As Esther follows Dr. Gordon and prepares to undergo her first electro-shock treatment, she sees a shouting, struggling woman being dragged along the hall by an unsympathetic nurse with a medicinal smell. This wall-eyed nurse tells Esther that everyone is "scared to death" before their first shock treatment. When it is time for Esther's treatment, her temples are covered with grease, and Dr. Gordon fits two metal plates, one on each side of her head, with a strap. When Esther bites down on the wire that he gives her, she is shot through with "air crackling with blue light," and the jolts and flashes that split her body make her wonder "what terrible thing it was that I had done." Later, as Esther sits in a wicker chair holding a glass of tomato juice, after her "punishment," she remembers the time when she received a blue, flashing shock from a defective cord on a lamp beside her mother's bed. The scream that she emitted then was "like a violently disembodied spirit." Dr. Gordon asks her how she feels, and Esther lies and says, "all right." She can remember which college she goes to, and he is satisfied. Her disembodied spirit is not strong enough to rebel against him, to reject the institutions that ultimately seem to fail to protect and help her. On the way home in Dodo Conway's car, Esther experiences a feeling in which her mind seems to be sliding off into empty space, and after she is home she tells her mother that she is not going back to the hospital. Her mother, in classic denial fashion, smiles and says, "I knew my baby wasn't like that."
Back home, Esther becomes fixated on stories about a starlet who committed suicide, and her own demonic voices begin to chide her about her work and her neuroses. She is afraid that she'll never get anywhere so she toys with her package of Gillette razor blades. She goes to the bathtub because a Roman philosopher had said it would almost be pleasant to open his veins in a warm bath. But Esther can't slit her own white, defenseless skin, so she packs up her blades and catches a bus to Boston.
