"What man?"
He taps his skull with his pen. "The man in here."
"Oh," I say, nodding. I take a guess. "Is he short, sort of egg-shaped, with sometimes a blue shoe, but sometimes not?"
He bangs the table, thrilled. "Yes!" he cries. From the desk there is a voice saying to keep it down as it is night and other people are sleeping. "Yes!" he whispers. "That's him! Do you have him too?"
"No, I'm no good at math. I can't even learn languages. Maybe he's God."
He leans over his notebook, agog. "Do you really think so? Wow. Maybe he is."
"Well," I say, smoothing my hands out over the air. "Actually, the system itself is God. It's an elegant mathematics, that are God, and he is the angel who comes to give you good tidings of great joy."
He shakes his head slowly, amazed. "How do you know so much?"
"Oh," I say, waving it off. "Actually, I don't know much. For example, I've never heard him explain the system. I just studied philosophy in college. So he is the argument for God, at least from the perspective of Kierkegaard, who I pretty much agree with, because, well, I've seen the little man, and I get flashes of how the system looks, but not how it works. Because obviously, he's telling you, because you understand math."
He stands up and shakes my hand thoroughly. "Thank you. Thank you so much."
"Hey, no problem," I say. "I'm just glad I could help."
"Oh, you have," he says, still shaking my hand. He bows low, grabs his notebook to his chest, and says, "My meds just kicked in, so I have to go listen to the man."
"Sure, go," I say. "Myself, I sleep during the day."
"We'll talk more about this later," he says, straightening up and setting off down the hall, which leads God knows where.
The next day, or another, the young man with gold hair, whose name might be Peter, but I have forgotten since the last time he told me, goes loping by, talking at a great speed and gesturing grandly, following on the heels of one of the staff members, who is ignoring him, though not in a mean way. Jeff and I watch the loping young man as we munch on our snack.
"Who's that?" Jeff asks.
"I think his name might be Peter. Don't quote me on that."
"What does he have?"
"Bipolar. He's psychotic right now." Peter, or whatever, spins on his heel and follows the staff back in the other direction. He waves his notebook over his head. "He has a mathematical man in his head," I mention to Jeff.
The staff person passes us, Peter close on her heels.
"I knew it!" he cries, jabbing his stub of a pencil into the air. "This is all part of the plan, isn't it?" He looks absolutely delighted. He spins around and notices us, and sits down next to Jeff on the couch. He shakes Jeff's hand vigorously, then turns to me.
"I knew it," he repeats, satisfied, picking up a tattered magazine, crossing his legs, flipping through the pages, throwing it back on the table, uncrossing his legs, throwing his arms over the back of the couch, and looking around as if taking in a sunny day in Havana. He shakes his head. "This whole thing," he says, gesturing at the psych ward, the patients and visitors and staff. "They're telling me it's not part of the plan. But I see the plan."" He looks at Jeff and smiles very wide. He leans toward him. " You see the plan, don't you?" he demands.
"Of course. It's plain as day," Jeff says, and offers him the bag of chips.
The next time we see Peter, he's possessed, and a horde of hospital security has come to hold him down. His parents watch from the corner. Security hauls him off to the padded room. His parents look around, then slowly sit back down on the couch.
Hospitalization #4
October 2004
The visitors sit at tables, or in circles of chairs, with their person. The visitors watch their person, not knowing what to say. They talk to their person about anything they can think of except what's going on. The people who have visitors have not yet lost everything. Some of the visitors stare at us, rudely, stupidly, as if we don't see them staring, and in truth some of us don't. But some of us do, and we catch their eyes, and they look away quickly, embarrassed, afraid of us, wanting to stare at us some more.
Most of the people with visitors are near enough to sane that they can recognize them, can say, at least, hello, even if they then retreat into their private worlds. The visitors look away from their person, sometimes glancing uneasily at them. They often sit with their arms folded tight across their chests, as if to defend themselves from the madness around them. When their person talks, they look up eagerly, hoping the person will suddenly seem sane, as if he might suddenly break out of his torpor or confusion or delusion or manic agitation and begin talking sense to the visitors, who want nothing more than for this person to stop being how he is.
