Free Against the Wind by Madeleine Gagnon Page B

was this whole place that he had grown attached and accustomed to, that had taught him so much about the madness within and the outward show of “normality,” and about reality and truth, which had often seemed so much more real and true here.
    Joseph had become fond of some people, and real friends with a few, over these three weeks, forming relationships that were as real and enduring as those with his friends “outside.”There was Rebecca Goldberg, older than he was and from a very different background, with whom he had formed a close friendship. Rebecca felt the same way, and it was understood that they would continue to see each other in “life outside.” And Dena, his occupational therapist, who had with such intelligence and sensitivity brought him back to his painting. Dena, to whom he would be “eternally grateful,” as he told her. But they too would see each other again. Especially because she and Rebecca were close friends.
    But there was also – most of all, because chances were that he would never see them again – his attachment to some of the patients, with whom he’d had such strange and moving exchanges. Such beautiful exchanges, through words, games, paintings, music, sane talk and ravings, sometimes, which Joseph had, for the first time in his life, learned to listen to, to follow in their unique logic that seemed so easily to dispense with the reason with which he had thought until then. Joseph knew that his reason would never be the same again. His mind had been opened to another logic, to other logics, and that would always stay with him. “When I’m ninety,” said Joseph, “I’ll still think differently from how I did before coming here.”
    Among those “real people” who, without speeches, each one in his or her own fashion, had taught him a different way of seeing the world, there was Lois, a woman in her forties, not beautiful but so engaging, so touching when she was animated that you quickly forgot her physical appearance, Lois, who had a husband and children she loved, except that every five years or so, she would fall into such misery, such melancholy – and she never knew why – that she would have to be hospitalized for a short time.
    Lois would sometimes say to Joseph or Véronique, “You don’t know, my dear friend, what it is to suffer so much, to break down completely, to just want to die, just to die. Not even knowing why. For days and nights, days and nights!” She would try to describe her condition in words, but she could not. She said that the words had been taken from her long before what had made her so unhappy. She would say, “It’s like an emptiness. Like a feeling that’s empty, but that hurts. Like an empty, deep anguish that’s without substance.Without form. It’s within me and all around me…with no limits.”
    Joseph and Véronique loved talking to Lois, but they had to accept losing her two or three days a week, each time they came to get her for her electroshock treatment. Joseph was there one day when they were taking her to the “electroshock room,” and she hugged him and said, “Dear, I’m not going to recognize you after I come back from that room. Don’t worry. It will last two or three days, and then I’ll be with you again.” She added that that was the only way that had been found to alleviate her suffering but that each time she came back, whole chunks of her memory were gone forever. They were killed, Lois said, killed along with the unbearable suffering.
    Joseph watched for her return and was stunned when he saw her come out supported by two nurses, her eyes dead and her skin pallid. He followed them discreetly to Lois’s room, where they laid her on her bed, and there she remained, totally absent, for three days. But Lois came back to them on the fourth morning as if nothing
had
happened. In fact, for