by Ted Neill
“Judith,” the voice beside her was saying in her mother tongue. “Judith, I am a nurse, we are here to help you.”
Chapter 9
Aliases
I am not alone, of course, at the orphanage, accompanied as I am by a number of well-intentioned foreign volunteers. For one particular month when the children are out of school the need for volunteers is intense. So I am joined, among others, by a team of six Canadian college students, all women, who have already acclimated to living in Kenya after spending a semester traveling to the national parks in a massive Land Rover and taking courses on ecology, biology, international law, and economics at night, in their makeshift camps, from their guides, who when they are not traveling are professors back in Canada. Aside from being amazing with the children, they are great company to hang out with, play board games, and watch movies. One night we compete to see who can clip the most clothespins to their face. The winner, Ainsley, displays an amazing ability to endure a total of twelve pins pinched onto her cheeks, ears, nostrils, lips, and eyelids.
There is Helen with whom I teach preschool. Helen is from the UK. She is soft spoken, gentle, and consistent with the children—basically the opposite of me, so she is a good teacher. She is constantly finding ways to make art projects from bottles, egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and cereal boxes. She also has a prescient way of always being right about what the kids will want to do next, leading me to coin the unofficial Rainbow Children’s Home rule, meant with full sincerity, “Helen is always right.”
Melissa is a volunteer from my church back home in Northern Virginia. She is a school teacher and makes me realize that even I need practice at long division. One night I get the losing end of a deal with Melissa. The children had just finished watching a movie in the schoolhouse and Rachel, a new girl still adjusting to the diet and medications of the orphanage, has a case of explosive diarrhea in the schoolhouse bathroom. Melissa asks me if I’d like to take Rachel to her cottage and clean her up or if I would be willing to clean the bathroom. Without seeing the bathroom I agree to clean it, feeling that it would be more appropriate for Melissa to strip Rachel down and stick her in the shower.
There is a scene in the Eddie Murphy movie, Daddy Daycare, wherein Eddie Murphy, having set up his own daycare must confront a similar situation in his own bathroom. As the audience, we never see the actual damage to the bathroom, instead the camera fixes on Murphy’s face as he looks in, capturing his reaction to the carnage. His eyes examine the toilet, the walls, and even the scatologically-stained ceiling.
I can assure you such things are not just in the movies. While the ceiling was spared, the rest of the bathroom looked like a trichromatic Jackson Pollack painting. I cannot even enter, the best I can do is haul in the garden hose and spray down the entire room from outside.
For those readers expecting page after page of unmitigated tragedy, I can promise some relief, as it is impossible to have one hundred children living in one place without having ridiculous shenanigans.
Most amusing to me is the children’s tendency to personify everything. A toilet is not backed up and gurgling, it is talking. My shirt is not faded and tattered, it’s tired. When the soles begin detaching from my shoes, leaving them to flop beneath my toes, my shoes are not ruined, or old, they are just smiling. The creative language does not end there, neither does their directness. After considering my acne for a few moments and mistaking my pimples for mosquito bites, Josephine, a ten-year-old says to me, “Ted you would be much more handsomer if the mosquitos would stop kissing your face.”
One Saturday we take the kids to see Spiderman in a theater where the management wanted to provide a treat. We have the theater to ourselves. I sit in back letting the kids sit as close or far from the screen as they want. During the scene when Toby McGuire bursts into the frame chasing after his school bus around eighty children turn around simultaneously and say, “Ted, it’s you!” To clarify, no one in my entire life has ever mistaken me for Toby McGuire but just as whites are accused of acting as if all black people look the same, the reverse might also be said of Kenyans, or at least these children. No matter the differences I see between me and Toby, to the children, with my lean frame and glasses, I’m a dead ringer for Peter Parker—even though his face is blessedly free of acne.
