Sleeping Awake (20 page)

Nicolaas grabbed me again. I
slapped him away, jumping off the bed and curling into a corner.

“Leave!”

Nicolaas got up and made as if
to come towards me.

“LEAVE!”

He froze.

I closed my eyes. “Please.”

When I reopened them, he had
gone. The necklace was still on my bed.

*~*

It was happening again.

Dark Clouds.

No light.

No smile.

No love.

Nothing.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t
expect it; the peace always got disturbed eventually. I reverted to my old
routine.

No sleep.

Kept to myself.

Drank whatever I could get my
hands on.

Turned off my phone.

Wished that it were all over.

Totally and completely numb.

The anti-depressants didn’t
work. The anti-psychotics didn’t work. The mood-stabilizers didn’t work. The
sleeping pills didn’t work. The string of psychiatrists didn’t work. Attempting
suicide didn’t work.

I was living until I was
allowed to die.

*~*

       I
awoke at dawn.

My mind was racing; I couldn’t
think clearly.

Images raced across my mind, spiralling
blurs of black, white and gray.

There was only one thing to
do.

I grabbed my easel and paint
and headed to the pool house.

I drew the girl
first—naked. She had her head in her lap. Her hair fell and covered her, trapping
her in the dark.

Next came the circle. Large
and spherical; a bundle of missed opportunities. A murky gray filled the inside
of this circle of despair; it looked like mud. Mud ruined everything.

An owl sat in a tree outside
her bubble and watched her with its yellow eyes as every pill imaginable fell
from the sky.

All day long, I painted. Joni
Mitchell floated through the speakers.
“I really don’t know life at all…”

Amen, sister. Amen.

I neither knew anything about
life, nor what I wanted to do with mine.

I graduated from prep school.
I smiled for the camera, went to dinner with my family afterwards, and headed
to Bryn’s suite at the Four Seasons Hotel for a graduation party.

I did everything that my
fellow seniors did. I was second (to Bryn) in the graduating class with a 1590
SAT score. My teachers forgot about the fact that I didn’t talk in class unless
called upon along with all of my other surly qualities; they gladly wrote me
glowing recommendations. My guidance counsellor forgot the fact that I’d been
forced to see her for an entire semester in my sophomore year after a failed
suicide attempt. Everyone was willing to do anything for me, so that when I
inevitably went on to make a name for myself, it would also be noted that I
went to Lycée Olivier Dumas, which
must
have contributed to my
success.

I went to NYU and allowed
Maman to convince me that being undeclared was not unacceptable, even though
she had her fifteen-year plan drafted by the time that she was sixteen and saw
it through all the way to the birth of final baby number two, which had
unexpectedly turned out to be babies two and three.

Come the end of my sophomore
year, I was still no closer to declaring my major or changing the world. I
cracked. I had a nervous breakdown and showed the world just how sad of a
creature I was. I went to Golden Ridge instead and passed that course with
flying colours. I came home and what?

Nothing.

Still a failure.

Still undeclared.

I was almost twenty-three, and
I would be the laughing stock at next year’s five-year reunion.

*~*

Some time later, someone
knocked on the door. I imagined that it was Cienna coming for another talk.

“I’m not really in the mood to
talk,” I called.

The door opened regardless.

“That’s too bad, because I
am.”

Nicolaas.

I froze. My heart started
beating at an unnatural pace.

“What are you doing here?” I
eventually managed to ask.

“I was about ask you that
question myself,” he replied. His voice was annoyingly calm.

“What?” I snapped.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“No.”

He stepped past me anyway.

“I said no!” I tugged on his
polo. It was green, a colour that’s always looked delicious on him.

He slapped my hand away. “I heard
you. Is this the reason why you won't return any of my calls?" He sounded
almost conversational.

“Get away from it!” I yelled,
covering the canvas.

“Touchy, aren’t we?” His
eyebrows arched to an almost impossible height.

I hated it when he got like
that. He was reading my mind and violating me; toying with me until I broke. I
reached for my box of cigarettes. I refused to be turned into his guinea pig.

