Madness

by Marya Hornbacher

  "You wanted to see me?" I say, standing in my editor's doorway. I love this guy. He gave me my first job here when I was nineteen.

  "How are you?" he asks.

  Niceties! Nonsense! "Fine," I say. "What's up?" I go in and sit down.

  "I'm a little concerned that you're working too much."

  I blink. "I'm not. I'm working as much as I need to to get all my work done."

  He nods, smiling. "Maybe you shouldn't be doing quite so much work?"

  Ridiculous! "I'm just making the section as good as it can be."

  "And it looks great," he says, nodding and nodding. "It looks really great. I just don't want you to burn out."

  I laugh out loud. "Of course I'm not going to burn out! Don't worry about me. I always work this much. It's just how I operate. I like to get things done, and I don't like to waste time. Hey," I say. "I'm just trying to give you my best." I smile my most winning smile.

  He shakes his head and laughs. "Okay," he says. "Whatever you say. Just don't be afraid to ask for some help, all right?"

  "All right," I say, hopping up. All right, all right, all right! "Thanks!" I say, and leap out the door.

  "They're driving me crazy!" I shout when Jeff comes home from work. I spin around in my office chair while he drops his briefcase and kisses my head. "It's always, slow down, slow down, slow down, doesn't anybody want to get anything done? Don't they get bored? Sitting there in their cubicles, churning out the same old articles they've been churning out for years?" I jump out of my chair and charge down the stairs, calling, "Dinner!"

  I start at the magazine working thirty hours a week. That creeps up to forty, then fifty, sixty. By August 2003 it's eighty, and I'm whipping up and down the aisles between the cubicles at the office. I'm out late every night at openings and shows. I wake up at the crack of dawn to work on my novel, which is finally nearing completion, then race into work, where I move in fast-forward, delighted by the efficiency of my various systems, clicking along; answer the phone, assign the story, edit the piece, make the call, set up the interview—stopping briefly when someone comes over to talk to me, talking to them a million miles an hour—dash out of the office for the lunch, dash back in for the meeting, sit down at my desk, e-mail the writer, file the press releases, scribble the notes, get a little burst of energy and gallop down the hall, gallop back, crash into my chair, and slowly the office is emptying out, and I'm typing, and people are stopping by to say good night, and I'm typing, and I am humming under my breath, whole symphonies, all the parts, and I keep typing, and suddenly it's totally quiet.

  I peek over the top of my cubicle and survey the cubicle farm. All the little ants have gone home. I notice that it's dark outside. I look at my watch: nine o'clock! Jeff! I grab my coat and go running out of the office. I tear through the streets, his car is there, he's home! The little yellow lights in the window are delightful! I take the stairs two at a time, burst in the door, run through the house, and fling myself at Jeff, "I'm sorry I'm late! Lost track of time! Did you eat? I haven't eaten. What do we have? How was your day?" I'm throwing things in bowls and stirring wildly and boiling water and I have about fourteen hands, and he tells me how his day was, "You're kidding! Oh, no! What a jackass! Good job! That's great!" and I break out my symphonic song, and throw whatever I was stirring into a pan, and he laughs at me, and I laugh, and we laugh and eat dinner and have sex and then he falls asleep, and I lie there.

  My head is humming. I worry that it is humming so loudly it will vibrate the bed.

  It doesn't feel like mania. No no, it's happiness, it's energy. I'm doing everything right.

  Even though I've gone crazy every summer for most of my life, this year it's not crazy—I'm just having a fabulous time. There's a theater festival in town. Two weeks of hardly any sleep, parties, people everywhere, my days spent writing wildly in the office, churning out stories on both the festival and the rest of the art scene, and then there are the interviews, and the meetings, and I'm still racing along on the novel.

  I'm on fast-forward, alive with the old addiction to thrills. My speech speeds up, I'm flinging my hands around, my heart is pounding like mad. There is drama and gossip at the festival, and I need no sleep and no food, and I ignore Jeff, vacating the house completely, doing precisely nothing like running a home life. No night is too late and nothing is too much and nothing is enough.

