The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (16 page)

In a gesture that made me feel like I'd been struck by lightning, the
two of them suddenly grabbed hold of me and tried to pull me away.

But I was taller than both of them, and had the added advantage of the
pipes. Dr. Brandt was trying to loosen my grip, and Mrs. Jones was
pulling me by the hair. We were all completely out of control, and I
was sobbing and screaming wildly. How could this be my Mrs. Jones,
yanking at my hair and ignoring my cries for her to stop being so
unkind?

"We need to call the police," she said to her husband. Police? For
me?

"No, no," said Dr. Brandt. "No, they'll only take her to a mental
hospital."

"I'm not leaving!" I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Finally, defeated, Mrs. Jones left the waiting room for her next
appointment. "This is a shame, for you to do this to her, Elyn," said Dr.
Brandt. But I wasn't having it. Stunned at her betrayal, I nevertheless
could not leave Mrs. Jones behind.

Ultimately, they decided to leave me be. They each saw several
rounds of patients, with me all the while sobbing quietly in the waiting
room. Several hours passed, and near the end of the day, Dr. Brandt
came back to me.

"Elyn, Mrs. Jones is downstairs, waiting to say good-bye to you,"
he said. "If you are not able to leave on your own, we will have to call
the police. This must end now. Are you ready to go?"

In all my confusion and pain, I knew that he meant it. I knew I'd
pushed things as far as they would go, without something or someone
getting badly hurt. "Yes, I'm ready," I said quietly, and went
downstairs with him, my shoulders hunched over and my legs
weighing a thousand pounds apiece. When I put my arms around Mrs.
Jones, though, I began to cry uncontrollably, soaking her shoulder.
She had been the tether that held me to the outside world, the
repository for my darkest thoughts, the person who tolerated all the
bad and evil that lay within me, and never judged. She was my
translator, in a world where I felt most often like an alien. How could I
survive in this world without her?

Mrs. Jones pat-patted me on the back and stepped out of my
embrace. "Take courage, Elyn, take courage."

I don't know how I got home, but once I got there, the lights were
all out, and Janet and Livy were long since in bed and asleep. I sobbed
throughout the night.

My flight back to the States left the next day. In the long hours of
the trip, with the stale air and the bad food and the transient sounds
of fussy babies and coughing passengers, I was cold, and alone, and
awash in fantasy and grief. Over and over, I replayed the previous five
years, trying frantically every single moment to keep the demons in
my head from invading the plane and savaging the other passengers.
From time to time, I considered asking the flight attendant whether
she would mind if I jumped out the emergency door. Other than that,
it was an uneventful flight.

chapter nine

As
ALWAYS, MY
family greeted me at the airport in Miami. I noted,
barely, that my parents had aged somewhat since our last visit
together, although I suspected that to an outside observer, they looked
far more hale and hearty than I did. The number of tan and healthy
faces that swirled around us as we waited to retrieve baggage and deal
with customs felt like a personal rebuke—I knew I had the pallor of
someone long indoors, nose in a book, spirit in a turmoil.

Although I would tell my mother and father about my second
hospitalization soon after I had arrived back home, I would be
intentionally scarce with details. So they didn't know any, didn't ask
for any, and in any case I wasn't going to give them any now. What
purpose would it serve, except to heighten their anxiety and add to my

self-consciousness and shame? So the talk on the ride home floated
carefully on the surface: Congratulations on the fine academic work.
Glad to have you back in the U.S. finally. Yale for law school, this is so
exciting. You're terribly pale and thin, Elyn, it will be good for you to
spend some time in the sunshine.

My parents had apparently decided that I could chart my own
course and didn't need any help. On one hand, I was always relieved
when our conversations turned into nothing; on the other hand, I
sometimes wondered what it would have been like, just once, if they'd
turned into
something.
But there was a wall of appropriateness
between us at all times; in fact, we'd spent years carefully constructing
it, I on one side with my particular set of tools, they on theirs, with the
tools they'd chosen. As long as nothing gratuitously unpleasant
happened (as long as I managed to keep myself sufficiently pulled
together to interact with them without making some kind of mess), all
was calm, on that first day together, and on all the rest of the days
throughout that endless summer.

