I agree.
Evan and Jeremy smoke with us until the party starts to clear. I’m not sure how long that is. Time flies when you’re having fun and all. We look like Cheech and Chong by the time we see Katrina again. I had forgotten we even came with her. She is all sorts of excited about some after-party. Free weed and coke to any fine ladies who show up, she claims. I don’t really want to leave our new friends like this; it’s kind of rude after they smoked their bud with us all night, but Evan says we’ll meet again soon enough. He likes me, for sure, and I don’t want to lead him on or anything. But it never hurts to make new friends.
This after-party is in an apartment out south. Jane has finished off her thirty-two-ounce vodka Redbull, so I’m driving, following Katrina who’s following some random guys. When we get there, park, and go inside, all there are is dudes. Eight or ten dudes. Most of them look about twenty. Skaters and shit. Not cute. They probably only have bammer. We should have stayed with Evan and Jeremy.
There’s a huge oval table made of cast iron and glass in the kitchen. It’s got to be a hand-me-down from somebody’s parents. I can’t imagine how it’s still standing in a place where so many males mix with drugs and alcohol. Jane, Katrina, Katrina’s boy toy, and I sit down around the table with a few other guys. One of them, Mario, is the one with the stash to share. He seems cool enough, but he doesn’t say much, just pours the rocky powder directly onto the glass. I let him know from the start that he doesn't need to line anything up for me. I don't do coke. I don’t get it. I’ve tried it enough times to know it don't do much for me. That’s fine. Why would I want to put shit up my nose anyways?
So Mario chops this shit up and lines up enough rails for everybody at the table but me. Then, he stands and gives Katrina his seat. Her flavor of the week pulls a twenty from his wallet, rolls it into a cylinder the width of a straw, and hands it to her. She puts one end in her nostril, the other just above the first line.
And Jane flips the fuck out. "What the hell are you doing?" she yells. It is hard to believe such a big sound can come from such a small person.
Katrina jumps back, startled by the outburst, but then pushes back. "Snorting this line; what does it look like I’m doing?"
"You ain’t even going to check it?" Jane says. I remember the bunk shit she bought off of me. She knew it was fucked-up, but she bought it anyway. What good is checking it if you’re just going to do it regardless?
"You don’t just put shit up your nose without making sure you know what the fuck it is." Katrina just stares back blankly, caught but also insolent.
Silence. They just stare at each other.
Finally Katrina gives in, puts a dab on the tip of her tongue. She squints back at Jane and waggles her head. "It tingles."
But that’s not good enough. No, Jane has to give her the "smell it" lecture. I feel bad for the three guys at the table. They’re just sitting there quiet, patiently waiting to hook my friends up with rich folks’ drugs, no strings attached, and they have to listen to this shit.
"Just smell it," I say, rolling my eyes. Now Katrina is staring at me like she wants to hash it out again. "Whatever," I laugh. "I’m gonna go smoke."
Thank god they’re done with the coke by the time I finish my Newport, and they’re just about to pass around a blunt. Then there are shots of tequila, lots of shots, and more lines. I take Jane’s keys away again about halfway through. She is glad to give them up and takes it as permission to get even more fucked-up. We leave sometime around four in the morning. I drop Jane and her car off at her house where my own car is waiting. Driving home, I feel good. It was a good night. No real drama. Just a chill night that met the challenge and took my mind off life for a while.
2
Not just hungover, I am still drunk and a little high from the night before when the front door echoes throughout the cottage. BANG BANG BANG. I fall out of bed and stagger out of my room. In little more than a pair of boxers and a sheer white tank, I throw the door open, ready to rip whoever woke me from my stupor a new one. But then my heart falls into my stomach, my head spins, my fears teeter on the brink of confirmation.
"Good morning ma’am, I’m Officer Jones. Is this your vehicle parked out front right here?" He is young and kind of cute in that super well-groomed sort of way.
I squint in the direction that he points and nod at my little red car. My head swirls in confusion. What does my car have to do with my aunt’s suicide?
