Unhinged

  Raj gets up around ten and finds me on the couch. He sees my dire expression and snickers. “What’s up your butt this morning, Anna?” he sneers.

  “Dean didn’t come home last night.”

  Raj laughs and claps his hands twice. “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later,” he says. “I only wonder why it took him this long.”

  I have to get out of there.

  I grab my cell phone and backpack, throw things inside it without thinking, and dash out the door. I forget to take my coat. When I get outside, I realize I have no shampoo or conditioner. I decide I will need shampoo and conditioner if I am going to leave the untenable apartment situation and find somewhere else to live while I search for Dean’s dead body (there can be no other possible explanation for why he didn’t come home last night). I will stay with a friend and figure things out. It will be okay. It will be okay. It will be okay.

  I’m walking when I realize that I don’t have a coat and it is very, very cold. I should go back to the apartment and get my coat, some shampoo, some conditioner. Wait, no—there’s no time. I’ll just go to Walgreens and buy some cheap hair products for 99 cents. Bought it. Got it. Good. Don’t know exactly why I feel I need it so desperately, but I do. This is what you’d call “disorganized thinking,” a classic symptom of a brief psychotic episode. I’m focusing on all the wrong things for the wrong reasons, like believing a cheap bottle of shampoo is the only thing that will keep me alive.

  I exit Walgreens and walk some more. I’m getting colder and colder with every step. I walk faster to warm up. I dial Jacey. We talk. She can’t help me. Not today. Maybe later in the week. I hang up and walk some more. I walk and walk and walk without seeing, without hearing, without feeling the uncontrollable shivering that has set in as I spend hour after hour in the freezing cold with no jacket, no gloves, no hat. I walk and walk until I end up somewhere in Lincoln Square. I glance at my watch and see that several hours have passed. It’s almost dark. Soon it will be nightfall and I have nowhere I can stay unless I go back to the untenable apartment where Raj thinks the fact my live-in life partner has vanished into thin air is funny. I have to go back there anyway, though, because suddenly I remember that I need a coat.

  I find an el station. I ride the train south-southwest until I reach my neighborhood again. I get to my building and climb the half-flight of stairs to the first floor landing. I try my key, and it doesn’t fit. I try it again. It doesn’t fit. I make sure I have the right apartment—I do­—and try my key a third time. It doesn’t fit.

  I inspect the door. There’s a new deadbolt on it, smaller and shinier than the one it used to have. I pound on the door several times, beg to be let in. Silence.

  In the few hours that I’ve been gone, Raj and Amy have changed the apartment locks—illegally evicting me. I can’t get inside my own home (such as it is), even to get a coat to protect me from the freezing Chicago cold. I can’t get a change of underwear or contact lens solution or the small stash of cash I have hidden in a shoebox underneath my bed. Raj and Amy have finished their investigation of me, and have obviously discovered something about me so awful and sinister that they have banished me for their own protection, lest the pus-covered, gaping black hole of my illness somehow creep its way through the crack of the doorjamb and infect them too. As of this moment, I am homeless.

  I am homeless. Broke, cold, crazy, and homeless.

  I trudge back out onto the street. Everything is a blur, a dark, colorful blur. I try to think of friends I can call at this hour to help me, to shelter me, but I come up with nothing. I can’t, for two reasons. For one thing, my brain has been hijacked into what my therapists will later tell me is a brief psychotic episode. For another, the very small part of my brain that is still working properly is too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. Because to do that will be to admit that Dean, Raj, Amy, the cast and crew of the play I just produced, and everyone I’ve ever met is right about me. They have found me out, discovered that my true self is that of a nutjob and a life on the cold Chicago streets is therefore all that I deserve.

  And so, I swallow the rest of my pride and sanity and make for The Sunflower Arms.

  Tonight, I will sleep in a flophouse.

