“Try to let it go, Heath,” Faith says. “Can you try?”
But I can’t. I would cut off one of my hands to have him sitting beside me. I think, if he were here everything would be okay.
Sakura watches me from the foot of my bed with baleful eyes.
They’re here all the time now, the voices. They’re not voices like people who shoot up movie theaters talk about. I know they’re in my head. It’s just they’re so mean and so loud that I find myself cowering before them. All day long—you’re so stupid. You’re nothing. You’re nothing. You should die. Why don’t you just die.
And images. You know those images I mentioned? The ones I had when I was a kid? I’m starting to have them again.
Monday, February 18, 2008
I’ve been in bed four days now. I sleep here and there in the afternoons, but at night I’m wide-awake. I cannot sleep. I think it’s been several days since I had a night’s sleep. This is not good.
I work on my stories by the glow of my computer. I don’t have the energy to get up and turn on the light. I’m so tired, but sleep will not come. I’m repurposing my Dublin story for every magazine I can think of. I will make someone take it. I can’t stop crying. All the voices are laughing at me. And I cannot control the images. They’re as bad as when I was a kid. Worse than in Dublin. Someone is sawing at my flesh with a serrated edge.
I call Eleanor and she freaks out entirely.
I hang up on her and I scream at my phone to shut up when it keeps ringing.
In the front of my house there is nothing. Just Styrofoam peanuts and wrappers from packing tape. Tumbleweeds of Sakura’s hair blow through the open space. A cardboard box, half-assembled. A bookshelf half-full. What was Josh’s office is a void. My footsteps echo. I get down on my hands and knees and crawl down the hallway back to my bedroom.
I try on my size 25 jeans. I think, they’re getting tight. The voices say, You should kill yourself. There’s no way out of this.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
I fucking knew it! Colm McCullough just won an Academy Award. He and Miss Fairy Tale get a standing ovation. Online everyone is all, who are these people? Aren’t they just the most fascinating people on the planet? “A new Dublin?” ponders a TV anchorwoman in a ridiculous sparkling evening gown. “Fuck you!” I shout at the TV screen. “That’s my story!”
“Dublin, the new coolest place on the planet?” muses E!
“You motherfuckers!” I shout. “I’m going to blow up Condé Nast. I swear to God! Just like Guy Fawkes! I’m going to be a cultural hero to freelancers everywhere!”
Then I’m facedown in my pillow, sobbing.
Monday, February 25, 2008
I was awake again all night after the Oscars, tearing at my covers. I wrote a pitch to Talk of the Town about Colm and Dublin. I’m so tired, and it’s hard to breathe. Eleanor doesn’t understand why I can’t let this story go. But I can’t. I won’t. This was supposed to be my big break. There’s such shrieking in my head.
I fall asleep around six in the morning. When I wake up there’s an email for me from the Talk of the Town lady. She writes, “Thanks for writing. This story has already been assigned.”
I call her up on the phone to force her to change her mind, but her voice mail picks up. I start to say there’s been some misunderstanding because I was assigned this story. But halfway through I realize how totally untrue this is. I start to panic and I find myself instead saying how much more qualified I am to write the story, and then the voices in my head are laughing and saying, Loser, loser, loser, and I lose all track of what I’m even trying to say and finally hang up on myself, barely making it to the end of a sentence. So now, even if there ever had been a chance, I can pretty much say for sure that I will never work for the New Yorker.
I scream, “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” to the voices and bury my head under my pillows and pound the walls with my fists.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I can’t take the images. They’re becoming increasingly severe. I hung in there for a long time, didn’t I? Almost thirty-seven years. I left Josh. I didn’t die in Dublin. But it doesn’t matter. The images are winning.
Imagine they’re on a caboose and just let them run right by you, I can hear my mother saying. Go to hell, I think. You have no idea.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
“I just love your writing,” Tyler Patterson says. “It’s fantastic. It’s such a good pitch. The best I’ve gotten in a long time.”
Tyler is an editor at Esquire, and I’m sitting in his office, trying to act like I haven’t been in bed for ten days curled up in a ball fending off images of my body being violated in every way imaginable. He’s very well dressed, in a bright checkered shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, like someone cast to play a magazine editor in a movie. I sent him the pitch about Colm and Dublin and he wrote back right away asking me to come in. I think, finally. I will not be foreclosed on. I will survive this.
“The thing is”—Tyler taps his hands on his desk—“the story isn’t right for us. It’s a great idea, but not for us.” I’m thinking, you made me come to Midtown to tell me this? I unfurled myself from the fetal position, left my house, got on the subway, and sat there like the crazy lady in the corner with my coat up to my chin giving people the evil eye for this? I don’t know who I want to kill, him or myself.
I try to keep the smile—I think it’s a smile—on my face.
“But God, you have a great voice. I really want you to pitch me some other story ideas.”
Please, I think, is it so hard to give me an assignment? I have no other ideas. Don’t you see? This is my last stand.
Tyler stands up. “I really enjoyed meeting you,” he says.
