Free Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir Page B

herself Russian; I’d have to remember to tell Ivan about that. There were hand-cast pottery mugs in the kitchen, a used and not yet washed wineglass in the sink, an espresso machine next to a canister of coffee. In the refrigerator, cheese and lettuce and some convenience items; not much there.
    She kept a tarot deck in her bedside table along with a couple of novels and a vibrator, which made me smile. Her clothes were more muted than her apartment; like most Montréalers, black was Danielle’s main motif, though she also apparently liked blues and greens in their darker varieties. Like me, she preferred flat shoes.
    There was absolutely nothing that we saw that gave any indication of why she had been killed.
    There was something distasteful about the whole enterprise: like being a voyeur in someone else’s life, pawing through dirty clothes and scummed-over glasses. I wondered what people would think of my home, my kitchen, my bed, if they were to go through it as I was doing now. Like undressing an already denuded corpse, finding out what’s under the skin as well as under the clothing. It gave me chills.
    Julian, happily unaware of my dark thoughts, at length snapped off his gloves. “No secrets,” he pronounced. “No laptop, either, so we need to crack the code at school.”
    I looked around me, feeling suddenly desolate at the apartment’s emptiness. Bereft of the young woman who would never open that door again. “Julian,” I said quietly.
    “Yeah?”
    “Let’s get him,” I said.
    That first time, I was in restraints for three days.
    Three long days and three longer nights, and if I’d found the howls of the dormitory occupants disturbing, it was nothing to what I was hearing now. These weren’t the screams of people haunted by ghostly apparitions; this was pain. I was tied down: I couldn’t even cover my ears, shut it out, pretend that it wasn’t happening.
    I’ll never speak out again, I promised myself; if they’ll only let me out of here, I’ll do whatever they want. Anything. Anything to make this stop.
    They gave me water to drink from a long straw and once a day the restraints were loosened enough for me to sit up and eat a slice of bread. That was all. Other than that, I lay there, my muscles cramping, the restraints cutting my wrists and ankles, staring at the ceiling. Twice a day I was brought a bedpan. That was all.
    I had nothing to do but think, and hear, and smell, and feel. They were cold and hard, the restraints, and there were no blankets at night. I couldn’t stop shivering, even though it was springtime, even though the air should have been warm.
    There were people coming and going all the time, and gradually I stopped knowing when it was daytime and when it was night. The clatter of chains, the murmur of voices, doors slamming, children—you couldn’t not know that these were children—wailing.
    What I heard when I was there—it was the worst. I wanted to pretend that the voices I was listening to weren’t human, because I didn’t want to believe that a human could make a sound like that.
    The metal had rubbed my wrists raw. The orderlies returned me to one of the dayrooms, where I recognized the sister in charge, and she looked at my wrists right away and sent me off with a younger nun to have them cleaned and bandaged. “Sister’s always angry they don’t take better care,” the young one said.
    “That’s kind of her,” I said, my voice tentative, because I didn’t yet know what got you in trouble in this place.
    “It’s not,” the young sister said. “Sometimes they get infected, and then the patient can’t work, and Sister Véronique hates that.”
    I looked at her face, hearing the matter-of-fact tone in her voice, trying to stifle my astonishment that someone so young, with hands so gentle, could see nothing wrong with what she’d just said. But there was nothing to be read there, and I went back to the dayroom, tired and aching and feeling despair as