Death Grip (28 page)

By the third group I stake my claim on the seat closest to the door, so I can escape (but to where?). The social worker in charge, Tom, a reformed ex-biker judging by his denim ensemble and handlebar mustache, takes me aside afterward and asks if everything is okay. He says he could feel the fear radiating off me like no one else in the room.

“It's anxiety,” I tell him. “Fight or flight. I need to be by the door.”

“What are you scared of, man?” asks Tom.

“Klonopin withdrawal.”

“Oh … yeah, that's a hard one. We don't, uh, see it very often.”

“What should I do, man? What should I do?”

“I guess I don't know,” Tom says. “You'll have to ask the doctor.…” The guy drifts away.

After lunch I wander out in the courtyard with the other patients. They stand around in packs smoking on the lawn—it's all very high school. They have the world-weary air of combat veterans. The doctors shocked the catatonically depressed woman with whom I played cards this morning. Now she prances about like a child hunting Easter eggs, pointing out the rabbits that occasionally emerge from a warren beneath the grass and proclaiming, “Bunnies! Look,
bunnies!”
Her happiness looks put on to me, like a kid feigning elation at receiving dress socks for Christmas. Maybe this woman thinks the doctors are watching. Or maybe she needs to believe in this because, really, what choice is there?

It's a clear, perfect, autumn day, and I can see a corner of Longs Peak over the fence, the tip of the Diamond in fact, a great alpine wall topping out at fourteen thousand feet where I've had incredible adventures. I feel like pointing it out to somebody, telling them that I've climbed it at least ten times, but then realize I'll only sound grandiose, like I'm fabricating fictions. I swallow my words and look up at the rock, black at this distance, an artifact from another man's life. It's warm enough in the flatlands that climbers could be up there today, making a late-season ascent, donning a third layer of clothing for warmth as the sun slips behind the massif and the meltwater lining the vertical cracks freezes into verglas.

By the fourth group I'm in such a tizzy that I practically hover over my chair. I situate myself again by the door, beside a plumpish, curly-haired woman who was there alone when I came in. She sat spraddle-legged, skirt hiked up, grinning into space, a small boombox blaring tinnily on the seat beside her. I wondered why she had her legs open, glanced over, caught a wink of panties, saw something curious about her eyes like they had sand in them, looked away to spare her any embarrassment. Other patients filed in and the group commenced, more talk about feelings and med compliance and chemical imbalances. I was not and am not listening. I cannot listen. Then:

“Sally, why don't you tell everyone why you're here today?” the nurse prods the woman with the boombox.

“I, uh … Oh really, do I have to?” Sally says. Her face falls a little, the Cheshire cat grin vanishing.

“You don't have to, Sally, no. But I think it would really help everybody.”

“You do? I can't imagine how.”

“Well, you do have quite a story.…” the nurse says.

Sally pauses, then says, “Okay, well, then—it's depression. I've had depression for a long time. Most of my life, I suppose.”

“Depression is tough, isn't it, Sally? That's why you've come here again this week, so we can help you with your depression.…”

“Yes, I'm hoping to feel a little better so I can go home again and be with my family.”

“But this isn't your first time here, is it, Sally?” says the nurse.

“Well, no.”

“And why did you come the first time?”

The woman pauses, inhales, speaks.

“Do I have to?”

“Well, Sally, I'd love it if you did,” the nurse says.

“Okay, it's because I blinded myself,” Sally blurts out. “I took my fingernails in my eyes and scratched them until I couldn't see anymore.”

The room goes silent. I glance over, and sure enough she has the offset gaze of the sightless, her sclera black and sparkling, the irises scarred and furrowed—the “sand” I'd noticed earlier.

“And Sally, why would you so something so terrible?” the nurse asks after a few beats.

“I was having trouble breathing,” says Sally. “Just … trouble breathing all the time, like I couldn't get a full breath.”

“But it wasn't asthma?”

“No. They couldn't find anything wrong with me.… They looked and they never did. To be honest, I was sick of being a soccer mom. I felt so bored and empty and … just depressed, just driving my kids around, driving from one place to the next. Just driving and driving them around until there was no more ‘me' anymore, just this chauffeur. A chauffeur for my kids. One night I looked at myself in the mirror and hated what I saw. And then I started with my fingers.”

“And you blinded yourself,” says the nurse.

“Yes, I blinded myself.”