  The bed at The Sunflower Arms is lumpy and lopsided. I can’t sleep. I can’t even cry. I know I should feel sad, and empty, and lost, and frightened. Those would be logical emotions to feel when someone who is smart and educated and used to have a good job finds herself suddenly homeless and broke and sleeping in a flophouse. But there is nothing inside of me right now that is logical. Logic is impossible when the only emotion occupying my brain’s empty shell is rage.

  The rage I feel is rage in the pure, classical sense. Rage is a primal emotion. Most people never truly feel it. I know that I’ve never truly felt it until this exact moment. Those that do feel it often commit heinous crimes. Rage is what drives people to commit murder, violence, war, mass extermination. Rage is dangerous. And rage is real.

  As I study the desiccated remains of the horsefly on the light bulb just beside my head, I wonder if my rage is real enough for me to commit a crime. It certainly feels that way.

  So I do.

  I dig my cell phone out of my purse. It’s after ten, which means the call won’t use any of my precious few remaining minutes. That leaves me free and clear to do what my borderline-psychotic brain tells me must be done.

  I dial Dean’s number at work. I know he’s not there, but his voice mail is. I can’t let my rage loose on him personally because I don’t know where he is, but voice mail is the next best thing, right? There’s nothing illegal about that, is there?

  Dean’s voicemail greeting picks up. I wait for a second or two after the tone before I let loose.

  “You fucking cocksucker, I am going to kill you. Do you know why? Because I don’t have anywhere to fucking live right now, and it’s all your goddamn fault. You abandoned me, you fucking asshole! And now I’m fucking homeless! If I ever get you in my sights again you are gonna fucking die. I will kill you, and you will die.”

  I hang up. Ten minutes later, I leave him another, longer, even more threatening message. And so I pass the night in the flophouse this way, threatening to kill, dismember, shred, burn, annihilate Dean in every possible way and with every possible weapon until his voicemail at work is full.

  The next morning, I check out of The Sunflower Arms and consider my options.

  As I stand in the blinding morning light on Belmont Avenue, I realize I don’t really have any options. Except one.

  I decide to call my friend Sharon.[6] She and her husband Brian[7] were classmates of mine back in college. They are married now and have an apartment together nearby. Sharon is a computer programmer, Brian is a part-time graphic designer and painter of postmodern nudes that I have posed for on occasion when I needed extra cash. I haven’t talked to either one of them in a while. But I know that Sharon has had problems with depression in the past and takes a cocktail of several antidepressants every morning to help her function normally. Somehow I guess that the two of them will be sympathetic to me, maybe give me shelter and aid until I figure out what to do.

  It’s the middle of a weekday, so when I call Sharon’s house the voicemail picks up. I leave as desperate a message as I can. I’m far beyond pride or shame by this point.

  I have no money on me so I go to the Chicago Public Library branch a few blocks away to wait for word. My stomach growls from lack of breakfast; my teeth are mossy from lack of brushing. I sit in the Periodicals Department, a few tables away from some smelly winos who are obviously regulars there. I am humiliated.

  My cell phone rings. “Anna, it’s Sharon. I just checked my voicemail at home. Look. Go to our apartment, right now. Brian is working at his studio this morning but he’ll meet you there soon. He’ll help you get your stuff back from Raj and Amy too. We’ll take care of you. Don’t worry. It’s going to be OK.”

  “Thanks,” I say. A recorded female voi
ce interrupts and says I have no more prepaid cell minutes available, and the line goes dead.

  I crash at Sharon and Brian’s apartment for the next several days. They are kind to me. Brian goes over to the apartment and manages to get Raj and Amy to let him in so he can retrieve most of my belongings, including my cat, Mouse. Mouse doesn’t get along with Sharon and Brian’s cats, so my friend Jacey (who has returned from her downstate movie shoot) takes my cat to her place in Evanston. Brian offers me some paid work modeling for his latest painting project. Jacey offers to pay me to help her catalog her vast costume collection. Everyone is so kind, so generous, so nonjudgmental. They all say that I have been horribly wronged, that Dean is a weakling and an ass to disappear without explanation and allow his so-called friends to throw me out onto the street. Nobody even considers the possibility that the whole thing is my own fault, the inevitable result of a mentally unstable brain that exploded under the pressure-cooker of the apartment—at least, they never say this to my face. Whether they really believe those statements, or just say them out of pity I’ll never know. But I’m forever grateful for their help when I’m at my lowest. Perhaps they do this for me because of their own experiences of mental illness. They know better than to judge when they could someday be judged themselves—or perhaps they already have been.

