by Joel Derfner
(Unless of course you are the Empress of China, in which case insanity is throwing yourself a thirty-million-tael birthday party instead of strengthening the military, so that in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion it’s a piece of cake for the Eight-Nation Alliance to seize the Forbidden Palace and send you into exile.)
“Psychosis is a protective measure,” Mike told me once. “If you believe you’re Rameses II then you don’t have to deal with the fact that you’re actually really sick and living on the streets and addicted to heroin.”
“So your job is to take people who think of themselves as extraordinary and gifted and amazing and force them to see that they’re actually crazy homeless junkies?”
“Pretty much.”
I get it; I really do. But I still believe that there are ways in which the disease is preferable to the cure. The people whose voices order them to hurt others, or whisper to them that passersby are actually witches trying to kill them, them I can understand medicating. But I would rather die in two months as king of the elves than live for years watching everything I have worked to become go to wrack and ruin.
Because one of the most troubling aspects of psychotic disorders is that, though medicine can slow them down, it seems to be unable to halt their progress. Today’s antipsychotic drugs are somewhat less likely than their forebears to induce things like sustained painful muscle spasms and irreversible facial tics, but even with medication the odds are apparently one in three that if you are schizophrenic your mind will sooner or later turn to gruel.
“Would you still love me if I developed schizophrenia?” I asked Mike.
“It’s probably too late for you. Schizophrenia usually shows up in men by the early twenties.”
“Well, would you still love me if I developed late-onset schizophrenia?”
“We would always be very good friends.”
I know patients are seriously ill when Mike calls them cute. “We had the cutest kid come in today,” he’ll say. “She was an intergalactic supermodel.”
“What did she think of Tyra Banks?” I’ll say.
“Totally over.”
The Dorothea Dix Home for Assisted Living was only a few blocks from where I lived, and when I found the address I immediately began to envy the severely mentally ill for living in a fabulous Victorian High Gothic mansion. The interior decorating scheme, unfortunately, featured not mosaics and girandoles but a great number of linoleum tiles, though their flattening effect was mitigated by the light that streamed in from the wide windows. A large man named Kyle led me downstairs to the activity room, where he pushed the couches to the walls and against the pool table and pointed me to the electric outlet.
People started trickling in as I set up the boom box; by four-thirty, the official start time, I had nine students, six women and three men, facing me in two rows. I asked their names, forgot them at once (except for Doug, who impressed himself upon my memory by drooling on my hand when he shook it (drool being a common side effect of antipsychotic medication)), and started the CD. As we warmed up by marching in place, I told the students to breathe deeply on my count. “Breathe in,” I said, lifting my arms, and then “Breathe out,” lowering them to my sides.
“Breathe in breathe out?” asked a tall caramel-skinned woman in the back row.
“Yes.” I demonstrated a couple more times and then we started.
At Mike’s urging I had put together the simplest routine I could think of, but I hadn’t gone nearly far enough. These people had trouble moving in time to the music and in the right direction; if I forced them to attempt grapevines, chassés, or mambos I would surely regret it. Thinking quickly, I replaced all the traveling steps in the routine with kicks, knee lifts, and hamstring curls, accompanied by peppy arm movements. We also did some finger and toe exercises, to help forestall diabetic breakdown in blood flow to the extremities.
The severely mentally ill seemed to be having a really good time. Three of them never stopped grinning. One gazed off into the middle distance but a smile played at the corners of his lips. A short woman in the front row started whooping in excitement (whooping is always heartening to an instructor).
After twenty minutes or so, we stopped and took a few minutes to cool off. “Arms slowly above your head,” I said, “and then down.”
“Breathe in breathe out,” said the tall woman in the back row. It wasn’t clear to me whether she was asking if she should breathe in breathe out again along with the arm movements or admonishing me for neglecting to instruct the class to breathe in breathe out.
“Yes. Breathe in, breathe out,” I said.
“Breathe in breathe out!” she said again.
“Right!”
“Breathe in breathe out!”
“Breathe in breathe out yes now everybody go sit on the couches.” I turned the lights off, put on the cooldown CD I had grabbed on my way out the door, and forwarded it to C.H.H. Parry’s setting of Psalm 84. Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, sang the choir, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water. I instructed my students to shut their eyes and imagine pools of water and relax their muscles and let their heads slump down onto their chests and feel the stress of the last week drain from their bodies.
I let the CD track play to its end as my students sat in the dark. “Okay, I’ll see you guys next Tuesday!” I chirped, and left.
As I walked home, I tried to figure out how I would frame this story to my friends. I had laughed to them beforehand, “Yeah, I’ll be all like, ‘I don’t care if Napoleon is telling you to hold your arms above your head, I want you to move them in circles!’” But nothing remotely like this had been called for.