“Why have you been avoiding my
calls?” His voice got softer.

I knew what he was doing. He
was trying the “Noira, I care about you,” approach.

I wasn’t going to fall for
that one either.

“I had no desire to speak to
you.”

“And why is that?” he
continued, not at all affected by my comment.

Why. Why. Why.

“Because I wanted to be alone.
If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t really spoken to my sisters either.”

“It doesn’t.” He took two
steps and in an instant, was crushing my cigarette under his size thirteen
shoes. Fucking giant.

“Why did you do that?” I
shrieked.

“Why don’t you be a nice girl
and tell Daddy what’s wrong?” He sat on the sofa and pulled me onto his lap.

“You’re not my father.” I
said. I made no effort to try and move, because I knew that it would be futile.

“Alors, il y a vraiment un
problème, non?”

“Stop it!” I demanded. I
didn’t care if he thought that my not wanting to talk to him was a problem.

“Comment?”
he asked innocently.

“Quit speaking to me in
French!”

“Pourquoi?”
he asked.
He clamped his hand over my
mouth and stifled my scream before it could even escape my throat. “Now are you
going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to spank you first?”

“Fuck you!” I hissed when he
released me.

“Bend over, and I will.”

His hand once again suffocated
my new scream of frustration. This was why I didn’t get close to someone. They
got to know me too well and pushed all my buttons, even when I didn’t want them
to.

“If you’d just tell me what’s
wrong with you, Noira, then everything else will be fine. Is it your mother?”

“Don’t speak about my mother!”
I glared at him.

“Then what is it? Why have you
been avoiding my calls?”

“Because I’m sick of you!”

“Sick of me?”

“Yes!” I shrieked. “Sick of
you and your fucking big feet crushing my damn cigarettes—”

Nicolaas interrupted me. “My
big feet crushed those cigarettes because you need to stop smoking.”

“The only thing that I
need
to do, Nicolaas, is die.” I wriggled around in his lap trying to pry myself
free. His cologne was making me nauseated.

“Well keep on smoking those
damn cigarettes of yours and you’ll end up like your mother, battling cancer.”

I slapped his face. I could
hear the sound of the wind as my hands spiraled through the air and a loud
“splat” announced contact. He let me go, and I backed away from him. There was
a large red imprint of my hand on his face. I felt torn between wanting to caress
his cheeks and wanting to punch him.

He stood. "I didn't mean
it."

"Yes," I replied,
"you did."

"No. I didn't."

“Then
why
did you say
it?” I asked. I watched as his shoulders sagged and he ran a hand through his
hair.

“Because you scare me,” he admitted.

I laughed. It started at the
very bottom of my belly, and erupted into every corner of the room as I threw
my head back. I had to lean against the wall in order to steady myself.
Nicolaas watched me the entire time, squinting as if a sharp pain was shooting
through his body.

“Not returning a few phone
calls scares you?” I pursed my lips.

“No,” he whispered.

“Then
what
?”

He
walked over to my easel. “This.”

My breathing stopped again. It
felt as if he had peeled off my skin and was watching my heart beat. “Stop it,”
I commanded.

He turned slightly. “Is that
girl supposed to be you?”

“What does it look like?”

He looked back at the painting
for a while then quietly replied. “It looks as if you're suffering; like you're
trapped.”

“Well I am,” I replied. I
walked over and blocked the painting. I picked up the box of cigarettes. This
time, he didn't stop me. I watched him stare at me, silently daring him to tell
me to not smoke once again.

“Noira, why are you doing this
to yourself? Why won’t you let me love you?” he asked. The pained expression
was back on his face. I ignored the urge to take him into my arms.

“Does it matter? You think that
I'm killing myself, so what's the point of knowing?”

 “I never said that,” he
said.

 “Okay, fine. You never
said that.” I exhaled again and watched as the smoke curled and floated towards
the ceiling. “Moving along.”

“What's wrong with you?” He
asked.

I shrugged.

