Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  But I neither fell nor fainted. I stood and watched. It was a long five hours observing Larry remove blackish pieces of tumor bit by microscopic bit while I fought back alternating waves of nausea and hunger, but I wanted to be there. I wanted to know everything about what Larry did—not only that he saved lives, but also the grit of it, the blood dripping into a clear plastic bag beneath the patient’s head, the growing hole where the pinkish frontal lobe was disappearing, the acrid smell of bone dust.

  Now what I wanted was simpler, yet seemingly impossible: to have one whole day free from fear. So Larry agreed to bring me, his emotionally unstable wife, to his new job. I figured if something went wrong, I was already in a hospital. Luckily, what I’d hoped turned out to be true: being there helped me feel slightly less scared than usual. But still, despite the company of my trusty notebook and laptop, I couldn’t write. So I drew a picture for Larry instead. Only, two-year-olds can draw better than I can, so the elephant I sketched came out looking like George Washington. Larry put it up on the corkboard in his office anyway, and as he pushed the tack in, he smiled. This, I thought, is the family I never had.

  When Larry went off to see patients, I busied myself by watching Meet the Parents on my laptop. I don’t know what Larry’s assistant thought each time she entered the room to put something on Larry’s desk, but when she said hello and commented on the rain, neither of us discussed the fact that I was curled up on my side watching Ben Stiller spray-paint the tail of a cat. Normally I might have tried to snap the laptop shut or at least make some excuse for myself, but she came in each time without warning. Besides, when it’s a matter of survival, it’s hard to care what people think of you. And for me, that’s what it felt like: survival.

  What I found comforting about Meet the Parents was that nothing terrible happens, and the wispy blond schoolteacher’s parents will always keep her childhood room as she left it, wallpapered in flowers and frilled with fluffed bedding and a delicate string-pull lamp. And I could imagine that room—that safe, unchanging place—as my own.

  When I finally decided to confide my predicament to someone, I called my friend Annie, a sprightly Floridian lawyer with a toothpaste commercial smile and a Suzuki GSX motorcycle. As soon as I told her what was going on, I could feel the slap of her words across the states. “What the hell are you doing? It’s been nearly two months. Two months you haven’t had any control over your life. How long do you plan to suffer with this?”

  “I’m just trying to figure it out. If I can start to understand—”

  “What you need to understand is that sometimes you need help, and you should get it. Get two prescriptions—one for Prozac and one for Xanax—and pull yourself together.”

  I tried to explain that I’d made it this far in my life without medication, so why change now?

  “Because you need it,” she said. “That’s why.”

  “What if I need something else? What if I’m supposed to learn something from this? Wouldn’t taking drugs just mask it?”

  She was silent so long that I thought she’d hung up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” she sighed. “If you want to suffer, then suffer.”

  Of course I didn’t want to suffer. Who does? But a wise social worker once told me that the only way to be truly happy is to also be willing to suffer our suffering. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant at first, and I didn’t like the sound of it, but what he meant was simple: each of us will endure pain in our lifetimes—there’s no escaping it (there is an entire religion based upon this truth)—and we can keep trying to flee this pain, or we can abide by it. Those are our only two choices. Most of us get twitchy for relief and try to squirm away. But the social worker’s point was that by moving through our suffering, instead of away from it, we learn the most about ourselves.

  “I love you, Annie,” I told my friend. “And I appreciate your advice, but I really think there’s something here for me to learn.”

  “I love you, too,” she said. “Learn well.”

  I decided to try learning something at a local Unitarian Universalist church, mostly because of the rainbow on the church sign, which suggested people who might be accepting, who wouldn’t judge me for obsessively taking my pulse or for needing to stand near the door for an entire service, people who left their houses each Sunday morning because, like me, they were searching for something.

  As I stood with Larry beside the door in the back of the church, I had to reconcile the difference between the churches I’d attended in the past and this one. By all appearances, they had a lot in common: the acolytes, the hymns, the announcements, the older white man at the pulpit. But that’s where the similarities ended. Because this minister wasn’t quoting from Mark or Luke or John; he was quoting from Vonnegut: “ ‘I tell you, even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.’ ” That was exactly it. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, but to make it all disappear with a pill wouldn’t solve the fundamental question of why. I wanted to make sense of my panic; I wanted the why.

  The minister went on to espouse words from a local ornithologist, along with Whitman and Pound, all of which were enough to entice me to grab Larry’s hand and, after standing for half the service, sit down in the last pew—still close enough to the door to make a quick getaway in case of a fire or collapsing roof or sudden collective ridicule from a hundred turned heads. As we settled in, I thought I saw the minister smile at us. And it felt good, that quick acknowledgment in our seat beside a woman and her young child. I realized then how lonely I’d been.

  The minister gently sculpted the air with his hands as he spoke about gifts, how we should always pass them on, how one of these gifts is “to love whoever is around to be loved.” Wow, I thought, this is one special place. But then, after placing our money in the tidings bowl, I gave a nod to Larry and we slipped out the back before the exodus.