It would be simple to say that, having thought of the severely mentally ill as a joke, I had been forced to confront our shared humanity. But that wasn’t what was going on. I had already known very well that mental illness doesn’t change the fundamental makeup of human character. I had cracked jokes about my students-to-be, yes, but I had done so recognizing, at the back of my mind, that laughter is a powerful defense against the threat posed by the hideous disintegration of personhood. If I can keep at a distance the man walking down the subway car pouring orange soda from a two-liter bottle onto each seat and carefully wiping it up with newspaper, if I can think of him as fodder for humor, then I do not have to ask how the world can be so pitiless as to have allowed one of its children to come to this. All those starving-Ethiopian jokes in the eighties were popular for a reason.
It would also be simple to say that I came away from the experience thinking There but for the grace of God go I, but that wouldn’t be true either. Partially this is because I recognize that most of the factors contributing to psychosis are absent from my life. Mostly, though, I prefer to believe that God has no grace to give. Because the alternative is that He gives grace capriciously or, even worse, that He plays favorites. Some desolate valleys become places of springs, and others wither until they are sere beyond hope, and if God is the one who chooses which is which then I would rather live in a universe lucky enough to have escaped His notice.
Finally I gave up trying to figure out how to tell the story. My friends would just have to wait.
When Mike came home from the hospital that evening, I told him about the class and about the breathe-in-breathe-out lady and about how I couldn’t tell whether she was asking a question or rebuking me.
“Neither one,” he said. “She was just having a good time. You were saying it, so she joined in. That’s the behavior of a person who’s very impaired.”
“My explanations were less depressing.”
Class the following week unfolded in much the same fashion, but the week after that nobody showed up. Great, I thought. Even insane people don’t like my class. I had unplugged the boom box and was putting my sweater back on when who should walk in but the breathe-in-breathe-out lady? “I’m here to exercise!” she said.
There is little I dislike more than teachin
g an aerobics class of one. A room full of exercisers creates an almost palpable energy, and it’s very easy to draw on that energy to teach. When there’s one person there, you have to be just as energetic as you do when there are twenty, but there is no crowd to buoy you up, so you have to generate all the energy yourself. When a single person shows up for a class I’m teaching—thankfully a rare event—he or she invariably says, “Oh, if it’s just me, let’s not worry about it, I don’t want to make you stay,” to which my oppressive sense of responsibility forces me to reply, “No, no, if you’re here to exercise then we’re going to exercise!” Then I make up some cockamamie story about really enjoying teaching one person because it means I don’t have to try to teach to different levels of experience simultaneously. Then I remind myself to TiVo whatever I want to watch that night because by the time it starts I will be dead to the world.
But Sarah (such was, I finally learned, the breathe-in-breathe-out lady’s name) was here to exercise, and besides I really enjoy teaching one person because it means I don’t have to—oh, never mind.
The CD I had brought that day started with a remix of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” “You like Whitney?” Sarah asked as we moved from step-touches to marching in place.
“Yeah,” I said. She started giggling. “What? What’s so funny?”
“You like Whitney!” She kept giggling.
“Do you like Whitney?” I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. I am insecure enough about my taste in popular music without having it impugned by a crazy person.
“Not really.”
“Oh, then let me change the song.”
“No, I like this song. Breathe in breathe out, right?”
“Right.”
We moved into side lunges with reaches. Sarah was an inept exerciser, but what she lacked in skill she made up for in enthusiasm. When the CD moved to the next track and Laura Branigan started singing (“Was it something that he said/Or the voices in your head/Calling Gloria?”), Sarah sang along. “This is good for your muscles, right? Makes you strong?”
“Well, it makes your heart strong. And that makes you healthier.”
“Breathe in breathe out,” she nodded.
By now Sarah seemed able to handle the basic steps of the routine, so I figured I’d add some variety. “Flap your arms like a chicken,” I said, demonstrating and making chicken noises. This is not a standard aerobics move but I secretly enjoy making chicken noises and I was glad to have an excuse. Sarah flapped her arms dutifully, though she did not join me in the chicken noises. “Okay, follow me,” I said as the CD moved to the next track. I step-touched forward, still flapping my arms, and led Sarah around the room, out into the hall, and back in again.
I am dancing around a pool table, flapping my arms and clucking like a chicken while the Weather Girls sing “It’s Raining Men,” I thought, and she’s the crazy one?
“I like you,” Sarah said as we started heel digs.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, very nervous about where she might be headed.
“As a person, I mean,” she said quickly. “You understand? I like you as a person.”
“I like you too,” I said, relieved. “Okay, watch my feet here and do what I’m doing.”
For the next few weeks, Sarah was the only person to show up for my class. “I have to stay out of trouble,” she said one day during hamstring curls. “Stay away from boys, you know?”
“Boys are definitely a lot of trouble,” I said.
“I want to get married, so I have to stay out of trouble.”
“Who do you want to get married to?”
“I don’t know yet. First I have to get well. You know I’m mentally ill, right?”
“Yes. That’s terrific, move your legs exactly like that. You’re doing a great job!”
