Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  “Did you tell him where I was?”

  “What do you want, everyone to know you’re in a place like this?”

  “He was my husband, Ma. He can know.” When she didn’t answer I said, “Come on. Aren’t there psychiatric hospitals in China?”

  She muttered something I didn’t catch.

  “What?”

  “I don’t like these rules. Why can’t I call my own daughter?”

  “Next time, Ma. I’ll see you next time, at family therapy.”

  “Your sister is coming home.”

  “When?”

  “I tell her soon. It’s too hard for old lady all alone.”

  “Oh, come on, Ma. You’re not old.” But as I said it I saw her paleness, paler than the powder that covered it. When had she started wearing powder?

  An MH was standing in the foyer, seeing the families out. She smiled at my mother. “Hello, Mrs. Wang. I’m glad to see you made it tonight.”

  “That girl has good skin without foundation,” Ma said to me.

  The front of our unit had a sliding glass door that was controlled electronically from the nurses’ station. As it whooshed open for my mother the smell of wet earth and trees came gusting in, and for the first time in months I remembered what it felt like to be well.

  5

  Remembering.

  That was how they judged you in the loony bin, by how much you remembered and how well you related it. My group was getting frustrated. You would have thought I was betraying them in some way. I’d given them every single detail and they wanted more.

  “Sally, you’re not a reporter. This is your life.”

  “You can tell us. You may fall apart, but you won’t die.”

  I knew what they were after: rage.

  They pointed to my tiger stripes: this is what happens if you don’t scream, beat on a pillow.

  “When are you going to confront your mother?”

  “When are you going to confront your sister?”

  Valeric was more patient than my group, taking down all the pieces I could conjure up without immediately wanting to fit them together. Her scribbling was especially prolific, I’d noticed, when it came to my dreams. But what, exactly, was the point? What was the use of calling up the past when you were drowning, how was it going to save you? Take Rachel—she was better off than any of us, because she’d figured out the time when her life was perfect and moved back there. Why should she have had to hold something in her mind like her boyfriend’s brains splashing all over a tree trunk if she couldn’t bear it?

  And Lillith. She’d developed her memory into an art. How many times had she told the story of her uncle, with how many variations? She took out all this drama and wore it like a shawl, flinging it about her for everyone to gasp about. She never failed to weep at certain points in the telling, as if she were reading the sad part of a book over and over. But I couldn’t see that her remembering had helped her any. She was either crazy and unreachable or obsessed with the past. Either way she was trapped.

  Valerie said you remember in order to understand. I wished it were that easy. I wished I could step back from my life, as if it were a painting in progress, study it from different angles, in different lights, so I could figure out where to put the next brush stroke.

  In OT I tried my hand at the potter’s wheel, making bowls, which I flattened down afterward. I loved the feeling of the cold slippery mass disintegrating beneath the pressure of my palms.

  “Masochist,” said Mel. He was sitting at a table behind me rubbing a copper sheet over a mold.

  “Destruction is the flip side of creation.”

  “Right,” he said, smirking.

  On Easter Sunday he’d introduced us to his ex-girlfriend Bethie, a slight blonde in a ratty rabbit coat who couldn’t take her eyes off him. She was partly responsible for his being in here. They’d been arguing in the car when a cop pulled them over. In a classic case of displaced anger Mel had punched the policeman in the jaw.

  Lillith came by carrying a tray of sculptures for the kiln. They were miniatures of food: a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, a hot dog in a bun, an ice cream sundae with an out-sized maraschino cherry tilting off the top.

  “Want a bite?” she asked us.

  “I’ll wait till they’re baked,” I said.

  “Dibs on the sundae.” Mel reached over and poked the cherry, making a dent.

  “STOP IT.” Lillith snatched the tray away. She was acting anorexic, making food instead of eating it. As she marched toward the kiln, it struck me that she had the bearing of a mad queen, all bones and misplaced energy. Her hair, which she was wearing in twin skinny braids plastered around her head, even sort of looked like a crown. Although it wasn’t a particularly cold day she was covered in layers—two turtlenecks, a button-down shirt, and a sweatshirt—at least that’s what I could see—which somehow managed to accentuate, rather than hide, her skeletal form.

  The next thing I made on the wheel I kind of liked, and it was getting close to the end of the hour anyway, so I put it aside to be fired, then washed up. I meandered over to where Lillith was standing by some wooden racks displaying the work of other patients. She wasn’t looking at them though. She seemed concerned with something on the knee of her jeans, rubbing at it furiously.

  “What’s the matter, do you have a stain?”

  “Got to put it out.”

  “Put what out?”

  “I’m on fire,” she said.

  At breakfast the MH, a new one, asked where Douglas was.

  No one knew. It wasn’t unusual for one of us to be missing mornings: bad nights were common, and there were always shrink appointments. Still, they kept pretty close tabs on us. He must have planned it down to the last gesture and worked without pause.

