"It'll be better for you. Down there it'll be quiet with none of the bothering and such. It'll be better for you Darl."
Darl sits on the dirty floor of his whitewashed, unkempt room, his cage. In his dirty, ivory straitjacket. The same man with the once white suit that was whiter than the walls of Darl's ever-locked cell comes in again. The man who claims to be a psychologist. He can't be one though. Not really. Darl saw doctors like that, real ones who knew what they were doing, at the war. This man, with his white suit and his silly questions is not a doctor. Doctors don't put people in giant wheels or under water while firing cannons into the Mississippi. Darl just laughs at him. "Why do you laugh?" I said.
"And how are we today, Darl?" he says, with that sham of a smile plastered on his face.
"Yes yes yes yes yes yes."
The man looks at Darl quizzically. He tries to talk to Darl again and Darl, his "patient", laughs.
He is in an insane asylum. Therefore he is insane. It just is. It cannot be are or was or were. It is. It's a whitewashed, torturous, strange, infinitely better prison. He is in a straitjacket. Caged and under lock and key. The bed that he refuses to sleep on is white, like everything else in the room would be if it wasn't so covered in filth. Everything is quiet unless the man comes in, the doctor.
"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!!"
An asylum. Full of insane people. Lunatics. Mississippi Lunatic Hospital Number 23. Jackson. Our brother Darl is in Jackson.
And suddenly I knew what I had once known and forgotten. I knew like I knew with Dewey Dell and with Jewel. No one told me. No one else in the world knew. It was my secret. It would go with me to the grave and no one would ever know. There was no one to tell that would believe it any more, and what good would telling them do. But I knew. It was as if a final veil of the deceit she had so despised had vanished. Once and for all. Forever.
And I really laughed. I laughed at all them in their idiocy. I laughed at the world. The man in the suit looks at Darl. The lunatic.
"Why do you laugh?" the says, a look of sheer stupefaction on his face.
Now I knew why I had been laughing. It made me laugh harder than I'd ever laughed before.
"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Thanks for reading!
I wrote this story for an assignment in my Honors English class in my sophomore year of high school. Let me know what you think. If enough people like this version I'll post the one my teacher preferred too.
And, please, no flaming.