Madness (34 page)

This is good. This is life. I am brilliantly, thrillingly, violently
alive.

I'd been doing fine. My medication was working beautifully. And then I went on vacation. The flight back was a redeye, and that was the trigger, something that small: one night without sleep, the tiniest bit of jet lag—two hours' time difference—and I was off to the races.

So of course I'm not the least bit tired, and spend the day running around, fixing, cleaning, planning to save the world next week. I don't have the slightest idea that I'm spinning off into the stratosphere—lack of insight, one of the first signs that hypo-mania is morphing into full-blown mania. You have no idea that your symptoms are symptoms; they seem like completely reasonable behavior to you. Today, you think, is a good day to get things done, and indeed you get things done.

I wake up in a splendid mood, the sleep deprivation bothering me not at all. I sit down to write for eighteen hours and nearly
wrap up an entire section of this book, about seventy pages. Jeff comes home at some point. I ignore him, keep typing, obsessed, my cheeks flushed, fingers flying, heart pounding in my chest. "Out!" I shout at him without looking up from my computer. "Writing! Can't stop now! Almost done!" He goes away.

A minute later I simply
must
talk to him. I pound down the stairs and find him in the kitchen, looking surprised. "We're moving to New York!" I shout, turning and sliding around the hardwood floor in my socks. The dogs bark wildly, as excited as I am, clearly getting it completely. Jeff loosens his tie. "Okay," he says, turning back and continuing to chop whatever it is he is chopping. I crash into him, pulling on his shirt. "I've decided to start a public relations company! Sorry to be so loud! I'm just extremely, extremely excited!" I hop onto the kitchen counter and wiggle my feet. "Have you eaten anything?" Jeff asks, putting a pot on the stove. I roll my eyes and sigh loudly. "Pain in the ass!" I cry. "Completely boring!" I fly out of the room and up the stairs into my office and get back to work.

Eventually I come tearing out of my office, cackling with glee. "I finished it!" I shriek, sliding down the hall, crashing into the wall, heading into the bedroom. "Finished!" I shout. Jeff looks up from his book. I dive headfirst onto the bed, flip onto my back, and kick my legs. "I'll finish the book by Friday! Isn't that
marvelous?"
I demand, sitting up. "Let's watch
Law and Order.
Quick!" I climb under the covers, fully dressed and wearing shoes. "Hurry! We must watch it right now! Is there any chocolate?" He passes me the box and turns on the TV. I gaze at it intently, becoming totally absorbed in seconds flat.

Somewhere between scenes, I start sobbing. Startled, I look at Jeff. "It is
so fucked up!"
I wail, putting my head in my hands. I sob terribly, as if someone close to me has died. The odd thing is, I'm not even slightly sad. Between gasps and snorts and sobs, I explain this to Jeff, who is perfectly cheerful. "I know," he says. Handing me the box of Kleenex, he says, "I think you wrote a
little too long today." "Noooooooo!" I wail, sliding down onto my back and flipping over on my front. Pounding the bed with my fists, I bury my face in the pillows, sobbing even harder. Jeff puts his hand on my head and says, "Anything I can do? Do you need me to sit on you?" (Sometimes I feel uncontained, and he does that. It works very well.) "No," I sob. "I'm fine. Nothing wrong. Had a perfectly nice day. Sorry about this." "No problem," he says, and keeps watching TV. I sob myself silly, then abruptly stop. "Better?" he asks as I sit up. "Just fine," I say brightly, wiping off my face. We settle in and continue as before.

He falls asleep around the fifth hour of reruns, and continues to sleep though I bat at him to wake him up. Eventually I turn off the television and the light and lie down and try, uselessly, to sleep.

I feel my mouth filling with words, words I need to write down right now, and my mind begins to race, words whirling in circles, a cyclone of words. I force myself to try to rest. I breathe slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, as instructed by the many books on breathing and "being in the moment" that I've been given over the years. I imagine myself in a beautiful place, on a beach, or in the mountains. I count sheep. Somewhere around two thousand, I fall asleep, thinking gleefully of how much I will write the next day, what with all these wonderful words.

But I don't write the next day, or the next or the next after that. Because sometime during that night, the words scattered. The whirlwind of words, beautiful strings of sentences, which I pictured as a net of letters, strands of words spun into a kind of silver sugar cone inside my head, whirl away from me, phrases and snatches of words now seething all over my brainpan like a pit of snakes.

