Madness (26 page)

"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.

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 debili
tating 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.

So when she asks me if I'm willing to try electroshock therapy, it isn't Jeff who says yes. It's me. It hurts that much. I won't remember saying yes. I'll remember Jeff sitting in a chair by the side of the bed, asking me if I'm sure. He says, You made me promise I would never let them do it. You made me promise. Are you really sure?

Now I am being wheeled from the psych ward down the hall.
Wheeled not because I can't walk—my legs technically work—but because I cannot, by force of my own will, direct them to move in the usual fashion, one foot in front of the other, forget it, I can't. What hall is this? One moment I am one place, and the next I am somewhere else. In madness, there is no such thing as location, no place where I understand that I am. There is a waiting room. It's not that I recognize it—I surmise it, as I frantically review shards of memory, turning them over in my hand as if they are seashells I find on the beach. And here, I guess, is the room where I lie on the bed and they administer the electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ECT.

The room is white and cold and blindingly bright. Perhaps it is not a bed? Perhaps it is a gurney. Perhaps it is a cold steel table such as they have in a vet's office. I am lying here, and I blink into the lights above my head. I try to count the dots in the squares of particleboard that cover the ceiling. I lose my place. Numbers dance around my skull like the plastic magnetic letters and numbers that people with children have on their refrigerator door. I lie here thinking of the Count on
Sesame Street: One two three four five six seven eight, counting! Counting! One two sixteen forty-three, counting, counting!
The nice man stands at my side.
I'm Dr. X. I'm an anesthesiologist.
I think of an Anne Sexton poem: "You, Doctor Martin, walk / from breakfast to madness..."

How are you feeling today?
I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not. I have ceased to be.
Where am I?
Here is the nice man. Is he still talking? His mouth moves in some kind of pantomime of speech. He wears a white coat. There is also a nurse.
Where is Dr. Grau?
I must have asked this out loud.
I'm right here, honey.
Dr. Grau looms over me from my left. She lays her hand on my shoulder.
Right here.
Aha: She is
right here.
Then this will be all right.
Where am I? If I am here, why am I here? If
(X) Dr. Grau is here
+
(Y) I am here, then (Z) it is all right.
Where is here again? Can someone explain? The room is white, violently bright: therefore, hospital. I am on a gurney: ergo, emergency room? No, this room is shinier, cleaner, and there is no sound of shouting or crying. But here is Dr. X, the
nice man
who says he is—that's right!—the
anesthesiologist,
which means he has
anesthesia
in his possession. Needles!
I love needles! I love anesthesia!
It feels like dying.
Dying is an art / like everything else.
Sylvia Plath. I'm just
full
of suicidal poets, aren't I? Dr. Grau is near my face. I turn my eyes up to her. She is God. She is putting something cold and slimy on my temples. What is it? Glue. It's getting in my hair. It hardly matters. Who knows when I last washed my hair. I put my hand up to touch it. My fingers come away from it, a thread like snot. A nurse or some other indistinct figure is wrapping a tight band around my right arm, which has
excellent
veins
.
The vise around my arm is knotted and snaps against my skin. I remark on my excellent veins,
Yes, they're very nice,
noting also that the veins in my left arm
suck,
but not noting that because of this, a lifetime ago, it was very difficult to shoot myself up, being, as I am, right-handed.
You're going to feel a little pinch.
I smile, anticipating it: there it is. I feel the needle slide into my excellent vein.
It might burn a little bit.
It burns. I feel the anesthesia seep up my arm. I picture it: it is
yellow.
No,
gold.
It is a drug. I love a drug. It is malevolent. It is perfect. It is poison. It races up my arm toward my shoulder.
I'm here. Right here.
I turn my head to the left: Dr. Grau. She will take care of me. What are they doing to me? Why? Where the hell is Jeff? I open my mouth to call to him, but then the feeling hits and
I am rocking on the surface of the water. The water barely moves beneath me. It's smooth as sheets under the palms of my hands. The sun is a perfect white sphere; is it a fluorescent light? No. I catch and hold my breath; I beg my mind: stay here—right here—for just a minute more—

But I grow too heavy and I slide beneath the surface of the water. Its smooth surface does not break but merely bends below me and I disappear. It swallows me and the surface of the water shimmers as if I had never been there at all.

This is the part I don't see. I can only imagine it. They send an electric current through my brain, inducing a seizure. The seizure is tiny. Only my toes curl. Still, I cannot shake the image of myself flopping around like a beached fish. After it stops, they suction the black foaming fluid that seethes from my lungs, the tar from years of smoking surging up out of my mouth because of the seizure.

I wake up in the recovery room. Slowly, I bubble up from the water, consciousness seeping into my brain. I squint in the bright light. I don't know where I am, or where I've been. A nurse appears over my face. She's very cheerful, and I like her immediately.
Do you know where you are?
I look around myself: hospital curtains separating my bed from the next one.
Hospital,
I say.
Good! You're oriented. Do you remember what just happened?
I rack my brain. She asks the year. I shake my head.
What is your name?

A beat. Then:
Marya. Isn't it?

It is!
The nurse moves away.
You just rest, now.

Electroshock, as safe as it is, is still used as a last resort, after medication has failed to break a severe episode of mania or depression. Doctors don't do it lightly. But often it works. They don't know why it works, but it does. It is sometimes used as maintenance treatment for patients with particularly hard-to-treat cases, and it can make life possible for them again. It has saved my life more than once, a simple electric current breaking through the walls of madness, bringing me back from wherever my mind has stranded me now.

But what happened? Why do I have this incredible headache? Why do my limbs feel as if they've been filled with wet sand? I try to remember something, anything, and can't. What did I do yesterday? What will I do tomorrow? Can I go home? Aha!—I remember something. Jeff. Where is Jeff? Where is home? What
day is it? Does it matter? I close my eyes. Perhaps I will stay here forever. It seems as good a place as any.

They wheel me down the hall. From the place where memory, however fractured, resides, I remember these words. Suddenly alive, I recite Lowell to the person who is pushing me along:

"Come on, sir." "Easy, sir."
"Dr. Brown will be here in ten minutes, sir."
Instead, a metal chair unfolds into a stretcher.
I lie secured there, but for my skipping mind.
They keep bustling.
"Where you are going, Professor,
you won't need your Dante."

Months go by, and I tumble through them, going home for a few weeks, a month or two, surfacing from my bed now, only to go back under. Then the drive in silence downtown, and the emergency room, the shuffle to Unit 47, and the staff assuring me it will be okay soon.

I believe them the first time. By the second time, I have my doubts. By the third, I know they are lying. By now, I have simply ceased to care. I sit down on the couch to wait for the cycle to come round again. And it does. And again. One year turns into the next, and I slide back and forth between a modicum of sanity and a state of madness, between the hospital and my house, between the world you know and a world of my own. I get used to the worried, sad, hopeless look on my parents' faces. They begin making plans for the day when I will need permanent psychiatric care. Jeff slips into his own world, resenting me for leaving him this way.