Madness

by Marya Hornbacher

  The therapist says, "Cathy? Would you like to say something?" All heads turn to Cathy. Cathy is enormously pregnant. Her face is entirely still. She stares into space. Her hands are folded on her lap. I understand that she cannot move her mouth to say no, and she cannot shake her head either.

  "Aren't you even excited about the baby?" the perky woman asks, horribly. "Doesn't that make you happy?"

  The woman is not excited about the baby. It does not make her happy. The baby is just one more thing that requires her to be alive. I want the perky woman to go away and leave Cathy alone. The agitated woman rocks and wails.

  Everyone in this room is crazy. I fall asleep again.

  At the end of the day, I follow everyone else out of the building. Someone asks me how I'm getting home. I stare at her, drawing a complete blank. Well, do I need a ride? Blank. Where do I live? I recite my address, which I know in case I get lost and have to find a policeman who will guide me home. Just to be on the safe side, I recite my phone number as well. Then I remember—my mother and I agreed that I would brave the bus and get home all by myself. Right-o. This person goes away. I stand on the hospital steps, holding my purse by the strap. I go down the steps, look both ways, and cross the street. This is easy. I take the bus all the time. I see other people standing on a corner. I join their group and we all turn our faces in the direction from which the bus will come. We stare that way for a while.

  Then a car drives up and I watch while all of them climb in and drive away.

  I look around for the bus stop sign. There is no sign. I am frustrated with myself. What an idiot. I keep walking down the busy street until I come to another cluster of people. "Is this a bus stop?" I ask no one in particular. Everyone turns to look at me, then goes back to watching the road. I stare at a woman who is reading a book until she looks at me. "Is it?" I demand. "Is what?" "Is this a bus stop?" These people are deaf! "Yes," she finally says, giving me a look and going back to her book.

  Well, very good. I climb onto the bus with the rest of them and take a window seat. I settle in to enjoy the ride. Everyone is being very quiet, on this bus. I look around. Everyone is being quiet because they're all looking at me. I swish around to face the back of the head of an elderly Asian man. I sit there being unnoticeable. A moment later, I venture a quick glance over my shoulder. Still staring! What is it? I check my fly, rub my nose, straighten my glasses, and then I hear it. They're talking. I train my ears on what they are saying, but I can't make it out. There is a little boy sitting next to me whose feet dangle off the seat. I wonder momentarily where his parents are, then consider whether I will ask him what they're saying. If I ask him, he could consider me odd. He could get up without a word and change seats and stick his little freckled nose in the air. So I say nothing, listening to the rising hum of them, whispering, talking in low voices, getting louder, and still I can't make it out. I look around, trying not to be obvious. A very old woman the size and substance of a feather is hanging on to her grocery bag with both arms and glaring at me. I have done nothing to her. Why does she glare? There is a gaggle of horrible teenagers with black fingernails and green eye shadow and teased pink and blue hair. They represent my adolescence and terrify me. They are talking, their heads bent together, gesturing subtly in my direction, just like the girls at school used to do. Just ignore it. Ignore it. They can't hurt you. A businessman holds on to the post and pretends to read his newspaper. He is watching me over the top of it. He thinks I can't see him, but I can. I see them all. I know their tricks. The din of their voices, all sibilants and hums, rises to a particularly disturbing pitch.

  "What are they saying?" I can't take it anymore, it just comes out. I know I'm being weird, but this paranoia will not subside, no matter how I tell myself it's all in my head. I bend down to the little boy's ear, trying to be both inconspicuous and nonthreatening. He looks up at me. I smile a great big smile, feeling a little wild. "Don't worry," I say. "There's no reason to be afraid of me." This widens his brown eyes considerably, and I realize my error in even mentioning being afraid, but he is a brave soul and doesn't bolt. "Just tell me what they're saying," I whisper.

  "What who are saying?" he whispers loudly. Now everyone is looking at him too, because he has been caught talking to me.

