Paris: The Memoir(47)
The transporters brought me to Provo in handcuffs. We went up in an elevator to a floor with an infirmary. Somewhere down the hall, someone was screaming. A girl was huddled on a bare mattress in the hall. Orderlies fell in step with the escorts and took me to a bare cinder-block room where a pig-faced matron waited with a creepy expression. Greedy. Hungry. A nurse who looked as small and nervous as a ferret said, “Face the mirror and take off your clothes.”
Provo intake was a step beyond what I experienced at CEDU, Ascent, and Cascade. There was a full pelvic exam. When I tried to resist, Pigface said, “Open your legs for the nurse or we’ll get someone to restrain you.”
Nurse Ferret used a speculum to open me up and pushed gloved fingers inside me. I struggled to be still and not kick her in the face. Someone gave me faded sweats with the number 127 on the shirt. From that moment on, no staff member called me by my name. To them, I was 127, a numbered unit on an assembly line. They gave me the usual book of nonsensical rules and left me in an isolation room to study it.
The PCS rule book outlined a point system for achieving various levels where you could get weekly phone privileges and attend classes, but mostly it was an insanely long list of rules for absolutely everything: how to open a door, how to use the bathroom, how to stand up and sit down, how to speak and not speak, how to move and not move, how to trudge like soldiers to the cafeteria and stand in line like robots for meds. Failing to follow the impossible-to-follow rules meant corporal punishment, chemical or physical restraints, isolation in “Obs” (short for observation), or loss of privileges including visits and phone calls.
You started out in the hole with, like, five hundred IPs—Investment Points—and you were supposed to earn your way down to zero, but if you slouched, coughed, shuffled your feet, or got sleepy, someone would smack the back of your head and say, “Class ten!” which meant ten points got added. It took hours of sitting still to earn a few points, and they could take it all away in a matter of seconds.
I wasn’t the only one sitting there with thousands of IPs. Failing to level up meant staying in Investment, so that’s where I was almost the whole time. I don’t recall ever being allowed outside. Eleven months without seeing the sky or breathing fresh air. I remember running around and around the gym, trying to help other girls keep up, because if one of us stumbled or slowed down, we were all punished. I scrubbed floors and cleaned toilets, trying to earn enough IPs to level up so I could call my parents or participate in group visits where boys were brought into the girls’ area and we were allowed to sit at a table and talk.
Rebellious types slept on mattresses in the hall with the lights on and doors open. Staff came along once in a while to poke us to make sure we were breathing—or just because—so I never really slept. I just drifted in and out of this weird, twitchy state of semiconsciousness. My body was constantly on the alert, wired to wake up the instant someone touched me. If I dozed off, I went to a shallow nightmare place, haunted by an icky awareness of being watched.
Most people who worked there seemed to get off on degrading children and seeing them naked. They seemed to get a creepy pleasure from hitting, shoving, terrifying, and humiliating us. The few staff members who tried to be decent didn’t last. Or their decency didn’t last. I suppose they had to convince themselves they had no choice. All of them (as far as I knew) were Mormons, and most of them had gone to Brigham Young University, which—in their minds—was a big deal and somehow made them super-godly people.
That’s so fucked up. People using religion—this holy thing—to manipulate and abuse people. Carter and I are both Catholic (officially), and I do believe in God, but churches give me anxiety. I’d rather just think about God on my own.
Instead of the chaotic Rap, Provo had “group therapy” where we sat in a circle—dry eyed and numb—and beat each other down with clumsy indifference. We were all so sedated, the screaming and weeping was minimal, but the objective was the same. We were supposed to tear each other down and tell on each other. Destroy any possibility of trust. Strip away any shred of self-esteem. It didn’t matter if it was truth or lies; you got rewarded for being cruel. Turning us against each other kept us isolated and vulnerable. It was scary to see another person get slapped, choked, or thrown to the floor, but the shock was followed by a shiver of relief because it was somebody else. This time.
I cried a lot the first few weeks I was at Provo, but after a while, I didn’t have the energy. Being observed in the shower, foul food, forced labor, endless screaming down the hall—this was my life now. Why fight it? I swallowed the pills and stared at the wall with the flawless mask of a runway model. Whatever they were giving me made me feel like my head was disconnected from my body. That scared me, so I figured out a way to fake-swallow it. When they made me open my mouth to show that I’d taken the pills, I tucked the capsules inside my lower lip and waited for an opportunity to discreetly spit them into a Kleenex.
That worked until some girl told on me. I saw her talking to Pigface. Pigface glanced in my direction. The girl scuttled off into a corner with that guilty better you than me expression on her druggy face, and I knew I was screwed.
“One two seven,” Pigface said. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“I want to know what those pills are,” I said. “I want to know who prescribed them and why.”