Nevertheless, I became obsessive about her. That night, I lay in bed and when my cock lifted at the thought of her I followed its ascent and was in her room moments later: Nurse Seroppian was asleep at her post, her enormous purple eyelids shuddering, and she was known for the dependability of her nightly doze. I spent the night in Rochelle’s bed and entered her once after she’d fallen asleep. She woke for a moment, didn’t seem to mind, and slipped back into sleep. It went on that way for weeks; we made love like people beating their heads against a wall. It sometimes amazed me she was only sixteen and so bereft of romantic illusion, but mostly I didn’t care. I didn’t discuss this liaison with Dr. Clark—I knew it would give him trouble—but I did slowly gain a secret sexual reputation: for endurance, if nothing else, or just plain availability.
Before long I took a second lover, a girl from Chicago named Pat Eliot, who had curly yellow hair, cupid’s-bow lips, prodigious breasts, and who pronounced her first name in two syllables. Pat was in her early twenties, an actress. She was actually a success in the world: she’d appeared at the Goodman Theater in many plays and had had a good role in a Hollywood movie, though it hadn’t been released. She was a wonderful lover, tender and powerful, without a trace of athleticism. Her breasts fascinated me but they were so huge they also made me shy, which pleased her because I would guess people had made too much of an issue about them. And so I had two lovers, and then a woman named Stephanie was admitted to Rockville.
Stephanie was just twenty and already a graduate student at the University of Chicago. She had brutal nightmares and wandered about in her sleep. I didn’t know her last name. But I was fixated on the idea of making love to her, and as soon as I had an opportunity to approach her, I did. She had no interest in making love with me and not much interest in knowing me. But I pursued the matter with increasing single-mindedness. Like any losing gambler, I could think of nothing else. I stared at her, followed her, dreamed of her, thought of her when I was with Rochelle and Pat, wrote notes to her, and finally lured her to my room, where I threw myself at her with odious abandon. She ran from my room, not exactly screaming, but saying “Christ sakes” in a loud, excited voice, and within the hour I was taken down to Dr. Clark’s sunny little office, where he waited for me behind his desk, drumming his fingers on its polished surface, empty except for a folder that turned out to be my records.
We talked for a long while; I told him I was “sexually active,” and he said that he knew I was. He told me that nothing unfortunate was likely to come of my friendship with Pat, but with Rochelle I was involving myself with a “girl of mysterious pathos,” and that with Stephanie I was simply behaving like a jerk and a bully. The peculiar thing was that the reprimand didn’t end in a warning; my actions were not directly proscribed.
I continued to pursue Stephanie despite my failure to interest her and despite Clark’s words with me. I cannot even remember what attracted me to her or what I wanted: I analyzed the attraction as sheerly magnetic and I gladly surrendered all memory and forethought to an urge that really wasn’t quite so blind as I would have liked. I felt myself capable of any low behavior. I imagined forcing myself on Stephanie, grabbing her from behind, sneaking into her bed at night. I took these empty, frustrated thoughts as signs of vitality, and so I welcomed them even as they destroyed me from within. The real point, of course, was not to think of Jade, and in this all illness served its purpose: if it had not been erotomania it could just as well have been hysterical paralysis. Finally, one day I convinced Stephanie to come to my room; I think my persistence was beginning to work on her, added to the emptiness and loss of self that was growing inside her as her stay at Rockville became longer and more routine. I had gotten her into a conversation about Nobel Prize winners and we were going to check in my almanac how many Americans had won the prize for literature. Rochelle saw us leave and a few minutes later she went to her room and uncovered the cache of Librium she’d been hoarding over the past couple months and attempted to commit what she might categorize as a revenge suicide.
Rochelle was saved without much difficulty, but the day after—with the entire hospital in a nervous hush—Dr. Clark told me that he was recommending that I be “released” from Rockville. I knew that it was only bad news, but I asked if this meant he was recommending me for outpatient treatment, if I was going to be allowed to return to Chicago.
