I found out where the ducks go. They migrate. They just get up one day and fly to Florida or some place. They spend their goddamned winter down south. That's one of the things I learned in that institution, is where the ducks go when the pond freezes.

Most of the people there were real loonies. I mean, the kinds of people who hear voices in their heads. I didn't belong there. I'll admit, I was having my difficulties growing up. But some of the people there, boy, were they crazy. I spent just over two years in that place.

My parents sent me to this place because it was supposedly some sort of high class joint or something. They paid lots of money to put me there, and it wasn't anything special. I've never been to another institution or anything, but this place didn't seem worth the money. It was small and bland. It wasn't even big enough to have separate men and women's wards. Instead, all the rooms lined two hallways that joined to make an L shape. The women were in the vertical half, while the men were in the horizontal half. Whenever anyone made a comment about it, the officials at the hospital just made up some kind of story about how it was a new thing they were trying out, or something. Or that it was only temporary until they could get the money to expand the building. When I first heard that, it damn near killed me.

There was one girl, though; she's the one who told me where the ducks went. Her name was Mary. Mary Davis. At first, I had a hard time believing she belonged there. She had the longest hair I've ever seen on a girl. I remember her telling me at some point that the last time she'd cut her hair was when she was in the third grade. But this girl, she was something else. She wasn't the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen, that was for sure, but she was attractive in her own way.

Like I said, I had a hard time believing she belonged there at first. When we first met, I was sitting in the lounge watching some bad romance movie that happened to be on the TV. I had only been there maybe a week or two. She just plopped herself down in the chair next to me.

"Hi. I'm Mary. Who are you?" she asked.

A few fake names flashed through my mind before I finally said, "Holden."

She smiled at me and shook my hand. "What are you doing here?" she said. "I mean, what made them send you here?"

I shrugged. "My parents didn't want to deal with me anymore. I was giving them a hard time, having a hard time in life. Something like that."

For someone I had just met, I was being awful honest with her. I'd considered lying. I considered lying a lot, actually, but I didn't. I think it was because she reminded me so much of Jane at first.

Mary and I spent a lot of time together. Whenever we were could, we sat in the lounge talking and play chess or checkers. I learned that she was from New York as well, and that she was the same age as me. Talking to her was just like talking to an old friend. I called her Jane on more than one occasion, on accident of course. She just reminded me so damn much of old Jane that sometimes I couldn't get by it.

I guess that's why I was so disturbed when I finally saw why Mary was in that place. They had been cutting down her medications, she told me. Cutting them down too much. One day, rather than meeting me in the lounge like she always did, she spent the entire day in her room alone.

Her room was just around the corner from mine, and across the hall. At some point during that night I found myself awakened by her screaming. Not just shouting, but all out, blood-curdling screams. It took a second for my mind to focus, but once it did I got up and ran to my door, peering out through the square glass panel.

I could see Mary, wearing a thin nightgown, being held back and removed from her room by two of the larger male orderlies. Her tiny body struggled back towards her room. The head nurse, Betsy, was standing nearby flicking the plastic tubing of a hypodermic needle full of some clearish liquid.

At first, I couldn't really discern what exactly Mary was screaming. The sound just sort of entered my ears and bounced around my head. I was too shocked at seeing the person I thought was perfectly normal now being dragged out of her room kicking and screaming. But then her words got clearer.

"Let me go! No! Shut up! Don't touch me! Let me go! They won't leave me alone. Why won't they leave me alone?"

She started mumbling now, and rambling. Betsy injected her with whatever tranquilizer was in the needle. Eventually, Mary's body collapsed to the floor and one of the orderlies picked her up and carried her down the hallway. That was when I noticed the smears of blood on her nightgown and on her arms.

I opened my door and stepped out of the room. The air in the hall was uncomfortably chilly. The orderly carried Mary down the dimly lit hall, but she was still slightly conscious and still mumbling. Her head turned slightly and she stared down the hall at me with the most pained expression I have ever seen on anyone's face. It made me sick to my stomach.

The next day, she wasn't in her room. I found out from one of the other patients later on that she had been taken to the solitary confinement area and locked up. Solitary was the place they took you when you went especially crazy. We called it the Zoo. You got put there when you were dubbed a "danger to one's self or others". They basically just lock you up all alone in this room. The only thing in there is a bunk attached to the wall, with no sheets. They leave you minimal opportunity to injure yourself in any way, shape, or form. The walls are padded, as you'd expect, and there's a huge observation window made of Plexiglas at the end of the room where nurses and doctors keep watch over just about everything you do. They record their notes in your file and make you sound even crazier than you really are. If you want to go to the bathroom, you have to ask and be escorted to one of the restrooms. They feed you three times and day, and usually a nurse will sit there with you until you've consumed a substantial amount of your meal. I hated the Zoo. They only had to put me there once, and I was done.

