Jane.

by Riya Anne Polcastro

  Even then, in the moments beyond comprehension when I will rage at her internally for the selfishness of her behavior, I will long to understand her—to understand why she is the way she is, why she lives in her own little world. I want to know, really know, why it is that she can see things that the rest of us cannot and hear things that we would not want to hear. Could there be some clue there, some clue to these decade old questions? There could be an answer in there . . . in that catatonic state, right? A sign? A glimpse of the complete puzzle? Something? Anything?

  Currently, she subjects me to one of her odder delusions. The soap is not right. "It has to be green."

  "Green?" I lean back, crossing my arms over my chest, and let my eyebrows knit together. This is not the Aunt Rose that I remember.

  "Yes, it has to be green. It has to! If it is any other color but green, I will break out in hives."

  I reassure her that she does not have to worry about that. "This bar came from the health-food store, and it’s all natural: no chemicals, no fragrances, no dyes. So see, it can’t possibly make you break out."

  "No, no." She shakes her head like a wet dog trying to get the water out of its ears. "It has to be green."

  I say yet another silent thanks to Mother for the warning. "Aunt Rose, now I promise it won’t give you hives. Will you please try it?" What happened to my adventuresome aunt? The one that loved to try new things and lived for novel experiences, where is she? Just last night she ditched out on cab fare and led me on a wild escape, and now she is afraid to try a new soap? "Please Aunt Rose, I don’t have a lot of money, and I can’t afford to buy you any green soap right now. As soon as Darla sends your spending money, we will get you some green soap, OK?"

  "But Jane," she whimpers, "it isn’t green. Green soap is the only kind that doesn’t make me itchy."

  "Now Rose, that just doesn’t make sense! This is all-natural soap. Handmade! It’s the best you can get!" I snap, shaking the bar of soap at her. "If anything, it’s the green soap that will make you break out! It has all sorts of chemicals and this doesn’t!" I yell, reminiscent of everything I disliked about Mother, and Rose looks a little scared. She bows her head and finally takes the bar of soap, sulking the entire way to the shower.

  Fifteen minutes later I hear the water turn off, the shower curtain pull back, and then a scream—a loud, bloodcurdling scream. The door to my room swings open, and my aunt storms in, butt naked and dripping wet. "See this?!" she yells and points at the red splotches all over her body. "Hives! Fucking hives! I told you! Hives!" Then she cries. "That was really mean, Jane. That was really mean to make me use that soap."

  It is not possible.

  "You promised," she yelps. Water drips off of her, and there is already a pool on the floor around her.

  "Come here." I take her left arm in my hands to examine the impossible red bumps and run my index finger over a raised cluster.

  "It itches!" she complains with a shiver.

  "It’s not possible."

  Rose’s face crinkles into another bout of waterworks.

  Sleep deprived and pissed off about the previous night, my tongue raw with reproach, I somehow manage to hold the worst of it down, shove it silently into the dark hole where all repressed feelings go. Somehow, nothing more than mild disbelief escapes into my words. "Look . . . it’s just that," I pause to bite my tongue and rack my brain for a way to put it delicately. "It’s just that it isn’t logical. It doesn’t make any sense that this soap, this soap that does not have any of the artificial irritants that your green soap has, would make you break out like that."

  She looks back at me with something just a little less base than regular old shock. "Jane," she gasps in exasperation, "my world is not logical!"

  Oh, how right she is! Aunt Rose’s world is full of irrational truths and realities that are hers alone.

  Promises of Benadryl and calamine lotion fail to silence Rose’s demands to see a doctor, so we drive to the urgent care facility in the richest, whitest part of town, where we will wait a half an hour instead of the two hours it would take in our neighborhood.

  The nurse takes a quick look at my aunt’s arms and tells us that the doctor will be in shortly. Aunt Rose asks if she should change into a gown, and the nurse tells her that will not be necessary. She insists anyway, which would be odd for anyone else, but this is Rose we are talking about, so I just roll my eyes and look away.

  A short, round doctor joins us ten minutes later. He has silver hair that sticks straight up in spite of his well-gelled effort to comb it flat. My aunt holds out her forearms for him, and he says, "Ah, I see." He comes closer and takes her right hand in his in order to inspect the little red bumps. "Do they itch?"

  Rose nods furiously as she scratches at both of her arms. "Yes, yes, they itch like holy hell!"

  "Wow, that’s remarkable." He nods and another lock of silver hair escapes the gel’s hold only to stick straight up with the rest. "You have got a very impressive case of hives. Did you recently come into contact with an allergen?"

  Rose nods and continues to scratch.

  "Roll down a field of grass recently?"

  She shakes her head no.

  "New detergent?"

  She shakes her head again and points at me, the mimic of a child tattling on a sibling, then blurts out, "She made me use soap that wasn’t green!"

  I roll my eyes again. "It was all natural, no dyes or fragrances, nothing, just a bar of soap."

  "But it wasn’t green?" the doctor clarifies.

  "No . . . it wasn’t green. It was off-white, kind of beige-y. Like I said, it was dye free."