“You know very well what it means and what it doesn’t. I’m a little surprised, even as your doctor, that you’d use this as an occasion…Well, never mind. The answer is no. The decision is limited to one consideration: we don’t feel that we can treat you with any great hope for success. At this point, your presence is disturbing the overall therapeutic community. I’m afraid your treatment is going to have to continue in a setting in which community is not as important. And who knows? It might be the change you need.”
Right…
My grandfather Jack wasn’t paying part of my hospital charges any longer; my breaking parole and Arthur’s affair with a black woman launched Grandfather away from us and our interminable problems. My parents had been able to negotiate a slightly lower rate with Rockville, but it was still a lot more than they could afford. When it was decided that I could no longer stay in that permissive Wyon hospital, a cursory search was begun to find another comparable institution in the state of Illinois, but nothing suitable seemed to present itself—and the truth was that my parents couldn’t afford to pay for private treatment any longer. At the recommendation of the court, my psychiatric files, my body, and my fate, were transferred to a state-run hospital called Fox Run, in Highland Park, a Chicago suburb. Breaking it to me—the details, that is—Arthur tried to be encouraging. “I think this is just the kind of place the court wants you to stay in before you get your release. The trouble with a place like Rockville is it’s got a reputation, and the thinking is if you’re spending your time here you’re not getting helped and you’re not getting punished.”
“Then why’d you put me here?” I asked.
“It’s what you wanted,” said Arthur. “You said it was.”
“And now you’re putting me in Fox Run? I’ve heard about Fox Run, you know. There’s been people here who’ve spent time there. It’s a goddamned hole is what it is. Oh God, can’t you feel what’s happening? I’m getting lost in the shuffle. Fox Run is the kind of place you disappear in. You get beaten to death, or drugged to death, or forgotten. Fine. OK. I’m not going to care, not another word. I just want to suggest that you both take a good look at me. If you think I’m bad now, next time you see me you’re not going to recognize me at all. I swear, it’s the end of me.”
On July 1, 1976, Eddie Watanabe and a rabbinical-looking staff worker from Fox Run took me by Ford to my new quarters in Highland Park. As a parting favor, Dr. Clark had given me a whopping dose of Stelazine and the bright neon anxiety I’d been feeling was now encapsulated in a soft, faintly transparent gel. I was bleary, silent; I sat in the back seat with my valise and a paper bag, watching the cornfields turn to suburbs, the sky turn from the blue of robins’ eggs to the blue of faded denim, to the barely decipherable blue of smoke. Eddie and the fellow from Fox Run talked about the mayor and the governor and the federal budget and then about things they’d believed when they were younger. Finally, Watanabe said, with weary pride, that they were both “survivors of the sixties,” and the fellow from Fox Run nodded in agreement.
The joke at Fox Run was that we, the patients, were the foxes and the staff was the hounds. They tried to get us to identify with them by continually informing us of the neighborhood’s attempts to have the hospital shut down; every third day, it seemed, part of the staff would be off somewhere fighting for the life of the institution, testifying before a citizens’ group or a state committee, defending Fox Run from the charges, the thousands of charges made against it. We inmates ranged in age from eighteen to ninety-three; many of us were without family; a large number were without rememberable pasts. We were Oriental, Appalachian, East European, Mexican, black, and most of us would be spending the rest of our lives in this hospital, or in another.
One of the principal complaints of the people who lived around Fox Run was that security was so patchy that patients, supposedly at will, would leave the hospital and wander through the community, peering into windows, shitting in bushes, staring mournfully at the children in shorts and halters. As soon as I learned this, I resolved to escape and soon I had an opportunity. I was mopping the floors in a ward when I heard a supervisor tell an orderly that a fire exit door was jammed and had to be repaired because it could neither open properly nor close. I slyly patrolled the corridors, looking for the defective door. I found it in short order and stood before it, breathing heavily and adjusting to the idea of freedom—of the bright, vast world that stretched out beyond that door.
