This asylum is known as The End of the Road. At the end
of State Hospital Road, witchgrass overtakes asphalt. Foxtail cracks
cement walls that once enclosed convicts. Only the window bars remain
intact: grim metal mouths. Headless barbells, rack pulls, and iron boots
abandoned a century ago rust above the silent valley
where hawkswept winds caress muted deer.
Some patients on D ward have never known this tableau
as they were warned upon entry not to look up: Never look
anyone in the eye if you want to survive in prison.
The youngest man in my therapy group bares a mouthful of broken teeth.
Saliva seeps through the cracks from heavy haloperidol cocktails. But
when the music rises, he moves with abandon:
from fish-gasping, distressed splashing in air, he kick-turns
full pirouettes, limbs flailing with their own cadence.
With a tenuously controlled fury,
barely missing my face, he reaches up and extracts
from the air something large and wet
that he slaps like a slab of meat
or a missing organ on his shoulders—
then his chest, thighs, waist—slaps transforming to fists,
fists to slicing knives. Somehow, he defies
his habitually hunched stance, head hardly lifted
from chest so he is forced to view the world sidewards,
eyes rolling up as in worship. He defies
his customary gait that suggests skiing on gravel,
tripping to heave himself forward. Instead,
we dance fluently, intersecting rivers.
He crouches and hops off
down the dusty hall like a baby bird,
feet grazing the ground.
He flaps, leaps, and lunges, extending himself boundlessly
to the weak brightness that filters through
the reinforced windows.
Until doctor and techs rush in, inject him with tranquilizers, chastise me
for inciting so much energy. This dance is dangerous: it encourages
sexual urges among men who have raped a paraplegic girl, who have
murdered their mothers. In the ensuing silence the young man meets
my gaze. Innocent children gather in his eyes. He caresses his chest
over the heartache: There is a tiny animal living here inside me.
Now that he has found her, he can depend on her—not to haunt
or hunt him, not to flee in fear, but to hold his head upright.
While he dances, he can see, and the bantam, from her perch
protected behind his fervent sternum, is discerning.
