The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (18 page)

Crawling out from beneath the desk, I quietly told the nice social
worker that I needed a drink of water. He followed me out of the room
and toward the water fountain. Suddenly, I darted for the side door,
hoping to make my way down the stairs, but he moved fast, caught me
in a few steps, and put me in a restraining hold. Although small, he
was very strong, and I couldn't move in his grip as he brought me back
into the room.

"I'm sorry I did that," he said apologetically. "It had to be done,
you know, but I do feel bad about it." As fragmented as I was, I
believed him. He wanted to be kind to me, but for some reason I was
making it hard for him.

The psychologist came back into the room and reported that it was
difficult to find a hospital bed on the weekend. The social worker then
replied that maybe he could make a couple of calls and see if there was
anything out there. He left to make the calls. The psychologist stayed
with me.

I was going to the hospital for the third time, I knew it. I was going
to be an inpatient again, and they would make me take drugs. Every
nerve in my body was screaming. I didn't want a hospital. I didn't
want drugs. I just wanted help.

Struggling to control the terror in my voice, I politely asked the
psychologist if we could go into the hall so I could get a drink. She
followed me out of the room and toward the water fountain, and once
again I darted for the side door and the stairs. The psychologist called
out to me, "Stop, Elyn. I won't be able to catch up with you. Please stop
now."
No no no no no.
Unseeing—of obstacles, of other students, of
anyone who might have been staring at me—I ran all the way across

campus back to my room. Thankfully, my roommate was not there.
It was an inauspicious beginning to my legal career.

chapter ten

I FULLY EXPECTED THAT
someone from Student Health would
send the campus police after me, and I braced myself for their arrival.
They'll take me away. They'll lock me up.
I cowered in my room for a
long time, waiting for the inevitable knock on the door. But no one
came. Scared, but restless, I decided that I could remain hiding in my
room or take my chances out in the world. And knowing exactly what
would calm me down, I did what I always did whenever my back was
against the wall—I gathered up my books and headed for the library.

I began to breathe easier the minute I walked through the doors. I
spent the entire day there, reading and going over my notes, trying to
focus my thinking about the coming week's classes. Every so often, I'd
glance over my shoulder, but nobody was paying any attention to me.

By the day's end, I'd managed to calm myself down.

When I returned to my room that evening, I discovered a
telephone message that Emily had left for me. The psychologist from
Student Health Services had called, and I felt it both professional and
kind that she had not identified herself. She asked that I call her back.
I thought about it for a few minutes—what's the worst that could
happen if I didn't do as she'd asked? But then I decided that given the
state I'd been in the previous few days, it was probably a good idea to
make the call.

It turned out that I'd been reassigned to another doctor: Hans
Pritzer, a senior psychologist and psychoanalyst who, I discovered
later, had a formidable reputation for tackling "the most difficult
cases" at Student Health.

Dr. Pritzer was Austrian, with a compact frame, reddish hair, and
fair complexion; he spoke with a thick accent, where ssss's often came
out as zzzzz's. "You caused quite a commotion this weekend," he told
me at our first meeting, shaking his head slightly, a concerned father
to a truant daughter.
Zis veekend.
For some reason, I relaxed a little.
"We need to try to work together now, Elyn, so that we can avoid that
kind of thing. How are you feeling today?"

As I almost always did when someone I didn't know asked me that
question, I quickly responded, "Better. Much better, thank you."

"No, I don't think that is quite the truth," he said. "I think that
there are things going on inside your head, and that you must tell me
what you are thinking, so that we can work through this and address
the problem."
Ve can vork zzzrooooo zis.
I wondered if this is what
Freud sounded like, with his vww's and his zzzzz's eliding as he led
his patients through the thickets of their own minds. My own mind
was again speeding up to such a degree that I could barely sit still.

"People are controlling me, they're putting thoughts into my
head," I told him. "I can't resist them. They're doing it to me. I'll have
to kill them. Are you controlling me? They're making me walk around
your office. I give life and I take it away."

Pacing as I muttered, I suddenly stopped in midsentence,
transfixed by something or someone unseen, and then I began to rock
and moan. I wanted to lie down on Dr. Pritzer's couch, but I was
astonished to discover that he wouldn't allow that. "Lying down
causes people to regress," he said. "You're too regressed already."

Surprisingly, he told me that he didn't think I was schizophrenic.

"You seem to be working very hard to connect with me," he observed.
"And you've been operating successfully in the world, whereas one of
the chief markers of schizophrenia is
not
connecting, and not being
able to function. At least, this is what I think so far."

"What about medication?" I asked. "Are you going to make me
take pills? Because I don't want to do that. I cannot do that. Drugs are
bad, you know."

"We'll see how it goes," he answered. "We will discuss it, and as I
learn more, we wall come to that decision together."

I wanted so much to trust him, this straight-talking old-world
gentleman whose only crime, so far, was that he was not my beloved
Mrs. Jones. We agreed that we would meet twice a week.

And then Dr. Pritzer said it was time for me to go.

"I...I can't," I said. My legs, so restless before, had turned to stone.

Again, the slight head shake. "Ah, Elyn, you must. It is time now. I
have another patient, we wall meet again quite soon."

Very reluctantly, I trudged slowly out to the waiting room and sat
down. Forces were keeping me from leaving, I could not get to the
door that led back outside. A few moments later, Dr. Pritzer came into
the waiting room to greet his next patient and usher her into his office.
Then, suddenly, he reappeared. "Do you think you can go now, Elyn?"
he asked. I was relieved to discover that if I put my mind to it again, I
could. And so I did.

Every appointment after that, I spent extra time in the waiting
room by myself when our session was finished. It was as though I
needed to marshal my forces to leave a safe place. But Pritzer allowed
me to judge for myself when I was ready to go, and each time, I
managed to make that decision on my own.

