Madness

by Marya Hornbacher

  So when she asks me if I'm willing to try electroshock therapy, it isn't Jeff who says yes. It's me. It hurts that much. I won't remember saying yes. I'll remember Jeff sitting in a chair by the side of the bed, asking me if I'm sure. He says, You made me promise I would never let them do it. You made me promise. Are you really sure?

  Now I am being wheeled from the psych ward down the hall. Wheeled not because I can't walk—my legs technically work—but because I cannot, by force of my own will, direct them to move in the usual fashion, one foot in front of the other, forget it, I can't. What hall is this? One moment I am one place, and the next I am somewhere else. In madness, there is no such thing as location, no place where I understand that I am. There is a waiting room. It's not that I recognize it—I surmise it, as I frantically review shards of memory, turning them over in my hand as if they are seashells I find on the beach. And here, I guess, is the room where I lie on the bed and they administer the electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ECT.

  The room is white and cold and blindingly bright. Perhaps it is not a bed? Perhaps it is a gurney. Perhaps it is a cold steel table such as they have in a vet's office. I am lying here, and I blink into the lights above my head. I try to count the dots in the squares of particleboard that cover the ceiling. I lose my place. Numbers dance around my skull like the plastic magnetic letters and numbers that people with children have on their refrigerator door. I lie here thinking of the Count on Sesame Street: One two three four five six seven eight, counting! Counting! One two sixteen forty-three, counting, counting! The nice man stands at my side. I'm Dr. X. I'm an anesthesiologist. I think of an Anne Sexton poem: "You, Doctor Martin, walk / from breakfast to madness..."

  How are you feeling today? I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not. I have ceased to be. Where am I? Here is the nice man. Is he still talking? His mouth moves in some kind of pantomime of speech. He wears a white coat. There is also a nurse. Where is Dr. Grau? I must have asked this out loud. I'm right here, honey. Dr. Grau looms over me from my left. She lays her hand on my shoulder. Right here. Aha: She is right here. Then this will be all right. Where am I? If I am here, why am I here? If (X) Dr. Grau is here + (Y) I am here, then (Z) it is all right. Where is here again? Can someone explain? The room is white, violently bright: therefore, hospital. I am on a gurney: ergo, emergency room? No, this room is shinier, cleaner, and there is no sound of shouting or crying. But here is Dr. X, the nice man who says he is—that's right!—the anesthesiologist, which means he has anesthesia in his possession. Needles! I love needles! I love anesthesia! It feels like dying. Dying is an art / like everything else. Sylvia Plath. I'm just full of suicidal poets, aren't I? Dr. Grau is near my face. I turn my eyes up to her. She is God. She is putting something cold and slimy on my temples. What is it? Glue. It's getting in my hair. It hardly matters. Who knows when I last washed my hair. I put my hand up to touch it. My fingers come away from it, a thread like snot. A nurse or some other indistinct figure is wrapping a tight band around my right arm, which has excellent veins. The vise around my arm is knotted and snaps against my skin. I remark on my excellent veins, Yes, they're very nice, noting also that the veins in my left arm suck, but not noting that because of this, a lifetime ago, it was very difficult to shoot myself up, being, as I am, right-handed. You're going to feel a little pinch. I smile, anticipating it: there it is. I feel the needle slide into my excellent vein. It might burn a little bit. It burns. I feel the anesthesia seep up my arm. I picture it: it is yellow. No, gold. It is a drug. I love a drug. It is malevolent. It is perfect. It is poison. It races up my arm toward my shoulder. I'm here. Right here. I turn my head to the left: Dr. Grau. She will take care of me. What are they doing to me? Why? Where the hell is Jeff? I open my mouth to call to him, but then the feeling hits and I am rocking on the surface of the water. The water barely moves beneath me. It's smooth as sheets under the palms of my hands. The sun is a perfect white sphere; is it a fluorescent light? No. I catch and hold my breath; I beg my mind: stay here—right here—for just a minute more—

  But I grow too heavy and I slide beneath the surface of the water. Its smooth surface does not break but merely bends below me and I disappear. It swallows me and the surface of the water shimmers as if I had never been there at all.

