Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (19 page)

He agreed.

“Yes. Instead of ‘He fell down the stairs,’ it should be, ‘He down the stairs fell.’ ”

This was going well.

It got better. I told him I didn’t want drugs. I rattled on a bit about this, as planned, expecting that once I’d nixed the SSRIs as being too mania-inducing, the favored Lamictal would come floating into the conversation like a bellwether balloon, and the phrase “no side effects aside from the rare but serious rash” would follow hard upon, like a bandwagon.

But no. To my great and glorious surprise, when I finished—he had actually let me finish—he looked at me respectfully and, without a spark of hesitation, said:

“Okay.”

This shut my smart mouth effectively and melted my sassy little heart. Had the doctor just rolled on his back? Doctors I knew didn’t say okay, except maybe to themselves, and then only as the coup de grace. As in, “Okay, we’re gonna take off this limb.”

But this guy had just used it in context to actually mean what it said. Okay. You got it. Your call.

Now I was quite possibly in love.

And then the capper. I told him I needed exercise if I was going to get back on the stick. He nodded knowingly. Got it.

“I need an hour pass to go running in the park,” I said.

I expected I would have to lobby for this each day, but he shocked me again.

“I’ll put an order in your chart for an hour pass every afternoon. Will that work?”

He was trusting me with freedom, giving me back a piece of my will with faith, believing that I could handle it, or if I couldn’t, believing that the failure would help me to measure where I was.

Wisely, he said this when I again expressed amazement at his willingness to grant the request.

“Day passes are a useful tool. They tell both you and me whether or not you’re ready to go back into the world, or to what degree you’re not ready. If, for example, you go out and find yourself totally overwhelmed in an hour, then you know you need more time.”

He was making me part of the process, giving my mind its necessary role in healing itself. He was listening to me when I told him what I needed, and giving it to me, because, unlike so many of the other deadheads in his profession, he could make a distinction between someone who said exercise would do her good and someone who said a ritual murder or a hit off the crack pipe was just what she needed to get back into the swing. He saw that I knew what I needed, or at least I knew in part; what’s more, he saw that I was right. He had the power to make it happen and did, because he also knew that the simple act of giving me what I asked for, when it was reasonable, made me feel enfranchised and heard, a partner in the treatment plan, not its bound-and-gagged recipient.

He was a wizard of common sense.

Our meeting was short, as short as the meetings at Meriwether had been, about fifteen minutes all told. But it served its purpose. He knew his role. He wasn’t there for therapy. The psychologist was for that. He wasn’t simply there for himself either, to impose his smarmy better judgment, or, per his job description, to assess and “treat” me. He was there responding to me. He was empowered to make things happen, and he used that power beneficently without personal agenda.

We shook hands and parted laughing, he, because I’d said how nice it was to meet a doc who was smart enough to know that he was stupid, and I, because he’d said that maybe the only good doctor was a dyslexic one. Per Magic Doc’s suggestion, I went up to the main ward that day.

My good-byes to Clay, Bunny, Bard, Fridge, Chloe, and the others were abrupt and strange, as abrupt and strange as the immediacy of our acquaintance, which went deep and narrow very fast, like a vein of precious metal in rock, and died that way too, a dead end, deep in drilled recesses, greedily mined and abandoned.

The hellos and good-byes were redundant, they always were, more pleasantries of the outside world dispensed with in there because what was encountered within those walls was already known and as quickly forgotten, but assimilated somehow nonetheless, like knowledge of a prior life. Like all the characters in the Jungian dream, everyone was you and you they, manifestations, internalizations, combined, recombined, recycled, made superficially to appear as another, but all the while simply more of you.

But you, reader, are the sane person reading this now, and you are thinking that these people on this page are not you. By no means are they you. They are the other, put away, out of sight—and yes I, too, laugh at this expression newly now—out of mind.

