by Ned Vizzini
“Hello,” a woman answers.
“Hi, I …” I give her the rap, just like I gave Keith. This woman’s name is Maritsa.
“So you stopped taking your Zoloft?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“You know, you should be on that for … a couple months, really.”
“I was on it for a couple months.”
“Some people stay on it for years. At least four to nine months.”
“Well, I know, but I felt better.”
“Okay, so how do you feel right now?”
“I want to kill myself.”
“Okay, Scott, now, you know you’re very young and you sound very accomplished.”
“Thanks.”
“I know high school can be tough.”
“It’s not that tough. I just can’t handle it.”
“Are your parents aware of how you’re feeling?”
“They know I’m bad. They’re asleep right now.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“At your house?”
“Yes.”
“You live with them?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, when you want to commit suicide, we consider that a medical emergency. Did you know that?”
“Ah, an emergency.”
“If you feel like that, you need to go to the hospital, okay?”
“I do?”
“Yes, you go right to the emergency room and they’ll take care of you. They know just how to handle it.”
The emergency room? I haven’t been in the emergency room since I got clipped by a sled and knocked myself out in the park in grade school. Blood was coming out of one ear, and when I woke up it was like I’d slept for three days and I wasn’t quite sure what year it was. They kept me overnight, sent me through an MRI to make sure my brain wasn’t dented, and sent me home.
“Are you going to go to the emergency room, Scott?”
“Ah…”
“Would you like us to call 911 for you? If you’re unable to get to the emergency room, we can send an ambulance for you.”
“No, no! That’s not necessary.” I do not need the neighbors seeing me carted off. Besides, I never realized, but I’m right next to a hospital. It’s two blocks away—a tall gray building with big tanks of frozen oxygen out front and construction vehicles constantly adding new wings. Argenon Hospital. I can walk there from here. It might even feel good. And once I get there, I won’t have to do anything. I’ll just tell them what’s wrong with me and they’ll give me medicine. Probably they’ll give me some kind of new pill—maybe they’ve invented that fast-acting Zoloft by now—and I’ll come right back home. Mom and Dad won’t even know.
“Scott?”
“I’m going. I have to . . .”
“You have to put on your clothes?”
“Right.”
“That’s great. That’s wonderful. You’re doing the right thing.”
“Okay.”
“You’re very young. We don’t want to lose you. You’re being very strong right now.”
“Thanks.” I find my shoes. No, pants first. I put on my khaki pants. The only shoes I can find are my dress shoes, worn to Dr. Minerva’s office this afternoon, a lifetime ago. They’re Rockports, shiny and beveled.
“Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m just getting my hoodie.” I pull it off the hook and flip it on. I grab the phone again.
“Okay.”
“You’re very brave, Scott.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re going to the hospital, right? What hospital?”
“Argenon.”
“They’re wonderful there. I’m proud of you, Scott. This is the right thing to do.”
“Thank you, Maritsa. Thank you.”
I hang up the phone and walk out the door. Jordan comes toddling out just as I’m leaving, cocks his head at me. He doesn’t bark.
seventeen
The emergency room is nearly abandoned at five-thirty in the morning—I don’t know how I caught that lucky break. There’s a long black metal bench sprinkled with people. A Hispanic couple walks around, the woman howling about her knee. An old white lady and her gigantic son fill out forms next to each other. A black guy with glasses sits at the end of the bench, opening peanuts and putting the shells in his left vest pocket, the peanuts in his right. It could be a plain-old doctor’s office, really. Except for the peanut guy.
I walk up to the main desk: REGISTRATION. There are two registrat-ors, one sitting, and one standing behind. The one behind looks about my age—she’s probably getting school credit.
“I need to be, uh, admitted. Registered,” I say.
“Fill out a form and the nurse will see you shortly,” the sitting one says. The standing one stuffs envelopes, eyes me. Do I know her from somewhere? I sniff my armpit to hide my face.
