Most of us paced up and down that hall at various times of day. It was the only exercise you got, unless you did push-ups and yoga in your room, as I did, or a few jumping jacks and miniscule laps on the roof for the fifteen minutes you were up there. Roof laps were always punishing, though, because you had to do them in your stocking feet. You couldn’t run in shoes without laces. The next day, my knees and the bottoms of my feet always felt like they’d been filled with broken glass.
Pacing calmed the mind, too, and assuaged some of the restlessness we all felt at being cooped up under the ever-watchful gaze of Mrs. Weston and her staff. And they were watching you. Believe me. You might think me paranoid for saying this, except that I got busted for enough petty misbehavior to know I was being observed. Sometimes the nurses would even object to your pacing itself, maybe because it made them nervous, especially because we often did it in pairs. But mostly they objected because they thought we were planning something. Which was, in fact, sometimes the case.
All the patients on the ward figured out pretty quickly that I was both compos mentis and a sap, meaning that I could be manipulated into getting my visitors to bring them just about anything they wanted, from candy, to phone cards, to cigarettes.
Mr. Clean was the worst in this regard. He was a six-foot, three-inch black psychotic diabetic, who was, to say the least, not exactly looking after his blood sugar. Not that the staff was helping much, but what could you do? The guy wanted candy and his cheap cigars, which they’d confiscated on admission. He loved McDonald’s and pretty much anything else salty or sweet that he could shovel into his sparsely toothed mouth. He was obsessed with his few pleasures, as we all were.
“It ain’t right to starve a person,” he often said.
The whites of his eyes were yellowed and bulged out of his head like gone boiled eggs. His hair was long and nappy, and it always had lint in it. His belly was so incongruously round and protuberant that it looked as if he’d strapped it on for a part in a film. The front of his T-shirt was always dribbled with jelly or gravy or God knew what else—handprints, smears, and stains of all descriptions, crusty, oily, or wet.
I was his connection. He wanted cigarettes. Badly. So he spent a lot of time and energy coaching me on how to make this happen for him, stage-whispering as we walked down the hall.
“See, I’ll save it till night. Then I’ll take it in the bathroom and blow it into the vent. Nobody’ll know. Just get me one, and some matches. Okay?”
His breath smelled like decaying meat.
Breathing through my mouth, I’d say, “I’ll try, Clean. I’ll try.”
And then he’d lean in and go through the scenario again, adding detailed instructions about how to get something past the nurses.
“Just put it in the wrapper of the hamburger or in with the fries, then put it in the garbage in the visiting room, and I’ll go and get it later. Then I’ll just take it in the bathroom late and stand on the toilet under the vent and blow it up in. Nobody’ll smell it. Just get me one, okay? Don’t get a pack. And some matches. Can’t do nothin’ without matches.”
If the nurses didn’t explicitly hear what he was saying, they surely inferred it. It wasn’t hard.
“Okay, you two,” one of them would say. “In the dayroom or in your rooms.”
Throughout the day he’d stop outside my room and moan.
“Norma?”
No answer.
Louder.
“Norma?”
I’d pretend I couldn’t hear him or was too absorbed in my notebook to respond. But he was insistent enough to call attention to himself every time.
“You got any candy, Norma?”
Invariably the staff would see him standing there and tell him to leave me alone. Then, of course, after visiting hours he’d step it up, he and several of the others who’d sniffed me out as the soft touch. They’d prowl around so obviously in anticipation of a fix that it wasn’t hard to figure out who was the source. Very quickly I got caught and taken to task. I had my roof privileges suspended for two days, but they let me off without suspending my visiting privileges as well.
One of my three roomies was a ciggie hound too, though more tactful than the others. I called her Tracy Chapman because of her comely face and short signature dreads. She was the only one of the three of them who didn’t talk to herself most of the day and night, and with whom you could carry on a fairly normal conversation. She’d told me she’d been committed or “called in” to the authorities by her foster children, whom she claimed had done it to punish her for denying them extra funds to buy clothes and high-tech toys.
It sounded plausible enough. Calling in fake abuse wasn’t unheard of, and at first blush she didn’t seem nuts enough to need to be in the hospital.
Ellen was my second roommate. She was a short, sixty-five-year-old black woman who had been in the hospital for five months. She said she’d gained sixty-five pounds in that time, which seemed very likely, since she never left our room except for meals, which she ate with gusto. She hadn’t even realized that it had gotten cold outside, having come in July and having sat in this regulated air for so long.
She could barely walk, her ankles were so swollen with edema. She wore a white rag tied around her head, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and a pair of Acti-Treds on her feet. She sat all day and night in a plastic chair by the bathroom door. She never used her bed because she had some problem with mucous, or reflux—I wasn’t sure which. She just said that the devil was in her stomach, and when she lay down he came up and she couldn’t breathe.
When she wasn’t sleeping she was staring at the walls, or at me doing my yoga or writing in my notebook. She saw everything I did unless I did it in the bathroom. After a while she started to feel like my conscience. Every time I looked up I’d see her staring at me in that blank unflinching way that went right into me, and then through me and past me.
