I met Jenny when I was working in the long-term psych ward, one of the many jobs I tried and then left. She was a small woman, 30 years old, with matted hair and a vacant expression. Of course, this was made even more vacant by her lack of eyes, and the puckered holes where they used to reside. Even without eyes she seemed to constantly be searching for something.
I sat to read her chart one night when I was working the graveyard shift, and it went something like this:
She was in college when the visions started. She didn’t have a religious upbringing and was not a person of faith, so she figured hallucinations or a psychotic break, from the typical stress most college students experience. In her initial counseling interview, she said she wasn’t under any unusual pressure, and she seemed well adjusted and well spoken. They tried medication after medication, escalating to shock therapy when the visions only worsened. Nothing helped. She finally decided, accepted even, that she was being given these visions from a higher power, the likes of which she had never believed in.
A few months later, at a campfire with friends, she put a burning stick to both eyes. She reported that alcohol didn’t even dull what she saw, and the visions had been more fierce, more frequent, concerning her four friends sitting around her, drinking and laughing. The only sober one in the group rushed her to the ER, but it was too late. Both eyes were damaged beyond repair and had to be removed. Unfortunately, this changed nothing with the visions, and she seemed to lapse into a quiet, knowing madness.
I met her maybe 8 years after this incident, and though she had never made peace with the visions, she seemed to let them flow through her and out, returning to her slow deliberate searching state after each one. She had been hospitalized since losing her eyes, and of course the people I worked with deemed her insane, crazy, off her rocker. Burned out low paid psych staff can be a little less than empathetic. I agreed until a couple of instances where she proved to be frighteningly accurate in her description of both past and future events.
The first came when I was sitting in the recreation area with a small group. Jenny sat holding and not working on a cloth puzzle, when she stood suddenly, as if propelled from the recliner, her hands limp, the puzzle forgotten on the floor.
“Amy, oh Amy, I can’t believe that happened to you, you were so small,” she shouted. The hair on my arms began to stand up and a shiver coursed through my back. No one else paid her much mind. They were used to her outbursts.
“They never caught him, did they? They never caught him, and you still think about it at night, sometimes you think about it, and you cry, you wake up crying. You wake up crying, don’t you? The smell of the room still there.”
“He had red hair, didn’t he? Do you remember his red hair? Do you know why you are afraid of men with red hair, but you just can’t explain it and people think it’s silly don’t they? Oh my god the things he did, the things he did to you, and you were so small.” We tried to calm her, to make her sit, but she just continued. My stomach was sick with the words that tumbled from her.
“You fight against it, but oh my god the things he did, so much, the weight of him, the red hair, the blood.” I broke into tears and left the room, mumbling an excuse as she sat back down as if nothing had happened. I didn’t dare to tell my coworkers that she was right. I didn’t need their pity. I told them I was just shocked to see her behave that way.
When I was 5 a man had broken into our home and had sexually assaulted and threatened me. He was there for over 3 hours and my parents never knew, never heard a thing, because I never made a sound. They found me in the morning, broken, bloody, silent. I didn’t make a sound for almost a year after. And they never caught him, but sometimes at night I did wake up, crying, the feel of his red hair falling in my eyes. I took to avoiding her when I could, but it seemed as if she was seeking me out. Despite her blindness, always able to find me, usually when I was alone. She apologized several times for what she said, telling me that the visions just shot through, and she had almost no control if one was strong enough. “I’m just the vessel,” she said, desperately shaking her head. She said she was so sorry to have hurt me. I played it off as nothing, pretended it wasn’t accurate, but she knew the truth and so did I.
The second time happened shortly before I quit the job, but I didn’t know how true it was until after I had been gone for several months. I did go back once to see her, after I knew the truth, but she was dead. Self-inflicted neck wound from using a nurse’s stolen pen to stick herself repeatedly, until she bled to death. Ironic really. A few days before, she had told her psychiatrist that she finally couldn’t stand it anymore. She wasn’t lying about that either.
The second vision was one concerning my father. He had been a big rig driver for years, with not even a fender bender on his record. He was running a long route, when he got into a terrible accident on an overpass in the middle of the night. He hung upside down, bleeding, not found for several hours. By then he was dead. I heard later that he had almost bled out and was as pale as milk. This lovely detail came from a drunk and retired cop who had been first on the scene, and who remembered me when he saw me at a local bar. Jenny had described all this so accurately, months earlier, it seemed as if she was there.
I never believed in God, or visions, and I still don’t know if what she saw came from God, or the devil, or some other presence, toying with us. She came to believe she saw through God’s eyes, and first tried to destroy them, before destroying herself in her final act. Some terrible and awful god who wanted us to know and see the horrors that have and would transpire. I’m still not religious. But I am wary, and careful, and afraid, and if that was God – I still want no part of it.