Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  “I know.”

  “Maybe what we need to do right now is give up the idea that we can save her.”

  We meet at a health food store near the hospital after she has paid her good-bye visit to Sally. Robin is at the end of her rope. The dis-ease of New York has caught up with her, she tells me. “I stepped on a dead pigeon. I feel utterly nauseous.”

  I walk her to her car. It’s an infernal afternoon. Robin presses a handkerchief to her face, as if we are walking among corpses: the charnel breath of July in New York. A street-cleaning truck wobbles past, its scrub brush spinning along the curb, sending scraps of garbage flying.

  “I’m glad the three of us could spend a few hours together,” she says. “To be honest, I was nervous about seeing you. But we did okay. I wish I could explain what has happened to Sally, even if it means blaming myself or us. I wish we could say, ‘It was pesticides or a vaccine or something she ate…’”

  She unlocks her Honda. A small wooden bear with a flowing back and bemused expression hangs from the rearview mirror: one of Robin’s exquisitely wrought carvings.

  “I’ve learned to make these things without expectations,” she says in response to my appreciative comment. “It only took me twenty-five years to stop caring about whether people think it’s art.”

  She pulls out of her parking space, then stops and rolls down the window. “I’m choosing to be optimistic. I refuse to see this as an ending for Sally. Her thoughts are just traps, you know.”

  “I’ll call you at the slightest development,” I say.

  “I know you will. I’m trusting you, Michael.”

  She drives away.

  Keep your empathies to yourself. Avoid eye contact with patients. Never argue. Resist overidentifying with others, and maintain the illusion of privacy with fellow visitors as you would with picnickers on separate blankets in a crowded park. Make friends with members of the staff, if possible, and expect nothing in the way of reassurance from them in return.

  After seven or eight days, Pat and I have become old hands on the psych ward, initiates to its tacit code of behavior and arcane ways. The guard in the lobby who barred our entrance when Sally was in isolation nods cordially at us now; and upstairs, Rufus unlocks the door for us as a matter of course. We have slipped into the rhythm of the place, becoming familiar with patients and staff the way one becomes familiar with faces on a commuter train.

  Pat makes no comment on Robin’s departure. “The real mother,” she calls her. She is as dutiful with Sally as ever, holding her in the clear pool of her attention. She listens to her with eyes half-closed. Sally, in turn, treats Pat as if she alone understands the spectacular workings of her mind. “I’m wired for this. It’s automatic,” says Pat with a certain soldierly aplomb.

  We try to be gentle with each other, but the strain shows. “Do you think she’ll snap out of it?” I ask one too many times.

  Pat’s neutral answer disheartens me. Unreasonably, I want her to be more certain. Occasionally she jots something down in her notebook. “For my piece,” she explains.

  “Are you finding material in all this?” I ask with a hint of annoyance.

  “I don’t look at it that way,” she says, and disappears to phone her dancers, to set up another rehearsal.

  The days pass. We are a silent force in Sally’s room. I tell myself that a kind of stasis has been struck. Sally has not grown worse, she is in abeyance, safely confined in a “holding environment,” as the psychologist Donald Winnicott called it. Watching her in the straitjacket of her medication, I sometimes can’t tell if she is awake, and wonder if the two states are indistinguishable to her as well. She is in no-man’s-land, I think, what the Buddhists call bardo, the state between the death of one incarnation and the birth of the next, where the “disembodied mind” hovers, neither here nor on the other side.

  A rare breeze passes through the room, and Sally says that the air is “tickling” her like “a feather.” Her languor lifts, and then returns with its downward tow. She digs her fists in her eyes, smiles apropos of nothing, and then treats me to a fresh vituperative burst. Just when her mania appears to be definitively routed, it mounts a new potent charge. At such moments she seems to be clinging to it as to her very being. I imagine the mania as a separate living thing within her, a gnome, like Rumpelstiltskin, wily and insistent. It speaks to her in a whisper, promising riches, deviously finding a way to escalate and live on.

