Chapter 7
“Melancholia... it’s not abnormal to grow mildly depressed upon beginning treatment. It is common for new patients to feel overwhelmed, and I happily assure you, Alice, that with your continued willingness, remedy shortly follows.”
‘Mildly depressed’ was not the term to describe what I was. I was miserable. In my tenure at Rothfield Asylum I had grown to despise the day far more than I’d once feared the night.
Every morning I found myself dumped into the chair before Sir Rothfield’s desk, folded to sit upright when my trapped arms could not steady my upper body from toppling forward. Day after day I was blessed with the attention of the most imminent psychiatrist in the entirety of the empire. Sir Rothfield’s smiles seemed kind, but they were no more real than the toothy, manic grin of the twins who’d taken to chewing my ankles now that they could no longer get at my bound arms.
My bruises, according to head orderly Calvin, had come from struggling when I had tried to climb from the ice bath or refused to sit in the rotary machine. The bite marks, he claimed, I had given myself once locked away at night.
A straightjacket had not been enough in their estimation to properly constrain me. For weeks I had been strapped down to rings embedded in the padded floor of my cell. Once I was perfectly unable to move, stuck under the flicker of my cells blinding light, there was nothing I could do to defend myself from whatever visitor the white rabbit conjured up to haunt me.
The old doctor’s kind smiles meant nothing, stood for nothing. Every morning he had the same questions. “Tell me more about the white rabbit.”
I knew that to remain silent would get me dunked in a tub filled with ice, or injected with something that made foam gather at my lips. “It sat on the shelf with my dolls. I didn’t like it.”
“While in the rotary machine yesterday, you began to scream that it was in the room. Is it in the room now?”
Of course it was. They had it on the doctor’s massive wooden desk between us. Just as they kept it in my cell. Just as it was in every last room I was tortured in.
My eyes twitched in the toy’s direction. “It’s...”
“Is it here, Alice?”
“It’s... not here.”
“Then why are you looking at the desk?”
I had never developed a talent for subterfuge, but in the growing tenure of my time at Rothfield Asylum I’d quickly recognized that lies led to progressive treatment just as much as truths.
Had I learned to conceal all I felt long ago, had I not pled with my parents for respite from the white rabbit, I might not have ended up strapped to a table my third day at the hospital, my legs caught in stirrups, while head orderly Calvin, dressed in a smock, put something cold against a part of me I was taught never to speak of. It had vibrated... to relieve my hysteria. Sir Rothfield explained it all when I panicked, but his explanation was not for me. It was for his fellow observing doctors.
I had wanted to die.
That thing had buzzed until I’d gone numb, long after a piece of rubber had been fit between my teeth to silence my complaints, long after most of the observing physicians had left to tend other patients.
After I finally stopped struggling, Calvin had pulled the whirring machine away and dipped down to stare between my spread legs. “The skin is pink, but there is no sign of dampness or shortness of breath. Manual stimulation may have greater effect.”
Sir Rothfield had cleared his throat and came to take a closer look himself. “No penetration, outer pelvic massage only.”
The pig-faced orderly, with his fleshy chin, and pug nose had stood between my legs. The same man who wiped me each morning after I was done on the pot, used his fingers in another manner.
He’d held my eyes while he did it, and I’d found myself powerless to look away.
Those special examinations took place almost every day, just like these morning meetings.
At my hesitation, Sir Rothfield’s voice chirped louder across the desk. “Is the rabbit in the room, Alice?”
Last night I had tolerated the companionship of the bloody woman, the night before the twins had giggled in the dark, bouncing off the walls and barreling over where I was tied to the floor. They were honest about their evil; they did not hoodwink themselves like the docto
r and the asylum staff with their delusions of grandeur.
I was so tired. “On your desk, sir, crouched back on its hind legs, it’s a stuffed white rabbit. It’s looking right at me.”
The old man reached forward, and swept his hand over the desk. “There is no white rabbit, Alice. There never was.”
Not true. A white rabbit was right there. But the eyes weren’t glass... they were buttons. And the fur wasn’t white, not pure white, but a pale shade that leaned grey. The doctor was trying to trick me into lying.
Getting caught in a lie led to things I did not want to consider. I committed to my previous statement. “There is a toy rabbit on your desk, sir.”