Page 19 of Ward D
When I look inside room 906, I don’t know what I was expecting to see. The description in the emergency room note made it sound like William Schoenfeld was a raving lunatic. So I’m surprised to find a man in his late twenties, wearing a clean T-shirt and jeans, his dark short hair neatly trimmed, his face with a couple of days’ growth of a dark beard, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. And he’s not pacing the room, ranting and raving. He’s sitting in his bed, quietly reading a book.
I rap gently on his open door. “Hello? Mr. Schoenfeld?”
The man looks up. He picks up a bookmark that was lying on the bed and places it inside the book. He then rests the book on top of a stack of other books on the dresser next to his bed. “Yes?”
I wring my hands together. “My name is Amy. I’m a medical student.”
He has a disarmingly ordinary appearance, which is not at all what I expected. I expected him to look more like Spider-Dan, or that guy who thought his father was God. This guy looks… normal.
Except for the fact that he’s hearing voices telling him to kill people.
“Can I help you, Amy?” he asks. He sounds pleasant enough, but there is a wariness in his tone. He’s put up his guard and doesn’t trust me.
“Yes, I…” God, this is really awkward. But then I remind myself that Mrs. Pritchett said I was a good listener—I can do this. “I’m on-call here for the night, and I’m trying to get to know some of the patients.”
His thick dark eyebrows shoot up, and I quickly add, “Medically, that is. Or, you know,psychiatrically. Like, why you’re here in the hospital and all that. I’d like to hear your story.”
He looks at me for a very long minute, then finally says, “Sure. Have a seat.”
I grab the chair on the other side of the room and pull it closer to him. But nottooclose. I leave enough distance so that I could make a quick exit before he grabs me. “Thank you so much, Mr. Schoenfeld.”
His hazel eyes skim over my face. “Will. Please call me Will.”
“Sure. If you’d like.” I clear my throat, folding one leg over the other. “So I guess I was just wondering how it all got started. I mean, I heard that you were… you know…”
“Hearing voices?”
“Well. Yes.”
“That’s right.” His eyes make contact with mine. “For a few months now.”
“And the voices were… saying things?”
One corner of his lips turns up. “Yes. As voices often do.”
“What were they saying?”
A muscle in Will Schoenfeld’s jaw twitches slightly. “They told me to kill people. Like, I would be standing with a friend, and a voice would whisper in my ear, ‘Push him into traffic.’”
“That must have been upsetting to you.”
A flash of irritation passes over his features. “You think?”
I cross and uncross my legs. I was proud of how good I’d become at talking to Dr. Sleepy’s insomniac patients—most of them were eager to open up and tell me all about their lives (and their pets). But Will is different. He doesn’t want to make this easy for me. “But you never… I mean, just because the voices were telling you to do that, you never…”
He arches an eyebrow. “If a voice were telling you to kill somebody, would you do it?”
I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had hoped to come in here and see a raving, crazy man. But Will Schoenfeld looks completely normal. He could be absolutely anyone. Some guy you passed on the street. A friend. A neighbor.
He could be a medical student.
“Do you still hear the voices?” I ask.
“Like, right now? Sitting here?”
“Well…”
He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Are you asking me if there’s a voice in my head telling me that I should kill you right now?”
