Plexiglass Faces

ive faces already, and not one of them a nurse. Another round of screams would make no difference; she had met her quota the night before. Surely it was time for breakfast; she could hear the rustling of trays and smell the tobacco smoke fumigating behind the steel door. But what she really wanted was something to throw.

Carrie circled the cell, two large paces across, four normal paces back, four normal across, two large back. After two more paces she would slam her shoulder against the wall and make another bruise, possibly breaking the skin this time and getting a bandage. Face number six, Merlin baring his teeth at the window again, a shark trying to devour a scuba diver through an underwater shield. Was she counting the same face twice today? She couldn't remember. No matter, she had already said six out loud, and anyway, Merlin would serve to boost the count. Merlin dotted the plexiglass with four soggy licks that would run together and distort the next few faces. Then he kicked the door six times to show Carrie he understood the game.

Face number seven, a woman whose eyes reflected the fluorescent lights and whose image promptly disappeared behind a spray bottle, a squirt, and two paper towels sponging away the blotches. Carrie knew janitor faces by heart, and this woman was not a janitor. She had a schoolteacher's face, the kind that welcomed new students into the classroom with reassuring hugs. Her cheeks glowed with the same spirit she was born with--she was definitely not a patient, her ducts being too moist with concern.

One could melt into such concern, the same concern Christ would have shown mental patients had he walked in this century. It bore a subtle depth that lurked behind dark dark eyes, like Carrie's mother every Sunday morning popping toast for an absent husband. Who was this woman, this angel sent to Carrie's spy window, conveying a love unattainable through steel doors?

Carrie squinted through the window to find the woman's belt loop void of any keys. No keys, no power. No pockets with cigarettes, either, and certainly no breakfast tray. Carrie crunched her nose against the window and became a savage ogre, perhaps a freak-show reject, anything unworthy of human kindness. The woman raised her fingers to trace Carrie's hair, now as rank as soapy clumps pulled from shower drains, and Carrie softened into a forlorn puppy longing to feel warmth in those human fingers, baffled by the hindrance of pet-shop windows.

Enough, you bitch, and Carrie flew from the window and crashed against the back wall, this time shattering her left shoulder in a spot already bruised from yesterday's ramming. The woman pressed her palms against the plexiglass, eyes bracing panic over her wavering impotence, and muttered a preliminary prayer for Carrie the Teenage Captive.

Carrie had nothing to throw against the spy window, except her own gown, which wouldn't even make a noise. But she would scream just as the gown hit the window, and if that didn't work, she would shit on the floor and smear it all over the woman's plexiglass face. It would mean an entire day of writhing in four-point restraints, but it would harden this menace into an adaptive coldness, protecting the other patients from her ravishing compassion.

But the face had disappeared.

Carrie huddled in the corner and rubbed her shoulder, her desperation shriveling back into its appropriate coffin, leaving no other spirit to take its place. Face number eight. A nurse. The keys jangled on the other side of the steel door, creaking it open at last. "Come on, you need a shower before the doctor comes," the nurse said. "He might be letting you out today."

"Don't want out," Carrie said. "Wanna stay here till I die."

"You're taking a shower whether you like it or not." The nurse slipped a bathrobe around Carrie's shoulders, but Carrie jumped to her feet, snatched a sleeve, and twirled the robe above her head like a bulky lasso. The nurse ducked. "You're crazy, girl!" then she caught the hem of the robe as it soared toward her temple and yanked it from Carrie's grasp.

"Don't give me a hard time. I'll call the security guards to give you a shower."

They had nearly drowned her the last time, won't be doing that again.

Carrie followed the nurse to the shower room, disrobed, and scrubbed away all the stench, all the raw waste that had made her wild. She had to wash her hair, comb out all the tangles, and change into a fresh gown, leaving nothing to show for those desperate hours, as though desperation had never even existed. But in fact it had become Carrie's best friend, it had kept her alive for years.

Back in her cell, Carrie began the counting all over again. Face number zero, the wall of the hallway, the fluorescent light that railed across the ceiling. Carrie knotted her hair with busy fingers, then sneezed into her fresh gown. Face number one, Blanche laughing, she knew what Carrie was all about--never revealing the humanity behind the madness, keeping everyone guessing. She punched the plexiglass and walked away.

Face number two, the doctor already. Damn, wanted to get up to five at least. Her record was nine, but she preferred to break it on a full stomach. She still hadn't eaten breakfast. The doctor let himself in. "How are we doing today?" the doctor said. Carrie spit on his shoes. "I see." He reached into his coat pocket for a tissue and kneeled. "The nurse told me you don't want out today. Is that true?"

"Wanna stay here till I die," Carrie said.

"Wouldn't you rather be doing things?" he asked. Carrie bit her wrist, pulling the loose skin with her teeth. The doctor stuffed the tissue into his pocket and rose to his feet. "I don't think it's wise to keep you in here, Carrie, so I'm ordering your immediate release."

"I'll just knock over another bookcase," Carrie said. "Then I'll throw some tables around. You can't keep me out."

