The End of the World as We Know It (11 page)

I took a Rorschach test. I never knew you went through the blobs once, and then again, to see if you said the same thing you said the first time around. If blob number 34 suggested to you your father's hands, it was somehow important that, when you saw blob number 34 again, it still reminded you of your father's hands and not, say, a cypress tree in a drought. It seemed kind of like going to a psychic, but I have to say that the woman's diagnosis
was uncannily accurate, like the psychic who tells you you have trouble with money or difficulty with commitment.

She said I suffered from anhedonia, from the Greek, meaning an inability to experience pleasure. Oh, really, I felt like saying. Oh really.

A young guy joined us on the ward, the first new person since I had arrived. He was kept in a room with glass walls next to the nurses' station, and he was so sedated he could barely raise his head from the pillow. We couldn't figure out what was wrong with him, except that he was sad. He hadn't tried to kill himself, at least not in any obvious physical way, but the fact that he was kept in the glass room must have meant that he might, at any moment. He was so depressed, he made the rest of us feel artificial somehow. He was so young and vulnerable and exposed, and his despair was mute and profound, and he made palpable and visible the agony of having a broken heart. It does happen.

We felt afraid for him. We felt for him a tenderness we didn't feel for ourselves. He was probably twenty-four.

We went for supervised walks on the grounds of the hospital. The air was crisp, the weather beautiful the way it almost always is in the middle of tragedy. The way it was after Kennedy was killed. October in Kentucky is heartrendingly beautiful.

It was, I guess, like the first weeks of being at college. We sat together and told our stories, we clumsily embroidered the truth to make ourselves more interesting, like the guys who said they'd gotten into Harvard but had chosen Hopkins instead. The weight of our narrative had a lyrical beauty to it. Most people's
stories didn't have a linear quality; their depression was diffuse and nonspecific and awful, just day after day of dread and fear and unquiet.

The doctors listened, and gently explained the causes of depression. They explained how it works on the system, how lassitude and manic energy both become self-fueling fires, winding us up and spinning us out of control, how we lose our appetites, our sense of place, our sense of where we belong in the world, of where it is we are meant to sit down.

I was taking 450 milligrams of Elavil a day, a kind of knee-walking drunk dose, if you don't know. I could barely walk to bed at night. I could barely follow the stories that moved me so much. There was just this veil of human misery over everything, and it made the earthly landscape hard to see.

“How's it going?” “How're you doing today?” In a loony bin, people are always asking you how you're doing, and they pretty much genuinely want to know, as opposed to the normal population outside, who couldn't care less. And the answer usually is, not very well.

When you're in a mental hospital, it's OK to feel bad. That's why you're there. You feel worse, on the average, than the average person will ever know. You're just generally, in the bin, not having a swell day.

I don't think anybody was faking. It wasn't the sort of team you could fake your way onto.

Some people felt like talking. A lot didn't. I didn't particularly want to go into the times and places that had brought me to this time and place. I felt the dozens of wounds on my arms were explanation enough, they stung and they itched and they were my
statement that I had been to places lower and more terrifying than any of the rest of them could imagine, with their sad routines and their mundane lives. Measured out in coffee spoons. They suffered, I felt, not from a surfeit but a lack of pain, self-inflicted if need be, but real physical pain to counter the emotional pain. Somehow, even in the bin, you're still competitive. You want to beat out the competition. You want to be the best at what you do, even if what you do is feel miserable and self-destructive all the time. Every minute of every day.

One woman was a psychiatrist. She was there because she had tried to kill herself for the third time. So I wasn't the only one. She was less than thirty-five. She was pretty, and she didn't seem particularly depressed, and she recounted the methods of suicide she had tried, the last being to stick her head in the oven and turn on the gas. Not very effective. She seemed determined that her next try would be her last. I never knew what was the source of her terrible anguish, because as cheerful as she was, she must have felt a great deal of pain.

She was so busy talking about methodology and her blueprint for the future we never got much of a grip on what got her in this state in the first place. She was hopeful for her chances of success on her next attempt, like somebody who's training to swim the Channel.

On top of it all, she really was a psychiatrist. She was a woman who had trained for years to treat crazy people. She had actually, until she began trying to kill herself, treated crazy people, although she said a lot of them were just bored. And she was crazy herself. Suddenly our doctors looked suspect, as though they themselves harbored secret insanities that could
come out in various perversities, in the forty Seconal, in the amphetamine addiction, in the sudden break with reality.

The boy from the glass room got out and joined in group therapy. He never said anything. He was on Haldol and Thorazine and God knows what else, we figured, which gave him in our eyes an instant kind of glamour. These were not drugs for babies. As drugged as we were, we were practically perky compared to him.

He had such a sad, forlorn air about him. Handsome, dark, young, pale with grief—the kind of face you remember for a long time. A face that should have been having sex with a girl in the backseat of a car, out by the river, their shirts unbuttoned, their lips swollen with kissing. But his face at the moment was a kind of putty. He was pretty knocked out. He was too medicated to speak. But he listened; he watched us with his glittering eyes, and he slept in a normal room in a normal bed where you could turn the lights out. Now he, too, had to get up every day at seven and follow the regime, drugged and sad as he was.

