Madness

by Marya Hornbacher

  "Lake Street."

  "Really? It looks different."

  "It's the same. Things will look familiar when we get closer to home."

  As we move southwest through the city, I start recognizing things. "Are we close?"

  "Yep. See?"

  "I can't drive. I would get lost."

  "You can't drive because you're completely dosed up on meds."

  "Right." That morning, Jeff and I got a list of the meds I'm on: Seroquel, Geodon, trazodone, Zoloft, Ambien.

  "I think these meds are messing me up," I say.

  Jeff nods. "We'll try them for a little while. If you're still feeling like this in a week, we'll call Lentz and get you on something else."

  "I can't afford to be sedated. I need to work."

  "You will."

  "When?"

  "Soon."

  I look out the window. He doesn't have any idea when. My mind, my life are completely at the mercy of whatever I'm prescribed on discharge day. They let you out well before you fully know how those meds are going to affect you; once you're no longer considered a danger to yourself, they let you go, and you return to the care of your outpatient doctor.

  Jeff parks and unbuckles my seat belt. He goes around the car and lifts me out, holding me around the waist. I am unsteady on my feet and start to tip. He props me against the side of the car and takes my things out of the back. "Ready?" he asks. "Hang on to my belt."

  I follow him up the steps and into the house. I stand there looking around.

  "Home!" he announces, setting down my things, picking me up, and kissing me. "At last!"

  I scan the room. "You cleaned," I say, smiling. "That was sweet."

  "A person should come home to a clean house," he says, leading me to the stairs. There is the mantel with the wedding pictures on it. Here is the cat, rubbing up against my legs, and the dogs leaping and barking like mad. We go upstairs. He shows me my spotless office.

  "Flowers!" I say. I turn to kiss him, stumble, and crash into the wall. My vision is swimming, and it feels as if I am pulling to the left, my head out of alignment. Jeff catches me and turns me to see the flowers. They are my favorite, roses, a smoky coffee pink.

  He leads me to the bedroom and helps me into bed, then goes downstairs and brings up my things. He sits on the edge of the bed. It's hard to hold my head up, and I rest my chin on my chest.

  "Sorry I'm like this," I mumble. I'm falling asleep. "I meant to be better."

  "You are better," he assures me. "The side effects will wear off in a couple of days."

  I sit up to hug him and tip straight into his chest. He puts me upright again, leaning me back against the pillows.

  "I should get up and do some work," I slur, throwing the covers off and trying to stand. My socks slip on the hardwood floor and I slide down, dragging the blankets with me.

  "Maybe tomorrow. How about you just get settled in today."

  He picks me up and I get back into bed.

  "Maybe," I say. "I have a deadline. Can't miss the deadline." I pause, lifting my head with effort to look at him. He wavers in front of my face like a smoke mirage. "I don't like these meds."

  "Just give them a couple of days." He stands up.

  "Where are you going?" I ask, panicked.

  "Just going to get you something to eat."

  "But you'll come back up?"

  "Right away."

  "And you'll stay here?"

  "All day."

  "What about tomorrow?"

  "The rotation's all set. Aunt Andy will be here at seven A.M."

  My head crashes left and I lie on my side. "Okay," I say.

  While he's gone, I stare at the window. The ivy that covers it is lush and jewel green. Summer, I think. This perks me up. I sit up with effort, scrabble around in the bedside drawer, and find a pen and paper. Pressing the paper to my knees, I write, very carefully, Summer. I look at the clock: 2:34 P.M. But what day? "Jeff?" I yell. "What?" comes his voice up the stairs. "What day is it?" I yell. "Thursday!" he yells back. Very good. Thursday. I tap the pen against my knees. I'm missing something. I search my brain. Finally, I climb out of bed and go down the hall, resting my head on the wall to my left. I get to the top of the stairs. Confounded, I get down on my hands and knees, turn, and crawl backward halfway down. Jeff appears holding a tray.

  "What are you doing?" he asks, setting it down and coming over and pushing me back up the stairs.

  "I had a question."

  "What is it?" he asks.