  I decide to bring her something to read. Books are out of the question: they would only drive home the fact that her concentration is shot. A magazine would be more suitable, I think. But which to choose? The one about celebrities is too grandiose; and the magazine about the travails and glories of being a woman seems cruel with its promotion of a perfection beyond Sally’s grasp. I settle on one devoted to food, and place it on her bedside table. Sitting there, its cover, which reads “Eleven Things You Can Do With Blueberries,” looks absurd.

  While Sally sleeps, I pass my time in the dayroom, sitting in my favorite spot under the reproduction of a painting by Chagall: a couple on a wooden bench, a picket fence in the foreground, and a shabby angel hovering over them under a full moon. Patients trickle in and out of the room, looking like photographs that didn’t quite get developed in the lab. It is the ward’s public square. A dark-haired woman enters in a wheelchair, pushed by a young rail-thin man in a Panama hat and white linen jacket. I recognize her from the medication line. On her lap are a blue cashmere throw and a small pile of books: Darkness Visible; The Bell Jar; An Unquiet Mind; Girl, Interrupted—the contemporary texts of mental disturbance. They park themselves in a corner, with the air of aristocrats who have been exiled to some backwater town. The man caresses her hand, maybe to reassure her. With a folded handkerchief he lightly pats the sweat on her forehead.

  The following day I catch sight of her in the hall, demanding that Nurse Phillips push her into the dayroom. “You can perfectly well get up and walk there on your own, Kara,” says Phillips, as if talking to a child. Furious, Kara propels herself down the hall, hand-powering the wheels like one who has been forced into the indignity of menial labor. I enter the dayroom behind her and sit down under the Chagall. The television is blaring. A visitor pores over the horoscopes in last week’s New York Post. After glancing about the room, Kara parks herself next to me. “They’ve put me on some kind of suicide watch,” she says as if making small talk that bores her. “It’s totally ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with me that a competent neurologist couldn’t get to the bottom of, if such a person exists in this godforsaken place.”

  Shielding her eyes from the sun, she looks out of the padlocked window at the stacked towers of the East Side. “I blacked out, and when I came to I couldn’t move my legs. As soon as my father comes, he’ll get me a real doctor and all this nonsense will be finished. He promised he’d come.”

  She acidly calls the psychiatrists “those superintendents of sanity,” discounting their medical expertise and demoting them to custodial status. Indicating one of the patients, she declares: “They’ve given her the wrong medication.” Of another, she says, “They don’t care what’s really going on inside him. It’s all about symptoms. Zero emotion.”

  Agreeing, I mention a paradox of psychiatry: mental illness is recognized by the patient’s distorted thoughts, but treatment is largely indifferent to their content. “You’re just like the rest of them,” Kara says, and she brusquely wheels herself to the opposite side of the dayroom.

  In her room, Sally wakes up and flips through the magazine I brought. “Yum. Blueberries.” I laugh, gratified, as she studies the glossy pictures. On my way out, I spot the young man with the Panama hat, finishing his own visit. Kara rises from her wheelchair and walks him to the door. She doesn’t seem to realize that she is on her feet, until Nurse Phillips, about to unlock the ward’s main entrance for him, says, “Maybe it’s time we put away the cripple’s chair.” As if on cue, Kara begins to teeter. With a hint of impatien
ce, Phillips grips her arm before she topples over.

  “Come on, sweetheart. You’re not going to get what you’re after by pretending you can’t walk.”

  With Phillips’s assistance, Kara limps back to her room like an injured athlete.

  The next day, she wobbles fawnlike into the dayroom on her own, clutching a notebook with a pen jammed in its spiral binding. A triumph. Her mother is waiting for her, along with the young man with the Panama hat, who, I now realize, is her brother. He seems more captivated than ever by her strict beauty: her cracked lips and fair skin and burnished raven hair. In a bright bristling voice, her mother describes an art exhibition she saw earlier in the day. “Wonderful work, by a woman no older than you, Kara. Disturbing, but in a positive way.”

