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by Erin Soros
Artwork by Phoebe Sparrow Wagner
No window, no lamp for reading—you cannot read. No clock. The one light in the ceiling is inescapable. You face it every time you open your eyes because you are lying on a bed, your limbs tied.
Look at that light, fixed and stark in the ceiling, an unblinking eye. You are in an interrogation room with no one to interrogate you.
The hour could be day. It could be night. This could all be a dream: everything that brought you here, where you are, and who you are.
How do you check? What can you know?
The ties are evidence. Pressure on the wrists and ankles is proof of some sort. Your arms are bound straight above your head. Legs splayed.
What other proof is there of your life, your path, the steps that led you to this room, the steps you could take away from it? You are in here, stationary and yet in freefall, away from human contact, away from the helpful orientation of any familiar and comforting stimulus, without something to tell you the date, that, chirp of a bird, voice of the mailman as he hands you a bill with your name on it, spring release of toast from the toaster, even that, something time made warm, something you could grip with your hands, the very hands that cannot reach and cannot hold.
*
For centuries the mad have flailed against chains and leather and cloth, all of these bindings that keep others safe from insanity’s apparent threat. The mad have screamed at stone walls and brick walls and plaster walls and those pastel walls meant to sedate in such cheery modern ways.
Who has witnessed the spider skitter of bodies resisting capture? Who has heard the last howl collapse into moans? How loud does a madwoman have to become to reach someone who will let her go?
The mad draw refusals on bedsheets. Limbs as instruments: arms and legs twitch an inch this way or that. Horizontal shuffle. Even these inches hurt, ties straining, this now familiar torment, the constant pulse, the rubbing and gnawing and aching, and still the mad do it, just to test the hold, just to see if perhaps one clasp has slipped loose, one limb can suddenly wriggle out of its cuff and open itself to the touch of unhindered air.
When the days of imprisonment are finally done, what will be left but wrinkles in the sheets that can be so easily washed away? Snap of dry clean cotton across ammonia reek, whiteness billowing into a sail heading nowhere.
*
Metaphors don’t work in solitary confinement. The very etymology of metaphor is to bring you across, to carry you from one place to the next, from one meaning to another.
*
Solitary confinement: Even these words are wrong, borrowed from the realm of prison and its punishments. The patient is solitary and the patient is confined, but these words are not the ones used in medical contexts. Hear the word seclusion and one might visualize a hotel retreat. They enjoyed ten days of peace and seclusion.
*
Beyond seclusion, the terms in the psychiatric literature include isolation, shuttered room, quiet room, unfurnished room, protective room, cleared room, secure room, segregation unit, padded cell.
*
And they just bounce off the walls, don’t they, these words, like that flat harsh light?
*
What would a piece of writing be if it stayed in one room where there is no sunshine and no houses and no trees, no magazines and no books, no community or relation, no dialogue and no movement but the twitch of a hand or a foot that is bound to a bed? Open the hand, close the hand, try to writhe in place and yet feel the fixedness that will not let you do so, nothing happening and even the mind, the teeming grey mass that used to be your own, is numbed, groggy with injected drugs as if restraint is not stillness enough.
*
As soon as someone can read it or hear it, it is not seclusion. The act of communication nullifies the content. The sense, the state, the experience of seclusion can never get out.
*
Restraint—limiting the freedom of limbs—is distinct from forced seclusion, although the terms restraint and seclusion are often used interchangeably in the psychiatric literature, or used together to refer to one total practice, reflecting how the treatments can be combined, a patient both tied to a bed and held in isolation. The words are linked in a single turn of phrase: restraint and seclusion, the simple conjunction joining the body’s fixity together with the isolation from sustaining human bonds, signalling the violent yet legal coordination of corporeal and mental immobility.
*
You are still. You are still here.
*
It does not communicate. It cannot be shared. A form of madness. Language’s end point, its zero hour. A hole. It is a room containing no one with the authority to be a witness, where there is no freedom of movement or ability to reach others. It is indefinite entrapment. It is the body held in place as it is not meant to be, as if human will, too, could be caught and fixed and silenced. It is the body stilled so that it does not disrupt others, does not interrupt the rhythm of human normalcy with any unusual speech or distracting movement, does not jar the actions and words of all those who might need to connect.
*
What is sanity but evidence, small daily proofs of a shared world: a nod from someone as you speak, a connection that is action, lips moving you recognize, sound or gesture or text, each single form of communication involving a motion like fingers on a laptop keying in small black marks in hopes of being understood by someone beyond the screen.
*
Alone, falling. Alone, tied.
*
Somewhere beyond the room, a hand reaches to turn off the light, and this means your eyes are supposed to close, but what difference does it make, open or shut, nothing to see, white walls or black walls, day or night, minute or hour, they removed your watch so there is no face to divide the dormancy of seconds or minutes or days. What is an hour? Where is it? What happens to time in here?
Sleep rolls through the morning and the afternoon and the evening. You tumble upside down while staying still on your back.
