Juliet the Maniac

by Juliet the Maniac (retail) (epub)

  A couple hours must have passed but it didn’t feel that long at all. People were coming into the parking lot. School was over.

  I walked down to the pickup circle. In the very beginning of the school year, when it still seemed like I would be cool and popular, Nicole’s mom pulled up every day in her big Mercedes, and on Fridays I went home with them. We’d hang out in Nicole’s room until it was late enough to go to a show or a party. She’d dress me in her outfits, do my makeup, fix my hair, and I felt like her little sister—irritating because I was older and smarter than her, but nice because it made me feel safe and cared for.

  Now, Nicole was not my best friend but my best acquaintance. She had broken up with her boyfriend a couple weeks ago, and I thought that’d mean we’d get close again but instead she replaced me with this girl Ariana. It made things seem so slippery and interchangeable. Because I’d behaved the wrong way, I’d been traded for someone more compliant.

  I only went to the pickup circle because I knew I’d just keep slipping if I went home alone. Nicole had recently dyed her hair maroon so I found her right away, standing next to Ariana, gleaming like a flame in the sea of pastels.

  “Hi,” I said to them. “Hi,” they said to me. I asked them what they were doing. They said they were going to Nicole’s. I figured they’d invite me along. They didn’t. I stood there anyway because it seemed wrong to just walk off. My hands were shaking very badly and I couldn’t figure out if it was because I had forgotten to eat that day or something else.

  “Do you see that?” I asked them. I held my arm in front of me, my hand limp. It looked like it was vibrating. There were colors pulsing off it, purple and orange.

  Nicole looked at it and said nothing.

  “Damn,” Ariana said. “Are you OK?”

  Nicole stepped off the curb, away from me. She looked at Ariana.

  Before I could say anything else, Nicole’s mom pulled up. They both slid into the leather seats, the heater so high I felt it on the curb. “Bye,” they said. They smiled. They shut the door. They drove off.

  The roaring made everything else sound too quiet. It was a weird day. It looked like it might rain. The sky was darkening fast, the blue dissolving into a dirty kind of yellow. It felt like a bad sign.

  I walked down Bonita Valley Road. People went past me in big SUVs and expensive bicycles. The air grew colder and the wind began to blow. I got this strange feeling in my chest, cold and heavy like a part of me was dying. Brown leaves swirled from the gutter as I walked. I saw shadows in my peripheral vision. My hands shook.

  WHY I’M SCARED OF BIRDS

  I always took a shortcut through a vacant field. It had been undeveloped for years, a blank square behind the mall at the top of the hill, before you got to the stucco apartments. Once the plants in it had been green and pretty, tall grass with bushes and wildflowers. It didn’t look like that anymore. Everything had turned chalky and gray. The dead grass crinkled when I stepped on it. At the far end of the field, there was a whole flock of crows, dozens of black marks like a pox.

  I expected them to fly away as I got closer, but they didn’t move. They were black, black, black all over, claws to beak, and I felt their black-bead eyes following me.

  I decided to sit down in the dirt, try to get the shadows to go away by willing myself solid and impassive like a tree. But the shadows caught up with me, and there were more of them now, shifting from shapes into pieces of people. Disembodied limbs, screeching mouths, long rotted hair. Ghosts. Wanting something from me, for me to do something, as if I could break their suffering and deliver them to heaven. They were saying something but all talking at once, and I couldn’t make out what they said. The crows were still watching me. They began to caw. They were all trying to tell me something. They were all trying to tell me what to do. The sun shone through the thick clouds, a yellow blob in the sky.

  My heart beat faster, faster until it was just one long thrum. The molecules around my head buzzed, the crows cackled, the shadows clung at me, and all of it was cloaked in doom. The poison in me was spreading, burning like bile in my veins, dismantling cells and becoming contagious. It would spread into my parents, into Nicole. The only way to get the evil out, to exorcise the ghosts, was to choke it. To choke myself. It was the only way. I stood up and it began pouring rain.

  When I got home, I was soaked. My parents were getting ready to leave for dinner. They seemed surprised to see me, surprised that I was soaking wet. “I didn’t know it was raining,” my dad said.

  A new Mexican restaurant had opened up near the gas station. “Do you want to come?” my mom asked. I told her no. “Are you OK? You look sick,” she said. I said I was fine. I was just tired, I was just cold and wet. I said I would take a hot shower. They left.

  The Other Thing took over, pushing me into the bathroom. I watched my hand take out my medicine—Tegretol, Wellbutrin. The pills poured onto the counter in a neat pile. It didn’t seem like enough. I walked into the kitchen, the tiny cupboard where my mom kept the vitamins and headache medicine. There was a big bottle of Tylenol from Costco. There was a smaller bottle of Benadryl too. I set both of them down on the counter. I grabbed one of the kitchen chairs. I dragged it in front of the fridge. There was a bunch of liquor bottles on top. I grabbed the gin. I stepped down, got a tall glass. I poured the gin into it until it was full. I didn’t put the bottle back. I took the glass and the pill bottles and went into the bathroom. I poured the Tylenol and Benadryl out next to the other pills, threw all of the bottles in the trash. They looked pretty—the white of the Tylenol and Tegretol mixed with the bright pink and red of the other pills. I grabbed a handful, shoved them in my mouth, swallowed them with the gin, until it was all gone. They went down my throat so easy it was like they belonged there.

