He Wanted the Moon Read online

  After about a month, my behavior had become exemplary in all respects. I said little and confined my activities to eating, sleeping, walking in the corridors when permitted, washing the corridor floor, dignified conversation with nurses and attendants, and courtesy to everyone.

  Up to this time, I had seen nothing of the hospital superintendent, Dr. Lang, but as favorable reports filtered through to him, he came over to pay me a visit.

  “All manics are the same,” Dr. Lang explained. “There was no use in my coming over until you had improved …”

  In other words, when I got sick he turned me over to his assistants and stayed away from me, but when I was well, he delegated himself as my physician and advisor.

  “It occurred to me that you had been treated too gently by your psychiatrist friends in the past,” Dr. Lang went on to say. “When you were admitted this time, I gave directions for you to be treated just like anybody else.”

  “Well, they sure laid it on heavy,” I replied. “I would never have believed that psychiatric care could be so rough.”

  Dr. Lang’s manner tended to indicate that he was pleased with my rapid recovery and thought that treatments had made this recovery possible. I wanted to tell him my recovery was in spite of these barbaric methods, not because of them, and that I believed that the brutal treatments had much to do with the unfavorable course of my illness. As the course of events proved, my illness became the longest and most disastrous in the history of my case. Dr. Lang’s ignorance, his old age, his total lack of any humanitarian viewpoint totaled up to the most unfortunate influences that have ever come into my life. I am sure that he has wrecked many lives that might have been salvaged.

  “I shall try to cooperate with you and Dr. Boyd during my present stay with you,” I said to Dr. Lang.

  “We don’t expect you to make any promises.”

  “Well, anyway, I’ll play ball with you.”

  “That’s all we ask. Perhaps you may not agree with my views but maybe we can work together anyway.”

  After his thirty-minute visit, Dr. Lang got ready to leave.

  “Thank you very much for coming to see me,” I said. “I’m glad to have had a chance to know you. Your visit has been very pleasant.”

  After another week or ten days, comments were made to me to the effect that I might be transferred downstairs, out of the violent ward.

  Mr. Burns took me down. Before we left he said, “Look out for Mrs. La Point downstairs. She may cause you some trouble.”

  MRS. La Point was a small, broad, strong-looking woman with dark skin, deep brown eyes, graying black hair and large protruding teeth which flashed as she talked and stood out prominently when she laughed. She was needlessly matter-of-fact and cold in her reception. Her voice was loud, coarse and capable of rising into a high-pitched resonant quality. She herself was nervous and irritable, easily angered and often spontaneously angry without evident cause.

  When Mr. Burns introduced me, Mrs. La Point ignored this formality.

  “Your box will go into the hall closet,” she said, “and when you need anything we’ll unlock the door for you. I’ll assign you a bed later. You may now go on the porch.”

  As I stepped up on the porch, I stopped and looked about me. Here was a collection of about thirty patients sitting around in chairs, ranging in age from six to sixty. Few patients seemed to be looking at me, but the dead silence suggested that everyone was completely aware of the event of a newcomer. I went around and greeted the patients whom I recognized, chiefly those who had been with me upstairs and had moved down ahead of me. Among them were Angelo Cephalo and Clare Johnson.

  The porch was essentially a recreation room furnished with four tables, four benches, straight chairs and rocking chairs, and a pool table. The floor was cement. Large sliding windows with glass panes began at the waistline and rose almost to the ceiling, providing an almost-solid glass enclosure to permit an excellent three-sided view of the hospital grounds and distant fields and hills.

  Soon after, I sat down to get my bearings and to read some letters. Some of the younger patients came and suggested games. I played with them then, and on succeeding days: bridge, poker, checkers, and after six p.m., pool.

  I’ll never know exactly how it happened, but one or more patients were constantly intruding upon my thoughts and actions. Many of them acted very strangely. One man, gray-haired and intelligent, about fifty years old, played checkers a great deal with me. He played well. When I defeated him, he wept openly, not loudly, but with tears streaming down his cheeks. The way he wept upset me. It didn’t seem that losing the game made him weep. It seemed that he wept because I was so greedy and cruel in beating him so badly.

