L'Aile du papillon
Joël Champetier
(Excerpt from chapter 4, p. 49-56)
A little before half past eleven, the tranquillity of room 525 was broken by the strident chirring of a watch alarm. Sylviane, who'd gone back to reading her paperback, got up at once. She put the book in the dresser drawer and went over to Michel, who had just finished stowing his meagre possessions in the storage spaces assigned to him.
"It's lunch time," she said, staring at him with her doll eyes. "They asked me to show you where it is."
Michel refrained from smiling at the seriousness with which the young woman went about doing what she'd been assigned to do.
"Okay, go ahead, I'll follow you."
Sylviane led the way, turning around once in a while as though she was afraid he would get lost. He would have been able to find the way on his own just by following the patients who were assembling in front of the central hall where the rear wings of the building met the main one at an angle, forming two triangular dining rooms. Sylviane didn't go into the first one.
"That one is for the patients in the red and yellow sections."
"You're in the blue section too?"
Her eyes moved slightly.
"Of course! They put you in my room. They wouldn't put someone from another section in my room."
"Oh, okay."
Michel followed Sylviane into the second dining room where a lot of people were already sitting at the tables in groups of four. Sylviane stopped at an empty table with three chairs.
"Usually I sit here. You can sit with me."
"Thank you."
"I don't want you to think I'm going to give you the cold shoulder, even if they forced me to have you in my room. I know that was not your choice."
At a loss for an appropriate comment, Michel just sat down at Sylviane's left. Trying to avoid the others' insistent looks, he pretended to read the posters on the walls. A fortyish, sniggering woman with long straight hair and a thin neck like a plucked chicken sat down with them, and their table was completed by a taciturn man in a wheelchair who answered Michel's greeting with a grunt. Dressed in a suit, the wheelchair man contrasted somewhat with the others until you saw his mutilated hands, a sight both unpleasant and fascinating. Two fingers were missing on his left hand, which looked like a pinkish potato with two spiky spurs: half a thumb and the two first phalanges of the little finger.
One of the kitchen attendants, a short blond man thin as a rail, with a razor-sharp nose, came in through the corridor opposite the door, pushing a big stainless steel cart. He cheerfully greeted everybody, opened the door of his cart and began serving the food. Denis, the fat taciturn nurse who'd welcomed Michel on his arrival, was helping him. The cart attendant stiffly placed two trays in front of Sylviane and the wheelchair man.
"Mr. Landreville," he exclaimed, with the slightly aggressive bonhomie of a traveling salesman, "always smiling!"
The patient made an irritated gesture, not wanting to answer, - or unable to do so.
"And you, Sylviane, how's it going?"
Without waiting for a reaction, the attendant went to take out two more trays, which he placed in front of Michel and the woman with the chicken neck.
"Hello, Joanne!"
"Hello, Richard!"
"You're so pretty this morning!"
The patient emitted a clucking laugh.
"Who's the new guy, Joanne?" asked the attendant named Richard, winking at Michel. "I don't know him. Is he your boyfriend?"
Joanne clucked anew, her face convulsed with nervous tics.
"No, no!"
Richard went back for more trays, more interested in teasing the patients than noticing their reactions. Michel examined the contents of his own tray. Between a fruit juice sealed under aluminium foil and a pudding of an indefinite color, there was plastic plate with a ball of mashed potatoes, three limp carrots and a whitish chicken breast drowned in a commercial-looking sauce. Michel picked up his plastic fork and knife - metal utensils were certainly not very popular in psychiatric hospitals - and prudently tried the food. He soon let out a huge sigh. On this at least Sylviane had told the truth: the fare in the Saint-Pacôme Hospital was positively and indisputably repugnant. And you couldn't say that the local ambiance compensated for the low quality of the food. Most guests ate silently. Those who dared talk did so in a low voice, except for a young man with long hair who spoke a lot, and loudly, so much so that Denis, who had stayed to watch over the room, sometimes had to warn him. Thanks to the numerous admonitions that punctuated the meal, Michel soon knew the young man's name: "Quiet down, Jean-Robert!" "And why don't you eat, Jean-Robert, instead of talking all the time?" "Jean-Robert, butt out. You know you can't smoke in here."