It is a significant expression in this context—out of sight, out of mind. But out of whose mind? Who is out of whose mind? The lunatic is out of his mind and so we put him out of sight—not because being out of sight is necessarily good for someone who is out of his mind, but because when the lunatic is out of sight he is out of our minds. We can forget him, forget his resemblance to us, forget that he is a member of the family. Thus he is made into not just “an,” but “the” other.

That is what pathology means. Other. Over there. Not me. Not mine. Another path diverging in the wood, going off, erring, deviating from the main. The road not taken, the path to wrack and ruin. Keep to the road, the main road, the mainstream. Stay out of the woods, the bracken, the mire, and most of all, forget. Forget that I am one of yours and that you know me.

In much the same way, I had known them, and then I forgot them. I saw them on smoke breaks a few times in the next couple of days, but we had less and less to say to each other. Bunny got out a few days later. Her first night home she called me. I took the call on the pay phone in the main ward. She was drunk and going on and on about how she and Clay and Bard had had some kind of weird love triangle going on in the ICU. She said she missed everybody and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to tell her, so I just listened until she tired herself out.

Then we hung up, and I felt terrible.

Clay made it up to the main ward on the addict’s side a couple of days before I left, but again, the magic intimacy of our time in the ICU was gone. He was still shaky, and he didn’t know what he was going to do when he got out. He was still unemployed, and to make matters worse, he’d had a call from his mother who’d told him that his cousin had robbed his apartment while he’d been locked up. He’d taken Clay’s TV and a few other things to sell for drugs. Clay’s mother had called the cops and had him arrested. It was all in the family.

I thought, sadly, that given what he’d be facing when he left, it wouldn’t be too long before Clay was back in here, or in jail along with his cousin.

I heard that Karen left in much better condition. She’d rested. She’d adjusted her meds, and she seemed to have tamed the worst of her flare-up. I held out hope for her success. Fridge left, too, presumably to go home to his grandmother and stop taking his meds. But maybe this time he’d stay away longer. One could always hope. Bard, of course, was stuck for a while. They kept him in the ICU because he was disruptive and because, or so he said, they were working on transferring him somewhere else to sit out the rest of his time. He was still in the ICU when I left.

Chloe’s parents came and got her the day I went up to the main ward. She went back to school, as far as I know, and went on as before, overachieving and probably cutting, though maybe doing so less obviously, so that she wouldn’t end up in St. Luke’s or someplace like it again. Still, I didn’t worry about her. Of all the people I met at St. Luke’s, I thought she was the most likely to recover, stay out of trouble, and go on to have a productive and mostly fulfilled life. She had never belonged at St. Luke’s in the first place. All she needed was a good therapist and some time to put a little distance between herself and her father’s expectations. She was going to be fine.

A depressive ward has a very different feel from a psychotic one. They don’t confiscate your pens, for one. Though I had come prepared, with felt-tips and retractable Sharpies, I needn’t have troubled. Never mind ballpoints, there were enough sharpened pencils in the dayroom to riddle yourself like St. Sebastian if you were so inspired. But nobody in here had that much energy or imagination. They hardly spoke.

I felt it the minute I walked in. Heaviness in the air, like some kind of spiritual humidity bearing down on my bones. When I stepped through the ward’s main magnetically locked doors, I came into a short T-shaped hallway. To the right, twenty or so yards down, there was an octagon exactly like the one in the ICU, though its set of locking double doors was propped open. This was the MI side. To the left, again, twenty or so yards down, there was another octagon, also with its doors propped open. This was the CD side. A short hall ran between the octagons, and, though the doors were almost always left open, we were not supposed to cross back and forth, so the wings were like two docked spaceships, with separate species looking warily across at each other.

The addicts’ side, though filled with people who were primarily depressed and only secondarily addicted, had a lighter feel than the depressive tank I was in. It had the levity of creative self-destruction, and the people had the charm of self-hatred. The addicts were people fighting their natures, clobbering their malaise with a high, and laughing over their resultant lost limbs, whereas at my end of the hall, there was no fight at all, no bite, just the occasional whimper of the unwashed or the glassy eye of the defunct.

