by Barbara Hall
Christine, one of the directors of the crazy palace, has come over to me and is sitting down. She doesn’t touch me because you can’t touch the crazies without permission.
“Are you all right, Sarah?” she asks.
“Yes. Please leave me alone.”
“You seem to be in distress.”
“No. I felt faint. I’m fine now.”
“Did Willie trigger you?”
“Who is Willie?”
She nods to where Shaggy was sitting. Obviously he’s been led away for playing with his food and laughing too loud.
“No.”
“Do you want to go back to your room?”
“No.”
“Try to slow down your eating and drinking.”
“I will.”
She sits there for another moment to make sure I’m telling the truth.
The roaring subsides. I take my hands away from my ears and smile at her. I eat a forkful of potatoes. Satisfied, she walks away.
It’s all right. It’s over now.
Chapter 8
When David gets home he finds Jen in bed with a glass of wine, wearing animal print lingerie. It disorients him and he stands in the doorway for what feels like a long time. She smiles at him and raises her glass.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
She laughs. “Well, if you have to ask it’s been way too long.”
He finds he can’t move toward her or away.
“Why are you so late?” she asks. “This thing has been digging in to my skin for an hour.”
“Something happened.”
“Oh, my God, what’s with your face?”
“It’s a black eye. I got in a wreck.”
“Oh, my God.” She scrambles out of bed and he wishes she wouldn’t. It’s too confusing to have a woman dressed like a leopard hooker descending on him.
“Don’t touch me,” he says.
“I’m not going to touch you but, baby, that’s some shiner. Didn’t your airbag go off?”
“Yes. But that’s from getting punched in the face. It’s my only injury.”
“By what?”
“Who. The guy who hit me.”
“The guy you hit in the car then hit you in the face?”
“Yes. But I didn’t hit him in the car. He hit me.”
“He hit you and then he got out of the car and hit you?”
“Yes. I’m all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“I went to the hospital. They did tests and took X-rays.”
“And the other guy?”
“Nothing.”
“Did they arrest him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was he insane?”
“No. He was an asshole.”
“The world is losing its mind,” she says.
“Lucky for us,” he says. “In terms of job security.”
“Is that a joke? Are you joking?”
“I’m trying to.”
“So you’re okay.”
“I guess.”
“And the car?”
“Totaled, I imagine.”
“Not a scratch on his, I suppose.”
“It was a Range Rover.”
She clucks her tongue. “That is the asshole car of all time. It is the cocaine of cars.”
“I need to lie down.”
“Do you want me to get you something?”
“No. I just want to be alone in the dark.”
She watches him as he makes his way to the bed. He leans back, appreciating the feel of the bed supporting him.
“Alone?” she asks.
“Yes, if it’s okay. I’m sorry about the lingerie. Can I see it another time?”
“Anytime. I just I thought we’d celebrate. I finished my book.”
Jen is always finishing a book. He can’t count the number of books she has written, telling people how to live their lives. Her latest is called Stop Trying, Start Doing. Trying is a bad word in life coaching. It is the root of all evil. It lets people off the hook. They feel they have achieved something by taking a halfhearted run at it. The world would be much better off if we’d take trying out of our vocabulary, Jen says. The Nike ad doesn’t say Just Try It, now does it? And so on.
He tells her, “I can’t celebrate. My head hurts. They gave me something strong. Vicodin.”
“You drove home on Vicodin?”
“No. I took it when I came in. Downstairs in the kitchen. I walked up the stairs on Vicodin.”
“Be careful, it’s very addictive.”
“Jen, I know you’re just helping but you’re not helping.”
“Gee, it’s only what I do for a living.”
He sits up with some effort.
“Really? You want to do this now?” he asks.
“No. I don’t. I’m sorry. I’m just disappointed. Get some rest.”
He lies back down and closes his eyes and listens as she gets dressed and puts on her heels and clacks over to him. She kisses his forehead, which makes him wince from the pain, and she apologizes again. He hears her clack downstairs and then she’s moving around in the kitchen gathering all her books and files.
He feels sad and remorseful and incapable of taking care of her.
“Feel better,” she calls out before she slams the door.
She’s a natural slammer of doors so he doesn’t know if she is angry. At the moment he doesn’t care.
Out of nowhere, the idea of having sex with Jen holds no appeal for him. It doesn’t repulse him, just doesn’t seem to have anything to do with him, as if she were a woman he would happily be friends with but would never consider sleeping with and he has no idea where that feeling, or lack of feeling, came from.
And then, lying there in the dark, he suddenly knows.
It came from meeting Sarah Lange.