  Sharon, Brian, and Jacey buy me food and toiletries and help me look for a new job, they hug me when I cry. I wonder if they would treat me the same way if they knew I leave more messages threatening to kill Dean on his work voice mail every evening before I go to bed.

  “You know Anna,” Sharon says to me one night over dinner. “Way back when, people like you and me, we would have been the crazy aunts that families locked away in attics and didn’t talk about. Or even worse, we’d have been lobotomized and put away in institutions like Rosemary Kennedy. We should consider ourselves lucky that we live in the age of Prozac.”

  “I don’t take Prozac,” I say. “I don’t take anything.”

  “Maybe you should,” Sharon says.

  I spend a few weeks at Sharon and Brian’s apartment. Dean finally resurfaces at his parent’s home. It turns out that he has had a nervous breakdown of his own that involved him living in his car for a while in rural Wisconsin. He takes medical leave from his job, and talks to me occasionally on the phone. I apologize for threatening to kill him. I apologize for all my voicemail rages, and for calling him a cocksucker and an asshole. He tells me that he understands, he tells me that it’s not really my fault I acted that way. “You had a breakdown, I had a breakdown. I know that now. I understand,” he says. But he doesn’t sound convinced.

  I have found a freelance job doing desktop publishing and editing on a short-term contract that pays well. The time comes for Dean and me to move into the apartment we rented together in Ravenswood. Brian and Sharon help me move. Dean shows up with his furniture and speaks to me civilly. Everything seems back to normal. But it isn’t.

  Once Dean has moved in all his furniture and household items, he gets up to leave.

  “You’re not staying here?” I ask.

  “I need some time,” he says. “I need some time at my parents’.” He will not meet my eyes. He leaves.

  I plunge on. My rages and mood swings eventually even out. I go to work and get through most days without a single thought of causing harm to myself and others, with occasional lapses that I suppress with alcohol and cable TV. I send Dean dozens of apology-love-note e-mails that go unanswered. I wait for him to contact me and tell me that we will be together in our little love-nest forevermore.

  He doesn’t.

  I settle into the apartment—a sunny, spacious one-bedroom-plus-den on a tree-lined street, an apartment with new carpeting and an eat-in kitchen and a bay window overlooking mature trees and a mailbox in the lobby that the landlord has marked with mine and Dean’s names. A week or two after I move in, I get a letter.

  I don’t have the letter any longer. I burned it with a long-handled butane lighter in a brass bowl designed for holding incense. I don’t have it any longer, but I do remember most of what it said.

  Dean sends me a break-up letter. He can’t face me himself or even call me to end things between us, so all I get is a laser-printed letter on cheap recycled paper, typed and folded and unsigned. He calls me a walking disaster area. He calls me a manipulative bitch. He calls me a lunatic fringe case. He says my personality is borderline, encloses a pamphlet on borderline personality disorder and a clipping of the anonymous classified ad he took out insulting me in the “Personal Messages” section of the Chicago Reader. He says that I and my mind and my body are damaged beyond repair, he says that I deserve to be miserable and alone, he says that I am solely responsible for his nervous breakdown that forced him to live in his car in Wisconsin and embarrassed his family. Dean says that with Raj’s investigation help, he has spoken personally to some old college classmates of mine who say I am crazy and a menace to society.

  One of those old classmates is Todd Naismith, the first man I truly fell in love with, the man who taught me about Buddhism and the Beat poets in a college dorm room that smelled of Japanese incense.

