Voluntary Madness

by Norah Vincent

  Besides, he was just too likable to dismiss. We smacked the ball around for an hour or so that morning, taking water breaks and talking about other treatment centers, mostly in Central America, where, in previous years, he’d established places like Mobius. He’d been in the alternative treatment business for a long time, establishing, refining, trying things out. At Mobius, it seemed, it had finally all come together. You could see that he was proud of his invention, and he had every right to be.

  My first night at Mobius, I dreamed of a house by the sea. I could live alone forever if I just had a view of the sea. That is what I thought as I sat in the dream house at the wide wooden desk, in the large empty room, with the old unvarnished floorboards and the peeling white paint on walls as dry and bleached as driftwood, looking out through the large seamless windows at the sea. I thought: I could live here forever. And then I thought: This belongs to me. This is mine.

  This place. This mind. This pole of being. Here. At the center. In me. Of me. Just me. And here again. Redirect the attention. Here. This spot. This still point. Consciousness conscious of itself. A being just being, each moment following upon the next, fully felt, fully found.

  How many times have I heard the injunction “Know thyself”? But how? How to find oneself when the seeker is the thing sought? The dog is chasing his own tail, the snake is swallowing his.

  In the dream, my house looks empty to me, because the person who lives there is outside looking through the windows, or she is inside looking out at the sea, but never inside looking in at herself.

  How can she? How do I see myself but in a mirror? And why is the image so hollow? I search the glass for clues to the person behind the eyes, but there is nothing. The meaning is more elusive the longer I look, the eyes more two-dimensional, the more I stare. This is not the way. So what is the real mirror of the soul?

  This is work for conjurers. How strange. I cannot be with the person who is right here, here all the time and yet not here, because I do not know her, cannot see her. I have never seen her. She is a ghost heard tell of. We are never in the same place at the same time, because we are the same person. I try to talk to her, and our conversations go like this:

  Her: Knock knock.

  Me: Who’s there?

  Her: Who.

  Me: Who?

  Her: Who.

  Me: Who is who?

  Her: Exactly.

  My time at Mobius was full of dreams, dreams I woke up remembering and then drew in bright color the next day so that I could hang on to what they were telling me, imprint the pictures they showed me, and bask in the feeling they gave me. Calm and centered. Full.

  I spent a lot of time there sitting with myself asking: How do you feel? And then listening carefully to the answer.

  In the dream of the house by the sea I saw the metaphor of myself. I had a house, to which I had the keys, but I did not live there. Now and again I’d go into the house to empty the trash or do some other chore, but I always ran in and out as quickly as possible, full of anxiety, the way you might if you were the caretaker of a house you knew to be haunted.

  But then one day, while I was in the house, I stopped in the room with the sea view and stood at the windows looking out. I was struck suddenly by the thought that this view was spectacular, and that it made the property, despite its disheveled condition, quite valuable. It occurred to me that I might stay, even take up residence. And that is when I began to consider the problem of identity, of how to both be and be with myself.

  As my tutelage at Mobius went on, both alone in therapy with Carol and in process therapy with the group, it became clearer and clearer that the problem was very simple, and always the same.

  Me.

  Every behavior was a form of escape, evasion, or cover. I kept picturing myself sitting in a chair in the middle of an empty room. Every few moments, it seemed, I’d get up and check the clock, or fiddle with something at the window, or go for the door. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t just stay in the chair. And that, in the larger real-world sense, was what doing drugs and having affairs was all about, getting up from the chair, not doing the work, not sitting through the discomfort.

  Carol did a lot of this work with me, pushing me by the shoulders into the chair and making me sit there with whatever came up, turning my head to face it again and again.

  That is where I got the most traction at first, and learned to stop spinning my wheels.

  During my first private session with Carol, she drew another stick figure on the board and said, as she had in group, “What’s the thought?”

  This time I wasn’t going to varnish my answer.

  “Do I want to fuck you?” I said.

