*
She came the next day, with a clipboard of the sort you’d keep a psychiatric checklist clipped to. I sat on my bed and she sat in the guest chair.
“I’m glad you’re doing this,” she began. “It makes it a lot easier and faster when a patient is willing to help with his own treatment. We always get better results. I know some of the experiences you’ve had have been very frightening for you, but I think that with your help we’ll be able to get you past it all and you won’t have to go through that kind of thing anymore.”
After much conversation, she pulled a bottle of Psylocybin from her pocket and placed it in my hand.
“This is an important step,” she said. “You’ve admitted that you have a problem, and the things you’ve said to me make it clear that you really do believe that. We’re helping you to get better, and now you need to show that you’re willing to help yourself.”
I looked down at the bottle in my hand. “What does it do, exactly?” I asked. I’d had these pills before, but it was really only to placate Winslow because he was worried I might hurt myself or somebody else[10] if I didn’t get mental treatment, and he threatened to call the police; I hadn’t been committed to taking them, I hadn’t even wanted them, so I wasn’t totally sure what they actually did.
“In your brain, the amygdaloidal nucleus – or amygdala – is responsible for emotions like fear, anxiety, and other basic, negative emotions. So, for example, if someone is breathing right over your shoulder while you’re drinking orange juice, you might feel socially anxious because of their proximity, and you’d probably move away a few feet. That’s normal. Scientists think it’s an evolutionary protection, because fifty-thousand years ago someone standing that close to you might be trying to steal your delicious juice, and to do so they might smash your head open with a rock, or a stick, or a piece of metal, or a bone, or – you get the idea, they’d use whatever they could do the smashing.”
“Now, that’s great for most people, but,” she said, raising her hand palm-outward, “in some cases, like in your case, the amygdala has grown too large, and the rest of your brain gets the impression that signals from the amygdala are more important than they actually are, purely due to the size and strength of them. So you’re drinking juice you got from a vending machine, and just to be safe, your amygdala suggests that because other people also think juice is delicious that it’s probably a good idea to go in your house, lock the doors and close the blinds before you have a drink.”
I felt my cheeks warming up and I looked away from her – many times I had bought a drink from a vending machine only to have to hide it protectively in my coat and rush home, and by the time I got there the cold refreshing drink I was promised by the billboard would be warm and unappetizing. I would drink it still, but it would only taste of shame.
“And while you’re at it,” she continued, not noticing my discomfort, “why not get under a blanket, too, in case somebody can see through walls. Then they’ll just see a lump under a blanket instead of a guy drinking juice, and since lumps aren’t delicious you’d have nothing to worry about then. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but I’m not a neuroscientist myself, so all I can give you is the basics, which is good enough for me and you.”
“For most of human history, that’s what people with your condition were stuck with: irrational and unreasonable emotions, fearful reactions and frankly absurd behavior, all just to reassure the tiny (yet still oversized), nervous, tyrant Amygdala. A decade ago, researchers at the pharmaceutical company NorCorp,” and here she paused to remove a pamphlet from a deep pocket and place it on the bedside table, “discovered an enzyme which can control or limit undesirable signals from any specific part of your brain. This enzyme, in combination with certain chemicals – different combinations for each undesirable signal – was trademarked as Psylocybin. As you probably remember from the newspapers at the time, a lucrative market sprang up among the newly invented sport of bare-knuckle bear fighters, who used a version of Psylocybin to suppress their wholly rational fear of boxing against a six-hundred pound carnivore that doesn’t understand the gentlemanly rules of boxing. That kind of thing is self-correcting though, and so soon the bare-knuckle bear fighting market for Psylocybin dried up and the sport died off – along with the human competitors. The only parties who cared about this event were NorCorp, which had to search out new markets for its drug, and certain species of bear which had grown accustomed to their dinner running calmly, fearlessly, and directly into their jaws, and now were loathe to return to the effort of chasing…”
Hearing this from her made me feel less ashamed about my own problems. After all, at least I’ve never tried to fight a bear, and I prided myself in keeping track of all bear sightings at bearbeware.net before vacations so that I didn’t accidentally holiday in an area where a bear or someone in a bear suit might have been looked at once. I was feeling so pleased with myself for being sensible and safe that I’d forgotten to take in what Penelope was saying, but I caught the trailing thread of her Psylocybin history lesson.
