“All right you stupid mother fuckers lets clear out this God Damn day hall. Move it. NOW!” Pausing for another gasp and to adjust the juicy cigar stub he mumbled, “When the glass is cleaned up we’ll call tpus ass holes, but until then get the fuck in your rooms.”

Glaring coldly at us, the small crowd got out of their hard back chairs and zombied down the hall until the closing clanks of the big iron doors began. The expressionless men that wore drooling towels like bibs walked even slower but the burly attendents hurried them with a stinging crack of the wide leather belts, allowing them no dignity whatsoever. Thorazine, Prolixion, Haldol and any other psychotropic drug on the market maintained and assured obedience of the strictest kind, so it was fed like candy. No humanity, but I almost forgot. We are not human. Clank!

Every joint in my body seemed to stiffen and freeze as I stepped in claustrophobically ridden 8 by 10 room and pulled the door. Clank. Edging over to sit on my bed is becoming more of a chore but I did adjust myself on the plastic mattress. With the mass of nothingness I decided to use my imagination on the chipping paint on the opposite wall. I could conjure up silhouette images for my own amusement and try to identify them. Today, only faces, old, ugly and ravaged demonic faces seemed to hallucinate from the chips of an aging institution. It was scary but I allowed it. The wall was laughing at me. I hate that wall. Damn that wall! It wants to come closer and closer and laugh harder. The sweat from my brow was stinging my eyes but I fought to keep them open. I have to guard that wall, or that loud laughing wall will move in on me, invade me, crush me. I will stay frozen and guard the damn loud laughing wall. 410 men declared criminally insane shadow the endless halls of this God forgotten pit. I grow angry at the fact that the State had the gall to call this place a hospital. Lima State Hospital. Clank!

Silence fell over Ward 22 except the tinkling and sweeping of the broken window. Someone smashed a small window in the day hall where we sit against the wall in hard, thick wooden chairs. You sit, you may smoke. You do not talk, you have both feet on the floor, or life will get very hard on you. Who broke a window? Now the attendants will be in a bitchy mood because their card game was interrupted and one will be ordered to stay in the dayroom if they will let us out of our little boxes.

—I could hear nothing, dazed in my trance-like stupor. My body was numb and hollow. The damn loud laughing wall stopped laughing. The wall was a wall and the chips were chips. My hands were cold but clammy and the thumping of my heart echoes inside my hollow body. The waitful anxiety began to choke me, waiting to come out of my little box, but I remain frozen on my bed staring at the silent, motionless wall. Me, a nothingness zombie in a nothingness box in a nothingness hell. Saliva trying to spill over my dry parched lips was a sure sign that the psychotropic medication was fighting for control of my mind, soul and body. Should I fight it? Declare it the winner?