"How was your day?"

"Oh, it was good, I got a lot done, how about you?"

"Oh, the usual. Here, have some of these wonderful tomatoes."

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I didn't have any classes that summer; in fact, I didn't have any
commitments at all—and the absence of a calendar and an organized
structure quickly knocked me sideways. In addition, I was taking no
medication, except for sleep, and sometimes I wouldn't even take that.
So most of my days were spent burrowed in my room, frantically
clacking away on my typewriter as I wrote Mrs. Jones one grieving
letter after another. Ten, fifteen pages at a time, and sobbing all the
while, with the classical music turned up so no one in the house could
hear me. There were moments when I thought the grief of the distance
between us would leave me doubled over on the floor. The blinding
Miami summer sunshine, the weight of the humidity, the bright
chatter and busyness of the people I passed by whenever I ventured
out—what could anyone know of the fantasies I had? Or the demons
that I wrestled with in the night, and the way I needed to grit my teeth
together during the day in order to summon the simplest pleasantries
of excuse me and thank you and I beg your pardon?
Please, Mrs.
Jones. Please, please.

Occasionally, I received a letter back from her, measured and kind
and cautionary in tone—recognizing most probably that we needed to
keep a certain boundary, because we were no longer in an analytic
relationship. I was profoundly relieved each time she wrote; it meant
that she wasn't dead, and that I wasn't, either, at least in her mind.
Her words attempted to soothe me, acknowledging that I was having a
hard time in this transition, and that she washed it would all be better
soon. She knew I missed her. Steady on, and all would be well.

And then, suddenly, there was a cluster of news stories about a
workplace shooting, a disgruntled postal worker, and dead coworkers
left in the wake of his rage. The postman left a tape recording of his
thoughts; disjointed, psychotic ramblings that didn't sound so very
different from my own. The man sounded crazy.
Could I do that?
Have I done that? Am I a mass murderer? Am I him? Did I shoot
those people? Was the wrong person killed?
It haunted me for weeks,
worrying that somehow I'd had a hand in the carnage.
Was the wrong
person accused? Should I go to the police and confess? I'm evil. There
are voices and commands. One must do what they say. Tell them to
get away!

Kenny and Margie Collins, my old friends from Vanderbilt, were living
in Carbondale, Illinois, where Kenny had been teaching English at
Southern Illinois University for six years. We'd stayed in close touch,
and they invited me to come and visit them. Desperate for a change of
scene, and nostalgic for the kind of simple certainty their friendship
had always given me, I packed up and left Miami for what I hoped
would be a good trip.

The initial stage of the flight was direct to St. Louis; from there, I
had to take a prop jet to the airport nearest Carbondale. The plane was
smaller than I was used to, and far noisier. It also flew much lower to
the ground than the transatlantic jets did, and I was hyperconscious of
the land passing below us, with the farms, rivers, roads, and vehicles
clearly visible. As the minutes went by, I became convinced that
something terrible was going to happen, that the plane would crash
and burn, and only my sheer force of concentration and will could
prevent it. Perhaps if I held my breath. Perhaps if I closed my eyes and
counted. No, closing my eyes in the middle of death-and-destruction
fantasies was never a good idea; I needed to be alert.

Nothing happened, of course. The flight was uneventful, we landed
in good order, and the smiling faces of my dear friends when they
greeted me managed to subdue the fantasies. As I began to reclaim
myself a little, I did my best to participate in the kind of rambling,
catching-up conversations old friends take for granted when they're
together after a long time apart. I chattered like a magpie about
Oxford, my years in England, the difficulties of the relocation, the
upcoming challenges of Yale. It was as though I were scared of what
might happen once I shut my mouth.

