She carried a carton of Marlboro Reds in one hand and a tiny leather purse in the other. When the cage opened at the end of the tunnel, she knew she would be in with the animals momentarily.

     A fat woman with blonde hair sat behind the yellow counter. "Who ya here for?" she barked.

     Patty noticed the sweat stains beneath the woman's armpits. "McPherson. Katherine McPherson."

     The woman reached her hand over the desk and opened the carton of smokes, glancing inside before handing Patty a pass. "You got a half hour."

     Patty thanked the woman, and grimaced as she walked past. She took in the dim atmosphere and remembered St. Paul's: the reading room with plush benches, the vast windows that poured out onto a well-kept lawn. But you couldn't smoke there and Katherine wouldn't have that. This place was free at least. Falling apart but free.

     There were no windows inside the ward, just beige walls. What would you see through those windows, she asked herself while trying to picture the perimeter of the building. There wasn't much in the way of landscaping out front. But this wall seemed to face Northeast, or possibly even another ward. She wasn't sure. I should've eaten, she thought. With every step the hallway contracted like an eye exposed to too much sunlight. No sunlight in here. Her headache worsened. As she approached the chain link door that opened into the ward, a few patients recognized her and crowded the gate.

     "Pass Mrs. McPherson," said the attendant in the doorway.

      "Can't I just git one o' them," a patient interrupted nearly drooling on herself at the sight of the carton.

     Patty ran a hand through her dyed black hair and tried to ignore the crazies.

      "Go into room 5 and we'll bring Katherine to you." The woman shut the gate as Patty entered.

     "Can't I just git one o' them?" the woman asked again. She was a short black woman wearing tight purple jeans and a black bandanna.

      "I'm sorry," Patty told her while removing the sunglasses from her head. She thought of the ward as one giant cage. It wouldn't be bad visiting them if they weren't so uncivilized. She hadn't been approached by beggars since the ballgame the previous summer. He had a scraggly beard and had asked Richard for bus fare. They begun walking quickly and the man kept pace saying something like, "If you aint got no change can I at least bum a square? I even got matches." She still hadn't figured that one out though. It sounded homosexual. It must've been. What else would it mean to "bum a square." She had always tried to blot that image from her mind but it crept back whenever she came to this place. Since then, she hadn't been to a ballgame.

     She passed a television set where three women sat and watched a show about racecars. A woman wearing a pair of pink stretch pants passed her. A wet spot sat near the front of her pants and when Patty walked by the woman smiled, revealing a gaping hole where two front teeth used to be. Patty quickly turned her head. She thought of the old Christmas jingle "All I want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" and began humming it to herself.

     At the door of conference room 5 she stopped short. A woman wearing a pink bathrobe stood gazing at the picture of the whale glued to the door. She would take a step to the left, bend her torso toward the floor, and straighten up, still gazing at the whale. You could barely discern the movements of her skinny legs beneath the gown. Patty looked at the decorations on the wall, scattered with no particular order. The medication here was delivered twice a day at precisely the same moment. The television programs were scheduled by people in the control room and were played at the appointed time by a computer. But the walls were scattered with an incoherent array of framed pictures and a dizzying arrangement of tattered quilts. But none of the residents here seemed to mind.

     "Excuse me mam," she said in the polite voice she generally reserved for Richard's dinner guests. "I'll just sneak by you there. I need to get into that room."

     "My husband was a goat in a past life." The woman turned and smiled. She appeared to be in her mid to late twenties. "Could you imagine giving a goat a blow job? There are women here who look like goats because of their goddam beards. They'll turn me into a goat soon, with that goddam silly medicine." She laughed slowly, her smokers' rattle shaking in her throat with every chuckle.

     "Baby, you need to give up on the farm animals and find you a man," said the woman with the bandanna. "What about you lilacs?" she asked Patty. "You got yourself a man?"

     Patty fidgeted with her little leather purse and looked toward the ground.

     "I've never met a person named Lilacs before," said the goat lady. "That's a beautiful name." She kept swaying in front of the picture.

     "That's really not my name," Patty told her in a calm voice. "My name is Patty. My sister stays here."

     "Listen sweepy. Everybody here wishes they was someone else, and there aint nothing none of us can do but be who we are." She touched Patty's shoulder with her arm.

     The goat lady turned, nodded her head and smiled, still swaying. "She's right Lilacs."

     "Say, how bout just one of them?" The woman with the bandanna pointed to the carton in Patty's left hand.

     "I'm sorry; they're for my sister." She nudged the goat lady and opened the door to the conference room.

     The goat lady began shrieked then went into a song.

     She sang this refrain about six times before a nurse came over to take care of her.

     "I'm sorry Mrs. McPherson. Mrs. Stone just gets excited from time to time." The nurse then turned to Mrs. Stone and said, "Come now, we'll get you a snack in your room."

     The other woman smiled at her and started swinging her hips and snapping her fingers. "This place is just one big song and dance. And they say I'm nuts. Can you believe that, Lilacs?" She chuckled and walked back to the television set where the race cars still circled an oval track.