“And then you came here.”

“Yes, that first time…” says Sally. “They sent me here after the emergency room, after the hospital.”

“Thank you, Sally,” says the nurse.

“That's okay,” says Sally. As soon as she stops talking, Sally's grin comes back over her face. She aims it at nowhere and at nobody in particular.

Then: “See,” says the nurse, “what can happen if we don't treat our depression?”

Nobody says a word. I feel that I might throw up—I have this same trouble breathing.
Was Sally on benzos?
After group ends I almost stop to ask her but then lose my nerve, fearing what she might say. And besides, really, it's Sally's business and no one but hers; she seems almost happier in a world in which she cannot see and in which her only charge is a portable plastic stereo.

Night comes again, dinnertime, a black crashing wave—I'm growing increasingly more confused and agitated around dusk, like my grandfather when he was fading with Alzheimer's. They call this “sundowner's syndrome,” only I'm thirty-three and he was eighty-seven. The anxiety rages like a fever, and I emerge from my room to ask the nurses once, twice, three times when the doctor will see me. This expert shrink will surely, upon, reading the Hopkins evaluation, wave a magic wand and make everything better. He will see me quickly and safely off the final three-quarters of a milligram. They call us for dinner, and I vibrate at the table, wondering how I'm going to choke down a gray slab of dog's-ass meatloaf with a side of spinach entrails when a nurse takes my elbow.

“Okay, Mr. Samet. Dr. Jabba is ready to see you,” she says.

I follow her to a windowless room, go inside, and sit down across from the doctor. He's a fat, jowly, bearded troll with Dick Cheney lizard eyes and all the warmth of an Antarctic ice shelf. He does not extend his hand nor introduce himself.

“It says here, Mr. Samet,” he launches in, leafing through my file, “that you want help getting off Klonopin. Is that correct?”

“I—I—Yes! Yes, I do,” I say. “Please, please, Dr. Jabba. You've got to help. The anxiety is so bad … so, so bad. Oh God, oh please, I need your help.…” I'm openly sobbing before this man, a man I've never met in my life. It's something I would never ordinarily do—in fact, before this period and especially after it, I'm often accused of being too reserved, too silent and emotionally standoffish around family and friends.

“And how long have you been on it?”

“Years. I—I was on Ativan for five or six years, then Klonopin for the last year or two.”

“And you want to stop?” His words are clipped, emotionless.

“Yes, please, please, please help me quit, Dr. Jabba. I—I—I—just want to get my life back. To be with my girlfriend and my dog.” I reach for some tissue, dab my eyes, blow my nose. “I … I'm a climber.”

“And you live here in Colorado?”

Something is wrong. Why is he asking questions he could have easily answered himself by reading my file?

“I do. Boulder. But I thought you—”

He cuts me off: “Look, Mr. Samet. You have chronic anxiety. Why would you want to stop your pills?”

My spirit sinks like the proverbial man who wakes up in a coffin, realizing that he's been buried alive.

“Because I think the pills are making the anxiety worse, Dr. Jabba. Because I—I … This is what I came here to do. The woman out front, she said you guys could help me get off benzos. That's the
only reason
I'm here.” I stutter and stammer as he stares at me with all the compassion a black widow might feel for a fly: “It's … it's what I came here to do. All the way back to Colorado … Didn't you read my evaluation from Johns Hopkins? They said I needed to stop the Klonopin, too.”

“No.”

“No?!”

“No. I haven't had time.”

What?
It has been twenty-seven hours since my admission, three hours beyond the timeframe in which, legally, a doctor must evaluate his patient, and he hasn't even cracked my fucking file? What kind of cunted-up three-ring shitshow is this place?

“But you need to read it to understand what—”

He cuts me off again: “Klonopin
treats
anxiety, Mr. Samet. And I see you sitting in front of me sobbing and clearly severely anxious and wanting to go off, but you need to be on it. The proof is your extreme anxiety. The proof is right here in front of me—
you
yourself are the proof. In fact, Mr. Samet, you need to be on Klonopin for the rest of your life. It is a safe, reliable anxiety treatment, and I can't see why you would want to stop. I'd even suggest that we increase your dose tonight.”

How can this doctor, knowing me for all of two minutes, make the snap judgment that I need to be on benzos forever? This is “health care”? I'm waiting for Allen Funt to emerge from behind the door and say, “Hey, great one, Matt. Well-played, but you're on
Candid Camera
!” What a fine joke that would be.

