Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  The spell ends for me as well. My insomnia falls away and I sleep in long dreamless gluttonous sprees, unable to rise.

  At Sally’s suggestion we pay a weekday visit to the Museum of Natural History, and find ourselves alone among the Large African Mammals, each in its glassed dioramic world. We used to come here often when Sally was a young girl, and we relive the delight of those excursions, revisiting her favorite diorama, that of a springbok gazelle with a small bird feeding off the bugs that live in the springbok’s hide.

  In the museum cafeteria, she says: “I have to figure out who I am again. It’s like starting from scratch.”

  She tells me that on the night before we took her to the hospital, with her mind blazing, she caught a glimpse of herself—“the sane me”—looking back at her from the bathroom mirror. “It was a spot in my eye, and it was there for a split second, this little part of myself that I still hadn’t burned, watching me go crazy. I see you. I know what you’re doing. I know who you are. And then it vanished.” She snaps her fingers. “It didn’t fade, it just went out, like the wick on one of those kerosene lamps we used to go camping with. It was like I stopped to take a last look at myself, like I was saying good-bye.”

  I remember the tale of the rabbi to whom a dead man came with a problem: he believed that he was alive. “Don’t you know,” the rabbi told him, “that you are no longer among the living? You are in the Land of Confusion.” On hearing the story, the rabbi’s son worried that he too was in the Land of Confusion. “Once you know that there exists such a world, you cannot be in it,” explained the father.

  The matter of who exactly she is now after her manic attack continues to pester Sally. At home, she asks, “Does this mean that everything I believed while I was crazy is bullshit?” How much must she repudiate? How does she sort out what she can safely keep from her mania, and what she has to discard?

  Later, she wonders how something so vivid and obvious could turn out to be false. “If my insights weren’t true, then what is? When you fell in love with Mom or with Pat, did you worry that it might be a delusion?”

  “Only a little bit.”

  “But it didn’t stop you.”

  She seems immensely matured. I realize that she has acquired another dimension. Her range of experience seems enormous. I have to remind myself of how little she has lived, that she is still a girl.

  The time has come to remove the Wellness Contract from the refrigerator door. Sally goes out now for three hours alone. She is pensive, filling new notebooks, “self-educating,” she tells me, “the way you did it.”

  We enroll her in a Japanese brush painting class at a storefront studio on Sullivan Street, so she can ease herself back into the quotidian world of conversation and simple human exchange. It proves a benign place to begin her reentry; she attends her three classes without enthusiasm, but seems heartened that they are not a total disaster.

  One evening, she invites me to sit with her in the Bleecker Street playground, the site of her initial epiphany. She goes straight to a bench—“my bench,” she calls it—like a worshiper to her regular pew in church. It is almost nine, no children are here, which seems to be the way Sally prefers it. “It’s like visiting myself in a museum,” she says.

  After I have sat down next to her, she does her best to make me see it, the moment her life changed. This is where two four-year-old girls playing on the wooden footbridge near the slide signaled to her—a wave, a stare of recognition, a solemn nod—igniting the vision that had been gathering force inside her: that everyone is born a genius, but it is drummed out of us almost from the minute we open our eyes. Everyone possesses this genius. It’s our unmentionable secret. When childhood is over we are afraid to salvage it from within ourselves, because it would be too risky to do so, it would rupture our drone’s pact with society, it would threaten our ability to survive.

  “I thought that to protect yourself from my discovery you had convinced everyone that I was insane. I really believed my vision would crush you, Dad, because you, more than anyone, were toiling to get your genius back, but you couldn’t, you were trying too hard.”

  She takes my hand. A couple passes by, noticing us with an approving smile.

  “Everything fell into place,” she says. “I don’t know how to describe it. My mind was going incredibly fast. But time slowed. I could see underneath the surface of things. I could see inside people. It was like I had been sleepwalking until then, waiting for this to happen.”

  She shakes her head in amazement and we sit in the empty playground for a while longer, in silence.

  Dr. Lensing continues to wean Sally from haloperidol, and the change is plain to see. “She’s reading again,” I tell her after one of Sally’s sessions at the behavioral clinic. “Her concentration is coming back.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t turn on her,” says Lensing. “Concentration can become fixation.”

  But she is obviously pleased with Sally’s progress. Two days later, at the end of their session, she takes me aside and whispers, “She’s almost out of the woods. The dark forest.”

  Sally says that when she hears people climbing the stairs at Bank Street, she thinks they’re coming to check on her. “Then I remind myself it isn’t real. I think people are watching me, but it’s only me watching myself.”

  Lensing warns Sally not to flirt with such thoughts. “They put you at the center of the world. They make you feel important. People are watching you. You feel chosen. You know better than to fall for that bill of goods.”

  Sally listens with her lower lip between her teeth.

  “I don’t know when to trust my mind anymore. I don’t know when I’m being psychotic.”

  “When you’re back at school and your life is full again, you’ll be less interested in what psychosis has to offer.”

  At the mention of school, Sally grows tense. Only eleven days remain until she is to start tenth grade. “I won’t be treated like an invalid,” she shouts. “I don’t want special treatment. I won’t stand for it! I can do what other girls my age do!” She begins to cry.