Chapter 9
Being in therapy with Dr. Sutton is not all of what I do here. It’s not even most of what I do. That amounts to an hour once a week. Or maybe two days a week. The rest of my time is very structured but varies by day. For example, Mondays I have exercise class and arts and crafts and a few hours of free time, which is spent in a supervised setting—either the common room or the garden. We’re not allowed to stay in our rooms for long periods of time. We get an hour of reading time right before bed and even then, our doors have to be open. When I say we, I mean the suicidal ones. Just plain old crazy, those people have more privacy. We’ve given up our right to privacy by talking openly—and in some cases, unsuccessfully trying more than once—about the Big No. Some of the therapists here actually call suicide the Big No. Meaning it’s the Big No to life and it’s the Big No in that it’s the thing you’re not allowed to do but in my case, I see it more as the Big Yes. Yes to the other side. Yes to what’s more real than anything I see in front of me.
The guides agree with the therapist. They say it’s not allowed. They understand the pull. They are supportive and loving as you might expect spirit guides to be. But they keep saying I have something important to do here and I am not allowed to leave. Yet they know I can’t stop thinking about it, either, and that’s how I ended up here. They told me about this place. They told me in that I saw it in a dream.
It was probably someone human who actually told me about it by name. Probably my friend James, a very successful television writer who goes in and out of sanity pretty regularly, the way some people go to Hawaii. He is in a loveless marriage and he goes insane instead of leaving her. He has been to several different places but likes this one the best.
I used to think that was completely self-indulgent and, well, crazy before I started hearing nonstop from the guides. I railed at him about it. I told him to get a hobby or leave his wife but to stop dropping out of life on a whim. I told him to drink. (He didn’t.) I told him to do anything he needed to do but to stop using crazy like a crutch.
I smile thinking of that now.
I smile thinking of him reacting to the news that I am in here.
But he’ll never know that I have come here for an entirely different reason.
I am in arts and crafts right now. I am doing decoupage. That means I’m meticulously cutting pictures out of magazines and books and trying to create a pattern, and once I’ve done that, I’ll put them on a plate the supervisors have provided and then I’ll varnish it several times and when I’m done, they’ll put it on display with the others in a glass case they have in the lobby. It’s like being in fifth grade. But I find the process soothing and in that way meaningful. It reminds me of my side life as an artist, the one that Dr. Sutton uncovered. I drew a little and I created palate boards for the movies I wrote and sometimes I even made storyboards that the directors would promptly ignore because they were artists themselves and they didn’t want to see the picture in my head because they had pictures in their own heads. I did a little bit of work as a graphic artist but that wasn’t as rewarding as fine art. It was more mechanical, less immediate, less art.
This place feels like something in between. I can make something in the neighborhood of art but I don’t have to think about it too hard and travel out of my body as I used to have to do back when I was creating all the time.
But what do I mean? When was I creating all the time? Childhood, I recall. Drawing and writing poems and knowing exactly what I was supposed to do. Feeling energized and revved up, like an engine full of gas, just waiting for the open road. But then there was someone present, letting the air out of my tires. My parents telling me to stop doing that, taking my things away. They were so worried about it all. My father and mother whispering in the kitchen. Then the pressure to do well in school. Math problems and history reports. No time for creating anything. And I remember sitting in school feeling like it was some kind of prison, a death sentence. But trying to create anything made so much trouble at home. In that part of the South at that time artists were either crazy or Communist. My parents were certainly poor and their upbringings had left them with an abject terror of poverty. So the worried looks and the handwringing. The preacher coming over. Trips to the doctor. The lectures. This was not what people did. People got jobs and paid bills. People got married. People do this, people do that. As if I were not people. So I learned to hide the art along with everything else I kept hidden.
Something tells me to look up and I look up and see that Whitey, the sex addict from the garden, is in my arts and crafts class. He is sitting all the way across the room and he is staring at me but when my eyes meet his he looks down and focuses on his glue stick.
I stand and walk over and sit down beside him. He doesn’t look at me.
“You aren’t supposed to be in here,” I say.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re an addict. This is not an addict room. This is a crazy room.”
“Well, I’m officially crazy now.”
“What?”
“I started talking about suicide in group and now I’m in here.”
“You can’t do that. You can’t fake crazy to get in here.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Oh, really? You’re suicidal?”
“No. But I’m not an addict either. I’m here because if I didn’t come here this woman was going to sue me and I was going to lose my job.”
“What woman?”
“I can’t tell you my story here. This is art.”
“This is crafts and I don’t really want to hear your story.”
“So why did you come over here?”
I don’t know why I have come over. I don’t always understand what I do.