"So you are Matt Smith?" he asks.
What the hell is this fucker talking about? I hold onto the doorframe while the room spins.
"Tell me, Matt, did you report your car stolen at six fifty-seven this morning?"
Is he crazy? Confused? Playing some sort of sick game? My mind cannot process the words that spill from his mouth. They jumble around in my head and get mired up in all the leftover vodka and cocaine. All I can manage is, "Huh?"
"Did you report your car as stolen at six fifty-seven a.m.?"
"No," I shake my head and squint at him. "Why would I do that? It’s right there." My point is lazy and off-kilter; even my hands are drunk.
"Are you Matt Smith?"
He is joking, right? "Do I look like my name is Matt?"
"Well, then tell me," he says as he rests his hand on his holster, a threatening gesture that is compelling yet comical, "if you are not Matt Smith, then why are you driving his car?"
It occurs to me that Officer Jones is also drunk and possibly high.
"I ran the plates," he continues. "That car is stolen."
"No," I say. I bend down to pick my keys up off of the floor. "I’ll show you; that is my car." I stumble past him but manage to make it down the front steps without falling on my face.
A few steps behind, he calls after me, "Did you drive home last night, ma’am?"
"Oh, god no." I fling the driver’s side door open with drunken flair to prove that it is truly my car. Next, I climb in and start the engine. "See . . ." but my words trail off as I realize that this car is way too clean to be mine. Where are the Taco Burger wrappers and cigarette butts? Where are the clothes and the makeup and the extra pair of shoes? "Oh shit."
The officer does not care that I have a reasonable explanation. He hauls me off to jail without bothering to check my DMV record, where he would see that I do in fact own the exact same car. A day later, they find my car in the apartment complex where it was left when Julia accidently drove us home in Matt’s instead. A whole day later.
And it is not just any day that they leave me to rot in a cell. It is the day my aunt has waited and pined for with all of her soul: the first day she is allowed visitors on the psych ward.
3
(Rose) Sometimes it all doesn't look so bad if I just rock back and forth. Back and forth, it’s blurry. Back and forth, the edges aren’t so sharp. But then the other patients stare, and the nurse’s looking at me like she's about to get that syringe out again. So I stop. But I can’t stop. Every cell in my body’s agitated, angry with betrayal and false love. No one cares what happens to me, so why should I? I jump up on my chair and scream with all of my might. "AAAAAHHHHhhhhhhhAAaaaahhh!" I scream until my soul’s purged and my lungs are out of breath. I scream until four gorillas dressed as orderlies come out of nowhere and tackle me to the ground. And then . . . nothing.
Glass eyes, vacant stare. Time slips by, and I don’t care.
How long? A minute? An hour? No fucking limit.
Look back at where it went.
Don’t know where all the time’s been spent.
It’s gone, lost, thrown away.
Yes, yes the whole fucking day.
A cute little diddy. I hope I’ll remember it when I get out of here. It could make me rich and famous! I can feel it! My mark on the world, my fifteen minutes recorded in the endless analogs of history. Crazy people do contribute, you know. I could name them off for you—Van Gogh, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears—but the list of crazies would be longer than the list of sane,
so you know, it’s really beside the point.
And what is crazy, anyway? This place certainly begs the question. The staff here aren’t any saner than the patients. In fact, the whole world’s darn right tootin’ crazy, and it seems to me anyone who’s well adjusted in this world is the craziest of all.
Sleep drifts in and out. Or at least I think it does. Slumber and trances and delusions can be so similar. Or maybe they are all the same thing anyways. Either way, I am in fields of glowing purple flowers where rivers run through the sky and rain comes up from the ground. Then I take a ride on a giant white horse with featherless wings. It takes me to this place which’s THIS place but in an alternate universe, and I mix elixirs and potions and feed them to the staff in white lab coats. But then my eyes spring open, and I am once again on the wrong side of the patient/doctor divide.