  At the end of the festival, there are two hundred people in our house, fabulous food, endless booze—thank God Jeff and I don't drink—music blasting, people spilling out into the yard, every floor of the house packed with wildly gesturing, heavily inebriated actors, all of them seemingly moving as fast as I am. People crowd into my office, sitting in piles on the chairs and the floor, shouting and gesturing. I'm euphoric. The conversation gets louder and louder, we laugh until we fall out of our chairs. I'm at my most charismatic, my grand schemes seem perfectly reasonable. Mania is contagious, pulling people into its whirlwind orbit. I'm the pied piper. There's nothing wrong with me. Absolutely everyone is crazy. I'm riding the swell of excitement with everyone else.

  The party breaks up around four o'clock in the morning, and at six I hop out of bed and keep moving. Work has never been better. I've never written faster, never worked so hard. It's fucking great.

  Madness? This isn't madness. This is more fun than I've had in years. Why would I want to come down? This is just how it is now, this is how it's always supposed to be—I've hit my stride, and I just didn't realize how painfully slow I'd been going before. Everything before, pshaw. That was nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, you've never seen anything like it. Watch this.

  Fall 2003

  I'm taking my meds without really thinking about them, and I show up for my appointments with Dr. Lentz, sighing with irritation that I still have to bother with this nonsense. I report—and believe—that everything is going well, better than well, so he has no reason to think that anything's wrong. I brush off his incessant questions about whether I'm doing too much. What is it with these people? Lentz, my parents, Jeff, my friends—all of them making a fuss, telling me I'm doing too much, nattering on about the job, the book, the parties, the shows. How could I be doing too much when I'm doing everything right? The meds are obviously working brilliantly, as anyone can see with even a cursory glance at how great my life is. It baffles me that Lentz has any doubts, and I tell him he's just stuck in the past. Everything's different now. He has nothing to worry about, and neither do I.

  For a few more blissful weeks of fall, the mania carries me along on the crest of this fabulous wave. By this point I'm a royal pain in the ass, and Jeff is taking the brunt of it. The only thing wrong in my life is Jeff and his constant harping on me for never being home, never doing my share, never paying attention to him. He whines and whines and it drives me absolutely nuts. I'm not doing jack shit around the house. Never mind the dishes. Cleaning be damned. I have no time for such banalities. Jeff is a boring old grump, with his interminable slowness, his inexplicable crankiness. Marriage isn't going to hold me back, settle me down. Indignant, I explain to him, loudly, that he's a misogynistic ass. To hell with his resentment of me and his martyrdom.

  I come crashing in at three in the morning, wired to the gills on caffeine and the excitement of the night, and slide with exaggerated slickness into bed, fuming at Jeff's sulkily turned back. Irate, I flounce off to the guest room, where I lie with my eyes flickering across the ceiling, plotting my excellent, righteous dismissal of my marriage, of marriage in general, my takeover of the magazine, my centrality to all things good and exciting in town. Perhaps I should move to New York once I've conquered Minneapolis. I'll write for The New Yorker. No, I'll become editor of the New York Times. California—now that was the time of my life. I wasted it, wasted it foolishly, what a sorrowful loss. But no matter. I see my sorry ways and will rectify them now.

  And then, almost overnight, a spider web of cracks starts to spread across my brain. I dismiss all the grandiose plans—w
hat crap! What am I thinking, fooling myself into the belief that I'm capable of anything at all? My moods go careening up and down without warning. I'm manic, I'm blue, I'm dashing around in a panic, I'm curled up in bed in the empty, washed-out light of afternoon—and then I'm bolting back up, manic again. But the mania is painful, sharp-edged—I'm agitated, constantly anxious, gripped by random, sudden fears, and I whip around aimlessly, compulsively making lists, worried that I will forget something, that I'll lose something, that I'll fail at something important, that I won't get something done. I'm irritable as hell, and I snap at anyone who has the nerve to suggest that I'm not doing so well—their stupid comments about my moodiness, their idiotic worries that I'm working too much, their constant harping on the fact that I'm not being reasonable about anything at all. I'm perfectly reasonable. It's just that I'm stressed. It's just that people expect too much of me. I can't handle it. I rage at myself for my incompetence, my laziness. I am a failure and a fraud. They're going to find me out. I laugh sharply, talk too fast, and then suddenly fall silent. The voice of the person talking to me fades away. From far off—Are you all right? I snap to, shake my head to clear the fog, put a smile on my face, Of course! I'm fine!