  “Where is this coming from?” asks Lensing.

  To me Sally says: “Do you think I’ll be able to handle school?”

  I assure her that she will.

  “Will my friends be able to tell that I changed?” She turns to Lensing. “If I can’t handle it, I’ll quit.”

  On Labor Day, September 2, my brother Steve calls.

  “I’m not feeling good, Mikey. I want to go to the hospital. I think I’ve had it.”

  “What about those freeloaders?”

  “They’re gone. Junior and the others. They took off. Three days ago. I’m alone now. I swear to you. They’re not coming back.”

  In a shaky grasping voice, he tells me that to survive he’s been tramping to church basements for handout meals. “I been standing in line with the rest of the bums.”

  “You’re not a bum, Steve. Your family is behind you. You can hold your head up. You don’t ever have to be a bum.”

  I tell him I’ll be over in half an hour.

  “I love you, Mikey. Not because I have to. Not because you’re my brother. You’re the only one.”

  It has been a month since I laid eyes on Steve. After my last, disastrous visit to his apartment, with his stoned friends sprawled out on the floor, he stopped meeting me at the supermarket for our shopping dates or even answering the phone.

  A week ago I received a call from a man named Edgar, who identified himself as the manager of Steve’s building. “I need permission to inspect your brother’s apartment,” he said. “There have been complaints, and we’ve reason to believe Steve is violating his lease, as well as posing a health hazard to my law-abiding tenants—and to himself, I might add.”

  I fended Edgar off, playing for time. “I understand the problem. We’re taking steps to resolve it.”

  “I’d prefer not to have to resort to legal action.”

  I reminded Edgar that he
has been accepting rent from Steve since the day the building opened, twenty-one years ago. And it struck me that this was the real reason why he wanted to evict Steve: his rent is a quarter of what the apartment would fetch on the open market.

  “This is the first problem you’ve had with my brother. Ever.”

  “Yes, but it’s a very large problem, Mr. Greenberg.”

  As it happened, Edgar also contacted my eldest brother Jay at our father’s scrap metal yard, which Jay and another brother, Larry, inherited after our father died.

  After speaking with Edgar, Jay called me. He didn’t blame him for wanting to get rid of Steve. “The way he’s living in that apartment sounds revolting.”

  I pictured Jay with Larry in their square, gray, bunkerlike office, their metal desks only feet apart, Jay restless and hardened by a life that he fell into rather than chose.

  “Tell me this,” he said. “If someone was bringing drug addicts off the street into your building, where you lived, how would you feel?”

  “Right now, I don’t give a damn what Steve’s neighbors feel.”

  “Well, you better start giving a damn, because they’re going to evict him.”

  “They can’t evict him.”

  “Bullshit they can’t. The building’s going co-op. He’s destroying their property values.”

  “Steve’s a legal leaseholder, with a lifelong history of mental illness. There isn’t a judge in this city who would evict him, and Edgar knows it. So let’s forget the threat, and figure out how to get rid of the deadbeats who are crashing with him, because if we don’t, he may wind up on the street, no eviction necessary.”

  I told myself that Jay’s callousness toward Steve was really an expression of his guilt at being lavished with Helen’s love while Steve got nothing—guilt expressed as anger at the guilt-inducing party for causing so much discomfort. But what did I really know of his feelings? We were a battalion of Cains, growing up, willing to throw a weakened brother onto the garbage heap. “More for me!” was the operative ethos of our household. Cut loose by our parents, Steve became our resident scapegoat and pariah. Our shield.

  “The only way to put an end to this is to scare him straight,” said Jay.

  To accomplish this, he and Larry planned to send a hired tough to his apartment—an ex-cop who had installed a security system in their warehouse in the South Bronx. His name was Ralph. I had met him once while visiting my brothers about a year ago, a powerful-looking, well-mannered man in tan Florsheims, a pink button-down shirt, and blow-dried hair. My brothers seemed proud of their association with Ralph. He was a testament, they believed, to the raw-knuckled world they inherited from our father (though our father never would have hired anyone to intimidate a member of his family). The idea was that Ralph would pose as a cop and threaten Steve with eviction and jail. “Wise him up.”

  When I protested against this tactic, my brothers reminded me that nothing I tried thus far had worked, that fear was what people responded to, that it was for Steve’s own good.

  They may understand fear, I thought, but not the intractability of madness. How to explain this, however, when I just learned it myself? Steve was beyond the therapy of fear, and Ralph’s threats wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Steve was in another world.

  When I arrive at Steve’s building, Gato the Dominican doorman with a mustache so fine it looks as if it was drawn over his lip with an eye pencil, my ally in the building, is listening to the Yankees game on the radio.

  “Edgar’s been calling me. How bad is it?” I ask him.

  Gato takes me aside. “Look, I got a loco of my own at home, it isn’t easy, I know the score, you got to keep loving ’em when what you want to do is shoot ’em between the fucking eyes. Management sent orders not to let anyone up to see Steve. ¿Entiende? Some bruiser came by last week, said he was a cop. I let him go up when he showed me his badge. Otherwise, Steve’s barred. Not that it changes anything. These malditos sneak in through the service entrance. They have their own keys to your brother’s apartment. Tenants are freaking out, hombre. Malditos roaming around the fourth floor. People afraid to go out into the hall. People who live alone. They call me wanting to know what’s up. I’m going to let you through because I know you’re okay. But escúchame bien, do something to straighten out your brother, man.”