  "I have season, time, and day. What else?"

  He leads me back down the hall. "Date," he says.

  "Date!" I cry, delighted. "What is it?"

  "August eighteenth, 2005."

  I write it down, fold the paper into four squares, and tuck it into my pillowcase. This way, when I get confused, I can check it, just to be sure.

  After a week or so of my lying in bed, the cobwebs in my brain start to clear and I venture back into the wreckage of my office, a whirlwind of papers and books. For the seventh time in two years, I put things in their places, stack the papers, re-shelve the books. I look at my desk calendar, still open to the date I went in. The pages are almost unreadable, crammed with black scribbles, the notes I'd taken on the cesspool of my mind, the dozens of appointments I'd made in my frenzy to cram my days full of the endless things I wanted to do, believed I could do — get PhD, write new book, go to London, start advocacy group. It's not that I couldn't do these things—people with bipolar disorder do things like this all the time. But each item on my list was cooked up in a fit of mania, when anything was possible. In any case, I don't even necessarily want to do these things, now that I've come down. I turn the page to the correct date, smooth my hand over it, and think for a minute. I look in the drawer: razor blades, rusty with blood. I throw them out, along with the Kleenex I'd used to sop up the mess.

  Somehow I have finished a book, written several articles, and started a new writing project between hospitalizations—I have no memory of doing any of these things, and I look at the reviews, edited manuscripts, and notes in utter confusion. Since then, letters and hundreds of e-mails have gone unanswered, editors haven't been called back, my more distant friends think I've disappeared or died.

  Jeff comes in.

  "Whatcha doing?" he asks.

  I look up at him. "Starting over," I say.

  "All right," he replies, and jogs back downstairs.

  A few weeks later, Megan flops into the armchair in my office. "Hey, chief," she says. She sets a bag of lunch on the desk. "You're up and about."

  Megan is a small woman with round glasses and very tidy, sensible, shiny chin-length black hair. She has two main facial expressions: no expression and cracking up. Jeff calls her Marcie and me Peppermint Patty. She looks like she is playing poker all the time: totally still. Occasionally she glowers, when I have done something particularly insane. And then she cracks up, holding her stomach and sort of silently bobbing up and down as if she's on a pogo stick. She's an astonishing painter. We are both very weird. She is essential to all things good in my life.

  I am half dressed, sitting at my desk, tapping in short bursts on the computer. I made it as far as pants and couldn't quite get a handle on shirt, but here I am in my chair, chain-smoking and drinking a cold cup of coffee.

  "Sort of," I say. "I got as far as the office."

  "That's farther than the bed."

  "True," I say. "My next project is going downstairs."

  "When are you doing that?"

  "Not yet. It's sort of overwhelming."

  "Maybe later. What are you working on?"

  "Nothing. I'm just writing for the sake of writing. I woke up this morning and was going totally batshit, so here I am, writing." I turn away from the computer, pick up my coffee cup, and peer into it.

  "That's an apple core there in your coffee cup," Megan remarks.

  "I was drinking around it."

  "Right." She unloads lunch in front of
me, tomato soup and a chunk of bread. "I figured soup was pretty straightforward."

  "It is. I can do soup." It's sandwiches that overwhelm me. Too many parts.

  "So how's the old mood today?" Megan asks, eating her soup.

  "I can't tell. I'm not speeded up and I'm not depressed. I guess I'm middling. Is that where I'm supposed to be?"

  "Sort of. You have no expression, though."

  "I don't?"

  She shakes her head.

  "Rats." I pull apart my bread and dip it carefully in my soup. "I'm supposed to have an expression."

  "Even a couple of them."

  "So my mood might still be a little off."

  "Maybe a little flat. But you've got to admit, that's better than nothing. I mean, you're out of bed. You're sort of dressed. You're writing."

  "I'm writing garbage."

  "Doesn't matter. The point is you're writing. So, see, you might be almost in a mood."

  I fall asleep.

  "Say, chief," Megan shouts. "You're asleep."

