Prozac Nation (38 page)

 

Antidepressants, unfortunately, are not fast-acting. They take anywhere from ten days to three weeks to kick in, and sometimes six weeks isn't long enough. So of course, without the Mellaril, my little orange knockout pills, without any sort of life support system, I feel like hell in the beginning of my Prozac days. My roommates have brought me my little Panasonic tape recorder—the same one I used to take to junior high with me to play Foreigner while I hid and cut myself in the locker room—and I scrunch up in the fetal position and listen to Lou Reed over and over again, no longer finding the twisted poetry of Bob Dylan or the lovesick folkie blues of Joni Mitchell even vaguely apposite.
I'm too afraid to use the phone / I'm too afraid to put the lights on
I listen to the same song the same words the same snarly voice repeatedly like a broken record.

I wonder how long I can lie here, waiting for this fluoxetine stuff to work. But that's the plan, that I'll stay put for however long it takes. I keep thinking of a John Berryman poem in which he talks about lying under a thick green tree, or maybe it's leafless and bare, a weeping willow, waiting for his happy hour.
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy
is the last line. I guess I'm doing the same thing. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.

It's going on a couple of weeks since I last bathed; I am so greasy and broken out that I don't even feel human anymore. I feel more like some piece of poultry, a Perdue chicken going through the forty-four kinds of inspection mentioned in the ads, as an attendant comes in each morning and sticks a needle in my arm to draw some blood and shoves a thermometer in my mouth to take my temperature, as if I were a sick person in the physical sense, as if I were here with pneumonia or mononucleosis or any of the more usual reasons that bring people to Stillman.

Dr. Saltenstahl, the attending physician at Stillman, comes to see me a couple of times a day. I keep telling her I've never felt so low, I can't see any reason to go on like this. And she assures me that someday, when I've worked out a philosophy to live by and found the things that I like to do, I will be happy, I will be fine. She reiterates that the medication I'm on is excellent, has worked wonders for depressed people whom nothing else would help in its pilot programs. She says things like, Give it time.

Dr. Sterling comes to visit me and I keep telling her the same thing, that the fluoxetine isn't working quickly enough. And she too says, Give it time.

God, do I wish that every psychiatrist I have ever dealt with could know what it's like to be a patient and to feel desperate. I wish they could know what it's like to wake up every morning afraid you're going to live. Dr. Sterling keeps telling me that this drug will start working in a week or two, but she doesn't understand that I don't
have
a week or two. She doesn't understand that the pain is so bad that I don't want to live like this anymore. If Dr. Sterling told me, if she promised me, if she guaranteed me beyond a shadow of a doubt that within ten days the fluoxetine would make me feel completely better, I wouldn't care at all, it would not make a whit of difference: It would not make it worth getting through these days, these hours.

I try to convey this to Dr. Sterling, and though she may truly sympathize, all she can say is, “What can I do to let you know that help is on the way? How can I make you see that you
will
get better?”

“You can't.”

She doesn't respond.

“I want shock therapy,” I say. “I've read about it recently, and apparently it works quite well on people who are beyond hope. Knocks your brain out a bit. Or else I want morphine. I want something that will work
now.
”

Through this whole conversation, I'm lying perfectly still on my side, my hair matted down like a layer of glossy brown paint on my head, my voice slightly muffled because I'm sunk into a pillow. I am speaking in a monotone, and I hear myself as if from a great distance. I know the person that is lying in my bed is so low that she's asking for electroconvulsive therapy, knowing that in all its history shock has been administered to reluctant patients who beg to be spared this procedure, but I'm too detached to find my request odd. Right now I'll do anything to feel better. A frontal lobotomy, even.

“Look,” Dr. Sterling says, pushing off the windowsill, where she's been leaning, “I know you're really in pain, but I'm going to have to give this some thought.” She gathers her helmet and begins to wheel her bike toward the door. “I am so certain that the fluoxetine is going to help you really soon that I just have to find a way to keep you going through these next few days. It's already been a week, and I actually think you're doing better. You may not see it, but I do. Your
symptoms,
which is to say, what you are feeling, may not have improved, but your
signs,
that is, the way you appear to people who know you well and can judge, are much better.”

