by Terri Cheney
My boyfriend found me sprawled on the carpet the next morning, and the paramedics were quick on the scene. The very next day my brain chemistry kicked into overdrive and I began a brand-new love affair with life. So overwhelming was my newfound desire to experience life to its fullest that two weeks later, when Lisa asked me to go on safari, all I could think of was how wonderful! How absolutely marvelous!
You probably have to know me to know just how bizarre this is. I am not at all an outdoorsy kind of girl. I consider hailing a taxicab to count as strenuous exercise. I went camping once—when I was six years old and couldn’t get out of it. Ever since, I’ve boycotted any activity that doesn’t come with a blow dryer and might possibly involve spiders. Even so, I agreed, aware that even the most well-appointed safari would probably mean bad plumbing and bugs. Such is the power of postsuicidal euphoria: anything seems possible, even hiking boots.
So I said yes. Yes to Lisa, yes to Africa, yes to life itself.
I got stuck with a big preliminary injunction, an emergency favor for a senior partner, the week before I was supposed to leave for Kenya. I had no choice but to take it, which meant that I had to work nonstop, night and day, for five days before we took off. I wasn’t worried about exhaustion. I had survived on far less sleep before. But I knew that prolonged sleep deprivation does all sorts of funny things to your brain chemistry when you’re manic-depressive. Sometimes it sends you tumbling down into depression; sometimes it kicks you straight up into mania. In any event, it almost always destabilizes you in some way. Add the long flight over, the multiple time zones, and I knew I was tempting fate. I just didn’t know in which direction.
I thought I would sleep on the plane, but I was too wired from both excitement and five days’ worth of caffeine. Lisa slept beside me, and I wondered whether I should tell her that oh, by the way, I was manic-depressive and there was a better-than-average chance that my brain chemistry might be going slightly haywire in the very near future. But then we started our descent and the moment was gone.
We were in Africa. My brain was flooded with euphoria, and all the worries and concerns slipped away. Africa! It was just as I had hoped it would be. For the first time in my life, I could actually feel my ribs expand when I took a breath. Sunlight permeated everything. It soaked through my pores and drenched my skin. Our very first day out on safari, a family of elephants came lumbering down out of the hills and played in the water not fifteen feet away from our jeep. I could feel their monstrous, pounding footfalls deep inside my body. I started to cry, for no reason except that I was so supremely happy. Lisa looked at me, concerned, but I waved her away. “It’s just so hopelessly beautiful,” I said, and continued to cry throughout the trip. Zebras, gazelle, white rhino, wildebeest: each animal brought new tears.
It was the lions that finally did me in. They were so golden and glorious, it was all too much. Too much beauty. I started to sob and couldn’t stop. Our guide looked at Lisa, and she just shook her head. Had I crossed the invisible line that separates me from “normal” people?
I was probably manic, I realized. It added up: None of the other people on safari had started bawling at the sight of two cheetahs humping. Nobody else kept standing up in the jeep and making sweeping pronouncements like “Surely this is how God meant the world to be.” And nobody else was spending all night camped outside in a deck chair, staring at the African sky, expecting the stars to speak to them. But recognition of mania is one thing. Doing something about it is something else altogether.
I could double up on some of my medications, I thought. But then, did I really want to miss out on this experience? Who in their right mind would give up the chance to feel Africa so intensely? This was God’s country, and I was God’s creature. Did I really want a pill to act as a buffer between us?
The danger of mania is always its grandiosity. If nothing else, Africa puts you in your proper place. I felt thoroughly in perspective, a tiny smudge beneath that infinite sky. So no, I concluded, there was no danger of my grandiosity running out of control. But just to be safe, I should probably take my awe and exuberance down a few notches to fit in with the rest of the group. And then I’d let Africa itself act as my antipsychotic: surely it would keep me in better check than any pill ever could.
