“Sorry,” the orderly says. “A little action around here.”
I find Aaron in the lounge, but quickly he ushers me into a quiet hallway. Ten minutes ago he was sitting in the lounge at lunch when another patient yelled at an orderly that he was being kidnapped. “You can’t do this to me!” He threw his cereal bowl at the TV, punched a male nurse in the face. All the orderlies and nurses rushed him, took him down, shot him up with Haldol. There is still a flurry of aftershocks around the ward. Orderlies speed-walk around the halls, their keys hopping on their belts. Can I talk to a nurse about Aaron’s meds? No, it’s not a good time.
Aaron is shaken up, holding back tears. “I’m sorry you had to see me go down like that,” he says.
Amidst all this, in the lounge, a new patient, androgynous and light-footed and slim, is dancing. The dancer has long, dark hair, glistening, and black painted nails; the dancer wears sneakers and hospital scrubs, the top pulled up around a flat chest and knotted to reveal a flat white belly. The dancer twirls from corner to corner, weaving through the tables where people are eating their dinner, smiling, singing, unceasing.
“I’m going to kill that guy,” Aaron says, his voice low. He shields his eyes with a hand.
“Or girl?”
“I’m going to kill that person.” The dancer has been singing outside Aaron’s room all day. The happiness is enough to drive a sane man in the psych ward crazy.
“Please don’t get in a fight,” I say. “Then they won’t ever let you out.”
“I know,” he says, “I know.”
Still, the incident has put everyone on edge. As I leave the ward, one of the hall-walkers walks ominously close to the nurse escorting me out. She finds the right key on a fistful of keys. “Joe, if you touch me again,” she says, “I will make you very sorry.”
* * *
This time I call the hospital from the hospital parking lot, sitting in the car as it warms up. “Q North.” A shiver shoots from my ear to my shoulder. Through the defrosting windshield I can see the whole of the building, a sandy concrete square, wings and wards pinwheeling off the sides. I wait to be transferred to the doctor. And as the dial tone stretches on I see another building, sandy concrete, massive against a blue Florida sky, imposing as an institution. A condominium, thirteen stories, gently curved against the shore. Quay North. Across from it, a twin. Quay South. “Quay,” as in “key,” but we pronounced it with a “Q.” A key turns in my ear. This is what I’ve been hearing, not the echo from five years ago, but an ancient echo, a different haunted house, the one where Aaron grew up.
* * *
When I visit again that evening, during dinner, the ward is calmer. The dancer is still twirling but has stopped singing. The hall-walkers have paired up. A cheerful dietician is making the rounds, asking how she can help accommodate Aaron’s vegetarian diet. Wonderful, we say. Thank you. Is the cashew burger still available? It was the first meal I ate after Henry was born and we used to joke about having another baby just to eat one again. She will look into it. When she’s gone, we produce an empty laugh together. We are more confident about getting the cashew burger than we are about getting the meds.
Across the lounge, under the big window with the view of the lake, the doctor—the head of the unit—is talking to a family. I recognize him from the website. And I recognize the Cornell student. Her parents—I assume they’re her parents—are listening and nodding. I wonder if they’ve traveled far to come fetch her, if this is the first time they’ve come for her in the hospital or if it is already the fabric of their parenthood. It is almost too much to see their expressions of restrained concern. But I don’t have time for empathy: I need to talk to that doctor.
“How do I make an appointment to talk to the doctor?” I ask one of the orderlies.
“You just have to kind of catch his eye. He makes his evening rounds until six.”
There is a line of other families, it seems, here to talk to the doctor. Aaron and I stalk him from corner to corner, then to the conference room. You do the talking, Aaron tells me. He is too tired, too demoralized to advocate for anything. It’s just after six when the doctor emerges from the room, says good-bye to another family, and locks it. “Excuse me, Doctor,” I say. “I left you some messages? About Aaron’s meds?” I grip Aaron’s elbow. We know his rounds are over, but will he please give us a few minutes?
