Three thirty usually rolled around pretty quickly, and then it was back into the van to the apartment where we usually had about an hour to ourselves before the evening activities. If it wasn’t spa night, I often used this time for my workouts down at the apartment complex’s minimalist gym, which was located next to the oval pool and Jacuzzi, where Cook and Bobby did their woozy cuddling.
If it was spa night, then I saved my workout for later and took a nap. The spa had a much larger, better-equipped gym than the apartment complex and a twenty-five-meter pool where I sometimes did laps. Petunia and I often spent most of our two hours at the spa working out, spotting each other in the weight room or riding the cardio machines.
After the evening’s activity, we went back to the apartments, where I cooked myself dinner and ate it watching TV. I usually finished out the day in my room making notes about the day’s events or combing the work of existential psychologists like Rollo May for juicy chewables to sleep on. I’d lie there drifting off, thinking hazily and more than a little self-satisfiedly of Kierkegaard’s assertion that anxiety is our best teacher.
And then after a deep, restful sleep, I’d wake again to the sucking sound of the rubber seal breaking on the front door, and I’d wander sleepily out of my room to find Roger opening his yellow toolbox full of meds on the table in the kitchen.
As I said, it was predictable. It was simple. There was nothing to do but just be and breeze through the days unencumbered by responsibility yet untrapped by a locked ward. You had as much freedom as any program could grant you, and as much therapy and fresh air and entertainment as you were willing to grab.
On Saturdays and Sundays we slept in, and then they took us to the beach and to the movies, and we ate potluck lunches around the pool. If it rained we went to a museum, or we sat around in each other’s apartments watching sportscasts and garbage TV.
People complained about the few small restrictions—that we had to go everywhere as a group, or we had to be driven around from place to place like bad-seed preschoolers. But after my experiences at St. Luke’s and especially at Meriwether, I knew that these guys had no idea how good they had it. To me it was like a low-budget vacation or an ashram at the Motor Inn. It was all right. And given the alternatives, it was paradise.
I even got something out of it. Something real to take with me and use in times of distress. Call them tools, for lack of a better term. Or progress on the ongoing problem of me.
Best of all, I got a real therapist, someone who would be a person with me and challenge my views, nudge me off my brutal, grinding track and offer me a gentler alternative.
“Give yourself compassion,” Carol said. “When you’re feeling something intense, stop, observe the feeling, acknowledge your discomfort, and then give yourself compassion.”
She saw me shaking my head.
“What? You don’t like the word ‘compassion’?”
“No. It’s too delicate. It’ll never work. My mean brain will just roll over that like a doll in the road.”
“All right. Think of another word that you can relate to.”
“I don’t know.”
I’d thought. The obvious, common words had come into my head. Kindness. Gentleness. Sympathy. But I had shaken them off with disgust. Then I’d thought, for some reason, of myself in the lobby at St. Luke’s, terrified and crumpled, and I’d remembered that word. The word I had said as an exclamation, an invocation, a prayer. “Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary.”
“Help,” I’d said.
“Help,” Carol had repeated. “Great. So,” she had written it down on a sheet of paper for me, “stop. Observe yourself. Acknowledge your discomfort. Give yourself help.”
“Right. Help,” I’d repeated. “I can try that.”
I had come back to the meanings of words. “Help.” And now “try.”
“Try that.” “Just try.”
I’d elongated the sound in my head. Trrrrryyyy. I had written it down in my notebook, and as I’d looked at it I’d seen that it was one of those words that looked off-kilter on the page the longer you stared at it. Three letters and the nonvowel vowel Y. It was like one of those words you see a lot in crossword puzzles because they fill in the three-letter gaps. Like emu or awl.
Try. It had a nice twist to it when I pronounced it again slowly to myself, like someone wringing out a rag between his fists. Tryyyyyyy. Squish. Dribble. Drip. Drip. Drip.
And then there was try, as in “Try the criminal.” The trial. The judges in my head. They, too, had been in the lobby at St. Luke’s. Pronouncing their sentence. Pointing their fingers. Relentless.
Ah. And there it was. Again. The pattern starting. This was how my brain went to the bad place. This was how I would end up in the tub. I would take a perfectly good sunny-day word like “try”—“Try it. You’ll like it”—a word full of possibility and personal empowerment, and bring it around to Kafka in three minutes flat.
Thinking about it afterward, I could just hear what Carol would say, “Norah, listen to yourself.”
Yes. Listen. Observe. See the downhill metal ball rolling, gathering speed until it is a bullet right in your path. Right in your brain. As fast as gravity. Then momentum. Then force.
Choose not to. I say this to myself a lot now after Carol. Choose not to go down that path. Take the dark thought pattern and bring it into the light. That was what perception therapy was all about.
The old thought is: Try.
The old perception is: I am on trial.
The old behavior is: Penalty.
The new thought is: Try
The new perception is: Try and try again.
The new behavior is: Go on.
