“We were talking about you leaving the hospital in ten days? Are you in control? Will you be ready?”
“Can I ask you to please turn that thing off,” she said.
“The fan?”
“Yes,” she pointed at the fan.
“Okay, if you’re uncomfortable.” Dr. Burkert stood, his finger pressed on the red square button that controlled the offending object.
She moved in her seat. “You’re talking about discharging me. I’m just nervous, that’s all.”
“Did seeing your mother have something to do with how angry you’re feeling this morning?”
“I’m not leaving the hospital to be with my mother,” she said.
“Your mother was very overwhelmed herself when she spoke with me.”
“I’m guilty,” Lilly said. “I destroyed her life.”
His hand carved a space in the air, then his fingers closed in on his own palm. “Destroyed her life—how?”
She knew when she looked at him—if only for an instant this time—that beneath her storm and the rage, there was still something else beckoning where the bulb had made a place within the confusion that swam inside her, and she felt herself reaching for the familiar feeling of escape where she would evaporate, flow invisibly as a stream of breath beyond what was there. But it didn’t happen this time, her vanishing. She felt, instead, the weight of her own unbroken will. “I don’t want a family session,” she said firmly.
Lilly was certain that, when he looked at her waiting for her to answer, he had taken her silence for the opposite of what it meant, as a compliance with what he was saying. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m glad you feel the work we are going to do together will help you feel a distance from her. Safe. We have a lot to prepare for before you leave.” When a commotion started outside his office, he rose from his desk, distracted.
“We’ll continue this later,” he said. And then she was sure he couldn’t have known that she, just at that moment, wanted to run away from everything he had been planning for her.
That was the day, during visiting hours, when, with so much activity in other parts of the ward, the door was loosely guarded by the staff. Lilly watched doors to the outside hall and elevators open and close as a nurse let various visitors onto the ward. But then she found herself trying to control her impulse to throw something, to break a window. Why did she want to do such a thing? She prodded herself, imagining Dr. Burkert standing there in the doorway. Would he stand and stare at her and wonder how far she would go?
Was he rescuing her from her mother only to put her under his control?
Suddenly, one of the nurses opened the door to the outside elevator vestibule to let out a waiting family. The nurse was distracted by another visitor, and Lilly lurched through the doorway. The door closed behind her. Then she was feeling the cool, metallic air outside the ward in the small vestibule before the elevators. The elevator came, the visitors entered, she remained behind and heard the elevator door clack shut, leaving her alone in the vestibule. It felt unbearably strange to be alone, of her own volition, without any permission from staff for the first time in over eight weeks.
Run. Hail a taxi, Lilly suddenly thought. Get to Little Italy. Watch the night fall over the bridge. She would pay the fare and jump out. She would escape Dr. Burkert and his “preparations.” Control the ending of all this, instead of him, she thought. She remembered how much she had missed the balcony in the evenings at Elizabeth Street. Hadn’t she often stood on her apartment’s balcony overlooking the pavement where the men came from the Salvation Army building across the street, exiting with only a bag of belongings, but no money, fresh faces, skin rashes that were raw from scrubbings in the shelter? She had watched them nuzzle together on the Bowery, free until the next time they knocked at that door. She had stood on that balcony a thousand times, awestruck at the ease with which each of those men had, without shame, continued his fecund and anonymous wanderings, thinking, It could never be me.
She paced restlessly now in these first few moments inside her own space. But then she was filling with an anxiety deeper than she had ever felt. She conjured the sound of Dr. Burkert’s voice. He would be angry if she discovered her here, she thought, remembering how much of a disciplinarian he was when she fought him to get loose from his hold the days in the seclusion room, his words like waves of water slapping her. Suddenly, she felt the life in her sex aroused by the dread of being caught by him, and by the fear of what would happen to her if he found her. She trembled. She heard the elevators, but they were below her, all the way down near the lobby. She had but a few moments before the elevator would ascend again, and open, and possibly halt at her floor. Caroline, an aide, or another nurse could emerge from the locked door behind her. She implored and dreaded that the elevators would arrive, open, and free her from feeling this dreadful pleasure.
But Lilly reached and touched herself under her waistband. She knew she had seconds before a door would open, and someone would enter and take it all away from her again. Daring everything, she felt for the life in her sex. Then it was as if she were pulled down to a blade. Her skin had turned into a nightgown, she was crepe, and she slid across Dr. Burkert in her fantasy. She imagined his penis and he was there, she controlling him. What pact with the ghosts, the fallen, and those who would dominate and beat her had she traded for this phantom of equal danger? Then, what could she possibly do about it now? She asked herself, but then she knew this was her turning point, swelling up inside her like a siren. On the edge of her fantasy, she approached the familiar annihilation, but it was pure and she felt good. She was still whole when her body ejected an orgasm with the logic of a flower. And then nothing hurt inside her but pleasure.
She let the orgasm run through her, as her own genesis. Was she crazy? Who was she?
