Madness (15 page)

"Everything. I don't know what I mean." I stare out the window. The air conditioner hums. She sits with her long legs crossed, not getting it at all. I don't know how to make her get it. I don't know what I want her to get. For all her obliviousness, the fact is that I'm not telling her everything. I allude to the chaos, mention the drinking, say I'm scared, but I still make light of these things.

"It's just kind of a nightmare," I say. "My life is a nightmare. The affairs are a nightmare. The stress is a nightmare. The book is late. I'm turning into a monster. I don't care about anything. I feel like I'm going to explode. It never lets up. I feel like I'm choking on it." I look helplessly at her. She gazes calmly at me.

"Are you taking your Depakote?" she asks.

"Yes," I say. "I'm not sure it's helping too much." A psychiatrist with any wits at all would be alarmed at my own admission that I was drinking too much, and would make the obvious connection between the fact of the drinking and the fact that my meds weren't working. But apparently she doesn't have any wits. Depakote and alcohol are an especially toxic combination—both are processed by the liver, and in high enough doses, both can seriously damage it. Even alone, Depakote's not a med to be played with, and its levels in the bloodstream are supposed to be carefully monitored. This psychiatrist doesn't check my levels once, despite the fact that she's upping my dose almost every time she sees me.

"I think the Depakote's working. You'd be in much worse shape if it weren't." She looks at her watch and writes me a prescription. She rips it off the pad and hands it to me. "I'll see you next week."

They ask me at parties,
So, what do you do?
I say I'm a writer.
Really? Fascinating! Fabulous shoes!
I pretend to be one of them, but I'm not and never will be. I begin to have anxiety attacks at the very mention of dinner parties.

But here I am at yet another one. The woman across from me mentions that her mother is a psychiatrist. Brightly, she turns to me.
You're on medication, aren't you?

My wineglass stops on its way to my mouth. I am mortified. Everyone at the table is mortified. Except the chipper woman who asked. I am a freak show. I am not one of them. I am a failure as a wife, already divorced at twenty-five. I will never get married again. I will never learn to play house. I will never be a success.

Yes,
I say, and my wineglass completes its route to my mouth, and I take a swallow and set it down. I play with the stem of the glass and stare at my place mat. Surely someone will say something soon. Surely we will not sit around here staring at me much longer. Soon someone will say,
Anyway—

Thank God, someone clears his throat.
Anyway—

So what are you taking?
the bright woman chimes in.

I want to die.
Depakote,
I say.

I've heard it's a good med,
she says.
But aren't you on tranquilizers?
she asks. Will this never end?
I should think you'd need something to calm you down?
She smiles at me.

Klonopin,
I say, and stand and push my chair in.
Excuse me.
I hurry to the bathroom, my face burning, near tears.

Because I have no other hope of keeping myself from total collapse, I trust my therapist completely. She tells me to take Klonopin, I take Klonopin. She tells me to take massive, toxic doses of Depakote, I take them. She tells me I don't have a drinking problem, so I don't. She's the professional. I swallow my pills each morning and night, with my bedside wine.

I'm working around the clock on the book and school and teaching two classes, drunk or sober, it doesn't matter, and my stress level is through the roof. I've blown through almost all the money I made on
Wasted
and the advances for the novel as well, and I'm not quite sure on what. My friends are giving up on me. I'm not sleeping, I'm having compulsive, risky affairs, hardly eating. Why eat? There are plenty of calories in booze.

Another night, another party, another fabulous red dress: I am in my bathroom putting on red lipstick. I am made up like a little garish doll. I will be the perfect guest.

But I am not well.

My hand shakes. I smear the lipstick. I try to clean it up, only smearing it more. I am gripped with terror. I cannot go. I cannot go to this party. They will see and laugh at me. My lipstick is
crooked. My dress is not right. I am not well, and they will know it. They will see it. They will say,
She is not well. Oh my. She definitely is not well.

I am sitting in the closet in the laundry basket in my dress and fabulous shoes. There is lipstick all over my face. I am sobbing. I hold my head in my hands and pull my legs into the laundry basket. I pull the laundry over me. I am very small and well dressed and my lipstick is done poorly and I cannot leave or I will die.

I am not well.

I am suddenly in Oregon, having driven there from California in the middle of the night. I am on a crowded sidewalk in LA. I am in a hotel room in New York. I don't know how I got here. Anywhere.

I am in Minneapolis, drunk on my mother's couch while the ball drops at midnight in Times Square on New Year's Eve 1999, and it becomes the year 2000, and everyone cheers. I pull an afghan over me and drink white wine from the bottle. Why bother with a glass?

I am inexplicably standing in front of an undergraduate classroom at my school, teaching Shakespeare. There has been a terrible mistake. I am a failure. I am a fraud.

I am on my seventh martini at lunch.

God knows whose bed this is now.

It seems always to be night. I am always in my car. Things flash past. Lights smear across the sky. The Golden Gate Bridge, always a popular suicide spot, swings its mammoth girth beneath my
wheels. I am driving a hundred miles an hour. I dimly remember having dinner with the person in the seat next to me, with whom I may or may not be having an affair. He is screaming and laughing hysterically. I switch lanes with the speed of a racecar driver. I am a racecar driver. I am the Indy 500. I am the car. He screams. I fly.

I am now teaching my class in a bar. It saves time. No need to move between class and happy hour. Happy hour gets longer and longer. Happy hour is all day. In the morning, I get up, swallow my wine and meds, stagger into the kitchen, and pick up the bottle of vodka to steady my body, which shakes so hard I can barely hold the bottle to my mouth with both hands.

At night, the bottle is always dropping to the floor. I swing my head toward it and follow it headfirst. Red wine or vodka or scotch spills all around me. I pick myself up and stagger to bed. Clean it up later. Once I've steadied my hands with the bottle. Which I will then drop.