"You will be restrained to a chair by the nurses' station," the doctor said. "I'm also increasing your Thorazine." He poked his head out the door to call security. They had been lingering in the hallway the entire time, ready to pounce at the doctor's first summons. Within seconds Carrie was surrounded by five uniformed thugs, prompting her to follow the doctor without complaint and sit in the chair prepared especially for her.

The guards strapped her wrists to the armrests with leather cuffs, her ankles to the legs, two belts around the waist, one around the thighs. Carrie said "thank you" each time the buckles were locked into place. Two minutes after they left, Carrie began her first round of screams, provoking the nurses to cover their ears, pressing hard, damn! They hadn't thought about that. Each scream echoed through both hallways at once, and each round lasted exactly thirty minutes.

Except for the screaming, Carrie had no other games to play, no spy window to count faces on. Her quiet intervals were spent evaporating into the Thorazine sloth, her desperation fading into a black cloud with all its rain squeezed out. Carrie bent her head low, groping for a reason to begin the next round of screams, her shoulder stinging from the lack of adrenaline. But then a horde of fingers appeared stroking her hair, tempting her to cry. It was the woman with the angel face, of course, her eyes dark and sad like deep mossy ponds, her hands warm and smooth, touching something vulgar.

Carrie jerked her head backward and trembled every inch of her body, making sure no part could surrender to that touch, a touch that would surely turn Carrie's staunch desperation into a voracious monster, an ally no longer. Carrie squirmed and howled and pissed her pants, but the woman persisted, now caressing Carrie's arms, waist, thighs, all the parts that were strapped in the tightest. "Stop!" Carrie screamed. "I'll do whatever you want!"

The woman stopped. "It's okay, Carrie," she said. "I know who you are, and you don't have to be afraid."

"You don't know shit!"

"You don't like to be touched, you say, but you are forever pushing others to touch you."

"Oh yes, I just adore injections."

"I think you do."

"Please leave."

"I think if somebody touches you in a loving way often enough, you will no longer need the violent touches. Your dad used to kick you, didn't he?"

"I hate you."

"He used to kick you and say he loved you at the same time." The woman began to brush Carrie's hair. "Then he'd slap your little brother and rape your sister."

"I don't have a sister," Carrie said. "And I don't want my hair brushed. I like it tangled."

"Why? So you can look like a wild child?" the woman said. "You're not a wild child, Carrie, and you're not a lunatic, either. You are a beautiful human being with the same needs as everyone else. Do you really think you can reject love?" She gathered Carrie's hair into a ponytail and brushed away the snarled ends.

"GO AWAY! NURSE! NURSE!"

The woman dropped the brush and stroked Carrie's cheeks until Carrie tried to bite her fingers. Then she slid her hand to Carrie's shoulder and massaged just enough to soothe the pain. Carrie was sobbing with fury by now, her body heaving from the anguish of a mother's touch, a touch as potent as a rapist's knife and no different than her father's thrusts at three in the morning, lasting until exactly three-thirty.

"Please stop," Carrie cried. "You're killing me."

"You need love, Carrie, just like the rest of us, but you keep trying to replace that need with something vile and desperate." The woman cupped Carrie's chin into her palm and squeezed. "I'm going to free you, Carrie," she said. Then she disappeared into the nurses' station, returned with a set of keys, and began unlocking the straps until, at last, Carrie was sitting like a normal person in a normal chair.

Carrie's thoughts overflowed with plans. She would scream for thirty-five minutes this time, then forty, and she would strip off her gown and hurl chairs across the room and grind her shoulders against the wall until the bone finally broke through and the nurses would have to give her a bandage. But first she would sit quietly and grant this woman thirty more minutes of fondling her hair and cheeks and arms, whatever she wanted. And she would not grit her teeth.

Carrie endured the woman's every touch, discerning that a fresh hardening had been long overdue and that this angel-faced woman would be serving her well. It was a time of flooding, like when those turn-of-the-century behaviorists locked a young boy into a room full of mice until he no longer feared the mice.

When the woman's time was up, Carrie sprang from her chair and screamed like swine before the axe. She seized her rapist by the throat, squeezing, squeezing, expecting veins to burst and splatter all over her fresh gown, a fresh stench to mark the victory of her revived desperation. But the woman was solid, suddenly baring muscles Carrie had neither noticed nor anticipated. She toppled Carrie onto her stomach with a single swipe, straddled her waist, and pinned her shoulders to the concrete.

Security arrived on cue and, seeing that the new intern had the patient suitable detained, began discussing the whereabouts of the bed frame with the four-point cuffs. Already in the isolation room, one of them said. I rolled it in the minute I realized what that shrink was planning to do. Carrie and the woman were frozen in their postures, silent except for their lumbering pants. Newcomers, another whispered. More deluded than the patients.

The woman withdrew her grip from Carrie's shoulder and hoisted her legs from Carrie's waist. Then she stood and swiped the wrinkles from her pants. Two guards lifted Carrie to her feet and walked her to the isolation room. Carrie offered no resistance. She hopped onto the bed, rolled on her back, and stretched her limbs to the four bed corners.

And each time the buckles were locked into place, Carrie said "thank you" and puckered her lips into invisible kisses.