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catatonic.
    My main job on the day shift was to help administer electroshock therapy, which meant holding the patient down while the doctor induced a grand mal seizure. I had a terrible time emotionally for three or four weeks, until I started to see the good that oftencame from it—perhaps only temporarily. The analogy the doctors gave us was that it was like lifting up a car that was stuck in the snow because its wheels kept spinning, digging the car in deeper. When the troubled mind is no longer in the same rut, maybe it will take a new path.
    The evening shift was my favorite. I helped escort the patients from the locked ward to a Red Cross dance, three times a week. It was held in a reception hall on the ground floor. No bars on the windows. A busload of young girls—all volunteers—came in from town, which was two miles away, to dance with the patients. The other corpsmen and I were not allowed to dance with these young girls. The Teamsters always provided a small band, which played popular standards. I was tempted to break the rules and ask one of the young ladies to dance. I thought of what might happen if a nurse came in and started reprimanding me:
    “Silberman, don’t you know the rules?”
    “Mam, I was dancing with this young lady to show this patient that there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”
    But I was too chicken to ever try it. There was one young patient who played bridge with me at these dances, when we could find two other bridge players. He was so normal that I couldn’t understand why on earth he was put into a mental hospital, let alone into a locked ward.
    “Dick,” I asked, “what the hell are you doing here? You’re saner than I am.”
    “When I was attending class at Officers’ Training,” he said, “it took me 5 minutes to straighten all the books on my desk. They had to be stacked properly, all facing in the same direction and with all the edges touching each other in a correct way. The next day it took me 15 minutes to straighten my books, then 30 minutes, then 45 . . . and by that time the class was over.”
    Another young man, named Roger, was terrified of stepping oncracks. He was also terrified of dancing with any of the girls. The few times he did ask a girl to dance, he got a horrible headache and begged me to take him back to his bed. Once, while we were walking along the wooden corridor, on the way back to the ward—with him zigzagging all over the place to avoid stepping on cracks—I said, “Tell me something, Roger: what do you think is going to happen to you if you do—just accidentally—step on a crack?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “But please don’t make me do it.”
    Another patient would go into the latrine every night and wrap a thin white string around his penis. That fellow I stayed clear of. Sure, I wanted to ask him, “Why the hell are you wrapping string around your penis?” But he was so sick I was afraid my question might set him off.
    Of all these young men, the one who got to me the most was the patient who knelt down each morning in front of the television set—blocking the view of all the other patients who were watching
Amos and Andy
—and began praying . . . to the monitor? Or Amos? Or Kingfisher? Or God? (
Hold on here,
I thought.
You’re getting into my territory
. )
    That’s when the heavenly thought first occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t called on by God to do some special and sacrificial thing. . . . Maybe I was just sick.
     
    We were given two days off each week. The other soldiers wanted Saturdays and Sundays; I wanted Mondays and Tuesdays, because New York was an hour-and-a-half train ride away and that meant I could attend acting class at the HB Studio every Monday night. Corinne and her husband, Gil, said that I could stay with them and their baby, in their small apartment in Queens, on my two days off. All my friends at Valley Forge loved me for never putting in for weekends.
    The following