When she got out of Mobius, Bobby only had about a week of freedom to enjoy before she had to do her time in jail. Since she and Cook were apparently an unofficial item by the time Bobby left, Cook had offered to let her stay at his beach house for that intervening week. He’d asked his sister to pick her up at the terminal.
Word was that Bobby had been so obliterated and belligerent by the time she landed, she’d nearly been arrested by the airport cops. She’d been outside on the curb ranting about lost baggage for about ten minutes when Cook’s sister pulled up just in time to yank her into the car and drive off.
That was the last I heard of Bobby.
Now that she was gone, Cook had turned his attention back to Katie, who was basking in the prospect of another male to abuse. But Cook didn’t mind. He didn’t mind anything. He had a week to go and he’d be back on his sailboat making a trip to the Sargasso Sea, or some other place that seemed aimlessly appropriate. He was as supple and soft as the blond hairs that covered every visible inch of his body, like a golden down that signified his favored status with the gods. To look at him, you’d never know he’d been to prison. He looked like he’d been a lifeguard all his life, even in prison. He had a gift for finding the smooth passage, even through an ordeal. He had a talent for happiness, which might have been why he didn’t really pay much attention in class. He knew how to turn negativity around. He was in the hammock already. What did he need with the Buddha.
I wondered if his equanimity was siphonable, like maybe his balls were full of quinine and that’s why he wasn’t susceptible to my disease, and if I could just tap some of that elixir, I’d be as sanguine and sun kissed as he was.
I wondered what his therapy sessions were like.
The thought is: Life is good.
The perception is: I’m made of nutmeg and cherries and malted milk.
The behavior is: Taste me.
Of course I knew this had to be an illusion. He wouldn’t have been at Mobius if he’d had it all sorted out. Either that or he’d just gotten caught and been forced to do his time here like the others. He said he’d come of his own accord, but maybe that was crap.
Still he was there with the rest of us, and I was grateful for the enthusiasm he showed for the activities portions of the program. He was there in den chi
bon, smiling and gesticulating inanely with Sam and Gary and me. He came to life in the art room after rebirthing when we drew our silly pictures, even though he couldn’t draw any better than I could.
He took part enthusiastically when we made a Tibetan sand mandala one afternoon on the floor of the activities room. Earlier that week, Sam and Carol had asked each of us to draw a picture or symbol that we felt would be representative of our time at Mobius, something personally meaningful that would encapsulate what we had learned or remind us of the healing principles we should try to reconnect with in times of stress. They gave each of us a square of white cardboard, nine inches by nine inches, and asked us to fit our picture or symbol into that space. In order to make the mandala, we placed all of our small squares of cardboard side by side on a larger piece of cardboard on the floor and recreated the images on them, this time using colored sand, which we poured from the narrowed snouts of plastic bottles. As Sam and Carol instructed us, the sand mandala was a lesson in cooperation and impermanence, cooperation because it is a collective form of art, and impermanence because the sand is never fixed to the base. The wind can blow it away.
My symbol was a chair. It was my reminder to stay put, to stay with the feelings, not to run or try to escape through sex or drugs, to inhabit myself and my dreamy sea house for the first time.
Gary’s symbol was an eye. A huge eye. He said it was for vision and seeing clearly. Other people made abstract symbols whose meanings I didn’t investigate. Some had drawn mountain scenes with the sun rising above them or calming bucolic vistas as seen from a cottage window. That kind of thing.
It took us a few hours to finish tracing our own designs, and to fill in the open spaces at the center and edges of the large piece of cardboard underneath. It was like being in fourth-grade art class again, except without the mess. It was a relaxing way to spend an afternoon, and, more to the point, it was a way to calm the critical mind by occupying it in the relatively menial task of pouring sand.
Once engaged in this way, the mind stops watching the rest of you so closely, and your thoughts can amble unsupervised and unjudged. This will sound strange, and yet I’m sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself. Klonopin had done that. By chemically shutting out thought, it had stopped the whirling, overwhelming, expectant world and brought me to a tiny still point of focus right in front of me.
Working on the sand mandala had the same effect. The part of my brain that would normally have been obsessing about my failures and inadequacies, or the passage of unoccupied, unimproving time, or the pointlessness of going on, was busy thinking about how to trace the drawing with grains of sand.
Again, the material is meaningful. First, sand is not easy to manipulate precisely. It takes patience and concentration. What’s more, it forces you, as I had learned by the end of my time at St. Luke’s, to shrink your world, in this case from the overwhelming bucket or beachful to the single, manageable, even fascinating grain.
Sam and Carol were always trying to teach us, according to the Buddhist tradition, to be present, in the moment. This, they urged, was the way through our pain. But the novice rarely grasps this as anything but rhetoric. The conscious, micromanaging mind is just too omnipresent, too used to splashing around disruptively like a brat in a pool.