  "Shhh!" I hiss. "The watchers." I nod my head over my shoulder. "Them."

  He cranes his neck around. "They're not talking," he says in his deafening whisper. He looks back up at me.

  "They are!" I say. "You just can't see it. They're sneaky, the watchers. They like to keep you off-guard."

  He stares at me, his eyes cartoon-huge. The bus slows and the bus driver calls out the stop.

  "I have to get off now," the little boy whispers. He points over my shoulder. "That's my mom."

  I look. "She looks very nice. Off you go."

  "Are you going to be all right?" he whispers, worried. His mother will wonder why he has lost his voice. He will say it is because he was talking to the crazy lady on the bus.

  I nod earnestly at him. "I'll be fine."

  He makes a dramatic swipe of his forehead with the back of his hand and says, "Phew!" He hops up, waves, and is gone.

  I make it as far as the next stop, listening to them with their evil hiss and hum, and then I bolt off the bus, my hair blowing in its exhaust as it pulls away. I look around. I have no idea where I am. How long was I on the bus? What neighborhood is this? There are houses, and it's relatively clean, so it's not the Mission. There are no tall buildings, so it's not downtown. There's no marina, so it's not the Marina, and there are neither strip clubs nor Italian restaurants, so it's not North Beach. There's no fog, so it's not the Sunset. I turn in slow circles. But it's also not the Richmond, where I live.

  That leaves the Presidio. Even when I'm sane I don't know where the Presidio is, and I don't know how to get back by car, let alone by bus. I start walking. I walk up and down the beautiful streets overlooking the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge enormous across the sky. I start to run. I run and run. I hop on one bus and find the watchers and jump off, and I hop another one, and they're there, too, and I ride around the city for hours, getting on and off buses, too frightened to speak to ask for directions—what, ask the watchers? They watch me run, slow down to a walk, run again. They turn to one another in my wake and start talking about me. I pass little outdoor cafés and boutiques and sushi restaurants and cheese shops and bars and bodegas and nightclubs and through empty industrial areas and through the park, more than once. I get lost in the park on my best days. This is not one of my best days. I walk in circles, hop on one last bus, get off when the watchers get too loud and, miraculously, am standing in front of Mr. Chao's vegetable stand. I stumble toward him, nearly upsetting the melons, and he says, "Whoa, whoa!" He smiles at me. "Cabbage?"

  The next day, my mother drops me off at the hospital again, and again I spend the day sliding in and out of a stoned, drooling sleep, sitting up, tipping over again. The wailing/rocking woman has been hospitalized. The chipper woman wears a yellow dress. Cathy is sitting with her back to the room, staring out the window. No one sees me. I crawl under a chair.

  My mother has to be somewhere else for the evening, and I am feeling a little odd. Alone in the house, I pull myself to my closet and stand there, wavering on my feet, looking for a dress. I'm supposed to go to a benefit tonight. A friend of mine called to ask what time I was going to arrive. Arrive? Arrive where? How can I possibly go out? How can I possibly get out of bed? And why on earth should I do so? I pretend I have some idea what she's talking about. Having managed to get the details out of her—where, what time—I hang up and rack my brain. I finally sort out that the benefit is for an organization on whose board I sat. Ah, yes. A holdover from my other life. My past life, where people made the grave mistake of allowing me to do things like teach and sit on, you know, boards. I organize myself into a dress, first putting it on backward and then inside out, concentrating very hard in an effort to find matching shoes, making
sure that not only do they match my dress but that they match each other as well.

  Fumbling with my keys, I start the car and drive to the party, whispering the directions over and over under my breath, terrified that I will get lost somewhere in the city and be unable to find my way home. I have been to this place a million times, but now I have no idea where it is. I lean forward over the steering wheel, squinting out at the road. I drive about five miles an hour, cars blaring their horns and whipping around me. My vision is strange, wavy, the other cars weaving too close. I flinch away from them, jerking the wheel. I make it to the party and walk in, trying to pretend that I am steady on my feet and not swerving into walls. The gathering, talking, laughing, glittering people all around me, and I retreat to a corner where I can hang on to the wall.