The visitors dread coming when this is new to them, sometimes even when it's something they've been doing for years. The new ones don't understand what's going on. Some of them resent their person for what they see as willfulness, or weakness. They can barely disguise the anger or disgust that flickers across their faces. Their voices, when they speak, are accusing, or sarcastic. Some of them have for months been telling their person to snap out of it, to cheer up, to get herself together, to stop feeling sorry for herself; they're the ones who are visiting a depressed person, not anyone psychotic. The visitors of a manic person watch their patient with wide eyes, moving quickly to try and follow the hyperkinetic movements and rapid stream of speech and leaps of logic. Many of these visitors, usually family members, speak in low voices, trying to soothe their person, bring him or her back to reality. But there aren't as many visitors for the manic people. Nor are there many who visit the schizophrenics.
Those who visit often, who for years have driven the same route to the same hospital to be let onto the same floor to scan the same room to find the same person, look tired. They sit closer to their person than the others, and their conversation, what there is of it, is a little easier. During the silences, they glance up and absently watch the other patients, not judging them like some visitors, but feeling for them, and feeling for the patients' visitors as well. All the visitors are shut out, and they can only wait for the meds to work, for the episode to pass, for their person to be returned to them, shaky, unsteady, needing their help to reenter the vast, confusing world. At the end of visiting hours, they will get up, go back through the locked door, worried as always, and very, very tired.
One day, when I am still manic, I am more than alert, I am alive with the whizzing and spinning of my mind. My boss and another editor from the magazine where I worked a thousand years ago come to visit me.
All day, I have been waiting. I have a joke to tell them. I am having a hard time keeping it to myself. I grin and squirm. I think I will die if I can't tell it soon. I thought it up, and it is a most fabulous joke, a joke such as I have never heard, let alone come up with myself. So I have been hopping around all day, going to my stupid little groups, and I've read all the colored worksheets, and made all the little coin purses in art group, and done all the little brainless breathing exercises the group leaders tell me to do.
This is how I thought up the joke: my boss sent me flowers. But get this—they came in a vase! And the vase was made of glass! They inadvertently sent me glass! So the staff had to take it away and put the flowers (tulips and daffodils) in a plastic bucket. Which, in my opinion, completely ruined the effect. But never mind that. I have a joke. I watch the clock, bouncing in my seat, dying for visiting hours to come. I cannot wait.
So my boss and the editor arrive, and I unleash my joke.
"...so it's incredibly ironic!" I crow at the end, my arms wrapped around my legs, rocking back and forth with glee. They smile nervously at me, the way people do when they don't get the joke and are hoping there's a punch line coming. I look at them in their idiot confusion and roll my eyes and lean forward to emphasize my point. "I can't have glass!"
Again with the nervous smiles.
Amazed by their stupidity, I throw up my arms
. "So I could kill myself!" I shout, and begin laughing so hard at my excellent joke that I have to hold my stomach.
Now they laugh, and nod, aghast. "Oh!" they say, nodding. "Yes!"
When Jeff comes to visit that night, I tell him the joke all over again. He finds it hilarious. We laugh our heads off, getting it totally"
"I don't think they liked my joke," I say sadly.
"That's weird," he says, handing me my decaf Americano. "It's a great joke. I'm sure they just didn't get it."
"They're stupid, then. It's totally obvious."
"Totally," he says. "Do you want to sit in the chair?"
I look up at the chair. "Okay," I say, feeling pretty agreeable. Standing up from the floor, I notice that I am wearing my pajamas. My hands fly up to my hair. "Oh my God," I say, eyes wide. "I'm in my pajamas!"
"You are indeed," he says, unpacking a snack. "So what? It's not like you're going anywhere."
"I must have been wearing my pajamas when they came! I am totally embarrassed! What are they going to think of me?" I groan and flop down in the chair.