  This is the part I don't see. I can only imagine it. They send an electric current through my brain, inducing a seizure. The seizure is tiny. Only my toes curl. Still, I cannot shake the image of myself flopping around like a beached fish. After it stops, they suction the black foaming fluid that seethes from my lungs, the tar from years of smoking surging up out of my mouth because of the seizure.

  I wake up in the recovery room. Slowly, I bubble up from the water, consciousness seeping into my brain. I squint in the bright light. I don't know where I am, or where I've been. A nurse appears over my face. She's very cheerful, and I like her immediately. Do you know where you are? I look around myself: hospital curtains separating my bed from the next one. Hospital, I say. Good! You're oriented. Do you remember what just happened? I rack my brain. She asks the year. I shake my head. What is your name?

  A beat. Then: Marya. Isn't it?

  It is! The nurse moves away. You just rest, now.

  Electroshock, as safe as it is, is still used as a last resort, after medication has failed to break a severe episode of mania or depression. Doctors don't do it lightly. But often it works. They don't know why it works, but it does. It is sometimes used as maintenance treatment for patients with particularly hard-to-treat cases, and it can make life possible for them again. It has saved my life more than once, a simple electric current breaking through the walls of madness, bringing me back from wherever my mind has stranded me now.

  But what happened? Why do I have this incredible headache? Why do my limbs feel as if they've been filled with wet sand? I try to remember something, anything, and can't. What did I do yesterday? What will I do tomorrow? Can I go home? Aha!—I remember something. Jeff. Where is Jeff? Where is home? What day is it? Does it matter? I close my eyes. Perhaps I will stay here forever. It seems as good a place as any.

  They wheel me down the hall. From the place where memory, however fractured, resides, I remember these words. Suddenly alive, I recite Lowell to the person who is pushing me along:

  "Come on, sir." "Easy, sir."

  "Dr. Brown will be here in ten minutes, sir."

  Instead, a metal chair unfolds into a stretcher.

  I lie secured there, but for my skipping mind.

  They keep bustling.

  "Where you are going, Professor,

  you won't need your Dante."

  Months go by, and I tumble through them, going home for a few weeks, a month or two, surfacing from my bed now, only to go back under. Then the drive in silence downtown, and the emergency room, the shuffle to Unit 47, and the staff assuring me it will be okay soon.

  I believe them the first time. By the second time, I have my doubts. By the third, I know they are lying. By now, I have simply ceased to care. I sit down on the couch to wait for the cycle to come round again. And it does. And again. One year turns into the next, and I slide back and forth between a modicum of sanity and a state of madness, between the hospital and my house, between the world you know and a world of my own. I get used to the worried, sad, hopeless look on my parents' faces. They begin making plans for the day when I will need permanent psychiatric care. Jeff slips into his own world, resenting me for leaving him this way.

  At home, my world is reduced to the hallway between my office and my bedroom. I shamble back and forth, sitting at my desk writing as if possessed, then to bed, where Jeff finds me every day when he comes home. He makes me something to eat and I sit on the mattress eating it. I know this is getting to be too much.

  "Are you up for this?" I ask in a moment of clarity. "This." I gesture around
me in bed, my days-old pajamas, the pile of dishes on the nightstand, the bottles of pills.

  "Of course I am," he says. His voice is tired. He changes out of his work clothes and gets into bed beside me. We spend our evenings watching Law and Order, not talking. Of course he's not up for this. No one should have to be up for this. He signed on for a marriage, not for taking care of an invalid wife.

  Hospitalization #7

  July 2005

  Jeff squeezes and kneads my hand. "Your hands are cold," he says, scowling at them, as if scowling at them will warm them up. He rubs them between his mammoth paws. I always forget how big Jeff is until I am here, where I become tiny, smaller than usual, somehow reduced to half my size. I feel fragile, as if someone passing by me might blow me over in his wake.

