Emails from the Edge by Ken Haley Page A

impression. At the far end of the room were a couple of beds with leather restraints to prevent the uncontrollable patients from falling out. Oh God, don’t let them put me in one of those .
Now I was in the matron’s charge. Grimness of face, seriousness of purpose epitomised her every gesture. Until I met her, I noticed that one of my more obvious traits—a sense of humour, however warped—had vanished without trace. Matron brought it back. Once she had established that I knew my name, she asked, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
‘Because the police brought me here,’ I said, deadpan. She reminded me that I had been running down the road in the middle of the night, screaming. I didn’t deny it, but tried to pass it off as a natural occurrence, a routine event like stocking up on groceries.
Most of her first day’s efforts were spent calming me down. To this end, she prescribed regular doses of lithium and plenty of bed rest. I was assigned the bed nearest her office, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I could stay on it. Later in the afternoon, Matron must have added Valium to my light pharmaceutical diet, and this—combined with the debilitating impact of nervous exhaustion— plunged me into dreamless unconsciousness, from which I awoke sometime after sundown. The distant blue light of the TV in the meal room, and the murmur of its canned voices, punctuated by the evening call of the muezzin, reminded me of where I was, resolving a puzzle that had given me a startled half minute or so.
Occasionally, a low moan would issue from the other end of the ward—ominously from one of the beds with leather straps—and this would send a new shiver of fear down my spine, but my mind was still too seized with its own torments to dwell on other people’s pain.
At six in the morning, lying on my right-hand side, I opened my eyes and saw—as one sees a picture hung askew—two Filipino male orderlies, in starched white coats, seated opposite each other at a table, reading the morning paper. This was the paper I was supposed to be still working on. One orderly turned to an inside page, so that the old newspaperman in me (able to read type upside down and now, I found, sideways) could not miss the front-page banner headline: HUMAN SHIELDS, which set a new train roaring out of control down my mental track.
    If the Iraqis come, they will take me hostage. The terror will increase, the agony will drag out. Will it become so insupportable I lash out, am punished, tortured, or shot, or will I go insane?
The already insane constantly ask themselves that last question, I discovered: it’s the most logical thought they have. I don’t belong here , I told myself. But then I could also see that, the way my world had dissolved, perhaps others would be better judges of that.
Breakfast meals were brought in on a trolley with the main course on hotplates. In this respect, you get better service in an asylum than at most hotels these days, if only because hospital managements don’t consider self-service to be a safe option. If I had one complaint, it would be that plastic cutlery tends to be inadequate in any given encounter with chargrilled sausage.
The meals were wrapped in cellophane, their destination written in marker pen: ‘EUROPEAN MEAL’ or ‘ASIAN MEAL’. Quite a few of the residents were Indians, perhaps not surprisingly in a society where people from the subcontinent are often treated little better than slaves. At the time I thought it reflected an odd strain of racism that the meals should be segregated thus, but it was probably an attempt to cater for the cultural preferences and religiously prescribed dietary imperatives of one and all. Not that this mattered much: the psychological upheaval of my life had left me with little appetite.
That morning I was invited into one of the administrative offices. Ranged on seats, from left