I take the Xeroxed form that’s handed to me. It asks my birthdate and address, my parents’names and phone numbers, my health insurance. I don’t know much about health insurance, but I know that my Social Security number is my ID number, so I put that down. I feel kind of good filling out the form, like I’m applying to a special academy.
I put the form, completed, in a small black tray hanging off the side of the registration desk. There’s only one piece of paper in front of mine; I sit back down next to Peanut Man. I stare at the floor; it’s made up of foot-long tiles in red and white, like a chessboard, and I imagine how a knight would move across it. I’m so crazy. I’ve lost it. This isn’t going to help. I should leave. Is it too late? My bike is back at home in my hallway. I can do it. I’m strong enough.
“Craig?” a woman pops her head out from a door at the end of Registration.
I stand up. The Hispanic couple howls that they were here first and someone comes out to talk to them in Spanish. Sorry, people.
“Come,” she beckons. “I’m the nurse.”
I shake her hand.
“Have a seat.” I enter her long, thin chamber, which has a computer and two chairs and an array of tubes and robes on hooks on the wall. The sun is rising through a window at the end of the room. Across from me is a poster about domestic violence: If your man beats you, forces you to have sex, controls your money, or threatens you about immigration papers, you are a victim!
The nurse—short with curly hair and a clownish face—reaches to the hooks behind her and unfurls a blood pressure gauge. I always liked these. Not that they’re pleasant, but they always feel like they could be so much worse. She attaches it to some readout device and pumps me up.
“So what’s wrong, ishkabibbles?” she asks.
Ishkabibbles? I give her the rap.
“Did you do anything to yourself? Did you try and cut yourself; did you try and hurt yourself; did you actually go anywhere?”
“No. I called 1-800-SUICIDE and they sent me here.”
“Good. Wonderful. You did the right thing. They’re so great.”
She unwraps me, turns, and types information into the computer. She reads off my sheet in a tray to the right of the monitor, where I wrote “want to kill myself” as my reason for admission.
“Now, were you on medicine?”
“Zoloft. I stopped taking it.”
“You stopped?” She opens her eyes wide. “We get that a lot.” She types. “You really can’t do that.”
“I know.” I’m glad I have a concrete thing to blame this on, something everyone can point a finger at.
“You really have to stop, right now, and think about how you feel. I want you to remember how you feel the next time you decide to stop taking your medicine.”
“Okay.” I commit it to memory; I feel dead, wasted, awful, broken, and useless. It’s not the kind of feeling you forget.
“You’re going to be fine, ishkabibbles,” she says.
I look at what she’s typing on the screen. Under “reason for admission,” she puts SUICIDAL IDEATION.
That would be a
good band name, I think.
“Come on,” she says, getting up from the computer. Behind it, a printer is producing something, whining and clicking. She reaches back and pulls two stickers out, puts them on plastic bracelets that she has attached to her belt, which is like a nurse utility belt, and affixes them to my right wrist.
I look down. They both say Craig Gilner, and have my Social Security number and a bar code on them.
“Why do I get two?” I ask.
“Because you’re too special.”
She leads me out of the room into the ER proper, past curtains that are alternately drawn and undrawn to show the cast of characters here on an early Saturday morning. The vast majority are old people—specifically, old white women with tubes in them, yelling and moaning. What they’re yelling for is water—“Waaa-taaa, waaa-taa”—and what they’re getting is totally ignored. Doctors—I think the doctors are in white coats and the nurses are in blue, right?—stride by holding clipboards. One has a young scruffy blond beard that I would never expect to see on a doctor—his name is Dr. Kepler. It says RESIDENT, so he’s a college guy. That’s one of the things I could be someday if I hadn’t messed up and gotten myself in here.
“This way,” the nurse says.