  By eight-thirty it had already hit seventy, one of those freakish March days where at school you’d see people in tank tops and cutoffs lounging on the grass. Forcing spring. We were all in good spirits. On the way back from breakfast Lillith and Rachel linked arms and did the “We’re off to see the wizard” gallop down the flagstone path toward the house. I was lagging behind, watching the ducks on the lake. Even when I saw the ambulance it didn’t occur to me that anything was wrong. We were used to them at all times of the day gliding up the snaky drive to the admitting ward. Two men in light green uniforms emerged from the front door of our unit carrying the stretcher. They went by so fast all I got was a glimpse of the enormous wrapped body and blue eyelids. I thought the person must be dead until I saw that he was hooked up to an I.V. bag.

  Later they figured out he had gotten the razor blades from his father on family therapy night. Usually blades were doled out one by one, and you had to turn them into the nurses’ station when you were through. A casual request: “Dad, the blades they have here really suck, could you bring me some Wilkinson’s?”

  In the downstairs bathroom where he’d puked up raspberry licorice, not ten yards from the nurses’ station, Douglas had shaved his head completely bald. Then with a new blade he’d sliced open his carotid artery.

  “Right here,” explained Lillith, sliding the side of her index finger diagonally down the front of her own skinny neck.

  Douglas made the kind of mess you didn’t want to hear about. Five more minutes, they said, and we would have lost him. Five more minutes, and there would have been more of him outside his skin than in. They blocked the end of the downstairs hallway to clean up with mops and buckets, and a section of carpeting had to be cut away.

  Compared to Douglas I was an amateur.

  We had an emergency group meeting and then we went to dance therapy where we lay on our mats and listened to spacey music. Mel didn’t participate. He stood in the doorway and chain-smoked. His face had a closed-in look, which I took to be a bad sign.

  Sure enough, that night after dinner he and Pajama Man got into a fight. What I saw was Mel twisting the guy’s arm around his back and pounding his forehead into the carpet. The door to the n
urses’ station opened and two male MHs emerged, taking such big strides they looked like they were moving in slow motion. One of them pinned Mel to the floor by sitting on his back, the other got him into the straitjacket. I’d never seen one before. It was strangely innocuous, pure white with laces, like a corset. Mel looked like he was hugging himself.

  The nurse brought out the syringe. I knew I shouldn’t watch but I couldn’t help it. They pulled down the back of his jeans, and as the needle slipped in, he threw back his head and howled. It was the most primal sound I’d ever heard a human being make, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

  For the first time I could truly believe I was in a loony bin.

  Mel was knocked down to Status One, standard procedure for such a major acting-out. Before lunch Lillith and I went into the dayroom to see how he was doing. He was out of the straitjacket, looking normal, his tray already set up on the coffee table, as far away as possible from the TV, which was Pajama Man’s territory.

  “How’re you feeling?” Lillith asked.

  “Nothing like a Thorazine hangover,” he said breezily. But the only clue to what had happened the night before was a slight darkness under his eyes. He was nineteen, after all. We watched as he unfurled the paper napkin as appreciatively as if it had been made of the finest linen, spreading it out on his lap with a flourish. He ate European style, cutting the food into tiny bites before popping them into his mouth like kisses. It was grilled chicken, garnished with sprigs of rosemary.

  “That’s what I’m having,” I said.

  “I’m afraid it’s not on the menu.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mel wiped his mouth with his napkin, looking a little embarrassed. “My dad sent it over. He owns a restaurant. Here—” He speared a morsel of chicken on his fork and held it out to me.

  “No thanks.”

  “You sure? It’s awfully good.”

  I saw that his eyes were not green, as I’d first thought, but a clear hazel with a dark gray rim around the pupil.

  A badly photographed postcard of a town square with cobble-stoned streets and window boxes full of garish red flowers. It could have been anywhere in Europe. But the handwriting was just as I remembered it—small and careless, with uncrossed t’s and dots from the i’s flying all over the place.

  Sa—I wanted to send you Monet’s poppies but it’s not the season. Denny is spoiling me to death with home cooking and an extremely well-stocked wine cellar. I’m in charge of the daily marketing and my French is becoming extraordinaire. Tomorrow we’re getting up at dawn to see the lavender harvest. Hope you’re better and happy. Mille baisers,Mar.

  On Saturday night I attended a dance. Mixers, they called them. The only thing I could think of were boarding school mixers, where you wrote down your height on a list and were then bused to a boys’ school and matched up with someone who tried to ditch you right after dinner. I put on an old cardigan of Nai-nai’s, smoke blue with pearl buttons, to wear with my regular jeans and sneakers. Some people in our unit got really decked out—walking through the foyer I got a strong whiff of mingled cologne and aftershave.

  The gym where we had rec therapy was darkened and blasting with old disco from a sound system set up near the bleachers. The adolescent girls leaned up against the walls behind the basketball hoops, smoking and talking mostly to each other. They seemed one of two types: big-boned and mannish, or anorexic, with jutting wrist bones and long wispy hair. Hard cases, a lot of them had been kicked out of juvenile homes. One separated herself from the pack and sauntered over to the bleachers, where Lillith and I were sitting.

  “Any news about Id Squid?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Duggle-ass.”

  I told her what we’d been told that morning—he’d been upgraded from critical to serious.

