Another silent Wednesday night. The row of silent nights stretches on into the future without an end in sight. I feel my life drifting away, one silent Wednesday night at a time.
A door slams at the back of the room and a young man saunters in. He reeks of beer. It is a sign of mental wellness that he is actively drinking and, possibly, partying like non-residents do. His hair is short and white blonde, his tan the kind that signifies good health rather than vanity. I doubt this boy in his clean jeans and bright blue T-shirt is a resident looking to join the Malaise Group.
He waves at us and pours himself a coffee, then fills a plate with cookies. He whistles a tune that sounds vaguely hard rock, vaguely familiar. His buoyancy is remarkable, even if it is alcohol-induced. It’s refreshing.
The young guy approaches the stage with hands full, bounds up the stairs without dropping anything, and sits down next to Sasha. He is tall and lanky but muscular, well-built. He is good looking, too, with a bashful smile. He does not seem to notice when Sasha carefully leans her body as far away from his as she is able to without scooting her chair. I am watching Sasha tip precariously.
“Sasha, sit up straight, please,” I say. She ignores me and continues to lean dangerously.
She should be leaning in the other direction. A healthy young woman would be tipping her body toward this cute boy, a fetching smile on her face. Sasha has no sex drive, however. She expresses so little vital energy that I see her body as an empty container. Motivated by a wounded animal’s instinct to withdraw, she tips her chair as far back as it can go.
Like most of the residents here whom I am at a loss to help, I myself have not indulged lately in good, hard, rollicking and rolling sex. Not for a long time. They may have SIPD, I have no viable men in my life. I cannot remember the last time I had memorable sex.
Perhaps this is what Victor has picked up on, this yawning absence in me. Like the missing dough in the center of a bagel.
“Hey, I guess you’re in charge here,” the blond boy says to me. He is wolfing a cookie. When I smile, he leans toward me, his breath beery sweet. “I’m Ben. I go to the U and I’m majoring in psychology. My prof told me to come, he said we should come on a Wednesday evening and sit in on the Malaise Group. To get a feel for the disorder. SIPD.”
The boy smiles and swigs his coffee. We look nakedly at one another while Sasha slowly steadies herself, returning the chair to safe balance on all four of its skinny legs.
I am wondering how old he is and what it feels like to be inside his head. His mind is still open, innocent of the horrors of SIPD. His mind is still free. (But really, what kind of mind is free?) Before I can get my act together and say something intelligent, however, Sasha beats me to it.
“Do you have dreams while awake, dreams you are unable to awaken from?” Sasha says in her soft voice. She regards her own lap where the bony knees under her rumpled skirt protrude and quake. “This is SIPD Stage I. Do you lose track of yourself? Do you have to struggle to maintain your vigilance? This is SIPD Stage II.”
I watch Ben and he gazes serenely at Sasha. He continues to eat Oreos, occasionally gulping coffee. How long has it been since I ate cookies with abandon? Since I did anything with a sense of abandon?
When I was seventeen my boyfriend raped me when we were kissing on the beach at low tide. Before that night, he had rarely touched my bare skin. In public, he would not put an arm around my shoulder or hold my hand. But that hot June night, he just had to have me. He couldn’t not have me. His bony sternum poked hard against my small breasts, his broad back covered in sweat and sand. I remember scratching him in the face, the eyes. Our sex was, I would learn later, rough sex. That first time was rape, but after that I often initiated. We continued on in this way, our angry passion fueling a deep need to hurt one another, until we both went off to college.
“Do you find your mind has fallen away into a state of randomness? This is SIPD Stage III,” recites Sasha. She moves on to list the symptoms. “Symptom One: You begin to feel like you do not care about your life anymore. Two: You really don’t care anymore.” As I watch Ben eat, I lick my lips as if they were studded with crumbs.
Why am I thinking about my old boyfriend? And rough sex? The prisoner has swallowed the key, is what I find myself thinking. The prisoner has swallowed the key.
