The doctor turned away and Fargo let go of Connie. Weak through and through, she felt as if her bones had turned to wet rope. Her knees crumpled and she sat abruptly beside Sybil. She started to speak to Sybil, but Sybil shushed her and crept closer to the glassed‑in station where the doctor and Fargo were once again looking over the ward book. Sybil was trying to lip‑read through the glass. Finally they emerged and the outer door was unlocked with the usual clatter.

“All right, clean that one up Monday morning and bring her down for Dr. Redding … . Oh, she speaks English? I mean reasonably?”

“Sure, no problem, Dr. Morgan. Wouldn’t I tell you right off if she couldn’t talk?”

“Righto. Clean her up and trot her down early Monday.”

Sybil and she looked at each other in the ward boiling with tension. Sybil whispered, “All I could make out was that doctor he mentioned–I never heard of him before–Dr. Redding this, Dr. Redding that. And the phrase ‘possible subject.’”

“Oh! Oh!” Joan muttered. She got off her bed and darted over to peer into Connie’s face. “Knock, knock! Watch out!” Joan fled back to her bed and pantomimed the locking routine she seemed to hope would protect her.

“What do you think they’re going to do to me Monday?”

Sybil shook her head, frowning. “They like you because you’re small. They expect to push you around easily.”

She was scared but alert. Maybe it was a new kind of therapy? Usually they didn’t pull patients out of L‑6 for group therapy, the only kind in the hospital. If it was shock, they wouldn’t make such a fuss. Maybe they were testing drugs, as they had on Claud. Claud’s friend Otis said they had given hepatitis, the dirty disease that had killed Claud, to a whole lot of little kids in Willowbrook, a state institution. Some doctor had injected little kids who hadn’t done anything wrong except to be born dim witted, and got a big reward for it. What would they do to her?

Monday morning she was taken from Ward L‑6 halfway across the grounds to the hospital building itself–the real hospital in the mental hospital. Normally it was a sleepy, understaffed building, but one floor seemed to have undergone changes. She got only a glimpse of maybe twenty other patients, men and women, waiting on chairs in the hall, before Fargo dragged her off. “Behave yourself now. I want to use the staff john. Now you keep quiet and don’t mess around.” Fargo installed her by the clean white sinks with liquid soap in a container that worked. Enviously she approached. Fargo was pissing. Over the liquid soap container with its yellow‑green ooze, she saw a drab, funny‑looking woman in the mirror. Quickly she looked away. Outside, no day passed without her seeing herself in mirrors, in shopwindows, everywhere reflected. The battered tin mirror in the bathroom on L‑6 gave up only ripples of distortion.

Her hair looked disgusting: not only uncombed, straggly, dirty, but with white roots grown out along her part. Her hair had turned white down the center like a skunk as soon as she had passed thirty. Dolly gave her money for hair dye, which she hid as carefully from her caseworker as a stash of dope. It was her secret vice, dyeing her hair, but also it was a small act of self‑affirmation. As long as her will kept her hair black as it had always been, as it should be, she was some part Consuelo who had won the scholarship to junior college, who had had the guts to depart Chicago for a strange city to get away from a rapist, who had broken Geraldo’s nose–yes, she was proud of that. Her definition of Connie included black hair.

Well, at least she was no longer overweight, but she was flabby. At home she had the exercise of running up and down four flights of stairs ten times a day, every time she needed something from the superette or the candy store, every time she checked the mail, took out garbage, got a pack of cigarettes, mailed a letter, went down to welfare, went out to those scrubwoman jobs welfare made her do. She carried her groceries, her laundry, her garbage. She walked many blocks. Here her only exercise was being herded to and from the showers.

Small particles of dead skin gave her flesh an ashy look. If only she had a brush, she could disentangle her hair, brush out the mats and clumps. Ah, she looked like a bundle of institutional laundry!

Fargo hauled her along. The young doctor was bustling around the hall, followed by a secretary and more attendants. Fargo turned her over to one of the new attendants, a fat red‑faced man, who inserted her into a row of green plastic chairs where the men and women had been placed to wait. As each new arrival was checked in, all the waiting patients stared in hope that something about the newcomer would make clear their mutual situation.

“Do you know what we’re in for? What they’re going to do to us?” she whispered to a young man in the next chair.

“I don’t know.” He was white, skinny, long‑legged and tall, with abundant kinky brown hair. “They came on my ward last week and they looked over five of us. That blond doctor and attendant. They only took him and me.” He pointed to a short black man beside him.

“They didn’t say what for?”

“Some kind of testing, we heard … . It looks to me like that room at the end of the hall is fixed up as a lab. Past the offices.”

“A lab? What kind of experiments could they do on us?”

He shrugged, “Man, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you bet it will hurt.” He sighed, combing back his nervous hands through his long, tangled hair. “My name’s Skip. This is Orville … . You don’t have any weed, do you? By some miracle? I can buy.”

“I’m Connie. I wish I did. Last time I was in, it was all over the place.”

“Some buildings it’s around, some it isn’t. In some you can get anything … . Not ours. God, can you imagine the incredible acts of brutality we might commit if we had a little dope? Monsters like us. You been in before, huh?” He waited for her nod. “Me too. Seven times in various spitals. One for each consecutive time I tried to off myself. Actually that was only five times.”

“And never made it?” She laughed.

“I’m persistent. Maybe I have a will to failure. Orville, here, he cut up his girlfriend. Did you do anything like that, maybe?”

Orville said flatly (probably for the sixtieth time, as she well knew), “I was overworked. I had this job as night watchman and then I was delivering pizzas weekends. I couldn’t cope with it all.”

“Sort of.” She clutched herself. “I smashed a bottle in the face of my niece’s pimp.” She grinned. “I wasn’t overworked. I just hated him.” Such a light feeling, like floating, to say that truthfully and let it hang there; at the same time the floating feeling was a cutting loose because she had been raised and had lived under a code where a woman never did anything like that, let alone speak of such actions.

“As far as I can tell, we all walk and talk,” the boy went on. “We’re functioning crazies. We all broke the law. I hope we aren’t about to get shipped to some maximum security place–not that this place isn’t pretty tight.”

“You got a record?”

“Yeah … possession. But the shrinks wrote up worse things on my record.” He poked her with his bony elbow. “That doctor’s the boss. The other’s just his lackey.”

Middling height, middling weight, brown hair, thick glasses, in his late forties, he exuded an energetic self‑importance like a big Harley‑Davidson gunning up 111th Street with a Savage Sheik on top. He washed his hands together with a brisk dry happy sound as he marched by the row of bedraggled patients on green plastic chairs, and in his wake bobbed the pale man, Dr. Morgan, a nurse, a man in student clothing, a woman in a white coat whose hand brushed the student type’s hand super‑casually, a male and female attendant, and a secretary, who stood holding a sheaf of records and pages and pages of other, ominous paper. Eventually Dr. Redding, as she heard him called, took various papers and cruised them, nodded and handed them all on to Dr. Morgan. “Fine, fine. Let’s get the show on the road. Morgan, Acker, and I will do the screening, and Patty and Miss Moynihan will sit in. We should zip through this batch before two, because I have to get back to the university to meet one of those foundation johnnies.”