Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  “They think I’m crazy…did you tell them I’m crazy? Were you so afraid, Father, you told them to lock me up?”

  She means to sound indignant but her voice is stifled and wobbly like a warped LP. Pat and I look at each other, stunned by the change. An immense apathy flows out of her. Her head falls back on the mattress. Her eyes close against her will, like dropped blinds.

  “They stole my words,” she says.

  When we ask her what she means, she purses her lips and gives a sly, irritated laugh, a glimmer of her psychotic self that makes my stomach quail. Clearly she is in the throes of a second metamorphosis, every bit as violent as the one that brought her here. She sits up, the hectic glitter in her eyes wavering in and out of focus as if some battle for supremacy over her being were raging behind them.

  I repeatedly try to break through to her, to establish some point of agreement between us (any point would do, an observation about the weather, or about the sky outside the gated window looming over her bed), each failure stabbing me as if for the first time.

  Pat does better, but not by much. “Have you been sleeping, Sally?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure,” comes the delayed, foreign reply.

  After a while, we both stop trying, the three of us sitting in the room like passengers in the compartment of a train. I hold her hand. “Sally, we’re going to take care of you. You’re going to be okay.” She gives a muffled laugh that abruptly turns into a groan.

  A nurse comes in to take her temperature and blood pressure. The room is so narrow that to make space for him Pat and I have to sidle over to the door.

  “Ninety-eight-point-six,” he says as the thermometer emits its little digital beeps. “Perfectly normal.”

  When he leaves, Pat decides to launch into action. From under the bed she retrieves the night bag we left with Nurse Phillips yesterday afternoon. It’s obviously been searched. “They took the dental floss,” Pat says. “And the lotion, probably because it was in a glass bottle. I should have known.” Sally’s hospital gown is twisted around her, half the buttons unsnapped. The plan is to get her showered and into a pair of fresh pajamas. Pat coaxes her out of bed and leads her to the bathroom, shooing me out of the room.

  Spilling into the hall from the room next door is the Hasidic family we saw in the lobby. There are at least eight of them, the women in long skirts, their shaved heads covered in ritualistic wigs and scarves, the men in payess or side curls and black hats. They’re all eating from kosher plates they’ve brought, with the exception of the patient, their shoteh, who is poring over a black leather-bound Torah with a hollow intensity that reminds me of Sally with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. His family surrounds him like a protecting herd: the curse of madness collectively borne by the tribe. Or so I imagine. I feel a surge of admiration and envy—for their solidarity, their numbers, their devotion to one another in the face of this bewildering storm. If only Pat and I could form such a phalanx around Sally! I nod to one of the men. He shoots me a sharp, disapproving look as if I’ve done something to harm him, and turns quickly, almost disgustedly, away.

  Farther along the hall I come across the Quiet Room, easily identifiable even without the nameplate on its door. “Isolation.” A tiny, fluorescent-lit cell, the walls padded with beige plastic foam, a single rubber-sheathed mattress on the floor. Shadowless, efficient, numbingly bland—a mockery of the Gothic chamber I had imagined.

  A janitor is scrubbing what appear to be words off the floor, scrawled there apparently with a felt-tip marker. Nurse Phillips passes by, keys jangling. She smiles at me and continues on without pausing.

  During the next few days I will piece together (from nurses, the attending psychiatrist, and in a fragmented way from Sally herself) what transpired after we left her in the ward that first night. Clutching the pen that the nurses had permitted her to have, Sally furiously began writing in her notebook. At the same time, the doctor ordered her first dose of haloperidol, a powerful narcoleptic widely used in the most acute cases of psychosis. Haloperidol is a direct descendant of chlorpromazine, the ur-drug of the psychopharmacological age. Its psychiatric value is its ability to induce indifference. (“The chemical lobotomy,” psychiatrists called it when it was introduced in 1952, referring to the procedure that it rendered obsolete: the severing of nerve fibers in the brain’s frontal lobes with a household ice pick inserted through the eye sockets.) And if excessive conviction, grandiosity, and fixed irrational ideas are among the symptoms of our most potent delusions, then indifference would seem to be a natural corrective, if not cure.