I need to collect myself and refocus. As much as I hate to stop her, I must interrupt Sasha. It is my job to guide the group in the proper direction.
“Ben.” I like the way his little baby name rests softly on my tongue. “Do you have a letter of introduction from your professor? A visitor’s pass from the reception desk?” His blue green eyes are wide and clear, and staring into them is relaxing, like a bath in the summer sea. But I see a disturbance there, a ripple coming toward me, and he looks away.
A door at the back of the auditorium opens and one of our dorm advisors steps inside. Joe is a big man (they all are), dressed in the standard-issue whites, with a heavy belt and its prerequisite tangle of keys jingling from his super-size-me waist. Joe does not smile or call to us, but he waves an acknowledgment.
Behind him, a second man of even larger dimensions steps into the auditorium. His blue uniform stretches across a middle-aged burst of a gut, but his face is young. And blank.
It’s the young man who mows the lawn. He is staring directly at me, so I smile politely. His face is as round and expressionless as the moon. No wonder I never have sex anymore. All day and into the night I am surrounded by men who are residents and men who should be residents but are not.
I smell cheese fries again.
Both men leave, as suddenly and silently as they arrived.
Ben swears under his breath and Sasha laughs. She laughs! This could be seen as a Malaise Group miracle. No one ever laughs in Group. Remember, the people here do not care about anything. They barely care enough to show up. And Sasha, a twenty-one-year-old child, has lived here since her junior year in high school. Sasha has not matured, she’s frozen emotionally at age sixteen. Clinically, she is a Stage III sleepwalker with a medical file thicker than a dictionary. Yet here she is, laughing with a young man her own age. Like a normal girl.
Ben grins at us. He has a dimple in the center of his chin.
“Let’s continue,” I suggest and Ben nods.
Then Sasha nods. This too is like a little miracle. Sasha is actively participating in Group. Sasha regularly attends the Malaise Group, and every week she lines up the food, the napkins and the sugar packets. But she isn’t really there.
This is what SIPD is all about.
“Symptom Three: Your memories from when you cared about your life become twisted and ugly,” she says. “You remember things that didn’t happen, violent things, weirdly distorted events. Symptom Four: You lose affect, weight, muscle tone and skin color. You have become lost in the false world inside your own head.”
My mouth is dry as I ask Ben if he is already familiar with the stages and symptoms of Stand-in Personality Disorder. Or does he wish for Sasha to continue to provide our newcomers’ welcome information? I am ignoring proper clinical procedure and institutional bylaws here. He has no letter of introduction, no pass from Administration. But he is demonstrating a certain power, eliciting a restorative effect on a Group member. His eyebrows are auburn and perfectly shaped.
Ben says, “Here’s what I know. Stage IV is when you begin to feel like someone else is living your life. At this point, all your symptoms improve. Because it’s as if someone else is in your body now and they’re living through your physical being. I mean, that’s how it feels to the person with Stage IV Stand-in Personality Disorder.”
He has finished his plate of cookies and he places it carefully on the floor next to his chair. “From what I’ve read, there’s a number of viable medications available for treating people with SIPD,” he says. “Like Adjuster, I mean. And derivatives, the generics. But
these drugs only quiet the symptoms while failing to cure the disorder.” He pauses, hesitating. “Although it is curable. At least, that’s what they taught us in psyche class.”
I can smell the advancing tide. I used to like to bite my high school boyfriend’s exposed flesh while we rolled across damp sand toward the tide line. Sometimes he held my head under the rise of the waves until I came up spluttering.
“Do you feel frightened of SIPD?” Sasha’s reedy voice brings me back to the stage lights, to Group. “Do you worry you will come down with the disorder, or are you afraid you might already have it? Does anyone in your family suffer from SIPD? Have they been institutionalized?” Sasha is listing the warning signs of SIPD. She has two hospital green plates of cookies. She hands one to me, taking an Oreo for herself from the other plate before passing it on to Ben.
