Ward M – Fiction by Ghanaian Writer, Rigwell Addison Asiedu

The ceiling fan in a consulting room of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital’s psychiatric department descended with a serpentine glide, the blades slicing through the air like a helicopter at the end of its flight, and when the white blur roared above Kyei’s upturned head, he saw that the dome had facial features. The eyes of the fan opened and stared into the boy’s soul, searching past his fears and instability to find a minute part of him that was still aware that a fan could have no face or come down from the ceiling to look him in the eyes. Kyei cradled his head and rocked his body in his seat facing a psychiatrist who was asking him a plethora of incisive questions. Her name on the white coat read DR. S.A. ASAMOAH.

“Kyei, are you okay? How are you feeling now?” Dr. Asamoah asked.

“Everything keeps watching me. They are watching me through the ceiling fan,” he said, pointing at the fixture which had returned to its position. He could still see the eyes in the globe. The eyeballs reddened and began to drip blood on his head. He tried to clear the thick red mess, whimpering and cursing. The laughter of the fan filled his ears, a terrible ululation that made him scream, “Get me out of here. Get me out! They are watching me.” A thousand eyes peeled open in the walls, rolling retinas and dilating pupils, studying the unstable teenager as he struggled in his seat. Kyei’s parents rushed into the consulting room to calm him down. Their grip faltered under his fierce struggle. Dr. Asamoah called the muscular nurses to hold the boy down.

“We need to admit him. Take him to Ward M,” the boy could hear the psychiatrist saying, whilst holding his folder. He wanted to scream that he wasn’t insane, that madness was for the naked people he had sometimes seen on the streets or the mental illness he saw Americans and other white people have on the TV shows he binge-watched, but a needle pierced through his arm and he felt himself falling down an ocean, watching the speck of sunlight on the surface undulate through the waters and grow distant until all was dark in his troubled mind.

Kyei woke up many hours later, his medicated brain wrapped in gauze, to the smell of antiseptic, drugs and vomit. He rose from the stiff bed, cleaning the grains of sand in the corner of his eyes. There were five other beds arranged in a parallel line, all facing a door to an outer space where he could see nurses and doctors converse. At the other end of the outer space was another room where he could see six beds with women walking about the room. One of the younger women had a protruded belly that she caressed as she paced about the room and muttered to herself. In the male part of the ward where he stayed, they were all older men lying or sitting in their beds.

“Hey, young man,” one to his left called him. The man had grey hair in his stubble and a lopsided smile that unnerved Kyei.

“Good…”Kyei looked outside the window. Dusk had painted the outer world a dark grey. Streetlights punctuated the darkness with yellow dots and dashes of light. “…evening.”

“You are so young.” The man ignored the greeting. “What are you doing here? How old are you?”

Kyei swallowed.

“I’m 17.”

“Eii, you look way younger o. I thought some 14-year-old bi mpo. Na what are you doing here? Were you doing drugs?”

“What?” Kyei asked, his forehead furrowing into ridges of sand.

“These young boys and drugs…” the man said, shaking his head with a distracted look. Kyei mumbled “I don’t do..” and rose to his feet. Whatever they had injected him with had made his feet water. The ground was undulating mirrors and he felt as though taking another step would make him crash through one of the glasses. He blinked and saw concrete ground again. The nurses in their seats sat upright as he tottered towards them.

“I need…” the medication had made his tongue a candle, and thoughts melted and crystallised in his mouth unevenly. He deferred to the power of his body over his will, pleading for strength, for a way to escape the asylum his parents had condemned him to. Asylum. The word sloshed like brackish water and bile at the back of his throat, forcing him to vomit on the nurses’ desk. Still retching and bent like a Muslim in prayer, he screamed that he wanted to leave, that his parents were wrong and wanted to punish him, that he was okay now, that the people watching him would get him if he was trapped in Ward M in Korle Bu, that he had to leave Accra as soon as possible.

“They are coming for me,” he said, pointing at the snakes playing flutes and saxophones as they slithered on the wall. A hundred pairs of lips appeared on surfaces and echoed “coming” in a crescendo. The lips became familiar labia belonging to the thighs of older women from his childhood. Then they morphed into the anus of his ex-boyfriend, pursed like the mouth of a mini drawstring bag. Millipedes grew out of his skin crawling towards the crown of spiders on his head.
He felt a needle prick his arm and he yelled; memories of banged doors and forced penetration flooded his mind until he was drowning again. Before his eyes closed, he formed only one thought, one goal: he had to run away from Ward M.