When I still thought pleasantries applied, I’d smile nervously and say, “Hey.”
She didn’t respond, which was awkward at first, but came to feel natural and easy, even pleasant over time. It was actually a relief to stop making small talk. That was one of the things I liked best about hanging around my ward mates. Social conventions didn’t apply. It was one of the privileges of being “disturbed.” It was probably one of the diagnostic criteria. But God, it was nice. I really liked being able to just end a conversation and walk away, or say nothing to fill the silence.
At night, Ellen wrapped herself in a sheet and put it over her head, so that sitting there in the dark with the lights of the city coming through the window and picking out the whiteness of her form, she looked like a dead body, as if propped up by the staff for some sick joke. At first, I didn’t understand why she did it. My third roommate, Sweet Girl, did it too, though she did it for much of the day as well. As time went on, and I came to understand that privacy was one of the other major deprivations of that place, and one of those other things that most of us take for granted in the outside world, I realized that they did it because it was the closest they would ever come to having a room of their own, to reclaiming the structural integrity of their minds as separate places that belonged only to them.
Of course, in public hospitals, private rooms are an uncommon luxury. And, of course, people who are a danger to themselves or others can’t be left unwatched. All of this I understand. I am not comparing Meriwether to the gulag. And yet, as any Solzhenitsyn will tell you, watching is a form of torture. Being watched is a soft violation that grows into a harder one with every passing day. Like dripping water on a stone, the eyes of other people wear you down, slowly, invasively. They leave a hole.
Lying there at night, unable to sleep, I’d look at Ellen and Sweet Girl wrapped in their shrouds and think that I was in the morgue. In part it spooked me, but most of the time it just made me terribly sad, because the shrouds were not only for privacy. They were, I think, also a way of saying no to what was happening. This was the pose of the aband
oned, the dress work of a despairing mind that was tired of being poked at and observed, degraded by the treatment, and talked down to.
Yes, the “treatment.” That deserves to be in quotes, and probably italics, too, because I mean it in both senses. I mean it disrespectfully, as in pseudo, as in your treatment is a joke and an insult and an arrogant, dehumanizing, lazy nonsolution. And I mean it, too, euphemistically, in the same way that cartoon hit men mean it when they say, “Give him the treatment.” As in work him over, make him easy, like pulp. Treatment as in, dealt with, put in place, made malleable, and put down.
Sweet Girl was in her early twenties as far as I could tell. I never found out for sure, but she talked often of having been a student at a local college, and she had the face and bearing of someone very young. She was beautiful—high-cheekboned, mahogany-skinned. She hardly ever spoke to anyone but herself, spending most of her time deep in scanning speech colloquy with an imaginary friend she called Patsy. Usually she was curled up in the fetal position on her bed under the sheet, though sometimes she’d sit bolt upright as if surprised by or aghast at something Patsy had said. Then she’d stare into the middle distance and argue the point until she was satisfied, or maybe make a trip to the dayroom, where she’d continue the argument in front of the TV.
When I first heard her talking to herself, I thought it was a foreign or made-up language. But then, as I got used to it, I realized that it was English, just very fast English full of all kinds of shorthand and slang that presumably only she and Patsy understood. Sometimes she would coo and giggle and say discernable things like “I love you, too.” Other times she’d blurt something about “your smelly cunt” or reprimand Patsy for saying something worse.
“You’re disgusting. Shut up.”
I tried to listen in, but with little success. Besides, it seemed to me that eavesdropping was just another breach of privacy that I had no right to inflict.
Still, from the parts that I couldn’t help overhearing or taking note of, because they were shouted, or repeated, or chanted almost like a prayer, it seemed to me that somewhere along the line Sweet Girl, or perhaps her renegade brain, had done what any of the rest of us might have done in her position. I had no way of knowing what her reality was like in the outside world: where she lived, with whom, under what circumstances. The information was not forthcoming from her.
But she had clearly created a world of her own inside her head, an alternative to what I can imagine must have been a brutal, or at the very least unpleasant and alienating, world on the outside. Maybe she hadn’t been abused. Maybe she had only been strange, unpopular among her peers, alone for too long with an unshared and unshareable view of the world, socially inept, and cripplingly shy. (This seemed undeniable from what I saw in our encounters.)
Or maybe the docs were right, that it all stemmed from an innate chemical imbalance, as faultless as autism or retardation. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, she had produced for herself what seemed to me to be an eminently adaptive response to unbearable isolation. Unlike me—who spends way too much time thinking about all the things I wish I had done or had yet to do—Sweet Girl was not a prisoner of too much consciousness.
She was in her own world, peopling it with friends.
And sometimes, fairly often, I envied her for it. She was socially hermetic.
My envy, of course, led me to wonder whether the lucidity and the sanity we were so eager to impose on her were really so preferable to her world. Would they make her feel better? Or was consciousness—brutal, imposing consciousness—precisely the thing from which her mind was fleeing with all its creative energies awhirl?
Is this a romantic view of madness? Probably. Or maybe just a realistic view of reality.
