Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [280]
The moment Nicole had put her signature on the page, she knew it was an awful mistake. "Why didn't I just walk out of this motherfucker?" she asked herself. All the way to the ambulance she kept telling herself, "The reason you didn't, girl, is because you got nothing but hospital pajamas and a blanket." They had wrapped her good and she couldn't move her arms or legs. A bug all trussed up. As they drove, she couldn't see out of the ambulance, but there was something about the whine of the gears as the vehicle went up one long grade that sounded like the end of the trip. She was on the long approach road to Utah State Hospital. Oh God, the nuthouse they had had Gary in.
She was familiar enough with that. Same feeling. Even the same ward. It was shaped like a U, with the boys in one wing, the girls in the other, and a social room connecting them. The halls were long and narrow, with bedrooms and cells, and bright linoleum on the floor. Goddamned asshole paintings all over the place. Thoroughly stupid stuff like COMMUNITY IS US! painted in pastel watercolors that had caked and gone dead. Orange couches, yellow walls and plastic cafeteria chairs and tables. It depressed the hell out of her-like she was condemned to live in a visiting room forever. Everybody looked all tranked out. It would take you 150 years to die. Everything so god damned cheerful and phony.
John Woods had had an upset stomach the night before, coughed up some blood, and thought, Jesus, now I'm getting an ulcer. He decided to stay home from the hospital, but a frantic call came in from the ward. They said, "Nicole Barrett's on the way to us."
"Like hell she is," said Woods.
He went over the Superintendent's office and first thing Kiger said was, "I sent her to your unit. That's where I want her."
Woods said, "Nicole oughtn't to be in Maximum Security. This is just another indication that the rest of the hospital can't carry their share. Thera-Mod should be able to take her." Kiger agreed. He started to interrupt, but Woods was so mad, he said, "Let me finish."
He revered Kiger, thought he was the only man who had had a new idea in treating psychopaths since they coined the word, and so it got to him whenever he thought Kiger was doing something for less than the noblest motive.
Of course, Woods's unit was the only one with enough security to protect Nicole from the press. As Kiger said, "This is going to be sticky, newswise." Every wire service, major newspaper and magazine was going to try every trick to interview Nicole. That meant heavy pressure. The media would squeeze the politicians, and they in turn would squeeze the hospital. If Nicole pulled off another attempt, all their heads were on the block. It irritated the hell out of Woods how much this was going to interfere with the therapy of everyone else on the ward. His job had shifted, Now he was there to keep Nicole alive.
Yet, it killed him. It just wasn't Woods's idea of therapy. They'd be junking a lot of their program just to keep a 24-hour watch on Nicole.
Nicole wanted to go to sleep like she never had before, but immediately a boss-looking chick, probably a patient, but domineering and awful sure of herself in a rotten limited way, was telling her, "No lying on beds in the daytime." "Take a shower!" "Take off your jewelry."
They started to grab her, and she began to fight. That was when Nicole realized everything she did from here on out was going to be a fight. It came down on her like a disease. It would be a losing battle all the way. "I'm going to be suffocated by these fucking sheep," she said to herself. Yes, this was the place Gary had described where everybody ratted on everybody.
Instead of working with the antisocial impulses of each patient as it came into conflict with the group interest, instead of the group being the anvil on which each patient's personality might get forged into a little more social responsibility, the emphasis would now have