“Oh. Yes.” With some reluctance he unlocks the room again and invites us inside. He takes a seat across the conference table from us. We might be giving a job interview or applying for a mortgage. He’s a small man with rimless glasses; his name tag rests on a prim little belly. He looks not unlike Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“You do know I’m not your doctor,” he clarifies.
“Yes, we know.”
“You’ll see the doctor assigned to you tomorrow. He’s the one with the power to release you.”
We know. But what’s urgent is that Aaron is given his regular medications right away. The doctor explains that the medications were stopped to ensure that Aaron’s psychosis wasn’t drug related. It’s common practice, he says, to cease all prescriptions when a patient enters the ward.
Okay. That makes a certain sense. “But the antibiotics. Those are essential. The Seroquel I can understand, but—”
“There’s the potential for an interaction between the Seroquel and one of the antibiotics.” He flips through some pages on his clipboard.
“The Rifampin. Yes, we know. It can reduce the effectiveness of the Seroquel.” The doctor gives me a level look. Perhaps he is deciding whether to be impressed. “But his psychiatrist raised his dose to 700 milligrams.”
He takes some notes. “I left a message,” he says. “For a Dr..…”
“Bernard,” Aaron says.
“It’s the weekend. He’s not going to call back until Monday at the earliest. He needs his antibiotics before then.”
“And for what condition were the antibiotics prescribed?” He flips through some pages on his clipboard.
I don’t want to say Lyme. I definitely don’t want to say Morgellons. Aaron has been given a booklet of patients’ rights. Our primary goal is to keep you safe, it says, from hurting yourself or others. It does not say: we’re here to help you figure out what’s making your brain sick. I’m not here for a diagnosis anymore; I’m here to get him out. The only thing that has cured my determination to see my husband hospitalized is seeing him hospitalized against his will. “Dr. Bernard is a Lyme specialist,” I say.
He agrees to resume the other antibiotics. The Rifampin will have to wait.
* * *
In her essay “John Doe, Psychosis,” Esmé Weijun Wang writes about the ways her collected mental conditions clash and compound. On top of schizoaffective disorder, she has been diagnosed with chronic PTSD as a result of a rape by someone close to her. “There are still nights when I feel myself on a knife-edge, when the terror of PTSD mingles with the trickiness of unreality. It spreads through me like ink-blotting paper.” One day her husband shouts out after burning himself while frying eggs, and, terrified, she flees into the bedroom closet. Years after her sexual trauma, the memory consumes her. Still, the subject that persists in The Collected Schizophrenias is the damage done to her psyche over the course of three involuntary ten-day hospitalizations. In “On the Ward,” she writes, “I believe that being held in a psychiatric ward against my will remains among the most scarring of my traumas.”
Months later, getting the mercury fillings removed from his teeth, the dentist’s chair cranked flat, Aaron will panic, swimming up for air, jumping to his feet. “Sorry, man,” he says to the dentist. “I just can’t be held down like that.”
In the urgent care waiting room, where I’ll take him when his face is pulsing with Bell’s palsy, he’ll jump to his feet again when the nurse sneaks up behind him and hands him a clipboard. This time he’ll walk out the door. I’ll have to coax him back inside, like a scared cat hiding under a car.
&nbs
p; Never the hospital again. “I don’t care if my head falls off,” he says. “Don’t ever take me back there.”
He was already a person who couldn’t sit in a room without facing the door. “I like to be able to see who’s coming up behind me,” he shared in a twelve-step meeting once. Others in the room nodded at their laps. “Like John Wayne.”
* * *
The truth is, I left. On Friday night at the ER, while we waited for him to be seen, while he twisted and turned in the bed, I left Aaron alone to go to Wegmans. I said I had to pick up a prescription for my dad before the pharmacy closed, and I did. But I also bought myself dinner. I bought myself forty-five minutes. I needed any excuse to get out of there. What happened to him happened while I was waiting in the waiting room. But it could have happened while I was buying myself a tabouli salad and a green smoothie.