     Patty glanced around the tiny conference room. On the far wall some of the plaster had fallen away exposing the grey cement beneath. A rusty drain in the center of the floor made strange gurgling sounds as though some swamp creature lurked below.

     "Patty, good to see you." Katherine walked with a stiff gait barely bending her knees. She sat in one of the steel folding chairs and smiled.

     "How are you doing Kate?" she asked.

     Katherine had her legs folded right over left and rocked her right one back and forth. She noticed Patty staring and said, "The halodol makes you shaky. I can't sit still." She brushed her hair from her eyes as though her leg and her hand were fastened to the same spring.

     "Is everyone treating you okay?" Patty took a breath mint from her purse and offered one to Katherine.

     "No thanks." She cracked the knuckles on her right hand and added, "All those fucking doctors have been taking their turns raping me." Patty stared at the chipped plaster on the wall. "How's Richard. Do you think they'll crucify him?"

Patty shook her head and squinted her eyes. "I don't think we'll have to worry about that." She wondered about the meds. "Is Doctor Balentine around?"

     "He's probably out removing organs from other patients. That would be my best guess," Katherine said laughing.

     Patty stood and walked toward the door, "I'm going to find Dr. Balentine to ask him some questions about your dosage." She opened the blue steel door. In the center there was a rust spot about a foot in circumference.

     Katherine took the tiny purse from the table and began shuffling through credit cards and compact mirrors. She found a tiny blue book that had "Photographs," written in faded gold lettering on the front. She opened to a wallet-sized family picture and saw Richard. He wore a navy blue collared shirt and khakis. She began to chuckle, then stopped, quickly glancing at the grey spot on the wall. She watched the door out of the corner of her eye and thought of Richard.

     He had held the dog biscuit tentatively and said, "Good boy, come here. Food! Food!"

     Katherine had stood laughing in the background with her twelfth glass of wine of the day. She walked past him, grabbed the dog by the collar and led the beast back into the house. She remembered taunting Richard by speaking to the dog in a similar tone. "Yes, your master is a big wimp! Oh, I know. He has no balls and he's afraid of the little animal. Poor Lawyer boy."

     Richard had simply shook his head and walked toward the house. This was before the diagnosis.

     Katherine shifted in her chair and stared into the bare spot on the wall.

     "Katherine what are you doing?"

     Katherine quickly dropped the purse on the table and turned toward her sister. She curtsied in her white night gown. "Hello madam. Are you here for the tea?" She laughed and then went into a coughing spell.

     The man in the white jacket cleared his throat and said, "Boy Katherine, You sure are lucky to have such a nice sister." His sounded like a father speaking to his two year old son. "Did you know that Bernice and Sheila have nicknamed her Lilacs?" He laughed while Katherine stared at him.

     "So, ya wanna bang her that bad hey doc?" Katherine resumed her seat in the chair.

     Patty's eyes widened slightly. She gasped before saying, "Show some respect. That's not polite."

     The doctor patted Patty on the shoulder and said, "Oh, that's quite all right. I think Katherine was only joking."

     "The beautiful thing is that I'm certified. I'm fucking nuts." Katherine laughed a long mysterious laugh, like a murderer in a horror movie. Her eyes looked like they would pop out of her skull. "I don’t have to show respect for anything. If you wanna show respect for something, find a church or throw one of your fucking dinner parties."

     The doctor turned toward Patty. "Don't worry, it's perfectly normal for them to be a bit edgy when they first start with the meds."

     Katherine shuffled across the room with that strange halodol gait that makes the patient look like a corpse. She peered into Dr. Balentine's face. "So…it is an army."

     "Maybe we should rest Katherine. Things will be clearer in the morning." He patted her on the shoulder.

     She thrust his hand away and left the room.

     Patty pulled a Kleenex from her purse and wiped her eyes. "I can't deal with her when she's like this. She has no respect for anyone. I'm the only one here to see her, and this is how she treats me."

     The doctor opened the steel door and held it for her. "Don't take it personally. This is the way they all are. At this stage they aren't even aware they have visitors. I'm gonna up her dosage. This is a progressive case, and I don't want the delusional thinking to worsen. We'll watch her in the meantime."

     "What should I do with these?" Patty asked holding up the carton of cigarettes.

     "I'll give them to the nurse. We'll ration them out a pack per day. Otherwise she'll be done with them in the next three days. It's amazing. They really can't restrict themselves. It sounds terrible to say, but they really are like animals when they get this way."

     Patty thanked the doctor and stepped out the glass doors to the smoking deck. She hugged Katherine and said, "Take care, sis."

     Katherine stared blankly at her.

     "You'll feel better. The doctor says he's gonna up your dosage."

     "Well, I'm glad you feel so comfortable leaving me here. They'll gang rape me at 1 AM and end the evening with a good old-fashioned crucifixion."

     "Hey Lilacs. How 'bout one of them smokes?"

     Patty glanced toward the other end of the deck. The woman's black bandanna took on a silvery tone in the sunlight.

     "Hey bad dye job, I'm talkin' to you. Don't turn your back bitch. I know who you are as well as you do."