He joined us in the gym. He was strong and had obviously seen the inside of a gym before. He wasn't intimidated by the rednecks, but he was too blanked out to take much notice of them. Even our thundering defeats in volleyball left him no more fazed than he was already.

Then one night the psychiatrist who had tried to kill herself three times had a brilliant idea. She began, in group therapy, to talk to us about volleyball and addiction.

“The thing about drunks and addicts is they have no sense of limits, they have no sense of boundaries,” she explained. “That's why they get to be alcoholics and drug addicts. They don't know
when or where to stop.” Not that sticking your head in the oven or slitting your own skin open with a razor shows much sense of decorum or control, it now seems to me, but at the time she had our attention.

“Volleyball is a very simple game. There are six people on a side. The court is divided into twelve sections, six on each side of the net. If you notice, if you hit the ball, say, far down to the left side of the court, the average addict will follow the ball. He'll leave his square and follow the ball. They all will. We can beat them.”

We didn't believe her, but she was so intent about it we listened anyway.

“If we just play in our squares, if we stick to playing the space assigned to us, we can beat them really, really easily. It's simple. The first person on our team serves the ball all the way down to the right, they all run down there. If they get it back over the net, the next person hits it all the way down to the left. They'll all run down
there
. Sooner or later, they'll get tired out, and we'll win. They'll all be in one big clump, and they'll get tired, they'll run all over each other, they'll get winded from all those Camels they smoke, and we'll beat them.”

Meds were kicking in. We didn't believe her, but the idea of winning at anything after so much loss and confusion was charming enough to send us to bed happy. Happy—450 milligrams of Elavil kind of happy.

Later, when I told my internist in the real world how much Elavil I was taking, he gasped. He just didn't believe me.

The next morning, she had to explain it all to us again. It made sense. We weren't athletic, we weren't strong, except for the glass-room kid, but we were smarter than the redneck bikers. Smart
enough not to get a tattoo or arrested for dealing cocaine to some undercover cop and sent to rehab to avoid hard time.

We played it her way. We hit the ball to the extreme edges of the court, over and over again, and they trampled all over themselves trying to get to it, leaving the other end completely unguarded. It was like a human demolition derby.

We beat them, and boy did it make them mad. We beat them again, and they started to get a really nasty look in their eyes, but before anything ugly could happen gym time was over for the day. We had done as we were told; even the glass-room kid had stood solidly in one of the front squares and sent the ball flying down to the left-side boundary.

We had beaten them, and we never lost to them again.

There was, of course, more defeat than victory in our collective story. There was more tragedy than triumph. Once I got out, I never went back there—it's not the kind of place you go for some casual sightseeing—and I don't know what happened to those people once I had spent my three weeks with them.

Maybe the psychiatrist did die. She probably did. People who want to generally do. Maybe the glass-room kid never came out of whatever it was that had put him so deep in the well. Maybe he saw the stars from the deep darkness down there. Personally, anhedonia, I have found, is not a passing phase.

I heard this old country guy say once, “I think you decide pretty early on how happy you're going to be, and then you just go on and be it.” But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.

There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable.

How most people carry on is a mystery. What they talk about at supper. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night. How they can think bowling is fun. How they choose their neckties. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry an heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son's lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching
Oprah
as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.

It's a mystery, and there is no answer. But we beat them at volleyball. It didn't make anything better. It didn't change the course of our lives or keep bad things from happening, even the very same things that had happened before.

But we beat them at volleyball.

On my thirty-fifth birthday, August 4, 1983, I had dinner in a charming restaurant called Devon House with four women I liked. Then I went home, got in bed with the light on, and did what I had planned to do for a year.

On the morning of my previous birthday, I had awakened to the mess of my life and thought, If things don't get better in a year, I'm going to kill myself.

The year had passed. I slit my wrist.

I didn't weep. I didn't think of anybody I knew. I didn't think of revenge or feel remorse. I slit my left wrist with my right hand. I'm right-handed.

The skin gave easily, and the blood flowed down my arm into my cupped hand and onto the sheets. The pain was searing.

I could see my room in minute detail, the desk, the scattered papers, the phone, the dirty clothes thrown on the Thonet chair. I could see the pictures of my mother and father in their tarnished silver frames. I could see the building across the street through the dirty windows, through the orange glow of the street lamp. I could hear the rattle of the cheap air conditioner.

The blood was a rich red, redder than I had thought. It was
a beautiful color. Crimson. Like the dark glossy lipstick of a beautiful woman. It glistened wet in the light. I was in love with my blood. The skin of my left arm was white and milky and pure, snow nobody had walked on. The cut widened, and I could see the meat beneath my own flesh.

This is it, I thought. Nobody can say this is a rash decision. I've thought about nothing else for a year. I've waited long enough. This is what I've waited for all my life.

It didn't feel tragic. It felt brilliantly mesmerizing. It felt astute.

I had written notes. To my parents. To my lovely sister. I had, of course, said it was nobody's fault. The notes were lyrical and winsome. One note was written to a friend of mine. He had once given me two thousand dollars in cash when I had no money. I was so poor, I had to walk to his apartment to get it. Nothing in the bank. No credit, nothing left on my credit cards. I had seven cents left in the world. Seven pennies. He gave me twenty one-hundred-dollar bills.