Memory offers its architecture, and you cling to it against the drugs that hook your body to this bed as fiercely as do the straps that grip their intimacy around ankles and wrists. Time is the day drug and the night drug. Time is the weight of the drugs taking over, taking you under.
You were walking along a street and you heard your friends calling you, remember that? From this car, that car, the car that speeded by, silver car, red car, the small white car with the happy horn, so many friends.
Were they there?
If you could reach them, you could ask but there is no phone, no computer, no leaving this static square.
*
Restraint within psychiatric wards now takes two forms: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical refers to the physical implements—cotton straps, strait jackets, leather cuffs, the limbs of security or staff—used to limit the patient’s movement. Chemical refers to the psychotropic drugs that create both mental and physical docility.
*
Where are your friends now—in a restaurant? At home? Are there still restaurants and homes, gyms full of sweating bodies, even at this hour, it can’t be too late, is it late? Too late to call for a glass of water. Too far away for anyone to hear.
A glass of water would serve to pace the night.
One sip, two, you would know the second sip was after the first one and that would be a kind of clock.
*
Numbness in the left hand, and a tingling that runs down the nerves of the shoulder where the ligament strains in its protracted distortion.
You shift slightly toward the cuff on that side, but there is no release. The pain twinges. The pain settles deep into the muscle as if leaving a cellular imprint of metal.
*
This moment is a piece of plasticine that you and your sister used to press against newsprint to lift off the image of a face and then stretch the eyes and nose and mouth into something monstrous. This moment is what happened to all those rows of small but sturdy words when you pulled the plasticine wider, how their darkness faded as if language too could smear into nonexistence.
This moment is the next moment. Each moment the same. If you could only scratch your nose, that would be a change, a chance, small relief, touch of your skin on your skin, that welcome stimulus to say you are here.
Breath, another breath, you must become your own clock, but how many breaths has it been since the last time you started counting?
*
The wrists, the ankles, two plus two, all day and night your bodily arithmetic as you pace a tiny fight against unyielding straps, a psychiatrist’s calculation of safety encircling your brittle narrow places.
*
Even in your dreams you are tied. Your ankles are held wide apart, your arms above your head, armpits open like wailing mouths that can emit no sound.
*
Then one night you dream your limbs free, legs pumping a swing in the green yard while you sing joyous nonsense notes under the giant yellow ball of a sun, under that open blue sky, that wisp of a cloud kissing the sun, tip your head back and feel your hair dip the ground as your eyes widen to look at the upside down world.
*
Wake into this fixed whiteness. Strain of the straps. You are an X with no surrounding letters on the page, no proximate shapes to enable you to mean anything but this.
*
At moments you kid yourself that these straps hold you like ties left by a lover enthused about restricting your body to a bed. Imagine this lover asked what you wanted. Imagine this lover requested permission, attentive to your desire, your consent.
Can I tie you up? Sly smile, the hand holding—a ribbon? Not a cuff, nothing stiff, but something supple, a curve smooth and slippery that still represents constraint and the release made possible by it.
You reach your arms above your head. You spread your legs.
But the lover grows absent-minded. The lover leaves you in this lonely room, no kiss, no caress, no teasing about surrender.
The ties toughen. Or were they always this severe? They are biting into your skin. Come back, you cry to the wall, come release me, remember what needs to be undone.
*
Your lower back spasms. Your upper back is a steady hurt. Your spine stiffens, itself an aching cable.
*
But your left shoulder is the worst. Why do you deserve this treatment? The shoulder ligament reminds you of this unrelenting question. You can do nothing to ease the pain. You recall animals that chew into their own flesh to release a limb from a trap and then run through foliage amputated and bleeding and free.
*
The thin foam mattress, all that is between you and the steel frame, lies firm as a barricade from anything beyond this cell that could ease confusion or facilitate some return, some trust, a way to be with others, an opportunity to hear a voice and love its cadence or to find a smile and understand at least that line.
*
Force is not tranquility. Abandonment is not care.
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Time grows slack. Time oozes, time thickens and solidifies the way mud in a creek dries, the bed cracking, empty veins branching, item, emit, tie t e meti me mmm make another word out of it, time another creature, another monster, how many words can you make, even a word that is not one, a word out of order like the minutes of this day longing its way toward the door.
*
But are there words? Are there letters? Is there a space between?
*
Infant. Visceral terror of no one answering your cry. No speaker no listener no self no other no sign no thing. You have become what we all once knew, have felt, now fear—that unheard unmeant slipping into
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Photo by Alexis Goodenough
A settler born in Vancouver, Erin Soros writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and critical theory, often in some hybrid form that frustrates categorization. She researches trauma-induced psychosis and the police and psychiatric response to it and she works within community to create mental health care without force. New poetry is forthcoming in Canadian Literature and essays are forthcoming in English Studies in Canada and in Futures of Neurodiversity. Her honours include The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry 2020, Silver at the National Magazine Awards for poetry, and Gold at the National Magazine Awards for One-of-a-Kind-Storytelling. Her fiction received the CBC Literary Award for the Short Story and the Commonwealth Award for the Short Story. On Twitter @ErinsoroS. On Instagram @ErinSoros.