When his eyes opened, his parents’ faces floated above him, halos bathing their hair with gold. His mother raised him to sit gently and sat beside him. His dad continued standing, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Kyei could see his small fingernails bitten down to a bloodied mess. He held his father’s hands and stroked the fingers. His mother arranged a meal of Hausa koko, koose, bread, bofrot, fruits and water on the table. The millet porridge bowl warmed the boy’s palms as the gingery steam rose with a feathery grace into his nostrils.

“Are they treating you well here? Have any of these big men attacked you?” his mother whispered in a conciliatory tone, stroking his hair. She kissed his earlobe and he flinched away, before forcing a spoon of the porridge into his mouth. Her patronising concern smothered him, and the sweet smell of fresh bread nauseated him. He’d craved this for many years, and he was only getting it now on the brink of adulthood. This was the first time in about a decade that they were both alone with him without his five other siblings who took up more space with their brash personalities. Over the years, he had learnt to curl into himself until his visible back was a hard shell around his other body parts. That was what he gave to everyone, including his first girlfriend whom he could never bring himself to desire, and even his ex-boyfriend who left after frustrating months of trying to get Kyei to open up. The boy had tried to present himself as a brick, a man that his parents would finally be proud of and stop calling an effeminate disgrace to manhood, but that hardness was brittle and now it had shattered.

“No,” he said. “I want to leave. I need… I can’t stay here,” he said, watching his father with pleading eyes.

“You are not well, Kyei,” his mother said, trying to touch him but leaving her hand to freeze mid-air.

“No one apart from the immediate family knows you are here,” his father finally said. “Except the pastor.”

Kyei scoffed. Even in the middle of this breakdown, his father cared more about his reputation. When Kyei had started showing signs of instability, his dad had refused to seek medical attention, calling it an attack from the devil that the boy must have allowed in some way.

“He should confess his sins to God and he will be healed,” his father had said with a dismissive flick of his hands. As an elder of his church, he processed every event as either from God or the devil. When Kyei deteriorated into an argument with invisible people at the dining table, his mother persuaded the father to take action.

“What if he runs naked to the streets and brings disgrace to the family?” That was the question that finally spurred the elder into action. He bound Kyei’s hands and legs before driving him to the pastor’s house in North Kaneshie. The intense prayers began at home as the pastor claimed there were demons residing in the boy that needed to be exorcised. He tried to convince the elder to drive the boy to church where all the prayer warriors would gather and pray over Kyei, but the father refused, rubbing his palms together as he knelt before the pastor.

“You know how popular I am as an elder. This will bring disgrace to my family. What will happen when this boy makes insanity associated with my clan? His elder sisters are of marriageable age. Who will marry them if I get exposed as the father of a mad boy, that we have madness in the family?”

The pastor had agreed to keep the boy in the basement, but his wife hated the arrangement. She dreamt of the boy’s shadow stealing up the basement, the stairs, and the walls of her room with a knife in his hand. One week into the deliverance session, even she, with her unwavering faith in God, could tell that the boy was rather getting worse, chained and feral with incoherent threats in the darkness below. She contacted her sister who was a nurse in Korle Bu and explained the situation to her. She knew it would be impossible to convince the elder to drive the boy to the psychiatric department as a new case to be treated, so she sat his wife down and told him about a dream she had where the boy got healed in the hospital. God wanted it that way, for the boy to receive his healing under the care of doctors. When the elder heard this, he sighed and shrugged. His head bowed to prevent the women from seeing his drops of tears dot the white tiles.

“If that is what God wants, who am I to say no?”

And so here was Kyei with his parents in Ward M. A nurse walked to them with a cocktail of drugs.

“Please are you Kyei Osei-Bonsu?” the nurse asked with a baritone voice. Kyei’s mother responded in the affirmative. The man dragged his crocs across the floor as he flipped through Kyei’s folder.

“I am to give you these meds,” he said, still looking at the folder with arched eyebrows. The nurse grimaced when he read a page and then looked up. He clicked his tongue and read out all the medications and side effects. The tablets were a riot of colours in his palm.

“Open your mouth wide. That shouldn’t be a problem for you anyway,” the nurse said, his voice laced with judgement.

Kyei swallowed and the nurse left with a smirk. His father sat beside him and kissed his head. The boy began to cry. There was no need to run away. Everything he had ever been afraid of had happened. What darkness could make an unlit room at midnight worse?

“We are here for you,” his father said and hugged him. It was an unfamiliar embrace, and Kyei’s hands hung in the air before touching his father’s back slightly. His mother hugged his back and whispered soothing words in his ears. The fan in the room swirled, still affixed to the ceiling. The dome was a white orbit without eyes.