  Indifference, however, isn’t the only effect of these drugs—they also rupture much of the process of sequential thought. On chlorpromazine, the poet Robert Lowell was unable to build a three-letter word on a Scrabble board or follow the count of balls and strikes in a televised baseball game. Sally would experience a similar intellectual paralysis. Yet the drugs are necessary, the only way to wrench one from the grip of acute psychosis. In prescribing haloperidol for Sally, the doctor was responding to a medical emergency. Peter C. Whybrow, in his book, A Mood Apart, describes patients with “fulminating illness” like Sally’s “who had dropped dead from manic exhaustion.”

  As it turns out, she was nearer to the abyss than we knew. Haloperidol blocks the production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose excessive presence in the brain was responsible (in purely chemical terms) for her distorted behavior. The brain’s initial response to this blockade, however, was to produce more dopamine, faster (an attempt to compensate for the sudden stifling jolt), so that in a very short time Sally’s mania shot higher, catapulting her to levels of psychosis she might never have reached without medication. She filled the pages of her notebook and continued writing—on the floor, the walls, the door. Thoughts rushed at her with unsustainable speed. But “thoughts” is the wrong word. They were more like explosions, as Sally would later describe them, visionary bursts in which the interconnectedness—the oneness—of the world was instantly revealed. The hospital became the place where genius is hospitably housed, the nurses the nurturers, the ward The Word…Zen Buddhists speak of satori, the rare instance when a novice is struck with the totality of the world in one. But what struck Sally was a kind of anti-satori: her instant of epiphany shattered at once into chaos, only to reassemble and self-destruct again.

  After crushing the tip of her pen, she ran out into the hall, her urge to impart, to enlighten, propelling her in every conceivable direction. She roused sleeping patients out of their beds, gripped them by the shoulders, led them staggering back into the hall. We are components of a single creative force, she tried to tell them, natural geniuses because this force is the embodiment of genius. When she opened her mouth to speak, however, what came out were not words, but a series of cracked, almost hesitant cries.

  Responding to the disturbance, the night crew locked her in isolation, where she remained until the haloperidol successfully quashed the dopamine in her brain—a process that took about thirty hours.

  When I return to the room Sally is freshly showered, wearing the silk fuchsia pajamas my mother gave her last month for her fifteenth birthday. Her head is on Pat’s shoulder, her hair shiny and wet.

  “I don’t know who I am,” she says.

  “Did you ever know?” asks Pat.

  She shakes her head, No.

  “Then nothing’s changed.”

  At 7:30 P.M. she is summoned by a nurse. Medication time. She gets up and walks into the hall. Another shock: two days ago she was coiled and lithe, wrestling Pat and me to a draw. Now she walks with a Parkinsonian shuffle, tentative and stiff. (A side effect of the haloperidol, I will learn; in A Mood Apart, Whybrow describes how dopamine helps drive the motor system and determines the fluidity with which we move our arms and legs. With her dopamine blocked, Sally’s limbs have become like wood.)

  She gets in line with the other patients in front of a booth where the meds are stored. A hushed decorum prevails; conversation, when i
t occurs, is conducted in a barely audible murmur. Along with Pat and me a few visitors are still hanging around. We give each other a wide berth, avoiding eye contact, tacitly agreeing not to pry. We have something in common that we’re not eager to share. And what would we talk about if we were so inclined? There are no emblems of objective illness in the psych ward—no oxygen tanks or IV bags, no cardiac monitors or surgical wounds. Symptoms feel like intimate secrets; causes are elusive, cures unknown.

  A dark, attractive woman in a wheelchair is in line in front of Sally. When her turn comes she stands without difficulty, swallows her meds, chats with the nurse. Gently, coaxingly, the nurse suggests she try walking to her room on her own. On hearing this, the woman’s legs immediately turn to jelly and she slumps back into her wheelchair, her head in her hands in a gesture of sorrow so complete it seems to obey its own natural law.

  Sally is handed her pills in a paper cup with ridges like a chef’s hat. She takes them in front of the nurse and moves on.

  “The halls are a maze,” she says as we head back to her room. “Isn’t that a-mazing?”