"I'm sure they didn't even notice," he says mildly, and hands me a paper plate.
Hospitalization #5
January 2005
"I brought you Mrs. Crow," announces Ruth, sliding onto the couch and squeezing my knee. Ruth is a twitchy, wiggly, skinny-legged person, very beautiful, always in motion, with enormous eyes and spidery eyelashes she frequently bats, to excellent effect. Mrs. Crow, a stuffed crow wearing a skirt and a rainbow ribbon for a belt, is the talisman. Whoever is in trouble, me or Ruth, gets to have Mrs. Crow until she is well.
Nothing fazes Ruth, or Megan, or really any of my friends. They have their own quirks and eccentricities, and, in several cases, their own diagnoses. To them, my madness is just a part of me, something that happens, and they come to see me, and I am useless company, and I sit there, profoundly grateful that they are there but unable to tell them so.
Christi, Ruth's partner, pulls up a chair facing us. Christi is schizophrenic and visits Unit 47 fairly regularly herself. "How's it going?" she asks me, throwing an arm over the back of the chair. She wears a fine hat. I want it.
"Not so good," I answer. "I'm totally confused."
"That'll pass," she says.
"Will it?"
"Always does."
I raise an eyebrow. "Okay," I say. "If you say so."
"So," Ruth says, tucking Mrs. Crow in next to me and handing me my decaf Americano, making sure I have it in both hands before she lets it go, "who's in here?"
I look around the room. "That guy, over there, he's bipolar." They look over at him. "He had a wife and a kid but he doesn't know what he did with them. He hasn't seen them in a while."
"That sucks," Ruth says.
"He says he used to be the CEO of the government." I pause, uncertain. "Does the government have a CEO?"
"I don't think so," says Ruth. "He doesn't really look like a CEO." He wears a pair of loose, dirty gray pants held up with a length of rope, a white eyelet nightgown, and a pair of tennis shoes full of holes. His toes stick out.
"Course, you never know," Christi says. "Maybe he was a CEO before all this."
"Could be," I say. "Exactly. Like that lady over there." I nod toward her, and they look. The woman, who wears a red suit, is sitting at a table, bent toward the paper on which she is scribbling intently. When she gets to the bottom of each page, she lifts it with a flourish and sets it down on one of several piles she has stacked neatly around the table. She lays the page down, straightens its corners, then does it again. She does it several times.
"That's a patient?" Ruth asks.
"Why else would she be in here working?" Christi asks, cracking up. "It's not like this is a library and she came here because it's nice and quiet." As if to punctuate this, a roar comes from behind us, and we turn to see a man standing up in front of several visitors, his arms lifted to the ceiling. "Lord!" he cries. "Will you tell these idiots that I have seen what I have seen, and that I must get out of here so I can spread the word?"
"That's the prophet," I say. "He's been after me all day."
"Is he schizophrenic?" Christi asks.
"Not sure. Could be bipolar," I answer. "Delusions of grandeur."
"Have you ever had those?" Christi asks.
Ruth laughs. I glare at her. "I get mild ones," I say. "But I've never thought I was queen or anything."
"Are you sure about that?" Ruth asks. "Don't you remember that time you thought you could be a Supreme Court justice?"
"But not queen," I say.
"No," she agrees. "Not queen."
Ruth has seen me in all manner of states. She's seen me manic as hell, depressed, confused, sedated, incomprehensible, and everything in between. But she sits there calmly, agreeable, perfectly willing to follow the circuitous meander of my thoughts, or hold my head up when it's lolling, or sit on the floor with me when I'm under a table. I adore her.
"And that guy," I say, pointing to a young man buried in an enormous coat, the hood up, his hands in his pockets, off in a corner by himself. "He hasn't said anything since he got here. I don't know what his deal is. But her, she won't shut up." The woman I'm referring to is perched at the edge of a chair across the table from a catatonic man who's wearing several layers of hospital robes. "She's trying to convince everyone that her suicide attempt was just her following the orders of the Great Spirits, who needed her."