  I jerk my head up off the desk. "No I'm not," I say. "Just had a moment." I shake my head to wake myself up. It's still heavy, and tipping to the left. I prop it up with my hand. She's saying something. I'm falling asleep. My eyelids feel like they've got weights on them and are being dragged down. Megan reaches over and takes the soup so I don't knock it over.

  "What do you say you go to bed?" she shouts.

  I nod, staggering to my feet. "Can you stick around?" I slur. "It only takes a little while to pass."

  "No problem," she says, guiding me down the hall and dumping me unceremoniously on the bed. "I'll go get some coffee."

  "Thanks," I say, greatly relieved. "That'll be good." I fall asleep again.

  I wake up twenty minutes later, totally alert. I go back into the office and find Megan reading a book. She looks up. "Better?" she asks.

  I nod. "I fucking hate these meds. This happens every day." I sit down at my desk and stare at the computer screen. Nonsense, pages and pages of single-spaced nonsense. I select it all and hit the Delete key.

  "You'll get the hang of writing again," Megan says.

  "I hope so," I say. "It's the only thing I know how to do. I can't exactly hold a regular job."

  "No," she agrees. "But who cares?"

  She's got a point. There are millions and millions of people with mental problems. They work regular jobs, irregular jobs, they work at home, they don't work, they're married or single, they have kids or don't, they do laundry and fall in love and have opinions and grieve their losses and, if they're lucky, take their meds.

  That's what I'm learning. I am a person with a mental illness. So it takes some extra effort. So sometimes it's debilitating. But now that I'm learning to manage it, it's becoming not my entire life but simply a part of how I live, something the people around me live with as well, something I can accept. I have to. That's the only way this works.

  One day, I find a note on my calendar, made sometime between hospitalizations: I'm supposed to meet with a Web designer today to talk about my website. I am completely unprepared for this. My meds are still making me a little batty, there are a lot of side effects, and anyway I'm not totally able to track a conversation for any length of time. But I'm determined: I am going to be normal. I am going to this meeting if it kills me.

  So I go to the closet and put on the long-unused regular-person clothes, including shoes—after months in slippers, they feel very weird on my feet, and I wobble—and I get in my car, which feels enormous and is awfully complicated, and drive very badly to the Edina Grill to meet this guy for lunch. We sit down, start talking, my brain clears up a little, although I know I will forget everything that is said the minute I leave the restaurant, and my impression of a normal person is exceptional, all the way until our food arrives.

  Then it happens. The sleeping thing hits. My eyelids sag and my head starts dragging to my left. I tip over in the booth and slide under the fucking table.

  I'm mortified. This guy sticks his head down and peers at me, alarmed. Are you all right? Of course I am! Um, do you maybe need a ride home? It's all I can do to nod my head and crawl from under the table. I'm dimly aware that the whole restaurant is staring, obviously, and the website guy has to push me out the door and down the street and sort of arrange me in his car. He pulls up to the house. Can I help you up the steps? And I'm waving my hand, slurring my words, Oh, no! I'm perfectly fine! I stagger out of the car and walk up the steps like I'm drunk, and I make it into the house and crawl up to bed, and I lie there totally horrified.

  Okay. We are not quite ready for the real world yet. Noted. Will try again later. I pull the blankets over my head and hide.

  Summer is just beginning to give way to fall, and there are still lush lawns and thick ivy growing over the fence, the trees heavily green in the breezy September air. Home for a month now, I can finally be out of bed for long stretches at a time before my brain shuts down—a few hours in the morning, a few in the late afternoon, and most of the evening. Leaning on walls, the kitchen counter, the door, my family and friends, I begin to do the things that have gone undone.

  There are fewer visits from my babysitters, who have been keeping me company so I don't get lost in my moods. Soon, the babysitters won't come at all. I'll be left to my own devices and thoughts, thoughts that seem to be generated by my own mind rather than by some demon alter ego. I get dressed some days, brave the downstairs, and sometimes even go outside. Finally, I begin to write, a little bit most days. When I can write all day, and write decently, and remember what I've written, and wake up in the morning and do it again, I know I'm well.

