Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  To me she says: “We’ll spend about forty minutes alone together, then, if it feels right, I’ll ask you to join us. Okay?”

  “Of course.”

  After about half an hour, Lensing reappears, inviting me into the sanctum: a large shabby south-facing room with a ripped couch on which Sally is stretching herself and yawning, soporific yet restless.

  “Your daughter is a pleasure to work with, Mr. Greenberg.”

  They giggle like girlfriends sharing a private joke, and I marvel at the instant rapport Lensing seems to have struck with her. Maybe she is the shaman-therapist I’ve been hoping for.

  “Sally and I have agreed upon a goal: for her to be in shape to return to school in September. We have five, maybe six weeks. Right now, for her to try to go to school would be like running a marathon with a broken leg. So that’s our first piece of good fortune: we’re lucky it’s summer.”

  Four days a week I ferry Sally to the behavioral clinic seven and a half miles up island from Bank Street. Lensing isn’t always as expansive as she was during Sally’s first appointment. Sometimes she’s abrupt, her expression pinched, her eyes dark from lack of sleep behind her professorial glasses. A vague air of dissolution hangs over her. Her invitations to me to join them near the end of their sessions grow increasingly rare. I feel unreasonably spurned when she neglects to say hello to me or even to meet my eye. And I become almost as interested in her moods as I am in Sally’s, craning my head to catch a glimpse of her as Sally steps into their room—Lensing slumped in her therapist’s chair, slightly unkempt, pasty under the punitive fluorescent light, yet sharply attractive.

  When she does beckon to me I feel a grateful flutter, entering with my hands held high against the sunlight which hits one in the face in that room like a thrown pie. Lensing occupies the only chair, so I am obliged to prop Sally’s feet on my lap and sit down on the couch beside her. Refreshingly informal. Lensing doesn’t pretend there’s such a thing as a science of insanity; she doesn’t lord it over me as if she harbors some secret expert power. There are no absolutes, no final authorities, she seems to be saying. We’re all in the dark.

  In response to my continuous anxiety about Sally’s extreme medicated state, she says in her flawless, German-inflected English: “It’s still a challenge for her to concentrate. No question about it. Nothing’s perfect. But nothing is forever, either. Mania is…” Stumped for the right word, she breaks into a flurry of hand gestures as if trying to grab hold of some elusive object flying about in front of her nose. “…stubborn. Mania is stubborn. It hangs in there, it lays low. I’m no fan of these knockout drugs. I’ll do everything I can to wean her from them. It’s part of the plan.”

  Then she reports a setback: lithium, element number three on the periodic table and the most common mood stabilizer for manic-depressives; lithium, the plain gray salt that is the lightest solid element on earth, with its three electrons and cost of five dollars for a month’s supply; lithium doesn’t work for Sally.

  “This is not a catastrophe,” says Lensing. “It doesn’t work for thirty percent of manic-depressives.”

  As an alternative, she is increasing Sally’s dosage of valproic acid, an anticonvulsant that is sometimes effective for mania for reasons that are unknown.

  “If it works as well as I hope, she won’t have to swallow the bombs anymore—haloperidol, prolixin, we’ll taper them off.”

  As a supplement, she’ll supply us with tranquilizers, to be taken as needed, during bouts of insomnia and restlessness.

  “I’m psychotic, psychotic, psychotic,” says Sally.

  “It’s not an identity,” says Lensing sternly.

  I imagine sitting with her in a different room somewhere, without the sunshine and the torn couch and the dented radiator cover, and without Sally and the constraints of the fifty-minute hour. In the imaginary room, I am trying to charm her. Sally is forgotten. The image sharpens, and I have trouble getting rid of it, though I know I’m on shaky ground. In an effort to establish a parity of misfortune between us, I think: she’s unhappy, lonely, brokenhearted. She gives more of herself than others do; she has bad luck with men. I work out in my mind that someone in her family was psychotic. It’s the reason why she was drawn to psychiatry, to do battle against madness. What does she think of me, this repository of my family’s woes?

