You know, for me, life in a mental hospital is nothing more than a test of proficiency, or rather: of endurance. A program of survival, a meditation on deeper feelings of loss and alienation. On the ward: you are with many, but you’re still alone. And you have to do it all by yourself, every day. In every life. In every death.

  We are all supporting actors, expendable youth, with no key-lightning to brighten our faces. We’re performing anonymously on the sidewalks in back streets of lost cities, or just somewhere on skid row. And with a clear plot that is definitely out there somewhere but not to be found by any of us:

  Who writes our story? Who sits in the director’s chair? Even the White Coats shrug in vein when it comes to such questions. They just write out prescriptions for more pills: Haldol, Lithium and Prozac as a kind of substitute-answer. (Hey, they’re getting paid for it, so who is complaining?)

  And I ask them what the difference is in their approach to, let’s say, God or Coincidence? And the White Coats will laugh, if possible in some sort of hellish choir, and tell me this:

  ‘God and Coincidence, they’re both hand-made, young man, you see? Pure craftsmanship. Made in Taiwan most likely, invented by the first ape-man who, simply out of curiosity, dug a little hole in the earth on which he walked. Get it?’

  An ape-man in Taiwan?

  I got it.

One thing is fore sure, though: you can as well be your own Lord of a Mental Ghetto, as much as you are a Master of Disguises.

  Carnival or no carnival.

I remember a young woman, coming to the ward one day. A girl more likely. Her name was Kim. A beautiful but reserved name for a beautiful but reserved girl.

  She never spoke much. She was broken inside for the better half of her life. (But who can tell what some nerdish scientist can come up with to fix us all and put the entire force of psychiatrists out of business? It has to be some kind of medical correct super-glue, to stick all the lost fragments of our shattered lives together again. Besides, the Nobel Price hadn’t been invented for just morons who got lucky discovering a cure for AIDS while looking at some black hole somewhere above us in the universe....)

  Beautiful, reserved Kim: a worn-down Miss. Barbie. A burnt-out dealer in exotic trauma’s of an obliterated and sinful youth. Hey, who wasn’t, here?

  But Kim was a severe case. As a child she was the victim of her father who, for some reason, couldn’t keep his hands of her. The first whole year this was going on, Kim was embarrassed and ashamed, asking herself constantly what she’d done wrong (while wiping dear sweet daddy’s sticky stains of attention of her thighs...)

  When she was in class, she’d often stare out of the window. The autumn leaves which were blown playfully from one side of the street to the other and back again, were to her the souls of fallen children. Children without identity, or even: with shame as their middle name.

  But the kids, the souls, the leaves, floating on the wind, were happy now, for the long dark breathing nights were over for them. (That’s why all those beautiful colours, Kim thought.)

  But for Kim herself nothing was over, for Kim there were no beautiful colours. Night after night she got the same thing from dear sweet daddy over and over again.

  But one day she discovered, quite by accident, a way to survive the dark, sweaty nights. Whenever her father climbed on top of her, and went on doing his little thing, she started to hum songs from her childhood, very softly, only for her to hear. (Songs from the innocent days, forgive me the cliché...) Apparently it worked, that is, at first. Until one day this beautiful but reserved Kim completely freaked out.

  She was at school and her biology-teacher had accidentally looked at her a moment too long when he was explaining to the class the ins and outs of mating and reproducing. Kim leaped from her chair, attacked her poor teacher and bit his throat in just a couple of seconds in two equal parts.

  The very same day she was taken to an institution, just one of the many which would follow, and every time she was transferred, she was told it was for ‘better circumstances’. But no one really knew how to ‘bend’ a broken little girl back into a straight upstanding woman. The wounds had toughened up and were raw, and didn’t give in. Blood refused to flow any longer through narrowed veins. And her soul didn’t want to be a guinea pig for pharmaceutical orgies any longer.

  And then she arrived at my ward. And she stayed here, silently staring, mumbling, and smoking. (Marlboro Lights, the red-and-white package coloured nicely with her hands, in a quirky sort of way...)

  In my opinion she was quite at home here. This was the bottom of the well. We were society’s outcast here; this was mental skid row.

  Kim was a basket case, as any of us ever would be, and this micro-panorama of the Silent Girl In The Ward remained the same for a long time, like an endless, anonymous freeze frame by the Dutch Vermeer, until she, quite by accident, discovered an old piano in one of the recreation rooms upstairs.

  Now she could be found there every single day, every minute she could spare. But her musical performance was as awkward as herself. Sometimes she’d just perform some childish practice scales and other ‘light-weighted experimental tunes’, and some times she would burst out into feverish flames, in an almost musical super nova, and drew the most complex, haunting, religious music of Bach, Rachmaninov, Ludwig Von and other conspirators-of-the-keys out of the instrument.