“Don't give me that look. You
wouldn't be doing this to yourself…” He pointed to my painting. “…You wouldn't
feel trapped if nothing were the matter.”

I felt as if I was about to
jump out of my skin and maul him with my bare nails. “I'm sick, okay?” I
screamed.

“What?”

“You know all those rumours
that I told you about?”

“What?”

I began pacing. His sudden
stupidity was infuriating! “The ones about me being crazy and what not. Well
they're true.”

He
still
looked
confused.

“I'm Bipolar,” I snapped. “A
mental case.”

That wasn't exactly the way
that I planned on telling him. I hadn't even planned on telling him at all. But
now he knew the truth.

“Well?” I placed my hand on my
hips.

His eyes returned to me. “Well
what?”

“Aren't you going to leave?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Yes.”

Big lie. Huge lie. Possibly
the biggest one I'd ever told. I stared straight ahead. 

Wordlessly, Nicolaas turned
and left. I watched him close the door and reached for my cigarettes.

They always left in the end.
 

**~*~*~**~*~*~**

I barely made it to my room after
Nicolaas left. After crossing the threshold, I fell to the floor and
instinctively curled into the foetal position. My face became wet as hot tears
splashed their way down my cheeks. I tried to raise my hands to wipe them away,
but I could not move. There’d been a period at Golden Ridge when I’d been so
depressed that the only physical movements that I could manage were to blink
and to breathe. For one month, I lay in bed, my brain seemingly detached from
my body. I was diagnosed with psychomotor retardation. It was if I was taking
part in someone’s sick puppet theatre as I was stripped naked, bathed, fed
various cocktails of medication without my consent, hooked up to a feeding
tube, and left to the general mercy of whichever nurse had been assigned to my
care that day. All the while, a persistent voice rang in my ear:
Get up. Get
up. Get up.
It was a fate worse than any death that I’d imagined.

As I lay on the floor in my
bedroom, I did something that I hadn’t thought of doing in well over eleven
years: I prayed and made a pact with God that if I was spared from another
episode, I’d get help.

The next morning I woke up in
my bed. Cienna and Camelea sat on the chaise by the window. It was the first
time that I’d seen them in such close proximity without verbal insults and
daggers flying between them. As I struggled to speak, they rose.

“Can you move?” Cienna asked.

I tried to wriggle my fingers.
Beneath the sheets, I saw movement. “Yes.”

Camelea turned and went
towards my closet. I watched as she opened the doors and pulled out a black
dress.

“Do you think that you can
manage to shower on your own?” Cienna asked.

“What’s going on?”

“Someone is here to see you,”
Camelea responded. “You’re not well.”

“What?” It felt like pushing
weights off my chest as I sat up in the bed.

Cienna walked into the
bathroom instead of answering me. A few seconds later, I heard the shower running
and Camelea, having placed the dress and shoes that she’d selected on the
chaise, gave me her hand.

“If you called someone at
Golden Ridge,” I warned. “The next that you see me will be in a coffin.”

“No one said anything about
Golden Ridge,” Cienna replied. She stood in the doorway between the bedroom and
the bathroom, scowling down at me. “Your last stay there obviously didn’t
work.”

“Then who is here?” I
demanded. Camelea tried to give me her hand again, but I ignored her.

“Dr. Roth,” Camelea responded.
“He’s a psychiatrist who specializes in Bipolar Disorder and schizophrenia.”

I allowed Camelea to lead me
towards the bathroom. Evidently, God was determined to keep me to my word.

“I can shower and dress
myself,” I declared as we entered the bathroom.

Wordlessly, Camelea and Cienna
left. It was a strange sight watching them together.

I took my time getting ready.
Western medicine had beyond exhausted me, and I doubted that anything that Dr.
Roth prescribed me would work. Still, time waited for no one, and I eventually
found myself opening my room door, dressed and ready to meet my fate. Dr. Roth,
a prematurely gray man, who looked more like an aging Hipster with his
oversized glasses and tight jeans than a psychiatrist, stood to greet me. I wondered
where Cienna and Camelea had gone to find him.