  Immediately I understand that coming here was a very bad idea. I am clearly unwell. My head is full of cotton, and my mouth doesn't want to move. I am dizzy, my perception of space is off. The sound is turned up to a shrill, piercing screech. The terrifying people eddy around me, their faces looming large in the telescope, filling the lens. Their voices reverberate in my skull. My face freezes in a smile, and periodically I nod, knowing that that is what I am supposed to do. When they laugh, I laugh. Their mouths are huge and yawning, and I see their glistening teeth. Eventually they go away, swallowed by the seething crowd, and I shrink backward, trying to blend in with the wall. In desperation, I take a glass of the champagne that is being passed around. My hands are shaking so hard that I need to use them both to get the plastic glass to my mouth.

  In an instant, I am much improved. Suddenly brave, I follow the server with the tray of champagne like a dog and take another glass. That's better! All I needed was a little drink to lighten up. I talk to everyone, I throw my head back laughing—the friend who called says mildly, I thought you'd stopped drinking?—and I assure her that it's just once in a while, on special occasions like this. I guzzle champagne, emptying plastic glass after plastic glass, setting them back on the passing trays. I am having a perfectly marvelous time.

  The next thing I know, it's night, and I am walking out of a liquor store with two bottles of scotch in a brown paper bag. I get in my car and drive home.

  Somehow, I am not exactly sure how, Crazy Sean is living in my house. This is one of those things that to this day I can't explain. He seems to have teleported himself from the side of the road in Seattle where I left him to my house in San Francisco. Crazy Sean joins me on the porch. We sit there drinking. Well, I for one lie on the ground, but never mind. I drink the better part of two bottles in about an hour.

  All of a sudden, I am being raced through the emergency room in a cocktail dress and all my jewelry. The lights flash past.

  Without warning, my mother is there. This confuses me. Does my mother live here? How did she get here? I thought she went home.

  I'm back in the psych ward. The booze out of my system, I sink back underwater, the depression closing in around my body. I hold my breath, floating down. My limbs are too heavy to swim back up. Everything is blunted. My heart thuds against the inside of my ribs. It annoys me. It continues to move when I want to be utterly still. I wish it would stop.

  While I am in the psych ward, my family agrees that I clearly can't stay in California by myself. I am completely nonfunctional. I don't dress. I don't eat. The not eating has nothing to do with my eating disorder, which has been in remission for years, and everything to do with the fact that the depression has sucked away the energy to do anything at all. It's obvious that I'll start drinking again if I'm left alone. It is decided that I will move to Minnesota to live with my mother and stepfather for as long as is necessary. We pack up one suitcase and abandon everything else. I understand only that I will not be in California anymore.

  I am sitting on an airplane. My mother is propping my head up with her hand.

  Attic, Basement

  Fall 2000

  I am in my mother's guest room. I am lying in bed. I am utterly still. The light is blinding. I pull the pillow over my face. I am dimly aware that in the course of about two months, I have gone from a job teaching college, a lovely house near Golden Gate Park, and half a dozen maxed-out credit cards to lying in a bed in my mother's attic, from which I have not emerged in a hundred years. I am filthy, heavy. I weigh down the bed. There is no reason to move. They've taken all my credit cards and closed all my accounts. They've quit my job for me and dropped me out of school. My car and all my things are right where we left them, in California, now the burden of my furious friends. Periodically my mother appears with food, or tea, or other unnecessary things. I watch her mouth move.

  Awake at night, I sit on the floor watching TV with my mouth hanging open. In hell, Jerry Springer reruns play all night. Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry! Days go by. Then weeks. Months. It seems that I will never leave the room. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll stay here forever. I can't bring myself to care.

  My mother drives me to Dr. Lentz's office every few days. I hadn't seen him in two years. I have nothing better to do, and going there differentiates one day from the next. Still in my pajamas, I go down the stairs, clinging to the railing, and get in the car with my mother. I lean my forehead on the window and watch the bleak city go by. The world is ugly and surreal and a very long way away.