But that was the point. It was meant to be such a horrible experience that you were forced to keep yourself under control, lest you spend ridiculous amounts of time in the Zoo, which would more than likely drive you even more insane.

It was later on in that same day that I finally found out what was actually wrong with Mary. I had been there, by this point, for something like four and a half months. I'd known Mary most of that time, and she'd never told me why she was there. I'd never seen any reason as to why she would be there. One of the older patients, a guy named George, told me about what was "wrong" with her.

George was a nice enough guy. He was probably about fifty or something, and black. He had matted gray hair that stuck out about a half an inch from his head. Somehow, old George knew about just about everything that went on in that place, and he knew all about just about everyone.

He told me Mary'd come in during the middle of the night one night about a year ago. Her mother submitted her, because she was just too out of control. When she'd first come in, her hands were covered in blood and she was screaming that "they" wouldn't shut up. The nurses cleaned her up, bandaged up her hands, and brought her immediately to the Zoo.

Mary heard voices. One or two highly condescending voices in her head that would often argue with each other, or with her, all in her head. Often times she would believe things that never happened. She could dream about something and wake up thoroughly convinced that it happened. I'd noticed that she had a strange train of thought, but it never occurred to me that this was one of the symptoms of her disease. She was schizophrenic.

It was because of these voices that she developed an obsessive compulsive-like behavior. Mary was obsessed with being clean. She washed her hands probably about ten times a day, another fact that I had noticed but never thought much of. Sometimes that got out of control, though. Old George told me she never felt clean, she always felt as though her hands and arms were dirty and she just had to get them clean. That's why she'd come in with bloody hands that night. The voices were arguing with her about how bad of a person she was, about how dirty she was. She washed and washed her hands but they kept egging her on, saying she would never be clean enough. She scrubbed so hard to get the non-existent dirt of that she'd made her hands raw and bloody. God, the thought of that just made me sick.

I guessed that was what had happened the night before, when she'd been dragged away. She'd seemed fine recently. As I've said, I didn't think there was a damn thing wrong with her. They tried to wean her off her medications, but they were doing it too fast and she broke down. The voices started up again and really tore her apart. She'd turned on the sink in her room and scrubbed her hands and arms to the point of blood. Old George said that when the orderlies were doing their rounds that night they'd found her still scrubbing, despite the blood smeared on her gown and dotting the edges of the sink. George knew everything that went on in the building. He was one of those kinds of guys.

I really started to miss Mary while she was in the Zoo. There was no one else to talk to around there, besides George. But I started getting tired of hearing the life stories of everyone in the joint from this one old guy.

I was starting to get tired of my meetings with my counselor, too. My counselor was an old woman. A tiny, old woman with gray hair held back in the same tight bun every time I saw her. She had little wire-framed glasses that always sat too far down her nose as she looked over the condescendingly at me.

I'd go into her office a couple times a week and sit down in the uncomfortable wooden chair while she looked over my file. She looked over my file every day, at every single one of our meetings, as though things would drastically change from one meeting to the next. She shuffled through the papers and looked up over her glasses at me, asking me how I was and how things were going.

She tried to make me talk about Mary a lot after that incident, but I didn't want to. She said that my concern for Mary showed improvements in my "condition."

My condition, that's right. I haven't yet explained that. The doctors there decided to call me anti-social. At first, it sounds obvious. Anti-social, against society. Well, yes, I was against society. But apparently it's more than that. This one simple compound, hyphenated label was the perfect explanation for all of the out-of-the-ordinary actions I took. My consistent lying, my detachment from people and society, my high and mighty attitude towards people in general. All were accounted for with this one word.

I stopped lying, eventually. Well, not all together, but I stopped the elaborate stories with no basis, and I stopped using my aliases. That was another one of my "symptoms", the fact that I often used some sort of made up alias. My counselor was proud of that. About as proud as someone with no emotions can be, I guess. I swear, she was the least expressive person I ever met. One of those tight faced women who were trying desperately to look younger than she was. She was also "proud" of my genuine care and concern for Mary, and the fact that I had nearly dropped my attitude towards society.

I grew up a lot in that place. I had to. I was on my own and it finally clicked that there was no catcher in the rye. That I could very well fall off the cliff if I didn't watch out, because no one else was going to be there to save me. And the same went for everyone else. They had to stop themselves before they went over the edge; there was no way I was going to be able to stop anyone from going over.

When Mary got out of the Zoo, I didn't see much of her for a long time. She kept to herself a lot, and kept quiet a lot. She barely ever left her room, and when she did, she hardly talked. It was like she was broken or something. It made me sad, seeing her always looking so tired and unhappy. She went into the Zoo two more times after that. My time in the Zoo was between her second and third times. I pretty much completely lost control and started throwing things around and screaming and crying. I just wanted to get out, I wanted Mary to be ok, I wanted to go home and see Phoebe. I wasn't crazy, I didn't belong there. They kept me in the Zoo for a while, too, because I just continued to swear and scream and the doctors and nurses behind the window.