“Hello, Noira,” he crooned.
“How are you feeling today?”

“Like shit,” I replied.

Camelea winced. Dr. Roth
smiled. “That’s good. I’d have driven a long way for nothing if you had replied
‘Fine.’”

I fought the urge to return
his smile. Instead, I turned and beckoned him into my room. Cienna and Camelea
didn’t follow.

“Sit wherever you’d like,” I
said, closing my room door behind me. Unsurprisingly, I turned to find that Dr.
Roth was making himself comfortable on the chaise. I took the window seat and
waited until he’d gotten his iPad out to begin.

“None of the medication that
I’ve been prescribed has worked,” I announced. “I doubt that anything that
you’re thinking of will do anything for me.”

“I’m not just here to
prescribe medication, Noira,” Dr. Roth replied.

“You’re not?” I frowned
slightly. What was his deal?

He shook his head. “No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To help you. Tell me what’s
been going on, if you don’t mind. Your sisters think that you’d stopped taking
your medicine.”

So they had noticed.

“They’re right,” I replied,
leaning against the window.

“What were you on at the time
and why did you stop taking them, besides the fact that they stopped working.”

I sighed and began reciting my
daily bread. “Lamictal, 150 mg. Geodon, 80 mg. Ambien CR, 12.5 mg. Cymbalta,
100 mg. Sometimes Xanax, which didn’t work, but I don’t remember the dosage.”

“Any side effects,” Dr. Roth asked.

“Geodon made my bladder
overactive and caused me to sleep shortly after taking it. Ambien CR kept me
awake, strangely enough. I gained weight with the Cymbalta. The Lamictal didn’t
seem to do anything for the mood swings”

“Are you currently in
therapy?”

“No.”

Dr. Roth looked up. “You’re
not in therapy?”

I shook my head.

“They discharged you from
Golden Ridge without releasing you into the care of a psychotherapist?”

I nodded. “I have…had a
psychiatrist, but I never went to see him for a follow-up appointment. I weaned
myself off the medication before it was time for my refill.”

“You should be in therapy,”
Dr. Roth declared.

“I agree.”

Dr. Roth set aside his iPad. I
watched as he took off his glasses and ran his hands over his eyebrows.
Nicolaas sometimes did that when he was tense and needed to relax.

“My advise for you will be
simple, and even though there are those who frown at my methods, I’ve seen
improvement in my patients who’ve followed my instructions.”

I sat up, intrigued. A rogue
doctor.

“No sugar, no alcohol, no
caffeine.”

“What?” I asked, alarmed. “I
have to have Earl Grey in the mornings, and I drink wine with dinner—”

“No sugar, no caffeine, and no
alcohol,” Dr. Roth continued. “And you will exercise for an hour each day and
attend thrice weekly meditation classes.”

“No,” I said, folding my arms.
“I am not giving up my tea. And what am I supposed to do about the no sugar?
Sugar is in
everything.
”

“Sugar is not in everything.
Sugar is in processed foods, sweetened juices and desserts. Fruit is fine.
Anything with “sugar” as an ingredient is not. You will eat clean, whole foods.
And as for your tea, would you rather have a life without intense mood swings
or a daily cuppa?”

“But…”

“Your sisters told me that
they found you on the floor yesterday and that you couldn’t move. Do you want
repeat episodes of this?”

I held my tongue.

“You are to do this for a year
before we decide whether or not this is working for you.”

“And you really think that
cutting out these things and meditating will cure me?”

“Nothing will cure you, Noira.
Bipolar Disorder is for life. But yes, doing these things will help control
your mood swings. You might still get depressed, but you won’t become
suicidal.”

“And the mania?”

“None of my patients have
experienced mania, or at least, not in the traditional sense. They have periods
where they feel more energetic than usual, but that is why I recommend that you
meditate.”

“And what if this doesn’t
work?”

