How on Earth had she gotten there? She remembered screaming and squealing, kicking and biting the head nurse`s hand, while the other nurses had tried to hold her still so that they could get a syringe into her. It had hit her like a train at high velocity carrying her into a tunnel blacker than night (which, after all, has things like stars and is not so black really). Velvet black became day and night, waking for injections only before falling back to the cave of "Close Sesame".

Richard and Sabina: A Biography of the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand and His Wife Sabina

And the first walk on carpet slippers with little pink pom-poms to the Day Room, where bleary, dozed others were propped in chairs against the walls. Music piped the room and the sun had let itself in through the great windows without even wiping his feet off, much to Alice`s dismay.

Many of the patients smoked hubble-bubbles (water pipes) so that water swirled at the base of their pipes, whilst others seemed content to chain-smoke from packs with surrealist designs and intriguing names. A ponderificating couple pouch-scooped tobacco into pipes and smoke-signaled around the room. A nurse kindly brought Alice a cup of tea in a beaker but it contained too little sugar for Alice, who was a very sweet, little girl.

As if at a signal, all the patients (for, yes, indeed all the people in the room were patients as was Alice, too) got up and stood in line. As Alice later learned, the signal was a little medicine chest, that was pushed out three times daily, and if you were quick to see it you could be nearly first in line.

After the Madness

Alice held out her hand in great expectation. She received a sky-blue pill but the others were merely aspirin-white, although in interesting shapes and sizes so you could tell them apart. Everybody seemed to get different combinations and this was why it took the nurse an infernally long time to dish them out, thought Alice.

The next day, Alice entered the Day Room again. She couldn`t help but notice small fleecy clouds trailing languidly across a blue sky. This heartily annoyed her. So she got on a chair and waved her arms at them, shouting the while imprecations to get them to move faster. Her efforts at weather witchery were not appreciated, however, and rough male nurse hands removed her from the chair and into a sideward, where she was locked in. There were flowers running up the wallpaper and she tried with her spells to make them run down but otherwise nothing happened and time didn`t even tick by because there was no clock.

One day, when Alice had stood in line as usual, she noticed something about the pills. They were different pills. This happened again and again. It`s too much to say it happened regularly. It just happened. No one spoke to Alice. The nurses were much too busy to speak. And she didn`t see a doctor because they told her it wasn`t necessary. The other patients didn`t speak. They had their mouths full of something to puff at anyway.

Girl, Interrupted

Now one day, Alice became aware that her predicament was dire. It didn`t happen at first. At first, she was very happy. Happiness changed to optimism. She was sure she was not like all the rest. And then one day, it hit her. She was on the Funny Farm with the Funnies. She was a Funny. What she had thought was unreal was real. It was as if a fighter plane had kamikazied into the pit of her stomach. She collapsed into a chair and sat in a row with everyone else. Feebly, she puffed at the proffered cigarillo.

That terrible black feeling inside, as if the skein of her gut had been stretched along the Milky Way, receded a little and she made her way to the window to see where the sun had betaken himself. Before she even knew what was happening, her hand levitated aloft and she bashed it through the window with a vengeance.

The nurse took her to a small room. He berated the blood on her pink pom-poms and besmirched pajama bottoms. He also became extremely preoccupied and searched all the little draws in his medical cupboard to find thread. He didn`t really talk much. Pricked her with his syringe, full of local anesthetic, sewed her, was careful himself in his little rubber gloves, of course. Finally, he said, "Don`t ever do that again." But he seemed right away to have regretted his own waste of breath.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Time after that did not exactly fly, but, fly, or drag its heels, time passes at the same tempo anyway. One day, Alice was discharged.

But how to find the way back to the garden. "Eat me," said the pills that the doctor had given her. But the flamingoes in the wonderland world did not keep twisting their necks up virtually to render croquet impossible, nor did the jolly gardeners busy themselves about the garden painting the roses the other way round. Instead Alice had a depression. The pills caused the depression. So, she took a full bottle. And, of course, the next day, she woke up dead. "Eat me."

should also like to say how happy I am that you are an Attorney. I really have no idea about American law and I`m very glad that you`re there to correct my excesses. Truly Dumbness has been the cause of my errors and not Maliciousness.

I also enjoyed very much indeed reading the short stories of mental illness, The Cult of Discipline and His Stock In Trade, you sent me and will read and re-read it in order to form my opinion. It is very humorous but it raises big issues to do with freedom and accountability. It has a neat end whereby we`re left wondering who`s crazy.

In the little novel I`m trying to write, I want to get inside the inner world of somebody, who`s mentally ill because I figure that has to be my angle. It`s something new for the reader and surely he wants to be somewhere new. Your world is also very new and frightening in its implications. Happily, I`m not duplicating you, however.

Tomorrow, I`m taking the bus to Aalborg, which is a lot less than half the distance to Manhattan. I intend to take writing paper and renew my library books, see a couple of guys, stay with my wife (who left today and will return with me mid-week). I look forward to being in touch, when I get back.

Sincerely,

Geoff Jackson