Part 11 (1/2)

Forget reporting. Forget guinea-pigging myself and submitting to whatever they might or might not see fit to prescribe me. I was in full-on patient mode. I was being stubborn because I knew that I would probably have to go back on some drug to dig myself out of this hole. But for now it was on principle that I refused. I wanted to do it when I I was ready, not when the ”for your own good” brigade decided. was ready, not when the ”for your own good” brigade decided.

I had met with the on-call doc over the weekend, a cursory Turk who finished my sentences and scribbled his two cents in my binder. MI. Yep. Sure enough. Depresso domesticus Depresso domesticus. Run-of-the-mill.

”You want something to sleep?” he said.

”Sure,” I'd said. ”Why the h.e.l.l not.”

But today, I was meeting my keeper/king of the hill, the guy who had power. That was how it usually worked in these places, at least the ones I'd been to. The MD psychiatrist sat at the top of a pyramid and delegated everything down.

Beneath him (at St. Luke's anyway, where there were such luxuries) were the psychologists, the PhDs accorded the respect of their educations, though they were largely symbolic and without real pull. They did give you therapy, however, three times a week for fifty minutes. Actual one-on-one talk about your problems, believe it or not.

Then there were the social workers, the nurses, and finally the psych techs. Psych techs were babysitters. They had no degrees, no real qualifications but youth and optimism. They took you on smoke breaks, they led formality wrap-up discussion groups at the end of the day, and they told you to stop gambling with Skittles.

But the doc was the man. Everyone else was really a peon with pretensions. Everything you wanted came through him. To every significant question the stock response was: ”You'll have to ask your doctor about that.” So, if your doctor was a d.i.c.k, you were screwed.

Still, I was going to fight like with like, if need be, and get myself an hour pa.s.s to leave the hospital, even if it meant sucking up to his expertise and burying fathoms deep my resentment that my life had been reduced to a file under his arm.

But as it turned out, there was no need.

h.e.l.lo. My doctor was not a d.i.c.k.

He was like the dad on a sitcom, extra large, warm, even cuddly, six-foot-four, bald and bearded, roomy and soft in the middle, big paws, and a smile that got into your veins like homemade gin.

I could tell in the first exchange-”So how are you?” for example-that he really wanted to know, and didn't think he already knew the answer. He was so wholesomely paternal that I wanted to crawl into his lap and talk about my investments. I was so pleasantly surprised I could have s.h.i.+t myself right there and happily sat in it. He was a keeper.

I said this right out.

”Wow, you're actually intelligent and not arrogant. How'd you manage that?”

He told me he was dyslexic and thought that maybe that was why he was humble. He knew what he didn't know. I admitted that I couldn't spell, and often made h.o.m.onym errors. We bonded over the grammar school challenges of language that still somehow persisted. He submitted that English is really backward, and I added that, yes, wasn't it interesting how, for example, in German, the verb came at the end of the sentence.

He agreed.

”Yes. Instead of 'He fell down the stairs,' it should be, 'He down the stairs fell.' ”

This was going well.

It got better. I told him I didn't want drugs. I rattled on a bit about this, as planned, expecting that once I'd nixed the SSRIs as being too mania-inducing, the favored Lamictal would come floating into the conversation like a bellwether balloon, and the phrase ”no side effects aside from the rare but serious rash” would follow hard upon, like a bandwagon.

But no. To my great and glorious surprise, when I finished-he had actually let me finish-he looked at me respectfully and, without a spark of hesitation, said: ”Okay.”

Okay?

This shut my smart mouth effectively and melted my sa.s.sy little heart. Had the doctor just rolled on his back? Doctors I knew didn't say okay, except maybe to themselves, and then only as the coup de grace. As in, ”Okay, we're gonna take off this limb.”

But this guy had just used it in context to actually mean what it said. Okay. You got it. Your call.

Now I was quite possibly in love.

And then the capper. I told him I needed exercise if I was going to get back on the stick. He nodded knowingly. Got it.

”I need an hour pa.s.s to go running in the park,” I said.

I expected I would have to lobby for this each day, but he shocked me again.

”I'll put an order in your chart for an hour pa.s.s every afternoon. Will that work?”

That works nicely. Very nicely.

He was trusting me with freedom, giving me back a piece of my will with faith, believing that I could handle it, or if I couldn't, believing that the failure would help me to measure where I was.

Wisely, he said this when I again expressed amazement at his willingness to grant the request.

”Day pa.s.ses are a useful tool. They tell both you and me whether or not you're ready to go back into the world, or to what degree you're not ready. If, for example, you go out and find yourself totally overwhelmed in an hour, then you know you need more time.”

He was making me part of the process, giving my mind its necessary role in healing itself. He was listening to me when I told him what I needed, and giving it to me, because, unlike so many of the other deadheads in his profession, he could make a distinction between someone who said exercise would do her good and someone who said a ritual murder or a hit off the crack pipe was just what she needed to get back into the swing. He saw that I knew what I needed, or at least I knew in part; what's more, he saw that I was right. He had the power to make it happen and did, because he also knew that the simple act of giving me what I asked for, when it was reasonable, made me feel enfranchised and heard, a partner in the treatment plan, not its bound-and-gagged recipient.