My eyes are open, but there’s nothing to see. My head pounds around my clenched teeth, and curiosity asks what it is in this life that I cling to. Except there’s no time to ponder before the bigger question as to who am "I" barges past and the disconnect happens, and suddenly I am but a tiny fading piece of something much larger trapped in this decaying vessel. I stare out through these foreign eyes, disoriented to a sense of self that I cannot reconcile; has it abandoned me or have I overcome it? The truth is just a different shade of a lie. Does it really matter how it came to be? So I don’t care who I am or where I am insomuch as I don’t even exist to care. I am here, unreal in this place as unreal as me, with vision gone gray and ears so overwhelmed by never-ending stimuli that they hear everything and nothing all at once.
4
They release me without apology. Instead of thanking me for not driving drunk, for giving my keys to a sober(er) driver, they scold me for not recognizing my own car and hand me a bus ticket. By the time I find my way home on Salem’s ridiculous maze of an underfunded public transit system, there are no fewer than twenty messages from my mother. Each message is worse than the last. They start out as little more than a reproach and get successively worse as my aunt spirals downward. The first: "Now Jane, I realize this is tough for you. You want to have your own life and all, but you agreed to this responsibility, and you need to uphold your end of the bargain and be there for your aunt." From there, after the next few messages, she graduates to: "Goddamn it, Jane, where the fuck are you?" By the final message, she is cursing the day I was born from the psych ward where my aunt has gone fully catatonic. It is too late to visit now anyway, so I turn the phone off and crack open a fresh bottle of vodka. After a few pulls, it is easy enough to drift off to sleep.
Julia picks me up bright and early the next day, takes me to see my aunt. But Rose is completely unaffected by my visit. Her therapists and social workers have always insisted that visitors are imperative to her treatment during a psych hold. There is not, however, much to do with a catatonic person. You cannot share a tasty treat or discuss the progress they have made or inform them of the latest gossip. If anything, it is just uncomfortable sitting here trying to talk to someone in a mental coma. I do not see how it is benefitting her in any way.
My sympathy is gone. I can no longer force myself to care about green soap, uncontrollable manic whims, or any goddamn voices. Agitation festers within while on the outside, my feet tap nervously and I crack my knuckles in tender expressions of rage. The nurses start to look like they want to slip me some Ativan of my own. I cannot stay here and take all of this in silence while the rage wells in my belly, taunting me to scream at my aunt and scream at the staff, rip the stupid mass-produced portraits of tranquility from the wall, overturn the med cart in a flurry of rebellion. It is all I can do to bolt out the doors and jump into Julia’s car before the impulses take over.
Julia is quiet. Observant. As if she is not sure if she can handle me. If I could see myself through her eyes right now, bouncing in my seat and vomiting out a million words minute, my face red and my fists ready to do violence for the sake of violence, I would be ashamed of myself. Except in that same moment, I do not give a fuck. My behavior might be selfish in the way it releases all of these anxieties and pressures helter-skelter, but years of stuffing and tamping it down . . . well, there is no denying this explosion was imminent after it all. This is the Jane that has been lurking in the shadows, the one that has hidden all this time, waiting for the other one to give up and let her out. This Jane undoubtedly feeds off of the kid gloves that she is handled with. Julia’s stone cold silence, her obvious discomfort, is but fodder for her cannons, excuse enough to take it to the next level. This Jane stomps the floor and slams her head into the dash.
Julia exhales loud and purposefully. With as much composure as she can muster, she instructs, "You need to calm down or get out of the car."
This Jane looks at her sideways and senses fear—not a physical fear but rather the emotion in relation to this tenuous occasion for dissolution. It is a tough call how far crazy can be pushed. The limit beckons, and yet the repercussions are not quite worth it. It is not just about the space between Julia and me. There is another line out there, a line in the sand between sanity and insanity. I have been searching that line out, toying with it, reveling in it. Someday soon, I might just take a running leap right over it. And while the point of no return may be coming around the bend quick, for now at least, it is imperative to maintain control: control even in the midst of its complete disavowal, control of crazy—an oxymoron if ever there was one. This Jane slinks back to her cave as though I really have been slipped a sedative or two. Everything is quiet. Julia drives, and I stare out the window with vision as gray and catatonic as my aunt’s.