This worked well enough for the next five days. I toned down my reactions, quieted my pronouncements, and Lisa and the other tourists stopped acting so anxious around me. But marvelous as my experience had been so far, it was all just picture postcard epiphanies. I wanted more. I had come to Africa, like centuries of explorers before me, for answers.
Our guide had promised us a treat for the last day of our safari: we were going to visit a Masai village. “The real thing,” he assured us. “Very special, very rare.” This village was not usually accessible to tourists, but the guide was related by marriage to one of the tribe and thus was able to get us in. We could smell it long before we arrived: that sharp and savage odor peculiar to the Masai diet of cattle milk and blood. Then a hazy black cloud appeared on the horizon. “The cattle?” I asked the guide. “No. The flies.”
I thought he was exaggerating, but when we were within one hundred feet of the village we had to raise our voices to be heard above the angry, buzzing swarm. Flies everywhere. And not your well-mannered American house fly, either. These flies were half the size of my fist. They came at you and stuck to you with a single-minded purpose you had to admire. We were hopelessly outnumbered, but we still slapped and kicked and karate-chopped ourselves until we reached an uneasy truce.
But the flies didn’t seem to bother the Masai natives. At first I thought the whole tribe was tattooed; that is, until the tattoos started moving. The villagers simply allowed the flies to crawl all over them, even in and out of their noses and mouths, as if they were a second skin. This might have been picturesque through a viewfinder, but I was far too close to see it for anything but what it really was: a hideous harbinger of disease. Just beneath the crawling black coats were masses of oozing red sores. The little children, in particular, were covered with large, weeping ulcers.
The only other time I had seen skin like this, although on a much lesser scale, was on my last visit with David. Toward the end, the bedsores on his back, buttocks, and thighs had become grossly infected with no hope of healing. But at least they were covered in ointment and sterile gauze bandages, and unpleasant as the sharp ammonia smell permeating his bedside was, it was still an odor my mind could catalogue and place. Whereas this stench had no counterpart in my memory. It smelled of one thing: death.
A wave of nausea flooded me. I could taste the heavy cream and butter the chef had used to scramble my eggs that morning. Breakfast had been delicious. For that matter, dinner the night before had been delicious, too: the tournedos Rossini lightly seared to perfection, the lemon soufflé a marvel of spun sugar and air. In fact, everything about this trip had been delicious—until now. I could feel my mood beginning to plummet.
What right? I asked myself. What possible right have you ever had to be depressed? I thought of my therapist’s office, and the thousands of dollars I spent each year, complaining about my life. I thought about the handful of antidepressants I swallowed each morning: one pill alone cost me almost four hundred dollars a month. Add to that the psychopharmacologist I saw every six weeks or so, at three hundred dollars per visit. All totaled, the price of my depression was staggering, more than enough to feed and house and clothe several Masai families for an entire year. What right, what right?
But the question went far deeper than cost. What right did I have to own despair, with such genuine suffering before me? I looked around me at the pockmarked children, and all I could think was, a six-figure lifestyle drove me to suicide.
It’s chemical, I told myself. I didn’t choose to be manic-depressive. It’s as much outside my control as the color of my skin or where I was born. I knew at some primal level that this was logical, and therefore likely to be true. I gradually began to feel a
little bit better.
A tug on my shirt made me look down. A little girl, entirely naked but for the beaded hoops in her ears, was standing directly in front of me. Her entire body was covered in sores. Yet she smiled, a smile wide as the savannah, open as the sky. And all the logic in the world made no sense after that. I had no arguments to compete against that smile.
The only question now, and I knew it was the one I had come to Africa to ask, was why? Why in all its many vast permutations: Why did the plague visit this village? Why did my darling David have to die? And why, above all else, was I manic-depressive? Or perhaps the real question was, why did I deserve to be sane?
I fully expected something cataclysmic to happen—a sudden flood, a stampede, a gust of locusts. I waited. Nothing happened. The next morning, the trip over, I left Africa for home.