For the following years that I know the children they often refer to me as Peter Parker. It is one of my nicknames in addition to Ted D. Bear and Ted Ushumari (the Kiswahili word for nail since my last name, Neill, sounds similar). I lose count of the children who want to examine my wrists to see where the web comes out and/or fold down my middle two fingers and back away, expecting webbing to issue forth.
Harry Potter is a close second to Peter Parker when it comes to my aliases. One of my favorite memories is taking some of the boys from Cottages Red to see Chamber of Secrets and watching them lean forward in their seats as Ron’s family car comes roaring to Harry’s bedroom window, levitating in the air. The boys were enraptured and amazed and I’ve never been more convinced of the magic of the big screen. After that, the children regularly check my forehead for a lightning bolt-shaped scar.
I am in a field hospital in Mesano, in the far west of the country, where HIV rates are the highest. I am accompanying the doctor—an American missionary—on rounds. I see things that will haunt my dreams the rest of my life. A woman with an infected C-section incision that is yellow and purulent, another woman with AIDS whose chicken pox has advanced to the state that massive sections of her flesh have turned to festering sores. She looks as if she has been flayed. Another man lies in a bed reduced to nothing but a skeleton, a figure of death, prone on an altar of white with a gaping mouth, pleading eyes, and a death rattle.
But by far the case that strikes me the most is the story of an eleven-year-old girl. She is sitting alone in the children’s ward, nothing beside her except a plastic cup. She sits with her feet hanging off the side of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her shoulders are folded inward, her head down. The doctor explains to me that she is HIV positive and from Mombasa, on the country’s east coast. Her parents are dead; her relatives, tired of taking care of her, and convinced her case was hopeless, bought her a one-way ticket to the far side of the country to be rid of her.
Now she sits waiting to die in a hospital ward where she knows no one. To even contemplate her plight gives me an ill feeling in my gut—and yet I’m all too aware that I am the observer here, a voyeur to suffering I could never imagine and have avoided by sheer, unfair, dumb luck and a level of privilege that is utterly unmerited and, on some level, built upon centuries of exploitation of millions of black and brown bodies like hers. If she were a middle-class eleven-year-old where I come from, likely she would be entering seventh grade. She’d be consumed with her friends, pop stars, and fluorescent head bands and charm bracelets. Maybe there would be a boy she had a crush on, maybe two. Maybe some would even have crushes on her, her emaciated face shows signs of high cheekbones and clear, light eyes, and long lashes.
But none of those things will be for her. Instead she is here, in an alien part of the country, with no one but strangers to keep her company while she dies.
Randolph is a quiet fourteen-year-old street boy who originally came to Rainbow Children’s Home after police arrested him for stealing. He has deep soulful eyes and a tentative but bright smile. He is a lanky kid but it still seems sudden to me the day I look up from playing hopscotch with the kids and I see him outside Cottage Red, thin, skeletal. I freeze.
Randolph is dying, I think to myself. But how? He’s been a healthy kid, responding well to antiretroviral treatment. However, I learn from his house uncle that he has tuberculosis that has spread to his stomach, making it difficult, if not impossible, to eat.
It’s not long before he is moved to the sickroom.
Chapter 10
“It’s not like the movies.”
Mental illness is insidious. You can’t see it necessarily like a rash or hear it li
ke a cough. But it does become physical. You do feel it as it manifests in the body. I can’t exaggerate the pain of it. For me, it was analogous to the pain you would feel if you knew a huge ogre were standing behind you about to slam a cinderblock, covered in razors, on your head. The physical blow never comes, but that instance of dread in anticipation of its painful impact lengthened from an instance to an eternity for me. The tensing of muscles, the pinched shoulders, the cringe and rush of adrenaline and cortisol that come with the bracing for imminent pain, was a 24/7 state for me. I could not concentrate. I could not sleep. The lack of sleep kept me from being able to be fully awake. But awake, I moved in a distracted and trembling daze. It became worse and worse. I had days that I didn’t tell anyone about, where I would curl into a ball on the floor of my apartment in a fetal position, as if I were protecting myself from that very ogre. I would remain there until the panic would pass, or until I had to leave the house, for class or my job as a research assistant. I would force myself through hour by hour, presenting a mask of normalcy and calm but leaving me beyond exhaustion at the end of the day.