I look at her, even from my prone and expressionless vantage point, like she is totally crazy. “Look at me,” I mumble. “You can't really tell me you think I look better?”

“No, not in obvious ways, but I've been watching you very closely, so that I can see some improvement in you even though you've been in the same position every time I've been here.” She scratches her head and pauses to think for a minute. “What I'm going to do is up your dose of fluoxetine to two pills a day, since I think one has gotten a partial, but not total, response. I'm confident that that will work very soon. In the meantime, I actually think you should get out of Stillman. This might be unorthodox, since in your condition you ought to be protected, but I think that lying here, being so isolated, might be making you worse. It seems to be a pattern with you that certain things that were solutions at one point eventually become part of the problem so you have to find new solutions. It's a sunny day. Go outside. That might help.”

 

The next morning, I'm back in my miserable bedroom in my eerie apartment still waiting for the fluoxetine to work, and Samantha bangs on my door and wakes me just after 9:00.

“Elaine from your mother's office is on the phone,” Samantha says, as she pushes the door open. “She says it's urgent.”

I want to ask Samantha if she can drag the line into my room, which, of course, she can't do because it's not physically possible. Every time I meant to get an extension cord for the phone I was too depressed to go to the hardware store. I want Samantha to make some excuse for me, but I have this feeling I better get up and deal with this. “Hi, Elaine, how are you?” I ask, trying to be pleasant.

“I'm fine, thanks,” she begins, “but, Elizabeth, I don't know how to tell you this, but your mother was mugged this morning.”

“Oh my God!” Just when I thought life couldn't get any worse. “Did anything serious happen? Is she badly hurt?”

“Well, the guy beat her up pretty badly. She's very bruised. And he broke her arm.” The way she's talking, I think there might be some unspeakable detail she's leaving out, but after a minute I realize that that's just Elaine's voice working on my paranoia.

“Is anyone with her? How did this happen?”

“She was walking on Sixty-fifth Street at 6:00 this morning, and this guy just lunged after her,” she says. “She called me from the hospital, and I went to see her. We had a cry together, but she seems okay now.”

“Jesus, I guess I should come down.”

“She said to tell you that she's all right, no need to leave school.”

“But now she's all alone, right?”

“Well, the police came by with pictures of suspects.”

“And?”

“The guy was wearing a hood, she couldn't see him.”

“Oh.”

I know I have to get down there, I just don't know when I can. It's Friday. Maybe first thing Saturday morning.

“Elaine, I mean, is she okay?”

“She's badly hurt.” Elaine doesn't know what I mean. I mean:
Is she losing her mind? Is anyone visiting her?
I know my mother. She is very solitary. Never remarried, isn't the sort to spend hours on the phone gabbing with her girlfriends, she and her sister haven't been getting along lately, her parents are in geriatric lala-land most of the time, my grandfather wondering if I want purple milk or green milk with my breakfast. I'm pretty much all she has, and I'm falling apart right now.

When I call my mother, she insists that I don't have to come down. But then she starts crying about how he didn't have to knock her over and beat her, that she would have given him her bag without all that. She starts asking me why he kept punching her and kicking her in the face while she lay on the ground, she wants to know why he kept brutalizing her even after he had her pocketbook. And then she says she knows they'll never arrest the guy because she can't identify him and that for the rest of her life every young black man she sees might be the one who did this to her. And I just, I don't know what to say, can't think of a single bullshit comforting thought that can possibly put a redeeming gloss on this incident. Instead I promise that I'll take the first shuttle in the morning.

As I get back into bed, I pray for adrenaline, I beg God to make the fluoxetine suddenly start to work, to endow me with whatever it takes, whatever greatness is contained within the human spirit, that will allow me to rise to this occasion and take care of my mother.

