At night when I can’t sleep I watch furrows of shadow disperse and coalesce on the gently heaving bedclothes of my roommate. Sleep eludes me in part because it’s never dark here. The big sodium vapor bulb leers in the window, sinister moon. It sheds a sickly ochre light and emits a low hum I sometimes mistake for the murmur of voices.

The other thing I do, sleepless, is still my breathing until I can hear the night sounds of the ward: nurse’s fluttering snore from the distant cavern of the day room, soft scratch of mice in the walls. Chelsea’s chanting, three cubicles away: Chair sit, chair sit, chair chair chair sit. Chair sit, chair sit, chair chair chair sit. I had to listen for a long time before I could make out the words. I think she must sleep in tiny catnaps. All night, all day she mutters these words, low and soft but insistent. Even through her meals, spilling food from her mouth in the breath stops.

In the morning attendants will come and sit Chelsea up. She’s stiff as a board, her legs drawn up as if to fit in a chair. They lift and swing her to the edge of the bed in one motion. She walks bent like that, too. Her mission is to find a chair in which she might sit, undisturbed, for as long as possible. When it’s time to move from the dayroom to the cafeteria, from the TV room to the showers, she dashes like someone possessed, duck-waddling from one chair to the next, grabbing and pushing others out of the way if she must.

As a child, was she made to stand too long in line? In the corner, the closet, the basement? What made her fear losing her place, never being able to sit again? These are the questions that occupy my mind during the sleepless nights, the interminable nights so full of the breathing, the sighs and moans, the swirling exhaled dreams of my companions.

Miriam, my roommate, has the most beautiful face I have ever seen. The way her cheekbones splay gives her a sly, wolfish look. Skin like alabaster, an unearthly glow beneath the surface. Stone virgin, Botticelli Madonna.

She has to be watched all the time. She’s forever trying to jump off of things—the cabinets and tables, the flimsy wardrobes that partition the sleeping area. Once she broke her ankle when she jumped from the toilet stall. Another time she squeezed her narrow body through the bars on the second-story windows and jumped to the ground, fracturing her right leg and several ribs. She’s not allowed to go outside because she will climb a tree and jump out of it. It’s as if the thought never leaves her. She might be eating oatmeal or ferociously twisting knots in her hair, and still you know she’s thinking of it.

She is so closely watched, though, that she has turned to cutting. Always on the lookout for paper clips, stones, anything with an edge. I hear her some nights, laughing softly as she makes cuts in the skin of her thighs and other hidden places with whatever she has secreted away. In the morning her sheets are spotty with blood.

When I see the places on her body that she has opened, the small gaping mouths of skin, I remember certain things. Flesh parting beneath a blade, freshets of blood. Watching it pool—viscous, beautiful, surreally red. The sheriff’s van. A sea of cornfields, silver light spilling through mist. And then this fortress of stone.

I could say that my psychiatrist is a tiny woman who inquires after my dreams as if she’s stalking a runaway circus bear, once tame but now possibly dangerous. Or I could tell you that my psychiatrist is a young man whose skin is so thin in the tender blue pockets beneath his eyes that it's exfoliating from the weight of his patients’ intractable visions.

In our sessions together he sits in a rolling desk chair, in the watery light from barred windows near the ceiling. He sips coffee while I peel the skin back from my ravaged cuticles. His tongue darts out to catch a drop from the cup’s rim; a feral motion, quick, knowing, surprisingly muscular. I imagine that darting motion between my thighs. I look up, scanning his face, not quite sure he does not hear the pounding in my ears.

Anyway, how would you know? I can tell you anything. How can the truth of it possibly matter?

They prescribe something to make me sleep, another thing to stop what they claim are hallucinations. They think they must unearth and possess the first moment he brushed my skin with his hot breath. They say it does something terrible to awaken sexuality in a child. I say I have seen the face of God. I have touched it.

They think it was my father. They know nothing about the luminous hollows of child-hips, limbs that match bone to bone, whispers in the dark.

Once we went to lay pennies on the tracks. We stood wrapped to the shuddering girders of the trestle as the train roared over us. My teeth hummed. He pulled me down into the cinder dust. Light blazed through his hair, a pale gold corona striated with flame.

Miriam’s husband comes to visit on Saturdays, and brings their baby, whom Miriam left, howling and balled up in a red-faced knot, when she locked herself in the bathroom and split her forehead open on the corner of the vanity. He reveals more details of their disordered life together each week as he waits for Miriam to get out of bed, while I smoke, filling the flimsy dayroom ashtrays, wondering why he sits beside me, allows me to touch the baby’s cornsilk hair.

The child is toddling now. When Miriam sits down, impassive, dutiful, the baby reaches chubby wet fingers into her hair and tugs, shrieking. Miriam’s beautiful skin blotches purple around the scars, and her eyelids descend over eyes both startled and resigned. I’ve seen a mother cat look just that way as she gives herself up to hungry kittens almost old enough to be weaned.

I think of them as gifts, these signs. Murmurs at the shadowy turnings of stairs. The cold wail of clover when I press my ear to the ground. Sometimes I hear his breathing just here, beside my cheek, or a whisper that stirs the downy curve of inner ear when no living breath has passed there.

The tiny psychiatrist would have them and leave me bereft. She says she wants to understand. I know what that means. She wants to split them open, expose and chart their inner dynamic like the nervous system of a dissected worm. I pretend ignorance of her desire, just as I pretend to swallow pills dispensed by the ample, freckle-fleshed nurse.

Growing up, people often remarked how much we looked alike. I never thought so. His hair was much lighter than mine, and in death, white as milkweed silk, all the color leached out. But there were certain similarities of feature: a comma where the lips join, curve of nostril, line of jaw. Now when I pass a mirror or darkened window I see, not his likeness, but the white flaring eyes of an animal caught in the glare of headlights, frozen.

II.