Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (17 page)

In a totally unscientific survey of RNs done right around the time of my fourth psychotic break, I was named the number one pediatrician by
Boston
magazine. Truth is stranger than fiction.

I had prayed and God said things would be okay and I assumed it meant okay without my having another breakdown or having to go to the hospital. God was a lot less wordy than the voices. He also neglected to say anything about my marriage, which was unlikely to be improved by my hospitalization and not being able to work for a while.

I had a memory of throwing rocks that I had grabbed from an aquarium at my wife right before I tried to go through the window. That wasn’t like me. We had seen two marriage counselors at that point, and I should have had at least a clue that things might not work out no matter how little she or I wanted to get divorced.

During my first break, the content of my delusions involved questions of human existence that went back to the beginning of time. This time it seemed largely about the advantages of free-market economies. Nuclear war would be averted and the Berlin Wall would come down if I emerged victorious. Anyway that’s what I was told. It boiled down to me against the Russian Bear.
The hopes and fears of all the world are met in thee tonight
.

Win or lose, the cover story would be the same: I was crazy of course, in a hospital of course. The department will deny all knowledge of your mission.

“I’m here to stop the war,” I explained. “I don’t really care
that much about free-market economies.” It seemed like I was getting dragged into disputes of less and less caliber. Free markets? Next they’d be summoning me to settle zoning disputes.

The voice of God is in the wind.

There’s nothing in the world to be afraid of. There’s nothing that’s not in the world
.

You are in the palm of God
.

“Does that mean I don’t have to wear seat belts? What about saving for college or retirement? Could it all be just silly?”

Beguiled again, a child again, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered
.

I was on a quiz show again.

“John Coltrane was from South Carolina. High Point, I believe.”

Why aren’t there more questions about early Christianity?

It wasn’t so much the voices, but I wished everyone wasn’t dying and going away forever. I wished I didn’t have the feeling there was something I was supposed to do about everything. I wished we could go back to not having everything be so important. There’s always an earthquake somewhere.

Someone could no longer remind me of someone without actually becoming that someone. The difference between hearing something that sounded like my name and hearing my name was the difference between sleeping in my own bed and waking up in that windowless room where big people come and give me shots.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff
.

Why is there so much meaning when the mind breaks? Why isn’t it just static or nonsense? I became convinced that my
being willing to wrestle the Russian Bear could avoid a nuclear exchange and save millions upon millions of lives, not to mention the planet, from nuclear winter. The content of the voices and visions constitutes a hazardous nuisance to someone like me who so likes to figure out puzzles.

The first time I went crazy I thought that good things might come out of it. I looked forward to learning whatever it was the voices knew and how they knew it. I thought it might be possible to acquire powers that could be used for good. I was asked to save human existence and wanted to do my part.

In the seclusion room I was riding a pendulum that would swing from the past through the present into the future and back again, though that wasn’t all there was to it. There would be times, very brief times, when I was okay and could understand and make myself understood and where it wasn’t all lurching gobbledygook. Before I swung out of the present and was really nowhere again, I wanted to wake people up and tell them I was okay so that they wouldn’t give up on me.

I was a late entry in a very complicated battle of the beatitudes, in lieu of war, where the poor the hungry the sick the naked the meek of all cultures and nations could settle arguments and avoid bloodshed. I didn’t argue as much as maybe I should have, but my capacity for faith and supposition and quick connections was a lot of why the job had fallen to me in the first place. I had handlers who packed me in cotton and foam and smuggled me across borders. It was important that I be very still and quiet and keep my eyes closed.

What do you have in there?

There were passwords.

“You don’t want to know.”

Where’s the princess?

“Okey-dokey.”

The eagle has landed
.

The bear doesn’t want to talk about it
.

“You want me to do
what?”

They would put me next to someone else from somewhere else, and I, or they, would win. It had something to do with depth of human feeling. It was like we were in a stadium full of utterly quiet, meek, sick, poor, hungry people who decided to back either me or the other quiet, packed-in-cotton-and-foam person.

“So the meek really do inherit the earth,” I thought.

When I won, I went forward to the next round with the backing of all the people who had backed the person I had beaten. The losers went back to doing whatever they had done before after having their memory erased. Nothing bad happened to them.

I kept winning round after round. Having my memory erased and going back to whatever normal was would have been more than fine with me. All of China gave up without even trying.

“We have some crazy people here, but no one that crazy.” And it was on to the next round.

During this time the hospital billed Blue Cross Blue Shield for two thousand dollars’ worth of psychotherapy I don’t remember.

The thread that was to help me succeed in getting to wrestle and prevail over the Russian Bear was the joke about the courageous Indian brave:

There’s a young warrior who is told by the shaman that he can have a long, happy life and save his father from the loan shark, his tribe from starvation, whatever, if he…

1. Climbs an unclimbable mountain and brings back the tail feathers of an eagle from the nests on top of the unclimbable cliffs.

2. Wrestles a polar bear.

3. Makes love to a beautiful princess.

He climbs the mountain, scales the cliff, gets the tail feathers, then comes back to the village, his clothes and self bloody, torn, and tattered.

“So where is the princess I’m supposed to wrestle?”

Yip di mina di boom di za

What’s the white stuff in bird poop?

“That’s bird poop too.”

Explanations of what was going on and why were presented by the voices.
You know that you are dead. You know the world is ending. You know it’s up to you. Package it up. Put a skim coat on it and hope people think it’s a wall
.

There were five teenagers in the dayroom who threw things at me and called me
doctor
. I was an injured lion circled by Rhodesian ridgebacks. I hoped one of them would slip and get close enough for me to grab.

There are no grown-ups
.

There will be no reckoning
.

The day before the day before Christmas 1985, in the dayroom where the five mean teenagers ruled, I went up to the very overweight curly-haired girl I knew was the Russian Bear and said, “Do you want to dance or what?” and she fled crying. It was pretty much the end of Soviet-style communism. They took me back to my room like nothing big had happened.

It was over. I tried to explain my theory of grammar and psychosis to the people at the hospital, and they listened politely.

My hospitalization was all black and gruesome punctuated by daily moments of peace and light when they gave me pathetic little fragments of Xanax around 5
P.M.
For twenty minutes or so there would be hope in the world and color and then it would fade and I’d wait for 5
P.M.
the next day. Never trust a drug that’s spelled the same backward and forward and has two
x
’s in its name.

I was not addicted to Xanax. That would have made me a drug addict. I just needed it to breathe. Six years of drinking a little every day with a little Xanax to help me sleep = no trouble. One week of no drinking, no Xanax = big trouble. It’s not easy
to go from being one of the seven righteous pillars holding up the planet to being just another mental patient.

My frightened eight-year-old son came out of the fog to visit me in the hospital. I wished very much that he didn’t see me like that. Maybe having kids was pushing things too far.

Big strong man, strong right arm, machete, will of steel, had managed to hack his way deep into the jungle.

“Things will get better, Zachary.” I vowed I would fight through hell itself (might as well, since I was already there) to make this moment go away and not be what my precious son remembered of his father. My mother looked at pictures from her childhood and saw a mother not able to look at or pay attention to her little girl. She was not sure for how long or how many times her mother was hospitalized.