I am disappearing. Such a hassle; you're sitting there quite peacefully and then all of a sudden you're in Mexico watching a gecko eat the red hibiscus. You're skulking through the Tenderloin, conspiring with the bums. You're lying on the kitchen floor in a cocktail dress; your mother is there;
Darling, do get off the floor, it's not polite, it's really not; no, darling, would you please not climb into the cupboard; darling, are you feeling all right?

I dress myself neatly and head off to school. I actually make it to lunch before I have a drink.

My chemistry's in chaos. I am sleep deprived, poisoned with meds, pickled with booze. That I have made it all this way without dying or killing myself or someone else is a miracle, or a joke. I am a joke, my life is a joke, I win an award for teaching, I delay the book once again. I hole up in my apartment with my bottles and books. I faithfully take my meds and wonder why on earth they're not working. I know I'm going crazy, and the people left in my life watch me turn yellow from the alcohol, shrivel
up like a raisin, clothes hanging on me, hands bony and blue, a chatty head that spins from ecstasy to horror to a mask with empty eyes.

It is only a matter of time.

He is mad before me.

By this I mean he is mad before he meets me, and this summer, he goes mad before I do.

If only things would stay simple: the sound of the foghorns at night, the wild calla lilies that grow along the fence, the cool sharp fog that wraps around my face and throat. But it isn't that kind of summer. And this time I have a partner in madness.

Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire.

You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as you go flying. The car is beside you, smoking, belly-up, still spinning its wheels.

But at first, as always, it fools me. At first it is lovely, showy, hallucinatory, neon bright. I am viscerally, violently alive. I don't know when I turn the corner from merely crazy to completely psychotic, but when I do, Sean turns with me. We draw into ourselves, our eyes rolling back in our heads so that soon we can see nothing but the chaos and terror of our own minds.

We meet when I'm teaching summer school in San Francisco. I
pace in front of the class, leaping, punching the air, pouring out everything I know—I am wildly manic and usually drunk by early afternoon, and the board is crowded with my mad scribbles, so tangled up they're indecipherable. Teaching allows my manic stream of thought to focus on the one thing I still care about: words. Sean is one of my students. Our eyes meet and we read each other's lips, knowing each other intimately at once. When we speak, we hear the weird, warped voice of something insane.

Sean, a slight man, very pale, his short-shorn dirty blond hair receding already, is an astonishing writer. He gives me his novel. It's very dark and very beautiful. Sean is slipping into a psychotic depression, and I am flying toward a psychotic mania. Quickly, our relationship is tight, intense, obsessive. We pour out pages and pages of letters to each other, spend hours each day e-mailing when we can't be together, the connection between us sudden and essential and profound. If both of us are not already losing our slim grips on reality, we will be soon.

But we don't know, or care, anything about that. There is nothing strange about us. Medication isn't necessary. We don't talk about mental illness, which has nothing to do with the perfect union of minds that we have found. Our minds have reached a pinnacle of perception, and we see things the way no one else can see them, and the way we see them is the way they really are.

It is decided that we will leave. We will run away. We will go to the desert, where nothing can touch us, where the lives we hate will be forgotten, escaped. We will find ourselves a map. We will find our way.

The point is the driving. It's the cheap motel, the dust, the sweaty, salty, dirty skin, it's the wind in the window, it's the water, it's the map, which is for tracing where we have been, not where we are going. Mornings, we start driving in any direction, to see what there is to see, to see where we end up next. We collect the names of towns like children collect rocks. We mark them on our
map, which is spread out on the beaded motel bedspread or on the burning hood of the car, heads together, we are
here,
we say, and
here,
and
here,
we trace our path with a red pen, fingernails stubby and filthy. In the car, we're propelled by some weird force. Our feet are heavy on the pedal. The place back there fades in the rear-view and we fly into the arms of something fantastical, more real than real.

We're gone for days, then weeks, a month. No one knows where we are.

THE BORDERLANDS.

We climb out of the car in a nameless town where there is a store, a post office, a white adobe church. The metal cross catches the sun and reflects it so brightly it burns the eyes. The flash of white light repeats itself on the back of my eyelids. We go into the store. The people in it look at us strangely, perhaps because we are gringos and perhaps because we are filthy and look a little nuts. We find a pile of maps. They are maps of the deserts that extend down into northern Mexico. We unroll them on the floor. Which one, which one should we buy?

We could get this one,
I say, unfolding a map of the Chihuahuan desert. Sean glances at it.

Too far left,
he says, and bends his head over a map of Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. We've been through Joshua Tree and Death Valley, where we said nothing and stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the vast expanse of the slender, twisted, black bodies of trees. We wandered off onto it, like walking through a de Chirico, or a Dali: all emptiness, haunted silence, cracked ground. We wandered till dark. Sean had a GPS with him. That was how we found our car.

Then through the Painted Desert, where I pointed out the window at rock formations and color striations. His head turned, almost in slow motion, as he followed things as they went past. The speedometer read over 90. It was excruciatingly slow.

This one,
Sean says, triumphant, looking up from his map. I crouch next to him. I nod.
Of course,
I say.

We leave with a topographic map of the Sonoran Desert. It shows no roads, no towns. Only the infinitesimal, perfectly accurate lines that indicate where a hill rises up a hundred feet, where a stream circles the hill, the lines rippling out from a high point and widening down to a low. With this map, we are ready. Now we will know where we are if we get lost. We will be able to say,
C72, lat 623',
yes, obviously, now we can see. It all comes clear. We are explorers. We have the finest map known to man, the one true map, the map for those who grasp the real significance of the single step this way or that.

We get back in the car. The sun is falling. We drive past a sign that says
G
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