  I went into my bedroom. The lights were off and the room was very dark. I lay down on the bed. My eyelids grew heavy and I closed them. Everything felt thick and dumb. I think I fell asleep. I dreamt I was tied, my hands behind my back, my feet together. Someone had lit me on fire. The flame that burned me was very white and very hot, but it didn’t hurt. I couldn’t see anything else but flames. I lost place of my body. I became the fire.

  And then my dad was shaking me. I opened my eyes and the fire was gone. He was sitting on the bed, over me. It looked like there were three of him. My mother was over his shoulder. There were three of her too. Her face glistened, I think she was crying, and the tears glowed, brilliant as stars.

  The next thing I knew, I was in the car. My mother was in the backseat with me. My face was against the window, the glass cool on my cheek. She kept on saying my name over and over, her hand grabbing my arm. It seemed too difficult to answer her and so I didn’t. We were on the freeway and the other car lights went by in streaks and blurs, like lines of fire.

  EMERGENCY

  Hospital bracelet, December 1998.

  There are so many things to learn after an attempted suicide.

  Here is one: the most embarrassing feeling in the world is waking up in the hospital after a botched attempt.

  A burning mortification. I’d fucked up on the ultimate fuck-up.

  Next in its vividness: there were things stuck into what seemed like every last place on my body. Needles and tubes in both arms and both hands, monitors and wires attached to my chest and back and one finger. I even had a catheter.

  The catheter was the thing that was most shocking.

  Somehow less surprising:

  I had been intubated

  because I had stopped breathing.

  Also memorable: an intense and overwhelming pain in my throat. However, this was not something I could mention because the intubation made it so I couldn’t speak. It seemed a fitting punishment, an important right that had been revoked.

  Or rather, that I had given up.

  I had rendered myself speechless.

  The embarrassment was for the obvious reasons, but it was also because I knew strangers had inserted all these t
hings into me without my consent or knowledge, in the most mortifying possible conditions to be seen naked.

  I felt like:

  disembodied teenage breasts,

  disembodied teenage pussy.

  In that way—a typical teenager.

  The embarrassment made me desperate to reverse time, so I could either undo the whole mess, or try harder so it would stick.

  The funny thing: I wasn’t sure which I preferred.

  The embarrassment made me want to go back to sleep, go back to being parts of a body. A physical object, in need of care, but not attention.

  The embarrassment made me want to rip out all the wires and tubes and needles, kick all the nurses and doctors in the face, smear their blood on the walls and floors, and burn down the flimsy curtains that surrounded me in a pathetic attempt at privacy.

  But the embarrassment paled in comparison to the guilt that rolled over me when my parents walked into the room. I had never seen them look so old or so tired. Eyes completely bloodshot, lips thin and gray. The expression on their faces displayed not anger or frustration or even concern, the way I might have thought. There was one word for the look on their faces, one measly syllable that encapsulated it all:

  Pain.

  The mundane became strange. The nurses fed me a stream of drugs through the IV. I fell asleep and woke up again. I fell asleep and woke up. Time was marked not by hours but by hospital trays, and it was impossible to tell how long they’d been beside me, because the food was not really food at all. Instead, broth and jello. Food they feed the very sick and the dying. Over those three days I had been classified as both.

  Sometimes God slipped in, but not in the way I would have thought. He put rats on the ceiling, rainbow rats, rats that were iridescent and glowing, rats that ran over each other, caught up in the tiles by a seemingly endless coil of rainbow iridescent string. Their beauty was so majestic I could have looked at them for hours. But I didn’t, because once again I fell helpless into a drugged, dreamless sleep. When I woke up, God reminded me of one thing:

  You have been chosen.

  Sometimes the Other Thing slipped in too, equally as unexpected. Gurneys passed in the hallway, urgent beeping and the hushed noises of rushed movement from a few doors down. Shadows crept in. Almost comically, I wanted to tell them, “Next room.”

  When I felt a little bit better than totally out of it, they removed the breathing tube and catheter. They told me the catheter removal would hurt, but the tube, they claimed, would cause me to feel “a tickle.” This was a lie. It felt like they were pulling a long rubber hose out of my gut, one that happened to be covered in needles and barbs. It turned out this was because I now had pneumonia. Sometimes this happens with intubation, I learned. The nurse who gave me this information shrugged, like it was no big deal.

  And I guess, in the scheme of things, it really wasn’t.

  Then there are the math problems.

  Q. A fifteen-year-old girl weighing 100 pounds consumes approximately 300 pills and 12 ounces of 40-proof gin. 60 minutes pass before she receives medical attention. How long will she remain unconscious?

  A. 3 days

  Q. How many cards and visits and flowers would a girl like me receive from her friends after a suicide attempt if she went to a school like Carmel Heights?

  A: Zero.

  Some trivia:

  Q: How much time does the State of California require a person to involuntarily spend in a mental hospital after attempting suicide?

