The Death of Small Creatures (19 page)

Or maybe I'm a ghost, gauzy and pale, a thread-worn curtain in tatters, and this is what he stares through.

He is the same. Or is he?

His mouth is moving. He looks familiar. I think,
You're different. Something's different
. I can't put my finger on it.

It's shocking; I will forever remember this moment.

This is the moment I realize I have ceased to exist to him.

He sneezes, rubs his eyes red, coughs all night long. I hear him in the bedroom across the hall. With each sneeze my contempt for him grows.

“I can't handle the rabbits much longer,” Leigh says. “I'm getting sicker every day.”

I look at him, defiant and puzzled.

I spend my
days in halos of Febreze and artificial light. I clean, propelled by champion impulses to destroy every germ, granule or crumb I encounter. I clean because I hate myself, and all I can think to do to quell the self-hatred is to put the world in order so that at least the space around me is less contaminated. I clean because it is better to be an ugly thing in a clean room than an ugly thing in a dirty room and because, quite simply, I can't stop moving.

The amphetamine aspect of the DXM hurtles me into motion. I last for an hour then collapse on the couch, then leap up again and start cleaning all over. I vacuum cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling, dust with a Swiffer extendable duster that can reach awkward places, like the tops of the kitchen cupboards and the insides of those hideous saucer-style light fixtures, those little bug graveyards.

I sit on the back porch steps in my pyjamas at three in the afternoon, hug my knees to my chest. There is nowhere to go. Out there in the world, I feel harangued, pronged, meat on a hook; a skinned pig hanging from a hook in a window in Chinatown. I put on slippers and saunter down the driveway as a test, but pain crushes me so badly I can't breathe. I hurry back inside, run to the bunny couch and tremble, my pulse in my throat.

This is hell on earth.

“I'm not getting
rid of the rabbits,” I say.

Leigh is stricken, wounded. His blue eyes are watery. I can't tell if this is because he is crying or his allergies are actually bothering him.

“You have to decide,” he says.

“No,” I say.

“It's the rabbits or me,” he says. “You have until Friday.”

The days pass
slowly.

On Thursday night I add an array of drugs from the medicine cabinet, little handfuls of pills from each bottle: two types of allergy medication, both prescription brands; Robaxacet; Advil; one Tylenol 3 from when Leigh fell off his bike; and Ibuprofen.

I take them quickly, don't think about what I'm doing, rattle the pills from each bottle into the palm of my hand, toss them back and wash them down with Neo.

I think,
Let's see what happens
. I monitor myself closely, but soon I'm too stoned to correctly calibrate anything, least of all life pitted against death's onslaught. I press my finger against my pulse, and my heart beats fast.

The bunnies hop on then off me, scamper about the room as I drift off to sleep.

Caravaggio's long black
ears are curved forward. Little invisible beacons on the tip of each one go
blip
,
blip
,
blip
. He's lying on my chest, looking at me. “Are you dead or alive?” he says.

I don't know how long he has been there. He feels heavier than usual, and I feel particularly heated up in the place where he lies.

“I'm alive,” I say.

Marcello lies sleeping in his bunny bed in the corner of the room. His body plumes in and out, his flanks filling with air, sighing. He is at peace. When Marcello sleeps his eyes become little diagonal squints, the corners of his mouth curl up slightly and it looks like he's dreaming of something happy.

“What were you thinking?” Caravaggio sighs.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I'll never leave you again.”

Journal

April 24, 2009

I've been consuming twenty packets of NeoCitran DM each night. I drank it in a travel mug all day at work the other day. Made me high and loopy, but I still made it through the workday.

I take such a large amount now because I need that much for it to have any effect. That's 600 mg of DXM each night, and now in the days too. I'll have to start keeping track.

I pray for an overdose now, that I will just go to sleep, but I will sleep so deeply my heart will stop and I won't wake up. I think I'm flirting with this quite seriously now.

My encounters with all this DXM, combined with lithium, Zoloft and clonazepam are flirtatious to the point of being perilous. I check my pulse throughout the night, cannot tell if it's beating too quickly or if it's beating too slowly. My perception is distorted. I think I may be imagining a pulse when there is none. The vessels and veins beneath my skin become dark, almost purple. I noticed this the other day—my legs and arms. When I push down on my skin, anywhere, a pure white spot appears from the pressure of my thumb, then it slowly goes away and after about twenty seconds those purple vessels come back.

