that got shot says, getting up and dusting himself off.

“Thank you for letting us demonstrate on you, Rowan,” Fern says.

“Why are you doing this? We never signed up for this! You’re kidnapping us!” Larry says.

“You can ask any questions you want. I encourage you to ask questions,” Mike says.

“WHY?” Larry explodes.

“Did you kill anyone?” Dylan asks.

“I have a question!” Stella says. “What is your manifesto?”

“When do we get to go home? Or at least back to the hospital?” Andrea says.

“One by one. Larry, Stella, you both basically asked the same question, and it’s a long answer, so I’m leaving it for last. No, Dylan, we never killed anyone. We’d never do that. And Andrea, you can go home as soon as we’re done with you.”

“But why do you need us?” Andrea and Stella both ask at the same time.

“We’re rescuing you. We just need you to bear with us…”

“What do we need rescuing from?” Salvador asks.

“Ingrid,” Mike says.

“Who?” I ask. This is getting more and more bizarre. These people obviously belong in the Davis; they’re unstable.

“That female PAB on CPC 2. I was in the chapel in the Poirot pavilion. I saw her typing on her laptop. I was curious. So I looked over her shoulder. There was no one else in the chapel. And she was chatting with someone. Then she went on video call. I ducked behind a pew. She said she was going to let her friend with a gun onto CPC 2 to kill everyone there.”

“Are you telling the truth?” I ask.

“YES!” they all shout.

“Why?” I ask. “Why would she and her friend want to kill everyone on CPC 2?”

“Because they failed to help her friend, when he was in there,” Lorne says.

“Did they abuse him?” I ask.

“No, but they didn’t help. They said he was faking to get on welfare and then they kicked him out.” Mike looks at me. “You believe us, right?”

“Why didn’t you tell the police, instead of-- this?”

“They found no evidence. I guess she got rid of that laptop. And I don’t know who the friend was. Then again, after their investigation, I heard her in the men’s bathroom in Poirot, talking to a guy she was having sex with in a stall, planning the whole thing. It was the friend she was going to let in to shoot up the place. The friend that was kicked out of the Davis for allegedly faking. Alex was his name. I learned his name was Alex. That’s all I know. I don’t know his last name, or what he looks like.”

“Alright,” I sigh. “Maybe I believe you. Maybe I don’t. But if you can prove it to us, I’ll help you. But why didn’t you evacuate the whole unit? There are a few patients you left behind. Brigitte. Brahm. Others.”

I wait for them to trip up, but they don’t. They give a legitimate answer.

“Brahm raped Allie. I was the one that walked in on them, and she was trying to get him off her, and he wouldn’t budge,” Mike says. “Brigitte would never have come. Nor would the others. They wouldn’t have cooperated. I’m sorry, but they were too far gone. And some of them were the type to tell on us. I tried talking to them all. I really did.”

The bus suddenly stops in front of an apartment building.

“Alright, listen up,” Fern says. “I’m going to tell you exactly why and how this is going to go down. You see this building? Lorne’s father is the landlord of it. He’s in on this too. He’s going to hide us. Then we’re going to wait, see if the shooting happens—the police will see we were right all along—and we’ll let you guys go.”

“Mike, do you mind if I ask you a question?” I ask.

“I love it when people ask questions. Fire away.”

“If you knew the guy’s name was Alex, couldn’t you have tipped off the police to search Ingrid’s Facebook for all Alexes and investigate them all?”

“I tried. They told me I was crazy. I don’t think it helped that I was a patient in the Davis.”

“Discrimination! Fuck me!”

“I appreciate your attitude, Hettie.” He gives me a colossal grin.

Then I notice Dieter looking at him. Scowling. But I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t believe what he’s saying.

I think it’s because he likes me and is therefore watching Mike closely.

They lock us in a basement parking lot with no cars in it. They drive the bus into a separate enclosure also in the basement. I guess they don’t want us taking off in it.

That’s when Stella has a panic attack.

Then Larry starts panicking too, though sweating with just the occasional gasp instead of hyperventilating like Stella’s doing. Andrea says, “Stop it, you guys! You’re making me want to have a panic attack!”

“Shhhhh! Andrea, you’re making them feel guilty, and they’re going to panic more!” says Dylan.

Salvador is pacing. “They didn’t even apologize for the inconvenience! Or for scaring us! They say instead that they’re saving us! How could they do this! And do we even believe their story!”

“You’ll thank us in the end,” says a voice from the doorway. One of the Lerner guys, a burly redhead, is pushing a cart with food on it. “Eat up, guys!” he says.

“I don’t know whether to touch that food or not,” Larry says.

“Don’t. It could be poison,” Dylan says. “On second thought… they wouldn’t bring us all the way out here just to poison us.”

“But maybe it’s got drugs in it. Maybe they want to make us high so they can rape us,” Andrea says. “Or have some sort of orgy.”

That’s when I realize the cart is full of sealed jars and cans and other packages of food that obviously haven’t been tampered with. There’s even a can opener on the cart. “Guys…” I say. But they’re already digging in.

Still… this could just be a ploy to get us to trust them.

Regardless, I’m hungry. I pick up a round hard plastic see-through package containing a black forest cake. I’m going to enjoy myself while here.

Andrea is singing a soothing song to Larry and Stella, particularly Larry, who’s laying with his head in Andrea’s lap while she strokes his hair. Stella is curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth. The rest of us are eating.

“Save some of that for me, will you?” Dieter says, smiling as he watches me devour the black forest cake. He grabs a piece in his bare hands and shoves it into his mouth, getting crumbs and icing on his shirt that’s already got beer stains on it that didn’t wash off properly.

After I swallow the last of what I ate of the cake, I start on a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs. Then I move on to a package of ham that I first study very closely for holes where someone could have stuck a needle in it and injected the ham. There are no holes. I break the seal and eat half the ham.

“Pace yourself, Hettie,” Dieter says, laughing.

Well, look at us, having fun while being held hostage.

Is Stockholm Syndrome already setting in?

No, it’s not. It’s already set in.

We still have so many questions. Some of the people in here are worried they won’t be able to get their meds. Salavador starts yelling “HELP, HELP!” hoping someone in the building will hear us in the basement parking lot and call the cops. But Dieter then tells him, “They own the whole building and it’s empty except for them.”

Salvador rounds on him. “How do you know this?”

“Listen, it’s a long story. I went to high school with Mike and Lorne.”

“What does that have to do with—is this some weird plot?” Dylan asks.

“And then you were suddenly all in the hospital together on the same unit?” Salvador says. “Incredible.” His voice is tinged with sarcasm.

“We did something stupid together, alright? We mugged a guy, like I told some of you. Well, I didn’t. So they beat me up, and tried to dissect me alive, and threw me in front of a train, but the train just went over me. They were taken to Pinel, but usually the ones that go to Pinel end up in the Davis in the end. I was in the Davis all along with PTSD. When they were transferred in from Pinel, they were put on the same unit as me. And you know what? They apologized. They tried to make amends. And then Mike was in the chapel and heard of what was going to happen, that shooting Ingrid and that Alex guy, whoever he is, were planning, and—”

“What, is all this so that Mike and Lorne can assuage their guilty consciences by saving us or something?” Salvador’s anger is through the roof. He looks like he wants to hit Dieter.

The door opens. “How many of you are there? Ten? Twelve?” says the head that pops in. It’s Mike again.

“There are seven of them,” a voice behind him says.

“Here!” Mike says, and throws in seven binders full of papers.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“It’s more information,” Fern says, appearing in the doorway with Mike. “The history of the users’ committee at the Davis is that they advocated for people to get the information they were entitled to when they were admitted to the Davis. Well, we want to be even better than the Davis. Not worse. We’re here to help you, save you, not victimize you. So we understand you have rights. And we’ll free you as soon as we surrender, once that shooting happens or Ingrid and Alex are caught. ”

“Hopefully they’ll be caught before it can happen,” Mike explains.

They leave. I grab one of the binders and look at it. It’s very well put together. It’s got an English section and a French section.

It explains what the International Incident Instigation Initiative is. It also calls the gang (or whatever they are) that kidnapped us the International Incident Initiators.

It explains how they were formed. Apparently, Dieter was telling the truth… it was started by Lorne and Mike, out of guilt for what they did to Dieter, trying to get right with God. When Mike heard that conversation between Alex and Ingrid, he told Lorne (and Dieter, who albeit at first wouldn’t talk to them) and they saw an opportunity to do something that would get them right with God. It turns out that Dieter actually emotionally blackmailed them, telling them that he would forgive them for what he did to him and that guy they mugged if they just did something about the shooting Ingrid and Alex were planning. Then they recruited Fern from the users’ committee, after Fern was unsuccessful trying to get staff to take their reporting of Ingrid seriously, and then Fern recruited her friends from Lerner, where she was currently a patient, and then got Dieter and Mike and Lorne to recruit more people on CPC 2. To save our lives, and it says that we can join them and help them too, but only if we want to.

Dieter agreed to lure us in, and even be captive with us for a while. He’s also here to answer our questions, apparently.

“You, my friend, are Patricia Hearst,” Salvador says to Dieter. “They sure did a job on you.”

“Wait… like the Patricia that worked at Lerner?” Stella says.

“No. Patricia—Pati Hearst—was a newspaper heiress in the States that was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army—a terrorist group—and she was chained in a closet and brainwashed and she later joined them and helped them blow up cop cars.”

I continue to read the papers while Salvador and Dieter have a back-and-forth, bickering in the background. The papers explain that Mike tried to call the cops again after he heard Alex and Ingrid in the bathroom stall talking and realized his name was Alex. And some cops checked again, but they didn’t find any Alex in relation to Ingrid… and told Mike off for wasting their time and Fern and the staff at the Davis off for letting him.

“This could just be brainwashing, you know,” Salvador says to me. “And you’re reading it. You’re giving them ammunition and satisfaction.”

“I’m just keeping an open mind,” I say.

“But you’re not supposed to open your mind so much your brains fall out!”

“I’m not doing that. I think you are. What I mean is—you’re just ASSUMING they’re brainwashing us.”

I read on. It even tells us we have the same rights we always did, except the right to leave or to tell or show anyone where we are. So unfortunately, no phone calls. But videos and letters are allowed, and will be sent in the mail to the family members, friends, lawyers, police and journalists of OUR (not their) choice. It even acknowledges that we have the right to tell our loved ones we’re okay.

“Do we have the right to go to the bathroom?” Dylan asks. “Because I have to piss so bad.”

“I feel nauseated,” Larry says. “I think I need a bucket to throw up in.”

Salvador tosses him an empty soup can.

Suddenly, the door opens again. “Anyone need a shower or to go to the bathroom?” Lorne yells.

Dylan and Larry go first. Then I’m allowed to go; I haven’t had a shower since the day BEFORE the day I was arrested under the Mental Health Act. Fern and another girl (who was at Lerner standing around drinking beer with them), both with taser guns, escort me through the door, through the laundry room it leads to, out into a hallway, and up a flight of stairs and then down another hallway and into an apartment. First they usher me into a bedroom full of bags and boxes and bins filled to the brim with clothes. “Grab something to wear, and we’ll wash you guys’s clothes,” Mike says, passing by. I find this overly nice. I grab a pair of stretchy pants that would fit me and and a dark green t-shirt that looks my size with a picture of a grizzly bear on it. I can’t find any underwear, but fuck it; at least I find a bin full of neatly-folded pairs of socks. I wonder where all these clothes come from. Donations? Victims they had that they killed?

The two girls, Fern and the other one, Hester, stand guard outside the bathroom while I shower. They let me close the door most of the way.

The window is too small to climb out of anyway, and there is nothing in the bathroom I could use to hurt myself or them, so I don’t know why they won’t let me close the door the whole way. I guess they remember when Dylan tried to drown himself in a glass of water.

Then it’s back to the garage, and one by one the others are taken to shower and change until we’re all back in here again.

I continue to look through the binder they gave us. Aside from the right to make videos and write letters for the outside world as long as they don’t give away our location, we apparently have the right to our meds, and we have the right to know what’s going on in the world as well as every new development in this… case we’re involved in. It even says they have a doctor for in case anyone is sick/injured/in labor. We have the right to three meals a day. We have the right to go to the bathroom and shower once a day. We have the right to ask questions and get truthful answers about anything they do to us. And we even have the right to spend “quality time” alone or with one or more partners in a private room in an apartment on the fourth floor.

It’s like they’re expecting us to eventually feel so at home here we want to have sex.

Or maybe they just understand that no matter how freaked out someone is, that doesn’t mean their sex organs fall off.

After all, many if not all of them have been hospitalized in the psych ward.

“How long do you think we’re gonna be here?” Dylan asks the two French guys that bring us our next meal (more sealed cans, boxes, bottles and packages).

“Hold on. I go ask Mike. I also get the doctor to bring your meds,” one of the French guys says. “By the way, I’m Jean-Paul and this is Eric.”

“Hi, Jean-Paul. Hi, Eric,” everyone choruses sarcastically.

“How do they know what meds we’re on? And why didn’t we get them last night?” Larry asks. “I was having a panic attack and nobody brought me any meds! She was too!” He jabs his finger at Stella.

“Fatim photocopied the part of your files that contains your medications,” Lorne says, coming up behind Jean-Paul and Eric.

Then an older-ish man in a suit and a white coat follows him in. I don’t know what I was expecting. A young guy, perhaps. Someone who would be more likely to fall into this kind of cult setting. But this guy is at least fifty, probably in his sixties.

“I want to see you one by one,” he said. “To make sure you’re all happy with your meds. I will change your meds if need be. And here.”

He holds up something. His diploma. It looks real. “We made a pledge that we’d be transparent with you guys, so here’s my diploma to prove I’m really a doctor. And here’s my ID,” he says, throwing a wallet at me, “to prove I’m the person on the diploma.”

I look at the medicare card and passport in the wallet. It looks legit. I pass it to Salvador, who looks at it and passes it to Andrea, and it makes the rounds of all of us. Finally, Dieter passes it back to the doctor. The doctor’s name is Etienne Tremblay.

Stella is escorted out by a group of them to see him first. She comes back smiling. “He gave me gabapentin!” she says. “I always wanted to try that!”

“Be careful. It’s addictive,” Salvador says.

“You’d better be on a low dose, or you’ll never get off it,” Dylan says.

“He is such a nice guy,” Stella raves. “They let me see him in private because they say I have the right to confidentiality. So I saw him with just Fatim in the room guarding, no one else.”

“Fatim is a PAB. He knows our business anyway,” Larry says.

“Exactly,” Stella says.

Larry goes next. He, too, comes back smiling. “He gave me gabapentin too; what’s it like?” Larry asks Stella. “And he increased my Celexa!”

“What’s he giving you guys Neurontin for? Where do you have pain?” Salvador retorts. (Neurontin is the brand name for gabapentin. I was on it myself. I must admit, I liked it and am looking forward to getting it again from this doctor.)

“It’s also for anxiety,” Stella says. “Panic attacks.”

“It also makes you HIIIIIGH!” Salvador says. “Be fucking careful, you guys.”

It’s my turn next. They lead me into an apartment on the third floor. It looks like a pharmacy. It’s got shelves and shelves of pills! Behind a desk sits the doctor. The others, except for Fatim, leave.

The doctor doesn’t give me gabapentin.

