Free All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald Page A

the doorway with couches and bureaus that seemed to have no other purpose than for times like this. Joan had been through this before: “Black Willey” was after her again. He started to bang down the door and push through the barricade of furniture, which was buttressed by Joan and Ma. Davey roared with laughter, but I was so nervous I shit my pants. Ma started to talk to Willey from behind the furniture. It worked. She got him to calm down, sit on the couch, and talk to us, while Joan sat on Ma’s other side and cried. Willey told Joan that he was sorry, that he was in love with her, that’s all. He apologized to me too.
    Once everything seemed calm, the attendants finally showed up out of nowhere and tackled Willey to the ground. Willey fought them off and started to get the best of them, saying he would beat their white boy asses black and blue. Some of the other inmates took a break from the ticking and gathered around to cheer Willey on. It took six attendants to restrain Willey and take him off to “the quiet room.” We knew then that we wouldn’t see or hear from Willey for a good long time. Joan screamed as they took him away, Davey laughed and told Willey to keep fighting, and I could still feel my legs shaking as I looked out the window again, thinking visiting hour was almost over.
    At least I could leave every day. Davey couldn’t, whether we wanted him to or not. The doctors said he was a danger to himself and to others. His imprisonment was made painfully clear to me one day when it was time for us to go, and he begged Ma not to leave him. “This is the fucking nuthouse,” he said, and he was starting not to feel so good, with all the medication they were forcing on him. There was no more laughing at the nuts. He didn’t belong in here. “These people are fucking nuts, and the fucking attendants are even nuttier.” He’d stopped swallowing his medication and was able to blow the pills up his nose, to hide them when they made patients drink a cup of water and show their tonsils to make sure the pills went down. Then he’d spit them out when no one was looking. He wanted to come home with us. He wasn’t crazy and didn’t want to get crazy from this hellhole. The attendants made us leave when they saw Davey getting worked up. As we went toward the steel elevator doors, Davey bellowed “Ma” and tackled my mother from behind, knocking her to the ground. About four attendants were on top of the two of them, pulling Davey off Ma. I hated every one of them and started pounding on their heads. One of them restrained me, and the rest dragged Davey down the long corridor toward the quiet room.
    When we went to the offices downstairs, the doctors assured us that no one was going to hurt Davey, that what he was going through was a normal phase that many patients go through after deciding that they’re different from the rest and don’t belong there. They insisted that Davey was a danger to himself and to others. They’d diagnosed him as schizophrenic.
    The next time we went to visit Davey, he was locked in the quiet room. We looked through the small glass window in the heavy door. The room had no other windows at all, and everything was padded—walls, ceiling, floor. And there was Davey restrained in the middle of the floor, pleading something we couldn’t hear through the thick glass. Ma pushed me away from the door, saying I shouldn’t see this. Sometimes Ma got this voice, and you could tell that she wanted to cry but she wouldn’t. That’s what she sounded like now. We found out that we wouldn’t be able to meet with Davey for a few days. So we gave out his carton of cigarettes and left. All the way home, Ma tried to reassure me, and probably herself, that Davey was okay, that the doctors were just getting him to calm down, and that he would be out of the quiet room and Mass Mental in no time. I thought that