"For what?" Ruth asks.
"I don't know. I guess just to help out. She's got a thing about Native American spirituality. She keeps saying she's a Sioux princess."
"I don't think the Sioux have princesses anymore," Christi says.
"Well, she's pretty out of it. Anyway, everybody else is just regular manic or depressed. My roommate hasn't come out of her room since she got here. She's starting to smell."
"You've got to wonder what these people are like when they're out," Ruth says.
Christi and I look at her. She looks back at us.
"Oh," she says. "Like you."
Suddenly my hand stops working and I drop my Americano in my lap. We all stare at it for a minute.
"I'll get paper towels," says Christi, standing up.
"Thanks," I say, trying to sort of back away from the coffee, which has spilled all over my front, my feet, and the couch. I look up at Ruth, bewildered.
"Maybe change the pajamas," she suggests, standing and reaching for my hand. She pulls me off the couch and takes me down the hall to my room. She digs around in the paper bags that hold my clothes and takes out a pair of red ones.
"But I like these," I say.
"But they're all wet," she says, pulling my shirt off over my head.
"But they're my lucky pajamas," I say, standing there.
"These ones are lucky too," she says. "Pants off." She hands me the new pajama pants. I put them on and sit down on the bed and reach for the socks, but get disorganized trying to get them on my feet—something about doing it one at a time isn't working for me—so Ruth does it.
"The socks aren't long enough," I say, upset. "They have to go up to my knees or they aren't right."
She digs around and finds another pair of socks and puts them on me, one foot at a time. Christi appears at the door.
"Time for bed," says Ruth, pulling down the covers and standing there like my mother. I crawl across the bed and get in. She pulls the sheet up to my chin, because she knows I like to be contained. She leans down and kisses my head. Christi does the same.
"When are you coming back?" I ask.
"Wednesday," Ruth says.
I feel very small and warm in my dry pajamas. "Thanks for coming," I say.
"Don't be silly," she says. "Of course we came. Go to sleep."
I nod, and am asleep before they reach the door.
Hospitalization #6
April 2005
The first time I was in the hospital, I'd been very clear. I made Jeff swear he would never allow them to
do it to me. He swore. I made him swear again: I said, Promise me. Don't ever, ever let them give me electroshock. He promised.
So I signed my rights over to Jeff. I signed the piece of paper that said I would allow Jeff to make the decisions for me should I be too crazy to speak, should the patient be unable or unwilling to state her own decisions ... in a state of psychosis or other debilitating condition; should I be, for example, insisting on leaving the hospital, I would allow Jeff to tell them to keep me there for her own safety and the safety of others; should I be in such a state that I would be unable to care for herself, and was, for example, unable to dress myself, wash myself, or speak anything other than gibberish, I signed her rights and the responsibility of her decisions regarding her freedom over to Jeffrey Curtis Miller [SPOUSE], allowing him to tell them to lock me up and, if he so chose, throw away the key. I signed away my life to my husband, who swore, who promised, he would never allow them to give me electroshock.
Dr. Grau is sitting at the edge of my bed, speaking slowly. Dr. Grau is very small and moves with precise, efficient movements. She dresses quite smartly and her black hair is cut in an excellent short, snappy style, and it gleams. She speaks with a heavy Brazilian accent. I know it hurts, she says. Oh, I'm so sorry you feel this way"I'm lying in the hospital bed on my side, staring at the other bed in the room, my body racked with such a mind-bending ache that I feel it's possible that I will never draw a painless breath again. Suddenly the pain intensifies, and tears seep out of my eyes. I fail to care, really, that I'm crying. I'm so sorry. Can you talk to me? she says. It's the kind of crying that isn't born of sadness so much as sheer physical pain. It is not a real physical pain, but it feels like it is, and the pain takes hold of my rib cage with its hands and clenches and squeezes the pliable bones to such an extent that one realizes one will never escape, one will die of the pain before they can save me from the cruelty of my own mind.