“You seem very calm. If you start to panic, let me know, and I’ll prescribe you some gabapentin, but a low dose first to see if that works. For now, I think your Celexa and Abilify should keep you grounded.”

So he’s not just drugging us. That is FANTASTIC to know. So what’s these people’s motivation? Not to torture, rape, drug or kill us. Or maybe they’re just still at the stage where they’re trying to gain our trust. I don’t know.

And wait. I never took Celexa or Abilify. I always refused it at the hospital. I had a court date to force me to take it. But I was going to fight it in court.

“Can I refuse?” I ask.

“Yep,” he says. “It says in your file you refused at the Davis, so you obviously had the right to do that. So just let me know if you want or need anything.”

“Okay. Thanks,” I say.

Back in the garage, Larry asks me, “What did he give you?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“He said I had the right to refuse. Because my file from the Davis said I did.”

“Wow!” several people—Larry, Stella and Salvador—say at the same time.

“What could their motive possibly be for having us here?” Salvador asks, pacing, agitated.

“I don’t know,” I say. “But maybe, just maybe, they are telling us the truth.”

“It says in here,” Andrea says, paging through one of the binders they gave us, “that we have the right to birth control. And if one of us gets pregnant we have the right to an abortion, or the right to have our baby delivered by a full, qualified medical team.”

“This place is no place to raise a child,” Salvador says. “Are you pregnant? Or do you plan to become pregnant in this place?”

“No… but what if we get raped?” Stella says.

“They’re not going to rape us!” I say.

“Someone’s drunk the Kool-Aid already,” Salvador says.

“I’m just keeping an open mind. And no, my brains haven’t fallen out yet. I can still think. I can still feel people out to the best of my abilities and come to the conclusion that yes, such-and-such is the case, or that maybe it is. But I’m not sure.”

“Well, you said nobody’s going to get raped. You sounded pretty sure,” Salvador retorts.

“Just—I don’t know—maybe they will. But I don’t think so.” And I don’t. I looked into their eyes. They seemed like their eyes were hiding nothing, so there was nothing to question. It’s hard to explain. I tell Salvador and the others just that. I can feel their anger radiating out of their eyes onto my skin, even though I’m not looking at them.

“What were you in the Davis for?” Salvador asks me.

“What, you think I’m crazy? What were you in the Davis for?”

“Not fanciful delusions!”

“Oh, no?” Andrea says, jumping into the fight. “Well, you were going to drop everything and move to China two weeks ago, and you quit school and your job and started shoplifting.”

Salvador goes white. “Who told you that?”

“You told me yourself,” Andrea retorts. “A hundred miles a minute too. See? You were so manic you don’t even remember it.”

“Look, guys, we have to stick together. We can’t start squabbling among ourselves,” Dylan says. “Or the cops are going to come here and find seven dead bodies in the parking garage.”

“What was that?” Dieter suddenly says.

“What?”

“Someone just screamed.”

“What was what?” Salvador asks, annoyed. “I didn’t hear anything. Are you hearing voices now?”

“You’re one to talk! You heard voices telling you to go to China!” Andrea says.

“Just one voice saying ‘Yes!’ when I was praying asking God whether to go or not!” Salvador shoots back.

“And that doesn’t qualify as hearing voices?” Stella asks.

“What do you think I just heard?” Dieter says. “Just one voice! Screaming!”

“Are you sure it wasn’t you?” Dylan asks. “I mean… your PTSD gives you flashbacks, right? It could have been you hearing your own screaming when Lorne and Mike attacked you, or that guy you guys mugged.”

“I didn’t mug the guy! Lorne and Mike did! I tried to stop them!”

“Guys, this is stupid! We have to stop fighting!” Andrea says.

“What do you think you’ve been doing with me? Giving me a blowjob?” Salvador retorts. Then he’s suddenly quiet and turns tomato-red.

“I’m not fighting! I was making an observation to try and help you guys!” Dylan says.

“Salvador, that was just wrong,” Andrea says about the blowjob comment. “I can’t talk to you anymore. It’s too awkward.”

“We need to stop—we need to cooperate!” I exclaim over the craziness.

“With them, or with each other?” Larry says.

“With each other.”

“Oh, okay, I thought you meant with them.”

Then Stella has another panic attack, and as if on cue, the door opens and, flanked and protected by Eric and Jean-Paul with their taser guns, the doctor and one of the guys from Lerner bring in a clear plastic bag full of bottles of pills, a big jug of water and a stack of plastic cups. “You’re going to have to take them in front of us,” the guy from Lerner (I think his name is Jean-Claude) says.

Everyone has pills to take except me. “You should have asked for something,” Dieter says.

“No, thank you. I’m normal,” I snap.

“Sorry I’m not normal, Hettie,” Dieter says, and I feel guilty, because he’s joking and not angry at me and I’m relieved.

“We’re normal,” Larry says.

“Well, we won’t be after they’re done with us,” mutters Dylan.

Suddenly I hear it.

It’s a scream. A bloodcurdling scream.

But it’s coming from outside, through the garage doors, not from inside the building.

Then I hear sirens.

Suddenly, I hear someone shout “Mic check!” and then more people shouting “MIC CHECK!” I recognize the saying from Occupy Montreal. It’s the Human Microphone. The police banned megaphones and microphones and bullhorns from Occupy, so they had to use the Human Microphone.

“They’re here!” shouts someone in the building.

“THEY’RE HERE!” shout more people.

Soon I hear people running all over the building, shouting “They’re here! They’re here!” all at the same time.

“Who ratted us out?” I hear a guy calling out from beyond the laundry room.

Then a girl’s voice: “It was me… I’m so sorry; it just didn’t feel right, doing all this…” I think it’s that girl from Lerner whose name I think is Jamie.

I swallow the knot in my throat. I need to run. Now. They’re going to kill us. Or maybe not. But I don’t want to take the chance. My nervous system is telling me not to take the chance.

“Hands up! All of you! We’re going to release you!” Mike shouts.

I can’t help but think he’s going to release us from our earthly bodies.

“We’re letting you go, but you’ve got to put your hands up,” Lorne says.

It all happens at once. Salvador attacks Eric. Dylan, Stella and Andrea tackle Jean-Paul to the ground.

I don’t know what to do. Am I brainwashed? Then I decide that if they truly are good people, they’ll understand us having to attack them. So I join in. I kick Eric in the back of the knees and he keels over, falling into Salvador’s arms, where Salvador catches him in a bear hug and then jumps on top of him. Eric’s taser gun clatters away across the pavement. Jean-Paul is down, being held by Stella and Larry, while Andrea holds his stun gun on him. I run to grab Eric’s stun gun, stepping on Jean-Paul’s stomach on purpose and then regretting it because our captors were so nice to us, and what if they’re good people?

Jean-Paul projectile-vomits upward, close to my face but not in it. I dive for the gun.

Someone grabs me around the waist and the gun is getting farther and farther away. It can’t be the old doctor; he’s not fit enough to grab me like that. It must be either Mike, Lorne, Jean-Claude or someone else who just came in.

I ram my head backwards into theirs. The resulting yell from the person who has me around the waist sounds Frenchy; it’s either Jean-Claude or another French guy. He lets me go, startled, and I realize it’s Jean-Claude.

Then suddenly, screams. From inside the building this time. Then “THEY’RE ATTACKING US! THE CAPTIVES ARE ATTACKING US!” and “CODE FORTY-THREE!” Soon they’re all shouting “Code forty-three!”

“What’s Code 43?” someone, one of us, asks.

And they have at least forty-three codes? What are all the others? Wouldn’t it be Code One or Code Four or even Code 20 if it was really important? This tells me that us escaping or not escaping isn’t on their list of priorities. So maybe—

“Hettie! Grab the gun!” Salvador shouts.

What?

But it’s too late. Five more people with taser guns are in here.

“We’re abandoning ship,” someone, one of our captors, says. “Just leave them. They’ll find them.”

The five people who just came in rush out again.

There’s a right ruckus upstairs. I can hear a guy yelling something with “POLICE!” and “HANDS UP” in it.

My hands up and a little out in front of me, I head over to the door to the laundry room. Nobody stops me from walking gingerly through the laundry room, careful not to startle anyone. I leave the laundry room for the hallway, passing the open door of an apartment where the news is on the TV but nobody’s watching; they’re gone; already gone outside with their hands up.

I can hear my friends I was held captive with talking behind me. I turn my head around to make sure their hands are up; I don’t want any of them getting shot.

The SWAT team is outside.

The local police, the SPVM, is outside. The RCMP is outside.

There are fire trucks, ambulances, news crews, and a crowd of people outside too.

Nobody gets shot. Nobody even gets hurt. They arrest us and put us in paddywagons headed to Bordeaux (the men’s jail) and Tanguay.

Five hours after being sorted out as a victim rather than one of the perpetrators, and being questioned nearly to death by the SPVM, the RCMP, and then by the press, the police drive me, Dieter, Dylan, Salvador, Andrea, Larry and Stella back to the Davis. We’re all involuntary, so we don’t have a choice… we have to go back.

After what happened, a court date to make me take medication and stay in the mental institution seems like nothing. Oh, and speaking of court, I have to testify. But at least I can give a victim impact statement. But I don’t want to. I don’t know whether I should even cooperate with the investigation. Except, of course, to do what I did today… tell them that they were very nice to us, gave us as many rights as they could, informed us of our rights, and even got us our medication and offered us a private room to have sex, for fuck’s sake (pardon my pun).

So this is what happened. My instincts that maybe these people were good people turned out to be right.

They caught Ingrid with guns at work at the Davis yesterday, when we were still being held captive in the parking garage. A patient getting money from the patients’ trust fund in the Poirot pavilion was in the bathroom when she heard Ingrid in a bathroom stall loading her guns, then she dropped her pistol by accident and it went off. No one was hurt, but it made a hole in the wall.

The frightened girl who was in the bathroom with Ingrid stood on the toilet so Ingrid couldn’t see her feet and called 9-1-1 on her cell phone. But Ingrid didn’t notice she was even in there, and was already headed out the door and through the tunnels with her guns, heading to CPC 2. The police accosted her in the basement of the CPC building in front of the elevator leading up to CPC 2.

Now everyone’s telling me I was right and that they’re sorry.

A bony, bald, pale, sickly-looking dude comes over to me. “Hettie, there’s a girl on the phone who wants to talk to you.”

“Who is it? If it’s my sister Orla, you can tell her to fuck right off.”

“It’s someone named Allie.”

I jump up and run to the phone, amidst two staff telling me not to run.

“Where are you?” I ask into the phone receiver.

“At Pinel. But they’re transferring me back here. They do that for most English-speaking people eventually.”

“And how are you?”

“Well, I won’t be getting my gun back. But I don’t need it any more. I don’t want to kill myself any more. Or even to kill Brahm. I’m so over him.”

“What changed your mind?”

“All that stuff with you guys… with those International Incident Initiators… it gave me something to look forward to. Something to get involved in.”

“But they’re all in jail now!”

“Right now they are. But they won’t all be in jail if we decide to become part of them ourselves. We’re not in jail. Well, you aren’t. I’m in a forensic psychiatric prison. But I’m being sent back to the Davis soon. And you’re freer than me, right now.”

“I’m on lockdown. Because I—because we all— willingly went with Fatim off the unit after hours, we’re not even allowed off the unit any more.”

“But you will be. And so will I.”

“Wow… you sure have changed. What did they do to you over there?”

“I told you, it wasn’t here, or them here. It was you guys.”

“Well, you’re welcome, then,” I say jokingly. “But it wasn’t us, it was the Initiators you have to thank… I guess you didn’t know they were coming, or you wouldn’t have been bothered sneaking in that gun.”

“I didn’t know. But Andrea filled me in yesterday about all the stuff you guys did and all the shit that happened to you. And of course the news is on every channel.”

“Yeah. Great fun,” I say. Sarcastically… I think.

“Look, I’ve gotta go,” Allie says. “Give Brahm a kick in the balls for me.”

“Sorry, no can-do. And why would you want me to end up in Pinel when you’re coming here?” I say jokingly.

“Okay, well, I’ll see you soon, unless I’m on Poirot 2A or something.”

“Poirot 2A?”

“The violent people’s unit.”

“Well, I hope you’re with us.”

“I hope so too. Be good.”

“I will. I think. I hope.”

The other six I was held captive with are waiting for me as I get off the phone, waiting around the long table in the activity room.

“We’re doing a psychological debriefing,” the female social worker from before says. “Please do join us.”

“I’ve done ENOUGH debriefing, reminiscing, rehashing, answering questions, and more, with my friends and with the police and with the press!” I say.

“Well, we want to know how you feel about it,” the male social worker says, sitting down with us.

“I feel like I’m part of something,” I blurt out. “Something meaningful.”

“It’s a complicated case,” the male social worker admits. “You might find you have a lot of psychological work to do.”

“Or none at all,” I say. “Or it’s not work, but fun.”

“You enjoy thinking about it?” he says.

“YES!” me and Andrea both say.

“We can talk about this. Let’s talk about this,” the male social worker says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Don’t you feel you need to?” the female social worker, whose name is Whitney (according to her Davis ID card around her neck), says.

“I don’t know. Once I sort out the feelings… when I want to… I might write a book about it.”

“No. You are not writing a book. We are writing a book,” Dieter says.

“I’ll write it with you!” Stella says.

“Me too,” Andrea says.

“All of us,” I catch myself saying. “We’re all in this together, and now we’re all in here together, and we’ll get out of this together by talking about it together.”

They probably wrote down that I have Stockholm Syndrome, but I don’t care. As long as they don’t decide to separate us or some other hocus-pocus, I’m fine. Hell, I’m fine even if they do separate us, because there’s no separating parts of an idea once it’s planted. When Nelson Mandela was in political prison, they decided to separate him and his political-inmate friends from each other by putting them in separate jails for common criminals.

They politicized the common criminals.

So the powers that be had to put them back together in the political prison.

I write that down to remind myself of that important point. Then I talk to Allie on the phone about my crush on Dieter, have sex with Dieter in the bathroom, draw a sketch of a woman mopping the floor in a morgue, start writing my book, draw a portrait of Dieter, draw a caricature of Brahm with his big nose and pouty lips and squinty eyes, sing innuendo-laced pop songs in the hallways, do a hundred push-ups, explain to an angry LaTawnda why the Initiators left her and most of the others on the unit behind when they took us off the unit, and refuse more pills at bedtime.

I toss and turn in bed, unable to sleep. Then a girl is escorted into my room by the PAB Dieter spat on the other day. He leaves her in here with us. She sits down on the bed Allie had when she was here. “Hi, Hettie,” she whispers. She rummages in her paper bag of stuff and takes out the stuffed polar bear with stuffing coming out of its ass. Obviously they took the gun out.

It’s Allie. She’s back.

“They questioned me,” Allie says. “But I knew nothing.”

“They questioned me for five hours at the jail and then for two hours here,” I say.

The other two girls in our room join in. “You guys are famous,” one of them, a bony, curly redhead with a triangular face full of freckles, giggles. “I wish I could be famous.”

“I wouldn’t want to be famous,” the other one, a fat, round-faced curly blonde, says.

“Why not?” the redhead asks.

“No peace. People constantly judging you.”

Then it occurs to me that people will judge me. People thinking I have Stockholm Syndrome is the least of my worries. They’ll think I helped orchestrate this whole thing. Or that it destroyed me. Or that I’m using it as a crutch. Or that I just let it happen and could have stopped it. My mood plummets.