  FIFTEEN

  Time slows. It stretches into a great vat, each second a drop falling in slow motion. Each drop explodes into liquid, changing the liquid each time. We’re standing in the kitchen, lined up like kids at a bus stop. We’re drinking tall glasses of many kinds of liquor from my mother’s cabinet, and someone has given me these pills that are pink hearts, and now they’re leaving, and I don’t know why they’re leaving. Wait, I want to say, but the word resists me, won’t rise. One boy stays, holds his glass, and his eyes are the color of whiskey, and the whiskey is staring at me. He puts his glass on the counter, and the earth stutters. “Come here,” he says, clutching the back of my head and pulling me toward him. The slimy muscle of his tongue grows, snakes its way into my throat. I’m going to throw up.

  While I heave in the bathroom, he slips out. Then I am leaving, too, because a weight is pulling me down, out of the light. I stumble out of the bathroom and vomit onto the pink carpet. I’m trying to get to the phone because I feel a blackness I’ve never felt before, like the pressing of tires against a road. I crawl across the living room floor and pull myself up onto the old pink sofa, to the phone. I try to speak, but my voice comes out like pulp. Then everything falls, and there is nothing but impenetrable black.

  In the week since my mother admitted me to this teenage psych ward, I’ve learned to play Spades, taught a few of the girls the perfect three-part eye shadow application, and met a cute boy named Tony. I’m partnered up with him in the middle of a Spades game when a jowly middle-aged man approaches our table. We’re playing against Paul and Stacey—a pretty girl who compulsively puts on lip gloss—and Tony and I are winning.

  “Hi, Dr. Kosarin,” Stacy sings.

  “Rita?” he asks, looking at me.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Dr. Kosarin, the psychiatrist here. Would you please come with me?”

  “We’ll pick this up later,” assures Tony with a wink.

  I nod back, smiling shyly, and fo
llow Dr. Kosarin to his office.

  “So, Rita, can you tell me why you’re here?”

  I lean back in my little metal-legged chair. “I guess because I keep running away.”

  The last time I ran away, that night after Mr. Malekzadeh was finished with me, I roamed through the apartment building, riding the elevator up and down, meandering down one hall and then another, until finally I went to sleep on a back staircase, which was carpeted and much warmer than the last one. When a security guard discovered me, I told him I was eighteen and just very tired, and he smiled sadly at me and told me we could call either my parents or the police. I chose my mother. The sun was up by the time she drove the hour to get me. I hugged her and thanked her and wondered, as she lightly hugged me back, if she could sense what had just happened to my body. If she could, she didn’t show it.

  Dr. Kosarin leans back in his plush leather chair and pulls off his glasses. “Is that all?” he asks, rubbing his hand over his eyes. He puts his glasses back on and picks up my file. “It says here that you were recently admitted to Baltimore County General Hospital for an overdose of—let’s see here—a mixture of amphetamines and alcohol. Do you want to tell me about that?”

  “There’s not much to tell. Some friends came over, and we made these really strong drinks, and then one of them had some speed, so I tried it.”

  “Uh-huh, I see. And have you ever attempted suicide prior to this episode?”

  “Of course not. I wasn’t trying to commit suicide.”

  “Okay. Tell me then, have you ever had any suicidal thoughts? Ever feel like it might just be easier to end it all—you know, run away for good, that sort of thing?”

  “No.” I’m starting to get annoyed. “I mean, yes, I’ve thought about running away for good, but I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”

  “Because it’s okay if you have. A lot of people do. We’re here to help you, Rita.”

  I’m beginning to learn that many adults aren’t any wiser than children, that, in fact, they can be the blindest, meanest people on earth. “Right,” I say. “But I’m not suicidal.” I look him defiantly in the eyes. “Why don’t you ask me why I run away?”

  Dr. Kosarin sighs, and I can see he’s equally annoyed with me. “Today’s purpose is to do an initial evaluation. We can talk more about that later. Now if you could just answer a few more questions. Tell me, how do you sleep at night?”

  “Fine.”

  “No trouble falling asleep? No waking up in the middle of the night?”

  “Like I said, fine.”

  “Do you ever feel like you want to hurt someone?”

  I imagine knocking him off his big chair. “No.”

  Back on the unit, I hear the sound first—growling, low and feral. It’s coming from a girl who’s squirming on the floor. Three staff members are trying to hold her down as she snarls, punches, kicks, and bites them. The counselors flinch. One is bleeding from her hand. The girl looks at nothing. She is all limbs. Her shirt has come up in the tussle, exposing her pale belly and the underside of a breast. Within seconds several men come rushing down the hall. They pin her arms and legs down as easily as if they were a doll’s. One of them produces a needle, and soon the girl’s eyes are rolling back in their sockets.

  “They probably gave her enough Thorazine to knock her out for days,” someone says.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Oh, nothing. She just goes off sometimes. They’ll probably put her in seclusion for a week.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Honey, don’t you know where you are?”