  "I talked in group today," I say, wanting to have something to contribute.

  "You did? That's great!" Jeff crows. "What did you say?"

  "I don't remember."

  "But you talked! That's wonderful! That's better than yesterday! You must be feeling better today!"

  "I think I am," I say hopefully. "I think I went to all the groups."

  "You're on a roll! You're kicking ass! Good job!"

  "But otherwise I just sat around," I say.

  "Did you read any of the books I brought?"

  "No." I stare at our hands. "I've gotten very stupid."

  "You're not stupid."

  "Yes I am. I can't read anything. I can't even read stupid magazines."

  "They're all out of date anyway." Jeff dismisses this with a wave of his hand.

  "But the point is I've gotten stupid."

  "You're not stupid. You're just not feeling quite yourself."

  This cracks me up. I hold my stomach, rocking back and forth, laughing my head off. "Not quite myself! No, not quite!"

  Jeff smiles uncertainly, not sure why this is funny. I'm not sure either. I gasp and let out a sigh. I gaze at Jeff. I adore him. He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? How many people would visit every day at six o'clock, without fail? And bring me dinner, and a grocery bag of fruit? Who could? Who would? Why would they? Why does Jeff?

  I say to him, "Why are you doing this?"

  He leans forward, his face animated. "Doing what?"

  "Coming here." I am struggling to form the thoughts it requires for me to ask him the question. The evening is getting later, I'm tired, and he'll leave soon, and there I'll be, left on the couch, a huge gaping space where Jeff was but no longer is.

  "Why am I coming here? Because you're here. Obviously."

  "But you're leaving soon." That's not what I meant to say. He glances at the clock.

  "Not yet," he says, rubbing my hands. "Not just yet."

  I wrestle my thoughts to the ground. "But you won't always come back."

  He furrows his brow. "Of course I will. I'll be back tomorrow."

  "But maybe someday."

  He gets a look on his face. "No," he says. "I'll always come."

  "Not if this keeps happening." It's dark out now. Soon he will stand up and pull on his coat, dressed, impressive, sane, and he will stride his giant strides to the locked door and wait patiently while the staff jingles the keys, and when they swing the door open, he will look back across the room at me, smile his very best encouraging smile, wave, and turn away. The door will swing shut behind him with a clang. The clang will reverberate through my skull. It will keep clanging, over and over, and each time I will jump, even though it actually only clanged once. And then I will sit here, frozen on the couch, my hands, now limp in my lap, getting cold.

  "If what keeps happening?" he asks. I don't know why he asks, because he knows.

  "If I keep going crazy."

  "You're not crazy." He shakes his head firmly.

  I sit there looking at him. "Jeff, I'm crazy."

  "You're not feeling well."

  "Jeff," I say, not sure he's really getting the point, "I'm crazy."

  "You're sick. Right now. Just for a little while." He shakes his head back and forth like a little boy denying that he broke the vase. No, no. Not crazy.

  "But what if it isn't just for a little while?" I ask him. My head is starting to tip on the top of my spine, heavy with the dead weight of my brain. But I persist. This is important. I need to know. I need to be sure of him. Without him, the days will stretch out, bleed into one another, no one will come at six and tell me how long I have been in here, assure me that I will get out soon, that tomorrow will be better. No one will lie to me, and their lies are all I have to go on, all the reason I have to crawl out of my hospital bed in the morning, drape myself in hospital robes, put on my hospital footies, and pad down the hall, moving through the eddying stream of noise, bumping into the walls, to sit at the table in the main room of the ward and drink my hospital decaf to demark that another day has begun.

  "It is just for a little while. You're getting better. You're a little better every day." He leans close and kisses me on the nose. "You'll get out soon. I promise."

  I think about this, trying to connect it to the next part of my thought.

  "But then it will happen again."

  "No it won't."

  I stare at him. "Yes it will."