“What’s wrong, Hettie?” Allie asks.

“They’ll judge me,” I say.

“They’ll judge all of us, all of you,” Allie says.

“I don’t want to face it,” I say.

Maybe I won’t go to court to fight my commitment.

I think I need those antidepressants.

I listen as the staff come in at six-thirty in the morning to wake us up. I don’t budge. Allie says, “Come on, Hettie, wake up!”

I roll over on the creaky wire cot and go back to sleep.

Someone throws water in my face.

“ALLIE!” I shriek.

But it’s Dieter, standing over me smiling with an empty paper cup in his hand.

“I have something to show you,” Dieter says. “Quick before the others get up.”

“Is it another group of people that want to kidnap us?” I ask Dieter. But I’m curious, and I probably wouldn’t mind engaging in some nice, wholesome nefarious activity.

He leads us to a cart with red binders on it. With our names on them. It’s our files.

“Take yours,” Dieter says. “I already took mine.”

Suddenly, I get an idea. “Is Alex’s file there?” I ask. But then I realize it’s just the forty people who are currently being held on this unit whose files are on this cart.

Speaking of Alex and Ingrid, even the graveyard shift staff are talking about Ingrid. It’s been Ingrid this and Ingrid that with all of the staff during their downtime for days, but this is different. They’re also talking about someone named Sindel, in relation to Ingrid.

Who’s Sindel?

Larry comes rushing over to us, followed by Dylan.

“Hey, you guys! You’ve got to come watch the news right now!”

I grab my file and think of where I can hide it. I decide on the wastebasket in one of the single rooms that someone was just discharged from. I run there with the file, put it in there, and ask Dieter where his is.

“In the bathroom, behind one of the toilets,” Dieter says.

“Is it visible?”

“No… I stuffed it in there well.”

“Well, come on, then! Let’s go watch the news!”

“No running, please!” one of the nurses says as we run to the activity room to watch the news.

The activity room is full to packed; everyone for once has gotten up early. And they’re all in here.

The chief of the RCMP is giving a statement: “The suspect Ingrid Braun is talking to us, she’s cooperating, she had a breakdown, or breakthrough, last night… she realizes what she did wrong and that what she did was wrong… and she has led us to another suspect… Sindel Narine… who may be using the code name ‘Alex’.”

“FUCK! SINDEL!” the bald sickly guy jumps up. “I was in his group home before! I got out of there. He was a scary character. He harassed me.”

Suddenly, on the TV screen, someone in a police uniform rushes to the podium and whispers something in the chief’s ear. His expression changes. “Oh, okay—sure; take the lectern,” the chief says. His expression still changing a mile a second, he leaves the podium/lectern and steps back a few feet.

The policewoman takes the lectern and says: “We have just received news that our suspect Sindel Narine has been shot dead in front of the Davis Hospital… he has killed people today—he was staying in a group home and—“

“FUCK! SINDEL!” shouts the bald sickly guy again, drowning out what the policewoman is saying.

The screen suddenly cuts to a duplex somewhere in Montreal, where body bags are being carried out and police cars are all up and down the street. Crime scene tape surrounds the duplex.

A reporter stands outside, far enough away not to be accused of tampering with evidence, but we can still see them carrying out bodies.

“It is unclear if there are any survivors, who may have escaped and might have something to tell the police, or if Sindel Narine and Ingrid Braun, who as we know is now behind bars and is cooperating with police, had another accomplice.”

The bald guy is having a nervous breakdown on the couch, rocking back and forth holding his head. “That FUCKER! My friends are there! My FRIENDS!”

This morning Sindel Narine, aka Alex, shot up his group home here in Verdun. He killed the manager of the group home and five residents, four males and one female.

Do I know any of them? Were any of them in the groups I attended? Maybe, but out of my friends in the groups I attended here at the Davis, none of them lived in a group home, so it can’t be them, thank God.

Larry is comforting the bald guy, saying “It’s alright, George, he’s been arrested. Sindel’s been arrested.”

“Did you know Sindel?” I ask Larry.

“Yeah… he was in the social anxiety group I went to at Crossroads.”

Crossroads is the little house on the grounds of the Davis that groups are hosted at.

“Who here knew or knows Sindel Narine?” I ask loudly to the whole room. Larry, LaTawnda and another guy put their hands up; George is still using both his to clutch his head in mental agony.

“Go call your friends. See if they’re okay,” Larry is telling him.

He calls his friend Zadok. No answer.

He calls his friend Hurley. No answer. This is excruciating.

He calls his friend Ilhan. No answer. He gives up, unable to take any more.

“But what if one of them is alive? And you think they’re dead? You deserve relief, not more anxiety,” I tell him. “Do you want me to call them for you?”

So I call his friend Beatrice.

Her sister answers and says she’s dead.

I look at George. He looks at me. I open my mouth to tell him, but he already knows. He starts hyperventilating and then passes out.

“He was headed for the Davis. To kill us,” I mull to my friends over a breakfast that we are eating late because we were watching the news.

Suddenly Dylan comes up to us again. “I just saw more news,” he says. “There was more. He killed the people at the group home because they refused to go help him shoot up the Davis and one of them told the staff at the group home on him.”

Apparently, the cops had also questioned every Alex who had ever been on CPC 2 but none of them had known Ingrid, and the staff had confirmed it… Ingrid had only been a PAB for a short while.

Larry comes up behind Dylan, breathless, running.

We all look at him. More bad news?

He confirms it by saying, “They found a guy dead at the 108 bus stop where they shot the guy, Sindel Narine, dead.”

“The 108 bus stop here?” Brigitte, who’s our friend again, says.

“Yeah! They said in front of the Davis!”

“At the end of the driveway,” Dieter explains. “The driveway next to the parking lot right out front of this building. There’s a 108 bus stop.”

“Who was the guy?” I ask. “I mean the guy he killed at the bus stop. Anyone we know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they said.”

The police are talking to the staff behind the counter. Then they come right over to us and call nine names: “George Adams, Dieter Bonhoeffer, Salvador Contreras, Andrea Derronda, Dylan Drain, Larry Laliberte, Hettie Masterson, LaTawnda Matherne, and Stella Polaris… if you would be so kind as to come with us, we have some more questions to ask you. The rest of you can stay here… don’t panic; there is nothing going on on the unit or in the building.”

“Your name is Stella Polaris?” Dylan asks Stella as they lead us away down the hall and off the unit to a conference room. “I mean, I knew your name was Stella, but Stella Polaris? Did you change it to that from something else or something?”

“My real last name is Polaris. So of course my dad had to call me Stella. I hate it. Everyone is always asking me the ethnicity of my name. And when I was admitted here, they didn’t believe it was my real name; they thought I was delusional until they saw my ID. My dad was born Edwin Pfeiffer but he changed his name to Polaris because of one of his schizo delusions.”

“I think it suits you,” Dylan says. “It reminds me of that girl Polaris from that show The Gifted. You even look like her.”

We sit down in the conference room. “Nobody talk. Nobody pass notes. We’re watching you. We don’t want you guys collaborating your stories; you can talk after we’re done. I’m going to take you one by one into the office over there and ask you some questions.”

“But you already did that. What more could you have to ask us?” Larry says.

“New developments in the case. We actually have a lot to ask you, in particular, Mr. Laliberte, along with… LaTawnda Matherne and George Adams… because you guys knew Sindel Narine.”

We can do nothing but stare at each other as one by one, they take us out. I feel like we’re waiting to go to the gallows. I don’t know why I’m so nervous. I don’t have anything to hide. But some of my friends might.

Why do I care so much? Why do I care at all????

The people that have already gone don’t come back; they no doubt either are back on the unit or have been arrested.

Finally, only me and Stella remain, and then Stella is called. They don’t take long with Stella. Then I’m called.

“Do any of these names mean anything to you… Zadok Barbay, Beatrice Dumas, Hurley Durane, Ilhan Omari, Francois Legault?”

“I remember at least three of them… not Francois, though… from when George was calling them to find out if they were alive. But I didn’t know them.”

“So I don’t have to question you about their relationship with Mr. Narine?” the cop asks. Rhetorical question.

“Well, all I know is they lived in the same group home, and it said on the news that—”

“I know what it said on the news. That they refused to help him. But do you know why they refused, or why he wanted them to help him?”

“I didn’t even know the guy,” I say. “Or anyone he knew, as far as I know.”

“Well, that’s funny, because three of your friends know him.”

“They weren’t my friends until like today!” I say. “Except Larry. He’s been my friend for less than a week, though.”

“Okay… so you knew Larry knew Sindel Narine.”

“He told me today, when we were watching the news. He didn’t know… we were actually trying to get to the bottom of… I mean, even the International Incident Whatever-It’s-Called were trying to get to the bottom of who Alex was. But it wasn’t us that were able to find out.”

“Fair enough. Now, one more thing.”

He places a picture of someone on the desk. A head shot. It’s a guy. He looks familiar. Then I notice his vacant expression and the fact that he has a hole in his head, and I notice the stainless steel grids with holes in them behind his head… he’s laying on an autopsy slab.

It’s Casey.

Casey, from the social anxiety group at Crossroads that I attended with Leah. Not the same one Larry was in with Sindel.

“It’s Casey. Casey Dooley. From the social anxiety group at Crossroads. He’s dead?”

“You know him?” the two cops say at the same time.

I nod. I tell them how I know him. They tell me it was him they found at the bus stop with a through-and-through bullet hole in his head.

“This is the biggest piece of info we’ve got so far,” the male cop says to the female. “This could have actually not been an accident. He could have been after the other people from the groups at Crossroads. Particularly the social anxiety groups.”

“What we’re worried about is that he and Ingrid might have other accomplices out there. So we’re going to have to move you and your friends to a secured unit. Because you’re all in the hospital and not allowed to leave, we can’t send you to a safehouse.”

“What, you’re taking us to jail?” I say.

“Not to jail. Just to another unit here. Meanwhile, we’ve locked down the units, we’ve got unmarked police vehicles at the end of every driveway and at every entrance to the grounds, nobody’s getting out or in to visit. But there could be someone on your unit or another unit who wants to kill you. So we’re taking you guys off the units as a precaution. You’re all going to an empty unit in the Poirot Pavilion.”

“What if it’s a staff member? What if they’ve got a mole who works for the Davis?”

“We’ve questioned all the staff. But be careful.”

“How can I be careful when I’m locked up!” I explode. “They should take us ALL—every patient in the whole Davis—somewhere else, or just fire all the staff as a precaution!”

“Don’t you think we tried? Sorry… politics.”

I need to get out of this place. I need to get out of here now.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” the female officer says.

“Thank you,” I huff sarcastically as I head out the door between the two officers and they escort me through the tunnels to the Poirot pavilion.

My friends are already there, sitting in the eating area. We trade stories. Then:

“Is there anyone else on CPC 2 who was in the Crossroads groups?” LaTawnda asks me. “The social anxiety group, I mean.”

“Nope. Or they’d be here with us too, or they’d have been arrested, if they were actually involved.”

“I guess that group’s cancelled until further notice,” Dylan says.

It’s only at night in bed that I remember Leah. I’ve got to warn her!

I jump out of bed and run to the phone in the hallway.

Leah’s sense of humor really shines through in the message she left. “Sorry… I’m part of a police murder investigation and can’t come to the phone right now… if it’s a red-hot emergency, call the cops and they’ll either put you through to me or come to your house… love you, miss you, see you later!”

“Well, at least they hopefully have all the people who went to the groups protected,” I say as I rejoin Andrea in our room.

“They do,” Andrea says. “The cops told me. They’re either guarding their houses or sent them to safehouses.”

“Whew,” I say.

There’s one nurse and one PAB on this new, special unit. The doctor still sees us daily, but on this new unit. The police guard the doors on this unit.

For a few scared moments, I wonder if the mole isn’t one of us, or one of the police. Then I remember they would have already killed me if it was. I think.

Dieter and I pass the time by having sex in the men’s bathroom. Andrea and Larry are in another stall in the same bathroom, having sex as well. Then after I’m done, I go to the female bathroom to shower and find Stella and Dylan in there having sex.

“Sorry,” I mutter, dashing out of the bathroom and deciding to give them their privacy and take a shower later.

LaTawnda comes running up to me as I walk down the hallway. “They just gave Ingrid truth serum and she just gave the names of all the people involved!”

No doubt LaTawnda’s been watching the news, or just talked to the cops.

“So there were more people involved,” I say. “How many? And who?”

Then I ask the question I’ve been asking a lot of lately: “Anyone we know?”

So they caught all those people who had been planning the shooting with them who had then chickened out and refused to do it with Sindel and Ingrid, so now we can return to CPC 2. They escort us there in a group, across the grounds this time instead of through the underground passages.

Sindel apparently asked people in his social anxiety group at Crossroads (the one he was in with Larry), but just people he trusted (and that’s why he didn’t ask Larry). He had asked a guy named Louis. Louis had said yes, then gone to another social anxiety group (mine) on purpose to find and recruit more people he trusted. He recruited Casey. Casey had chickened out in the end and said no, but not before he said yes and asked someone else in our group (Guillaume) who said no, but didn’t tell the authorities.

Meanwhile, Louis had recruited his brother, Jean-Philippe. But Jean-Philippe lost interest, though he didn’t report them.

Now, Jean-Philippe and Louis and Guillaume are being held in jail for obstruction of justice. Louis is also being held for conspiracy to commit mass murder.

A woman just got admitted onto CPC 2 saying she’s Sindel’s mother. She couldn’t handle the fact that her son did what he did, and was mad at the Davis for not helping him. So she came to the Davis, walked into a grove of trees where she had some privacy, and cut herself up really bad hoping to bleed out. She didn’t; just made a mess all over the grass, and was rushed to the Verdun General Hospital for stitches… and now she’s back here but as an inpatient.

She shows me a picture in her wallet of Sindel at age seventeen, in a tux, with a girl, on his prom night. It’s so different from the pictures I saw on the TV of Sindel secretly posing in his room at the group home with guns and knives.

“I’m sorry, for what it’s worth,” I tell her.

“Don’t. I should be sorry. I raised that son of a bitch, and never figured out what he was going to do. I knew him! I should have suspected!”

“People can deceive. No one can know everything. Maybe he didn’t show you any clues.” I wonder if she thinks she’s a bitch, or if she is a bitch. She called her son a son of a bitch, after all.

“I should have knooooown!” she wails, and starts rocking and shaking and twitching like she’s having a seizure or something.

A staff member comes and gives her a PRN and brings her to the conference room to talk in private. I’m not invited, of course, especially since I appear to be the one that upset her.

“What’s her name?” I ask Dieter, nodding at the room Sindel’s mother is talking to and screaming at the nurse in.

“Aleah Sandhu.”

“I didn’t expect you to know her last name; wow,” I say. I wonder if she was married to Sindel’s father. In Quebec even when you’re married you keep your maiden name, unless you apply to change it and pay for the privilege. I wonder if she abused Sindel. I wonder if he abused Sindel. I wonder if Sindel’s classmates at school abused Sindel. I wonder if someone else abused Sindel.

And I wonder why I care so damn much, when I shouldn’t be caring at all.

I can hear Aleah moaning and sobbing from her room down the hall as we eat dinner. We try to ignore it, as there seems to be nothing we can do.