  I HAD asked my secretary to send over some photographs taken while I was riding in various horse shows. One afternoon, they arrived in the mail. The patients showed a great interest in the pictures and asked for copies. I let them have the pictures on request. Sometimes I brought out my box of letters to read some of them again, seeking comfort.

  “He’s brought out his box again,” one or more patients would say.

  I couldn’t understand why my box annoyed them.

  We were allowed to bathe once weekly and to shave every other day. The bathing involved either shower or tub and included no unpleasant feature except standing in line and doing one’s ablutions in the presence of six or eight other patients waiting their turns. The shaving involved the same old unpleasantness of using equipment just used by a succession of preceding patients. The toilet seats were less dirty than upstairs, but frequently showed stains of urine and feces. Every night we all went to bed at 10 p.m. and were awakened at 5:30 a.m.

  “Time to get up!” an attendant would shout.

  There were two dormitories containing ten beds each, and a third containing about twelve. One room contained four beds. It was my debatable privilege to sleep in the four-bed room with a disgusting looking fellow with a harelip and a throat healing from a slash inflicted in a suicide attempt. Another roommate was a well-educated young man who talked intelligently about chemistry, but very insanely about astronomy. His chief disadvantage as a roommate was that he snored loudly and constantly, all night long. The third companion in this room was a former patient on parole. He slept during the day and worked nights as a supervisor on another ward.

  The food was unsavory and monotonous. On all wards, it was the same: a bowl of hot cereal with one glass of milk, but not cream or sugar at breakfast. The only way I could eat the cereal was to lay on some butter and let it melt, mixing it with cereal, adding sugar and eating with Courage. Extra milk was usually available as well as cold bread and butter. Coffee was always served in large tin pitchers from where it was poured into heavy porcelain cups. Luncheon and supper were colorless meals, often malodorous. The vegetables were cooked dry without seasoning. Meats included hot dogs, meat loaf, fish and salt pork. The salt pork usually had an odor of putrefaction. Milk and bread. Hot black tea without sugar. Desserts: Jello, pudding, and so forth. Every Saturday night: beans with a little pork fat. Milk and bread, no butter. Tea without cream or sugar. Several times at lunch they served a most delicious honeycombed tripe, but I can recall very few meals that were eaten without, proverbially speaking, the fingers holding the nose.

  I did more than my share of the daily work. Every morning before breakfast, I swept the porch floor and collected the dirt in dustpans from which it was transferred to large trashcans. I swabbed the floor with a mop and moved the furniture, first to one side of the room, and then to the other, to permit a thorough mopping job. Usually I had a great deal of help for these procedures, but sometimes I did most of it alone. During the day, I was active in keeping all trays empty and I helped sweep and mop the corridors. Often in the evening I played pool with Clare Johnson, Angelo Cephalo, the man who wept when I beat him at checkers, and others. I played pool with skill that astonished me, and somehow executed shots that I never expected to succeed.

  The radio
blared out constantly: music, boy detective stories, news broadcasts, and so forth. From 5:30 a.m. until 10 p.m. I was subjected to this wholesale barrage. I felt the pressure of great strain. It was difficult to sleep until everyone else went to bed, and hard to sleep then on account of snoring. Sometimes at noon I was so tired that I could hardly stand on my feet. I would occasionally sit and lean my head on my arms, but it was against the rule to lie down until after supper around 5 or 6 p.m. when the room and dormitory doors were unlocked. My cheeks became hot and red.

  One bright morning, I pulled a table over beside a bench and sat down to write a letter. Mrs. La Point rushed onto the porch.

  “Put that table back where it belongs!” she yelled.

  At other times, Mrs. La Point would suddenly appear on the porch, and seeing a patient lying on a bench would shout, “Get off that bench!”

  Her crude manner must have upset many of the patients.