I waited until the corridor was quiet; I could actually see the light coming through the door, an iridescent strand,
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
was stenciled in red across the door. This is an emergency, I thought to myself, as I pressed on the long lever and pushed. The door wedged open, swinging uncertainly on its broken hinge; the world leapt into view. Then just as suddenly I was grabbed from behind and dragged to a small room that was rumored to exist solely for the corporal punishment of patients and in which I was slapped, shaken, bounced around, and pummeled until I lost consciousness. The supervisor and two orderlies who caught and beat me never reported my attempted escape and I, in turn, never reported them. No one asked me about the cuts, lumps, and bruises that covered my body. It was a month before the pain disappeared and even longer before the limp and the headaches receded. Being beaten like that is so extraordinary, there’s no point in describing it. Those who haven’t been punished like that will never know how it feels, even if a genius describes it, and those who have, know it all too well.
In October, on a Sunday, Ann came to Fox Run. An orderly found me in the men’s fifth-floor television room watching the Bears play the Oakland Raiders. “Visitor,” he said, tapping me viciously on the shoulder with his index finger. I’d been feeling woozy that week. I asked if it was my parents—surprised, because I remembered our huge fight the week before and my asking them not to come to see me for a while. “No, it’s an aunt.” He showed me the white slip in his hand. Date, time, patient’s name. Visitor’s name: Ann Axelrod. Relation: Aunt.
She was waiting for me in the visitors’ room, sitting in a low green chair and studying the posters on the wall: gauzy photographs of couples walking hand in hand, swans silhouetted on the water, a waterfall, and a huge red and white striped balloon with the words “Up up and away” written on it. There were about twenty other visitors and as many patients, with five orderlies sitting around, looking the scene over.
I saw Ann before she knew I’d come into the room. I waited, giving myself a chance to feel whatever it was that seeing her again would awaken in me. I felt slightly nervous, embarrassed because I knew I didn’t look good and because it’s always embarrassing to be locked up. But other than that, my feelings couldn’t come forward; they remained pressed beneath the overwhelming weight of my circumstances. She’d gained a little weight, but it looked good on her. Her hair was almost solid gray—I don’t think time alone could have changed the color of her hair so radically. She wore a brown skirt and a soft, expensive-looking white blouse. She looked so elegant; I glanced around to see if everyone was noticing her, but no one seemed to.
“Surprise,” I said, dropping down into the chair next to her.
“David,” she said. Her voice suddenly disappeared, like a coin in a magic trick. Was she going to pull it out of my ear? She cleared her throat; color was rising in her face. “I told them I was your aunt.”
“I know.”
“I’m so bad at getting away with things,” she said. “I felt sure I’d get caught in my…”—she glanced around—“…lie. But now that I see you, I think I’ve actually pulled it off.” She smiled. Conspiracy. Triumph.
A surge of emotion ripped through me. All at once, I took Ann’s hand and held it, and then I lifted it slowly to my lips and kissed the back of her cool, faintly tanned hand. My nose was pressing against her; there was a faint cucumbery taste on her skin, and when I finally stopped kissing her and she let her hand drop into her lap, I saw that her hand was wet. I stared at it, hoping she would wipe it dry and horrified that she might.
“I’m in town at the behest of my publisher,” she said, quietly. “Promoting my book.”
“So you finally wrote a book,” I said.
Ann hesitated, nodded. She’d expected me to know. A slight overestimation of her own celebrity. I felt ashamed for her. How dare she think I would know
anything.
“I miss a lot of what’s going on in here,” I said.
“Of course. And even if you weren’t here. Maybe ten thousand people in all the world know my name. It’s a small world, the book world.”
“It’s about time you wrote a book. Think of it: a real book.”
“You look OK, David,” she said; “You really do.” She glanced around the room, as if to say: Better than the others, at least. Someone was having a coughing fit, a patient. His family was pounding him on the back to make him stop.
“I saw myself in the mirror yesterday,” I said. “And I thought, ‘Hey boy, you look like someone in a public fucking nuthouse.’”
“You look good. Your voice is deeper.”
“It’s the drugs. It relaxes my face and makes me look old. They give you a lot of drugs here. Remember how we used to love drugs? Well, it’s different here. It’s serious. They have to give them to us or else we’d tear the place down. Burn it. That’s why my voice is so low, too. The drugs. I’m glad you noticed. I wasn’t sure it was true, and I didn’t know who to ask.”
We were silent for a few moments. The cougher was still coughing. An orderly stood with his massive arms folded, watching the family pound the cougher’s back.