I'm with you in Rockland

She writes.

Desperate, raging vitriol penned in scrawling blue ink. Accusing her doctors of professional misconduct and of insanity and of stealing her underwear while she sleeps, sedated and innocent and helpless. Demanding sanity trials and industrial tribunals and compensation for the loss of dignity and injustice she has suffered, and is still suffering as we speak.

And yet nothing is done.
She cajoles, begs and pleads, and threatens to go on hunger strike and to starve herself to whichever comes first: death or size zero. To throw herself through the window and into the approaching twilight and onto the mercy of the cold concrete beneath.

Or her mobile phone.

Which actually happened one time when she accused it of hypnotism but no one believed her because they all knew she’d been talking to it continuously for seventy hours. Yackety-yak, yackety-yak, her internal monologue spewed forth in a torrential stream of consciousness until her voice, no more than a sigh, whispered words of wisdom and every particle of her being vibrated with the knowledge of good and evil.

            And now? The electric hum of florescent strip-lights and pine-scented disinfectant and angels watch over her slumber.

While she sleeps, dreamless, in institutional armchairs, the dying sun bleeds into indifferent hills. The vapours that trail in the wake of roaring aeroplanes crisscross the evening sky like the memory of failed suicide attempts.

She is a mountain.

The rolling hills of her flesh cascade like waterfalls beneath the folds of her simple, cotton dress. Her chin has already dissolved and her face is slowly melting into her collar. A hump of fat has formed at the back of her neck. Her scalp shows through thinning hair. There are gaps in her mouth and the teeth that are left are yellow as is her skin.

You don’t need to be afraid.

            As the street lamps outside flicker one by one she opens her eyes.

            ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ she asks.

            ‘You looked so peaceful, it seemed a shame.’

            ‘Remember that time when I would only eat carrots for three weeks and my skin turned orange?’

            ‘That was yesterday,’ I remind her.

            ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Remember that time when I kicked the crutches from that lady and she was furious because I’d healed her on the Sabbath?’

            ‘That was just a song you heard on the radio,’ I tell her.

            ‘Well, then, remember that time when I OD’d for the second time and afterwards I was psychic and could hear what people were thinking, and then I cast a demon out of the man at the bus stop and he called the police and they said there was no law against praying?’

            ‘Yeah, I remember that.’

            ‘They didn’t know what else to do so they called an ambulance.’

            ‘That’s what happened,’ I say.

            The nurse comes in carrying a tray and a tiny pot of pills and an empty cup and a jug of tap water.

            ‘Who are you talking to, Naomi?’

            She searches the room for inspiration.

            ‘Myself,’ she is finally forced to admit.