Never mind that. I am alive. I'm full of ideas, ideas I know I will string together again, any second now, but while I wait I become a tiny Tasmanian devil, tearing through my days. The ideas disappear in my wake, one after another, words flying through the air,
hitching post, emperor's elbow, hats off to the watchers, the watchers who watch and wait, the whispering watchers who
watch and wait and wiggle and writhe,
madly alliterating. Flight of ideas—it happens in the early stages of mania. Ideas fly past and I chase them in all directions, but they elude my grasp, a flurry of butterflies that twitch away just as I close my hand.

At the urging of everyone, I give Lentz a call.

I feel like I have been sitting in Lentz's office for the past ten years. Jeff is there too. I am slouched in my chair, practically horizontal, madly wiggling my foot. I raise it above my head and watch it wiggle with incredible speed.

"Have you seen my socks?" I ask Lentz, holding out my foot.

He glances up. "Very nice," he says. He is looking at his computer, scrolling down through my chart. He tips his head backward and peers down his nose.

I have been seeing Lentz since I was twenty-three. He has seen me as batty as I've ever been, from florid manias to catatonic depressions. And he has seen me utterly sane. He reads my books and articles faithfully. It seems to matter not a bit to him whether I show up wearing a tailored suit or a pair of grotty pajamas, an old torn coat, and a pair of gardening shoes. To him, I'm not crazy. I'm just the way I am.

He looks down at his little notepad and says, "Looks like you're feeling a little speedy."

"A little. Only a very little. A very little bit," I say, holding my fingers about an inch apart. "But I have to get my things done. I can't stop now. I'm on a roll."

He nods, and says to Jeff, "How would you say she's doing?"

"She's bats," Jeff says. This bothers me not at all. I have learned to take Jeff with me to the doctor when I am feeling off, since I have no perspective. He sits across from me on the little couch. He's watching me, looking worried. This irritates me gravely. I sigh at him and become more fully involved in the incredible speed of my foot.

"Marya?" Lentz breaks into my thoughts. I focus now on the tips of my fingers, which feel tingly.

"I bought a canary!" I announce, looking up.

"Oh?"

"She didn't buy a canary," Jeff says with a sigh.

"I see," Lentz says. "Have you been sleeping?"

"Not really. I don't like to sleep. Sleep is a monumental waste of time. Sleep is irrelevant in the face of my things. Which I have to get done."

"She's sleeping about two hours a night," Jeff adds. "Total. She's up and down."

"I'm up and down," I concur. I pause in my study of my fingers and stare at Lentz intently. "But you have to understand, I need to get my things
done."

"I know you do," Lentz says, poking at his little Palm Pilot, which has the pharmaceutical handbook on it. "It's important that you get them done."

"It's very important," I say.

"I know it is. We don't want to break your focus."

"Very important," I repeat, when suddenly my foot takes off again.

"How much Geodon are you on?"

"Eighty milligrams," Jeff says.

"I'm going to up your Geodon," Lentz says.

I look up, worried. "Will it make me fat?"

"No."

"Will it make me stupid?"

"No. It should just make you a little less edgy."

"I can't lose my edge," I say to him sternly.

"Of course not. How much is she working?" Lentz asks Jeff.

"All the time. She even works when someone's talking to her. She won't change her clothes because she says it would interrupt her 'things.'"

"I wrote fifty pages yesterday," I tell him, quite smug.

"Good for you. Are you eating?" Lentz asks.

"She's not eating," Jeff says.

"I'm eating," I say, rolling my eyes.

"She's only eating fruit."

"Marya, you have to eat more than fruit."

"No, I do not," I snap.

"Are you cutting?"

"I took all the razors," Jeff says.

"Totally unnecessary," I snap again, and get up and stroll in circles around the room.

"Do you need to be in the hospital?" Lentz asks.

"Absolutely
not!"
I say, hopping once in protest. "How am I supposed to get any work done? They never let me bring my computer. I can't very well work on
construction paper!"

"I think she needs to be in the hospital," Jeff says.

I spin around and jab my finger into his chest, hopping again and kicking him once in the shin. "I certainly do not! They don't let me have my
cell phone!
Which is
crucial!"

"Marya, you're really quite speedy," Lentz says.

I sit down in the chair and grip the arms to prove a point. "No I'm not."

"Okay," he says. To Jeff, he says, "Call me if she's still like this tomorrow."