  At eight o’clock we’re politely told to leave; visiting hours are over. We ask Sally if there’s anything she wants us to bring tomorrow. “Artichokes,” she says. “And chocolate.”

  She climbs stiffly into bed, her mania wriggling under the surface like a cat in a zippered bag.

  The Hasidim are in the lobby. To my surprise, the one who gave me a dirty look on the ward motions me over.

  “What I’m about to say is not against your daughter. She’s a friendly girl and I’m sure she means no harm. But she is disturbing my brother’s peace of mind. In my religion, you see, contact with strange women is prohibited.”

  His brother’s “peace of mind”? Has he forgotten where we are? I don’t like his reference to Sally as a “strange woman,” as if she were tainted, a she-devil distracting his brother from his righteous path. Nor do I like his use of the term “my religion,” excluding me from a practice that I too was brought up in, having spent eight years reading the five books of Moses in Hebrew as part of my daily diet in elementary school.

  “How did she disturb him?”

  She invaded his brother’s room, he explains. She put her hands on him and forced him to look in her eyes. “She has no right to talk to him about what he believes. My brother is a gifted man. He has achieved devaykah,” he adds cryptically, “the state of constant communion with God. Tell your daughter to leave him alone!”

  “I’m sure the staff is equipped to handle these matters,” I say curtly, and excuse myself, aware of his family watching us by the door.

  On reflection, however, I understand where the Hasid is coming from: he has no choice but to believe his brother is holy; the biblical alternative is to be outcast from God. When Moses announced the penalties for disobeying God’s laws, madness was first, before blindness and poverty, before the death of children, before war. Like the Hasid, I try to improvise my own area of protection around Sally. But I have little faith to draw from, either in medicine or God.

  Putting his faith in the former, James Joyce took his daughter Lucia to an unending succession of doctors, certain that he would find her cure. One doctor gave her seawater to drink. Another ordered injections with a serum of bovine glands. In 1934 Joyce took her to see Carl Jung at his sanitarium near Zurich. To subject Lucia to psychoanalysis, concluded Jung, would be catastrophic. Successful analysis required the wounded sanity of the neurotic; it was useless in the face of psychosis. Instead, he was determined to analyze her father. Joyce’s anima, or unconscious psyche, said Jung, was too identified with Lucia for him to accept that she was mad; to do so, thought Jung, would be for Joyce to admit that he himself was psychotic.

  It was a questionable opinion, but it didn’t contradict what Joyce himself had come to believe: that in some ineffable way he was responsible for Lucia’s condition. Jung compared father and daughter to two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling, the other diving.

  Yet the deeper Lucia fell, the more adamantly Joyce insisted that she was mentally sound—no madder, in fact, than he was. “Her mind is as clear and unsparing as lightning,” he assured his son Giorgio. “She has the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove.”

  Joyce removed her from Jung’s clinic and looked elsewhere for her cure. To no avail. Four years later he was telling Samuel Beckett that her mental distortions were caused by an infection in her teeth. “She’s not a raving lunatic,” he insisted, “just a poor child who tried to do too much, to understand too much.”

  I spend a fitful night on Bank Street, shuttling between dread for Sally’s future and hope that somehow everything will be restored.

  PART TWO

  When Pat and I get to the hospital the next day, Robin is curled up with Sally, enveloping her on the narrow bed, the two of them apparently sleeping. Mother and child, a perfect tableau—mother six feet tall, willowy thin, pliant in a way that is immediately familiar to me. My first reaction is relief: the sight of them in each other’s arms dispels the anxiety I’d been feeling about Robin’s response to Sally in her current state. They appear to have slipped right into an unforeseen communion. Their slumberous breathing strikes a fairy-tale note of contentment.

  “Like pals at a sleepover party,” whispers Pat with a hint of resentment. She hesitates at the doorway, an involuntary flinch: the stepmother instantly overruled by Robin’s biological assertion.

  We fit ourselves into the tiny room and stand against the wall like the last two people in a lineup. The air-conditioning unit in the ward broke down in the middle of the night. Within minutes we are glossy with sweat. Beyond the gated window, the noonday sun in its haze looks like an egg laid by some giant bird. Below, the East River churns under the elevated road.

