Madness (18 page)

It is very late now, it is the same night or another night, and the man with the clipboard walks from room to room glancing up at the dry-erase boards outside the doors to check our erasable names to distinguish one drugged figure in the bed marked
W
I
N
D
O
W
from the one in the bed marked
D
O
O
R
.
He will mark on his yellow sheet:
B
(
B
A
C
K
),
L
(
L
E
F
T
),
F
(
F
R
O
N
T
),
R
(
R
I
G
H
T
).
I am
A
(
A
W
A
K
E
).
This too will go down on the yellow sheet and soon they will come, cooing, to give me an
A
(
A
T
I
V
A
N
)
, because
wouldn't it be nice to sleep?

There are two beds in my room. This means I am better now. It means I am oriented. When I came they must have asked me questions to which I did not know the answers—
Do you know what day it is? What year? Who is the president? Do you know where you are?
—but to which I apparently do know the answers now.
Hospital,
I must have said, and that was the right answer so I won, and the crowds cheered. They have moved me from the room where I began, where they murmured, a lifetime before, or last week, where there was only one bed, the emergency psych room. Now there are two beds. Sworls of threadbare blankets wrap around our two figures like cotton galaxies. The thick blue dark gently presses its fingers into our eye sockets, the shallows of our open mouths, the crook of an arm pulled close to the body for heat. A damp and heavy sleep fills the room, a third body, breathing.

These are my facts. There are other facts. I do not learn these facts until much later. The other facts are as follows: I crashed into a depression that lasted for another nine months. The two-year mania in California that led into the psychosis that sent me tearing across the country with Crazy Sean and landed me in the hospital in Oregon for two weeks came to a sudden halt as depression took hold. It was the next stage of the cycle of bipolar: manic
depression hits both extremes, one following the other. The higher you fly, per cliché, the farther you fall. After a manic episode, the body and mind are exhausted, completely spent. I hit the wall. I picture myself flattened against it like a cartoon character, two-dimensional, sliding down.

I've spent my fair share of days flung across the bed, racked with a dull, aimless grief, and I've curled up on the floor in a corner of the room, my thoughts black and seething, and I've understood the word
despair,
the word
defeat.
I've felt the loss of the will to breathe, and felt the momentary wish to die. But it was momentary. I was always able to pull myself out. Or, really, mania always returned and sent me lying again.

This is different. I do not have the energy to pull myself free. I do not have the energy to even care that I am trapped. This is beyond caring, beyond a will to die, beyond will. Death is there, but you can barely lift your hand to reach out for it, and you cringe at the faintest suggestion of light. You can wish for death, but it is like wishing for sleep, a sense of exhaustion so profound that your whole body aches. And just as sleep does some exhausted nights, death eludes you. It is right there. You feel it. But it won't come close enough. And if you have the energy to cry, that's why.

Down, down, down.
It doesn't feel like depression; I am not sad. I am underwater. I am a body. I follow the world through my telescope. I am drugged, and so feel nothing at all, as the doctors scramble to find some combination of meds that will stabilize me. I sleep almost around the clock. The doctor explains to me that I am very sick. She explains to me that I need to stop drinking or I will never get better, it will always be this bad. My parents explain things to me too. They speak slowly. They explain to me, over and over, where I am, but I am profoundly confused. They sit in the hospital all day, every day, propping up my head with their hands, answering my endless, repetitive questions, wondering if I will return to sanity soon, or at all.

After two weeks, I am discharged and taken to my aunt's Portland house to recuperate. I go to sleep for a week, passed out on the living room floor. When I'm marginally cognizant again, my mother and I fly back to San Francisco. The plan is that I will enter a day program for people in crisis—people who are severely depressed, manic, paralyzed with anxiety, but presumably not psychotic, and believed to be nonsuicidal. My mother is staying at a hotel near my house, spending virtually every waking moment with me until I get back on my feet. I'm not suicidal because I couldn't possibly make myself care enough that I am alive to summon up the energy to off myself, not that I could even organize such an event if I tried. I cling to my mother like a monkey, her presence the only thing that makes sense.

She drops me off at the hospital for day treatment every morning, and I spend the day in group therapy with the rest of the completely nonfunctional patients. The room feels strange, hollow, populated by motionless silent bodies who sit, unaware of the sunny summer day outside. There is a sense of being nowhere, floating on the hospital floor in the middle of space. The cumulative madness in the room circulates, collecting on our shoulders and weighing them down.

We sit in a circle, trying to talk. The day program tries to give us something to do other than kill ourselves or lie on the couch thinking about how depressed we are and how much we wish we were dead. It is meant as a crisis-management program only, intended to keep us safe and occupied for as long as the episode lasts and until we are able to function on our own again. Most of the patients are depressed. I am not sure why I am here. I don't feel depressed. I feel nothing at all.

At home, my mother sits with me, talks slowly and gently, as if
talking to a skittish dog. Her presence is the only thing that I am fully aware of. I am terrified all the time. I ask her the same questions over and over, make her repeat the answers until my fear lessens a little bit, only to fixate on something else to fear. I make her explain everything to me, and I nod, but I don't understand.
Oh yes. I see.
I see nothing but the reeling sun. The world is enormous. I am a tiny speck on earth, and I cling to my mother's ankle, crawling up her leg like a flea.

"But what if I get lost?" I am frantic. We are trying to leave my house.

"You won't get lost. I'm with you."

"But what if you lose me?" I stare into her face with the fervent faith in her rightness usually seen in zealots.

"I won't lose you. You can hang on to my sleeve."

I nod. "All right," I say. I pace, then stop. "What if
you
get lost?"