Gerald was the worst case on the ward, by far. Even among the cave dwellers, he was unique. A person utterly destroyed. Psychic pain taken to the point of psychic absence. His eyes were dead. They did not fill with tears or recognition or response. He spoke only when spoken to, and then only in Bard-style monosyllables: Yes. No. Don’t know. Unlike Teary Molly and me, and a lot of the other depressives I would meet in this ward, he was not stubborn or childish, or self-indulgent, or complaining, or sorry for himself. Those are remnants of dissent. He simply wasn’t there.

He wore the same clothes every day, a pair of black jeans and a plaid button-down shirt. He was grossly overweight and shuffled along the walls half-bent at the waist. He was about sixty, and his hair was turning from dirty blond to gray, though he never bathed, so it was hard to tell what was actual color and what was just oily buildup matted to his skull.

There is not much else to say about Gerald, because despite repeated efforts to engage him, he would not talk to me, or to anyone. I’d try a joke, but he’d never smile. He would not even look at me. He just said in his usual distancing monotone, “Yeah,” and resumed his hollow contemplation of the carpet, or the walls, or whatever else wouldn’t look back and ask for contact.

Aside from Gerald there was Teary Molly, of course. She was often to be found at the small table in the dayroom, drawing or coloring while she talked with another of the more taciturn patients about the overwhelming burdens of her life and tried to swallow yet more rising sobs.

There was Trevor, a tragically ugly, infantile man afflicted with bloodless, pale dry skin that fell in large flakes from his bald spot into the long, stringy grayish brown hair on the sides and back of his head and lodged in clumps in the waxy porches of his ears. His ungroomed mustache cringed stiffly above his startlingly red wet lips. When he spoke in group therapy meetings, he had the unfortunate habit of knitting his scaly, long-nailed clawlike fingers together, resting them on the table in front of him and looking down at them gravely, as if he were a trauma counselor delivering the bad news. Thus he displayed his unkemptness, all in a row, from the top of his head to the tips of his hands, and people in the circle averted their eyes.

In the feeble voice of a boy who still wets his bed, he spoke of having nightmares every night, filled with flying “demons and devil dogs,” and he complained of having to leave the light on at night to banish them.

There was Josephine, who stomped around the ward wearing a permanent puss face. She was in her early twenties, but she whined at the nurses like a grounded fifteen-year-old who wanted to know why she was being punished for crashing Daddy’s car. She was constantly eating and drinking, shoveling fistfuls of trail mix or Cheerios into her mouth from a bowlful she carried wherever she went, and gulping 24-ounce bottles of hypercaffeinated Vault soda, which she purchased at the mall when they let her out on a two-hour pass.

There was Delilah, a dumpling-shaped, impish sixty-five-year-old who, like Trevor, appeared to be functioning at the maturity level of a second-grader. In our daily group therapy sessions her contributions took the form of transparent attempts to tell the staff what they wanted to hear so that she could get out sooner. That or giggling interjections, as when she pointed at Gerald and said, “His zipper’s down.”

There was Celine, a small, quiet, feisty woman with a tart smile and a keen eye. She was in her late seventies and lived with her son’s family. She had what Herbie had—the depression of old age, the accumulated despair of feeling useless and having nothing to do or look forward to, as well as the added humiliation of feeling like she was a burden on her family. Interestingly, like Herbie, she retained a sense of humor and perspective in her depression, contradictory as that sounds. She seemed resigned to waiting it out and enduring it as she had obviously waited out and endured so much else. She was one of the few people in the octagon, aside from Gerald, whose depression didn’t manifest itself as a kind of prolonged childish snit, or a one-note chorus of “Woe is me.”

At the sight of all this, you can imagine why I took to my room right away, and thanked Christ that I had a single. For others, especially those inclined to self-harm or night terrors, a room of one’s own might not have been the best option, but for me, this private realm turned out to be the very best thing about St. Luke’s.