Go fuck yourself, I think. And then there are the voices, Ha-ha-ha, they’re saying. Told you so. What a fool you are. Crawl on home, loser.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
It’s like a siren song in my head. Go into the kitchen, those beauties croon. Right foot. Left foot. It’s just down the hallway. Open the drawer to the right of the dishwasher. Go on, you can do it. I see the knife rip into my flesh—globules of fat just like on a raw chicken, veins bursting open, muscle tissue torn apart. I see serrated edges carving through my skin.
Do it, the voices say. Should I? I think. All I’d have to do is walk into the kitchen, right foot, left foot. Just down the hallway. It’s starting not to seem that unreasonable. It would be so easy. Like Sartre’s man standing on the edge of a cliff and realizing the only difference between life and death is his own decision not to jump. The terror of freedom, Sartre said. All it takes is making the choice. There’s no brick wall or iron door between you and it.
Hang in there, Heather, another little voice whispers. Hang in there.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Seth insisted on coming over today. At first I thought he must be mad about something, but when he got here, he said he was checking in on me. He left almost immediately upon arriving and went to the corner bodega and came back with a can of soup. He said, “This not-eating business is bullshit. What are you trying to do?”
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“I don’t care if you’re hungry or not.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “My life is over.”
“It will be if you don’t eat.”
It’s funny to think he cares. Does he? Could he? Seth doesn’t know about the images, and I will never, ever tell him. To please him I eat a little soup.
Eleanor calls me like every five minutes. I don’t answer. I text her, “LEAVE ME ALONE.” My claws are out. I have no control.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
“We think this is an untapped market. A lot of unrealized potential and easily monetized,” says Ari Goldstein.
“Totally,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Awesome!” says Ari Goldstein.
It’s my first job interview since I was twenty-four. This idiotic
Goldstein and his brother have left investment banking to start a website about luxury travel, and they want someone to edit the “content.” Somehow I manage not to scream in their faces.
“As soon as I heard about what you guys were doing, I knew I wanted to be a part of it,” I say.
“Awesome!” says Ari Goldstein.
I had to spend about forty minutes in my hallway with my head against the front door psyching myself up to leave the house. But I have negative $437.16 in my bank account and the mortgage is due in two weeks. You can do this; the voices aren’t real; it’s just a trick of your mind, I say to the howling demons. And then, oh God, what do you want from me, as another voice says, Why bother? You won’t get the job anyway.
The Goldstein brothers ask me to come back next week for a second interview. Score one for me, I say to the voices. Don’t kid yourself, the voices say back. They just felt sorry for you.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Peter shows up with all his possessions—two duffel bags and a box of books.
“You okay, dude?” he says when I greet him at the door.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
And then I crumple onto the floor sobbing.
“Oh, dude!” Peter says. He helps me up. I have my hands over my head. “The images, Peter! The images! They’re killing me!”
Peter helps me back into bed. He’s saying, “What? What? What do you mean?” Then he puts a hand over my forehead.
“You’re burning up,” he says.
“I’m not feeling so well,” I sob.
Peter comes with me on the subway to the doctor. I have my head on my knees the whole time and my arms wrapped over my head. I don’t want anyone to look at me. The voices in my mind are shrieking. It’s hard to believe no one else hears them.
“Ms. Chaplin,” the doctor says. “Have you been taking care of yourself? I can hear that your lungs are filled with fluid. This is not a joke. I’m going to put you into the hospital.”
“I don’t have health insurance!” I cry. “I don’t even have any money in my bank account!”
She gives me a long look and then administers a procedure that involves dropping a tube down my throat and suctioning out some of the crud that is apparently lodged in my lungs. I cry and sputter and gag the whole time. The voices say, Just let her die.
I weigh a hundred pounds. I am, at last, as small as a ballerina.
The voices shriek.
Friday, March 7, 2008
From my bed, I see Peter going by pushing the couch from my sitting room in the back of the house down the hallway to the front. Sakura is lying at the foot of the bed. He watches too.
“You can’t have no furniture in your living room,” Peter says. I watch the couch go by. Sakura watches the couch go by. I think, he can do whatever he wants. I have no intention of ever getting up again.
Monday, March 10, 2008
For some reason, since Peter has been in the house, I’ve been sleeping better. Two full nights. No dreams. No sweats. No up all night watching the dawn creep in. I even answered Eleanor’s call today. She’s pregnant again. She was calling to me tell me she’s bringing a new life into this world, and I was not answering because I have voices in my head threatening to kill me if I did.
Why is her life moving forward and mine has halted?
There is a world outside of my apartment and the images in my head. I know I should care about other people’s lives, but somehow I can’t. I’ve become like Josh—so consumed by my own pain that everything else just fades away.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Dr. Chester is, I think, a dwarf. He sits in a big leather chair with brass studs around the edges, but he only half fills it up, like some child king on a man-sized throne. He’s got a big, square-shaped head and big, sinewy hands but a tiny body. His hands don’t reach the edges of his armrests and his feet don’t touch the floor. His neck is torqued so that he has to sit slightly sideways to see me straight. It looks painful.