  Kara announces that she feels chilled. She rises to go to her room, but her legs buckle under her and she flops back into her seat. Her brother tries to help her up, but she pulls away from him. I have the irrational urge to stand in for her father, who has failed to show up. I could do for her what I have been unable to do for Sally. But what would that mean? Catching my eye, Kara turns away with majestic apathy, and then buries her head in her hands.

  When I learn that she has been discharged, I ask Phillips if she was able to leave the ward walking.

  “I can’t tell you that, Mr. Greenberg,” she says. “You should know better than to ask.”

  In the morning, Aaron phones me from Ohio. “I feel like I’m in one of those scorched-earth movies about the future. Everything decent has been destroyed. You realize how powerless we are in the face of some asshole’s decision to turn a quick profit simply because he can.”

  He is at the airport, on his way back to college in upstate New York.

  This time I try to give it to him straight. I hear the words “crack-up” and “hospital” come from my mouth, and realize that he thinks I am describing an accident involving a car.

  “No, no, the crack-up was in Sally’s head,” I say. “It happened from one day to the next. I don’t know how to describe it. She just fell away.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “She’s in a psychiatric hospital.”

  I sense him scrabbling to get a handle on this. “Are you telling me my sister is insane? Who decides such a thing? I don’t even know what the fuck it means!”

  “No one decides. It’s not a decision.”

  “This is such bullshit.”

  “I keep hoping that’s the case.”

  “Is Mom there?”

  “She was. She had to go back to Vermont.”

  “Did you think I couldn’t take it, Pops?” He has figured out that I kept the truth from him when he phoned a couple of days ago from his motel in Youngstown. “You could have let me help you.”

  Pat is sitting at the dining room table writing in her notebook. I read over her shoulder: The voices inside the dancers’ heads. Whispering to them from behind. Relentless.

  “Aaron, what you’re doing is important. I don’t want this to stop your life the way it has stopped mine.”

  “I’m changing my flight,” he says. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

  He arrives at the hospital late in the afternoon, six feet two, round-faced, handsome, bursting into Sally’s room with his playful rolling stride.

  “Scooch, you look fantastic,” he says, using his pet name for her. “What are you doing in this place?”

  He comes laden with presents—the New Yorker, Newsweek, People, Vogue—the very magazines I had pondered over and decided not to bring.

  “Did Father tell you why he locked me up?”

  Aaron envelops her in his arms, loving and offhand, hiding his distress.

  He beckons me out into the hall. He looks thinner than the last time I saw him, and is cultivating a soft uneven beard. “I thought I knew her,” he says, a hint in his voice of one who has been deliberately deceived. The idea of his sister behaving without a trace of rational intention is unfathomable to him, as it was to me at first. In a single stroke her identity has changed; and by extension ours, as a family, has changed too. I detect in him the same question I keep asking: Where has she gone?

  Horrified, he describes a patient he encountered while on his way to Sally’s room: a round, wild-haired, gap-toothed woman devouring a mango.

  “Fabulosa,” I say.

  “You know her?”

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time here.”

  “This can’t be good for Sally, identifying with these people, I mean. She’s not like Fabulosa, Pops. This isn’t the crowd she should be told she belongs to. Think about it, by putting her here, we’re telling her she’s crazy.”

  He drapes an arm around me. “You look like shit.” Then, lowering his voice, he repeats my own dashed belief that psychedelic drugs are the cause of Sally’s altered state. “I’ve seen people flip out after bad trips at school. It shakes them up. But they come back.”

  When I tell Aaron that I’ve already looked into this possibility, he is unconvinced. “You didn’t get to the bottom of it,” he says. “If she took acid, she has every reason not to come clean to you about it. She’s afraid of how angry you’ll be; and she wouldn’t want to rat out her friends. She’ll feel freer to confide in me. Watch.”

  And with that he goes back into her room without me, carefully closing the door.