  So Todd Naismith—whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in almost six years—thinks that I am crazy and a menace to society?

  It is this knowledge that hurts me the most.

  In the letter’s closing, Dean calls me a nutjob.

  I am a nutjob. Bona fide. I have it in writing.

  I burn the letter, savoring every red ember as the edges ignite and curl and float away into ash.

  1. Not her real name.

  2. Not his real name.

  3. Name changed.

  4. Mattie Quinn, “No Easy Solution for Uptown’s Mentally Ill Population,” Medill Reports, January 13, 2013, http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=214141; Emmanuel Adeshina, “Uptown ‘Ground Zero’ for Chicago’s Mental Health Crisis, Alderman Says,” DNAinfo.com, December 28, 2012, www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20121228/uptown/uptown-ground-zero-for-chicagos-mental-health-crisis-alderman-says.

  5. Not his real name.

  6. Not her real name.

  7. Not his real name.

  Chapter 4

  1993–2002: Nine Years to Enlightenment

  I fall in love for the first time when I’m nineteen. And the first man I fall in love with is one of the very few I never sleep with. Anybody who says that love is sex and sex is love has got it all wrong—I’ve got proof. I’ll call my proof Todd Naismith.[1]

  When I first meet Todd Naismith, he’s tall—six-foot-five if he’s a day—blonde, blue-eyed, lithe and rippled of body, strong of chin. He’s like a young Gen-X-grunge version of George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We are chosen to be resident advisors—RAs—in the same coed dorm our sophomore year of college at a large public university in the Midwest. As recognized peer leaders of our student body, hand-picked by the university administration to serve as models of good behavior and blossoming adulthood to incoming freshmen, RAs are supposed to be models of academic success, mental health, and stability. Todd Naismith and I are none of these things, so I guess that doesn’t say much for our university administration. But we are two grunge-goth kids with similar tastes in dark literature, death metal, and Kurt Cobain, along with just the right amount of melancholy. Our first conversation is a brag session where we compare our favorite books to read when depressed. (Mine is Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun; Todd’s is Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.) We both love Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and Violent Femmes, and we’re both the product of broken Catholic homes. Todd and I are kindred spirits, and we latch on to each other from the get-go. I’m a long way from Chicago, at this point. In college I’m just another 1990s working-class girl lost in a sea of mediocrity and Reality Bites.

  Todd and I are RAs in a dilapidated 1960s-era dorm. Todd is assigned the ninth floor of the building, and I have the tenth.

  Todd and I both have “specialty” floor assignments that are
matched to our own academic achievements. I have the Honors floor (with 24-hour quiet time and a private library to encourage extra studying by the floor’s Honors-program freshmen) thanks to my omnipresence on the Dean’s List; Todd has the Wellness floor (on which all smoking, drinking, drug use, and non-monogamous unprotected sex are prohibited) because he was active in the Campus Wellness Program (a student activity group that advocates for a healthy, active, drug- and alcohol-free campus lifestyle) during his freshman year.

  Todd and I both bond during the two weeks of RA training before the school year starts largely because neither of us lives up to our assigned floor’s ideals in our own personal lives. I might make the Dean’s List every quarter, but that’s only because I find all my classes unchallenging. I get straight As but rarely study more than a half-hour a day and never set foot in the library. Todd joined the Campus Wellness Program only to serve as cover for the fact that he consumes copious amounts of marijuana. Todd is also a connoisseur of frequent multiple sexual partners, booze, and mind-altering chemical inhalants—especially nitrous oxide, which he can get by the tankful whenever he wants at the dairy where he works on school breaks (they use it for whipping cream).

  Todd Naismith and I are therefore both campus hypocrites of the highest order. So of course we become fast friends.

  Todd is a history major with a minor in literature, I am a literature major with a minor in history. We therefore find ourselves in the same classes every quarter, and we start hanging out in each others’ dorm rooms for long late-night hours to “study.” The only thing is, we never really study anything, except each other. And I don’t mean that sexually.