Who Chose Them?

John Burnside

In the summer of 1980, I was admitted to Fulbourn mental hospital, a leafy and surprisingly pleasant institution three or four miles outside Cambridge. I don’t remember very much about the week or so that led up to this point, but I was told later that I had been hallucinating for several days, and I still recall images and fragments from what may well have been a meaningful though decidedly bizarre narrative, a story I was telling myself in a last-ditch attempt to create order in a life that had, by that point, become hopelessly chaotic. What others knew about these hallucinations I never fully established – did I talk about them? was I capable of descriptive speech? – and my own memories are patchy, to say the least. At one point, a series of tiny ballerinas pirouetted across a linoleum floor; then, several hours, or possibly days later, a sleek, oddly beautiful creature, half-girl, half-swordblade, came into the room where I had been sleeping and sat quietly on the edge of my bed, her face kindly, her eyes fixed on mine. Not long after that, a man in a pearl-white suit emerged from the far end of a long corridor and, smiling all the while, as if this were some kind of blessing, shot me in the forehead with a bolt gun similar to the weapons slaughtermen use on cattle.