“Hey, guess what, guys… the doctor said I’m getting out tomorrow! He’s dropping my court order because he says I handled all the shit that’s been happening very well,” Salvador says.

“What about us?” Larry asks.

“Yeah… what about us?” Dylan echoes.

“Well, you tried to kill yourself, Dylan,” Salvador says. “Twice!”

“What about me?” Larry says.

“What did you do? I can’t believe I never asked before. You were in a group home, right? And a group.”

“Yeah, well, I had some issues before, but I don’t now.”

“Come on; we all have issues or we wouldn’t be here,” Salvador says.

We talk about our issues again. I tell them honestly why I’m here because I might as well; they’re my friends. I’m a bit shocked at myself. Now I’ll never be free; they’ll probably tell the staff I need to be there or something.

So Dieter tried to kill himself from PTSD from Mike and Lorne attacking him, trying to dissect him alive and then when they heard the police coming, throwing him in front of a train.

Stella is here because she was cutting herself. She has Borderline Personality Disorder and bipolar disorder.

Larry is here because he had such a bad panic attack that he didn’t want to panic and suffer any more, so he tried to take too many pills and end it.

Andrea is here because she said once that she was suicidal, and she was, but she wasn’t any more by the time they arrested her and brought her to the Davis.

Salvador is here because he was manic. He was ready to go to China with no money, and was caught shoplifting after quitting school and his job, and was in jail for a week during which he crashed and became suicidal, and they brought him to Pinel and then here. He became manic again when on antidepressants here.

Allie is here because she tried to kill herself with pills, of course, and then she did it again in here, and then there was of course the gun incident.

Brigitte is here because her husband died, she got depressed, she wouldn’t get out of bed, and now she’s still getting electroconvulsive therapy despite being able to get out of bed now. I ask her if she consented to the ECT. She says she is consenting to it; she has to sign forms for it. Whew. I hope she’s telling the truth.

Brahm is here because he sexually assaulted a guy. He was in jail for it. Then he faked his way into here to get out of jail, threatening suicide and then being brought to Pinel and then here. So he probably did rape Allie.

Dylan is here because he tried to kill himself with pills, then he tried to kill himself by drowning himself in a glass of water in here.

LaTawnda is here because she was manic and hypersexual; she would lay naked on her bed with her apartment door wide open, yelling “Come in, honey!” to every passing guy.

George is here for mixed reasons. He has panic attacks, sure, but he was also not getting out of bed, partly due to the panic attacks and partly due to depression, and not eating or showering or talking at all. At least now he eats, showers and talks.

The curly redhead, Victoria, is here for anorexia. She says she hated being short and fat and was ridiculed for it and would rather be tall and thin. That’s why she starves herself and wears those platform shoes.

The fat curly blonde, Elsa, is here for hearing voices telling her to kill herself.

As I finish my coffee, the doctor (who’s been hanging around in the background listening to our conversation) says he wants to see me.

Uh-oh.

“Your court date is tomorrow,” he says. “If you want to sign this to waive your right to go to court—”

“Nope. I’m going to court.”

“Okay, then. How do you feel today?”

“I feel… mixed.”

“I understand you’ve decided to become emotionally involved in—”

“Decided? It just happened!”

“Sorry; English isn’t my first language.”

“Why aren’t you letting me go?”

“How are you getting along with your family lately?”

“What does that have to do with letting me go? And I’m not getting along with them. I’m not even talking to them.”

He writes that down, then waits for more from me.

“They think I’m mentally ill when I’m not,” I finally say.

“I understand they seem to be very open and honest about their own mental illnesses. Do you understand it’s nothing to be ashamed of?” the doctor says.

“But I’m not mentally ill!” I shriek. “And all that shit that happened—what do I need to do to prove it to you?”

“A mentally ill person can be handling a part of their life very, very well, but still be having an episode,” he says.

“How am I having an episode? How am I behaving badly?”

“You’re manic. If you weren’t here, who knows what you’d be out there doing. You’re still talking fast, pacing, having sex in the bathroom— by the way, I believe your nurse, Vallene, offered you the Pill and you refused…”

“I’m not going to get pregnant,” I say, feeling myself get red. “I— I’ve gotta go, I feel sick. And tired. And hungry again, for fucking oranges and meat pie for some reason. And forgive me if I’m a bitch, but--”

“I’m going to order a pregnancy test for you.”

Oh, shit. What have I done?

And if I can be in denial about getting pregnant, maybe I am manic. And in denial about it.

My pregnancy test comes back positive. My STD test thankfully comes back negative.

I’m watching the news and not watching the news.

Everyone else is either glued to the news, or not in the room, because they don’t wanna see it, or in the other little living room watching other stuff on the other TV.

I can’t concentrate.

How do I tell Dieter I’m probably, 99% surely, pregnant? Should I wait till it’s confirmed by a second test later? Do I want to know? Of course I do. I’m excited. Not a bad kind of excited, either.

Why am I not worried? Why do I like this?

Does Dieter already know? Did someone tell him? Did any of the other patients notice I’m different or that I was happier and then bitchier and then happier again than usual the last two days or that I was asking everyone for their leftover chicken pot pie and mandarin oranges and then putting the mandarin oranges in the pie and eating it? Did they notice me drinking a lot of water? Did they notice me smiling a certain way, as though I knew something… which I kind of did? Even before the doctor told me he was going to do the test?

How do I get help with a baby? Will they take my baby away? No; they won’t. I won’t let them. I’ll get the International Incident Initiators to break me out of here if they have to. I’m sure Dieter, who after all is the father, would agree to call up Lorne and Mike at Pinel or Bordeaux or wherever they are now and have them call up whoever they need to to get me out of here.

Or maybe I’ll just get a lawyer.

Maybe the Initiators have lawyers.

Maybe they have good lawyers. Better lawyers than Legal Aid. I mean, they even had a doctor.

“Hettie, it’s your sister on the phone.”

Fuck! How does she even know I’m here! She must have seen me on the news, being herded out of the building with my hands up.

“Oh, and your friend Leah called just like twenty minutes ago,” LaTawnda continues.

“Oh, and your friend Allissa called this morning,” George pipes up.

“Wow; you’re popular!” LaTawnda exclaims.

Why do I suddenly want to talk to Orla? And tell her the exciting news?!

So I rush into the booth and grab the phone. “Orla, I’m pregnant,” I blurt out.

“Was it consensual? Whoa, slow down. Tell me everything else that happened first. But wait… first first… was it consensual?”

“Yes it was,” I say, my words bumping into each other as they rush to get out of my mouth. “He’s such a great guy, named Dieter. You probably saw him on the news. German guy, tall and blond, blue eyes, wearing black pants and a white shirt when they filmed us coming out of the building.”

“Was it manic-consensual, or sober-consensual?”

“It was… it was both! It’s complicated! But it’s so simple!”

I happen to turn half around and find Dieter standing right there! “Dieter… I’m pregnant!” just rushes out of my mouth.

“I know,” he says.

“Can you talk to my sister for me?” I say.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time, perhaps ever. Orla and I are talking again! Leah and I are talking again! Allissa and I are talking again! Mom is mad; she wanted me to go to college, but fuck that; I’ll do it later.

Leah was not involved in the whole crap-that-was-happening, but the police of course questioned her just as a precaution, because she was in the social anxiety group with us. Allissa even got questioned, also as a precaution, because she was in one of the groups, though not the social anxiety one (she was in the bipolar one).

Leah, Allissa and Orla all want to come see me and Dieter. I told them they could. Visiting hours are from nine to nine. They’re all coming tomorrow, anxious for a piece of the action. Even though we’re only allowed two visitors each on the unit with us, Dieter says he’ll say one of them is his visitor.

Dieter told me a few days ago that his family disowned him after he became a drunkard due to his PTSD.

I can hear the phone ringing in the background. Maybe it’s someone else calling me.

“Dieter, it’s for you!”

“Who is it?” Dieter asks, puzzled.

“I think he said his name was Hans!”

Dieter takes off, rushing to the phone, leaving me to watch his cup of coffee and his newspaper.

He’s gone for a long time. I read the newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, while waiting for him to come back. It’s all about us, of course. The Montreal Seven. And the Initiators. The International Incident Instigation Initiative.

It’s international news. I even saw a copy of the New York Times on a table on the unit the other day, with a picture of us outside the building with our hands up.

Dieter comes back grinning from ear to ear.

“It was my brother. And I talked to my mother and my father. They’re glad I’m in here getting help. I told them a little white lie; that I put myself in here to get help. So they think I’m voluntary. But they said they’re proud of me for getting help and want to come see us!”

“Did you tell them about--?”

“Yes! They can’t wait to see their grandson!”

“Grandson? No; we’re having a daughter.”

Indeed, that’s what it feels like. I had a dream last night where I called my daughter Dietricka.

The elevator doors open and onto the unit step three people. Two PABs; I can see their Davis ID cards on one’s neck chain and the other’s belt loop clip. And the other person is…

“Pierre!”

It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.

Let me tell you a bit about Pierre.

Pierre and I went to high school together. He was dyslexic and depressed about it, thinking he was stupid. His parents called him stupid. His teachers were frustrated by him. The other kids made fun of him. He started skipping classes and dropped out of school. Because he couldn’t stay at home while not going to school, he ran away and stayed with a friend of his who was into drugs and other dangerous shit. He lived in a crackhouse. The one that is now Leah’s building, actually. The charity that owns and runs Leah’s building bought the crack house after someone tried to burn it down and everyone had to leave.

Back before the fire, Pierre stayed with his friend there, and, first to humor him, then for fun, then to forget his troubles, Pierre got into drugs and alcohol. Pierre one day, due to his dyslexia, couldn’t count some money right during a drug deal and his friend got mad at him. He kicked him out. Now Pierre was on the street. My family took him in and made him get clean and sober. He was a handful at first, but then thanked them for it. They made him go to the Davis for counseling about his issues from childhood and adolescence. They also made him go to adult ed to finish school, getting his GED. Pierre then became a fireman.

Now Pierre is in here, apparently. Again.

“Pierre, what happened?”

“I didn’t think you liked me any more!” Pierre says. He grins. He knows within a few seconds that I’ve changed. He knows I like him again now.

Pierre, Dieter and I are sitting together. I tell Pierre about our baby. Pierre is happy for us and sad at the same time.

“I thought you’d go to college like I was unable to do!” Pierre says.

“You can still go to college and so can I. It’ll just take me a little longer,” I say.

“No, thanks. I’m happy as a fireman,” Pierre says. “Or maybe not. I—I don’t know if I can work as a fireman any more. There was a fire at an apartment in Lasalle… three kids died; did you hear? I was there. I tried to save them. I did everything.” He looks at me and I don’t know what to say. He says, “I think I’m coming down with PTSD, to be honest.”

As I watch TV with my friends in the evening, watching but yet not watching Shawshank Redemption, which I’ve seen about ten times anyway, I think back on the day.

Reporter after reporter called the patients’ phone asking to speak to one or all of us, until the staff had to ban incoming calls and make the phones for outgoing calls only. Larry, Stella and LaTawnda disconnected their cell phones.

The nurses gave me lecture after lecture on how I should be taking my meds, why I should be taking my meds, and what the meds actually do, but what if they’re leaving something out? I don’t trust them still. And they could still give me undesirable, permanent side effects. Like tardive dyskinesia.

They also told us off for stealing our files; they told us we have the right to access our files if we just ask, but that we can’t steal them.

I had sex with Dieter in the little laundry room before realizing there was a camera in there just like in the other, bigger common areas.

I also threw up for the first time from my pregnancy, while one other girl in the bathroom shouted “Gross!” and another shouted “Shut up!” at her to defend me.

I talked to my mom again and she said I should have an abortion, as she thinks the meds are probably going to deform the fetus. But I know “it” is already viable. I know “it” is a little girl named Dietricka. I don’t know if all fetuses become viable at the same time or if the souls go into their bodies at all different gestational stages, but I know this one is alive right now and even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t take the chance. Don’t get me wrong… I’m pro-choice. But I wouldn’t, personally, get rid of my fetus or baby even for medical reasons involving me dying. I’m already too attached.

What happens next is a surprise yet not a surprise… the Initiators’ case goes to trial and the very liberal activist judge decides that it’s up to us, the Montreal Seven, to press charges on the Initiators if we want them prosecuted further, as they actually saved our lives by kidnapping us.

We gather in the activity room to discuss the situation.

The nurse named Jacynthe gives us a smile like she knows what we’re up to. The nurse named Aline offers us a conference room, saying we need privacy, but it only took us five seconds to all agree not to press charges and now we’re done. The nurse named Pierrette says it should be an individual choice with each one of us and that we shouldn’t influence each other’s choice, but she doesn’t understand we love and need each other.

Because we all refuse to press charges the Initiators are released from jail, to the Davis. “Where are they?” I ask. “What unit? Does anyone know?”

“They’re in lockdown on Poirot 2A,” LaTawnda says. “The high-risk, violent-people unit.”

“Why are they even still locked up?” Larry says. “They didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Is Fatim getting his job back? He didn’t do anything wrong either,” Dylan says.

“Is Fern back on the users’ committee?” I ask.

“No; they replaced her,” Jacynthe, who’s been eavesdropping, says.

“Have you guys seen Clarissa?” a girl comes up to us and asks.

Clarissa. The girl from Emergency who wouldn’t stop talking.

“Nope.”

At dinner it’s “Have you seen Clarissa?” again, from two different people this time.

When another person, then even the staff, ask where Clarissa is again at medication time, I know something’s up.

As one of my favorite songs, “Tear You Apart” by She Wants Revenge, goes… you pray it all away, but it continues to grow.

I prayed I wouldn’t make friends with a single one of these psychos, but here I am friends with them all.

I prayed I wouldn’t fall in love with Dieter. But now I’m having his baby, and naming her after him. I prayed I wouldn’t have sex with him, but now I’m having his baby, and naming her after him. I prayed I wouldn’t get pregnant, but now I’m having his baby, and naming her after him.

I prayed I wouldn’t take any medication. But here I am signing the form to waive my right to go to court for now, as my mania is making me want to try new things, including, ironically, Abilify, a drug that stops mania.

Stella is yelling at Dylan across the dining area. “All you were doing was using me, Dylan! You just like fat girls, that’s all! Well, if the only thing that you like about me is that I’m fat and have a name that’s interesting, that I by the way hate, then goodbye, Dylan!”

Dylan stands there in the middle of the hallway the dining area is on and looks sad. “Stella, I love you,” he says.

I’m sitting with Dieter and Pierre, who are in an intense discussion about journalism ethics, which I have nothing to say about so they’re pretty much ignoring me for each other.

Meanwhile, a young guy who just got admitted here whose name I think is Ryan, and who I already see has tardive dyskinesia, is struggling to lift his can of soda to his mouth with his shaking hands.

That white supremacist, Caleb, has been running his gums to anyone who will listen about his stuff, and I’m happy to see that now he’s sitting alone; nobody seems to want to be with him. However, he’s reading Mien Kampf, so I doubt he learned a thing from interacting with anyone here.

The shaggy-haired guy named Ethan is talking to Tyler, the guy with the Amish haircut, about doing drugs and drinking and going to the club and getting smashed and getting laid. Both are new on the unit; they just got in yesterday.