  Mrs. La Point succeeded in putting me under a great deal of strain and she contributed to my strange relapse: the most extraordinary adventure I’ve ever had in the realm of the unknown frontiers of human existence.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Westborough State Hospital, 1944

  The patient quieted down to a considerable extent, and was transferred to a quieter ward, but his over-activity increased and a week later he again became so overactive that it was necessary to retransfer him to a disturbed ward. During the manic stage at times he was quite confused and was boastful, extravagant in his statements concerning his physical strength and financial success. He wrote voluminously but a large part of his production was disconnected and exhibited an exaggerated flight of ideas.

  I GREW nervous, sensitive, weak, sleepless. I recall walking alone in the corridors of the hospital and living over again in strangely vivid daydreams. My life seemed extremely important to the world—poor fellow that I was, locked up in a state institution, pitied and looked down upon by so many, headed for many grave personal disasters. I imagined that our ward was at the center of the world’s attention. In some way I concluded that we were all in a building as transparent as glass, and that for a mile up into the sky and all around were stands accommodating hundreds of thousands of people (or perhaps souls, because I could not actually see that which I imagined.)

  The events of my past life took on new meaning. I could see myself as a hero in every fiction tale I’d ever read: Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers, and so many others. Suddenly I was Houdini, The Count, and a hundred other legendary characters. I grew more and more ill in a world overgrown with delusions.

  I spent much time watching the birds, robins, grackles, and sparrows playing around on the grass and in the trees. One day, an attendant came out of one of the buildings and threw some bread out for the birds. I imagined that my own love for the birds had influenced the gesture. I whistled for the birds, talking to them in their language. They were always easily coaxed to the place near where I stood to whistle to them. I had many delusions but no hallucinations: I saw and heard only what was actually there.

  Mr. Burns came walking down from the administration building. I imagined a crescendo of laughter and applause from the unseen and unheard galleries above me. I watched him closely as he strode along across the grass. He walked all the way around the three walls of the porch and climbed the fire-escape stairs to the upper floor. I followed him along, talking to him and teasing him. He looked larger than usual, his face broader, whiter. His fat, white uniformed body seemed to have increased enormously in size.

  Mr. Burns said, “Would you like to go back upstairs for a while?”

  A delusion took hold: perhaps they were closing the upstairs on account of some impending catastrophe, and maybe they wanted me to go back to be sure that my own room was about as I left it for future historians to study.

  I went with Mr. Burns; we walked upstairs. The soles of my feet were becoming so sensitive that I could hardly stand on them. I moved along slowly and quietly, down the corridor to my room. Mr. Burns stayed behind. There were no patients anywhere. I went into the closet and rearranged the slippers, towels and bathrobe, putting everything neatly in order. I went into my room and looked around. I laid one end of a towel on the window and closed it, leaving the towel hanging down. I took down the shade and rolled it up, thinking of it as sensitized photograph paper that held some type of record. I put this beneath the mattress, running it beneath some of the links in the steel bedsprings, thus fastening it down. I rearranged the bed clothing and turned to leave the room. An attendant came and locked me in. I was deeply shocked. I sat down.

  A little while later, I was let out and wandered around, finding that all the patients had reappeared. Perception of color became more intense. The lips of most of the patients looked intensely red, unnaturally so, as if they had on a coating of very dark lipstick. I walked around saying nothing, doing nothing, bewildered. An attendant came and took me to my room. I was placed in a straightjacket: The shock to my sensibilities was profound and painful. This straightjacket was new; fresh canvas made specially to fit me. It would have been extremely difficult to get out of it. I made no attempt. What bothered me was not the mechanical excellence of the straightjacket and the difficulty of getting out of it, but the utterly incomprehensible puzzle of why I was put in it when I was doing nothing but cooperating to the best of my ability, fully and completely.