  He turns away from me, just brushes me off, and rattles off his treatment plan to my aunt. "An over-the-counter antihistamine should take care of the hives. You can also use calamine lotion if you would like." Rose swallows his advice with the trusting face of someone who has just been given a magic elixir, though she scoffed when I said the exact same thing an hour ago. The doctor claps her on the shoulder with his pudgy hands. "And only green soap from now on." He glances at me and says, "Sound like a plan?"

  She ducks her head up and down with her shoulders, a smile beaming from ear to ear. Vindicated!

  "Why don’t you get dressed while I talk to your niece real quick. She’ll come right back here to get you when we’re done."

  Rose agrees, and the doctor leads me out to the hallway. "So is it safe to assume that your aunt has some sort of schizoid disorder?"

  I nod. "She’s had a lot of diagnoses, but none of her doctors have ever agreed on a specific one. Most of them have been of the schizoid persuasion."

  "Most . . . OK. Well, it sounds as if she has a certain delusion about green soap. I would not say that she is acutely delusional, per say. This is more of an ongoing delusion. She has probably had this thing about green soap for quite a long time."

  I shrug but do not say anything. I really have no idea. This one is all new to me.

  "My advice to you is to just go with it."

  "Huh?"

  "I know it is not the traditional advice you are probably used to hearing. But think about it. She believes in this so much that her mind makes it true! Cut her some slack and accept her reality. You might be able to stave off the more serious psychotic episodes if you do."

  I sigh. Or maybe huff. Once again reminded of how my mother snowed me with her "Your aunt is doing so well!" song and dance. "Great. So, what? These episodes are inevitable? There's nothing I can do to prevent them?"

  The doctor leans back against the wall and studies me for a moment. "Well, yes, and no." He pauses again to look at me questioningly. "I'm guessing she's had quite a few psychotic breaks in her day," he continues. "In all likelihood, she will have more. But with the right care and a faithful medication routine, you can make sure that those episodes are as few and far between as possible."

  Except they are not few or far between enough for me. Rose almost makes it to the end of spring without a psychotic break, bu
t then the doctor at mental health switches up her prescriptions at her quarterly checkup. Not a day later and . . .

  19

  (Zippo) There is music in her head. It is a faded song, a radio station faint and out of tune, the volume too low to grasp or discern its mesmerizing auditory titillations. She strains to hear above the otherwise silent room.

  Of course, there is not really any music there. Not REALLY.

  A hallucination? Sort of but not quite; I guess that depends on your definition.

  She hears it just as strongly as she knows it is not there. Is she crazy? Or is it just a different way of looking at the world? Rosalee Doe sees the world through a whole other lens than most—the lens of duality. She hears in duality. She smells and tastes in duality. She lives in duality.

  What she means by this is that whatever is there is also not there. Whatever exists also does not exist. In another life, she might have been an enlightened being. A prophet. A witch doctor. A philosopher. Instead, her genius is buried among the muck of modern-day insanity.

  The irony of duality? So that is what it comes down to? Psychoanalyzed by my own cigarette lighter?

  Rosalee has been the victim of an unquantifiable amount of therapy. Inpatient. Outpatient. A brief stint in the state hospital which she claims not to remember. Plenty of damage has been done by well-meaning practitioners. She has been told a lot of things by psychiatrists and psychologists, none of them favorable. A lot of labels have been thrown her way. None of them have been productive; none of them have helped her heal; none of them have allowed her to become an equal and fully-functioning member of society.

  She scoops me up with her right hand. With a tight grip and a quick flip of her thumb, she lets loose my flame.

  Whoosh . . . crackle . . . crackle.

  She holds my flame up to a cigarette and takes a long drag. She exhales nice and slow, savoring the smoke as it rolls over her tongue and past her teeth to attack the frigid morning air with its deadly smog.

  Now you just keep your thoughts to yourself.

  Hey lady, you’re talking to a fucking Zippo. You know, the one you stole from your grandfather right out of his pocket, out of his casket as he lay there waiting to be lowered into the ground. The one you’ve carried with you for fifteen damn years now, its flint and fluid replaced with zealous ritual year after year. And I am narrating your insignificant little life.

  Except that I’m not.

  She looks out the window. The water in the lake is very deep, deep enough to drown. There is no water. There is no lake. There is no window.

  There is an elephant in the room. There is not an elephant in the room. She can see him; he is right there. No, no there is no fucking elephant in here!

  There is a dead mouse in the corner, and it is begging to be eaten. A nice pepper rub would spice it up. Toss it in the oven to roast. There is no mouse. No mouse, dead or alive, and it sure as hell does not want to be eaten or roasted with a pepper rub.

  Then, as spring heads into its final stretch, a young intern at Marion County Mental Health in Salem, Oregon does what no one else has ever been able to do. He silences me. He stops me from telling her story. Now I am just a piece of assembled parts that uses combustible material to make a flame. That is it. I do not talk. And I sure as hell do not NOT talk. And it isn’t just me. This intern finds the magic psychotropic cocktail that destroys duality and quiets all of her voices. Suddenly.