I tell him about the images. He opens his eyes wide.
“That sounds horrible,” he says. He has a strange, high voice.
I tell him how I was awake for about a week and a half.
He says, “You have to sleep. Not sleeping often precedes a psychotic break.”
“Are you calling me psychotic?”
Dr. Chester pauses. “I’m not calling you anything,” he says finally.
“When I was in high school, a psychiatrist told me I had a personality disorder and I was like, fuck you, I have a great personality.”
Dr. Chester smiles the tiniest smile and keeps watching me.
“Have you had a lot of diagnoses?”
“I have.”
“Have you had these images before?” he asks.
“All my life,” I say. “They just usually don’t come so close to winning. Usually I win.”
“That’s terrible,” Dr. Chester says.
Now it’s my turn to squint at him. Is this psycho making fun of me?
“I’m sympathizing with you,” he says. “I can only imagine how hard life would be with those kinds of thoughts.”
“You know, I’m not a specimen,” I say. “I’m a perfectly fine, high-functioning, responsible adult who just happens to be having a little bit of a hard time right now.”
Dr. Chester raises his enormous hands in the air and now he does actually laugh.
“I believe you!” he says.
I start to cry. “Oh Christ,” I say, and drop my head into my hands. There’s a voice in my head saying, Don’t tell him another thing. And like a shadow passing over me there is breathing in the room and someone is just outside the door. The skin is being grated off my knuckles. My nipples are being sawed off.
Dr. Chester leans forward in his chair. “Heather,” he says. “What just happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Heather, what’s going on? Where are you?”
You will be punished, say the voices. I feel like the room is getting bigger and I’m getting smaller.
I hear Dr. Chester’s voice as if from somewhere far away. “Listen to me, Heather,” he’s saying. “Your mind is playing a trick on you. Can you look at me?”
I pry open my eyes, but I’m too scared to meet his gaze. I’m not at all sure it’s going to be Dr. Chester sitting there. I’m not at all sure there isn’t something waiting outside the door for me. But I tell myself, just a trick, just a trick, just a trick. It’s not real. You don’t have to pay attention. I cover my breasts with an arm to try and stop the feeling that someone is sawing off my nipples.
He writes me a prescription. “You need to start taking this right away,” he says. “It’ll help.”
It’s an antipsychotic.
“I’m not psychotic,” I say.
“I didn’t say you were,” Dr. Chester says. Then, “Just do me a favor and take the medicine, will you? You don’t need to suffer like this.”
I snatch the prescription out of his hand and make a dash for the door.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The medicine has made the left side of my face go numb. The images, however, remain.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Peter says, “Come on, let’s go check on your garden.”
“My face is numb,” I say.
“No, it’ll be good,” Peter says.
Scowling, I follow him down the stairs to the garden. Everything is covered in leaves, several inches thick over the flower beds and across the flagstone. I never raked last fall or pruned or did any of the things you’re supposed to do in the fall.
“I’ve killed everything,” I say. “It’s ruined. Do you think anything is alive under all this? Anything at all?”
“I’m sure it all is,” Peter says. “Leaves aren’t going to kill your plants. We just have to rake.”
“Let’s do it right now.”
“Didn’t the doctor say you needed to rest?” Peter says.
“We’ll just check,” I say
, and I scoot past Peter and get on my knees and start pulling leaves away with my hands.
“This is where my bleeding hearts should be,” I say. “Please don’t let them be dead.”
The first layer of leaves is dry and flies away easily. The second layer is wet and the leaves are stuck together into a single sodden covering. I peel it off and toss handfuls behind me. I’m trying to be careful, because if anything is alive under there, I don’t want to accidentally rip it out along with its leaf covering. I scrape and scrape with my fingers and then I scream aloud.
“Peter!”
I leap to my feet, staggering backward. Peter is right behind me, peering over my shoulder.
“Oh my God, what is that?” I cry. I’m pointing at something that looks like it belongs underwater, a nearly translucent green thing rising out of the dirt with strange, ragged, underwater wings unfurling along its edges. Peter gets on his knees. I get back down beside him. We both have our noses almost in the dirt, peering at the thing. Peter pokes at it gently with one finger. He sits back up on his heels.
“I’ll tell you what that is,” he says. “That’s your bleeding heart.”
“No,” I breathe. “It couldn’t be.”
“I think so.”
I touch it gingerly with my fingertips. “That thing is not human,” I say.
“No, dude, it’s a plant.”
“It’s so creepy. It looks like it’s alive.”
“Well, it is alive.”
“No, I mean really alive.”
“It is really alive.”
“Peter, look at my arm.” I show him how all the hairs are standing up on end. I start laughing. I slap my thigh with my hand, then cover my face, then laugh some more, then bring my face level with the little green stalk. I can’t stop laughing.
“You need to rest,” Peter says. “Let’s get some lunch.”
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