  “Gruesome what he did, huh?” The girl shook her head, hair flying—she was one of the wispy ones—and gave a few hard chomps to her gum. The heels of her cowboy boots scraped the freshly waxed floor as she turned to stroll back to her friends.

  Lillith got up and started dancing all by herself, on the edge of the floor. She shut her eyes and whirled with her arms outstretched, at the same sultry tempo no matter what was playing. Every so often she’d stop and scratch herself—her nose, under the arms, behind the knees. She was wearing layers again, and her hair was still up in braids—it didn’t look like she’d washed it for the entire week she’d worn it like that. Watching her, it hit me again how scarily thin she was, in a different way from the adolescent anorexics. They were taut with the control needed to warp their bodies into art. Lillith seemed at the mercy of something bigger than herself, becoming more and more brittle under its centrifugal force.

  There was a guy there who might have been about fifty, all dressed up in a herringbone jacket and tie, wire-framed glasses. He looked like a dork doing the twist—his face got so red I was scared he was going to have a heart attack. But when they started playing Glenn Miller he got out there with this woman in our unit and all of a sudden they were gliding and dipping like something out of a 1940s movie. Then he asked someone else—just another woman out of the crowd—and I couldn’t stop watching, it was so beautiful. When the next song started he was in front of me, holding out his hand and bowing.

  Dancing with him was like riding in a car, it was so smooth, the steering mechanism in the small of my back, where his palm was pressed. He hummed along in a pleasant, absent-minded way, and I thought, This is what it’s like for other girls to dance with their fathers.

  Afterward I went over to the refreshments table, where I ran into the alcoholic we’d been with in Admissions. She was all the way up to Status Four, weekend passes and everything. “They’re going to spring me soon,” she said.

  “You going back home?”

  “My husband and I have some friends in Albuquerque. We’re going to leave the baby with my mother and spend some time there, try to figure out if we want to stay married. What about you?”

  “I thought maybe I’d go down to St. Pete.”

  She wrinkled her nose and exhaled a stream of smoke. “Old people and no surf.”

  “My aunt and uncle have a house down there.”

  “At least it’s not New York City. Jeez, what a snake pit.”

  In front of us a slender man with long dark hair was dancing with a wispy adolescent. The alcoholic said, “Remember him? Can’t keep his hands off the girls. Rumor’s he’s on probation.” I looked closer and recognized the catlike confidence: it was the MH from Admissions, the one who looked like the romantic lead in a movie.

  After the dance was over he leaned down and said something to his partner, who pouted but went back to the group behind the basketball hoop. Then he was striding in our direction. The song coming on was “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” He extended his hand and I thought about refusing, but it seemed easier just to go along. We stood there for a moment feeling for the beat. “You’re thinking too much,” he said to me. “Just follow.” Before I knew what was happening he’d rolled me out into a spin and then back in again against his chest. It was so fast and easy, I felt like one of those paper-tongue party favors. “Okay?” he said into my ear.

  I decided to take his advice and let him lead. As the song progressed we did other, complicated things I’d seen people do, and I saw that he, like the Glenn Miller guy, knew where a woman’s center of gravity was. The difference was that the MH would use this knowledge for his own nefarious purposes.

  Nothing, he’s nothing, I told myself. Can’t hurt you.

  “I bet you don’t even remember who I am,” I said, when we were dancing close.

  He spun me so that my back was against his chest and said: “Ms. Broken Heart. The one with the sister.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I know you’re an artist.”

  I spotted Lillith sitting alone on the bleachers. She was watching us.

  A few minutes later the MH said: “I saw tha
t drawing of yours they put up in the cafeteria.”

  “My abstract period.”

  “No kidding, you’re very good.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “Professional?”

  “I was in school, but I dropped out.”

  “You should go back,” he said.

  Who are you to give me advice, I thought.

  When the dance was over I thanked the MH and then I climbed up the bleachers and sat down next to Lillith. She looked exhausted and a little crabby.

  “You’re the fucking belle of the ball,” she said.

  “Right.”

  Then she leaned up against me so that I could smell the rankness of her unwashed hair and whispered, “You ever do it with a girl?”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard.” I was staring straight ahead, but I could feel her fingertips slide between the buttons of my cardigan. They were so cold I had to suppress a shiver. “You and your sister never. . .?”

  I looked down. Her crossed feet in dirty white ballet slippers were so tiny I knew I could crush one with my hand.

  “No.”

  “But you have the look.”

  “What look is that?”

  “Hungry. Like you’d do it with anyone.”

  “It’s exactly the opposite. I never do it at all.”

  “It’s not so bad, you know. It’s actually pretty nice. More subtle than with a boy, if you know what I mean.”

  I wanted her to continue and I didn’t.

  “Quit it.”

  Slowly, her fingers withdrew. When I looked at her again she was back behind her own eyes, unreadable. As I watched she began to scratch herself viciously again, this time on the palm.

  Back at the unit, I went straight upstairs to get ready for bed. I was on the way to the bathroom to brush my teeth when someone called up the stairs that there was a phone call for me.

  I couldn’t imagine who it would be. I went down in my bathrobe.