Beeping serenades us. It’s coming from every where, a dozen different kind of beeps—loud ones, scary ones, ding-y ones, random ones. I wonder if they ever sync up as we pass by two giant metal racks on wheels—inside are pale yellow trays wrapped in plastic. Hospital breakfast. A nurse pushes them through a door marked FOOD PREP.
We move by a group of Hispanic guys lounging on stretchers who all look like they were in the same bar fight. One has a bandage on his face, one is pointing to his chest for a doctor, and one is rolling up his pants to show off what looks like a shark bite. The doctor hisses at him in Spanish, and he rolls his pants back down. We go by a bank of computers and there the nurse tells me to wait— she flags down an Indian doctor, and he takes a stretcher, which up close looks like a very complicated and expensive piece of machinery, with red and black levers sticking out everywhere, into a side room marked “22.”
Room 22 is just big enough to accommodate the stretcher. It doesn’t have a door, just a doorway. The walls are yellow. The nurse leads me in there.
“A doctor will be with you shortly,” she says.
It’s bright. Bright as hell. And I haven’t slept. I sit on the stretcher. What am I supposed to do in here? There’s nothing to do. There aren’t even any hooks.
Outside of 22, a black guy with long dreads is on a stretcher next to a curtain. He’s well dressed in dark brown—with black shoes like mine—and he’s holding his hip and writhing in pain. It’s something I’ve never seen except in movies—a man clutching himself and grimacing and swaying and breathing in little huffs and bearing his teeth and going “Nurse, nurse, please.” It looks like he’s dislocated his hip. He rolls over on his side and then back on his back, but nothing seems to help.
Who’s worse, soldier, you or him?
Dunno, sir!
It’s a trick question, soldier.
Well, him, obviously. 1 mean I’m sitting here loung-ing; he’s practically dying out there.
I expected more from you, son.
How?
You’re a smart kid. You should be able to see when somebody’s faking. And soldier—
Yes.
—Good job out there. I’m glad you’re still on board.
I don’t feel any better.
Life’s not about feeling better; it’s about getting the job done.
I look again at the black guy; as I do, a big police officer with closely cropped hair and those weird little fat bumps on the back of his neck saunters onto the scene with a newspaper and a cup of coffee. He takes an orange plastic seat and sits down right outside from me, between Room 22 and Room 21, another open-style, closet-sized space.
“Hey, how ya doin’,” he says. He speaks slowly and calmly. “I’m Chris. If you need anything, let me know.” He sits down and opens up his paper.
The black guy is really moaning now, bugging out his eyes at every nurse that passes by. He grabs his hip with both hands. Maybe he’s a heroin addict. They come to the hospital and pretend they’re hurt to get morphine. I watch him for minutes, trying to figure out if he’s real or fake. There aren’t any clocks. There are only beeps.
Chris shakes his paper. Page two is “86 Stories Down: Man Plunges from Empire State.”
“Jeez,” I say. I can’t believe it. “Is that about a guy jumping off the Empire State Building?”
“No.” Chris smiles, glancing at me over his shoulder. “Not at all.” He flips the paper back over. “You’re not supposed to be looking at this.”
I chuckle. “That is too much.”
“He lived!” Chris says.
“Yeah, right.”
“He did! And you will too.”
Did someone tell this guy what I was in for? Or do all people with mental difficulties get shuttled to room 22?
“What’d he do? Hit a tree?”
But Chris has moved on to page four. “Not supposed to be looking at this.”
Someone must have told him. He’s a cop in charge of making sure things are okay in the ER and someone must have told him they had a depressed kid in 22, and now he’s trying to be helpful.
I lie down on my stretcher, take my hoodie off, and throw it over my face. It’s not dark enough. I’m not going to be able to sleep. I’m sweating. I want to do push-ups, but I can’t on the stretcher, and it’s probably a bad idea to do them on the tiled floor, which doesn’t look recently mopped. I don’t need to go into Argenon Hospital for depression and come out with diphtheria.