  In his office, I sit curled up in his chair with my head on my knees. He tries lithium, Depakote, Tegretol, Topamax, and nothing is working. It makes me slow. It makes me shake. But it doesn't help. Are you suicidal? Are you taking your meds? I shake my head no. I nod my head yes. I whisper, Make it go away. He says he will. He says he's trying. He says something will work soon. I'm sorry, he says. Hang in there. I stand up and shuffle out of the office and get in the car and the bleak winter streets go by in reverse and I go home and climb back into bed and stare at the wall, lurching in and out of sleep.

  "Sit up," my mother says, pulling on my shoulder until I am partially upright. She hands me a plate of soft scrambled eggs. She makes me foods I liked as a little kid, in an attempt to get me to eat. I mouth the eggs as if I am very old and have no teeth.

  She rolls up the blinds. I shade my eyes with my hand, my plate balanced on my chest, my hand shaking so hard the fork taps erratically on the plate. She sits down in the rocker that she rocked me in when I was born. This depresses me. The attic room has windows on three sides. Outside, the leaves are turning red and gold and brown. It is autumn, which depresses me. Time is rolling by without me. I am trapped in my body, in this sunny little room, in this single bed, in these sweaty sheets.

  "Were you sleeping?" she asks.

  I give up on the eggs and set them on the bed stand. "I don't know."

  "I was thinking," she says, "that maybe we could bundle up and go for a little walk. Just a few blocks, if you felt like it. Get a little air. Wouldn't that be nice?"

  I stare at her, alarmed.

  "All right," she says brightly, changing tacks. "What about you try to come out of your room?" My eyes widen.

  "Just for a little while. I'll come with you. We won't go far, just downstairs. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to talk. Maybe you could look at a book while I work. Could you just give it a try?"

  I put my head back against the wall and tears leak down the sides of my nose. I note the tears and do not care. "So complicated," I whisper. "Completely overwhelming."

  "All right, honey. It's okay. We'll try again tomorrow. So right now, maybe you could sit up all the way. Maybe you could read."

  I shake my head. "Hands are shaking. Can't hold the book. I think it's the meds."

  She looks sadly at me. "The day isn't being good to you."

  I shake my head. "I'm sorry I'm such a freak," I say.

  "You're sick. You're not a freak."

  "You must hate me. I should go away. I should get out of here so you guys can go back to your regular life." That is more than I have said in days. I am obsessed with the idea that they secretly hate me and are only tolerat
ing me because they have to. "You don't have to take care of me, you know. You could tell me to leave." My head spins with this thought, and I imagine how many steps it would take to get even as far as a door.

  "I know that," she says. "This is just a good place to rest."

  "Resting," I say. I'm not sick. I'm resting. I like the sound of it.

  "Resting," she agrees.

  I recede into my head, look out the window at the trees. She sits with me quietly for a while, then gets up and leaves, running her hand over the top of my head on her way out.

  Fall rolls into winter. The trees give up the last of their leaves, and I watch snow fall past my window, collecting in perfect drifts on the black branches. If you put a camera in my room, you could watch the seasons pass in time-lapse. You could see me too, lying in bed, lying on the floor, sitting on the edge of the bed, always staring into space.

  One night, out of nowhere, the image of a glass comes to me, sharp and precise: a glass of scotch, two cubes of ice. The thought is clearer than anything that has passed through my mind in months. The image is so sharp I can see it, taste the booze, feel the burn going down. The doctors' warnings don't even enter my mind—the meds won't work, your liver's shot, you're going to die if you keep this up—to hell with it. Suddenly I am on my feet.

  My mother and her husband are asleep. I tiptoe through the house and creep down the basement stairs, wincing as they creak. I feel my way to the light switch, flip it, and survey the scene. I will find the booze if it kills me. I know it's down here. I will sniff it out.