  She turned and furrowed her brow. When she saw my face, she said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m not messing around. That’s what’s in my head.”

  She needed confirmation.

  “Every time you meet someone you consider whether or not you want to have sex with them?”

  “Pretty much. I mean I usually discard the idea pretty quickly, but it crosses my mind.”

  She let out a big breath.

  “Okay.”

  She wrote it down in the thought bubble above the stick figure’s head: “Do I want to fuck you?”

  She stepped back and looked at it for a moment, then reapproached the board. Again, as she had done before, she drew the heart over the stick figure’s chest. She turned back to me.

  “What’s the feeling?”

  Again, I didn’t hesitate.

  “Same as before. Loneliness, isolation.”

  She wrote these down inside the heart. Turning again she asked, “Anything else?”

  “Emptiness.”

  She wrote this. Paused.

  “Anything else?”

  I listened for what would come through, trying to go deeper, trying to let a very old part of my brain speak to me, translate some hidden code into a concept and then corral it into a word. Then it came. Hard. Unexpectedly hard. I spat the word rudely, surprising myself.

  “Hate.”

  She made an expression of interest, and then wrote that word in caps, larger than the rest.

  HATE.

  I felt a prick of rage, hot and pointed in my chest, and then a wave spreading from the point of entry.

  “You know the drill,” Carol said, drawing arrows out from the heart.

  “Now what’s the behavior?”

  The behavior that comes from loneliness? That was easy enough.

  “Seduction,” I said.

  Pause. Then the behavior that comes from emptiness? Again, easy enough.

  “Predation.”

  Pause. And the behavior that comes from hate? That was not going to be easy at all. Could I admit this? Could I own it? It was coming anyway. The channel was too open to stop it. Four letters. One syllable. Hate’s other shoe dropping. Wait for it. Yes, yes, there it was, on the tongue, the tip of the tongue, then in the back of the mouth bursting forward, barking into the room.

  “Rape.”

  There. Done. Criminal intent. On the board. In the open. Declared.

  Carol took it well, considering, but I felt the need to clarify, so I added:

  “Men, not women.”

  As if this made it somehow better.

  But it was true. I’d had pretty violent fantasies about raping men—always people who royally deserved it, mind you. Terrorists, rapists, child abusers, that sort of thing. In the fantasy I’m always a prisoner of theirs—usually in the terrorist fantasy—and they’ve had me for weeks, starving me, torturing me. At some point I break free or, more likely, I’m liberated in some trade or forced hostage relinquishment. There is always a big crowd of people waiting behind a fence when my captors bring me out, as if the transfer had been brokered and the meeting point revealed.

  When one of the captors brings me out for the trade in front of the crowd, I turn on him with a hidden weapon, always a bat or a bl
udgeon of some kind. That, or I relieve him of his weapon in a stunning martial arts move right out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I bang his head against the pavement a few times to subdue him, and then I tie his hands behind his back. Then I get him facedown on the ground, grab a fistful of his hair, and pull back his head so that I can spit my words right into his sweaty ugly face. Then I say something cringe-inducingly trite but satisfying, like:

  “My friend, you picked the wrong girl on the wrong day.”

  Then I yank down his pants, still clutching his hair and pulling back his head as far as it will go, and then I shove my dry fist up his ass, or as much of it as will fit, and as I’m ripping up his insides I say:

  “This is how rape feels.”

  The world is watching this, mind you. CNN and Fox have it live, even if they’re blurring out the fisting, and the crowd is either roaring or stunned into silence, I can’t decide which. Either way, this act is being seen. Recorded. Both on film and in the minds of every onlooker. It exists. It will be burned into memory and this man’s flesh.

  If a woman rapes a man in a clearing and everyone’s there to hear it, see it, and taste it, does it make a sound, a sight, a meal? Does it register? Does it constitute payback for every private, silent, secret rape in the world? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just payback for one. And that’s enough.