  I stop myself. My daughter’s therapist! I tell myself I am engaged in a convoluted transference: if Lensing can heal Sally, she will be my healer too.

  It is time for Robin to return to Vermont again. George and the bakery beckon. “My daily bread,” she says with a yawn.

  “We played Go Fish. Sort of,” she says after her last afternoon with Sally. “Did you ever hear of idiot compassion? You destroy yourself by entering the suffering of others, while doing nothing useful for them.”

  Thin to begin with, she has lost weight, becoming gaunt, with deep half-moon bruises under her eyes, though she claims to have napped every day with Sally, and to have slept “like a fallen tree” at night at her aunt’s.

  “We’re at opposite ends of the energy field, you and I are, Michael. That’s why we sought each other out. But we couldn’t complete the promise of our polar selves, we couldn’t find the wholeness we craved. Maybe Sally is the result of this failure. In the karmic sense, I mean.”

  With a prolonged limp embrace she bids good-bye to Sally.

  August stretches before us like a desert we haven’t the stomach to cross. Thirty-six days until school begins, a date that seems to belong to an unimaginable future. I worry, as Aaron warned me to, about the reaction of Sally’s classmates to her altered self—the derision, the cruelty, the primal distancing that is a universal response to madness.

  Sally’s irate euphoria ignites without warning, in the middle of the night or at one in the afternoon. Tearing out of an unreachable stupor, she berates me for my ignorance, my fear, my helplessness, my attempt to control her, to keep her down. “I feel locked up,” she says, and she doesn’t only mean in the apartment—to Pat, she confesses a powerful desire to rip herself open as if she were zippered inside a fur suit.

  Pat and I live in a state of red alert, monitoring her moods, her tone of voice, registering the urgency of her footsteps when she paces—at one moment her terrible indifference, at the next her ornate fantastical plans. We pass on observations to each other in a kind of shorthand, like spies. A constant wave of anxiety runs through me. If I fall asleep, I immediately wake up again, as if I am prohibited from losing consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time.

  After one of her explosions, she curls up next to me on the couch, red-faced and weeping.

  “I need surgery,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “In my mouth.”

  The television has become the new soundtrack of our household, a frayed chorus of canned laughter, advertisements, and snowy applause, the screen flitting from one shot to the next like a traffic light that has gone out of control. Lying in front of the set, Sally seems to have decomposed. Her incapacitation enrages me. If only there was a middle ground between her explosions and this nullifying slumber. How to contain her, to activate her, to live with her now?

  With election day creeping closer, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole appear more frequently on the screen, in varying degrees of damage control and ingratiation.

  Dole, in California, is complaining about the Endangered Species Act: “I know all this is very important, the fairy shrimp and the kangaroo rat, but people are important too.”

  The audience cheers.

  Abruptly I switch the television off.

  Sally doesn’t make a peep of protest, and I realize with a new stab of pity that though she was staring at the screen she wasn’t watching it.

  We follow the Wellness Contract as we would the instructions for some unassembled piece of furniture that has arrived in the mail. Julian was right—it gives us a way of measuring Sally’s progress. What had seemed cartoonishly simple when w
e drew it up with Julian now feels intricate and complex. It would be nice to have a friend visit, even for fifteen minutes, as step one of the contract stipulates, but Sally doesn’t appear to want one, and Pat and I are reluctant to allow news of her crack-up to get around.

  So we have jumped directly to privilege number two: “trips outside in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty minutes on my own.” This allows Sally to sit on the stoop of our building and smoke her cigarettes, a habit she acquired in the hospital, and one that under normal circumstances we would insist she give up. In comparison with Sally’s other woes, however, it seems of little importance.

  During one of these cigarette breaks, a half hour passes before I notice that she has not come back upstairs. I rip through the streets trying to track her down—to the river’s edge, where she spent so many hours before entering the hospital, and to the Sunshine Cafe, where the owner who threw us out that terrible day is hunched over the counter reading the sex advice column in the Free Press.