  He shakes his head.

  "Jeff, it will."

  His face falls for a second and his voice cracks. "But you did so well for so long."

  I start to cry. I want to be doing well again, for him. I want to go back to the part of the story where I made dinner for fifty and wore makeup and earrings every day and we leaned back in our chairs on the porch in the evening, watching the sunset, our heads tipped back, drinking the summer air.

  "I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't think this would happen again."

  "It's all right," he says.

  "You're going to give up on me."

  He takes my face in one of his hands. "I'm not. I'm not, not ever."

  I nod miserably. "You are. I don't blame you. There's no reason you should have to deal with this. This is a nightmare. I hate that this is happening. But," I say, starting to cry again, "I can't help it and I don't know if it's ever going to stop."

  "But it will."

  "But what if it doesn't?"

  "It will."

  There are circles under his eyes. He's working long days, then getting dinner, bringing it to me, sitting with me, my exhausting craziness, for hours, then going home, doing all the things I used to do, the laundry, the dishes, the cat boxes, walking the dogs, cleaning the house, and then he's collapsing, exhausted, in bed. I picture him lying there, a huge lump on one side of the bed, the other side empty, and he's not sleeping well, and he's getting up in the morning and worrying about me, and worrying about the future, and trying not to think about it, and facing the strange looks and uncomfortable silence at work, with colleagues who know his wife is crazy, and packing me bags of clothes and books and our wedding quilt, and hauling all these things to me, and wondering, every time he leaves, if I will ever be better again.

  "And you'll get tired of being alone," I insist.

  "I'm never really alone." I hear him reciting these things. I ask these things every day. "You're always with me." He glances at the clock.

  I sit for a moment, trying with all my might to stay here, to stay with him for these last few minutes. Why does time speed up when he comes? There is never enough time. I finally work up the sentence in my mouth: "What if it's always like this? With me going into the hospital, and then getting out, and then going crazy again, and going back in?"

  I can see his eyes going empty, I can hear the rote lines. Do either of us really know why he still comes?

  "Think of the good times," he says. "When you're out."

  I nod, my face slippery from tears. My cheeks are heavy again, my mind spitting and fritzing, its wires burned out for the night. I am out of questions. But I know that someday there will be a six
o'clock that comes and goes, and Jeff won't burst through the door. Or if he does, his step will get heavy, and he won't look at me, and he will hate me for what I have become.

  Nine o'clock. Over the loudspeaker, the voice of the staff: Visiting hours are now over. Thank you for coming. Good night.

  "I have to go," he says gently, leaning forward so his forehead touches mine. I nod. My mind is starting to fill with static. I hate my questions. I slump in the corner of the couch. He gets up slowly, not letting go of my hands. Finally he sets them softly in my lap. My eyes travel slowly up to his face. He lingers a long time, looking back and forth from me to the door. He leans down and kisses my head and leaves.

  Release

  August 2005

  Jeff and I walk out the hospital's front door and down the street to the car. The space around me feels strange; it seems like there should be walls somewhere nearby, holding me in. But there are only trees, the sidewalk, the passersby, the expansive sky. Jeff loads my things into the car, the paper bags of clothes and books, my pillow and my quilt. I get in the car, get tangled in the seat belt. Jeff untangles me and clicks it closed. We drive off. I look out the window at the streets and the old houses we pass.

  "Where are we going?" I ask.

  "Home," he says. "They just let you out."

  "They did?"

  "Yes. We're going to go home and unpack your things and then you can get settled. You can get in bed if you want. Or you can go in your office and maybe do a little work."

  "Oh my God," I say, overwhelmed.

  "But you don't have to. Nothing to worry about. You could just make a nest on the couch and read a book. Or look at a book, whatever you want."

  "I can read again."

  "I know. Isn't that awesome?"

  "Yes," I say. "I'm not stupid anymore." We pass the towering gray brick block of the old Sears building, and then the Yukon Bar, a Kentucky Fried Chicken. "Where are we?"