  Aaron the rescuer. I am moved by his impulse to prove that Sally doesn’t really belong here.

  I spot Dr. Mason coming out of the staff room.

  “Has Sally been tested for substance abuse?” I ask her.

  “She had a toxicology screen, yes, Mr. Greenberg. On being admitted. It’s standard procedure. She was completely clean.”

  When Aaron emerges from Sally’s room, he throws his arms around me.

  “Just as I thought. She dropped acid, Pops. She was out with a bunch of friends, trying to keep up with them. Don’t let on that I told you, she swore me to secrecy. She’s afraid you’ll never forgive her. ‘Father will hate me for lying,’ she says. ‘Father wants to put an end to everything. He’s so sad. Do you think I’ve made him sad?’ She calls you ‘Father’ now, for some reason. It’s a little freaky. You’ve got to talk to her more, Pops, try not to show how worried you are. The important thing is, she’s not insane. It’s just a bad trip. A very bad trip.”

  He embraces me again, taller, stronger than me, the body bequeathed to him by his mother’s Swedish stock.

  “You’re crying, Pops.”

  “Am I?”

  He looks amazed. “I never saw that before.”

  We go into Sally’s room. “She’s dead to the world,” he whispers. “That’s for the good. She’ll probably be more herself tomorrow. Can you talk to the doctors about all the drugs they’re giving her? They seem as bad for her as what landed her here. I wish they’d just give it a chance to run its course.”

  I break the news to him of my conversation with Dr. Mason.

  “It’s not possible. They must have the wrong results.” He pauses, stricken. “She was so convincing. I don’t see how she could have made it up.” He takes me through the details of her “trip”: the playground and the Sunshine Cafe, the potentially fatal certainty that she could stop moving cars—the same simple yet fantastical events that I have gone over time and again in my mind.

  “Everything she told you is true,” I say. “Except for the acid. She didn’t take anything.”

  “Why would she lie to me?”

  “She probably doesn’t think of it as a lie. She may have thought she was keeping you safe—hard as that may be to believe. She figures we can’t handle the truth. Her truth.”

  “She’s right, I can’t.”

  I can feel him gauging how implicated he is in Sally’s breakdown, racing through the stages I too raced through but with a sibling’s tilt. Was he too cruel to her when she was a child? “I teased her. I made fun of her weird ways. How can I be sure I wasn’t the one who pushed her over?”

  “
You did what every brother does to his younger sister,” I assure him.

  We go into the dayroom, where patients in various stages of disintegration and recovery wander about.

  “We can’t allow her to belong to this.”

  “We don’t look much different,” I joke.

  But we do look different, and with Aaron next to me the dayroom feels outlandish and raw. Fabulosa, with a purple do-rag around her head, acts as if she is in love with Aaron, mooning over him and laughing. Mitchell, a young man whose ambition to become a librarian was interrupted by schizophrenia, winks significantly at us, then apologizes for the impingement. “I didn’t mean to menace you,” he says. The patients ignore each other for the most part, but with a gentleness that seems connected in some way to their split-open selves. Aaron notices this too. “They live together, yet apart.”

  I urge him to tell me more about Youngstown, and a certain excitement creeps back into his voice. “I feel like I’m just kicking into gear, Pops. While Sally—” He stops, catching himself. “I feel relieved that it’s not me in this place, and I feel guilty for feeling relieved. I wish I knew what to do for her.”

  “Go back upstate. Write your paper. I can’t wait to read it.” I promise him that we’ll stay in close touch; Sally won’t be on the ward forever. “They don’t hold patients for very long nowadays.”

  In the evening I am standing in front of the supermarket on Hudson Street waiting for my brother Steve. It is time again to supply him with the eggs and frozen vegetables and canned soups and stews that he requires to survive. We have been meeting at this market since our father died two years ago, and it is with effort that I banish from my mind the image of Aaron meeting Sally in this manner thirty years from now, her maintenance one of his routine chores, the way Steve’s is one of mine.