  I finally catch sight of her at the corner of Hudson and Morton Streets, staring placidly into the window of a children’s bookstore called Time of Wonder.

  “Sally, were you running away?”

  The question seems to perplex her. “To where?” I think I hear her ask. Clasping her hands in front of her, she peers at the images of Babar and Celeste, and the Old Lady and Zephir the monkey in their idyllic kingdom.

  We ponder them together for a while, their comforting emanations of goodness. Then I take her hand, drawing her away, past the playground on Bleecker Street, where she insists on pausing to take in the squealing delight of a group of children running through a rising arch of water pouring from a sprinkler planted in the ground.

  At home, she puts on water for coffee. It takes her an eternity to raise the mug to her lips, and then it slips from her hand, crashing against the tile on the kitchen floor.

  “I can’t hold on to anything,” she mutters. And this is true. At Dr. Lensing’s suggestion, we have assigned her the chore of washing the dishes, and the shattering of dinner plates, saucers, ash trays, has become another element in the soundtrack of our apartment. The dishes that survive Sally’s attention we rewash when she is napping, to remove overlooked streaks of food. Her eye for details, so keen at one time, has vanished. It’s as if she has been rendered half blind, groping her way through a chemically imposed carelessness.

  Unable to bear waiting any longer for Sally to get out from under her pitiless ball of fire, I try to see the world as she does, and swallow a full dose of her medication.

  It’s around ten in the morning, and I am sitting in the living room with Sally, when it begins to hit me—in waves. I feel dizzy and far away, as if I am about to fall from a great height but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice, so that the rush of the fall itself is indefinitely deferred. The air feels watery and thick, until finally I am neck-deep in a swamp through which it is possible to move only with the greatest of effort, and then only a few feet at a time.

  I pick up the New York Times, which I had bought earlier in the morning:

  Scientists studying a meteorite that fell to Earth from Mars have identified organic compounds and certain minerals that they conclude are evidence of primitive life on early Mars.

  I read the sentence several times, so baffled by what the words “primitive,” “meteorite,” and “Mars” have to do with one another, that I start again at the first word, determined to make sense of it. By then, however, I’m lost, flailing away in my head, unable to gain any momentum of thought or meaning. The frustration reminds me of what I felt as a boy when my older brother would press his foot to my chest, holding me down. This goes on for what seems like an hour, but when I glance at the clock—and it takes another thirty seconds to read it—I see that only a couple of minutes have elapsed.

  I am sitting on the couch, while Sally is at the table tapping her right foot, an expenditure of energy that seems profligate and amazing. So this is what it is to be on meds, I think dimly. Robert Lowell, describing the effects of chlorpromazine, wrote: “I could hardly swallow my breakfast because I so dreaded the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bed making were more upsetting than the physical…My head ached…I felt my languor lift, then descend again.”

  To block dopamine in a brain such as mine, which manufactures more or less normal amounts of the stuff, is different from blocking it in a manic brain such as Sally’s or Lowell’s. But I have the powerful sense of understanding something of what she is going through. On some fundamental level I have, like Sally, been barred from experiencing the impact of being fully alive in the world.

  I rise from the couch to prove to myself that I am able to, take three steps across the room, and then, yawning uncontrollably, rush to sit down again. I make an effort to care about the simplest things—preparing lunch for Sally, returning a phone call—but an ungraspable panic comes over me, a panic of indifference, if such a thing is possible, as if I have been relegated to a bit part in the drama of my own existence and, moreover, have missed my cue to step onstage.

  Gazing at Sally, I feel as if my impotence is indistinguishable from hers. I understand exactly what she meant when she said to Dr. Mason, “I feel like I’m packed in foam rubber.” And I understand the allure to her of cigarettes: the stimulating flare of the struck match, the raw tingle of the smoke when it hits the lungs, the quickened heart beat when the blood vessels contract, and the narcotic lift of the nicotine. It offers its instant of actuality, of existence sharpened and in focus.