In the meantime, I continued going to my classes, straining to
focus my mind sufficiently to get my work done. But I was still
convinced my contracts teacher was taking special care of me.
Perhaps she and Pritzer are working together on my case. Are they
married? Perhaps there's something sinister. That's it, it's an
experiment! Contracts teacher works with psychologist. They have a
contract on my life. Experimental therapy with messages sent via
contracts cases.

In one session with Dr. Pritzer, I was frantically pacing from one
side of his office to the other, growing more agitated as my thoughts
became more violent. "I've killed people and I will kill again," I
announced. I was almost growling at him. "Who else is in the office
with us? Are you human?" I walked over to a big, leafy plant in the
corner and snapped off one of its leaves. "See? This is what I can do to
people!"

"You should
not
have done that, Elyn," Dr. Pritzer said sternly. "I
like that plant. You are not to do that again."

Chastened, I sat down, and tried to be still for the rest of the
session. He was setting limits; I was trying to observe them. But the
limits never held, at least in my mind. As the days passed, I felt more
and more in peril, as though I were hanging from a ledge as my grip
weakened.

In class, I was assigned to prepare my first legal memo. Its
purpose was to explain a very specific area of law, in a succinct, cogent
manner. In a memo, you address a question from both sides; in a
brief, you argue only for one side. The assignment was announced two
weeks before it was due, with a prescribed format, and the length was
to be no more than fifteen pages. As with all my other limits, I went
right past this one, too—in addition to the course work for the three
other classes, I worked on the memo day and night, for hours, without
sleeping. And when I was finished, my paper was nearly fifty pages in
length. I later learned that the person in charge of grading papers
thought that it was one of the two best pieces of work turned in by
anyone that year. But it was not what I was assigned to do. "It's very
good," said the teaching assistant. "But it's not a memo—it's more of
an article than anything else."

The law is precise; I was expected to be precise as well. And I
wanted to be. But each time, something inside me pushed me farther
than I was supposed to go. The work was unacceptable. I was
unacceptable.

And then I was assigned a second law memo. At this point, it was
like being instructed to climb Everest in sneakers. Too anxious to read,
I saw only words jumbled on the page, with no coherence. What's
worse, I couldn't remember anything I'd read up until this moment,
and when I tried to write, only gibberish came out—threads of
nonsensical words and phrases that meant nothing, in or out of
context, exactly the same way it had happened at Oxford when I was
at my worst.
Mrs. Jones, where are you? I need you. We've been in
this place before, and you led me out. Where are you?

All my life, books had been the life raft, the safe haven, the place I
ran to when nothing else worked. But now books revealed only page
after page of nothing that made sense. Panicked, I picked up my worn
copy of Aristotle, but even it betrayed me.
Nothing, nothing.

I greeted my two classmates in the Yale Law School Library. It was ten
o'clock on a Friday night.

One of them was an Alabaman named Rebel ("because I was a
breech birth," he'd explained), and the other was a woman named Val.
They were both in my "small group"—the only small class a first-term
law student has at Yale. And neither of them was particularly happy
about being in the library; it was the weekend, after all, and there were
plenty of other things they could have been doing at ten on a Friday
night. But at my insistence, we'd made the date to work on the second
memo assignment. Although each of us was responsible for his or her
own memo, we were allowed to strategize together. We had to do it, to
finish
it, to
produce
it, to...

"Memos are visitations," I informed them. "They make certain
points. The point is on your head. Pat used to say that. Have you ever
killed anyone?"

Rebel and Val looked at me as if they, or I, had just been splashed
with ice water. "A joke, right?" quipped one. "What are you talking
about, Elyn?"

"Oh, the usual. You know. Heaven and hell. Who's what, what's
who. Hey!" I said, leaping out of my chair. "Let's all go out on the roof.
It's OK. It's safe."

I hurried to the nearest large window, opened it, then climbed
through and stepped out onto the roof, a flat surface and not at all
scary. A few moments later, Rebel and Val followed me. "Course, the
police may see us and bring in a SWAT team," I said, laughing. "Can't
you just imagine? 'One-niner-niner, one-niner-niner, there's an APB
out for people trying to break into Yale Law Library.' Yeah, like there
are lots of valuable things
there"

They couldn't help but laugh back. They asked what had gotten
into me.

"This is the real me," I announced, waving my arms above my
head. And then, late on a Friday night, on the roof of the Yale Law
School Library, I began to sing, and not quietly, either. "Come to the
Florida sunshine bush. Do you want to dance?"

The smiles quickly faded from their faces. "Are you on drugs?" one

asked. "Are you high?"

"High? Me? No way. No drugs! Come on, let's dance! Come to the
Florida sunshine bush. Where they make lemons. Where there are
demons. Is anyone else out here with us? Hey, wait a minute, what's
the matter with you guys? Where are you going?"

Rebel and Val had both turned away and were heading back
inside. "You're frightening me," said one.

I shrugged. "OK, I'll come in, too. But there's nothing in there.
Nothing."

As we clambered back through the window, one of my classmates
said something about the Student Health Center. "Maybe you should,
um, go see someone there."

"I'm already seeing someone there," I said. "Twice a week."

"Oh. Well. What about maybe going over there right now,
though?"

I shook my head. "No. Not now. I need to work. We've got this
memo thing."

Once we were all seated around the table again, I began to
carefully stack my textbooks into a small tower. Then I rearranged my
note pages. Unsatisfied, I rearranged them again. "I don't know if
you're having the same experience of words jumping around the pages
as I am," I said. "I think someone's infiltrated my copies of the cases.
We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints. But they hold your
body together."

This was more than either of them had bargained for. "It's nearly
midnight, we're not getting anything done here. Let's get out of here;
we can try it again sometime tomorrow."