 

My mother's room at Roosevelt Hospital is large and tiled. It almost looks like a locker room. A meat locker or a mortuary, a place where bodies rot. It's not at all cozy like Stillman. I walk over to her bed, and there she is, this tiny person with her arm in a sling, two black eyes, a completely bruised face. She is colored a range of purples and blues and yellows, and she looks out of place in this bed, as if she were dropped there out of the sky with no landing gear. That's all that keeps running through my head: This room is so large and she is so small, how will anyone ever know that she is here? She has disappeared in the universe, as I've always feared I might do, and it seems like I'm the only person who might be able to find her.

The nurses' aides malinger at their station down the hall from the room. My mother keeps insisting she doesn't want to see anyone besides me, and I wonder how I can keep from obsessing about suicide long enough to do whatever she needs. The other people occupying this large room all seem to be in their own microcosms of pain, letting out groans or grunts every so often that would seem to indicate that they're still alive. They've got purple legs, necks held in place by gadgetry that look like bird cages, faces slashed and restitched, with lines of red blood seeping through the bandages where the seams of skin are held together. This whole Dantesque scene, this whole carnival of the damned, is too close a match with my mood.

“Oh, Mommy,” I cry when I finally lean down to kiss her. “Oh, Mommy, what happened to you?” I feel myself gasping the way I would if I were crying, but there are no tears. I rub my eyes instinctively, but they are dry. I wonder if fluoxetine has the same anticholinergic effect as Mellaril, turning off the tear ducts, and I feel so terrible being deprived of my tears at a time like this.

I hug my mother, and she hugs me back weakly, one arm flapping limply on my back like a door with a broken hinge, and she says something like “Hi, sweetheart.”

I don't want to hear about what happened, I don't want one more reason to feel unworthy of my misery in the face of someone who has real reasons to feel terrible, but I know I have to ask. “Mom, are you in terrible pain? Have they given you enough painkillers?” I start to imagine myself momentarily transformed into a valiant person, forced into some heroic scene like Shirley MacLaine in
Terms of Endearment
when she runs out to the nurses, who are indifferently filing their nails, and screams that they
must
give Debra Winger something for her pain
right now.
I imagine myself rising to the occasion.

But it won't be necessary. “Yeah, I'm fine, really I am,” my mother says. She's always been a trouper. She doesn't even like having a Demerol intravenous because she's one of those stoic antidrug people who aren't even comfortable taking aspirin for a headache. She's one of those people—bless their souls—who don't complete the Percodan or codeine prescriptions that they get after surgery. Can we possibly be related?

She seems to want to sleep, which is good because I am desperate to get out of there. I feel suffocated and helpless. Here she is, in the worst condition she's ever been in, and all I can think is that I am not strong enough to handle this, I will never get through this. I start wishing I had siblings, I wish my mother had a boyfriend or even a best friend she sees regularly who could come help me out, but the only person she really wants to see is me. I feel like her mountain. Only I'm about to have an avalanche.

 

My mother is supposed to leave the hospital Sunday morning and my aunt and grandparents are going to come into the City to welcome her home. This is going to be one of those grotesque family rituals, epitomized in the extreme in movie scenes of parents greeting their G.I. son at the airport, trying not to act shocked as he returns from Vietnam a wheelchair-bound paraplegic. And when the boy has to be carried in and out of the car, when he can't move by himself at all, when he even needs to be accompanied to the bathroom like a little kid for God's sake, everyone must smile and be warm and act happy to see the crippled man who was once such a wrangly, handsome lad, who can now do nothing for himself. So they try to smile, but their expressions betray the truth: They are grossed out.

My mother, no surprise, looks like hell when I wheel her out of Roosevelt Hospital. Her face is still bloated and blown, colorful in decorator neutrals—burgundies, khakis, grays. Because she was wearing her pocketbook New York-
style—the strap across her chest, instead of just balancing on her shoulder, to protect the bag from pickpockets—the mugger had to pull and twist her quite hard to get the thing off. As a result he broke her arm, and she will need to have microsurgery to repair the shattered bone. In the meantime, some of her nerves have been at least temporarily severed, and her right arm may never be completely functional again. She is a lefty, as luck would have it—or perhaps luck is the wrong word—but it's clear to me that she will be pretty helpless for the next few days. And I feel the wave drowning me.