  Steve’s door is unlocked and I walk into his apartment without knocking. Junior and the freeloaders are gone, as Steve told me they would be, though their blankets and debris are still on the floor. They have sold his television, the cable box that Helen paid for every month, his radio, his phone. The lightbulbs are shot, and the flannel sheets covering the windows make the place feel like a cave. I pull back the sheets; a large jagged section of glass is missing from one of the windows. The room is filthy, the stench overpowering.

  Steve sits on the bed, in his underwear, his cracked lower lip protuberant and slack. His skin has a calloused texture, puffy and pixilated with grime. I know what I look like, his expression seems to be saying. You don’t have to tell me. This is the way it is.

  “What happened to the window?” I ask

  “Junior pushed this guy Raimundo against it. It was an accident. A little scuffle. They went at each other. I had nothing to do with it. Now the rain comes in. It makes me feel homeless. Can you fix it, Mikey?”

  I search around for something presentable for him to wear to the hospital, but everything is dirty and torn. I settle on a striped pullover I gave him, its cuffs frayed as if they’ve been gnawed, and a pair of black jeans. I get him into a pair sneakers, without laces, and we make our way to the elevator in the hall.

  “I know what you’re thinking. I went on the spin cycle. I went out of control. It’s like Dad used to say, I can’t hack it, I don’t know how to have friends.”

  In the lobby, Steve shuffles out of the elevator like an elderly man, barely lifting his feet, his sneakers sliding off as he advances, the rear part of the shoe crushed under his bare heel.

  He nods hello to Gato. “You know my brother,” he says, obviously ingratiating himself to me. “He’s the one who keeps me straight. My lifeline.”

  Gato opens the front door for us and we step out onto Twenty-second Street. Steve immediately removes a charred corncob pipe from his pocket, jams a few twigs of tobacco into the bowl, lights it, sucks in the smoke till his face turns red, then exhales gasping. To empty the ashes, he hammers the pipe against the leg of his pants, peering at me in a burlesque of rage and contrition. “We gonna stand here all day?”

  I flag a cab and direct it uptown to a hospital on Fifth Avenue—not the hospital where Sally was—I couldn’t bring another member of my family there, I couldn’t face them—but where our father died two summers ago.

  We hurtle crosstown, the city rushing by, exhaling hotly, Madison Avenue still and pale, its window displays looking more preserved than alive, like the dioramas at the natural history museum. Another empty holiday weekend.

  Steve’s relief is palpable. He doesn’t seem psychotic to me, but childlike and helpless. His belligerence of the past two months has drained away, spent from the effort of a rebellion that he knew from the beginning he wouldn’t be able to sustain.

  I ask him about the “cop” who came to see him. Steve’s recollection of the visit is vague. “Was he a policeman? I guess he was. He acted like he didn’t want to be there. But who would? My place isn’t exactly four stars. He seemed to feel sorry for me. He told me I was going to be arrested if I didn’t straighten out, I wasn’t really listening, he talked like a counselor. He apologized for coming. Maybe he was shocked. I don’t know. He gave me a couple of bucks for tobacco, and split.”

  We make it to the Emergency Room, the first checkpoint, and settle in for a long wait on the hard plastic chairs, a television blaring overhead on its metal arm. To pass the time he recites the birthdays of most everyone in our family, including those of distant relatives, dead and alive, names I haven’t heard in years. Steve knows th
em all with uncanny retention, though he has less to do with them than any of us brothers; on the rare occasions that he shows up at family gatherings, he slips away after an hour.

  “I think you may be mentally ill too, Mikey,” he says.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “When you were a teenager, come on, your temper, your fights with Dad.” He gives me a sly, satisfied look. “They have markers for mental illness. All you need is a blood test to find out for sure. Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to scare you, but I think you have it, I’ve seen signs. They can tell from this test if an unborn baby is schizophrenic. Because you can be schizoid in the womb too. Why do you think they legalized abortion?”

  “There’s no marker, Steve. No blood test. You know better than that.”

  He emits one of his scraping laughs.

  “Come on, Mikey. I’ll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours. Bob Dylan said that.”

  He asks after our mother, whom he hasn’t seen in many months. He’s worried about her too. She’s getting old. She always had Bernie. She’s not used to life without him. An acid tone creeps into his voice. “She never worked, like I’ve worked, Mikey, putting in my time, schlepping vases of flowers in the snow.” He claims that the last time he visited her, she was sitting in her apartment in the dark. Alone.

  He is describing himself, of course. The person he is speaking of is nothing like our mother. Helen’s apartment is unusually bright; she has dozens of friends and, since Bernie died, several suitors as well. Her phone rarely stops ringing.

  Finally, a psychiatric resident interviews him. Steve doesn’t protest when the resident invites me to join them. “I got no secrets from my little brother,” he says.