He was a wizard of common sense.

Our meeting was short, as short as the meetings at Meriwether had been, about fifteen minutes all told. But it served its purpose. He knew his role. He wasn't there for therapy. The psychologist was for that. He wasn't simply there for himself either, to impose his smarmy better judgment, or, per his job description, to a.s.sess and ”treat” me. He was there responding to me. He was empowered to make things happen, and he used that power beneficently without personal agenda.

We shook hands and parted laughing, he, because I'd said how nice it was to meet a doc who was smart enough to know that he was stupid, and I, because he'd said that maybe the only good doctor was a dyslexic one. Per Magic Doc's suggestion, I went up to the main ward that day.

My good-byes to Clay, Bunny, Bard, Fridge, Chloe, and the others were abrupt and strange, as abrupt and strange as the immediacy of our acquaintance, which went deep and narrow very fast, like a vein of precious metal in rock, and died that way too, a dead end, deep in drilled recesses, greedily mined and abandoned.

The h.e.l.los and good-byes were redundant, they always were, more pleasantries of the outside world dispensed with in there because what was encountered within those walls was already known and as quickly forgotten, but a.s.similated somehow nonetheless, like knowledge of a prior life. Like all the characters in the Jungian dream, everyone was you and you they, manifestations, internalizations, combined, recombined, recycled, made superficially to appear as another, but all the while simply more of you.

But you, reader, are the sane person reading this now, and you are thinking that these people on this page are not you. By no means are they you. They are the other, put away, out of sight-and yes I, too, laugh at this expression newly now-out of mind.

It is a significant expression in this context-out of sight, out of mind. But out of whose mind? Who is out of whose mind? The lunatic is out of his mind and so we put him out of sight-not because being out of sight is necessarily good for someone who is out of his mind, but because when the lunatic is out of sight he is out of our minds. We can forget him, forget his resemblance to us, forget that he is a member of the family. Thus he is made into not just ”an,” but ”the” other.

That is what pathology means. Other. Over there. Not me. Not mine. Another path diverging in the wood, going off, erring, deviating from the main. The road not taken, the path to wrack and ruin. Keep to the road, the main road, the mainstream. Stay out of the woods, the bracken, the mire, and most of all, forget. Forget that I am one of yours and that you know me.

In much the same way, I had known them, and then I forgot them. I saw them on smoke breaks a few times in the next couple of days, but we had less and less to say to each other. Bunny got out a few days later. Her first night home she called me. I took the call on the pay phone in the main ward. She was drunk and going on and on about how she and Clay and Bard had had some kind of weird love triangle going on in the ICU. She said she missed everybody and didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to tell her, so I just listened until she tired herself out.

Then we hung up, and I felt terrible.

Clay made it up to the main ward on the addict's side a couple of days before I left, but again, the magic intimacy of our time in the ICU was gone. He was still shaky, and he didn't know what he was going to do when he got out. He was still unemployed, and to make matters worse, he'd had a call from his mother who'd told him that his cousin had robbed his apartment while he'd been locked up. He'd taken Clay's TV and a few other things to sell for drugs. Clay's mother had called the cops and had him arrested. It was all in the family.

I thought, sadly, that given what he'd be facing when he left, it wouldn't be too long before Clay was back in here, or in jail along with his cousin.

I heard that Karen left in much better condition. She'd rested. She'd adjusted her meds, and she seemed to have tamed the worst of her flare-up. I held out hope for her success. Fridge left, too, presumably to go home to his grandmother and stop taking his meds. But maybe this time he'd stay away longer. One could always hope. Bard, of course, was stuck for a while. They kept him in the ICU because he was disruptive and because, or so he said, they were working on transferring him somewhere else to sit out the rest of his time. He was still in the ICU when I left.

Chloe's parents came and got her the day I went up to the main ward. She went back to school, as far as I know, and went on as before, overachieving and probably cutting, though maybe doing so less obviously, so that she wouldn't end up in St. Luke's or someplace like it again. Still, I didn't worry about her. Of all the people I met at St. Luke's, I thought she was the most likely to recover, stay out of trouble, and go on to have a productive and mostly fulfilled life. She had never belonged at St. Luke's in the first place. All she needed was a good therapist and some time to put a little distance between herself and her father's expectations. She was going to be fine.

A depressive ward has a very different feel from a psychotic one. They don't confiscate your pens, for one. Though I had come prepared, with felt-tips and retractable Sharpies, I needn't have troubled. Never mind ballpoints, there were enough sharpened pencils in the dayroom to riddle yourself like St. Sebastian if you were so inspired. But n.o.body in here had that much energy or imagination. They hardly spoke.

I felt it the minute I walked in. Heaviness in the air, like some kind of spiritual humidity bearing down on my bones. When I stepped through the ward's main magnetically locked doors, I came into a short T-shaped hallway. To the right, twenty or so yards down, there was an octagon exactly like the one in the ICU, though its set of locking double doors was propped open. This was the MI side. To the left, again, twenty or so yards down, there was another octagon, also with its doors propped open. This was the CD side. A short hall ran between the octagons, and, though the doors were almost always left open, we were not supposed to cross back and forth, so the wings were like two docked s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, with separate species looking warily across at each other.