“Nurse! Nurse! Please!” the black man groans.
“Waaa-taaa. Waaa-taaa,” a woman croaks.
“Hey, what’s up?” Chris answers his phone. “No, I’m on.”
Beep, something beeps.
These are the sounds of the hospital, the hospital, the hospital.
“Hello, Craig?”
A doctor comes into 22. She has long, dark hair and a pudgy face and bright green eyes.
“Hey.”
“I’m Dr. Data.”
“Dr. Data?”
“Yes.”
Huh. I want to ask her if she’s an android, but that wouldn’t be very respectful; and besides, I’m not up to it.
“What’s going on?”
I give her the rap. It gets shorter every time. I wanted to kill myself; I called the number; I came here. Blah blah blah.
“You did the right thing,” she says, “A lot of people get off their medication and get into big trouble.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Now, besides wanting to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, have you had anything else going on? Have you been seeing things? Hearing things?”
“Nope.” I’m not talking about the army guy. Same rules as with Dr. Barney.
“Do your parents know you’re here?”
“No.”
“Okay, well, let me tell you what we can do for you, Craig.” She takes out her stethoscope, holds it in her hands, and folds her short arms. She’s pretty. Her eyes are serious and beautiful. “It’s Saturday, and on Saturday our best psychologists are here, the really good ones. I’m going to recommend that you see Dr. Mahmoud. He’ll be in soon, and he’ll be able to give you the help you need.”
I have a sudden vision of Dr. Mahmoud taking me into his office, a special shrink’s office within Argenon Hospital. It must be very pleasant and bare. There’s probably a black couch and a wide window and some Picassos. He’ll take me up there; we’ll have some emergency therapy; he’ll give me the kind of trick that Dr. Minerva has been unable to give me, effect the Shift, re-prescribe me Zoloft (maybe that fast-acting Zoloft!), and I’ll be on my way.
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Now, you have to inform your parents about where you are, because when Dr. Mahmoud comes down, he’s goi
ng to need them to sign for you.”
“Ohhhhh.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
“No. I can do it.”
“Where are your parents?”
“Like two blocks away.”
“They’re together? They’re supportive?”
“Yeah.”
“Are they going to be okay that you’re in here?”
I sigh. “Yes. I’m the one who’s. .. not.”
“Don’t worry, it happens to a lot of people. It tends to be related to stress. Breathe for me, Craig.” She puts her stethoscope by my back and has me take deep breaths, cough, the whole deal. She doesn’t have to hold my balls, which is cool, because there’s no door.
I look out as she’s examining me. The black guy has a nurse leaning over him.
“Dr. Mahmoud will be down soon. Call your parents, please, and make sure they’re here within two hours.”
Two hours. Jeez. I’ve got to wait two more hours? “Gotcha.”
Dr. Data nods at me. “We will help you.”
“Okay.” I try to smile.
She heads out. I figure that, with the parents, I should get it over with as soon as possible. I flip open my cell phone. No service in the emergency room. I walk out of Room 22 to find a pay phone.
Chris rises from his chair.
“Buddy, hey, I told ya, ya gotta ask me for things. What do you need?”
I turn and look at him, eye his badge and nightstick. I realize what he is now. He’s not there in general or for the ER; he’s there for my protection. When you come into the hospital with a mental disability, they put a cop next to you so you don’t hurt yourself. I’m on like, suicide watch. You want to commit suicide, you call 1-800-SUICIDE; you get suicide watch.
“Ahm, I have to call my mom.”
“Not a problem. Phones are right there. Dial nine.” He nods.
The phones are like, three feet away. But Chris puts his hands on his hips and keeps close watch as I pick up a receiver.
eighteen
Hi, Mom, I’m in the hospital? No.
Hey, mom, are you sitting down? Eh.
Mom, you’re not going to believe where I’m calling you from! Nah.
“Hey, Mom,” I say when I hear her groaned hello. “How are you?”