I don't have the courage to do it outright. But this DXM thing, I kind of view it as a potential sideways access into death, a slipping away but only halfway intending to, in case anyone wonders after the fact.

There really just isn't any point to any of this. I'm certain that I will never be able to escape this affliction.

Nothing is enough to sustain me.

Not even you.

Eight

The Pavilion (May 2009)

“You are not
doing well,” Dr. W says, finding me in his office leaning forward with my face buried in my hands.

“No,” I say. “I guess not.”

“How is the medication working?” he asks.

“It's not,” I say.

“Are you still using cough medicine?”

“I don't know if I can do this anymore,” I say.

He leaves the room to call Fiona and returns a moment later with a solidified opinion that my life is in peril and I must immediately, “as in, right now,” he says, “go to the Emergency Room.”

We have moved
from Beechwood Avenue to a big beautiful house on Foul Bay Road with hardwood floors and a fireplace.

We are renters, but there is a big backyard for the bunnies. After many arguments, I have convinced Leigh to let the rabbits stay in the new house. We keep them in the basement. We hope this will help with his allergies.

My rabbits' claws are in desperate need of trimming, and Caravaggio's congenital tooth disease requires that his teeth be trimmed by a veterinarian every couple of months, or they will curve inward and eventually pierce the roof of his mouth.

His appetite is ravenous; he has a hard time chewing. He cannot enjoy his rabbit treats or chew his chunks of carrots. He gnaws instead at lettuce leaves and parsley. It's horrific to watch, especially because I am the proprietor of his demise and pain.

I simply haven't got around to taking him to the vet.

I hide myself away in the basement with my rabbits, watch sitcoms on the laptop monitor, pass out, wake up in the middle of the night with a great pounce, Marcello bounding onto my chest, because he has not yet had his nightly bedtime treat, little sugary yogurt drops, berry-or carrot-flavoured.

Some nights I make it upright enough to find the package and administer to each of my bunnies three yogurt drops. Marcello eats his treats with great delight, makes little sniffling and grunt sounds, small squeaks from somewhere inside his round furry body. Caravaggio likewise takes his treats with great delight, but drops each one to the floor, nudges them with his nose, gnaws each one then gives up. Marcello eats what he cannot.

Leigh collects the laptop early in the morning, finds it still open and almost overheated on my chest. Sometimes it has slipped to the concrete floor. The laptop keys are loose, the tray bent because I pound it when the screen freezes, and the screen badly and permanently smudged.

My sister describes my living situation in the basement with my rabbits as a hovel—makeshift walls composed of big panels of cardboard, framed Van Gogh and Chagall prints of which the glass has been broken, rabbit cages, boxes and old shelving units, all of which have been arranged to form the inescapable inner circle.

Inside the inner circle is a blue love seat, piss-stained carpet and linoleum, rabbit beds and blankets, their litter boxes, food and water bowls, hay strewn loosely about the floor, and above it all, LED Christmas lights looped around the rafters.

It's Christmas all year round.

When I turn off the ceiling lights, a warm glow envelops my rabbits and me, safe within the confines of our hovel and well out of sight of the upstairs world my husband and now my two stepsons inhabit, that suburbia into which I never fit and into which I no longer feel welcome.

Leigh has grown to hate me.

Inside the Archie
Courtnall Centre: psychological screening.

“I notice you have scrapes across your wrists,” the doctor says.

“Yes,” I say, stricken by my own candour, though I am embarrassed, lower my hands to my lap. “It helps,” I say, “with the anxiety.”

“When did you do that?” she says.

The blood bubbles along the surface. I wipe it away, streak my palms pink. These are not dangerous wounds in the physical sense.

“This morning,” I say. But the truth is I snuck away to the washrooms in the ER shortly after arriving, wanting to meet the doctor with physical evidence of my despair, wanting attention.

“Can you tell me about your drug use?” she says.

“I get high on cough medicine,” I say. I say it unapologetically, directly.

I tell the doctor that I have occasionally lost the ability to hear sound (as a whole sensory category), and to understand English (as a whole linguistic discipline). DXM seems to work like PCP, acid for the neurons. “The other night I took twenty packages of NeoCitran and one extra-strength Robaxacet,” I say, “and a glass of Pinot Noir.”

“What would you say if I said that I would like to admit you today?” the doctor says.

