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our meds. We knew Mrs. McWeeney was a crazy person who had to earn a living. We weren’t trying to get her decertified; we just wanted her off our ward.
    Valerie was unsympathetic to our complaints.
    “Mrs. McWeeney is a professional,” she said. “She’s been in this business a lot longer than I have.”
    “So what?” said Georgina.
    “She’s fucking nuts,” Lisa yelled.
    “You don’t have to yell, Lisa—I’m right here,” said Valerie.
    We were all protecting Mrs. McWeeney, one way or another.
    Mrs. McWeeney wasn’t the only person in need of protection.
    Now and then there was an influx of student nurses. They were migratory, passing through our hospital on their way to operating rooms and cardiac-care units. They followed real nurses around in a flock, asking questions and getting underfoot. “Oh, that Tiffany! She sticks to me like a barnacle,” the nurses would complain. Then we got the chance to say, “Sucks, doesn’t it? Being followed around all the time.” The nurses would have to grant us this point.
    The student nurses were about nineteen or twenty: our age. They had clean, eager faces and clean, ironed uniforms. Their innocence and incompetence aroused our pity, unlike the incompetence of aides, which aroused our scorn. This was partly because student nurses stayed only a few weeks, whereas aides were incompetent for years at a stretch. Mainly, though, it was because when we looked at the student nurses, we saw alternate versions of ourselves. They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn’t been occupied with being mental patients. They shared apartments and had boyfriends and talked about clothes. We wanted to protect them so that they could go on living these lives. They were our proxies.
    They loved talking to us. We asked them what movies they’d seen and how they’d done on their exams and when they were getting married (most of them had sadly small engagement rings). They’d tell us anything—that the boyfriend was insisting they “do it” before the wedding, that the mother was a drinker, that the grades were bad and the scholarship wasn’t going to be renewed.
    We gave them good advice. “Use a condom”; “Call Alcoholics Anonymous”; “Work hard for the rest of the semester and bring your grades up.” Later they’d report back to us: “You were right. Thanks a lot.”
    We did our best to control our snarls and mutterings and tears when they were around. Consequently, they learned nothing about psychiatric nursing. When they finished their rotation, all they took with them were improved versions of us, halfway between our miserable selves and the normality we saw embodied in them.
    For some of us, this was the closest we would ever come to a cure.
    As soon as they left, things went quickly back to worse than usual, and the real nurses had their hands full.
    Thus, our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.

Nineteen Sixty-Eight
    The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night.
    Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.”
    But it didn’t seem to be settling down. People were doing the kinds of things we had fantasies of doing: taking over universities and abolishing classes; making houses out of cardboard boxes and putting them in people’s way; sticking their tongues out at policemen.
    We’d cheer them on, those little people on our TV screen, who shrank as their numbers increased until they were just a mass of dots