   We fellow inmates, well some of us, liked to sit down and listen to Kim’s performance. It brought us in a kind of trance; it made us feel at ease, even though they never wanted us to feel at ease. One could, they said, be institutionalised, get used to the surroundings, like it here too much. But we all knew we got a kind of cure here, when Kim was at the keys, a kind of cure they could never dream up in a million years, with their pharmaceutical chains, butterfly nets and straightjackets. Kim was our audio-Haldol.

  And we all felt immediately that these performances were Kim’s way to establish some kind of (Forgive me the cliché’s again…) contact. Not only with the staff, or us but mainly with herself.

  That’s why she often tried to sneak out of the ward at nights, after the eleven o’clock check up, but before the doors were locked.

  She would sit at the piano and caress the keys. She couldn’t make any noise of course but she could see herself playing the notes, it was as if she could hear the music with her eyes.

  And so she developed some kind of way of speaking with us directly: through music. An alternative as simple as effective, and probably as old as the world itself.

  So whenever she had to cry, she sang. And when ever she had to laugh, which was more common than one would expect from her, she recited things, buried liturgies, gibberish, lyrical nonsense, some delicious lost Syrian-Aramaic copulating songs, or when she really wanted to pinch us in the arm, just a bunch of dirty Hebrew limericks.

  Top story in Rolling Stone Magazine: ‘This beautiful but reserved Kim is Beth Gibbons and a young woman with a moist, sweaty wet microphone and a cigarette, drifting through the streets of down-town Portishead. And she is Lisa Gerrard with eyes as a pool of mirrors, with in her voice the duality of deranged sanity, and her tormented friends from the ward all stand around her, humming away, drifting in motion, proving to the outside world that the Dead really Can Dance.’

  And things worked out for us. And for her. We all saw her open up, lighten up even. If Kim could smile at dawn and keep on smiling until after sunset, then there was still hope for us below-average morons too. Kim became our mascot, and I say this with the utmost respect. She, to put it simply, was a sight for sore eyes. And, if I may add:  in sour times.

But then this thing happened. This thing we all feared. It’s a universal fear, not just the one you can encounter in a mental institution, although I have to say, that when this thing happens inside the White Walls, the victims often are more torn up inside then when walking outside on the sidewalk, healthy, even arrogant, knowing nothing of insanity.

  Call it a curse, call it being banned to the outer slopes of hell, but sooner or later something was bound to happen. It was more, if my memory doesn’t lie to me now, like an unwritten law than mere coincidence. Some of us called this the Jack Nicholson Syndrome.

  This was the thing that happened: most of the nurses and doctors didn’t quite see the development Kim was making. Maybe you had to be crazy to see a spiritedly dying person’s heart recover.

  On the contrary, they thought Kim was tormenting herself by playing that old piano neurotically every day and night, to somehow relive the past, unconsciously wanting to dig up the filth and dirt. As if she wanted to punish herself for being her father’s Nemesis, and for making him the victim all these years. The little daughter as perpetrator. Sex as some kind of moral manslaughter.

  So one day Kim was walking into the recreation room and found the piano locked. Totally upset she went to the doctor’s office. This doctor, being backed up by a wall full of framed diploma’s and other evidence of Rationality and Human Knowledge, apparently nodded in total understanding, then looked somewhat professionally at the ceiling for a while, rubbing his fingers in some kind of ritualistic routine over his chin, and then explained to her that no music was simply for her own good, it would be the best for all, and bla di bla di bla, and that one day she herself would understand, and if she had any trouble sleeping tonight, it was all right for her to ask for some more pills. Right?

  ‘Right,’ she said.

Two days later they found her in the recreation room again. But this time she was not sitting on the piano stool, but hanging from the ceiling. The piano wire had cut entirely into her neck. Kim was just dangling by her vertebral column.

  So things went.

I had my own death wish over there, between the eternal White Walls, but I never had the courage Kim had. It was a nauseating feeling of an almost megalomaniac form of self disgust.

  I still had this urge not-wanting-to-live-right-now after my release a few months later.

  When I walked pass the sign ‘Abandon all rationality, who ever enters here’ I could here music playing from a distant, unidentified radio: it was a Scherzo by Chopin, I knew.

  I was cured all right. I was in the world again. I was home. My body materialised into ever so slowly growing and loving and crying and decaying flesh again.

  First came the wings, then the angel. He rose up in me and made me whole again. He then took what seemed to be the remains of a smile, and crushed them between his hands, until that what was left over at the end, oozed like slack tears between his fingers.

  Once I was proud of the pain, proud of the arrogance I cherished every day. The mere thought I could somehow save the world was nothing less than a divine comedy. I drank from the gutter and ate from the walls. And my heart was so much bigger than that of the others.

  I don’t set the rules here, you know. It’s just the way things go. (Well, at least I guess it is.)

  Hey, anybody wants to complain?