This I do not expect, but rather thought I was here to jump through hoops as I have the past two years, since first being diagnosed with dysthymia, then unipolar depression, since Dr. L said I have bipolar disorder, social anxiety disorder and for kicks, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“I would be… really… really… against that idea,” I say.

She puts down the pen. “Well, I am going to admit you today.”

I am stunned. How can this be? How can she make such a statement of authority over my life, my free will? I'm waiting for the next sentence, the phrase that will undo the former—a window, a door, a portal I can move through. I'm waiting for the punchline.

But it's not funny.

I stammer, “But… can you… legally do this?”

She cites me a bureaucratic clause that details all the reasons she can admit me “involuntarily.” This is how it will read on my file for the next twenty days or so:
Involuntarily Admitted
.

“Okay,” she says, “I want you to stay in here while we get you a sedative.”

Do I have a choice?

I'm trembling, heart racing, cannot fathom the gravity of what's just happened. I have been involuntarily admitted to the place in town my stepchildren joke about, the place next to the Catholic School where little kids look over at us, the crazy people, and laugh: the Pavilion, across the street from Starbucks and Safeway; the Pavilion, formerly called the Institute, thus I have been pavilion-ized and not institutionalized.

I'm waiting for
the security guards to come and escort me over to the Pavilion, wandering around the Archie Courtnall Centre looking lost and weepy.

My blue scrubs are too big.

They have taken my shoes and socks.

I am stigmatized, forever branded.

A patient in a psychiatric ward, I cease to exist. I am defined instead by the details of the place: its locks and keys, walls and doors, windows through which I cannot leap, windows with glass too thick to be broken, security guards and live video feed at the main entryway in the foyer four floors below.

I have become one of the lost ones, openly weeping, sobbing, looking for an edge to hold onto, a pillow into which I can scream.

I need a bit in my mouth.

They don't tell you where to go, where to sit or lie or walk or breathe after they give you your sedative and hit you with this kind of news.

I walk to the window at the far end of the room, gaze out at the parking lot and at the Pavilion ward across the way, soon to be my new home for a while, and past the emergency room from which I just departed with a goat-like male nurse guiding me.

The other weepy people look at me then look away, unfazed. They have either misinterpreted me completely (they think I'm one of them, but I'm not), or have me entirely figured (I haven't yet come to realize I belong with them).

I crumple, weak-kneed. I slide my hand along a hard edge, can smell disinfectant. Oh, the sedative has kicked in. This I like. This numbness.

Two security guards arrive to escort me over, but my memory of this becomes vapour.

This vaporization of memory, hours, whole days even, is not uncommon, something to do with stress and shock.

There is an old beige phone on a table, and a chair next to it.

I make a call before leaving, my sister—the only person I can think of. I do not call Leigh, no way.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say.

“What's wrong?” she says, because she knows me better than anyone.

“I'm in the psych ward,” I say.

“What can I do?” she says. “Who should I call?”

I have long since feared that if ever I ended up in a place like this, my life would be a revolving door in and out of it.

“Call Leigh,” I say, “and can you please feed my rabbits?”

“Yes,” she says.

The last I remember are the doors to the security van, and making some apologetic joke about my blue paper booties, but the rest is gone.

The first days
slip by. I have no memory.

The ward is a big rectangular room divided into the A-wing and the B-wing, each at opposite ends. A-wing is not allowed to cross the line to B-wing.

I am A, which is fortunate because A has a homier feel than B, softer lighting above the couch and recliners in the TV area.

Some nights a pretty female nurse and a few patients sing along as a male nurse plays his guitar, Beatles and John Lennon songs: “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be” and “Imagine.”

I want to sing along too, because I love to sing in the shower and in the car, but I can't find my voice in public, especially here.

A week inside feels like a month.

Time becomes strange; something to do with the uniformity, the beige of the walls, the way A side mirrors B side as if each is a projection of the other, two universes oblivious to each other but each transpiring in the same timeline.

I look over there expecting to see myself turn a corner.

Each day is the same as the day before. Each day begins with a morning breakfast announcement on the PA, followed by the lunch and dinner announcements, snack-time announcement at 9 pm, then lights out at 10.

They won't yet give me back my clothes.

Do they think I'm going to make a run for it?

Are they right?

At some point (though I cannot say when it happens) the details sharpen, materialize from blankness.

I come into myself.

I become closer to here.