Dancers in the Dark

What lingers on the mind is the woman in her 40s who wanders through the large room like a dancer in the dark, saying “I love you.”

She says it to no one in particular and yet to everyone, glancing up occasionally to those in her vicinity. I love you. Nothing more.

The woman is a patient in Unit 414 of Metropolitan State Hospital, a facility for the mentally disturbed down a side road in Norwalk.

Only high fences and locked doors distinguish this sprawling, 162-acre facility as a place apart from normal society. Outside of Unit 414, the golden leaves of autumn are strewn like a testament to time over soft green lawns. A bright sun warms the red brick of buildings that have stood for 80 years.

But inside the unit, women wander about in a recreation room, locked into both the facility that houses them and into the ruins of their minds. A staff member calls them “the lonely people.”

They look out at a world adorned with lights and tinsel in a season where loneliness too often dances with despair. Christmas, to those isolated and troubled, can be the saddest time of the year.

Nowhere is that more evident than here.

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I visited the hospital recently at the invitation of Mike Salka, its Protestant chaplain. An imposing 6 feet 2, Salka might have ended up as a patient himself, but for a belief in God and an iron will.

Kicked out of his house at age 12 by an alcoholic father who tried three times to kill him, Salka enlisted in the Navy at 15 on forged documents and stayed for 24 years. He was a Navy SEAL with seven years of service in Vietnam.

“The day my father kicked me out was the best day of my life,” he says, sitting in a small, mostly barren office in a corner of the state hospital. He pauses for a moment as though reconstructing elements of his past, piecing them together in tiny bits of horror. Then he says, “He hated me the day I was born. I grew up hated.”

Little wonder that Salka, now 60, became a boozer and a brawler himself. But in combat in Vietnam he began to wonder why others were killed or wounded and he remained untouched. “I realized then,” he says, “that God had his protective hands around me.” Thirty days after leaving the Navy, he enrolled at a Baptist seminary.

We walk through the grounds of the hospital where Salka has served for a year as a chaplain. He greets patients both young and old who pass us, those found stable enough to be outside their units.

They call him Chaplain Mike. They shout hellos. They stop to ask questions. Sometimes they just touch him in a gesture of connection missing from their lives.

There are 900 patients here, their illnesses ranging from mild to devastating. Some are homicidal, and the possibility of their “escalation” to violence lingers like a dark mist within the enclosed individual yards or units that compose this place of mixed hope and sadness.

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Mental illness is the growing burden of a stressful age. Almost 20% of Americans 55 or older experience emotional disorders that are not a normal part of aging. Among children 9 to 17, about 21% suffer from mental or addictive disorders. And, says the U.S. surgeon general’s office, it’s going to get worse.

If there is a metaphor for the awful helplessness of someone suffering the torture of a damaged mind, it was that woman in Unit 414, a segment of the hospital composed of patients sent here by the courts. “Human beings,” Salka calls them, “with mixed-up minds.”

The building is no snake pit, but a series of dormitories, a dining room composed of individual tables, the recreation room and, if necessary, isolation rooms. The walls are brightly painted. Sunlight streams in through the windows.

And yet there is that loneliness too. A patient sits, arms folded, staring into space. Another wanders with tears streaming down her cheeks. There is a sense of loss here, a sense of yearning, a sense of anguish.

What chemistry or will of God aided Salka and condemns others? Will we ever know?

I keep thinking of the woman lost in her own empty world, dancing in the darkness of her mind, saying “I love you” to the shadows of her past.

Love is an embracing, consuming emotion that has been abused and defiled in an age that twists its meaning. But the woman in Unit 414 sees it as the only light in her endless midnights, and in that darkness it assumes a mighty meaning.

I will always wonder what has happened to her. She loves us. And in ways that define our humanity, we ought to love her too.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.