Several people whose names I don’t know sit alone doing nothing: the woman with the whole pack of bobby pins in her hair who’s sitting there moving around in weird ways, the baby-faced guy who’s rocking back and forth, the guy in the Montreal Canadiens sweatshirt who’s gesticulating wildly to himself as he talks a million miles a second to someone named Craig who isn’t even here.

There are forty patients on this unit. It’s overcrowded.

LaTawnda skips over to Salvador and starts hitting on him, but Salvador will have none of it.

“Hey, Hettie,” Dylan says, sitting by me. “How’s little Dee Dee?”

I look over at Stella; she’s fuming.

“Dietricka’s great as far as I know. They said the meds won’t affect the pregnancy. But maybe they will, so maybe I should keep refusing them. But then they’ll just force them on me anyway.”

Stella stalks over to Salvador, making as much noise as she can with her boots on the floor for effect. She starts crying, telling Salvador about how Dylan is treating her.

“Well, you’ll just have to be patient or find someone you think is better,” Salvador says, and he’s only being patient with her because she’s his friend, another one of the Montreal Seven.

Stella goes to the guy in the Montreal Canadiens sweatshirt next and starts asking him about his interest in the Montreal Canadiens and who Craig, the imaginary guy he’s talking to, is.

“GET OUT OF MY FACE!” he shouts at her.

She tries Ethan and Tyler next, but they’re clearly not interested. She runs sobbing out of the area, to the bathroom.

I get up to follow her. I want to make sure she’s alright. I’ve experienced rejection by a lot of people at once myself.

Suddenly there’s a scream from the bathroom.

The scream is Stella’s.

Is someone attacking her? Against my better judgment, I run to the bathroom instead of away from it.

And nearly trip over a dead body!

I look down. I look up. Nobody else is in the bathroom, just Stella, who’s now sitting on the floor in a stall doorway holding her head in her hands, and the dead girl.

Three staff come running… the PAB named Marcel that Dieter once spat on, the nurse named Aline, and the PAB named Hollis (who apparently floats from unit to unit).

“Stella, what’s going on? Come on, let’s go,” Hollis says, as someone’s panic button goes off, and they take her away to question her.

They don’t bother to question me, as they know I just entered the bathroom so I had nothing to do with this, but they shoo me away.

I look at the girl on the floor again. What’s wrong with her? Is she dead? Has she overdosed on something? She has no marks on her, or any blood or cuts or bruises or obviously broken limbs or anything.

Then I recognize her. It’s Genevieve. But I don’t recognize her from here. I recognize her from high school.

“She’s dead,” I hear Marcel saying. “Or almost. Call a code.”

Aline runs back to the staff station with her jingling jangling keys and clippity-cloppity shoes and calls a code blue over the intercom.

Security comes, and that end of the unit is blocked off by some security guards standing there guarding while the two PABs work on the almost-dead girl, Genevieve, and Aline goes clip-clopping and jingle-jangling back down the hall with another nurse, the head of the unit, that blonde from Toronto named Alexis who has just the right amount of Ontario snootiness.

We sit around in the eating area talking and trying not to be too obvious about watching what’s going in, because we know it’s confidential, and also trying not to be too obvious about what we’re talking about.

“I know that girl from high school,” I say. “Her name is Genevieve. Genevieve Perron.”

Everyone looks at me.

“She picked on me in high school. Called me a Nazi because I was no good in French. I mean, not that she deserves to die or anything, but… I went to a fifty-fifty school where the front of the cafeteria spoke French and the back spoke English. The English people never went to the French side. Or vice-versa. Then one day I went to the front to defend this kid who was being picked on, and Genevieve and her friends were there, and they sneered at me and called me a Nazi. They said English sounds just like German.” I remember the incident too clearly and painfully for my liking.

“Then what? What happened next?” Larry asks, smiling for some reason.

“Then they beat both me and the kid up. But obviously, they had issues. Genevieve’s here now because she has issues.”

“Karma,” Larry says. “Maybe it’s her guilty conscience.”

“Look!” Andrea says suddenly.

“Hettie! Look!”Allie says.

They’re rolling her out of the area, past us down the hall, on a stretcher, her head covered. She’s dead.

“She had a seizure” is what most people are saying, but staff are investigating what drugs she might have been taking and they shake down all our drawers and other parts of our rooms and the bathrooms and other places for drugs. I witness them finding a baggie of weed behind a toilet, a joint behind the bookcase in the activity room, a lighter that still works under a couch in the activity room, and some hash in someone’s drawer. The person is out on a day pass, literally, so I hear them planning to call the place he’s supposed to be at and ask him to come back, then they’re going to question him. Then I hear Ethan on the phone telling him not to come back, telling him to go to Ontario instead and that when Ethan and Tyler get out they’ll meet him in Toronto. The guy’s name is Kevin, according to the conversation I overhear.

I don’t tell on Kevin, Ethan and/or Tyler. I don’t even tell my friends. Not even Dieter. This is when I realize… do I even trust Dieter, or was I just manic to trust him before?

I know something is wrong the moment the three staff accost me in the hallway. They drag me into the conference room. Hollis keeps tossing a baggie of something up in the air and catching it. He throws it down on the table in front of me.

“Explain this,” Hollis says.

“What?” I say, refusing to touch it in case I get my fingerprints on it. “That’s not mine!”

“Well, we found it in your drawer.”

The Ziploc bag contains about twenty small round orange tablets.

“It’s okay,” Hollis says. “You can tell us anything. We want you to be honest with us.”

“Genevieve Perron’s overdose is consistent with the sedative—the benzodiazepine these pills are,” Alexis says. “Now tell us, truthfully. Did you give or sell Genevieve enough clonazepam for her to overdose on?”

I didn’t, of course. The only thing I can think of is that she remembers me from high school, hated me, and planted them in my drawer. Maybe she picked the lock to my drawer. (We each have a little key to our drawers on a little string or elastic that we’re supposed to just keep around our wrist wherever we go.)

I tell them what I’m thinking.

“An investigation is underway,” that asshole PAB named Roman says. “We’re watching you, Hettie Masterson.”

And that’s when I know I have to tell them about Ethan, Tyler and Kevin. It’s either guilty them or innocent me.

“What about Clarissa?” Hollis asks.

“What about Clarissa? I don’t know if she’s been using drugs too. I don’t know everything that’s going on on this unit just because I’m a patient here.”

“Do you know if Clarissa is with Kevin?” they ask.

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know everything. And I don’t know Clarissa or Kevin that well, or those other two, Tyler and Ethan.”

“Thank you, Hettie,” Alexis says unceremoniously, and I’m excused from the conference room.

“You didn’t know? Clarissa went AWOL. She’s missing,” Salvador tells me.

“You mean on a day pass or weekend pass?”

“No. She didn’t have grounds or off-grounds privileges. She actually escaped,” Dieter says.

“Well, I kinda don’t care right now… I’m being accused of killing someone right now so I really don’t care about someone that just escaped.” I’m sorry for my harshness the moment it’s out of my mouth, so I try to take it back by saying “I’m sorry if I sound harsh. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Sorry,” Salvador says.

“Sorry,” Dieter says.

“No. I’m sorry. But—oh, God, Dieter, I could go to jail.”

“I’ll look after the baby if she’s born in jail,” Dieter says. I can’t tell what percentage of him is joking and what percentage is serious.

“Who could have done this?” I say. “The only people who have access to my drawers are the staff. I always had my key on me, so nobody could have—”

“It wasn’t the staff,” Dieter says.

I look at Dieter. Though I can’t see myself, I can register that my expression looks as though he just shot my dog.

Then I remember. I sent Dieter to my room (we get moved around sometimes, and now my room is a different one, with my own drawers and Stella as a roommate) once with my key to get some of my drawings for me when I was busy talking to Andrea, Larry, Salvador, Stella, Allie and Dylan.

“You!” I say.

“I’m sorry. I thought the pills would be safe there,” Dieter says.

“Well, they weren’t, buddy, were they,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me! You only wanted me to know when I was ready to blame the staff!”

I think him not telling me hurts more than what he actually did.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” I ask, my voice rising. “I’m telling on you, Dieter Bonhoeffer!”

The staff are staring at me.

Then Alexis and Hollis and Marcel are over here again.

“What’s going on?” Alexis asks.

“He did it,” I say simply. “Oh, and by the way, Dieter, I’m breaking up with you.”

“He did what?” Alexis asks impatiently.

Better say it, before I chicken out or get stupid and think I should spare him. “He put those pills in my drawer.” There. It’s out.

They look at Dieter, then back at me, then at Dieter again.

“I did,” Dieter says. Then he starts to cry!

How could he not have told me he was getting pills from somebody! How could he not have told me he may have been giving pills to people too!

I tell him that.

“Let’s continue this conversation in private,” Marcel says. “Dieter, come… and Hettie, you can come if you want…”

I do, because I’m angry, and I want to see that worm squirm some more.

But he doesn’t squirm. He just sits down in the private office and keeps crying.

“We have a baby together, Dieter!” I say. “What are we gonna do?”

After the talk, Dieter ends up needing a PRN (as-needed medication, which here usually means a sedative). He ignores me for the rest of the night, and when I come out of the bathroom and accidentally bump into him as he’s passing by going to his room, I can smell Purell hand sanitizer on his breath.

Disgusted, I go tell the others. I warn Stella and Andrea that maybe their boyfriends (Dylan and Larry, though with Dylan and Stella it’s rather touch-and-go) are using them too, then realize I’m being sexist and warn everyone that their partners in here might be using them.

I realize that even besides Dieter, I barely know any of my friends here. I decide to get to know them better. What are their hopes and dreams? What did they do before coming here?

Back up… who am I? I need to know, to compare myself to my next potential partner. (Look at me, already looking for a new father for Dietricka.)

So let me think. My name is Hettie LaNan Masterson. I like greenhouse work, singing, art, writing, and… activism.

I like activism.

And that’s when I decide to write a book.

About all of us. About our hopes, dreams, occupations, hobbies, and ways of expressing ourselves.

I start with George, but he has a panic attack just thinking and talking about being unemployed like he is, so we have to stop the interview. “Oh well,” I say. “Later.”

I’m not going to ask Dieter. But he told me he likes travel, languages and driving through the woods. He also, obviously, likes drinking whatever alcoholic substance he can get his hands on.

LaTawnda likes fashion (she doesn’t say what kind, but I notice she loves sexy fashion) and hot guys. She felt un-sexy because her dad kept putting down her looks, so she became promiscuous. She’s unemployed.

Pierre likes sports, partying, and shoot-em-up video games. The latter seems odd for someone in a lifesaving profession, but I guess he has to blow off steam somehow.

Larry likes chess, video games, debate, and hearing embarrassing disastrous stories about people in high school. He’s unemployed.

Dylan likes anime and kind of the same stuff Larry likes—fiction, video games, debate. He’s also unemployed.

Stella likes debate, poetry by dead guys, some other literature. She had a job before coming here, a job carrying boxes in the back of Ardene, that chain store that sells hats and scarves and sunglasses and socks and shoes and jewelry.

Andrea was a sex worker, which comes as a bit of a shock to naïve little me who wouldn’t have thought it of this mousy little girl who likes anime, Emily Dickinson, debate and government policy. She does dress a bit slutty, in short, thin or tight clothes, but I thought nothing of it in this day and age. Today Andrea’s dressed pretty modestly too… sure, her leggings are a bit tight, but they’re not short shorts or a miniskirt, and she’s actually wearing a shirt that has sleeves and that covers her stomach and cleavage today… albeit a blue, off-the-shoulder one that says I WANT TO LICK LICK LICK YOU LIKE A LOLLIPOP.

Allie is a student at Dawson in the Social Sciences program (she doesn’t know what field she wants to go into though) who likes the works of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Edgar Cayce, who talk a lot about near-death experiences and the afterlife. This just confirms to me that Allie really just imagined seeing the “other side”. I should ask her about it. Actually, I will ask her about it.

Victoria, like LaTawnda, likes fashion and modeling, but she isn’t promiscuous like LaTawnda. It’s the only difference… the two have the same kind of insecurity. She wrote a gossip column as a job for her school newspaper, but got fired when she was hospitalized for anorexia.

Elsa likes cooking food and eating it and, like Victoria, likes Hollywood gossip. Elsa was in cooking school before coming here.

Salvador is gone from the unit, gone home, gone back to work in the McDonald’s kitchen.

Brahm likes sports but is no good at them. He’s unemployed. That’s all I know about Brahm.

Caleb comes up to me. He asks me why I never approached him to tell his story,. He’s so angry he’s ready to spit.

“Well, I just never got around to you yet. I was going to ask as many people as I could though.”

“No; you didn’t want the perspective of an actually Christian white male,” he sneers. “Instead you ask the scum because they don’t offend you so much.”

He fails to convince me that he’s a good Christian. I start to say, “No, that’s not—” and he says, “Sheesh, woman, at least give me a try.”

“Alright, I’ll try you,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.

But he doesn’t start spouting his white supremacist stuff. Instead he talks about being the only white guy in a mostly-black school. Getting his head stuck in an unflushed toilet bowl every day. Getting knives and guns pulled on him. Getting jumped right off his bicycle riding to school every day. Getting thrown in juvie when he refused to go to school any more.

And I think that this is amazing. I disarmed an opponent. Wow, look at me; I’m great at conflict resolution, at negotiating. Maybe I should be a diplomat.

I mean, what he does and says and spouts all the time is racist, sexist, everything-else-ist, and beyond disgusting. I don’t agree with it or with him doing it at all. But I understand now at least part of why he did it. He wants some pride for a change.

But he’s going to have to learn to get it a different way. He can’t go on hating everyone. Just like I—wait—I was hateful too? Saying I wasn’t mentally ill, that I was too good to be around the mentally ill?

Yes. I was.

I’m sorry. I really am. And I want to change. Better than being like Caleb.

I lay in bed at night, looking over my notes. An angry sort of shock courses through me as I think about everyone’s occupation. Almost all of my friends and other unit-mates are unemployed or have low-paying jobs, except Andrea, but Andrea would spend all her money on crack.

The next day in the dining area across from the staff station, I look up from where I’m writing my notes once again. Staff are arguing with Caleb about the shirt he’s wearing that says PRAY AWAY THE GAY, telling him politely he has to turn it inside-out because two people complained that they feel uncomfortable with him wearing that in here.

Finally, losing patience, Hollis says, “How would you like it if I wore a shirt that had a Confederate flag on fire?”

“They would probably allow that,” Caleb retorts. “Look at her!” he gestures at LaTawnda, who’s wearing a skirt the size of a dish towel and a tube top and knee-high hooker boots. “There are liberal bitches walking around half naked in here and I get picked on.” His voice and face are full of hate.

They tell him something about how he needs to learn to respect others. He takes a swing at Hollis and gets dragged down the hall, into the elevator, upstairs to CPC 3, the unit people talk about with dread in their voices.

As they wrestle Caleb into the elevator, two cops step out with a black guy in handcuffs between them.

Caleb spits on the black guy.

All hell breaks loose. They turn Caleb towards the back of the elevator so he can’t spit on anyone else, but then he does a backward head-butt right into Marcel’s face.

The doors to the elevator close on Marcel, Hollis and Caleb. I can hear him shouting all the way up to CPC 3, and I can hear him yelling up on CPC 3 and throwing something that smashes. Then a panic button sounds and staff all run out through the red door and up the stairs to CPC 3, not bothering with the elevator. They leave the short, frail newbie nurse named Andrew, of all people, to man the counter alone.