See, the guides don’t always speak. That’s the problem. They don’t always speak. They come and go. Sometimes the charisms fire and sometimes they don’t. I have trouble controlling it. When they go away, that’s when I have no idea what I’m doing, and when they come back, then I understand. When I don’t hear them it’s hard to cope. Today they have been quiet and I don’t know why I’m here and I’m missing my life that I don’t remember and I want to pick a fight with someone. I have focused on Whitey.
He must be reading my expression (he can’t read my thoughts, he’s not like me, people are mostly not like me) because he says, “My name is Kit. What’s yours?”
“Your name is not Kit.”
“Well, technically it’s Christopher. But people call me Kit.”
“You let that happen?”
“I’ve been Kit all my life.”
“You can put a stop to it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Kit.”
“I call you Whitey.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because your hair is white.”
“Yeah, but why would you ridicule me? And why would you call me anything?”
“I don’t know. Something about you bugs me.”
“Thanks for your honesty.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Well, we have that in common.”
“I disagree. You lied about why you were here,” I say.
“When?”
“You told me you were an addict and you’re not an addict.”
“I told you what I was in here for. When I first got here, I was considering the possibility. But now I’ve rejected it.”
“And now you’re pretending to be crazy.”
“I’m not pretending to be anything. I go where they tell me. I’m doing time. This is prison for me. Get it?”
“Are you a musician or a carpenter?” I ask.
“Both. Why?”
“Your hands are torn up.”
“Yeah. They’re getting soft, though.”
“What was your job?”
“Is. I’m not fired yet. I work for a guitar company.”
“You make guitars?”
“Yes, as a hobby, but that’s not what I mean. Our company has factories in Europe and China and we sell them to vendors. I’m on the sales side.”
“And that’s the job where you sexually harassed someone.”
“Well, I didn’t harass her. I had sex with her. It’s a long story.”
“Okay, I’ll hear it.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I like stories. I’m a writer.”
“You’re a writer?”
“I was. Sort of.”
“What are you now?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“You’re crazy.”
I smile. “I’m not crazy either.”
“I knew it. So you’re lying, too.”
“No. I’m officially crazy by their standards.”
“But really you have the answers? You’re a prophet? What?”
I look at my watch. “I have to go get ready for my field trip.”
“Where are you going?”
“To see if I have a brain tumor.”
“Oh. Well. Good luck with that.”
Chapter 10
David has a Prius loaner while his is in the shop. This one is black. His was silver. He feels like an imposter but he also feels dangerous, as if he’s an evil genius now. He’s gone to the dark side. The image makes him smile.
He feels Sarah Lange staring at him as they drive. No doubt, she is seeing into his soul or the guides are telling her something about him. He doesn’t let himself wonder what that must sound like to her, what the chatter inside of her head is all about. Or if she’s making it up, malingering. He doesn’t think about it because, as a scientist, he is not supposed to. He is supposed to gather evidence and not make any judgment about it. The first rule of psychiatry, at least as he was taught it, was that it doesn’t matter as much what he, the doctor, initially thinks is going on inside the patient’s head. It matters what the patient thinks is going on inside her head. After the investigative phase, one can look at the evidence and make a diagnosis. But the rush to analyze is dangerous both to the patient and to the doctor. This does not stop doctors from doing it. The arrogant ones in particular. David struggles with snap judgments like anyone but he k
nows it’s a weakness, not a strength. A good doctor, a good scientist, takes his time and is comfortable with not knowing. He can compartmentalize. He understands more will be revealed. A misdiagnosis in psychiatry can lead to catastrophe every bit as fast as a misdiagnosis in the emergency room. He is not going to misdiagnose Sarah Lange.
Even if he wanted to rush a diagnosis, he couldn’t. He doesn’t have a handle on her. The snap judgments don’t work. She is not schizophrenic. He has all but ruled that out. She doesn’t consistently present any kind of psychosis. Post Traumatic Stress presenting as a delusional disorder is promising but something about that doesn’t sit right, either. She’s too calm. Right now, he is pulling for the brain tumor. A benign one, of course.
“Why are you staring at me?” David asks her.
“How do you know I’m staring at you?”
“I can feel it.”
“So you can sense things.”
“Everyone can sense things.”
“Ah ha.”
“To a degree.”
“And what is that?”
“Part of the survival mechanism, I imagine. Fight or flight.”
“But you can’t qualify it.”
“It’s not my area.”
“So you don’t like to think about intuition.”
“It’s not that I don’t like to think about it. It’s just not what I do.”
“But you just did it.”
“That’s everyday stuff. I don’t address it in a larger sense.”
“But how do you talk to traumatized people without discussing it?”
“I don’t know. We just do. It doesn’t come up. What’s wrong with most of my patients is pretty obvious. It has physical manifestations. We know why PTSD happens. We know why its symptoms occur. It’s not supernatural. It’s physiological.”
“Got it.”