* * *
The next day, Monday, when I arrive during lunch, the dancer is still dancing. I remember the dancing patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the white-mustached man performing the perennial waltz with an invisible partner, forever lost to the music in his head. The pay phone is ringing in the lounge. Our friend who has gifted Aaron the sweatshirt answers it, cheerful as a receptionist, though he is, I have gathered, a patient like the rest of them. “Are you Nick?” he asks Aaron. He puts the phone down and travels around the lounge, asking every man he sees: “Are you Nick?”
Aaron is still wearing the sweatshirt. I am wearing my brown tweed blazer with the elbow patches. “I’m so ready to get out of here,” he tells me.
What it takes to get him out of here is five minutes with his doctor, a South Asian man in a brown suit. He and I are wearing the same uniform of the nonthreatening expert. The three of us sit in the corner of the lounge on the couch that lines the room, side by side, as though we’re watching the TV together. I cross my legs. I put on my professor voice. A complication of Lyme is how I put it. It affects his skin. It also affects his mind. I don’t say “Morgellons.” I say, “We just returned from a medical conference in Germany.” The doctor nods with approval. We will follow up with his Lyme doctor, I assure him. We will follow up with his therapist. This is what they want to know: what can they put on the discharge papers? What sane person will be responsible for this insane person?
“Are you willing to take him home?” he asks. “To receive him into your care?”
Across the lounge, our friend is still looking for Nick. I’ll think of him every time I see the sweatshirt, heavy and hooded and stained with my husband’s blood, and I’ll remember the best in people and the worst in people, until Aaron can’t stand seeing it anymore and throws it away.
“I am.”
Nick has been found. It’s the very last person our friend thought to ask: the dancer, who, without missing a step, dances his way over and takes the phone.
PATTERSON MILL LANE
2005
We organize our histories into houses. It was, we say, a chapter in our lives. We say: that chapter is over. It was a long chapter, the longest, five years in one house. It was a house with a name, Walnut Grove, for the black walnut trees that shaded the acre around it. But we called it Chez Crozet, for the name of the town we’d found ourselves in, this rural dot off the Interstate fifteen miles west of Charlottesville.
Built in 1800, it was more of a cottage than a house. It was the kind of house you could stand in the center of and imagine the shack it once was, the way it must have grown outward, awkward room by awkward room, over the generations.
We had lived in a number of houses before, but it was what they call a starter house: our first mortgage. My father warned us it was too much money. I’d just graduated with my MFA; I didn’t even have a job yet. But we knew that we liked Charlottesville and we wanted to stay. We wanted to be close to my family. And Aaron had cashed in an insurance policy of his father’s, enough for a down payment. It was 2005, the height of the real estate market, the age of the no-doc loan, when white people could buy houses they couldn’t afford.
We walked through the house with the Realtor, eyeing the wrap-around porch, the not one but two claw-foot tubs, the separate shower with not one but two showerheads, the six-burner gas stove salvaged from a New York City restaurant. The beadboard walls, thick with coats of paint, had seen plenty of their own stories. We felt it was a good place to begin ours, to begin again.
You could, I realized in Crozet, write a story with a house, with three strategically hung ferns along the porch, with a glass cake stand full of lemons on the dining room table, with my parents’ rickety old dining chairs, which I painted lime green, then antiqued with sandpaper, making the old new and then old again. The story said: We are people of taste. We are good country people. We threw a housewarming party. The story said: I hand-squeezed all the lemons in this lemonade.
There were good memories in that house. Dinner with friends on the patio, and all my nephews squeezed onto the red porch swing, and the stray cat who wandered into our yard and didn’t leave. She was fat for a stray, so fat we thought she was pregnant. Aaron named her Prego. The stray deer that wandered into our yard and didn’t leave. Aaron named her Sheila. He would sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette with her.