“… mental diseases such as manic depression, paranoid personality disorder and schizophrenia were beginning to lose some of their social stigma. NorCorp was excellently positioned to address the problems, and Psylocybin went on the fast track for FDA approval. Within a year, it was approved for use in treating a wide variety of mental disorders, and now it’s available to help you.”
“Does it really work?” I asked. “Is it really going to make me like everyone else, not worried and afraid of everything?”
“It works——” she broke off her sentence, and I could see her considering her words carefully.
“It works,” she said again. “I know, because I use it myself. A lot of the staff here have Psylocybin prescriptions for different disorders. It’s why many of us were chosen to work in Maple Ridge, since it specializes in mental disorders. We have intimate knowledge of the way these conditions can affect a person’s life, so we’re better able to help patients like you. I know what you’re going through; I’ve been through the same things myself.”
I couldn’t believe that she’d previously had the same irrational worries and fears as me, she seemed very professional and in control. My face must have betrayed my disbelief, since she said, “It’s true, it really is. I know it seems unbelievable, since now I’m professional and in control, but there’s been more than one night before where I’ve stayed up until six in the morning with my ear pressed to the side of a windowless van parked outside my apartment listening for the sounds – sounds that never came – of somebody inside talking about me. I wasn’t able to work – I was hardly able to eat for fear they would hear – and when I got fired for never showing up to my job at the hospital I convinced myself it was a conspiracy to leave me penniless and powerless so I wouldn’t be able to do anything about the man in the van. I was living in a homeless women’s shelter and sleeping with three pillows over my head at night, when a doctor at the free clinic recommended me to a friend of his who was running the first experimental trials of Psylocybin for paranoid people.”
She reached into her pocket and took out another pill bottle. She held it up to me and I read the name on the label: ‘HOPE, P.’ Penelope Hope. “I take one of these every morning, and since I started I’ve been able to lead a normal life again. It’s so good to have a nondescript van pass me in the street these days and not feel anything. Not that I’m numb, I do feel things. I just don’t feel worried that every van has it out for me. I was lucky that a hospital like Maple Ridge exists with the unique mission they have, because even though the last hospital I worked at gave me a bad reference and said I couldn’t be relied on, the HR department here is educated in mental illness and knew it was just because of my overactive amygdala, and that the Psylocybin kept me under control.”
I looked down at the bottle in my hand. “You’ve told me a lot more about Psylocybin than I knew before,” I said, “but I still feel unsur
e. When I used it before, although I know I didn’t take the exact dosage I was prescribed or use it on the exact schedule I was given, it felt like it changed me somehow, in an uncomfortable way.”
Penelope nodded. “The paranoia you have feels like a part of you. You’re used to the constant worrying, and you don’t feel whole without breaking into a cold sweat whenever you see someone hidden halfway behind a dumpster in the shadows of an alley as you’re walking down the street, when really that man hidden in the shadows is just having a smoke break behind his place of business, peeing against the wall, or conducting business with a prostitute who is hidden lower down behind the dumpster. If anything, he’s the one who should feel nervous or ashamed because you’ve seen him.”
“Feeling like you’re being watched makes you feel important, though; just like anybody else, you want to feel cared for, you want attention. Your brain makes up that attention for you, and coupled with the powerful signals coming from your amygdala, it can become an almost addictive feeling. When you’re on Psylocybin it’s hard to get used to the fact that really, you’re not more interesting than everyone else in the world and nobody has popped out of your shower drain to go through your drawers the moment you leave the house every day.”
“When your dysfunctional amygdala is no longer creating those feelings of importance and attention, you miss it, but you learn to fill your life with more meaningful things, like I’ve done by working at this hospital. I’ve made myself important to the patients here and to my employers; that’s real importance, not just something that exists in my head,” she said, tapping herself on the temple. “Because of the way your amygdala interacts with the rest of your brain, this is something you have to consciously accept; you have to want to change, or your brain is going to reject the chemicals in Psylocybin and it won’t have any effect. I’m going to leave you on your own to think about it more, and maybe you should read through this pamphlet to see if it can help put you at ease. I hope you come to the same conclusion I did, it really is much better this way.” She smiled at me, took her hand off my knee, and left the room.
Once she was gone, it was just me and the pamphlet; mano a folleto. The cover of it had only this lengthy title over a plain background of a solid color: ‘Further information on the usage of Psylocybin and its effects on the overactive amygdaloidal nucleus of certain individuals.’
