Giving Up the Ghost (24 page)

I knew what I experienced, I told myself over and over again. I knew what was real.

“So Blumfield thinks I imagined the whole Little Girl thing,” I told Laura as we sat on the edge of my bed the next day. “All of it.”

“What do you think?” Laura asked.

“I think Blumfield is an asshole.”

“Well, does it really matter? If you imagined it or not?”

“That’s what I said,” I replied. “Well, that’s what I meant to say. Well, I guess I kinda said it. But I was kinda screaming at the time. And I didn’t quite phrase it that way.”

Laura just looked at me for a moment and slowly shook her head.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook and pen.

“Why are you here?” she wrote at the top of an empty page.

“I don’t know,” I wrote after she passed me the pen. “To find something I’m looking for. To chill out. To get my head straight. WHATEVER.”

“Do you have any idea what you are doing here?” she wrote.

It was my turn to write something, but I wanted her to write the answer too. I so much wanted her to tell me what to do.

“Outside of not getting myself committed to a mental institution?” I wrote.

“Well, that seems to be working out very well for you,” she wrote.

“Very funny.”

“What do you want, Eric?”

Pause
.

“Honestly?” I wrote.

She looked at me and nodded.

“I guess I want peace,” I wrote.

She circled the word
peace
several times, putting a large question mark next to it.

“I just want to be left alone to do my thing,” I wrote. “Freedom not to have to explain things. Not have to struggle all the time. Space … peace.”

“That’s not peace, that’s complacency,” she wrote. “It’s false. There’s nothing worth having that doesn’t require something of you.”

“Ridiculous,” I wrote after snatching the pen. “Effort is exhausting. What’s wrong with wanting peace?”

“No,” she wrote. “What you are asking for is to not have to try. You just need to be happy.”

“To me, having peace is being happy.”

“What good is peace if you aren’t willing to set things on fire?” she wrote.

I looked at her and scrunched my face. What did that mean?

“All I know is that I don’t want to live this way,” I eventually wrote.

She scratched out what I’d written. “Then fight,” she scribbled over it

I took back the pen without looking at her.

“I’m sick of—”

She grabbed the pen from my hand midsentence and scrawled “FIGHT” over what I had just written.

“If I can’t find some—” I wrote.

She pushed the pen in my hand toward the paper to stop me from writing any more, then reached up and turned my face toward her own.

“Fight,” she said out loud.

She placed her hands on my cheeks. She gently drew me to her and kissed me.

“What you need is a reason to want to leave here,” she said after pulling back. “You need a reason to want to be happy.”

She grabbed her bag and seemed to get ready to leave.

She offered no further explanation. What was happy? Her? Something else? I didn’t understand. She didn’t seem to think it was important to explain it to me.

“Oh, I thought you might want this,” she said, pulling a cassette from her bag and throwing it onto my bed. It was the copy of
Music for Airports
that I’d given her the year before. “Sure beats Bob Seger,” she added, nodding and turning to walk out the door.

Later that evening, after the 5B residents had all settled in for that week’s episode of
Highway to Heaven
, I snuck off into the Relaxation Room, remembering that there was an ancient cassette player on the corner table. It was placed there for the convenient playing of the Relaxation Room’s collection of self-help tapes, such as
Lessons in Hygiene, A Better You Through Sharing
, and other similar nonsense.

I pressed the thumb-sized Play button and rested my head next to the speaker, turning the volume up just loud enough that I could start to make out the notes.

I wanted to feel it vibrate against my cheek.

I wanted to soak it in through my pores.

I wanted to breathe it in.

As I heard the first few notes crackle out of the player, I could feel tears roll down my face and collect where the grille of the speaker touched my cheek.

I knew that in a few minutes the staff would notice that I wasn’t accounted for. Then they’d come looking for me. Then they’d probably take the tape away, coming up with some improvised reason about how I could harm myself or others with shards of plastic and forty-five minutes’ worth of magnetic tape.

I knew I only had a moment, so I wanted to drink it in and savor it.

How did I ever get to this point? I wondered. How did I ever come to the point that I’d have to sneak away from a room full of drug addicts and schizoids in order to listen to
some music? A point where my freedom was completely gone? A point where someone had to watch me shave and clip my fingernails?

The sound of
Music for Airports
didn’t seem random at all; it seemed very purposeful. Outside of many renditions of “Heart and Soul” on the ward’s piano, it was the first real piece of music I’d heard since being admitted, and probably the most powerful medication I’d received. It was beautiful.

It was at that moment that I thought to myself: I’ve had enough.