At the Vegetarian Festival in Charlottesville, in the same park where more than a decade later white supremacists would protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and spark a deadly rally, we spotted a black and brown rescue puppy. He looked more beagle than anything else. They told us he’d be maybe forty pounds, but he would grow to be eighty, with the strong, coarse-haired body of a German shepherd. Usually the rescue agency required a few days’ waiting period for a background check, but we looked like such a nice young couple. Aaron held him wiggling in his lap while we drove home, where we crate-trained him in our bedroom, watched him bound through the tall wet grass until he was so tired we had to carry him. We named him Zabka, for William Zabka, the actor who played the blond villain on Karate Kid, because that was Aaron’s mostly inexplicable sense of nostalgia and humor. It meant “little frog” in Czech. We called him Zabby.
* * *
I called my mom. “I got a job.”
“Fabulous!” she said.
“Waiting tables.”
“Oh,” my mother said.
I was happy about it, though. Crozet was tiny but there was a little Mexican restaurant called La Cocina with decent guacamole and good Mexican beer and a festive little patio strung with lights. I was happy to spend the day writing and then go in for the dinner shift, coming home late, my apron pocket fat with tips. I just wanted time to enjoy our new house, our new dog, to work on my novel. I’d finished a draft that summer, but now I had to scrap it, more or less, and start again.
Next door to the restaurant was the post office, where Aaron mailed his eBay packages. He was deep into his business then. The only room on the upper level of the house, like a little square hat, was his office. The stairs creaked as he climbed them. He spent a lot of time up there, the room choked with weed smoke.
Meanwhile I read books on the patio and filled the flower boxes and on the six-burner stove, prepared elaborate vegan meals, stacked and stuffed and garnished, tiny white beads of aioli drizzled seductively at the edge of the plate. I picked mulberries from the tree in the backyard, though they were more trouble than they were worth, my hands stained purple for a small bowl of them. I collected black walnuts from the grass, black walnuts that were really green, and washed and dried and stored them in baskets in the tub. They always grew moldy before they dried out properly. I tried so hard to get the fruit of those trees to yield something.
* * *
It was a good family arrangement. My brother Pete was four hours south in North Carolina, a straight shot down I-81. My brother Sam was two hours north in Alexandria, along with my parents, who lived in the basement apartment. I did that drive so often I memorized every turn. One day, Aaron and I arrived at Sam’s house just after Keri had put their baby to bed. “Go on i
n,” she said. “Maybe he’s still awake.”
I tiptoed into the nursery. There was still light in the windows. My nephew lay on his back in a white sleep sack. He was awake and looking at me with his round blue eyes. I leaned over the edge of the crib, wanting badly to pick him up but knowing I shouldn’t. Something in my stomach kicked.
“I want a baby,” I whispered to Aaron, crawling onto the pullout couch with him that night.
“Me, too,” Aaron said.
“No, like I really want to have a baby. I want to start trying.”
“Really?” His whole face smiled.
I had gotten a job, to my mother’s delight, teaching composition. It was an adjunct position, forty-five minutes away. For a while, I still kept some shifts at the restaurant. I commuted with my friends Meredith and Sean, who had gotten jobs there, too, each of us alternating driving weeks. Meredith and I shared an office in a crumbling building at the edge of campus and in our new blazers we talked about the novels we wanted to finish and the babies we wanted to have. The next semester, when I got a full-time contract at the university—with a salary and health insurance and my own real office—I told Meredith that I’d thrown out my birth control.
“Why not?” She sounded surprised to hear herself say it. “You have the job. You have the house.”
“Why not?” I agreed. Maybe she was thinking about Aaron, too, or maybe only I was. Her husband was getting his MBA at UVA. They were waiting to start a family until he was done with school. They had made the wise decision to stay in their one-bedroom apartment with their hand-me-down couch.
“Nothing helps someone get their shit together like starting a family, right?” I said.
Everything I Have Is Yours Page 23