I approach the counter and slowly, softly put my hands on it where he can see them, because there’s no knowing what he’ll do. A scared, alone, backed-into-a-corner person is a dangerous person.

And the question is out of my mouth before I can stop it: “Is he coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Andrew says, looking at me funny, perhaps wondering what a girl like me would want with a guy like Caleb.

“Just wondering. Because I hear stories about up there.” I point at the ceiling, the floor of CPC 3.

“From who?” Andrew says.

I don’t rat my friends out; I remain purposely vague. “Some girl told me they just tie you to a cot and leave you there all day with no exercise. Then some guy told me they lock you in a room. I don’t know who or what to believe.”

“Look, I’ve been up there. They only lock you in a room or tie you up if you’re actively throwing yourself on people.”

“Good to know,” I say, not sure if I believe him.

It’s mostly just that I want to finish my interview with Caleb. It’s not that I want him back because I like him, or anything. But I couldn’t tell staff I was interviewing people; they might try to put a stop to it.

The black guy Caleb spat on turns out to be Kevin. Kevin tells me so in the smoking room, as he smokes and I just sit in there on the floor (there’s no furniture in the smoking room… fire hazard) talking to a group of them… LaTawnda, Victoria, Andrea, Stella, and of course Kevin.

Kevin is okay; when I walked in he was telling LaTawnda how he doesn’t want to go to that other unit they’re going to send him to to make sure he doesn’t escape again, that he’s going to miss LaTawnda and all the others too, that he’s scared.

LaTawnda and Kevin then start rapping together, making up the lyrics. Kevin’s anxiety fades a bit.

“I’m a bipolar bitch, I gotta admit. I get myself into a lot of shit,” LaTawnda raps.

“I hated it here and so I escaped. Now I’m going to another unit where I’ll probly get raped,” Kevin says.

“You won’t get raped. There are too much staff. If they even try, you’ll have the last laugh,” LaTawnda says.

“Seriously? You been there? What was it like in there?”

“It sucked but it was okay. Nothing to do but talk. Every single day. No going for a walk.”

“Could I pace, if I had the right look on my face?”

“Indeed you can pace, but not go off the unit. As for your face, someone’s likely to moon it. They’re very crazy over there. But at least you won’t have to worry about yo ass getting a tear.”

“I’m not a virgin, I like it up the ass. Just not from someone who has no class.”

“Alright, this is getting gross,” Andrea says, which is surprising, because she was a prostitute; shouldn’t she be used to everything and anything?

“Let’s change the subject. Rap about something else,” Victoria says.

“No, let him sing, I like it,” Stella says.

“You would,” Andrea says.

“Let’s change the subject. Let’s see,” I say. “How about… I lived in Lachine, it smells like a latrine.” Lachine is a borough of Montreal.

“It doesn’t! I lived there!” Victoria says.

“I don’t care,” I say, trying to rhyme with Victoria’s “there”. “I’m a poet whether or not you know it.”

“I live in Pointe-Claire. At me people would stare,” Kevin says.

“Why? And did it make you cry?” I say.

“No, it didn’t make me cry, but when they passed me by, I felt like I should die, and I always wondered why. I decided that the reason they were mad at me that season was because they’d just seen that news—and they interpret it how they choose-- about the black man who stole a Pointe-Claire guy’s van.”

“Seriously?” I say.

“I’m being totally serious. And man, I was furious.”

“That doesn’t really rhyme,” I say, a stickler for grammar.

“Kevin, we’re ready for you,” Hollis says.

“Where are you taking him?” LaTawnda says.

“Intensive Care. You can call him there,” Hollis says.

“Hey, that rhymes!” I say, slow on the uptake as usual, realizing a few seconds later that he meant to rhyme.

LaTawnda says her goodbyes to Kevin and hugs him, then I watch as Tyler and Ethan do the same.

After Kevin is gone, I realize I should probably have told him how much fun I had with him.

I go do my rounds of the unit, making sure nobody else is missing, and find nobody missing but that Clarissa is back too.

Clarissa is no longer talking to anyone. She’s gone from babbling, hopping manic to practically catatonic. She just sits there on the floor against the wall by the elevator, underneath the big signs that list our rights, looking at the elevator expectantly, until staff tell her to get away from the elevator.

I decide to talk to her, hoping to get her talking again. She tells me she and Kevin ran away together and were almost at the Quebec-Ontario border when they were caught. She and Kevin were put on a different unit in Emergency, in separate seclusion rooms, after being caught. They tapped out messages to each other. She says that was the only fun thing about it. Then they were brought back here, and Kevin tried to escape again, because he was going to be prosecuted for selling people on our unit the drugs found in his drawer.

I wonder if he sold those pills to Dieter. Clarissa says she doesn’t think so, but maybe she’s lying or doesn’t know.

Maybe she’ll spill the beans if—when—I interview her.

LaTawnda’s mother, Mashabelle, is visiting. Mashabelle is tall and thin like LaTawnda, but darker, and with a practically-shaved head. She’s over at the next table telling LaTawnda not to take no shit from nobody, that she been through segregation in the 1960s in Mississippi and that rights for the mentally ill are lagging behind colored and gay and religious and children’s and women’s rights.

This lights a fire under my ass. I immediately get up and go over to interrupt LaTawnda and her mom. I mention the book, but Mashabelle says LaTawnda already tole her about that there book. We talk about how everyone deserves the chance to redeem themselves, how redemption isn’t only tailor-made for the wretched like Stanley Tookie Williams said, but the wretched are tailor-made for redemption, and we get all philosophical.

“You’re the first white Canadian I know that knows about Tookie,” Mashabelle says, and I know right this moment that I just made an ally, maybe even a friend.

Mashabelle lends me a book she and LaTawnda already read, called The Help. It’s by a woman named Kathryn Stockett, who was raised by her family’s black housekeeper. The book is fiction, but based on the overall truth of how black people were treated as less-than and less competent and sentient in the 1960s. It’s about a female writer in Mississippi during that time, writing a book in secret with some black housekeepers that all know each other in the same town, and the society women and their families they work for all know each other too. Their book is an expose and gets them into a lot of trouble, but it’s worth it.

I read the book for the rest of the day. I love the characters. Despite their imperfect grammar, their intelligence shines through, with the comparisons they make between things and the things they deduce, and the jokes they tell.

That’s when I decide to up the ante. My book WILL be a bestseller. And in order for that to happen, I need to get some kind of scandal exposed that’ll alert people to the shit going on at the Davis, so that they actually care and actually want to read my book. I mean, I’ve already written all our rehashings of the International Incident Instigation Initiative/Montreal Seven/Sindel Narine debacle. But people are only interested in that… not about civil rights at the Davis.

But the Initiators… that’s it!

I can get the Initiators to help me!

And that’s when I decide to write about them too. To ask them why they do what they do; their civil rights stuff.

Then I have a better idea.

After writing my book, I’ll just join them.

Then I’ll keep writing books, a whole series about them, as shit continues to happen.

I’ll offer my services for free, if they don’t already have a writer, but I don’t think they do.

I go and talk to Allie and Andrea about it.

Mashabelle’s words echo in my head: “Don’t take no shit from nobody. I was in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s; I’d know. Rights of the mentally ill are lagging behind rights for women, for children, for gays and all people of color and for alternative religions.”

Stanley Tookie Williams’s words (and he should know; he was on death row before finally turning himself around and becoming a big author and activist against violence and being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) also echo in my head: “People forget that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched.”

What am I doing? Am I trying to redeem myself for all that discrimination I did against the mentally ill, saying I’m not because I’m too competent or too sentient or too normal or something?

I feel really ashamed of myself right now. It’s not even funny.

Now I really feel like I need to do this. This writing thing.

But will it work? Will anyone pay attention?

Well, they paid attention to the stuff the Initiators did. But they actually had to put it in the news, because we were missing and they thought we’d be dead if they didn’t find us. And they’ll now only pay attention to anything that has to do with that… not just everyday travesties from the Davis.

We need to do something to get shit happening!

But what… a riot? Escaping or helping someone escape? A fight? A protest?

A protest of what?

What do they do here that’s bad?

ECT comes to mind. Yes… yes!!!

I go find Brigitte, the one person I forgot to interview because she wasn’t around, to ask her about her ECT treatments.

Brigitte has a not-all-there feeling that I had when I was really depressed. But she never had hers before the ECT.

So ECT causes depressive symptoms. I jot that down.

“I don’t like them,” Brigitte says. “They hurt.”

“Why do you continue to take them? Is there a court order?”

“The doctor thinks I need them,” Brigitte says.

“Well, not all so-called doctors are right, and some of them shouldn’t even have the title of doctor,” I tell her. “Doctors aren’t God. They’re humans that make mistakes.”

“I’m tired,” Brigitte says. “I’m just too tired to say no.”

This makes me mad. They’re preying on people too tired to stand up for themselves!

I tell Brigitte so, but then Brigitte goes sour on me and says “Look, you can take your civil rights crap elsewhere. Running around with your little notebook, taking down people’s private lives… you make me sick. You are a disruption. We patients, we want to be left alone. Approach me again and I tell the staff what you’re doing... which I should anyway.”

“Okay, I’ll leave you alone,” I say.

So much for Brigitte.

Who else here gets ECT?

It’s hard, getting complaints from people, because this unit isn’t that violent or strict or controversial, and the ones that do have complaints just don’t want to make waves.

“Try Poirot 2A or somewhere,” Dylan says. And that’s when I remember the Initiators, Michael and Lorne and Fern and the rest, on Poirot 2A.

But when I call them they all say it’s a wonderful unit. They have no complaints.

“And I don’t think anybody here’s had ECT,” Mike says over the phone. “Try whatever clinic does the ECT. I think it’s the depression clinic.”

“But how do I get ahold of the patients?” I ask.

Mike says, “You don’t. You just give them a number to get back to you at and then they’ll give you an appointment and a doctor’s name. Then you find out who has had that doctor and if that doctor’s alright, if he forces ECT. We, in the Initiators, we looked up ECT at the Davis. So I can save you some work. The doctor that does the ECT is Dr. Class. He wrote an article condoning it. He takes all the medications to try them out for side effects before giving them to the patients, so he seems on the surface like a real nice guy, but he isn’t. He gives ECT even to people that don’t want it.”

“So what do we do? How do we protest?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Mike says. “I’m the one with the connections. But this ain’t gonna be no ordinary protest.”

A shock of excitement-slash-worry courses through me.

“What—what do you mean, Mike?”

“You’ll see,” he says. “You don’t have to do anything but watch and listen. If you want, since you’re our journalist—”

“I’m your--?”

“Now you’re our journalist. You’re responsible for publicizing what we do.”

“Wow,” I say. “I’m—honored.”

“Since you’re now our journalist, you can come with us if you have grounds privileges to do what we’re gonna do.”

“Which is?” I’m nervous again. Am I going too far for my nerves to handle?

“Someone might be listening in right now, but I’ll let you know,” he says, and before I can ask more, he says “Alright? I’m gonna go tell the others, Lorne and Fern and them, now. Not that we can do anything in here. But I know people who can do this protest.” And he says “Thanks, Hettie!” and hangs up.

After dinner Dylan comes over to me. He says his friend from the outside, who’s visiting him, wants to meet me.

Dieter, seated alone a few feet away, says “Hi, Kyle!”

“Shhhhh!” Kyle says.

That’s when I know something is up.

Kyle (who has a big Jewish nose and a doily on his head), Dylan, and I go to where it’s more private, in the little living room that can seat about six and where there’s no room for more than fifteen if nine of them stand. There’s nobody there right now.

“I’m a patient on Baryshnikov 1, with grounds privileges, but don’t tell anyone,” Kyle says. “I’m supposed to stick to my own unit and the outside areas. But Mike wanted me to give you this. He told his other friend from Poirot 2A with grounds privileges to give it to me to give it to you so it wouldn’t be too obvious.” I don’t ask who the friend is, as it doesn’t matter and I figure the less I know the better, in case I get interrogated.

And Kyle hands me a stuffed polar bear with a basket of chocolates. I instinctively look up the bear’s ass. I take the sealed envelope containing the letter out of it; the envelope is thick and the letter turns out to be long. “I’ll read it later. Thanks so much, Kyle!” So this was the notice Mike was talking about when he said he’d let me know the details of his plan.

Kyle visits with Dylan for a while so that it won’t be so suspicious, then after he leaves Dylan comes up to me. “I didn’t even know that guy,” Dylan says. “But when he said Mike sent him, I played the game and pretended to the staff that we knew each other.”

After depositing Polar (my new bear; thank you, Mike; he’s very sweet) in my room, I go straight to the single-person, unisex bathroom near the elevator and front-of-the-unit stairwell, make sure the door’s locked, and open my notebook, which contains my letter. I read it. It says…

DO NOT TELL ANYONE, EVEN OUR FRIENDS, OF OUR PLAN. THE LESS PEOPLE KNOW, THE BETTER. AND AFTER YOU ARE FINISHED READING THIS, MEMORIZE THE NAMES AND FLUSH THIS PAPER DOWN THE TOILET.

Dear Hettie,

The people in on it are: Mike Chartrand, Lorne Beauharnois, Hettie Masterson, Fern Delacroix, Gregory Pelletier, Bob Hartle, and last but not least, the great, amazing Wilhelm Desrosiers.

The date we are going to do this on is: July 5, 2018

Bob is getting electroconvulsive therapy he does not want. Wilhelm is his friend, and already saw his brother suffer from mental illness, then get ECT. Wilhelm became an archives guy at the Davis just so he could do this plan we have, to make sure more people including Bob don’t have to go thru what his brother went thru. Bob tried to pull the fire alarm and then call the bomb squad to get everyone out of the building and avoid getting ECT, but eventually, he was caught and subjected to a horrible dehumanizing punishment… more ECT.

Wilhelm works in archives. Wilhelm will start a fire in the file room in the Farley B. Carson pavilion, which is the ECT building. This will hopefully destroy the building so that its ECT facilities cannot be used. It will buy Bob and the others a little time to figure out what to do and where to go… time to get away before their next ECT comes up. It takes a while even for the powers that be to register them for ECT at a different facility.

Your job, Hettie, will be to observe and take pictures and videos of what happens with a phone we give you that doesn’t have a tracking device; I will get to this later.

I (Mike), Fern, Lorne and Greg will be let out of our unit where we’re not allowed to go out on the grounds. Wilhelm has the keys; he will let us out. He will also let you out; be by the door we sneaked out of the last time we sneaked out, at 10:30 AM on July 5. The four of us will create a diversion on the first floor, pretending to fight, while Wilhelm goes into the file room and lights the fire. Then the fire alarm will go off and Wilhelm will lead all the patients waiting in the waiting room for ECT, including Bob, out and onto a city bus, where they will go to Wilhelm’s brother’s friend’s house to hide. We will tell them all to get rid of their phones so that police can’t triangulate and find us. Even a dead phone can be tracked.

We understand that the Davis is a great place with 99% great people, but that 1% of bad apples can kill and poison the rest.

Thank you again, Hettie, for helping us. We hope you decide to.