  And there you have it. The subconscious at work, plucking scenes from bad movies and making a dream world of retribution. The poorly written script of my fantasy that plays over and over in my head, and has been for as long as I can remember, usually when I’m listening to raucous music on my iPod while I’m riding on the StairMaster at the gym or when I’m gritting my teeth to the cracking point in my sleep.

  This was the rage wound up inside me like a tapeworm after years and years of feeding it and wondering why I always still felt hungry, and why I think about whether I want to fuck everyone I meet, making them into meat in my mind’s eye and wondering how tender or tough they’d be, or how they’d smell, of clay and onion or maybe scalp oil and a musty old couch, or seaweed and the rotting sea. And I think about what they’d secrete, creamy or clear, salty or sweet. And then I’d force myself to think of drinking it, lapping it up and gagging, angrier still, but angriest with myself.

  This is punishment. But whose? His, whoever he is or was, and mine. Mostly mine.

  Punish me for my transgression. Because the transgression is mine. I fantasize about hurting the perpetrator, some perpetrator, any perpetrator, but the vector of revenge always turns back on me in real life, mostly because it is unacceptable to rape anybody, but also because the sickness lives in me, and that’s where it has to die, be cut out, excised, exorcised.

  I had said none of this to Carol. She was still with the thought bubble, the hate, and my last word, rape.

  “Talk to me about this,” Carol said, breaking my foul reverie. “How does it go in your head?”

  I wasn’t going to get into it, so I said what I’d said to therapists many times before.

  “I was molested as a kid. I had a venereal disease before I was ten.”

  She was ready for this, of course. Had put it together from the moment I’d said the words “Do I want to fuck you?” and “rape.”

  “Molested kids are often hypersexualized as adults, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She knelt down next to my chair. I wasn’t ready for this kind of sympathy. Didn’t want it. The molestation bit hadn’t been a confession. It was old material. Really old. I’d talked it to death in the past, or at least what little I could remember of it. The doctor’s office. The medical facts pointing to events I couldn’t, still can’t, recall except in comparatively innocent snippets. The virus suggests more. But what more? Who knows? Who cared? Yeah, yeah, I always thought, so somebody got to me in some way. So what? It happens all the time. Move on. I don’t need you to hold my hand.

  But she did. She took my hands, both of them, in hers, looked me long and hard in the eyes, waiting for me to meet her gaze and hold it. I couldn’t. I looked at the potted fern behind her on the floor, occasionally glancing back at her eyes, which were searching my face for recognition. When our eyes did meet for longer than an instant, she gripped my hands a little tighter.

  “Stay here. Look at me,” she said.

  Then she added, slowly and emphatically, “There is nothing wrong with you.”

  I guffawed.

  “Uh, clearly there is. A lot.”

  “No. All of this,” she swiped her hand across the board where we had written all my thoughts, feelings, and contemplated behaviors: hate, rape, fuck. “All of this is typical. A normal response to a very traumatic experience. Something very bad happened to you, and you reacted the way anyone would, the way most people have. That’s all.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Maybe.”

  “No. Really.”

  She clutched me by the upper arms this time and said the phrase again. I needed to hear it, and this time it got through.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  I heard the words and began to internalize their meaning. These were the words of the wellness model, not the accustomed disease model of so many psychiatrists I had known, the ones who were so eager to slap diagnoses and pathologies onto me in piles. Depressive, manic depressive, posttraumatic stress. These were all the things that were wrong with me. The troubles. But what if Carol was right? What if I was as healthy as the next person responding to an insult?

  Kick me and I will bruise. Starve me and I will weaken and grow frail. Stab me and I will bleed. Are these not normal reactions to injury? A bruise, even a scar, is not a pathology. It is a sign of proper function, a sign of the healthy, normal body doing its job, coming to the rescue after the war.

  All of this began to penetrate as I sat there, Carol holding my hands again in hers.