It was weeks before my dreams finally stopped buzzing. For a while, I truly appreciated my life: I savored every smell, lingered over every sensation, marveled at every creature comfort. Then inevitably, my brain chemistry shifted and my mood plunged back down to despair. Africa, apparently, was not a cure for depression. It only added a new level of guilt to my suffering.
And yes, it was suffering. Despite all my questions to the African sky, when depression finally struck again I not only believed I had the right to suffer, I felt I owned the patent on it. But it would be years before I ever attempted to kill myself again. Each time I thought about suicide, the image of that little Masai girl would flash in my mind. And I still could not argue against that smile.
9
I woke up strapped to a bed, covered in a thick gray charcoal vomit and desperately needing to pee. The only part of me that I could move was my head, and I turned it frantically back and forth, searching for some kind of clue as to where I might be. But no matter how hard I strained against them, the heavy leather restraints pinning me to the bed refused to give way. The edges of the straps were tattered and frayed, and the harder I struggled, the deeper they bit into the tender skin of my wrists and ankles. Good torture points, the inner wrists and ankles.
Had I been in some kind of an accident? A car crash? An earthquake? A fire? Maybe I was severely burned. That would explain the restraints, at least: they didn’t want me scratching my skin. I shut my eyes and started to cry. What a horrible thing, to be burned and deformed at such a young age. I sobbed for a while at the top of my lungs, but nobody came. Exhausted, I fell asleep, dreaming of dragon skin.
When I woke, who knows how many hours later (the room had only one overhead light, and no windows), the urge to urinate was so intense I felt sharp shooting pains all around my bladder. I whipped my head back and forth again, but there was no one within the line of my sight. All I noticed this time was the rather peculiar look of the walls. They had a thick, quilted texture to them, almost as if they were…padded.
Now what kind of burn victim needs a padded room? I puzzled a while, and then it came to me. Why, one who is out of her mind, of course. And then it all came flooding back: that terrible phone call, just as I was getting ready to leave the house. Strange how the telephone rings just the same, whether it’s wonderful news or the end of all life as you know it. I heard the doctor’s oddly high-pitched voice: “I’m sorry, Ms. Cheney, but it appears that your father’s cancer has metastasized far beyond what we ever expected. It’s just a matter of months now. You have my deepest regrets.”
I sincerely needed his deepest regrets. I needed everyone’s deepest regrets, because I was the one who was going to have to tell my father. The doctor thought it was better that way. Better for him, no doubt. But first, I needed a Valium. Or two. Or three. That’s what they were there for, after all—for times when you needed the deepest regrets. I waited for the pills to take effect, but after ten minutes my hands were still shaking too badly to pick up a hairbrush. So I popped a couple more. I’d be damned if I was going to tell my father news like this without my hair properly combed and my makeup perfectly applied. Daddy liked immaculate grooming. He liked me pretty as a peach.
I sat down on the bed and tried to rehearse my speech, but the farthest I got was “Daddy, I’m so sorry,” before I burst into tears. Damn the Valium, anyway; it wasn’t helping at all. I cursed myself. Why was I relying on the weakest gun in my arsenal? I went to the cupboard and gathered up several fistfuls of bottles and spread them out on the bed: Ativan, Librium, Klonopin, Xanax, and Stelazine. Surely inside one or more of these bottles resided the calm and the courage I needed to face this task.
By nature I’m rather small-boned and petite, but you wouldn’t know it from my astounding tolerance to medication. I can take enough pills to knock a Clydesdale off its feet, and at the most I’ll just yawn and blink rather drowsily and ask when the next dose is due. So I didn’t see any real cause for concern when I shook out a pill from each of these bottles and downed all five at once. Twenty minutes later, I still didn’t feel anything, although for the life of me I couldn’t seem to get my lipstick to go on straight. It kept wandering up and off my lip line and onto my cheeks. I scrubbed away vigorously at the errant crimson marks, but that only served to smear them further into my already streaky blush.