“What do you have to lose,
Noira? You’re not taking medication now, and by all accounts, you are very
unstable. I don’t think that you can afford to not try…”

He was right. Whatever had
happened to me the day before obviously hadn’t been a relapse into severe
depression, but I was disassociating none the less. I’d already lost Nicolaas.
The only thing that I had left to lose was my sanity.

“…And you will be on
medication again.”

“What?” I began to protest.

“You were on the wrong kind of
medication, and your previous psychiatrist obviously didn’t listen to your
concerns about the side effects or the Lamictal not working.”

I sighed. I had made a pact
with a God that I wasn’t sure that I believed in that I would get better, and I
had clearly gone so far off the path of normalcy that my sisters had taken
matters into their own hands.

“What are you going to put me
on?” I sighed again, defeated.

“For starters, you’re going
back on the Lamictal.”

I opened my mouth, but Dr.
Roth continued. “Your dosage was too low. We’re going to get you the starter
pack to get you up to 100 mg, and then we’re going to work our way up to 200
and see how that works for you. If need be, we can up the dosage, but I don’t
think that we’ll need to, because I’m going to give you another mood stabiliser
that’s been out in the UK for a few years and has been successful as an
additional medication for those with Bipolar Disorder and schizophrenia. It’s
called Saphris. You’ll be on 10 mg; 5 mg in the morning and another at night.
You melt it under your tongue.”

I said nothing.

“Do you have trouble
sleeping?” Dr. Roth asked.

I nodded.

“The Saphris will help with
that. All of my patients have been able to get at least eight hours of sleep
after taking Saphris at night. You might feel a bit drowsy for the first few
mornings after taking it, but that will subside.”

“Are you experiencing depression?
Your sisters told me that you’ve been withdrawn and stay in your room.”

“I can’t remember a time when
I wasn’t depressed since my early teens,” I replied.

“Well instead of Cymbalta,
I’ll put you on Wellbutrin. Are you hearing voices or get feelings that you
have extraordinary powers?”

I laughed. I really was crazy.
“Yes, I sometimes here voice. I also sometimes talk to myself.”

“I’m going to put you on
Invega for that. It, along with the Saphris, should help with the psychosis.”

“Anything else that you’re
going to add to the cocktail? We’re on pill number four now.”

“This isn’t a joke, Noira.” For
once, Dr. Roth was not imitating rainbows and sunshine as he spoke.

“I’m sorry,” I replied.

“You mentioned that you were
on Xanax but that it didn’t work. How often do you get anxiety or panic
attacks?”

“It depends. Sometimes I’ll
have them once a day for a period of time and then they’ll stop. Sometimes I’ll
have several a day. Sometimes they just happen occasionally. It’s usually
during periods of stress that I get several a day.”

“Okay. I’m going to prescribe
you Clonazepam, but you are only to take it as needed. If you find that you’re
in a period of prolonged anxiety attacks, you may take them daily. Take them at
night before you go to bed and
right
before you get into bed. I’m
serious about this. Some patients have reported getting high after taking
Clonazepam. If you have to take it in the day for a sudden attack, do not drive
and make sure that you are around people who can monitor you.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes. Stay on your medication.
Do not attempt to wean yourself off anything without my consent. You’re not
going to see any improvement if you don’t stay on your medication. The goal is
to eventually wean you off the Wellbutrin and the Saphris, but this will only
happen once you’ve gotten your diet and meditation under control. I also
suggest that you take up yoga. And you will see me once a week until I’ve
determined that you’re stable.”

“As you wish,” I replied.

Our session continued for another
half-hour with my describing my breakdown and my recent bout of mania when I
stayed awake for days and ended up drawing the painting that Nicolaas had
discovered. I didn’t mention Nicolaas. I didn’t want to talk about him to
either Dr. Roth or anyone else. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, but I could
stop talking about him.

Before he left, Dr. Roth
paused in the doorway and turned to face me. “You have a serious condition, and
it’s time that you accept this and learn to live with it and control it instead
of it controlling you.”

*~*

I was the one to spot
Maman
when we got to the airport. Even though she was in a wheelchair, I could tell
that she was even thinner than before. She was also wearing a winter coat in the
August.