  It's afternoon, and once again the blues wash over me. The office is making me crazy. I can't stand the noise. I have to get out of here. I grab my purse and practically run. Once home, I throw off my suit and crawl into bed. Everything is quiet now. I pull the covers over my head. My head is pounding, filled with static. There is something wrong with my head. I will myself asleep.

  I start calling in sick to work. Home, I whirl around aimlessly. I write dozens of pages every day, and every day I delete them. I pace, I panic, I worry I will get fired. No, no, you won't get fired, my editor says. When I go into work, I stay there late into the night. When I don't, I dive into and out of bed, and pace, and talk to myself, I'm not going crazy. It's going to be fine.

  I lie in bed and stare at the wall, bleak, knowing I am going mad.

  Stop it. Get up. You're not going mad.

  I wake up at four o'clock in the morning every day to find the gnarled old terror in my chest, familiar and despised. I clench my eyes shut, then lurch up and stagger toward my office, start hacking away at the book, get lost in the work, the light slowly rising outside, from black to indigo to violet to a pale, thin winter blue, and the piercing sun comes up, and I look at the clock—fuck! I'm late! And I go hauling into work. My mood swings wildly from fury to desolation, and I'm stumbling around with exhaustion by the afternoon. I pour more coffee down my throat, sick to my stomach all the time, shaking so hard I can barely hold my pen, What's wrong with you? You're making a fool of yourself, everyone's looking, everyone can see. The paranoia is back. Everyone hates me, is making fun of me, is disgusted by me, wants me fired, wants me dead. I keep my head down and work, snapping often in meetings, shouting, demanding to be heard—and then, humiliated, I run out of the meeting in tears, back to my desk, Pull it together, freak! Fuckup! Can't take it, can't deal, failure, they're looking, don't you see? This is simple, do it right, stop screwing everything up, you embarrassed yourself in there, you're going to get fired—and I either stay at work until midnight or bolt from the office at two P.M. To say I'm erratic is an understatement.

  I can't get the chaos of my mind to stop. I'm confused, and don't want to tell anyone. I can't remember conversations, can't keep tasks straight. Someone at work asks me to do something, and I wind up in a bathroom stall, crying, panicked, because I can't remember what it was. My desk is a sea of Post-Its, each of them with indecipherable notations that are supposed to tell me what to do. I'm afraid of the office, afraid of downtown, afraid of driving, of speeding, of getting stopped and searched, afraid of things being out of place, afraid of the laundry, the dishes, the mail, sharp objects, spirits, sleep, nightmares, afraid of being looked at, afraid Jeff and my friends hate me—I plead with them to admit it, to just get it out of their systems, so I know the truth and can end this incessant uncertainty that's driving me mad.

  We throw a Thanksgiving party for fifty people, another one of my blowouts with endless people streaming in and out. The next day, with no sleep, Jeff and I fly out of town at four A.M.,to relax, get away, get me back on my feet. We get home and I've only gotten worse. Christmas is parties, all-night wrapping, the watchers are everywhere, following me around the mall, I'm hemorrhaging money, I've completely stopped sleeping.

  By now, my friends and family are panicked. Jeff, who's never seen me go crazy before, is trying frantically to assuage my fears, keep me calm, get me to sleep. There are times when he has to pick me up from the office in the middle of the day, or night, because I can't figure out how to get home, or am afraid of leaving the building—I am fixated on the unspecified danger of parking lots. Other days, I call him from home, terrified of everything, the sun, the stairs, all the rooms in the house, especially the kitchen. I beg him to get rid of all the sharp things, scissors and razors and knives. I'm afraid they will come at me and slice up my eyeballs. I fail to mention that I'm also afraid of cutting myself up.

  And then it happens. On New Year's Eve, Jeff comes home from work. I'm sitting on the bed. He sits down with me. I tip over into his lap. Everything is fine, now that he is here.