Another person’s perspective of oneself can be both enlightening and maddening if not altogether confusing. I find myself at war with Julia’s view of me. She harbors both resentment and admiration as if there I some special esteem for being the craziest of all. She wrestles with her indignation at this; her admiration of my mental state is rife with some sort of strange masochistic envy, but she also shows her contempt at my arrogance to pick and choose my own rules. Her ability to handle me in this manic state is no doubt informed by the source of our conflict: a passive-aggressive demand that I recognize her as leader and my insistence that there is no such thing. I infuriate her even as she yearns to take to take it to the same level. Simply put, she is too smart to let it happen. She knows better. She knows what can happen when you cross that line. She has seen it happen.
Still, she is the one who has always cheered as I sprinted towards insanity; she is the one who encouraged us to make mental illness a competition. While most girls contend over who has the most shoes or purses or who can lose the most weight, we are in a race to the psych ward. Except it is all fun and games, right? We are not really crazy, just young and dumb and drunk and overwhelmed with the freedom of amateur diagnosis. The sober part of me shakes my head and rolls my eyes at our imitation of such serious disorders, but the even more sober part recognizes it all as a coping mechanism. We cannot go on like this forever, but for now, it is the way we choose to live.
5
(Rose) I’m trapped and I can’t get out. Force, force is all I need, but it runs away from me. I reach for it, but it slips from my grasp. The mere simplicity of it all makes it that much harder. I slip and fall further into the heavy abyss. I claw and climb at the walls of desperation, just short of determined enough.
6
The time comes when all other options have been exhausted and the decision must be made: to shock or not to shock? And now I hold my aunt’s health in my hands. Part of being her caretaker is making decisions for her when she is unable to do so. I even signed a mental health directive back when Mother was having her own health issues and not wanting to leave Aunt Rose in a lurch and all. It did not seem like a big deal at the time. It never occurred to me that I may have to go against her wishes in order to help her.
Electroshock treatments conjure images of a time many think is long past, a time of barbaric punishments administe
red to mental patients housed like cattle in decaying facilities. But my aunt’s first stay in the state hospital rattled my naiveté about the past being in the past from early on. I saw the torture as treatment evident on patients’ faces. I saw the obvious environmental degradation, the covert psychological torture that was used to keep them in their places. And after she got home, I heard Rose cry out in the middle of the night: "No, please not the shocks! Not the shocks! No!" Now, here I stand with the power to save my aunt from such trauma, but if I do so, will I be damning her to an endless catatonic state and indefinite admission into long-term psychiatric housing?
Dr. Novotny swears it is her only hope. If I deny it, he assures me my aunt is unlikely to leave her catatonic state. "She does not have the will to come out of it on her own," he says.
It is an arrogant statement that proves she is just another chart to him. My aunt has an iron will when she so chooses, and I cannot help but wonder what other motivation he could have to sell me on the procedure. Is it easier and faster than digging to the root of the problem? Of course. Will it clear a bed? Maybe. Does the manufacturer send him to a yearly "conference" in Hawaii?
The decision itself is overwhelming. Neither choice is a fair option. I can shock her and she can get better but hate me anyways. I can say no and she may be a vegetable for an unpredictable and possibly indefinite period of time. Then again, she may be shocked to no avail. What if the treatment cements her state as it is? The unknown is too big, the responsibility too much. "I can’t make a decision right now," I tell Dr. Novotny. "I need some time to think about it."
So I leave the triage center, but instead of going home to think, I meet Julia at a bar, and we drown thoughts of Rose in shots of tequila. Julia does not admire my aunt in the way that she admires crazy among the rest of us; she does not look up to her in spite of her reverence for all things insane. "There is a difference," she explains, "between crazy folk that can maintain and those that can’t."
Jane. Page 27