But making the mandala, which is an art practiced by Tibetan monks all over the world, showed me, not abstractly but concretely, what being present really meant. It put me there. Focus your mind on a task, the more menial and the smaller the component parts the better, and the shift is inevitable. As idiotic office managers are so fond of repeating, you will almost certainly find God in the details.
To preserve the tidiness of the activity room, instead of turning on a fan when we had finished the mandala and watching the beautifully patterned colored sand drift artificially along the baseboards, we poured it instead into several large pans that we planned to take to the beach the next day so we could toss it up and out over the water.
As it happened, the next day was my last full day at Mobius, so the sand-tossing ceremony made a fitting end to my stay. Instead of doing den chi bon in the exercise room as usual that morning, Sam and Carol took us to the site of an Indian mound in a nearby park. The mound overlooked the beach and was shaded by tall whispering palms. At the very top there was a flat clearing covered with loose soil. Sam set up his iPod speaker on a bench to the side of the clearing. He gave us each a receptacle—a bucket, a coffee can, what have you—and told us to walk down to the beach to gather sand.
When we came back, he told us to outline a large circle on the ground with a trail of sand. The circle had to be large enough for us all to stand along its circumference and still have plenty of arm and leg room to do den chi bon. Once we had finished outlining the circle, and had chosen our positions along it, Sam told us to make another trail of sand leading from each of our positions to the center of the circle, thereby forming spokes in a large wheel. Once we had done this, we took up our positions again along the circumference, and Sam took up his at the center.
Sam was wielding a long wooden staff that he had obviously fashioned for similar ceremonies. Gary had done this at least once with Sam. He claimed at one point to have had visions of spirits appearing on the mound in the form of wolves. Nobody else saw them, naturally, and nobody believed that they were there. But Carol had taken some photographs during the ceremony, and when she developed them, sure enough, you could see wolves in the circle. That was the story, anyway. I never saw the photos myself, and would have remained an unbeliever even if I had, but I did believe in the ceremony’s power to unleash suppressed emotion, and that’s all I was hoping for.
Being outdoors in that setting, standing atop a mound of crypted culture, made it easier somehow to let loose and connect with your own buried past. The open sky made you feel as though you could curse a blue streak without it bouncing back, and all that borrowed native juju seeping up through the soil was hard to beat when you were getting down and dirty with your inner child.
After we’d performed the usual den chi bon exercises, Sam took up his staff, aligning himself in turn with each spoke in the wheel, facing each of us one by one, and dancing up along the length of the spoke until he was close enough to kiss whoever was standing at the end of it. Then he invited each of us into the center of the circle for a little private mano a mano with him and the staff.
Actually, he didn’t quite invite each of us. He didn’t bother with Katie. When he made his way up her spoke, she looked at him like she’d beat the living shit out of him if he came any closer, so, no doubt knowing her history, he thought better of the gesture and backed off.
But the rest of us had a turn inside, an invitation to grab hold of the staff and try to wrestle it away from Sam while we put one lowered shoulder to his chest and leaned in hard against his resistance. Or as hard as any of us would. Almost everyone, even Petunia, whom I’d expected to mate more willingly with his demons, just moaned gamely and went through the motions, too embarrassed to really sumo in front of the group, or maybe just too emotionally impacted to purge the load.
By this point, I was a little more lubricated. I went at it with everything I had. When it was my turn, and Sam made his way to me, twirling and thrusting his staff, and grunting from the bottom of his throat, I said jokingly, “You’re a brave man, Sam,” and stepped into the circle.
Writhing against him, digging my toes into the dirt and pushing with all the strength in my legs, I barked, growled, and bellowed so hard and so loud that I scraped my throat raw. All the rage that I’d felt in Carol’s office and during rebirthing came charging out. So much so, that I very nearly took a bite out of Sam’s shoulder.
We went at it this way for at least five minutes, which feels like a hell of a long time when you’re wrestling someone with super
ior spiritual skills. Sam encouraged me to drain myself, saying, “Come on. Let it out.” And I did, until I couldn’t make another sound or push against him any harder. And then, as the emotion slowed, so did we. Our grips on the staff loosened, and we swayed slowly to a stop, breathing heavily, leaning against each other gently, and then not at all, until we were standing again fully upright, our breath coming back, our hands only lightly on the staff. Sam led me back to my place in the circle, returned to his place at the center, put aside the staff, and tapered out the ceremony as usual, calling us in closer so that we could hold hands and close our eyes and breathe together as the music ended.
Then in silence, we took the sweepings from the sand mandala and walked to the water’s edge. Each of us grasped a handful of the sand, ready to throw it out into the water, expressing our guiding thought for the day as we did so. Since it was my last day, mine was a guiding thought for the coming weeks and months, and maybe even years. In keeping with the symbolism of the chair that I had traced on the sand mandala, and the theme of inhabiting myself that I had been developing throughout my stay at Mobius, I came back in my mind to one of those four-letter words that I had written in caps in my notebook and underlined for emphasis: STAY.
Voluntary Madness Page 25