"I'm going to get
lots
of work done," I say, very pleased.

"What are you writing?" Lentz says, standing up and shaking Jeff's hand.

I tick them off on my fingers. "A play, a novel, an article, and a new series of poems."

"I look forward to reading them," says Lentz. "Take a Zyprexa."

"Absolutely I will
not,"
I say in a huff. "It makes me stupid and fat."

Lentz sighs.

Jeff goes out the door. I hop after him like a baby chick.

So this morning, I trot downstairs to start the day. "How are you this fine morning?" Jeff asks, handing me a cup of coffee.

"I'm good! Well, I felt a little funny this morning—anxiety, a little blue—so I increased my Wellbutrin." I sit down in an armchair. The day is sunny and beautiful. I will feel better in no time at all. This habit of fucking with the dosages of your meds is common among bipolar people; since we don't trust the doctors, we figure our ideas are better than theirs, and so we add and subtract pills all the time. This rarely has good effects.

That's why Jeff stares at me for a minute, then picks up the phone and dials the emergency nurse line.

"Oh, for God's sake!" I shout at him. "You are such an over-reactor!"

He waves his hand at me to shut me up. "Yes, hello? My wife has bipolar. She decided to take"—he glares at me and hisses, "How much did you take, you idiot?" and I cheerfully say, "Thirteen hundred and fifty"—"she took triple her regular dose of Wellbutrin. Thirteen hundred and fifty milligrams. Isn't that an overdose, more or less? What should I do? All right. All right. I'll call right away." He hangs up the phone and dials again.

"You might have a stroke," he snaps. "I completely can't believe you. This is serious. Why did you do it?"

I say, "I thought it would help," but he's on the phone. "Hello?" he's saying. "Yes, my wife has overdosed. I need an ambulance right away."

"This is ridiculous!" I'm shouting, slamming through the house. "I only took three extra!" He's ignoring me. The ambulance shows up. I'm sitting in the parlor with my legs crossed, perfectly presentable, and the EMTs stand around the room, looking a little ridiculous.

"I'm perfectly fine," I tell them.

"She took an overdose," Jeff says from the doorway.

"It was hardly an overdose," I say, rolling my eyes. "I took a few extra."

"She's having a manic episode," Jeff says. "She could have a stroke."

"Well, I'm obviously not having a stroke," I say. "Really, you can leave."

They don't leave. They escort me, indignant, out to the ambulance. The ride to the hospital is excruciatingly slow. Arriving at the hospital, I am put in a little room with a security guard outside. I lean out the doorway.

"Do you have to stand there?" I ask the guard. He looks alarmed, as if he didn't know crazy people could talk. After a panicky minute, he nods.

"I won't run," I say, and go back into the room. I'm irate. Also a little dizzy, a sort of vertigo. All I did was take three extra Wellbutrin on the theory that perhaps they would cheer me up. Admittedly, I should have looked up the possible side effects of overdose before I took them, rather than after, but still, what a ridiculous fuss they're making about all this. I start to pace around the room.

I pace faster. Then faster. I want to know where Jeff is. I start to cry. This won't look good. I'm trying to come off as perfectly sane, but this pacing and crying makes me look crazy. I realize this with a touch of surprise—why would I be acting crazy? And I suddenly understand that, in fact, somewhere in my reptilian brain, I honestly don't
see
myself as crazy. Which, I realize, means I definitely am. I want to go home. Why isn't Jeff here? I'm whipping around the room, holding my head in my hands. I have brought my tome
Manic-Depressive Illness
with me as reading material while I wait, which I am supposed to be doing
calmly,
which I am not, and I pick up the book and go stand in the doorway again. I'm sobbing now. The guard is horrified. "Would you find me a nurse, please?" I sob. "Really, if you could find someone who could come talk to me, that would be great." I go back in the room and keep pacing. Seconds, hours later, I don't know, there's a young nurse in the room,
What's wrong, how can I help?
and I'm explaining that I have bipolar disorder, and I offer her the book in case she doesn't know much about it, and where is my husband,
and could she please find my husband, and I didn't mean to commit suicide, I just wanted to feel a little better, and she is making all the right soothing noises—there are some amazing nurses in the world—and assuring me that the doctor will be here soon, and she leaves and returns with Jeff, on whom I fling myself, hysterical, apologizing for making such a fuss, and Jeff pretends he doesn't mind.