She wouldn’t have a weighty newspaper trial like Leonard for her crimes, the whole city hunting for a drug-eyed graduate student who accidentally went insane out of confusion and violence. Or be like Patty Hearst, holding a gun in her tender hands. Lilly wouldn’t be her father either, falling accidentally down a stairway, profound and snarled as a snake in one’s heart. She would not be executed or humiliated by cold dominators. She knew it was Dr. Burkert, the fantasy of him—that had brought her climax to its blossoming—but she didn’t care. Lilly threw her head back; it felt heavy again. But hadn’t she been courageous? She had unfolded herself, survived by riding on shooting stars. The doctor would never love her in return. Nor care for her beyond the fence put between them by their real functions, but even that felt good. She had used him for her own purposes.
Lilly stood alone out in the hallway for the few minutes it took for the elevator to ascend past her floor, not stopping.
She was undiscovered.
Lilly waited and then there was an opening. One of the nurses turned to answer a guest’s question and the visitor door was open.
By her own accord, by her decision alone, Lilly quietly stepped back onto the ward.
Chapter Eleven
LILLY’S NOTEBOOK:
Entries From My Room on the Fifth Floor at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Hospital July 1-13, 1974.
Historical Positioning:
ST. FRANCIS AND THE LEPER. The First Recorded Incident of the Therapy Called “The Laying On Of Hands”, 1200 AD.
The Brethren were working in the leper infirmary. St. Francis was near, at a convent in the village. There was a leper inside the hospital said to be possessed by the Devil. They called her “The Perverse One”. The leper spat food back at those who served her. She wouldn’t let anything—words or nourishment—enter her body. She pranced about, haughty, pinching her lips closed. And she clipped her nose shut with a wooden pin so she wouldn’t smell herself. She tore the clothes off that the Brethren tried to dress her in, demanding to stay in her own clothing though the cloth was corroded with leprosy. None of their oils or powders could heal her diseased skin. None of their sympathies subdued her raging.
After weeks, her skin gave off a stench so foul, the Brethren had to remove her from the rest of the leper community. They isolated her in a barren room. They took the wooden pin off her nose, forcing her to smell herself and stew in her own filthy odors. She cried harder, more urgently, when the spot tingled, because the room was nailed shut at every opening. There was no way to get out and ride the Devil’s goat when it came to the barred window to take her to the Sabbath.
“Her skin stinks like that,” the Brethren said, “because the Devil’s juices are boiling inside it. If we don’t keep her locked up they’ll leak out all over the community.”
The Brethren hoped the room could hold the escaping vapors. But, fearing that it wouldn’t, they asked St. Francis to come.
St. Francis entered the seclusion room where the leper was being kept. His robe was white and clean. And his hands were flawless and smooth as the robe. The leper backed away from him, warning: “If you come too close, my Devil Juices are going to spill out all over you and destroy that robe of yours.”
St Francis held out his hands, unafraid of the leper’s skin as it filled the air with vapors from the Devil’s bowels. “I don’t believe in “Saints,” the leper snapped. “Get your hands away or the Devil juices are going to burn them like acid and make leprosy grow on them after.”
St. Francis’s hands stayed outstretched. One, sturdy and determined, held a sponge. “You couldn’t wash me,” the leper said. “They’ve all tried to wash me. I can’t be washed.” St. Francis ordered water to be brought and heated with sweet-smelling herbs. He told the Brethren to strip the leper naked. Once she was exposed, the leper’s fighting arrogance disappeared. And the shame of the disease that covered her body made her freeze like hard metal in their hands. As the Brethren poured the water, St. Francis stroked and bathed the leper.
Very soon, the nodules of leprosy and the layers of soil vanished from the leper’s body. Underneath was new skin, so raw only St. Francis’ skilled hands knew how to handle it. Vulnerable to every sensation, no matter how slight, the new skin had to be encased in a special gel-like substance and wrapped in soft cloths. The leper herself wasn’t allowed to touch it. Its new veins and sensitive fibers could easily burst out bleeding beyond control if disturbed by unknowing hands.
The Brethren bound the leper’s hands behind her back, saying that they must protect her from her own chance itches should her hands touch the new skin by mistake in her sleep. Though the torment of her other life and the painful tingle from the Devil’s imprint were both gone now, the leper was a stranger to her own skin. She was helpless in the hands of St. Francis, dependent on the Brethren for feeding and dressing. The love she had for them, there because she was ignorant of her own flesh, brought her more shame than the leprosy they had cured.”
When Lilly stopped reading what she had written the last week, she felt a feeling of extraordinary lightness. For hours in the hospital, Lilly had hardly done anything else but write, as if she had just discovered it.
The myriad reasons for her hospital stay seemed to her like a soap opera sometimes: her father’s accident on the stairs, the two years of caring for him, then the phantom bulb, the “psychosis”, the melodramatic and hysterical language inside her head. The world was cloudier now that the bulb,— the delusion, —had vanished into her own history, but the world was closer to her, too.
Picking up her pen in her room now, Lilly continued her “notes.”
Notes.
1. The remedy for all the disorders of the soul, said Plato, is the same: “the use of certain charms’. These charms are ‘fair words’ and ‘beautiful reasons”.