Bright red cheeks, swollen mouth, and slightly glazed eyes: this was definitely not the look I was going for. I looked like a rather befuddled clown, and my father hated clowns. I started to panic. What if I never managed pretty again? I’d heard of people’s hair turning gray overnight from a shock. Maybe it’s possible to turn sudden ugly, too. I eyed all the bottles spread out on the bed. Surely another dose or two couldn’t hurt. Just to take the edge off this panic. Just to focus my meandering thoughts. Then as soon as I felt a bit more collected, I would drive over to my father’s and tell him the news. But not until then. And certainly not yet. I owed him more than collected. I owed him serene.
In search of serenity, I swallowed the next ten pills with a big glass of orange juice, figuring I probably ought to have something in my stomach to help them dissolve. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—this morning? yesterday? the day before? Who cared? Food was just one more item that used to matter that meant nothing to me anymore. Food, sex, books, movies—all those reliable little pleasures of life before the cancer seemed somehow absurd and trivial now. Watching my father’s eyes flutter and close when the morphine finally kicked in: now that was joy. A ninety-eight point six thermometer reading: that was ecstasy.
I knew that a prolonged lack of appetite is usually a good indicator that I’m manic, but that was certainly not the case at the moment. My current mood on a scale of one to ten was a minus five. But who wouldn’t be depressed under these circumstances? Sure, I was secretly suicidal. I longed for death, I daydreamed about it, it was all I thought about in my spare time. But I had no intention of acting on my fantasies—not yet, not while Daddy was still alive. He needed me. I loved him. It was as simple as that.
So when I tossed back the next big handful of pills, there was nothing suicidal about the gesture. I’d simply forgotten about the last dose. I was finally starting to feel twinges of serenity—a warmth in my toes, a pleasant humming in my ears—and I just wanted to speed the process along. But when I went to put the orange juice away, the ceiling and floor suddenly tilted at odd angles, and the next thing I knew I was flat on the linoleum. The cold, smooth tile felt good against my flushed cheeks. It dawned on me as I lay there that I was actually happy, happier than I had been in months. I knew that there was something I was supposed to be doing, something important I was supposed to remember, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what that thing was. All that really mattered was the here and now: the cool kiss of the linoleum, the soothing song of the refrigerator. I closed my eyes and was about to drift into sleep when the telephone rang, jolting me awake.
The phone didn’t ring very much anymore, except when it was news from the doctors. As Daddy grew sicker and I became more depressed, I pulled away from the world I’d known. My friends meant well, but their expres
sions of sympathy only made me feel more alone. They were never quite the right words somehow, and they were never anywhere near enough. The truth was, the battle lines had already been drawn. It was my father and me against the world. There was no room for anyone else.
The phone kept ringing, and I tried to get up, but the bones in my legs had melted to mush and wouldn’t support my weight. So I crawled on my hands and knees across the kitchen floor, and into the bedroom. I noticed when I went to reach for the phone that my hand was still shaking rather violently.
“Hello?” I mumbled. I couldn’t quite decipher the words, but I recognized the voice immediately. It was my ex-boyfriend Jeff, making one of his ubiquitous bicoastal checkup calls. Ever since my father had been diagnosed several months before, Jeff had taken to calling me at odd hours just to make sure that I was still alive and able to answer the phone. It was kind, and I sincerely appreciated the gesture, but I didn’t feel like talking just then. I felt like crawling back to the kitchen floor and listening to the refrigerator sing its sweet hymn. I explained just that as clearly as I could into the receiver. Jeff later told me it came out sounding like one long sodden slur of vowels, without a single consonant.
“Have you taken any medication tonight?” he asked me, and for some reason I found that question so hilarious I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard that tears coursed down my face. When I raised my hand to wipe them away, I suddenly remembered other tears, from times that were not so funny. I began to cry in earnest. “No!” I shouted. “I don’t remember, and you can’t make me!” Then I slammed down the phone as emphatically as I could, so hard I actually cracked the receiver. That struck me as funny for some reason, too, and all at once I was laughing again, laughing until I sobbed—but careful this time not to touch the tears.