I stared at this unbelievable drama down the sooty and stained brick walls, through wire and cables stretching across the grimy alley, and over the rounded roof of the wooden bridge  that I had just crossed for lunch.  I was such a pathetic, twisted figure on the ground.  Yet I felt protected by a glowing light up on the roof, and was at a safe distance from the tragedy below.   I heard myself yelling nonsense at the crowd of bodies gathering around my figure.  I was talking, but was not making any sense.  Because, among other things, I was telling them that  I was actually somewhere else, far above them:  Look up!  Look up!  I’m up here on the roof! 

            And they did look up, and of course they didn’t see anything, just the leaden gray sky filled with smoke and cinders.  They didn’t see anything except for a babbling idiot, lying in the alley!  I was a woman out of my mind.  But Frieda and three of my spinner friends reached into the bin, into which I had been so brutally thrown, and pulled me out.  They carefully laid me on the ground, while someone else ran to get some wool blankets to wrap around me because I was violently shaking.  When the blankets came, I was wrapped up, one was put under my head, and my friends waited with me, tenderly caressing my face.  They told me:  You’ll be OK, Antoinette.  You’re a trooper!  You’ll make it, Baby! 

            Those were much-needed words of encouragement at one of my life’s lowest points.

            Around this time, someone must have telegraphed for the white paddy wagon to bring me to the Danvers Lunatic Asylum.  I was reentering my body when the guys in the white suits and black bow-ties came in their wagon to get me.  On the side of the white vehicle was written in large, bold, black letters, simply PROPERTY OF DANVERS.  No mention of an asylum or hospital, just Danvers.  Looking back, they probably didn’t want to scare someone like me anymore than I already was by advertising the place they were hauling me off to.  And, also looking back, maybe they were trying to be sensitive, to not embarrass those like me who so obviously had lost control of their lives.  For as surely as I had been standing on the roof of the Baltic and staring down on my own body, I had gone over the edge. 

            The three men who came out of the vehicle to get me were not small by any stretch of the imagination, and one was as big as an oak.  He had short, black, curly hair; shoulders wide enough so that he had to turn sideways to get through most doorways; and was tall enough that you’d get a crick in your neck looking up at him.  The men were both gentle and strong, and had no difficulty in preventing me from running away, which with all my strength, I tried to do.  I was so scared because I had no idea what was happening to me.  My face, hands, elbows, and knees were bloody.  I had bruises on my face, arms, and legs.  My thighs and privates hurt where that monster had forced his hands into me.  Distant memories of Uncle Roger threw salt into my gaping wounds.  But at least I could see clearly out of both eyes!  Yet I barely knew where I was and my own name.    

            Before they took me inside the paddy wagon, the asylum men brought over a white canvas coat, with arm sleeves that were very long.  They placed my arms into the sleeves, which they then wrapped around my back, so that I was pinned inside that straightjacket.  It was as if I were in a tight cocoon that would not budge, no matter how hard I struck out and thrashed.  I screamed, though!  How I screamed to the high heavens, and to the Lord Almighty.  I screamed for my release and for my freedom from the horrible fate that had overtaken me.  I knew what awaited me: to be taken by brute force to a dark, brick castle on a distant hill.  The Bug House, the Funny Farm, and the Crazy Palace, labels for the frightening and mysterious place that other workers from the Baltic had been taken to––never to return.

            When they took me out of the vehicle, it took a few seconds for my eyes to get used to the strange scene before me.  I had, of course, gotten used to huge brick buildings in Lawrence.  But this was a place that was imagined by an unstable mind.  Granted it was gigantic, with many barred windows inside from which came the rants and screams of its victims.  The pointed towers, that I had previously seen with my aunt, now rose majestically before me.  Crows and pigeons flew around their fluted vents and finials, set on top of the slate-roof turrets. 

            My eyes and soul were blinded by the dark beauty set before me.  If ever there was a picture of Hell in the Garden of Eden, this was it.  I had been brought to a fortress of insanity.  This forsaken palace, set on a hill away from the world I had left, seemed to float on air, because as incredibly solid as its massive walls were, it appeared to me as the incarnation of a very bad dream.  Later, I would learn that many patients referred to this place as the Castle in the Clouds.  I looked at the outside with its magnificent arches, its threatening turrets, its cherry-red brick walls stretching to  beyond where I could see them end, just repetitions of successive connected buildings, each holding hundreds of patients, falling back into the horizon.  Oh, Danvers, how I both loved and hated you then!  It was as if some unseen force had repetitively stitched together this slithering giant, similar to the woolen fabrics I had seen streaming out of the mills.  And perhaps in some far-off world––unseen and unheard by us mortals––there was the deafening crash of machinery that had created such a haunting dream, as was this poisoned fairy-tale palace.  Or maybe it was just the fruition of all that surrounded the masterwork Castle that explained what I was recoiling from, as I, in futility, searched this place for any signs of hope, and instead found only brick and stone maws waiting to devour me and digest my very soul. 

            Maybe Danvers was the pinnacle of a New England creation, involving bitterness and deceit, greed and malice, fear and loathing; involving rock-strewn farms that were parched in the summer, and coldly barren in the winter, harvesting instead only the dusty semblance of growth in the one, and the icy rebuke in the other; involving the black and gnarled limbs of the large oak and maple trees that appeared to be reaching out to me; involving avarice and loneliness; involving rejection and spite.  All of it––the accumulation of the feelings and intuitions of so many souls in this self-serving and weary world––had created this ethereal landscape centered around the dark, cruel, and indescribably bizarre brick behemoth that was the Danvers Lunatic Asylum.