  A: 3 days.

  Q: What is the State of California’s term for this involuntary hold?

  A: 5150

  (It doesn’t matter if you already spent three days in the regular hospital. Those days don’t count. If you don’t remember them, the State of California doesn’t either.)

  Because of the pneumonia, I still couldn’t talk. This is what I wrote on a notepad to my parents while waiting to be well enough to be admitted to the mental hospital:

  It is the kind of thing meant to be said when you accidentally bump into a stranger at the grocery store.

  It is the kind of thing meant to be said when you forgot to call somebody back.

  It is a completely and totally inadequate thing to say when you’ve brought an unfathomable amount of pain to the two people who love you more than anything in the world. When you have mutated from their daughter into a monster.

  A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE #1

  Years later, the logical part of my brain reminds myself that it wasn’t necessarily my fault. I was sick. I was suffering. Poor girl. A victim of her own brain.

  Still, here is the thing. I am thirty-two years old now. The suicide attempt was over half my life ago. I have apologized for it, and all the things before and after, dozens of times, both explicitly and abstractly. I never had to be forgiven; to my mother and father, it wasn’t even something they felt they needed an apology for. But the guilt is seemingly endless, remorseless. Therapy of all kinds, doing the twelve steps, “writing as a form of catharsis”—this type of work can heal so many things—and it has—but I don’t know if this specific source of pain will ever go away, or even fade. Maybe it will if I write this. If someone reads this.

  If the usual methods don’t work, do you think forgiveness can be granted by a passive act from a stranger?

  Does it work like that? And if it doesn’t, do you know what does?

  I’ve only been trying to find an answer to this question for half my life.

  Are you a liar? Have you ever told a lie so many times that it started to feel like the truth? This is the opposite of that. These are truths I have told myself so many times they feel like a lie. My memory isn’t remembered. It is a movie, with all the scenes out of order, not of myself but of some random girl, a stranger. Who is that girl in that story? That is some other girl. I do not own her, or know her, but she both owns and knows me.

  NOTES FROM ALTURA MENTAL HOSPITAL: THE DOCTOR

  Patient Evaluation, December 1998.

  The psychiatrist I was assigned seemed like a creep when I met him. His desk was filthy, covered in files and papers and pens from pharmaceutical companies, five empty coffee cups. When I sat down, he leaned back and put his feet up on the desk, folded his arms behind his head. He kicked over an empty paper coffee cup, but didn’t seem to notice. Then he asked me what was “shaking.” I think he was attempting to “bro down” with me. It didn’t work. He just looked like an idiot, an old fat guy wearing an ugly tie with a fucking guitar on it.

  I answered his questions as briefly as I could while still being polite. The questions seemed insane. Like it seemed insane to not be able to pass his test. It seemed insane to answer “Do you feel suicidal?” with a yes. It seemed insane to answer his questions about drugs with the truth. It seemed insane to be asked “Are you experiencing any hallucinations?” If I was hallucinating, wouldn’t I not know I was hallucinating?

  I didn’t feel suicidal when I was sitting there in that chair, but I didn’t not feel suicidal either. Truthfully, I still wished I were dead, but I was now too lazy to do anything about it. Turns out killing yourself is hard.

  And I suppose technically I wasn’t hallucinating because I didn’t see any skulls or hear any ringing phones. But the hallways in that hospital were hideous, covered in these thick gray spiderweb things. I kept my mouth shut about that.

  NOTES FROM ALTURA MENTAL HOSPITAL: WARDROBE

  My clothes were all wrong. They took away my sandals because they said we had to wear closed-toe shoes. My mom had packed boots for me, but they wouldn’t let me wear those either because of the heels. She’d also packed my Converses, but shoelaces weren’t allowed because you might hang yourself with them. The shoes slipped off my feet without them, and they told me that was dangerous. I had to wear creepy hospital socks until the next day during visiting hours, when my mom could bring me some cheap slip-on sneakers she bought at the drugstore. I didn’t understand how the socks were any more protective than my sandal
s, but when I pointed that out the lady just rolled her eyes.

  My pants were bad too—they were too big without a belt because I’d lost weight in the hospital, and they didn’t allow belts, so I had to pull them up all the time. My sweatshirt had a drawstring around the hood, which they cut out. They took away my books and journal without even telling me why.

  The belt made enough sense, but the shoelaces and drawstring seemed absurd. They weren’t long enough to hang from, and they’d probably break with the weight of a body. All around me were things that would make better nooses. The curtains, the sheets, the towels.

  NOTES FROM ALTURA MENTAL HOSPITAL: PNEUMONIC DEVICE

  Spirometer.

  In the hospital, I was given this plastic device that I was supposed to use twice a day for a month to increase the strength of my lungs. It had a tube, and I was supposed to put my mouth over it and blow just right until a yellow ball rose up to the smiley face. So basically it was the same as sucking a dick.

  NOTES FROM ALTURA MENTAL HOSPITAL: HORMONES

  “Everyone in here just wants to fuck.”

  That was the first thing another patient said to me. I was waiting at a table in the recreation room while they decided where to put me. I don’t know why he was in there. Everyone else was in group.