  Some people with bipolar have only one major episode, or have several and then go into remission and live years without them ever coming back. My bipolar, ultra-rapid-cycle type I, is tough to treat, and the doctors have warned me that it will probably put me in the hospital again. But they can't say how often, or when it will happen next. So I have two choices: live in constant fear that the next episode is just around the corner, waiting to attack; or live as if by doing the right things to keep myself well, the episodes will never come again.

  And what if they don't? I can't picture it. I can't imagine life without the thrills, the flights and the crashes, the constant chaos that has ruled me, fascinated me, tormented me, since I was a child. I can't imagine reining in my mind, and my day-to-day pace. If I do, what will fill my days, what will inspire me, occupy my thoughts, drive my life, push me to go on?

  But I'm tired.

  The doctors offer me a paradox: tame the madness through surrender. Accept that it will be chained to me, pulling, always trying to get loose, for the rest of my life—but also know that if I respect the strength of the madness, I can live in some kind of peace. Only then will it, instead of me, tire out, and sleep.

  Much is lost to these two years of hospitalization. I remember very little, because madness erases memory, and so does electroshock. People tell funny stories about events, parties, trips, that I smile at, confused, because I don't have any memory of what they're talking about. I don't remember finishing my novel, and I barely remember going on tour. Apparently my thirtieth-birthday party was a roaring blast, but I argue with Jeff about whether I had a thirtieth-birthday party at all. I see the hurt cross his face when I look at him blankly after he reminds me of something we did together: special dinners, entire trips—he says they were wonderful—or times with family and friends, holidays, simple moments in our life. (However, he periodically makes things up and insists that they happened—Of course they did! You can't remember that?—and then he laughs so hard he cries when I panic, hopping up and down and saying, What? What? I did? I did not! I really did? We're on a plane and a movie I've wanted to see comes on—Hey, look! I cry, punching Jeff in the arm, that movie I wanted to see! And he glances up and shakes his head and sighs. But you already saw that! he says. Did not! Did not! But you did—and to this day I have no idea if he's just fucking with my head fo
r fun, or if I really did these things, went to these places, said these words. He finds it endlessly entertaining. Jerk.)

  For a few days after I get electroshock, every time, I forget how to get from my bedroom to the kitchen, and where I keep my computer, what book I'm working on, where the pile of pages on my desk came from, where my mother lives—two blocks from me—or how to get there. After electroshock, mostly you lose your short-term memory—what you did an hour ago, what you're doing right now. But the memory erased by madness is the memory one relies on to make sense of one's life. I have precise memories of conversations, crystal-clear recall of books I've read, and a blow-by-blow memory of everything that happened in one year, then nothing for the next two. I piece my life together from stories other people tell me, from journals and photos, from sitting with my head in my hands, searching for anything until I can get a dim picture of a face, a vague memory of something I know has happened but that I have to reconstruct from the wreckage of my mind.

  Memory is not all that's lost to madness. There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future and the choices you'll have. But there are some things gained. The years that have followed my decision to manage my mental illness have been challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes lovely. The life I live, even the person I am, is nearly unrecognizable compared to the life I had when madness was in control. There are things in common, obviously—my mental illness hasn't gone anywhere, and it still, to some extent, shapes my every day. But the constant effort to learn to live with it, and live well, has changed the way I see it, the way I handle it, and it's probably changed me.

  After the years in the hospital, I began to learn how to live the kind of life I want. These days, that life is becoming ever more real. But it took a while.

  Part IV

  Fall 2006

  Jeff sits in his office. I sit in mine. The fraying rope of our marriage stretches down the hall. Each of us stares out the window, looking in different directions, gazing at nothing, the early autumn evening slipping down. The leaves are just beginning to turn; the ivy that crawls up the side of our house is always first to go, and its tangled red and magenta covers the windows of our bedroom, where we sleep with our backs to each other, balancing at opposite edges of the bed. We lie there breathing, trying to pretend we're asleep, listening to the other one for sounds of life. We slip out of bed, moving carefully, trying not to wake the other one up, and creep back down the hall to our offices, where we sit motionless for hours, waiting for light.