Then there was the morning it didn’t pass and I couldn’t manage to eat or even shower. I remember writhing that day, as if in pain from electrodes on my body, even if it was all in my head. I guess it can be hard to imagine unless you have actually experienced it. But I took the position of a prisoner in a torture cell, begging for it to stop.
Then I realized I could make it stop.
I stood up and picked up a steak knife from my counter. It was easier to slit my wrists than to continue on. The knife had a wooden handle and a serrated blade. It was one that I had taken from my parents’ knife set when they had replaced it at home. The knife had followed me from apartment to apartment in the past years. I had picked it out of the dishwasher and placed it in the silverware drawer as part of my daily chores countless times growing up. How strange, that the innocuous things, things that accompanied us through childhood that were as familiar to us as a mother’s face or a childhood bedroom, can come also to be the instrument of our undoing. I held the handle in a tight fist and turned the serrated teeth towards the underside of my forearm where I could see the blue of my veins through my skin.
I guess it is a measure of how much pain I was in, how sick I had become, that it was easier to slit my wrist than to continue being alive, to continue suffering. I had heard someone on the radio once say that being depressed was like having your hand slammed in the door, over and over, but without even the relief that might come when the door pulls back for another swing. It’s that moment of impact, shock that is prolonged, interminably.
And it only seemed rational to end it.
I threw the knife across the room just before cutting myself and recoiled from it as it clattered in the corner. Sadly it was not a sense of connection to others, a sense that I would be missed, or even an awareness of any love others had for me or that I had for myself. I was beyond feeling any of those things, such is the sickness of mental illness. I think, in that moment, I was just scared, if nothing else, of the pain of rending open my own flesh.
I managed to put some clothes on and make it out to my car. I fought the urge to swing the steering wheel into oncoming traffic the whole way to the Georgia State University Counseling center. I remember begging to see a therapist. I remember curling up in a fetal position on one of the chairs in the waiting area. I was still wearing my shoes and the student volunteer working at the desk came out and asked me multiple times to put my feet on the floor. I kept trying, but even that was too hard. When the available therapist finally called me back into her office, I simply took my shoes off upon entering and curled up in the chair for her clients.
I told her about the knife. But I also told her about the thoughts that had flashed in my mind with growing frequency over the past year: of filling the bathtub, plugging in my space heater and dropping it in with me; of how I had taken measurements of whether or not the hose my landlady left in the side yard would reach from the tailpipe of my car to the driver-side window; about how I even had a place picked out, near Stone Mountain park where I would go to run the engine and simply drift off. The place I had picked was the corner of a church parking lot, just under the shade of some elm trees. I told her I had been there a number of times already, just thinking about how peaceful it might be to end things that way.
I was deemed a danger to myself. Georgia State University police and the therapist herself accompanied me to a mental hospital just outside the city. It took an entire afternoon to admit me while insurance forms were processed, doctors evaluated me, and phone calls were made. Finally, I was told I could enter Cottage Green, as they called the ward for adults. A part of me shrank from the very name, just another terrible reminder of the origin of some of the sadness, loss, and nihilism I was fleeing.
The ward was a beehive of quiet activity. The staff had an area to complete paperwork and read files. A wooden railing separated them from us, the patients. A common area with deep cushioned chairs was the heart of the ward. A dining area was off to the left, next to it were windows into the small office where medications were prepared and at certain times we patients would line up to receive our drugs. For my first half an hour I sat under observation with an African American teenager Calista—she had just turned eighteen so she had “graduated” from the adolescent ward. Her wrists were bandaged from a spell in which her body dysmorphia and self-loathing had overwhelmed her. A white guy in his twenties, Ian, also sat in the observation section with us. He had lived with ADD and anxiety disorders successfully for years, but his new psychiatrist had adjusted his medications and he had been unable to sleep for four days. He sat, his knees pulled to his chest while he wiped away uncontrollable tears. “Please,” he pleaded with the ward aids, “tell the doctor I just want to sleep.”