  SIXTEEN

  “Let me tell you what’s wrong with the way you’re sitting.”

  Though I’d mounted Shaddad only seconds earlier and we hadn’t yet taken a single step, I was already screwing up.

  “Everything.” Tommy approached me and put her hand on my leg. “See how your legs are forward? We call that a ‘chair seat,’ but riding isn’t sitting back on a sofa and letting the horse do all the work. In dressage, we’re constantly engaged—we ride every stride, as they say. In terms of our position, we strive to achieve a straight line from the top of the head to the seat to the soles of the feet—mind you, I studied biomechanics, so I’m very interested in how each individual part moves in the collective whole—so for starters, move your legs back and imagine a string attached from the rafters to the top of your head. Imagine that if we took the horse away, you’d be standing, not sitting.”

  I did as she instructed, and for the next half an hour, Tommy adjusted my inner thighs, the angle of my hips, my back, my shoulders, my stomach, my arms, my hands, and my feet—talking at length about each body part—while Shaddad stood stoically beneath me. In the first five minutes of entering the barn, I’d felt overwhelmed, but now I was so far past information overload that I was losing track of basic English. Which was not a good time to finally start moving. But I wanted to give myself over completely to this lifelong passion, to this elegant world of horses that, though it at times seemed so inelegant it became farcical, kept inviting me to climb over fear in ways I hadn’t known were possible. And if I couldn’t trust that, what could I ever trust? So we started moving.

  Standing in the middle of the arena, Tommy controlled Shaddad by attaching him to a long rope called a lunge line. She wiggled the whip in her other hand, and instantly, Shaddad started walking.

  “You’re resisting,” she said after a few steps. “Can you feel how his legs move forward one at a time as he walks? Just like a person?”

  The simple answer was no. It was hard for me to feel anything; I just knew that I was no longer on the ground and that I was perched on top of a large animal. “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Well, follow that. Let your hips move with him.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to feel his strides.

  “Don’t close your eyes. When you close your eyes, you automatically tilt your head forward, and that throws off your whole position.”

  And somewhere between my feeling for Shaddad’s gait and having to relearn simple facts like which side was my left and which was my right, Tommy asked Shaddad to trot. I had been on a horse a total of one other time in my life—and that was a few weeks earlier, when I’d randomly stopped at a barn and walked around for a few minutes on a horse named Applesauce—so I had no way of knowing that trotting would mean getting banged in the crotch over and over by the hard pommel of the saddle. I felt a somewhat rational fear for my life as I struggled to stay on. But that wasn’t all: I also had to learn to “post the trot”: to rise up out of the saddle with every other beat. Never in my life had I found a physical activity so difficult or felt so uncoordinated; never had I felt more like a child, not even as a child. My legs got tired almost instantly, but if I tried to sit, Tommy yelled at me to keep posting, and as I gasped out a plea for her to make him stop, she told me this is how you learn, so I kept shakily bouncing around in and out of the saddle, and after a lot of flailing, my first riding lesson was over.

  At several points during my lesson, I expected to start panicking. But those moments were fleeting; I was too caught up in my awkward physical rigor to give these deeper, more internal thoughts much airtime. And it wasn’t until later that I understood a difference between panic and other kinds of fear: this haphazard floundering about on Shaddad’s back presented a real concern, one based on some simple laws of physics—namely, how could I keep bumping around these circles without falling. My fear, then, of hitting the ground, had an immediate counterpoint: my fight to stay on. But in the fight-flight of panic, where the source of fear is constantly shape-shifting and shrouded in darkness, there is no obvious counterpoint, no way to fight or flee that which cannot be seen—no last rally of strength in the legs as they clutch the horse’s sides, no last thoughts about how to curl the body and protect the head if the legs fail and the ground comes fast—s
o the panic quickly moves to consume. Could it be that by putting myself in a situation that was truly scary, I was chasing away this other fear, this phantom? Was it that simple, that one fear could fight another? Maybe it was. Because when Tommy finally asked Shaddad to stop trotting, I was already stronger.

  As I slid off Shaddad and took a few steps, my whole body felt like rubber, and my legs still felt as if there were a horse between them. I reached to stroke Shaddad’s neck, and he turned to look at me. In an instant, I was four again. I was reaching out my hand to the sweeping and hungry trunk of an elephant and watching the world turn on.

  It had been a rough couple of hours, but I’d survived. I’d ridden a horse. I had looked into the horse’s eye and found a kind of peace.

  SEVENTEEN

  I knew my life was shrinking. Despite the books, despite the trip to Larry’s office, despite phone calls to Annie and other friends, I was still terrified of things seen and unseen, of all I could imagine and all I hadn’t yet imagined, of the world at large and of the basic functioning of my own body. But somehow I had deemed safe the space between the front steps and the edge of the azalea bushes, so my daily walk consisted of a few paces of that fifteen-foot swath of flagstone—that is, until I hit the low point of low points.