  Their sleeping child

  Among tygers wild.

  When we were high school sweethearts, almost exactly Sally’s age, Robin and I used to lie together in a similar manner, clutching each other for hours in her parents’ apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, sheltered in our adolescent cocoon.

  Robin opens her eyes. “Michael, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t realize you were here.” She peers drowsily at us from the bed, acknowledging Pat with a brief smile, meant to convey solidarity, I think, but falling short. “I jumped in my car at four this morning and drove straight through. Five hours. I couldn’t stay away any longer, I had to see my daughter, our daughter, Michael, I was so afraid for her, I didn’t know what to expect. After our telephone conversations, and the incident with the police and those horrible knives they had to hide…I thought she had changed shape or something. But just look at her, she’s as beautiful and sweet as ever.”

  She indicates Sally, lying on the bed, not at rest so much as removed from consciousness, as if she was stopped in her tracks by a stun gun.

  “She’s on a great deal of medication,” I explain, thinking of her scorched exaltations of a few days ago, the writing on the isolation room floor, the entire monstrous spectacle that Robin was spared.

  Careful not to disturb Sally, she climbs off the bed and slips into her sandals. With Pat she goes out to the hall toward the dayroom, the large common area where patients and visitors pass the time. “I’ll be right behind you,” I say, remaining in Sally’s room to do nothing more than listen to her breathing, and to ponder the undeniable mass of her on the bed and her shaken ephemeral fragility. A numbness comes over me that is like her numbness, I imagine, her knocked-out sleep, her distance from me and from herself—this hammered slumber that, I try to convince myself, is what will bring her back to me.

  In the dayroom, Robin and Pat are making stabs at small talk. Pat invokes Sally’s “willpower” Robin predicts that she will emerge “renewed, stronger than ever.” Joining them, I point out that tomorrow the holiday weekend will have ended, the staff will be operating at full tilt, and Sally will finally receive their full attention. “We may still find a si
mple explanation for what has happened. A trigger.”

  A man shuffles over to the snack table in the middle of the room, tears open a candy bar with his teeth and washes it down with fruit punch from a quart-sized tin can. Two patients argue over which video to insert in the VCR. A nurse named Rufus arrives, large-bodied and supremely bored. He confiscates the videos and switches on the television to a twenty-four-hour news channel: presidential candidate Bob Dole speedwalking down a Midwestern Main Street in a Fourth of July parade, flanked by screaming fire engines, marching bands, and grizzled contingents of other surviving veterans of the nation’s wars.

  Rufus mutes the sound, refusing eye contact with the patients. Like Nurse Phillips, he wears the union pin for local 1199 prominently on his uniform’s lapel—Service Employees International, the definitive badge of his separateness from this place, of his independence, his distinction. Your craziness can’t get inside me, it seems to be saying. Now what about my pension?

  In a corner of the dayroom I spot the Hasidic patient, the shoteh, with his entourage. He looks more agitated than he did yesterday, his lips cracked and trembling, his eyes swollen with an indefatigable intensity. He clutches his black clothbound Torah on his knees and fiddles worriedly with the knotted fringes of his tzitzis—the garment that ultra-Orthodox Jews wear under their shirts as a spiritual version of a bulletproof vest. I am thrown back to my grandmother’s kitchen as members of his family unpack their sanctified food: the aroma of kasha, barley soup, brisket of beef blending with the suety odor of the ward. Their shoteh sits pointedly apart, shunning them, praying in a feverish whisper. An older, stocky woman in a head scarf begs him to accept a plate of food. When he refuses, she places it under his chair and sits down beside him. His brother looks helpless and crushed. Catching my eye, he glowers at me with reinvigorated condemnation. I imagine the picture I must make with my two shiksas: Robin with her elongated Klimt-like figure and eggshell-blue eyes; Pat with her schoolboy haircut and balletic posture that must look to him like the very embodiment of pagan pride. His is a battle to multiply, to outlast, and hasten the return of the messiah. If he knew of my boyhood years studying Torah, he would despise me even more as an apikoros, the worst kind of traitor because I was brought up to believe and then willingly turned away from God.