“But, Dr. Jabba, I'm not here because I want to
keep
taking Klonopin,” I protest. “In fact it's the opposite. I keep trying to tell you that.”

He inhales deeply, rubbery man-teats rippling beneath his cardigan, drawing air down into his panniculus, this shabby, obese, dead-eyed motherfucker who could not even crawl up the cattle trail on mountains I've climbed by their toughest routes. This “doctor” pauses, scribbles a note in my file, and then sighs, loudly, theatrically, exhaling sour smoker's air. This is who I've flown back to Colorado to see: Jabba the Fucking Psychiatrist Hutt.

“Fine, then,” he mutters. “We'll switch you to Seroquel, see how that goes tonight.”

“But—but how long will I be here?” I ask.

“I don't know,” he says. “We'll just have to see. I'll call it in to the med station.” And with that the psychiatrist waves one flabby paw and dismisses me. I shamble out of the room, too dazed even to be anxious anymore. I forgot to ask how Seroquel works, but it hardly seems to matter. I know that it's an antipsychotic. Still stunned, I head for the med station and queue up next to a small, grandmotherly woman who asks my name. I tell her it's Matt, and her eyes light up. She says that Jesus had asked a “Matt” to relay a message to her. Thinking of no better option, I hug her and tell her that everything will be okay. The woman looks into my eyes, mumbles something, and takes my hand to thank me, saying God bless you God bless you God bless you God bless you. She swallows her pills and wanders off. I take the meds they proffer in a tiny Dixie cup, like the sample cups at an ice-cream shop: Trileptal and a dose of Seroquel. I swallow them and return to the dinner table. There someone tells me that the grandmotherly woman's son died and that she has not been the same since, that she is lost in a way no one can fix. I try to eat but within ten minutes can barely move, as if my entire body has been shot full of Novocain. When I stand the room yaws like the deck of an Alaskan trawler, so I shuffle unsteadily to a couch and plop down poleaxed, gripping the armrest and staring at patterns in the linoleum floor. I space out on scuffs and scratches and puke-colored flecks. My thoughts are like blood clots: lodged in there somewhere but dark and obscure, obstructing the proper flow of information.

I couldn't tell you how long I'm on the couch. Minutes? An hour? Days? I feel an arm around me and it's my father. I turn to the other side: Kasey.

“Dash, yoov harsh tor gar meen aortarrr har,” I say. “Kasey, theev garve me a barn pile and eesh … marfing me snicter.”

“What, Matthew? What?” my dad is asking. “Are you okay? Did you see the doctor?”

“Arsh dard I dinnint tell nawr.”

“He didn't see you until now? What—What did they give you?”

“Zhairerquill.” My eyes are glassy, fixed.

“Oh, nuggins,” Kasey says. “What have they done to you? What did they give you? You're not yourself.”

“Auntie shycaustic.”

“Antipsychotic?” my dad asks. “But why?”

“Strawp klonnerpenn … preesh, I wanter go harm.”

“I think maybe you
should
go home,” my dad says. “Did the doctor even read your file from Hopkins?”

“No.”

A flicker of anger crosses his eyes; this is a man who's accustomed, in the medical milieu, to seeing things done immediately upon his request.

“They can't do that,” he says. “They have to see you in twenty-four hours, and we paid a lot of money for that evaluation. I can't believe this.”

Kasey takes my hand and holds it, kneading it in her lap. My mitts are smoother than they've been in decades—office-worker hands, not those of a climber. I'm crying again, but silently, tears gliding over my cheeks, the face muscles frozen. I just want to go home and finish this taper on my own. My dad stands up and says he's going to find the hospital administrator. When he returns with the man—to his credit, profusely apologetic—they agree to release me, and my father pushes the point that in addition to a full refund the facility note that I did
not
leave “against medical advice,” as it might prejudice future practitioners against me. The administrator agrees to everything and has me sign discharge papers. I trail my hand across the page, willing my fingers to close around the pen. We collect my clothes, my new boxer shorts, my new razor, Smeech the frog, a self-help paperback on chronic hyperventilation that I've been reading. I'm starting to unfreeze simply by moving around while my father steadies me. I look back into the room a final time as we go and my roommate's still lying there, looking into the night and awaiting a liver that might never come.