Can we really say that our lives are in every way preferable to the madman’s? We spend our lives running from consciousness, too. Every chance we get. Our lives are full of guzzled substances and vapid entertainments, the generically familiar, homogenized, franchised world, all a distraction from the emptiness at the heart of ourselves and our heavy, heavy awareness of same.
Yes, awareness.
We as a society wanted to make Sweet Girl aware. We wanted her to know that she was a lost soul, or an outcast, or unloved. We wanted her to dwell on all the unbearable truths that her florid mindscape had kept her from really knowing. We wanted her to face the weather like the rest of us, even if it meant waking up to a nightmare. Or at the very least, the lackluster present tense.
But maybe, just maybe, awareness is overrated, and Sweet Girl knew that as well as we did.
Now it’s arguable, on the other hand, that she was, as the medical model would have it, a prisoner of too much unconsciousness. Her strange mentality may well have been exactly what kept her isolated from the world, and therefore intolerably lonely and dysfunctional. God knew, in her present state, she was not functional in the world’s terms. She could not hold a job, or most jobs. She could not sustain relationships or pay rent. And, as the smell of her would often attest, she couldn’t even manage to bathe or change her clothes.
Sanity, of whatever sort she could achieve on medication, would presumably allow her to do those things. But if that was true, it was also true that the “sanity cure” was a cure only in the sense that it would damn her to living with and like the rest of us. That is, holding a less than blissful job at best, and paying bills, and perhaps marrying with a 50 percent chance of getting divorced. It would allow her to fit, or pass as fit, as so many of us do, and maybe that was better than falling out the bottom of society because no one knew what to do with you.
Certainly, I had seen in other fellow patients the stress and pain that mental illness had caused in their lives, the loneliness and isolation that only made them take sterner refuge in delusions.
Mother Teresa was a classic example of this process at work. She was a forty-two-year-old Puerto Rican woman who, a year or so prior to landing in Meriwether, had left her three teenage children with relatives back home on the island and come to the mainland United States.
At the time of her admission, she had been living in a homeless shelter and working on and off at a fast-food restaurant. One of the other patients, a recovering alcoholic and depressive named José, had given her the nickname Mother Teresa because she was, to say the least, extremely religious, a pathological proselytizer and self-styled saintly minister to the godless and suffering.
A few weeks before I met her, she’d been arrested for disturbing the peace in the lobby of an office building in one of the outer regions of the city. By her own admission, she’d gotten a little excited and started running up and down the main floor of the building, laughing and singing and declaring herself the bride of Christ. She’d gone out to this part of the city, she told me, because she had seen Jesus flying that way, calling her to follow.
When I met her, Mother T’s delusions were many and various, though all biblical in origin and extremely pressing. She couldn’t stop herself from describing her visions of Jesus and the second coming and trying to convert or preach to pretty much everyone she saw.
This, more than anything, was responsible for the crippling loneliness she felt, and spoke of tearfully, on the few occasions when she wasn’t talking about Christ. She wanted very much to find a husband. She had been married very young and had had her three children, but her husband had left her not long after the children were born, and he was no longer in her life. She missed her extended family terribly. Before she left Puerto Rico, she had been living with her mother, father, and siblings. She spoke often of wanting more than anything to be reunited with them. But it seemed they were unable to deal with the wild vicissitudes of her illness and had sent her packing.
There was a pay phone on the ward accessible to any patient, but long-distance calls required a calling card, and most of the patients, including Mother T, didn’t have the money for one. I did have one, though, so one afternoon I suggested that perhaps she might feel better if she gave
her family a call. Maybe they could patch things up. She was very excited by the prospect, dialing the number eagerly as I walked away.
But only a few minutes later she appeared in the doorway of my room, crying.
“They told me to shut up. That I’m crazy and I can’t come home. They don’t see Jesus as I do. They don’t understand.”
After an episode like this, Mother T would spiral vigorously back into her delusions. As I watched her deal with the pain of her family’s rejection, and later with other rejections and crushing disappointments, I saw her grab hold of her visions and her perceived special connection to Christ like a buoy in a raging sea. They kept her afloat. They were a refuge from the cruel knowledge that no one wanted her.
“It’s okay,” she would say, her sobs abating, “I have the Lord and he knows me, and his plan for me is the most important thing. I must be here to do his work.”
“Yes,” I would say, stroking her back. “Yes. That’s right.”
“Ah, and you know, Norita, he is so beautiful. His eyes are like fire. Clear fire. And when his spirit descended, and my crown came down on my head, oh, it was . . .”
“Heavy?” I said.
“Very.”
“I bet.”
I put my arms around her.
“It will all be okay,” I said.
And then came a reprimanding voice shouting from the nurse’s station:
“NO TOUCHING. Down the hall, there. You two. No touching.”
“What?” I said, looking at Mother T as she pulled away. “Is that a rule?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “It is a rule.”
A necessary rule in some ways, as I came to learn, in a world where people had few or often no natural boundaries, and where tempers were likely to flare into violent altercations over almost anything. Keeping the patients from getting sexually or amorously involved with one another was a wise policy, and giving vitriolic patients as few pretexts as possible for overreaction was a prerequisite for keeping order.
Voluntary Madness Page 5