Emails from the Edge by Ken Haley

(but Manama has more roundabouts than a centipede has legs) and the driver made a wide-arcing left turn across a driveway and into neatly kept grounds dominated by a long, low, palm-fringed building set back from a high wall topped by razor-wire.
As the remorseless August sun glared down, the officers walked me into the building, a hand under each elbow as if I were going to run away. Only one question remained in my crumbling mind: Where in Hell am I?
I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. It was in the writing on the wall, a sign in Arabic and English. We were passing through the foyer now, past Indian guards, going up in the lift. Ignoring me, a matronly woman in nursing-issue white and grey addressed the police in practised no-nonsense tones. My vision stopped swimming. I saw her, and my new home, with clinical clarity. My future, so agonising in its approach, was now here, in the Bahrain Psychiatric Hospital—the insane asylum—and there was no telling when or where the nightmare would end.

Chapter 9
WHISTLING IN THE DARK
    But darkness opens like a knife for you
and you are marked
down by your pulsing brain
and isolated
and breathing
your breathing is the blast, the bullet, and the final sky .
LAURIE LEE A M OMENT OF W AR ( MONTPELLIER, OCTOBER 1937 )
AUGUST 1990
Arabia’s burning daylight had closed down the night like the flick of a switchblade. But the knife in my pulsing brain was still there, driven up to the hilt. The shearing of my consciousness sent past, present and future possibilities colliding and crashing together, shooting sparks through my unsleeping brain: thousands upon thousands of glimpses of what was, is and might yet be, most of them dire and many pointed straight at the final sky.
If my mood was manic, my basic curiosity had returned. Knowing I was in a madhouse—in the Middle East, of all places—certainly wasn’t a jolly adventure but what I call my rational sense (or the observer within) received enough stimulus from the new situation to ignite a host of inquiries: Am I safer here? Isn’t this still Bahrain? If Iraqi troops are going to land soon and Westerners are to be evacuated I will still be here when they arrive. With all the other Westerners gone, will I be (a) slaughtered in my hospital bed; or (b) missed altogether because nobody would expect to find a Westerner in a Bahraini asylum?
Every question led to a split choice; every mental road forked—and yet the questions bombarded my mind without let-up. Does anyone else know I’m here? Will they have phoned my family in Australia, spreading alarm? Won’t that mean that when I get out of here (when will that be?) I will be forced to go home, thus burying my six years of travel and word-work with the shame of returning with my tail between my legs?
The contrast between my racing, overheated mind and the loss of my physical freedom imposed an immense, almost unbearable strain.
Will I be strapped to a bed and given electroconvulsive shock therapy? Does anyone here speak English?
Anything could happen and there was nothing I could do about it. Again I felt panic rising, my breaths were gulps for air.
Putting its purpose to one side, it could have been any hospital room. The deadlocked doors contained small square windows covered in chicken-wire gauze, which rendered them a tad less opaque than the face of the security guard who sat just inside the door.
The first room I was shepherded into was a games-cum-lounge space converted to a meal room three times a day. When the plates were cleared away, table-tennis trestles went up, and most of the day a large TV screen played, with the sound turned down, though none of the other inmates seemed aware of its presence.
From the meal room I walked down a wide corridor, with the doctors’ and nurses’ rooms on the left and, a few metres on, the wards themselves. Sterile hospital beds with plastic coverings to guard against bedwetting were my first