  And then Jeff looks down and sees dried blood all over my hands. He yanks my shirt off. I've sliced up my arms. I'm as shocked as he is. I don't remember doing it. I haven't done it in ten years, not since I wound up with forty-two stitches in my arm and no real understanding of whether I'd attempted suicide or not. I am totally confused.

  Jeff puts me in the car and drives me to the hospital.

  Emergency room. Flashing lights. The cop outside the room. Hours and hours spent waiting. Finally the psychiatrist comes. Jeff watches while they drag me, kicking and screaming, away.

  Part III

  The Missing Years

  These years are mostly lost to me. Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when. I spend these two years caught in the revolving door of madness, going in and out of the hospital seven times, traveling from my bed at home to a bed on a locked ward, the weird world of the ward becoming more familiar to me than the one outside. This is the best I can do to piece the scattered memories together, to give some semblance of continuous time, to fill the hole in my life that madness made, and will not repair.

  Hospitalization #1

  January 2004

  Hi, someone says. He is very gentle. I am in the hospital. It is night. I register that fact and write it down on a small slip of paper: LOCATION Abbott Northwestern Hospital, TIME Night. I stuff it in my pocket with the other crumpled pieces of paper that I keep so I can read them when I get lost.

  Hi, he says again. He towers over me. We are in the lounge, a small triangular room enclosed by unbreakable glass. There are games. The games are always missing pieces. There is no way to play Scrabble. You have to make up your own language, which actually works just as well; none of you makes sense to anyone else, but you do understand one another at some deep level, as if you are all in on some conspiracy or joke. The games underscore the deep futility of all things.

  Hi, he says yet again. I look up at him out of the corner of my eye. It is very black outside and we can see the skyline of the city, where I know I have been, though that was years ago, which might have been a few days before. I am sitting in a pile of magazines, playing solitaire with half a deck and keeping an eye on a man who is no longer towering but has a face resembling a large moon, glowing.

  What's your name? he asks.

  This one I know. Very firmly, I say, Marya. My name is Marya.

  I am extremely satisfied with this name. No one ever knows how to pronounce it except for the other patients on psych wards.

  Marya, he says in wonder. That's a pretty name. He holds out his hand. I'm the prophet Jeremiah, he says, and we shake han
ds very seriously.

  He looks away thoughtfully, gazing into the broad expanse of night. He turns his face to me.

  Have we met already? he asks. He holds out his hand. My name is the prophet Jeremiah. I mean, I am the prophet Jeremiah. He pauses, laughing softly. That's why my name is Jeremiah.

  I nod, understanding that he is mad, and I am grateful that I know my name, which is Marya. I am in the Hospital, where all the nurses know me, and I am safe, for this particular moment in time. It is Night.

  ***

  There are four rooms in this world, and I don't know how they are connected—my room, the main room, the padded room, and the room with the Plexiglas walls. There is also a hallway, but I don't know where it leads or how it is related to the rooms. I have flashes of places: there is the view of the ceiling when I am lying on a bed with white sheets and a crinkly sound (the plastic-covered mattress). I can feel the bedsprings in my back. I worry they'll eventually start coming upward in a screwing motion, twisting into my back and right through me, screwing me to the bed. And then there is the main room, where I sit all day and all night. Beyond that is the room with Plexiglas walls, which upsets me a little; if I were in that room, I could be seen, so I stay out here where I am invisible. Except at night. At night, the Plexiglas is bright and safe, the light at the end of the tunnel, and the fluorescent lights move into your skull with their comforting crackling buzz. Sometimes I stand outside it and press my face against it, looking in. Sometimes I go in and press my face against it, looking out.

  I am at my best at night. I have strange, fleeting meetings with the other people on the ward. I play a complex game of solitaire and do not look at the people behind the desk. I get in the habit of making myself a cup of orange tea. I sit with my back to the desk. I put my feet on the heater, my Styrofoam cup between my hands, and look out into the dark, which is made of velvet so soft and heavy you could gather it up in your hands if you weren't locked in. When I get up and go to the window, I see the ground some number of stories below, and it is blanketed with snow, which looks blue in the moonlight. The trees are bare. This is how I know it is winter.