I was sharing a space, a label, and the stigma that came with mental illness. I met others who hoped to become stable enough to be allowed to stay in the halfway house, at least, and out of lockdown. We were from all backgrounds: Pablo, a former army officer in his fifties who in a state of despair and disassociation even deeper than my own, had gone through with sawing through the flesh of both his wrists, tendons, arteries, and musculature, leaving both forearms thickly bandaged and many of his fingers immobile. Cora was a white woman, an alcoholic, and had a Mensa-level IQ. She was depressed with the life of a housewife and had been arrested after picking up her daughters from school while intoxicated. She spent her first hours weeping in shame in the corner on the phone with her husband, apologizing for putting their daughters at such risk. There was also Henry, a black man in his seventies who after decades of alcoholism had checked himself into the hospital in an attempt to get sober. The combination of delirium tremens and the medications he had been placed on caused his hands to shake so much he could barely feed himself. Humiliated, he had to ask us to help him eat. At dinner I also met two doctors, one a cardiologist, the other an emergency room physician, who were struggling with alcoholism and addiction to drugs, respectively.
My first night I slept in my clothes, waking up multiple times as staff members would enter our rooms to shine a flashlight on us to make sure we were still alive. In the morning we lined up again to have our vitals checked. Rob, a kind staff member in a polo-shirt, took my blood pressure and recognizing that it was my first time waking up in a psychiatric ward, wearing the same clothes as the day before, tried comforting me.
“Don’t worry, it’s not like the movies.”
Chapter 11
Fire
Ivy’s mother survived so many beatings from her father, even the beating with the belt, she was sure that her mother could survive the illness that had infected her chest. Ivy told her brother Maurice that their mother was a strong woman, a fighter—which was where Ivy got her pugnacious spirit from—and that soon their mother would grow well and be back to normal.
But Ivy had been wrong. Their mother could not defeat her sickness. Ivy cr
ied when they buried their mother in the ground next to father’s other two wives. Many of their father’s other children came for the funeral and one of them, Bahati, never left. She moved in and began to take care of Ivy, Maurice, and their father. People thought she was a new wife but Ivy’s father had to explain that she was one of his daughters from his second wife.
Bahati thought that Ivy and Maurice should be in school so she took Ivy to the doctor and bought her medicine (she could because her husband had a good job). In a few days Ivy was feeling better and she started attending school again, but for a while her marks were not very good because she had missed so much. She was also very tired at the end of the day and often did not do her homework. The teachers would hit her knuckles with a pencil if she did not do her homework, but this did not bother her much—it did not hurt nearly as much as punching or being punched by someone. She would try to do her homework, but often she just wanted to go to sleep when she got home. At the end of the year they even told her she would have to repeat the grade. This did not surprise her but she was still very embarrassed.
When the next school year started, Ivy was already sick again. She was repeating it just like the year before, she realized, with the sickness and everything. She wondered if she would be fifty and still in standard four. The good news was that Maurice was the top of his class, so if she was not a good student and failed out of school, she was not too worried, since she was sure Maurice would grow to be smart and get a job to support both of them.
It was while she was in her second year of standard four that her father died. Maurice would not play or talk for several days after. Ivy did her best to distract him, to comfort him by reading to him, and buying him sweets, which he unwrapped and ate, without his usual smile. Ivy was also sad, but more so because Maurice was. She did not think she would miss the beatings from her father. She was more afraid that their father’s ghost would come back and haunt them or that they would become poor. Many people came for the funeral, more people than for her mother’s funeral. Because Bahati was around there was lots of food prepared this time. Bahati did not even go to the burial; instead she stayed home with her friends and finished cooking the food.