  Big mistake.

  The music stops. Rosalee’s world is gone. As crazy as that world was, it is the only world she has ever really known. It was familiar, like well-worn blue jeans. When it disappears, she completely loses it. She does not know how to live without the voices. She does not remember a time when they did not impose themselves upon her life, just as she does not remember a time when they did not cloak her world in both negativities and possibilities. This new world, with its set-in-stone reality, its definitive right and wrong, is foreign and unintelligible.

  All there is, is the cigarette. Just the cigarette. Not the cigarette and the NOT cigarette. Just one. Not one and its negative. What a fucking curveball! Who the fuck knew? Disoriented, time and space whir together. Everything is sharp again, clear—the way it is not supposed to be. Everything is what is. Nothing is also what it is not. The sky swirls. The ground quakes. What the hell has become of everything? Half of all of it is gone. The air presses down heavy, and Rosalee’s lungs struggle to take it in; it is air and only air. Where is the air that is also not there? The cigarette falls to the ground, forgotten because it cannot be what it is not.

  Rosalee stands up from the park bench and ponders the embankment below, the cold gray ripples. It is only the Willamette River. The shimmer of its sultry underside gone; it races north with utter indifference. The sing-song melody of its many voices has been replaced instead by a dull wail. It grinds at her eardrums. The real river, the one she has visited since she was a child, is gone.

  I must find IT.

  She follows a cement path that parallels the river; she follows it like a newborn doe, on legs that are only legs, the path only a path. One foot in front of the other, each step cautious lest the ground give way, her gait is more of a shuffle than a walk.

  Duality was not the only victim. The drugs took her instincts too. They took the force that pushed and pulled her for so many years. Told her when to bob and weave. When to serpentine. She depended on that force for everything she did and didn’t do. It directed her impulses. And led her quests. How can she possibly find IT without it? Those natural instincts, overbearing and over the top though they were, were also the key to her survival. Without their guidance, Rosalee is lost and all alone in the universe.

  She wanders south then north. She waits and searches for affirmation that does not come. Then, something new. The old railroad bridge is gone. There is fresh cement in its place. And guardrails. A new bridge altogether, shorter and closer to the water than the ones in Portland that she liked to frequent in the summertime. Rosalee stands before it and wonders if she should follow it. It is an impossible decision to make all on her own.

  Maybe it’s been put here to lead me somewhere.

  But the bridge does not talk back, does not respond, does not say yay or nay. Rosalee takes a couple of unsure steps, as if the structure might crumble beneath her feet. An elderly couple returning from the other side looks at her sideways through their clouded eyes. One of them mumbles something about drugs.

  If they only knew.

  Rosalee does not like the suspicion in their eyes. It makes her nervous. Very nervous. She tries to straighten her posture and fake some confidence.

  Be normal.

  NORMAL!

  The bridge is new and far away in the same manner that you can feel the distance when you are a very long ways from home. This is her hometown, but it feels like another place entirely. Rosalee stops to look down at the river. The steel and cement barriers are cold. She presses into them anyway, amazed that they have not yet given way and she has not fallen into water below. Without its nonexistent self, the bridge is impermanent and vulnerable. Without an alternative, how does it stand?

  Maybe if I sit on the ledge and dangle my legs over, I will be close enough to feel the REAL thing.

  So Rosalee hoists herself up onto the row of metal bars and takes a precarious seat on the guardrail. The breeze whips gently through her hair. She closes her eyes and sticks her legs out straight over the river, gripping the rail with her bony fingers. The river does not quite roar, and with all the other sounds of the town, it is really barely audible at all. Children laugh. Cars whoosh by on the nearby overpass. A train blows its whistle. Someone screams.

  "Oh my god, a jumper!"

  "Someone call nine-one-one!"

  Rosalee frowns. In her natural state, she would play along and have a great laugh at it all. It would earn her a night in a cell, but that is not what stops her, just as such a consequence has never stopped her before. Instead, it occurs to Rosale
e that jumping might actually be a very good idea. If she jumps into the river, becomes one with the bitter, polluted Willamette, maybe she will really be able to find IT—the real river, the whole river, the river and the not river.

  And then everything will be back to how it’s supposed to be.

  "Don’t jump, lady! It isn’t worth it!"

  Rosalee looks back to find an audience: a new mother with her baby sound asleep in an overpriced jogging stroller that has never been pushed any faster than a power walk, another suspicious old couple, a young dad with his two toddlers, and a few office hens on their lunchtime get-your-secretary-ass-in-shape gossip walk. Do these people really think she wants to kill herself? KILL herself?

  And even if she did, what do they care anyway?

  These people don’t give a fuck about me. They only care about themselves and whatever fucking PTSD they think I will cause them. I should punish them, make them watch me jump! That’ll show them!

  Rosalee turns back to the river and closes her eyes again. She pulls her legs back in and plants the balls of her feet on the thin metal rail. Slow. Like a yogi. She rises. Stands straight up on the rail.