  Later, when the meds have worn off and I have time to see Sally in the context of my few hours in that numbed world, I realize that the drugs release her not from her cares, but from caring itself. For caring, exorbitant caring—about the meaning of a passing glance from a stranger, the look in a news broadcaster’s eye on television, the fixed fired thoughts in one’s head—is the psychotic’s curse. (“Skinless” is a therapist’s term for those who cannot tolerate stimulation.) “To depart from reason with the firm conviction that one is following it,” reads a definition of madness from an eighteenth century encyclopedia. And indeed, inordinate conviction is the chief warning sign of our delusions. For the patient to burn low, to be half asleep, to take no notice, is the medical goal—for the patient to live in a kind of emotional cordon sanitaire. Psychosis is the opposite of indifference. Indifference, therefore, would seem to be its logical cure.

  Now, however, while I am still under the boot of Sally’s medication, the phone rings, and I have to call upon buried reserves of energy to answer it.

  I hear myself say “Hello,” like someone with a pillow over his face.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, but it’s after eleven, mon frère.”

  “Jean-Paul,” I manage to say, recognizing the voice of the movie producer with whom I left a message several days ago seeking work.

  “Can we meet this morning, at my apartment?” he asks. “We have some business to talk over. I may as well warn you, I don’t intend to play the usual games and hide the excitement I’m feeling. I’m almost certain you won’t find it a waste of your time.”

  It takes me a long moment to puzzle together the meaning of Jean-Paul’s words.

  “My daughter is sick. I can’t leave her alone,” I say feebly, after an interminable telephone pause.

  “Then I’ll come over to your place. I’m only around the corner.”

  This is true. I’ve spent many an evening in the lavish garden of the duplex on West Eleventh Street where Jean-Paul holds court to a cacophonous guest list of fashion models, photographers, writers, and various New Age clairvoyants.

  “Does it have to be today?”

  “Yes. Today. Now. If you have any regard for me, Michael, you won’t play hard to get.” And, saving me from the arduous effort of responding to this, he announces that he will be over in fifteen minutes and ends the conversation.

  In an attempt to m
obilize myself, I put on the kettle for coffee, but when it whistles I am momentarily perplexed by the sound. Then I understand, though the logic required to measure and prepare a cup nearly defeats me. Before I am able to fill it with water, the cup falls out of my hand. The shattered glass looks tiny, and the prospect of getting out the dustpan and broom is as challenging to me as that of scaling a ten-foot wall. I ponder it for a few seconds, not caring. It is a picture of broken glass, not actual broken glass. It almost doesn’t exist. Then, momentarily appalled at the extent of my detachment, I stab myself in the hand with a fork. It hurts! I hear myself cry out as if from across the room. To alleviate the itching rubbery dryness in my mouth, I drink straight from the kitchen tap, soaking my shirt.

  The door buzzer rings, and I consider, without much concern, the picture Sally and I will present to Jean-Paul. In some muted place inside me an immense anxiety has begun to wriggle about, like a man with duct tape over his mouth, straining to be heard. I desperately need the work Jean-Paul can provide, and it is up to me to perform for it in some way, to persuade him to give it to me.

  I stand on the landing and listen to him climb the stairs, a rite of passage for any visitor to my apartment, and an especially difficult ordeal for Jean-Paul, who pauses every fifteen or twenty seconds before wheezily resuming his ascent.

  He appears in stages: his wiry gray hair and beard, the spin-art splashes of burst capillaries along the corners of his sharp nose, his compact Balzacian frame huffing into view, and then Jean-Paul offering me his limp, child-sized hand to shake.

  In my dullness, I allow the hand to hang in the air for an insulting amount of time, until Jean-Paul withdraws it with a frown and employs the hand to flick away the sweat that is dripping from his forehead.

  “Jean-Paul,” I say with the belief that I am shouting his name in welcome, yet hearing myself in a barely audible whisper.