I felt a reluctance to open it – could it really hold information so powerful that it would answer all my questions and make me feel fully comfortable with taking Psylocybin and letting it change the way my mind worked? Maybe I didn’t want to be rationally convinced into giving up my paranoia, that familiar friend of my mind. My head swam among a school of conflicting thoughts; Penelope had said this friend could be an enemy, that she had found it to be a false friend; I had found it to be the same, if I was honest with myself. I knew that I had killed a man under the influence of my paranoia – an innocent man. The pictures Dr. Boggs had shown me were not faked.
I stared at the pamphlet, unmoving. Anyone watching the scene – if anyone was so bored as to spend their evening watching a mental patient’s internal conflict over looking inside an informative pamphlet – would have thought I had gone catatonic. I had not, though; I was only lulling the pamphlet into a false sense of security, letting it think that it could lie there unmolested until the end of time, with nothing to worry about from me. When I judged that it had relaxed sufficiently and would not expect it, I steeled my resolve, and quickly moved my hand to the corner of the glossy paper[11]. Before I could talk myself out of it, I had opened the pamphlet fully and its contents stared out at me.
It was one A4-sized sheet, folded into three sections. The left section depicted a dark, frightening scene of a man bearing a fearful expression who was carefully peering from behind the corner of a dirty brick building, watching several men with heavy coats and hats. Their coat collars were turned up and their hats were pulled low; combined with the bright moon high in the sky behind them, this put their faces in shadow so that you could only see their narrow eyes. They huddled around a collection of papers and photographs, and in one of the photographs could clearly be seen the face of the man who was hiding around the corner of the wall. Other photographs had titles such as ‘his house’, ‘his toothbrush’, and ‘his middle-school crush.’ Among the papers were maps marked ‘route to work’, ‘route to the store on Thursdays’, and others. It was apparent that these men were well equipped to follow their prey – the nervous man around the corner who was dripping with sweat – and they knew a good deal about him.
I saw another detail I had missed at first: at the other corner of the building, opposite the sweating man who was watching, was another dark man in a heavy coat with a sinister bulge under the arm, and he was watching the first man with his narrow eyes. The intent of the scene was clear; the nervous man was watching those who were watching him, and staying one step ahead of them, but unbeknownst to him he was caught in an invisible trap – he was being watched, even while he watched those who he thought were the watchers; while he thought he was safe and out of sight he was under the eye of their frightful microscope.
The scene frightened me not because it was drawn realistically or in any kind of horrifying manner, for it was not; it was drawn in an abstract, cartoonish manner, like a parody or caricature of life. It frightened me because it could have been a direct snapshot of my mind at any given time in the past ten years. How many times had I felt I was being watched, and done my best to escape and evade, and even sometimes felt like I was successful in my escape so that I was able to hide and watch them from my hiding place, yet even in my safe place I had worried that I was still being watched, and doubted my safety?
The middle section showed the same worried man, sat on a bed. A picture on the wall showed an older man with his eyes and an older woman with his nose – his parents[12], so he was in his bedroom at home. The clock showed 12:01AM, so either his clock had recently lost power or he was up quite late, and the darkness from the window indicated the latter. A set of narrow eyes pierced the darkness of the window – the eyes of a dark man in a heavy coat. The worried man on the bed had bags under his bloodshot eyes, and thick lines in his forehead like a piece of dough flattened and then pressed together from each end. It was like looking into a mirror that reflected the way I felt; inside as well as outside, I was always the man sat up until midnight with stomach ulcers forming due to the stress from excessive worry.
I looked away from the pamphlet to think, and caught myself reflected in the acrylic safety covering of a picture on the wall. It was only a thin, blurry reflection because that safety covering was not intended as a mirror, but still I saw a face that looked far older than I had imagined my face to look, with gray skin and haggard eyes. My body was thin; emaciated, even, because eating was a low priority when they were after you. A clump of my hair was missing; had it fallen out naturally from the stress of the situations I found myself in or had I pulled it out in a paranoid fit without realizing?
I looked back at the pamphlet, and saw that a copy of the same pamphlet lay on his bedside table, and in his hand the man held a prescription pill bottle, with ‘NorCorp’ in large, bright letters on the label, and ‘Psylocybin’ below that. In his other hand he held a small pill, and was raising it towards his mouth.