Kenny and Margie lived in a big, comfortable old house, and did
everything they could to help me be relaxed and at home there. Their
life together seemed to be so peaceful, so normal. Kenny seemed to
enjoy his job and his students and colleagues; Margie seemed equally
happy teaching at a local nursery school. They'd known about my
hospitalization, but I never did tell them about being psychotic. I
wanted them to think well of me. I didn't want them to look at me and
see a crazy person. Most of all, I wanted to stay with them longer,
hoping to absorb their normalcy, to take courage from their intrinsic
trust that I was a good friend and a decent person. But I couldn't stop
writing Mrs. Jones, and at night, I couldn't stop crying.

Soon after my return to Miami, it was time to prepare to head
north to Yale. As much as I'd anticipated this, when it actually came to
making the necessary plans and decisions, I was completely
flummoxed, and panicky as well. I made lists of what I thought I
needed to do, then just as quickly scratched things off and replaced
them with others. Should I fly into New York's LaGuardia Airport,
even though New Haven was two hours away? If so, then how would I
get to school? Or should I fly into Hartford, which was closer, but had
fewer flights? What time of day should I fly? Should I carry everything
with me, or should I send luggage and winter clothing on ahead? And
what about clothes? Law school, an Ivy League college...The thought
of a shopping expedition with my mother horrified me (I suspect it
horrified her as well), so once again I went to the L.L.Bean catalog for
mostly dark and sturdy pants, shirts, and sweaters. My mother raised
her eyebrows almost imperceptibly, but I brushed away her concern.
I'd never cared much how I looked, why should I start now? Besides, I
had no energy to waste on my exterior, when so much of my focus was
on the barely managed chaos inside my head.

The Yale Law School—the Sterling Law Building—sits on an entire city
block in downtown New Haven, across the street from the main
University Library. Built during the Depression, it's a group of
imposing gothic structures, with the requisite carvings, sculpture, and
stained glass windows, many adorned with brightly colored glass
medallions. As grand as that sounds, though, at the time I was there,
the complex was drafty, run-down, and very poorly maintained—not
until 1995 would there be a badly needed, multimillion-dollar
renovation that took five years to complete.

I would be staying in a two-bedroom suite, with a common living
room which I'd share with Emily, a vivacious redhead from a wealthy
family who was so excited to be there that for anyone else, her cheerful
enthusiasm might have been contagious. But not for me. I was in no
shape to start all over anyplace, let alone someplace so daunting as
Yale Law School.

Once classes began, the amount of work I had to do required that I
stop writing letters to Mrs. Jones. We were in class nearly twelve
hours a week, with additional hours in the library before, after, and
well into the night. The law school and the living quarters formed a
sort of quad, so for most of us, it was almost a case of rolling out of bed
and right into a classroom. Although Oxford had been challenging,
there hadn't been such constraints on my time and efforts there.
Within days of beginning my classwork at Yale, I was on a treadmill
that seemed to have no "stop" button.

My social life was as it had always been when I arrived somewhere
new. I was meeting people, but not really making friends. I could not
risk anyone knowing the truth. There was no one to trust, no one who
would not be repelled by the workings of my mind. And, as much as
I'd always felt like an alien, it was particularly pronounced those first
months in New Haven. It was 1982, and I'd been out of the country for
five years. I knew almost nothing about American culture, or the latest
trends and celebrities, and cared even less. Political conversations
went right over my head; someone had tried to assassinate President
Reagan while I was away, and it had barely entered my consciousness.
People on campus were listening to music on small tape cassette
players with headphones, and talking about rock videos. I'd never
seen or heard of rock videos (or the fledgling rock television station,
MTV, let alone cable television), and I'd missed five years of movies—I
don't know why my friends and I didn't go to any at Oxford, but we
didn't. I was still wearing navy blue docker-type sneakers, while
everyone else had moved on to running shoes, the fashion at that time.
I spoke with a slight British accent (which many Americans
recognized as British, but which a Brit would immediately know as