This last reprimand sparked a strong protest from the young man.
"I like to smoke when I eat, not after."
"You smoke in your room or in the lounge. That's it, that's the rule."
"What's the big deal if I smoke? The grub is so gross."
"Jean-Robert, put it out, I won't say it again."
With a flick of his fingers, Jean-Robert threw the cigarette against a wall where it landed with a small explosion of sparks.
"Damned asshole!" Sylviane said impatiently, her eyes twitching with exasperation.
The monitor ignored her impertinence and, imitating his two other table companions, Michel kept on eating silently.
At the end of the meal, as several guests had begun leaving their tables, a man in his early fifties entered the room; he had a pleasant face framed by a reddish beard and he went over to Michel beaming.
"Michel Ferron? My name Pascal Lafrance, and I'm the psychoeducator for your section."
Standing up, Michel shook the proffered hand.
"A pity we missed one another this morning," the man said. "Did Rico take good care of you?"
"Rico?"
"The attendant who helped you settle in."
"Ah yes, he explained everything."
"Pity you missed the group meeting, I could have introduced you to everybody. Well, we'll do it tomorrow. I see you've begun to meet some people, anyway?"
"Some."
"Would you like a guided tour? See how we're organized here? After all" - he laughed heartily - "you're here for several weeks. It would be good for you to feel at home as soon as possible."
Michel shrugged wearily.
"As you wish."
With the cheerfulness of a realtor smelling an easy sell, the psychoeducator took Michel on a detailed visit of the fifth floor, entirely dedicated to long term psychiatric care. They began at the central desk. Behind the counter there was a sheet of glass with narrow openings like in a bank. Behind the glass, so thick it was more translucent than transparent, there were many shelves full of jars and vials of all sizes. The department's pharmacy, Pascal Lafrance explained. On the left were the offices where the patients met with the doctors and the psychologists. Beyond those rooms, the corridor ended on the door leading to the elevators through which Michel had passed that very morning. Several years before, that corridor went far beyond the elevators, but that part of the building had been closed. "Budget cuts," the psychoeducator told Michel with a crooked smile.
The tour went on. Lafrance showed the visitor the men's room, the occupational therapy and physiotherapy rooms, and the billiards room, which doubled as a library.
A therapy room - called "the multi-purpose room" - occupied the centre of the building, just in front of the main desk. It was not currently in use. A maintenance employee - a young man who looked like he was North African - was washing the floor with short, very methodical movements. At the back of the room, you could see a balcony through a sun lounge covered with wire mesh; the balcony was surrounded by a fence as high as that of a tennis court.
"The balcony is closed," Lafrance explained, "but not for long now. It's open from June 24th to October 1st."
Michel followed meekly. During the whole tour he had been more interested in the patients' rooms. Most of the doors were open or at least ajar. He saw a woman with sparse hair sitting on a chair, staring at nothing; a man lying on his bed, with feverish eyes in a face devoured by eczema, unbelievably thin arms and legs tied down with padded leather straps. And an old man who angrily held up a remote towards a TV screwed in the ceiling.
Many rooms were empty, however, their occupants scattered in the dining rooms and the common room, the last stop in the guided tour. That common room, the "lounge," occupied the full width of the main wing, at its north-eastern end. The walls were beige, the floor covered with the same. Carefully polished yellow and salmon pink tiles that lined the corridor floors. The air was thick with a strong lingering smell of cold tobacco. With its deserted card tables and its TV viewers sitting in rows in front of the two TVs showing a local station, the vast resounding hall would have been perfectly gloomy if not for the green landscape you could see through the wire mesh of the windows. In the back of the hall, an awning hid a closet. Above the closet, a message was written on a white blackboard, in big black letters:Welcome to the Fifth (5th) Floor Lounge
Saint-Pacôme Hospital, Shawinigan, Quebec
It's Monday, June 14, 1999
Outside, it's spring.Michel needed a few moments to realize that this board wasn't there as an ornament, but to constantly remind the confused patients where they were and when...
© 1999 Éditions Alire & Joël Champetier
To find out what happens next...