  The hall clock must have stopped running, or if it didn’t I was no longer able to hear its ticking. Everywhere there seemed to be a ghastly silence. On the porch I could see many patients familiar to me, but I could not hear them talking or walking. They were all moving around incessantly but soundlessly. My north window was partly open, but no fresh air came through, and I heard no sounds from the road below.

  My imagination took on the speed of light. I thought that the entire Westborough region had in some way become detached from the Earth and was catapulting through space like a rocket ship. Either a movie camera left running had produced the ghostly figures on the porch, or else these poor patients were trapped with me. The silence continued.

  I lost all sense of time. I knew that Earth was hundreds or millions of miles away. I felt sure that several hundred years had passed and that if I ever got back to Earth all the people I had known would be dead and gone. I whistled “Intermezzo” and talked aloud to myself. The chart of my travels through space seemed to be toward Mars and I feared I might get stranded there. It occurred to me that other planets might be pleasant places to live, but I wanted to get back to Earth, even if all the people I knew were dead. It occurred to me that thought-waves were the only influence that I could exert to get the ship back to Earth. I sang and whistled and talked, trying to find the combination. Days, weeks and years rolled on by. No one came in my room. No one brought me food. To test reality, I made my bed jump up and down, and I made it move around and around the room.

  Once, as I was making my bed jump up and down, I heard a crashing of boards and the bed seemed suddenly to get jammed in the floor and I couldn’t move it. This made me imagine that the hospital building had been placed on wooden boards on a lake and that I had created a vibration with my bed that had crushed the boards and let the building sink to the bottom of the lake. For a while I thought we were at the bottom of the ocean between Greenland and the British Isles.

  After what seemed an eternity I heard voices in the hall and some attendants came in and gave me food. And then I was left again to silence, loneliness, to roam lost in the universe. Night came and lasted a hundred years. In the morning the attendants came and took me to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet quickly, then climbed over the partition into the toilet next to the window. I seemed unable to speak. I clutched the window tightly, looking at the glorious morning sun. The attendants had to drag me out by force.

  Another morning came. I detected an odor of exhaust gas coming through the window as I lay there in my straightjacket. I surmised that everyone in New England except us had been ki
lled by gas released by the Japs. I dreamed of thousands of Japs disguised as American citizens invading the Boston area, and I dreamed of an earthquake that made the Ritz Hotel topple over. My heart and soul were rent in agony.

  While I was trapped in this delirium, my wife and secretary came in with the sheriff to serve the divorce papers on me. My secretary was to serve as witness. I remember nothing of the episode, but my secretary related the facts about as follows:

  She and Gretta entered the room first. I was lying on the bed. The attendant came in and said I had visitors. I rose and sat up in bed. Eleanor, my secretary, put out her hand. I did not seem to see her hand or her. I did not shake hands. I rolled over toward the east window with my back to my visitors.

  “Dear, if you don’t feel well we’ll come again some other day,” Gretta said.

  Eleanor identified me as Perry Baird. The sheriff served his papers.

  Gretta wept all the way home.

  ONE day Mr. Burns came in with several attendants. I was loosened from my moorings to the bed and allowed to get up. Wandering around my room, perhaps a little confused, I recalled the night when I was tapping on the windowpanes and two of them became shattered into small pieces as if broken by sound vibrations. I stepped up to the north window and brought my right fist down against one of the small panes of glass. The blow was much too strong and the glass broke with large sharp fragments with dagger-like edges. The top of my right hand near the inside of the wrist was deeply cut. It bled profusely through an opening a little less than an inch long and evidently extending through the full thickness of the skin. There was a smaller puncture wound over the sensitive flexor surface of the wrist on its wide portion next to the bone. Blood also poured lavishly from this small opening. Many drops had been splashed on windowpanes untouched by my fist and the floor was mildly stained. After a rather long interval, several attendants collected outside my door and came in together, expecting trouble. The night supervisor bandaged my wrist. Healing took place rapidly at the site of the larger laceration but seemed slow in reference to the puncture wound. Several times, without any injury or other provocation, the puncture wound began to bleed spontaneously and required a compression bandage.