  There’s nothing wrong with me? I thought. Really? I’m not broken? Unfit? Weird?

  And that, dismissive as I had been, was when I broke. I started to cry. Suddenly, urgently, big, hot, fat drops rolling down my cheeks. Silently, against my will.

  I wasn’t crying about the “trauma.” I didn’t care about that. I could barely remember it. It had never mattered consciously. It had never made me cry. It was this that mattered. The stigma, the malfunction, and the shame. The taint. Was there really nothing wrong with me after all? Was I not broken?

  I cried harder.

  I couldn’t explain this to Carol. Not then anyway. The session was up, for one thing. For another, the shame, like the hate, was just one piece. Part of a chain, or a spiral of linked emotions that had yet to uncoil, each in turn. This was just the beginning.

  Carol could sense I didn’t want her to hug me, so, wisely, she didn’t. She waited for me to gather myself, watching carefully with large, sympathetic eyes.

  “Time’s up, right?” I said, wiping my cheeks.

  “Yes,” Carol said, turning up the corner of her mouth as if to say, “I’m sorry the timing’s so poor.”

  But it wasn’t really. I wanted to go. Needed to. I didn’t want to feel her eyes searching my face anymore. I didn’t want to have to respond externally to what we’d discussed. I hadn’t even come to Mobius thinking that therapy would happen to me, and yet, boom, it had. What had started as a crass willingness to play along, and to take notes about the process of therapy, had penetrated into real memory, real emotional content, coiled and waiting to spring. It had taken only the slightest touch to explode.

  I wanted to regain some composure. Some remove. I wanted to stare out a window and let this tearful dousing sink in, and then leach through, like rainwater in soil. And then I wanted to close my eyes on the day and forget. I wanted to go back to being a journalist just doing her job.

  Tuesdays were rebirthing days. Rebirthing sounds hokier than it was, though, I admit, it did have its moments. It was another one of those Mobius trademark activities, like den chi bon, that req
uired a suspension of disbelief, or at least scoffing laughter, if you were going to get anything out of it. And it was possible to get quite a lot out of it, even if you didn’t have visions, or weep copiously, or transport yourself back to the womb. Rebirthing, like a lot of other things they did at Mobius, was designed to access your subconscious, to function like a back door to your brain so that you could sneak in while the rest of you wasn’t looking and grab a few fresh clues to what was really going on in there. It was a way around your defenses. That’s all. Not, as I had worried, some form of devil worship or half-baked yankified shamanism all decked out in fake blood and feathers. As it turned out, it was really just meditation with a lot of deep breathing thrown in—again, for the oxygenated high, and the hoped-for partial dream state that might ensue if you caught that high while you were supine under a blanket and your eyes were closed.

  Sam and Carol stood over us, guiding us into the trance, encouraging us to breathe deeply and energetically, and instructing us to say aloud a quick punctuated “Ahh” on the exhale, almost as if you were dropping the breath like a heavy bag.

  Heeeeww. Ah. Heeeeww. Ah.

  I had just come out of my therapy session with Carol, full of charted sexual rage, which then disgorged itself inside of me silently, splattering against the walls of my mind as I lay there huffing as instructed.

  Hate, too. Hate was there in force, not just a word abstracted and splayed, written on the board in caps, but a bellyful, a meal of it rotting its way through me to shit.

  Digestion. A metaphor. Yes. I considered this. Lying there. Breathing.

  Emotion like a meal, always to the same end. I went with this train of thought. How marvelous to take every tasted morsel, from the lowly comfort food to the most refined and perfected dish, all of it made into shit. The same shit. Or different? Does the shit of a gourmet meal taste better to the dog that eats it than the leavings of a greasy spoon? And if so, is his palate more refined? It would seem so. To taste the chef’s art or the fry cook’s lowly labor in ordure, to suss out the progenitor in a potato, tell the coddled fingerling from the frozen shoestring, the Yukon from the Idaho.