"Then we're screwed." My mother laughs so hard she nearly falls off her chair. I don't think it's funny at all, and start drawing a map.

Another day of day treatment. They have steered me onto the correct floor and into the correct room, and now I am lying on the floor of the psych ward lounge. The sunlight blares into the room. The institutional curtains are from the seventies, orange with little white squares. They are bleak and so I close my eyes. Periodically, someone tries to rouse me, but it is a Herculean effort to lift my head a few inches, to whisper that I can't stay awake. Dimly, I watch the other depressed people sitting in a circle, on couches and chairs. I am bewildered by the fact that they are upright.

There is a young woman on her knees, rocking, wailing, afraid. Her voice tears at my ears and I think I will die if she does not shut up.

I fade in and out of a sedated sleep. There is a perky young woman. I've met women like that. They take their perky, happy faces out in public, and wear them around, smiling and smiling,
and then they go home and shoot themselves in the head. I watch her. She smiles and chatters on. "So my friend Dave called me this morning, and he said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'I got out of bed. I ate some cereal. Now I'm lying on the couch.' And he said, 'You rock!'" She laughs. "So I felt good for a minute. But then I hung up the phone and everything emptied out and I wanted to be dead all over again." She laughs.

The therapist says, "Cathy? Would you like to say something?" All heads turn to Cathy. Cathy is enormously pregnant. Her face is entirely still. She stares into space. Her hands are folded on her lap. I understand that she cannot move her mouth to say no, and she cannot shake her head either.

"Aren't you even excited about the baby?" the perky woman asks, horribly. "Doesn't that make you happy?"

The woman is not excited about the baby. It does not make her happy. The baby is just one more thing that requires her to be alive. I want the perky woman to go away and leave Cathy alone. The agitated woman rocks and wails.

Everyone in this room is crazy. I fall asleep again.

At the end of the day, I follow everyone else out of the building. Someone asks me how I'm getting home. I stare at her, drawing a complete blank. Well, do I need a ride? Blank. Where do I live? I recite my address, which I know in case I get lost and have to find a policeman who will guide me home. Just to be on the safe side, I recite my phone number as well. Then I remember—my mother and I agreed that I would brave the bus and get home all by myself. Right-o. This person goes away. I stand on the hospital steps, holding my purse by the strap. I go down the steps, look both ways, and cross the street. This is easy. I take the bus all the time. I see other people standing on a corner. I join their group and we all turn our faces in the direction from which the bus will come. We stare that way for a while.

Then a car drives up and I watch while all of them climb in and drive away.

I look around for the bus stop sign. There is no sign. I am frustrated with myself. What an idiot. I keep walking down the busy street until I come to another cluster of people. "Is this a bus stop?" I ask no one in particular. Everyone turns to look at me, then goes back to watching the road. I stare at a woman who is reading a book until she looks at me. "Is it?" I demand. "Is what?" "Is this a bus stop?" These people are deaf! "Yes," she finally says, giving me a look and going back to her book.

Well, very good. I climb onto the bus with the rest of them and take a window seat. I settle in to enjoy the ride. Everyone is being very quiet, on this bus. I look around. Everyone is being quiet because they're all looking at me. I swish around to face the back of the head of an elderly Asian man. I sit there being unnoticeable. A moment later, I venture a quick glance over my shoulder. Still staring! What is it? I check my fly, rub my nose, straighten my glasses, and then I hear it. They're talking. I train my ears on what they are saying, but I can't make it out. There is a little boy sitting next to me whose feet dangle off the seat. I wonder momentarily where his parents are, then consider whether I will ask him what they're saying. If I ask him, he could consider me odd. He could get up without a word and change seats and stick his little freckled nose in the air. So I say nothing, listening to the rising hum of them, whispering, talking in low voices, getting louder, and
still
I can't make it out. I look around, trying not to be obvious. A very old woman the size and substance of a feather is hanging on to her grocery bag with both arms and glaring at me. I have done nothing to her. Why does she glare? There is a gaggle of horrible teenagers with black fingernails and green eye shadow and teased pink and blue hair. They represent my adolescence and terrify me. They are talking, their heads bent together, gesturing subtly in my direction, just like the girls at school used to do. Just ignore it. Ignore it. They can't hurt you. A businessman holds on to the post and pretends to read his newspaper. He is watching me over the top of it. He thinks I can't see him, but I can. I see them all. I know their tricks.
The din of their voices, all sibilants and hums, rises to a particularly disturbing pitch.

"What are they saying?" I can't take it anymore, it just comes out. I know I'm being weird, but this paranoia will not subside, no matter how I tell myself it's all in my head. I bend down to the little boy's ear, trying to be both inconspicuous and nonthreatening. He looks up at me. I smile a great big smile, feeling a little wild. "Don't worry," I say. "There's no reason to be afraid of me." This widens his brown eyes considerably, and I realize my error in even
mentioning
being afraid, but he is a brave soul and doesn't bolt. "Just tell me what they're saying," I whisper.

"What who are saying?" he whispers loudly. Now everyone is looking at him too, because he has been caught talking to me.

"Shhh!" I hiss. "The watchers." I nod my head over my shoulder. "Them."

He cranes his neck around. "They're not talking," he says in his deafening whisper. He looks back up at me.

"They are!" I say. "You just can't see it. They're sneaky, the watchers. They like to keep you off-guard."

He stares at me, his eyes cartoon-huge. The bus slows and the bus driver calls out the stop.

"I have to get off now," the little boy whispers. He points over my shoulder. "That's my mom."

I look. "She looks very nice. Off you go."

"Are you going to be all right?" he whispers, worried. His mother will wonder why he has lost his voice. He will say it is because he was talking to the crazy lady on the bus.