The left section had been labeled ‘Denial,’ the middle section had been labeled ‘Acceptance,’ and the right and final section was labeled ‘Joy.’ The sun shone high and bright in a clear, blue sky, lighting up the scene. This section showed the same man, but he looked in much better health. Gone were the bags, the lines, the bloodshot eyes, the pale complexion, the harried, hunted look. His face bore a calm, satisfied, self-assured smile. He was sat at a table in the alley from the Denial section, and sat at the table with him were several men wearing heavy coats, the men from the other sections. Their heads were thrown back in laughter – perhaps at a funny joke the formerly worried man had told. On
e man was pulling something out from his coat, but instead of an instrument of death such as a knife or gun – as you might expect due to the sinister bulge under his arm from Denial – he was pulling out a gift, wrapped in foil paper with handsome, muscular unicorns printed on it. Since it was now clear that these men were not kidnappers or murderers or hooligans of any sort but rather were friends of his simply bringing him a birthday present, I became aware of a new element to the smile of the no-longer-worried man; I saw that it showed a measure of self-deprecation because he now realized how silly he had been to experience such worry over such a benign situation. I thought of how perfectly ashamed he should be – how perfectly ashamed I should be, in fact, for it was very clear that I was the same as this man – for behaving the way he had towards those who only wished to do him good.
The message of the pamphlet was crude, but it still had a precise effect on me. I realized what a fool I had been, and I let the pamphlet fall from my hands. How many days of my life had I wasted being in denial about my condition? How many years? But I knew it wasn’t too late, there was still time to turn things around. I could start on this medication I had been given. I could apologize to Winslow and to my other friends who I had wronged along the way, who I had suspected of treachery towards me or conspiracy against me for some innocuous reason.
Maybe I’d even be able to get back my old job as a candy tester, this time without breaking into a cold sweat every time a new flavor of M&M was brought to me because I was worried this might at last be the one which was poisoned so they could replace me with a man who had been surgically made similar to me in every way except for an overlooked mole on the back of his upper thigh, the significance of which could never be realized by anybody other than my mother, and then not even her because at my age it’s very rare for your mother to see the back of your upper thigh[13] unless she’s looking at faded Polaroid photos of you from when you were a baby playing in a metal washtub.
Thinking about my mother caused me to remember that I hadn’t spoken to her in perhaps a year for her protection, so that they couldn't connect her to me, but now I missed her deeply. She called sometimes, less than at first, but still every month or so, and I just let the phone ring when I saw her number on the caller ID. Once she had called from someone else’s phone, so I answered, but when I heard her voice I didn’t say anything else. I heard her voice then in my head as I thought back.
“Oscar? Oscar, are you there? It’s your mother. Please answer me, Oscar, why,” her voice caught in her throat, punctuating her sentences in odd places, “won’t you talk to me? I came over last week and knocked on your door for a while. I knew you were in there, I saw the curtain move at the side. Pick up the phone, Oscar.”
There was a pleading tone in her voice, but at the time I thought I was being protective and brave, shielding her from the bad people who I thought were following me and might use her as a weapon against me[14], so I walled myself up inside and pushed my emotions down deep. Now I realized that instead of being brave I had actually been the world’s worst son[15] for the mountains of grief and worry that I had caused to my mother for no real reason, when all she wanted was to be in contact with me.
The way I had treated my mother was just one example of what my friends and family had been through, and not even the worst example, which is why I told you about it. My former girlfriend was probably still mourning me after I had faked my own death and then left a dead pheasant in her mailbox to throw her off the trail, and I would tell the full story of that but it’s rather embarrassing, so instead you only get a footnote[16] which leaves your questions tantalizingly unanswered. I’m sorry for being so difficult.
I looked down at the bottle of Psylocybin in my hand. The list of people I had wronged, neglected, or just confused by my behavior was nearly endless. If what Penelope had told me was true, inside that bottle was a way to shorten the list, to right the wrongs, to erase some of the names and perhaps in time get them to erase my name off their own list of weirdos[17]. I opened the bottle, poured several of the pills into my hand, and then set them down because I remembered you were supposed to have them with food. I waited impatiently until dinner time several hours later, when a nurse I hadn’t seen before knocked on the door and came in, holding a tray of food for me. I thanked her, took several bites of my ham and cheese sandwich and took the pills. I didn’t feel any different at first, so I finished the sandwich and settled down on my bed to await the effects. Gradually, for the first time since I had been inside Maple Ridge Psychiatric Hospital, the light from the window dimmed, and by the time I fell asleep that day it was dark outside my window and in my room.