Mike Chartrand

And I know that I’m so far in over my head now, what with the books and all, and with Brigitte threatening to tell the staff on me for my writing, and me being pregnant and in a place full of staff that are telling me to decide fast if I want to carry this pregnancy to term (some of them trying to wear me down to have an abortion), that I’ve got nothing to lose. “Yes,” I whisper to the letter before ripping it to pieces and crumpling them and flushing them piece by piece down the toilet. “Yes, Mike, I want to do it, and I will!”

I try to act natural for my friends here on CPC 2, but I’m so excited. And nervous. I pace a lot more. They notice and ask me questions. Stella sees the little polar bear in my room and I have to tell her I’m kinda dating a guy from Baryshnikov 1, and make up a name. I’ll apologize to them all for lying later. But for now, I’ve got to keep the secret.

When Mashabelle visits LaTawnda again, Mashabelle knows something’s up, because I sit there pretending to write rather than going on over to her to say hi. She tells me I have that secretive-activist look, whatever that means. She tells me to be careful but also to be happy.

“Thanks,” I say.

When LaTawnda gets up and goes to the washroom, Mashabelle looks at me with those black eyes and says, “You can tell me anything; I won’t tell; but if you don’t feel right tellin’ me, don’t.”

I say, “Yes, I am up to some activism. That was what it was.” And I leave it at that, but she doesn’t seem offended.

It’s the day it’s supposed to happen, July 5. I sit on one of the chairs near the floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the hall where people sometimes like to sit and read or chat, next to the door I’m supposed to sneak out of.

I pretend to be writing. I hope nobody comes and sits with me. That will make it more risky. But they’re all hanging out in the activity room, the dining room, the other TV room, their own rooms, and the men’s room where some of them like to play cards on the floor. I’m in a different hallway as all those places except for some of the bedrooms and the men’s room, but nobody’s paying me any mind.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch movement in the security window in the door I’m waiting for him to come in by to get me. And I know it’s him. He has his ID card with the emergency guide on the back of it on a chain around his neck. But he gestures at me to open the door. So I do. I push it right open and go right out; he’s just unlocked it.

He doesn’t stop to lock it; we hurry down the stairs praying nobody saw me on the cameras. I should have gotten my friends involved. Should have gotten them to make a diversion or something. Too late now.

We go down to the first-floor landing and out of the building into the rain. But I guess that Bob guy and the others are having their ECT today, so rain or shine we must do it today. I think the fire will catch despite the rain; it’s going to be started inside, after all, and probably with kerosene oil.

We dodge from pavilion to pavilion so that nobody will see us, going first into the DeWitt pavilion, then skipping over the Davis Hall because it’s locked and the Poirot pavilion because it’s a main building with a lot of people, then secondly going into the Baryshnikov pavilion and finally dodging to the FBC pavilion.

Fern, Mike, Lorne and Greg are already there, and as soon as they see me, they start arguing among themselves about something mundane that they rehearsed. They make the argument escalate on purpose.

I start to film it, as Wilhelm just handed me a phone, but then Wilhelm says, “Hettie, come.” And he leads me downstairs. I know what that means.

Three security guards rush past us, giving us no mind; he’s just a staff member escorting a patient.

He opens a door. “Alright, Hettie… now you can film,” Wilhelm says. “Turn it back on. We want them to see me doing it so nobody innocent gets blamed. We’ll send it to the news outlets.”

So I film him taking three jugs of gasoline out of his backpack and dousing the files. He then hurries back to the front, balls up a paper from one of the files, sets the top of it on fire and throws it into the room, where it ignites some of the doused files immediately.

He slams the door shut.

We run. I follow him—up the stairs instead of back to the entrance. I’m scared now. Is he trying to kill me?

The whole stupid thing while I’m filming, because what can you do when you poo in a shoe; I’m here to do this filming thing after all. And that’s when Wilhelm starts shouting “FIRE!”

We make it up to the third floor. He opens the locked door to the waiting room.

“FIRE!” he shouts. “Downstairs!”

And everyone sitting around in there jumps up and runs, stampeding out the single door, nearly trampling me.

“Come on, we gotta go!” Wilhelm says as he pulls the alarm and it goes off.

“Good idea,” I say. I hold the phone tight, hold it over everybody’s heads as they all stampede down the stairs.

And then I feel the oppressive heat.

We explode through the door one floor up from the file room and find ourselves in a hallway; we keep running; we are joined by a few people including a staff member who appears to be having a panic attack. Out the door to that floor, down the steps, out the front door… across the field.

The fire department are here. We keep running. This is it. This is my chance to escape. And theirs too. And Wilhelm’s chance to get away before they catch him.

We run down the driveway as the fire trucks rush up the driveway. We keep running. Our group loses some people because those people have to sit down on benches along the driveway’s sidewalk because they can’t run any more.

A man and a woman are holding hands, running. A girl is running with two guys, her hands around their elbows. And me? I’m still holding that damn phone up, and there’s only one other person doing the same, an excited-looking nerdy little boy.

I don’t look back. I guess I don’t want to see. And I don’t want them to see me. What if someone back there recognizes me?

Most of us make it to the bus stop out of pure motivation to get out of here. I stop filming and put the phone in my pocket. I realize I don’t have a bus ticket, but Wilhelm hands me one.

“Qu’est ce que c’est?” the bus driver asks, speaking French. Translation: “What is this?”

“The hospital—there’s a fire—”

“The Davis is burning down!”

“There’s a big fire…”

“Get on. And forget the fare,” the driver says in his French accent.

We all pile into the bus, and he waits for others who are coming, until it’s standing room only. Then off we go.

We don’t talk on the bus. We’re out of words. We just need to get out of here.

The doors open many stops to the east, somewhere else in Verdun. The whole bus seems to be getting off here, including all the people I’m kinda-with, so I get off with them. Mike motions for us to get off.

We stand there until the bus pulls out and leaves us there. Then Mike and Lorne motion for us to follow them. We do. Right into a door next to a depanneur, one of those little corner stores in Quebec.

We climb the steep stairs to the apartment above the depanneur. The door is already open; we just go right on in.

“Sit down, sit down,” says one of the two guys in there. He remains standing and gives a speech: “My name’s Donnie. I live here. Greg used to live here too before he was put in the hospital. My dad owns this building and the depanneur downstairs. We can be loud, but we can’t be too loud. Now… who here has a phone? You’re gonna have to get rid of those. I’m sorry, but it’s a risk having a phone in this situation, because even when it’s turned off the cops can track its location sometimes. So put your phones up here and I’ll take them to a different location. Anyone want a coffee, tea, water?”

Everyone brings their phones to the front and sticks them in the plastic bin he’s got. But first, a girl named Alisha I recognize from the choir at the Wellington drop-in center speaks. Before depositing her phone in the bin, she holds it up, showing us a picture of a smiling young guy. And then I know she’s going to give a speech too, and that it’s going to be important.

She does: “This is my friend Horton Campbell. He didn't get out on time. He was in the ECT room getting shocked when we were evacuating. They just left him there; the staff. They just ran.”

Several people look around, probably to see if this Horton Campbell really isn’t in here with us. He isn’t.

“How do you know he’s gone?” a Latino guy asks.

“I heard the firemen pronouncing him dead outside,” Alisha says. “I was a bit slower than you guys. I sprained my ankle not long ago. Luckily the bus waited for me. Horton was such a great musician. He liked hanging with his friends but it was always his girlfriend, Lorna, first. He was great at drawing too, wanted to be an architect. And he was an activist, against ECT, for MindFreedom and the Icarus Project and ZapRap.org. I think that's part of why they just left him there.”

We’re all sitting around—on folding chairs, milk crates, the floor. We’re all quiet, sipping or gulping our coffee, tea or water.

Then Wilhelm speaks, and I know it’s a confession even before he opens his mouth.

Sure enough, he says he did it. And he says why. But he doesn’t give us away. “I thought the fire alarm would get everybody out of there,” he says sheepishly.

“Not someone passed out on drugs about to get shock treatment!” a girl named Shayla I recognize from the bipolar group at the Davis shouts. “They just left him and ran!”

With that, the room erupts. They close in on Wilhelm, they beat him to a pulp. I don’t like watching this, but I have to. I try to say something to them to make them stop, but what? Donnie and Greg and Mike and Lorne try to make them stop, but these depressed people who just escaped from ECT, despite hating ECT, sure can be vicious towards someone trying to help them never have to get ECT again. I can’t even look at Wilhelm’s head; it’s a bloody mess, and he’s not moving any more, let alone trying to fight them back or get away.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

It’s the cops at the door.

Crash! Splinter!

The cops are in here now.

I look over at the bin full of phones. If Alisha had just waited to give her damn speech about the dead guy (because she really didn’t need a photo for a prop), Donnie would have had time to get rid of the phones. And the cops wouldn’t be here for us now.

A girl, one of the patients who was going to get ECT, throws up her coffee all over the blood-stained floor. I wonder who’s in more trouble, me or her. Probably me, so I feel nauseated too, but luckily never took any coffee or tea or even water.

“HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEADS!” the cops shout. Then the SWAT team bursts in.

I don’t want to get shot; that’s the last thing I need. But I’m kind of glad the cops came in a way; Wilhelm might be dead if they hadn’t. (Wilhelm isn’t dead; I can hear him moaning, waking up again.)

Mike is behind me, whispering into my ear. “Hettie, don’t tell them you’re involved in this. Make it sound like we threatened you. It’s the only way.”

Wow. Just… wow.

But I’m no good at making up a story on the spot. I’m not practiced at crime, or at deception, or at sneaking around and making up stories. So I tell Mike, “They’ll find out pretty fast what happened.”

Anyway, I don’t want to throw my friends under the bus. And for what? I’m still locked up anyways.

“NOT A SOUND!” one of the cops shouts. We all grow quiet except this guy with Tourette’s who starts twirling and jerking his head and legs and arms and making weird sounds. I guess stress sets his Tourette’s off.

The SWAT team shoots him through the hand. I get splattered in blood. I hope this guy doesn’t have AIDS.

He starts howling and moaning.

“NOT A SOUND!” the cop repeats. The guy looks like he’s really suffering unable to howl and moan, but he manages to keep quiet, though still grimacing and contorting his face in pain.

The cops escort him out first, and they call the paramedics to take him to the hospital. Then they escort the rest of us out one by one, frisking us downstairs and then handcuffing us. They find nothing on me, or on most of the others, but they find a twelve-inch knife in a sheath on Donnie.

“What’s this for?” I hear one of the cops ask.

“In case someone murders me in my sleep,” Donnie says.

“So you planned to have them staying at your place for how long?” the cop asks.

“I’m going to invoke my right to remain silent,” Donnie says.

“Fair enough,” the cop says.

A crowd has gathered on the sidewalk. The cops are putting up crime scene tape. And the press is here soon enough. I realize with a sickening knot in my stomach that I’m going to be on the news again, and being arrested too, just like the last time.

I’ve been questioned up and down, and I invoked my right to remain silent. Now here I am in jail, on the phone with Legal Aid.

The dime-a-dozen Legal Aid lawyer tells me to tell them I’m not criminally responsible due to post-traumatic stress from being kidnapped before, but if I’m insane will they give me ECT?

“They won’t. I’ll make sure they won’t,” the lawyer, Denis Lafontaine, says. “We can help you through anything else you need help with in the future.”

I’m sitting in court with my co-defendents and our lawyers. Mr. Denis Lafontaine is going on and on about how traumatic it was for me being kidnapped by the Initiators and how they brainwashed me with fear and scared me into helping them this time… which isn’t true. But back at Donnie’s house before we were told to shut up by that cop, Mike had made me promise I’d lie and say it was the truth. He told me, “You have a future. I don’t. I’m going to be behind bars for a very long time. But you have a chance, and you’d actually be crazy if you didn’t take it.”

I feel so bad, though.

I’m back at the Davis. I’m considered NCR—not criminally responsible—due to PTSD that I don’t even have, so they sent me back here instead of to Pinel (where I’d have gone if I was actually charged with a crime but it was deemed due to my mental disorder) or to Kingston (if it was deemed not due to my mental disorder). I have to meet with the Tribunal Administratif de Quebec and a psychologist every month. It’s stress, stress and more stress, but I guess it’s better than being locked up as a dangerous offender in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines with no official release date like Mike, Lorne, Fern, Wilhelm and Greg are.

I’m on Poirot 2A now, with some of the other Initiators. Fucking Dieter is here too; he got transferred here when he got drunk and beat up a security guard when they called security because he refused to give them his beer someone had sneaked in to him.

I call my friends on CPC 2. Allie and Stella are being released soon. Tyler and Ethan are gone to Lerner. LaTawnda, Pierre, Andrea, Dylan, George, Brigitte, Clarissa, Kevin (who’s back on CPC 2) and Larry will be there a while. Salvador is gone, and doesn’t talk to anyone still there at all. I knew he was the type not to; he kind of couldn’t stand us but was stuck with us. Victoria is gone, discharged to the eating disorders clinic, and Elsa was discharged too. Caleb is still on CPC 3, and I hear he hates it and gives everyone a hard time there.

Allie tells me the people who had ECT that we tried to rescue are there on CPC 2 with them. The building they did ECT in (which burnt almost all the way to the ground) is now defunct, and a judge is making the ECT victims go to another hospital for ECT.

Oh, lordy, I sometimes wish I didn’t have to fake PTSD or Stockholm Syndrome. But I have to, just to be free. And I must remain free, because I have about twenty ECT victims to help. I just don’t know how I’m going to do it yet. Security is tight as fuck at the Davis lately. I sometimes watch through the windows as security roam the grounds in their cars and sometimes on foot.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be here… it’s up to the Tribunal. But I’ve decided to major in human rights at Concordia University and minor in journalism… I’m doing distance learning from in here.

I just hope I’ll be able to help my friends. Every last one of them. And anyone else that needs it.

Mike tells me that the Initiators’ next project is getting us all out of here, the legal route. Already I’m excited.

My sixth week as an inpatient in the Davis Mental Health University Institute, I decided on the full name for the child I’m pregnant with.

Dietricka Fernelle Masterson-Bonhoeffer. Dee Dee or Dee for short.

Dieter is a right loser, more interested in drinking hand sanitizer and beer sneaked in in RC Cola cans than in talking about our baby. And he’d already done that thing before where he’d stuck pills he was selling in my drawer so that he wouldn’t get in trouble. Lucky he admitted it in the end, or I’d be in fucking Tanguay right now.

There are sixteen of us on our unit, Poirot 2A, the “high risk” unit for violent people and heavy-duty drug addicts. There’s me, here because of what I did with the International Incident Instigation Initiative, trying to save those people from electroconvulsive therapy.

There’s Dieter, transferred here from the unit we used to be on, CPC 2, because he beat up a staff member rather than let them confiscate his beer.

There’s Fern and Mike and Lorne and Greg, the Initiators I did that ridiculous shit with.

There’s Steve and Jason, the two junkies.

There’s Valentino, the guy that tells everyone who’ll listen that he killed his wife and got away with it because he’s seen as crazy. He’s actually allowed to go outside and I’m not!

There’s Hanci, the gender-neutral person that snaps at everyone who gets their gender wrong.

There’s Carless, Jean-Max, Jean-Marc, Peter, Moe and Richard, whom I don’t know anything about yet, but I intend to find out.

I’m busy most days doing my schoolwork. I tell myself what I’ve read a lot of girls my age who are locked up long-term do… I pretend I’m away at school. I’m studying journalism and human rights so that I can help myself get out of this place. And help my friends get out of here too.

