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"This syringe contains a dose of insulin," he said, speaking in a grave, technical tone of voice. "It's used by diabetics to combat high blood glucose. However, when the dose is much larger than normal, the consequent drop in blood glucose provokes a state of coma."
He tapped the needle lightly, to get rid of any air, and then stuck it in a vein in Zedka's foot.
"That's what's going to happen now. She's going to enter a state of induced coma. Don't be frightened if her eyes glaze, and don't expect her to recognize you when she's under the effects of the medication."
"That's awful, inhuman," Veronika said. "People struggle to get out of a coma, not to go into one."
"People struggle to live, not to commit suicide," replied the nurse, but Veronika ignored the remark. "And a state of coma allows the organism to rest; its functions are all drastically reduced, and any existing tension disappears."
He continued to inject the liquid while he was talking, and Zedka's eyes were growing dull.
"Don't worry," Veronika was saying to her. "You're absolutely normal; the story you told me about the king..."
"Don't waste your time. She can't hear you anymore."
The woman on the bed, who a few minutes before had seemed so lucid and full of life, now had her eyes fixed on some point in the distance, and liquid was bubbling from one corner of her mouth.
"What did you do?!" she shouted at the nurse.
"Just my job."
Veronika started calling to Zedka, shouting, threatening that she would go to the police, the press, the human rights organizations.
"Calm down. You may be in a mental hospital, but you still have to abide by certain rules."
She saw that the man was utterly serious, and she was afraid. But since she had nothing to lose, she went on shouting.
From where she was, Zedka could see the ward and the beds, all empty except for one, to which her body was strapped, and beside which a girl was standing, staring in horror. The girl didn't know that the person in the bed was still alive with all her biological functions working perfectly, but that her soul was flying, almost touching the ceiling, experiencing a sense of profound peace.
ZEDKA WAS making an astral journey, something that had been a surprise during her first experience of insulin shock. She hadn't mentioned it to anyone; she was only there to be cured of depression and, as soon as she was in a fit state, she hoped to leave that place forever. If she started telling them that she had left her body, they would think she was crazier than when she had entered Villete. However, as soon as she had returned to her body, she began reading up on both subjects: insulin shock and that strange feeling of floating in space.
There wasn't much written about the treatment. It had been used for the first time around 1930 but had been completely banned in psychiatric hospitals because of the possibility of irreversible damage to the patient. During one such session she had visited Dr. Igor's office in her astral form, at precisely the moment when he was discussing the subject with one of the owners of the hospital. "It's a crime," Dr. Igor was saying. "Yes, but it's cheap and it's quick!" replied the other man. "Anyway, who's interested in the rights of the insane? No one's going to complain."
Even so, some doctors still considered it a quick way of treating depression. Zedka had sought out and borrowed everything that had been written about insulin shock, especially firsthand reports by patients who had experienced it. The story was always the same: horrors and more horrors; not one of them had experienced anything resembling what she was living through at that moment.
She concluded--quite rightly--that there was no relationship between insulin and the feeling that her consciousness was leaving her body. On the contrary, the tendency with that kind of treatment was to diminish the patient's mental capacity.
She started researching the existence of the soul, read a few books on occultism, and then one day she stumbled on a vast literature that described exactly what she was experiencing: It was called "astral travel," and many people had already had the same experience. Some had merely set out to describe what they had felt, while others had developed techniques to provoke it. Zedka now knew those techniques by heart, and she used them every night to go wherever she wished.
The descriptions of those experiences and visions varied, but they all had certain points in common: the strange, irritating noise that preceded the separation of the body from the spirit, followed by a shock, a rapid loss of consciousness, and then the peace and joy of floating in the air, attached to the body by a silvery cord, a cord that could be stretched indefinitely, although there were legends (in books, of course) that said the person would die if they allowed that silver thread to break.
Her experience, however, showed that she could go as far as she wanted and the cord never broke. But generally speaking the books had been very useful in teaching her how to get more and more out of her astral traveling. She had learned, for example, that when she wanted to move from one place to another, she had to concentrate on projecting herself into space, imagining exactly where she wanted to go. Unlike the routes followed by planes--which leave from one place and fly the necessary distance to reach another--an astral journey was made through mysterious tunnels. You imagined yourself in a place, you entered the appropriate tunne
l at a terrifying speed, and the other place would appear.
It was through books too that she had lost her fear of the creatures inhabiting space. Today there was no one else in the ward. The first time she had left her body, however, she had found a lot of people watching her, amused by her look of surprise.
Her first reaction was to assume that these were dead people, ghosts haunting the hospital. Then, with the help of books and of her own experience, she realized that, although there were a few disembodied spirits wandering about there, among them were people as alive as she was, who had either developed the technique of leaving their bodies or who were not even aware of what was happening to them because, in some other part of the world, they were sleeping deeply while their spirits roamed freely abroad.
Today--knowing that this was her last astral journey on insulin, because she had just been to visit Dr. Igor's office and overheard him saying he was ready to release her--she decided to remain inside Villete. From the moment she went out through the main gate, she would never again return, not even in spirit, and she wanted to say good-bye.
To say good-bye. That was the really difficult part. Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of insanity and becomes addicted to it. You no longer have to take on responsibilities, to struggle to earn your daily bread, to be bothered with repetitive, mundane tasks. You could spend hours looking at a picture or making absurd doodles. Everything is tolerated because, after all, the person is mentally ill. As she herself had the occasion to observe, most of the inmates showed a marked improvement once they entered the hospital. They no longer had to hide their symptoms, and the "family" atmosphere helped them to accept their own neuroses and psychoses.
At the beginning Zedka had been fascinated by Villete and had even considered joining the Fraternity once she was cured. But she realized that if she was sensible, she could continue doing everything she enjoyed doing outside, as long as she dealt with the challenges of daily life. As someone had said, all you had to do was to keep your insanity under control. You could cry, get worried or angry like any other normal human being, as long as you remembered that, up above, your spirit was laughing out loud at all those thorny situations.
She would soon be back home with her children and her husband, and that part of her life also had its charms. Of course it would be difficult to find work; after all, in a small town like Ljubljana news travels fast, and her internment in Villete was already common knowledge to many people. But her husband earned enough to keep the family, and she could use her free time to continue making her astral journeys, though not under the dangerous influence of insulin.
There was only one thing she did not want to experience again: the reason that had brought her to Villete.
