The Bell at St. Jude

The bell in Ward E never rang the same way twice. On the intake forms it was a bronze handbell from some previous era, its throat hairline cracked, mounted above the glass door in a bracket that should have been retired with the asbestos ceiling tiles. To the nurses it was a nuisance. To the night porters, a superstition. To Father Callaghan, who came every other Thursday with a bottle of holy water hidden in his coat, it was a test he always failed—he’d bless the bell, and the bell would answer in a note that was not a note, a pitch that slipped sideways inside the ears and set the fillings in your teeth itching.

I had been assigned to St. Jude’s Psychiatric annex for three months when the mirror case arrived. “Male, late thirties,” said Dr. Small, not looking up from the chart as the orderlies wheeled the restraints past. “Self injury with reflective surfaces. Keep glass out of his line of sight. No metal spoons.” She glanced at me. “You’re new to E. Don’t let the bell spook you.”

I told her bells didn’t spook me. That was before I learned that the bell was an instrument, and we were already inside a symphony we did not understand.

The man’s name—one of them—was Matthew Hale. The night nurse, Randée, whispered that he’d clawed a mirror into sand with his bare hands on the beach at Alki point, then tried to climb into the water as if it were a hallway. On admission, he’d asked for a piece of charcoal and drawn a lattice of angles on the floor so dense the mop could not lift it. When the porter laid a wet towel over the lines, the towel hummed.

“We don’t say that,” Randée hissed when I said the word Hum aloud. “Not on this ward.”

“What do you call it?”

She stared at the bell. “We call it the draft.”

On the second night I sat in the observation booth while the monitors washed the ward in grey. Hale was awake, lips moving. His hands were bandaged, a surgeon’s neat approximation of fingers. He stared not at the camera but at the window of his room. The glass was painted on the outside to a milky opacity, a rectangle of permanent fog. It should have reflected nothing. And yet, his mouth moved in replies, jaw tilting to an angle that suggested he was listening to someone very close, someone standing just beyond the glass.