“Aren’t you going to react?” she asked out loud, so that everyone in the room could hear her. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“No,” the man said and passed a hand over his face. A little thread of blood ran from his nose. “You won’t be troubling us for very long.”

She left the living room and went triumphantly back to her ward. She had done something that she had never done in her entire life.

Three days had passed since the incident with the group that Zedka called the Fraternity. Veronika regretted that slap, not because she was afraid of the man’s reaction but because she had done something different. If she wasn’t careful, she might end up convinced that life was worth living, and that would cause her pointless pain, since she would soon have to leave this world anyway.

Her only option was to keep away from everything and everyone, to try to be in every way as she had been before, to obey Villete s rules and regulations. She adapted herself to the routine imposed by the hospital: rising early, eating breakfast, going for a walk in the garden, having lunch, going to the living room, for another walk in the garden, then supper, television, and bed.

Before Veronika went to sleep, a nurse always appeared with medication. All the other women took pills; Veronika was the only one who was given an injection. She never complained; she just wanted to know why she was given so many sedatives, since she had never had any problems sleeping. They explained that the injection was not a sedative but medication for her heart.

And so, by falling in with that routine, her days in the hospital all began to seem the same. When the days are all the same, they pass more quickly; in another two or three days she would no longer have to brush her teeth or comb her hair. Veronika noticed her heart growing rapidly weaker: She easily ran out of breath, she got pains in her chest, she had no appetite, and the slightest effort made her dizzy.

After the incident with the Fraternity, she had sometimes thought: If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps…

But the reply was always the same: There is no perhaps, because there is no choice. And her inner peace returned, because everything had already been decided.

During this period she formed a relationship with Zedka (not a friendship, because friendship requires a lot of time spent together, and that wouldn’t be possible). They used to play cards—which helps the time pass more rapidly—and sometimes they would walk together in silence in the garden.

On one particular morning, immediately after breakfast, they all went out to take the sun, as the regulations demanded. A nurse, however, asked Zedka to go back to the ward, because it was her treatment day.

Veronika, who was having breakfast with her, heard the request.

“What treatment’s that?”

“It’s an old treatment, from the sixties, but the doctors think it might hasten my recovery. Do you want to come and watch?”

“You said you were depressed. Isn’t taking the medication enough to replace the chemical you’re lacking?”

“Do you want to watch?” insisted Zedka.

She was going to step outside the routine, thought Veronika. She was going to discover new things, when she didn’t need to learn anything more—all she needed was patience. But her curiosity got the better of her and she nodded.

“This isn’t a show, you know,” said the nurse.

“She’s going to die. She’s hardly seen anything. Let her come with us.”

Veronika watched the woman, still smiling, being strapped to the bed.

“Tell her what’s going on.” said Zedka to the male nurse. “Otherwise she’ll be frightened.”

He turned and showed Veronika the syringe. He seemed pleased to be treated like a doctor explaining to a younger doctor the correct procedures and the proper treatments.

“This syringe contains a dose of insulin,” he said, speaking in a grave, technical tone of voice. “It’s used by diabetics to combat high blood glucose. However, when the dose is much larger than normal, the consequent drop in blood glucose provokes a state of coma.”

He tapped the needle lightly, to get rid of any air, and then stuck it in a vein in Zedka’s foot.

“That’s what’s going to happen now. She’s going to enter a state of induced coma. Don’t be frightened if her eyes glaze, and don’t expect her to recognize you when she’s under the effects of the medication.”

“That’s awful, inhuman,” Veronika said. “People struggle to get out of a coma, not to go into one.”

“People struggle to live, not to commit suicide,” replied the nurse, but Veronika ignored the remark. “And a state of coma allows the organism to rest; its functions are all drastically reduced, and any existing tension disappears.”

He continued to inject the liquid while he was talking, and Zedka’s eyes were growing dull.

“Don’t worry,” Veronika was saying to her. “You’re absolutely normal; the story you told me about the king…”

“Don’t waste your time. She can’t hear you anymore.”

The woman on the bed, who a few minutes before had seemed so lucid and full of life, now had her eyes fixed on some point in the distance, and liquid was bubbling from one corner of her mouth.

“What did you do?!” she shouted at the nurse.

“Just my job.”

Veronika started calling to Zedka, shouting, threatening that she would go to the police, the press, the human rights organizations.

“Calm down. You may be in a mental hospital, but you still have to abide by certain rules.”

She saw that the man was utterly serious, and she was afraid. But since she had nothing to lose, she went on shouting.

From where she was, Zedka could see the ward and the beds, all empty except for one, to which her body was strapped, and beside which a girl was standing, staring in horror. The girl didn’t know that the person in the bed was still alive with all her biological functions working perfectly, but that her soul was flying, almost touching the ceiling, experiencing a sense of profound peace.

Zedka was making an astral journey, something that had been a surprise during her first experience of insulin shock. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone; she was only there to be cured of depression and, as soon as she was in a fit state, she hoped to leave that place forever. If she started telling them that she had left her body, they would think she was crazier than when she had entered Villete. However, as soon as she had returned to her body, she began reading up on both subjects: insulin shock and that strange feeling of floating in space.

There wasn’t much written about the treatment. It had been used for the first time around 1930 but had been completely banned in psychiatric hospitals because of the possibility of irreversible damage to the patient. During one such session she had visited Dr. Igor’s office in her astral form, at precisely the moment when he was discussing the subject with one of the owners of the hospital. “It’s a crime,” Dr. Igor was saying. “Yes, but it’s cheap and it’s quick!” replied the other man. “Anyway, who’s interested in the rights of the insane? No one’s going to complain.”

Even so, some doctors still considered it a quick way of treating depression. Zedka had sought out and borrowed everything that had been written about insulin shock, especially firsthand reports by patients who had experienced it. The story was always the same: horrors and more horrors; not one of them had experienced anything resembling what she was living through at that moment.

She concluded—quite rightly—that there was no relationship between insulin and the feeling that her consciousness was leaving her body. On the contrary, the tendency with that kind of treatment was to diminish the patient’s mental capacity.