Right there in that room, listening to that tape Laura gave me, I decided that I wanted something more than what I’d allowed myself to become. Listening to the voices and piano notes fade in and out, I decided that I wanted to be happy. If I had to fight for things in life, I wanted to fight for something bigger than the right to eat with a fork. I wanted to love and be loved and feel alive. I had no idea how to find my way, but listening to that music wash over me, I felt, for the first time, that the struggle I faced would be worth it.

Evangelicals always talk about being born and then being born again. They speak of the moment they devoted their life to Christ almost as if it were a reboot, starting over, being born anew. I had no idea of this at the time, but when I look back at that evening, with my head resting on that speaker, I know exactly what they mean, and why. It was a simple stolen moment to listen to some music. However, it was also a mark in time. The end of one life and the beginning of another. I don’t think anyone, except for Laura, thought I had even the remotest chance of pulling it off. That just made me want it even more.

The next morning I walked into Blumfield’s office and apologized for trashing his desk. And for almost doing it again.
And for calling him a needledick motherfucker. And told him I didn’t want to live this way anymore. And if he was willing to help me, I was willing to work hard.

Perhaps I’d been wrong about choice. For me, it felt like that moment was a true choice. At that point, I chose to live.

The first thing Blumfield said after my apology was that he wanted me to take the MMPI test again and actually answer the questions. All of them.

I told him that I’d be happy to do so after they reduced the medication I was on.

No, Blumfield insisted. Test first, then he’d talk with Dr. Chang.

Once again, the test felt like a daylong trip to the dentist. It was awful, and I let everyone know how miserable I was while taking it. I really wanted to tear it to shreds and stuff it down the toilet. But I didn’t. I made myself keep going.

The next afternoon Blumfield and I were in the midst of our regular afternoon session when he got a page to the nurses’ station. He put my file down on his desk and excused himself.

Lying on top of the open file was a neatly typed “Report of Consultation,” dated after my second blowup in his office.

I turned it around and began reading.

Two decades later I’d walk back into Timken Mercy, take the elevator to the records room in the basement, and open up the file containing all my paperwork, nurses’ logs, and reports from my stay at Timken Mercy. I was surprised that they still
existed, having been retrieved from a warehouse a few weeks after I’d requested to see them. The file jacket said that I had also requested to see these records three years after being released from the hospital, but I have no memory of doing so, or why.

Once the file was open, the first thing I noticed was the “Report of Consultation.” Seeing its slightly yellow pages took me back to a vivid memory of sneaking a peek at it that afternoon in Blumfield’s office, absorbing every word as quickly as I could.

When Blumfield walked back into his office and noticed that I was reading the report, he made no effort to stop me.

At the bottom was his diagnosis: schizotypal personality disorder. I pointed to it and looked at him, as if asking what it meant. Blumfield opened a book on his desk, spun it around, and moved it toward me.

Schizotypal personality disorder: “a pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.”

It went on to describe a bunch of symptoms and indicators: odd behavior or appearance, poor rapport with others, a tendency to social withdrawal, odd beliefs or magical thinking, suspiciousness or paranoid ideas, and about a dozen others. Some didn’t fit, most did. As I read through the entry, I couldn’t decide what idea was worse: that someone thought of me this way or that it might be true.

“Do you have any questions?” Blumfield asked.

“So, this is based on your opinion?”

“My assessment, yes,” he said. “Plus the tests you’ve taken.”

I remember wondering to myself why he would let me read it. Was it to humble me? Test me? Teach me something? Whatever he was trying to accomplish, it probably worked. After what felt like an hour of processing this in my head, I finally spoke up.

“So where does that leave me?”

“What do you mean?” Blumfield said.

“Where do I end up?”

“There are a few different directions,” he said. “Some continue into schizophrenia; others find that they can manage quite well with medication and therapy.”

“How do I know where I’m heading?” I said.

“Well, I think a lot of that depends on your treatment—and you have some hand in how that evolves,” he said. “Many people who aggressively deal with this live very normal, happy lives.”

“I was watching TV once and there was a report on about a guy who had his nuts blown off in Vietnam,” I said. “I mean, they didn’t say ‘nuts’ on TV or anything, but it was pretty obvious what they were implying.”

“Okay,” Blumfield said. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Well, he lived in a wheelchair and had no balls,” I said. “I mean, he adopted a kid and was married to this woman with big tits and huge hair, but there was a pall over everything: that he couldn’t walk and had no balls.”

“What is your point?” he asked.

“I guess that all depends on what you define as a ‘normal’ and ‘happy’ life, huh? I mean, this guy had all this stuff that was supposed to make him happy, but you could tell that all he really wanted was his balls back.”