“I want to stay away from boys, stay out of trouble, so I can get married. I was going out with a boy but it was too much so I stopped. Are you going out with anybody?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to marry her?”
I turned to stone.
During the ensuing silence I continued the knee lifts. “Nah,” I said finally.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just not the marrying kind. Move your arms like you’re throwing a basketball. Yes!”
But the thing is, I am the marrying kind. I want desperately to get married (by which I mean married married, not civilly united or domestically partnered or any other modified participial adjective the government might condescend to toss me). Mike and I have spent hours arguing about our theoretical wedding. I want us to get married grandly, wearing morning clothes. I’d book the Basilica di San Marco for the event if I could, but I do not hold out much hope that the Patriarch of Venice His Eminence Angelo Cardinal Scola will be easily won over. Mike, on the other hand, wants to get married in shorts in the middle of the woods. When he revealed this and I asked him, appalled, where our guests would sit, he actually said, “On the beautiful green earth.” The fact that I did not break up with him at once should be taken as an indication of how deeply I care for him.
So how could I paint Sarah a picture in which he was nowhere to be found?
Even as I told myself I was protecting her, I knew it wasn’t true; I was protecting myself. But from what? Did I think she was going to bash me? The medicated mentally ill are statistically no more violent than the general population. Furthermore, even if she had tried to harm me, she was not physically strong enough to do so, and it would have been the work of three seconds to overpower her. We were in a neighborhood known less for its enlightened acceptance of gay people than for its history of race riots, but that had been years before, and besides Sarah was from somewhere else.
Not long after I had started teaching aerobics, a friend interviewing me for a project in her sociology class asked, “Has discomfort with being open about your sexuality ever led you to modify your behavior?”
“Nope, never,” I had answered breezily.
But I realized now that my answer had been a total lie and that in fact I modified my behavior all the time. What about four days earlier, when I had told a waitress at Chevy’s in Times Square that my friend needed a refill on his soda? What about the week before that, when I had pretended not to hear the teenage punk shout “faggot” at me as I went through the turnstile into the subway? What about the week before that?
“What would you say being gay means to you?” my sociology-student friend had asked.
I had thought for a long time before saying, “It’s nothing, and it’s everything.”
Yes, being gay is just one of a thousand thousand traits that make up my character, no more remarkable than my love of M&M’s or my ability to mess up a room in fifteen seconds flat or my failure to understand the appeal of Luke and Owen Wilson.
But I believe that the desire to love and be loved is the strongest force on earth. And in that way, being gay affects every interaction in which I take part—just as being straight affects every interaction in which straight people take part. Every human motive is in the end a yearning for companionship, and every act of every person on this planet is an effort not to be alone.
So what right did I have to sneer at Sarah when I thought she harbored a romantic interest in me?
The following week three people came to class, including Doug, the drooling guy, and the whooper from the first day, whose name, it turned out, was Jane. Sarah, meanwhile, was in a bad mood. “My brother and sister get more rest than me,” she said. “I don’t think that’s fair. Do you think that’s fair?”
“Um,” I said.
Fifteen minutes into the class, she asked Jane—who had started whooping again—whether she was tired. “No,” said Jane, and kept on aerobicizing. Sarah looked at me and mouthed she’s tired while making the crazy-screwball gesture with her finger beside her head.
I wondered whether I should report to anybody that Sarah was in a bad mood, but then I f
igured, hey, it’s a group home, they already know.
“I love your hair!” said Jane to me between whoops, without breaking the hamstring-curl pattern. “I used to have hair just like that.”
“Oh, thanks!” I said. “But I think you have fabulous hair now.” Her hair was actually pretty great, equal parts copper and brass, held straight out from the back of her head with a bandanna. “Terrific work, keep going just like that!” Sarah looked unhappy at being left out of the conversation so I opened my mouth to tell her she was doing terrific work too but what I heard myself say was, “Breathe in breathe out!”
“Breathe in breathe out!” she responded enthusiastically.
For relaxation music at the end of class I had brought a CD of François Couperin’s Lessons for Tenebrae, a profound lamentation for Jerusalem exiled in Babylon. The ways of Zion do mourn, sang the soprano in Latin. All her gates are desolate, her priests do sigh.
“Shut your eyes,” I said as I turned the lights off. “Listen to the music. Relax your muscles. Let your head slump down onto your chest. Feel the stress of the last week drain from your body.” The Lessons for Tenebrae are not uplifting, like Psalm 84 with its early rains and pools of water, but the music is more compassionate.
And from the daughter of Zion all her majesty is departed; her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.
Suddenly Jane started singing along, unhindered by the fact that she knew neither the words nor the music. The quality of her voice suggested not mental illness but something like peace.
All that honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: Yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward.
Jane, Sarah, and Doug were all sitting on the couch in the darkened activity room, and I stood next to them. We had a minute or two left before class was officially over. And in the meantime, Doug remained still, and Jane kept singing, and I thought about going through the desolate valley and finding it a place of springs, and Sarah kept breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out.