I can’t be mad at my sister and my friend Leah for calling the cops and having me committed, because I went from having no friends to having friends coming out the wazoo. I have them on every unit of this joint.

My name is Hettie Masterson, and I have connections.

Has a nice ring to it, don’t it.

Let me make you a list of all my connections.

I have friends from the greenhouse I helped out in here at the Davis… Heidi and Desiree. I have friends who’ve been discharged from the Davis… Elsa, Victoria, Salvador, Stella and Allie. I have friends at Lerner House, the group home on these grounds… Ethan and Tyler. I have friends I met on CPC 2, the short term mood disorders unit… LaTawnda, Pierre, Andrea, Dylan, George, Brigitte, Clarissa, Kevin and Larry, plus more on that same unit that were just moved from here (Poirot 2A) to there… Jamie, Rowan, Flo, and others whose names I don’t even remember. Plus even more on CPC 2… the people we tried to save from electroconvulsive therapy… Bob, Miraleh, Shayla, Alisha, Haleigh, Stanley, Randolph, Elspeth, and Pia. (There were others too, but they were released because they were voluntary and when it was clear they didn’t want the ECT, that legally had to be respected.) I have a friend on Baryshnikov 1, the short term psychotic disorders unit… Kyle. And of course I have my family… my parents, my sister Orla, my brother Jude, and other relatives who are all mentally ill.

I can’t imagine life without any of them, or this place, since most of my friends are still here. I guess you can say I’m institutionalized, and I’ve only been here six fucking weeks.

Good news… they tell me I’m moving to Lerner. The group home on these same grounds. I guess they realize I’m not dangerous. Or maybe they just want me off the Violent Unit because being pregnant, and having the connections I do, I’m an injury and a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I can feel Dietricka moving around inside me now. Yes, It’s definitely Dietricka… I had an ultrasound and it’s a girl. And she’s alive. I don’t care if she has a mental illness, or a physical illness or disability, and I wouldn’t have even cared if she was a boy or something else. All I ask is that my child be alive, despite the meds they have me on, and she is. I’ve grown so much in this place and during my stints out of this place, creating trouble for the greater good. Now I’m so much less judgmental. I love my friends, my family, my acquaintances, all strangers.

And my enemies. Including myself.

It was a party in the morgue.

Autopsy tables were being used as beer coolers and dancing platforms. Morgue drawers were being used as sex cubicles. Rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer was being used as drinks and the flushable sink at the end of the long, wide autopsy room was being used as a barf basin for those who actually drank the hand sanitizer without watering it down.

Anait had just gotten back from a beer run to the depanneur. Then Prilla took the hose head out of the drain in one of the autopsy tables (where someone had stuck it because it didn’t have a proper holder), climbed up on the autopsy table, and started dancing around spraying water everywhere, onto everyone.

Even while it was spraying, I could see the reddish tinge to the water.

That’s when I realized the hose head had aspirated used water from the drain. YUCK!! How many people’s blood must have washed down that drain? How many people’s DNA was in there? And what diseases did they have??

“HEY! You just sprayed me with blood!” someone shouted.

Startled, Prilla dropped the hose head onto someone’s head with a crack, then jumped forward to grab it back, tripped on the framelike edge of the autopsy table, grabbed onto the caged, hanging fluorescent light fixture above the autopsy table and landed on three screaming people. Before they could fall to the floor the light, which was hanging only by some wires, came undone from the ceiling and fell on top of them. Ker-smash! Misty blue powder went everywhere.

Twenty-seven people had to be decontaminated that night. The morgue was closed until further notice. Charges were laid on all fifty-seven people who were still there when the cops came with their paddywagons, pepper spray and zip-tie handcuffs to arrest everyone in sight. Many questions were asked of us including who had let us into the morgue, but different people had invited different people to the party and let different others in. Fatim had been the first to open the morgue for us with his keys; he worked there. But Tammany had worked there too up until recently, so in the end we all blamed Tammany (with his permission—he already had a rap sheet longer than the room we partied in) saying he still had the keys even after he was fired.

So Fatim kept his job at the mental hospital morgue. He had actually been fired from his first job at that hospital, as a PAB, for letting people off their unit, helping them escape. But it was complicated; a long story—he was helping us escape because he knew of a shooting plot no one could prove that would leave us dead if we stayed. (Yes, we—I was one of the patients.)

And the quirky pathologist who I suspect has some sort of mental illness took pity on him, reached out, trained him and hired him as a morgue attendant.

In the end, they let us all go home (or, in the case of the patients, made them go back to their units at the hospital) but they gave us fines.

I was staying at Lerner House, the group home on the grounds of the hospital. So was Dieter, the father of my baby, whom I don’t talk to anymore because he’s a backstabbing, self-absorbed drunk. Many of my other friends both from there and from other units had been at the party.

All this begs the question: Who called the cops?

We made the news again, of course, with that morgue party stunt.

Some of our families were mortified, but mine, being mentally ill themselves, were more concerned about me and my mental illness than about appearances. Which I guess I’ll take, over them being ashamed of me.

I couldn’t drink because I was pregnant, so I as a sober person ended up speaking for many of the plastered people that night, making excuses for them. I think it helped.

We at Lerner didn’t suffer any consequences to our freedom; Lerner is in many ways a free-and-easy kind of group home. My friends on the wards though—Poirot 2A, Baryshnikov 1, CPC 2, and Emergency in the Ross pavilion—were locked down on their wards unable to go out for a while after that.

Then they were let out, and new people showed up in the group home, which has a capacity of eighteen patients: LaTawnda Matherne, Caleb Cronan the Nazi, nonbinary Hanci, a Muslim girl in a hijab whose name I don’t know, Mike Chartrand the ringleader of the mad pride resistance group I’m now a part of, and Miraleh Landeau and Bob Hartle, two of the people we saved from electroconvulsive therapy for a while by burning down the ECT building.

I was reintroduced to LaTawnda, Caleb and Hanci in the dining room at Lerner House, where Caleb stood on a table making fun of LaTawnda with a newspaper tucked into his pants like a skirt: “It’s my skirt! My skirt! My lovely lady slut skirt!”

“HEY!” LaTawnda and her friend Hanci said together, burning mad.

Caleb glowered at her, and without missing a beat grabbed a hairball off the floor, stuck it on his head, and chanted: “It’s my wig! My wig! My lovely lady transvestite wig!”

“HEY!” LaTawnda, Hanci and the Muslim girl shouted together.

Putting the newspaper on his head, Caleb then chanted: “My hijab! My hijab! My lovely lady hijab!”

At this the Muslim girl threw her chocolate pudding in his face.

“It’s my shit!” Caleb hollered. “My shit! My lovely lady shit!”

“I WISH it was my shit!” the Muslim girl said angrily as Calab was hauled away by security. “I honestly wish it had been my shit!”

“I hope he doesn’t come back,” Hanci muttered.

I felt a bit bad for not having hollered with them for him to stop. So I said: “I hope he does, so we can fix his clock!”

“Boy, do I ever wanna PUNCH him like a punchclock, baby!” Hanci said. “It’s okay to punch Nazis, so you know.”

“I know. Boy, do I ever know,” the Muslim girl said.

Caleb didn’t come back, and I heard from Mike who arrived later that night that he was harassing a Spanish girl named Modesta up on CPC 3 and that she threw her dinner in his face—ironically, it had been Spanish tacos for dinner that day, which I knew because we’re served the same stuff here at Lerner as they are on the closed units.

As I finish swallowing my pills and turn away from the nurses’ station to go back upstairs, Mike asks me to go for a walk with him.

Anxious for new adventure and thinking it might have something to do with what happened in the morgue or what happened today with Caleb, I say yes, and we go outside for a walk across the grounds.

But the first thing out of his mouth is, “I heard Alisha can’t remember her own name now.”

Alisha is a girl we saved from ECT very briefly a month ago. We burned down the ECT building in this complex and got them out of there, all the patients who were going to get involuntary ECT. But then we ended up accidentally killing one of them in the fire, and then the others were forcefully confined and forced to get ECT at another facility.

Now, they’re paying the price for our foolishness. They’ve been getting ECT without their consent for a month, as many as four times a week, and they’re losing their memories, their ability to concentrate, their motivation and their enthusiasm. They are really suffering under a doctor named Falco Friedrich, whom a LOT of people suspect is a closet Nazi.

Right away, I know what Mike is talking about. We need to make this right for them and for everyone in this situation. Our conscience demands it, and Mike then confirms all this by saying, “We have the means to do so. Bob has connections to a hippie group on Facebook that’s right here in Montreal.”

“What about anything else? Antifa? MindFreedom? The Icarus Project? Mad Pride groups?”

“I don’t think any of them have any close connections to Antifa, but Bob’s friend Hilaria has a group called Radical Mental Health Montreal that’s based on Antifa’s principles and might have a few members who actually do Antifa stuff in protests and that or belong to some activist group or other.”

So we sit down on a bench and check out Radical Mental Health Montreal on Mike’s phone. (At Lerner we’re allowed our phones, unlike on the closed units.)

We both like what we see, so we make a post there.

Mike is talking to Hilaria within five minutes. Mike and I go to the middle of a field on the grounds so that no one can hear us and sit down on the grass, then Mike puts Hilaria on speakerphone.

“We need to get them out of there,” they both say over and over again during the conversation. “No one else is willing to do this except us. They’re like, ‘Oh, we gotta be diplomatic.’ Well, the time has come and gone to be diplomatic. Every day counts here; these people are suffering and losing their minds.”

“So what do we do?” I ponder aloud.

“What do you THINK we do, Hettie?” Miks says, smiling that psychotic smile.

“Get as many people as we can on board and riot and bust them out of here?” I ask.

“Bingo.”

Hilaria promises to get her people and THEIR people and THEIR people and THEIR people involved.

The date we have picked is next Saturday, when there are no activities at Lerner.

Mike’s friend Fern, who used to be on the users’ committee at this hospital, which is called the Davis, taking complaints from people but was fired after taking part in our previous activism, is also going to get her people involved. She was close friends with the others on the users’ committee who are still on the users’ committee. Heck, she’s even been close friends with the ombudsman, Antonia Papaconstantinou, for a while now. Her friend Tracy de Anda is now in her old place as users’ committee complaint fielder; there’s a newer member too that was brought into the fold after Fern was fired… the new person is now good friends with them too and is… get ready for it… Miraleh’s sister Fantine.

Miraleh is one of the people we temporarily saved from ECT that time last month.

Fantine is also mentally ill and a patient (though an outpatient) here, which is why she’s allowed to be on the users’ committee. Fantine is bipolar like Miraleh but has never had or been prescribed ECT. She’s on meds though but according to Mike, doesn’t use them “properly”, whatever that is. She takes three times her dose of Celexa to keep herself nice and energetic. She’s prescribed twenty milligrams but takes sixty… which used to be an FDA-approved dose but now is not, but many people are still prescribed sixty and it hasn’t hurt them, so why not?

I’m on Celexa too, and I must say, I am starting to notice that it’s doing something similar to me. I felt more, not less, enthusiastic about sticking it to the Man when on the meds, which makes me think not all meds are bad.

If only I could get some extra Celexa somewhere, somehow.

Dieter loves his downers, most notably alcohol and clonazepam, and I love my uppers (or at least coffee, and antidepressants that act kinda like uppers)… one more reason we could never have been together. Dieter, however, has been prescribed Celexa for depression. Dieter is a functional alcoholic now… most people think he’s turning away from that now, but he so isn’t. But he’s got the Lerner staff so fooled that he’s allowed to be in possession of his own medication but I’m not even allowed to be in possession of mine. He gives himself his meds from a mailbox he has the key to. I still have to get mine from the nurses in the medication room.

So yeah, I asked him just yesterday if he’d give me his Celexa (which he hates anyway because it made his nuts swell up, no joke, and he was going to tell the staff but I offered him a nice big bottle of wine if he’d give the Celexa to me instead of having them D/C his prescription and then nobody would benefit from it.

So every day, he gives me his Celexa, and every week I sneak off to the depanneur and buy him a bottle or pack of cans of whatever he wants. We meet in the park near the lake across the street from the hospital and I pass it to him, and he finds various ways to pass me his Celexa every day… usually, we go for walks together and he gives it to me out in the field.

So he’s on 40 milligrams a day and I’m on 40. Which means that after the 60 I take every day, I have 10 left over every day for my private stash for later, for after we escape.

Yes, after we escape.

After our riot, we plan to escape.

So back to Antonia and Fern and Fantine and all them.

Mike takes me for a walk again the next day. We go to the ombudsman’s office in the Newark pavilion to pay Antonia a visit. There, we find the whole users’ committee, huddled as if plotting something.

Fantine flies into a rage at a guy named Dilton because he was supposed to lock the door but didn’t.

“You’re lucky it was just Mike and Hettie!” Fantine storms. I grin. So they know who I am. Mike and Fern must have told them.

We lock the door behind us. The office is big, like the size of a classroom at your average elementary or high school. We crowd away from the door, make sure the windows are shut and speak in hushed tones.

“I just heard from Hilaria,” Mike says.

“What’s the latest?” Fantine asks.

“Her group are going to demonstrate on the grounds, they’re even going to bring tents to camp out and a camping stove and big top tent and food to feed people.”

“Do they need any donations?” a girl with blonde braids asks.

“Food is always good,” Mike says. “And we need people to bring signs and art supplies to make more signs. Lots of pamphlets need printing too; we’ve got one that exposes the horrors of ECT and another one about how awful Dr. Friedrich really has been to his patients. We need as many people to print out as many copies as they can. Meds is also good, for the escapees’ benefit. We don’t want them going cold turkey off their meds or not having them if they still need them.”

“Where are they going to stay?” the girl asks.

“At a safehouse Hilaria has established. Her friend Marcel donated his house in Beaconsfield. Her other friend Maurice also donated his house, in Verdun. Any of you are welcome to stay there too if you don’t want to stick around and get arrested.”

We get a few volunteers to stick around and get arrested to allow the others to escape. We give them papers with info on what to do if pepper sprayed, bottles of water to wash their eyes out with, and a number for Denis, our lawyer, that each person is to write on their arm whether they plan to stay and get arrested or not… just in case they are anyway.

We have them memorize a statement for the cops and the judge. We also have volunteers doing YouTube videos explaining the whole thing to the public, and sending those same videos to all the press outlets along with written statements we’ll put on Facebook too.

“How many people will be there?” Dilton asks, worried there won’t be enough.

“Oh, there’ll be enough,” a guy named Edwin says. “I’ve got schiz friends fresh out of a hospital in Toronto who are traveling here to take part in the protest. They’re staying at my house; the hospital doesn’t know my current address; I recently moved. And my daughter Stella and her boyfriend Dylan say they’ll take part.”

I grin. “And who else who’s still locked up?”

“I think they’ve pretty much got the whole of CPC 2 and Poirot 2A and Baryshnikov 1 on board with this. Fatim still has the keys to the units so he brings messages between units; we don’t use the phones; they might be tapped. And the units are locked down so the people on the different units can’t mingle any more. But Fatim has the full support of the pathology department too. Dr. Isaacs leads the department as the head pathologist and he encourages Fatim to continue his secret activism despite Fatim being his morgue attendant.”

I’m getting so excited I think I’m gonna barf. If we can pull this off, it’ll be great!

Spews Just In

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