2. FROM: The Art of Alchemy, by Maurice Aniane: “Finally, it may be that alchemists knew of certain erotic “techniques” similar to those of Tantrism and intended to awaken the energy of sex without allowing it to be wasted in unwanted orgasm.”
3. In the 17th century, alchemy was discredited by Robert Boyle,and the entire Royal Society of London. (Though Isaac Newton himself secretly admitted he used alchemical theory for his own scientific inquiries and experiments.) The penalty for the practice of alchemy was death. Because of the process in alchemy which involved multiplication of a small gold particle into large pounds of gold for profit, alchemy was suspected as a fraudulent science to produce illegal gain.”
The morning of Lilly’s discharge, Lilly awoke and the fine haze that usually veiled her awakening gradually dispersed. Lilly pulled the chain of the reading lamp. The room was still dark but a blade of sunlight struck the clothes she had placed on the brown faux leather armchair last night. She startled at how neatly she had arranged her blue jeans, the red Bloomingdale’s leather-strapped sandals with giant cork soles— the style she had watched the nurses wear to work all month. Under the jeans, she had harbored a light button-down blouse that wasn’t a Tee shirt, but had “Made in Italy” on its silky label, along with “only to be hand-washed. Do not put in the washing machine or dryer”.
Helen did not come to the ward to visit. Dr. Burkert had let Lilly decide when and how she would see her mother again. Lilly could have run back into her madness, she thought now, until she reached a place where she would not be able to choose any more. But she had only touched real madness, she thought now, at the rim, she had eluded its seduction down into some irreversible and final absorption and scattering, into extinction. She was lucky, and that was enough for now. She was lucky, and she was a fighter, she reassured herself.
She glanced up into the mirror above her bureau. In the reflection she saw herself, a pale but intense figure.
Beside the stubby armchair legs, the portion of Jane’s baked walnut bread Lilly hadn’t been able to finish last night scented a grocery bag. Dropping it into the bag, she had later lain wide-awake until 4 am. She now figured she had finally dozed off and caught two hours of sleep. It was six-thirty by the electric clock on the bureau. She must get dressed. She needed to hold on to the self she was feeling. In the night she had worried about the bulb, but for now, it wasn’t on her mind.
From the view outside the window, she could not see the ramp, or the outpatient clinic Dr. Burkert had so carefully explained to her. She would put the schedule up on the refrigerator door once she got to the apartment in Little Italy. Jane had said she would be there by three this afternoon; they could go to a movie “or something”.
Wisps of morning cloud twirled up over the parking lots, appearing as smoke, but they were illusory and deceptive, she knew, only the July air teasing with its licks of vapors before a beating heat would fall down on all who walked below. But then she was remembering the college gardener’s sprinkler on the blueberry bushes at Sarah Lawrence in summer, and how the berries became warm and sweet. She had picked them once and washed them in the lavatory in the back of the Pub, it was the one of few times college had felt good to her. She was caught now between this world of patients and the hospital—-which no longer wanted much to do with her—- and the world outside, where she didn’t want to vanish. She felt herself forced between the hospital’s protection and the most essential of human challenges, that of merely moving forward, of setting some inner gears and moving through fragility.
How they did all survive? She wondered. All her al-chemists, all her fellow patients? Did they survive? Will she? She could see a whole tribe of people, connoisseurs of isolation and loneliness and invisibility to which she belonged.
Lilly rejected the idea of checking through all her bags again, to make sure she had everything, or of opening and shutting the drawers, or poking at the empty hangers that now lay empty-shouldered, gray-black, hard wire on a pole strewed across the top of the closet.
; She needed to gather up all her other things, glancing for the last time at the armchair, the desk, the metal frame of the bed with its four crowned posts, and the screened window where the morning light shimmered.
She whisked her notebook up off the bureau, and glimpsed at the newest swiftly written, almost breathless sentence. She had written down the feelings of yesterday, and further back. She had tried to recapture experiences she’d had in the hospital; rolling currents of feelings put into words which were spurts and splashes on the pages now of a notebook she bought from the hospital canteen weeks ago, but couldn’t start filling until she left the quiet room. The time she threw the lamp in her room… Leonard’s first talking to her, the night she awoke to the men singing him a birthday song, the face and hands of Beverly and the dreams of beatings and examining tables. Turning the pages, she saw again how she had filled the last days of her hospital stays with descriptions of the other patients, episodes she had felt compelled to write about on the hall. Pages, both random and ordered by a deeper place inside her than she knew existed now, the engine of her madness and her health intermixing, begging for consolidation— the night of her father’s accident on the stairs, the night which made little sense but became a starting point for all the sense yet to come to her, Helen, and Helen’s connection to everything else. Each page was like a room of many empty naked beds and trembling shadows, but Lilly was in the heart of a circle of light, shrinking back a little from the glare. And Dr. Burkert, the slender man was only a wind of maleness, like a breeze, the weather inside her damp and motionless.
Now Lilly began collecting all her sheets of writing up into a kind of file to put below her other belongings in the bags with the notebook.
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