I rest the plate in my lap. A pink paper napkin, a hot pink triangle, perches on its knees in the center of the plate. Five black and white cookies are arranged in a circle around the napkin.
The prisoner has swallowed the key, my mind informs me once more, this time from what seems like a great distance away.
“Randomness,” Ben says.
I am thinking how much better it would be inside Ben’s body instead of my own. I am not craving him as a sexual object, I do not want him inside me, not like that. No, what I am thinking about is how very fine life would be if it were me inside him. What if I were looking out at the world through those innocent, sugar-glazed, beer-blurred eyes? Seeing life like a six-pack of cold beer or a tray of cookies laid out for my personal enjoyment, an enjoyment I constantly indulged. Seeing life through the buzz of carefree day after day of mindless college classes in which wizened profs promise there are cures for everything, solutions for all the woes of the world. A world I was not in any hurry to join.
“I’m interested in the pathology of SIPD,” Ben explains. “And I’m not afraid of the disorder.”
Like seeks like, I am thinking. He is nothing, he is important, he is a man like all men, a man who feels superior simply for being a man. And me, I am a smart girl. I can figure it all out myself.
“There’s a sense of deep randomness,” Ben says. “I mean, something’s seriously off.” He pauses and looks at me for a brief but intense moment. I feel something hard and cold lodged in the back of my throat. “This is what it has come to. Everybody knows it.”
Sasha and I nod. We wait quietly, balancing our plates on our thin white thighs.
12.
Anders waits outside the Burdome Building in the bright moonlight. The wind is sweet and smooth now. All the dark clouds from the afternoon storm have scattered and disappeared. This happens every time, and each time Anders enjoys the refreshing coolness that follows a tropical wave. Tonight is especially nice because the moon has come up big and yellow and round as the sun.
Anders likes a full moon. He can feel the liquids inside his body welling up. His blood swishes around and he hears a pulsing in his ears. He rides that tide like a surfer dude. But sometimes he feels as if his head is underwater on the nights when the moon is full.
He stands behind the recycling can by the front door, leaning against the brick building and waiting patiently for the woman to come out. Joe went off to do rounds. Before he left, Joe said to meet him later, over at the gym, and Anders said okay, he would be there. But first he wants to follow the woman when she walks back to her own building. Then he wants to sit on his favorite bench in the quad to stare at her window until her light comes on.
After that, Anders will go to the gym and hang out with the guys. Hours later, when he comes back to the bench in the quad, the light in the woman’s window will be off. Then Anders will go home to his apartment in The City and sleep.
In general, Anders knows he is not good with time. Time bends and wobbles, stretching itself out and falling back on itself. Time is not to be trusted, Anders thinks. That’s why he likes his routines. His dull, comforting routines.
But things are changing. He’s changing.
Like tonight. Tonight, for the first time ever, he stepped inside the Burdome Building. Joe is allowed to go inside on his rounds, to check on locks and shut off lights, but Anders is not. Anders has no business inside the Burdome Building. So he is worried that he has made a serious mistake and will get in trouble with Administration. Joe said don’t worry about it, but Anders is upset. Anders’s knees are shaking a little.
He squats down behind the recycling bin to still his shivering legs.
Anders talks quietly to himself. He tells himself everything will be okay and nobody will care what he has done tonight. But, he warns himself, he cannot go inside the Burdome Building again. No trespassing! He has been told not to do this and he won’t. Not anymore. And he certainly will not go into the woman’s building. He cannot follow her to her place and wait until she has gone inside and then force open the front door to her building and go inside and go up the stairs to her door and force that one open and go into her room and stare at her close up. Like he wants to do. No, he cannot do this. No, Anders tells himself over and over, I will not do this.
But he really wants to do this.
The fluid inside Ander’s head throbs and the liquid from his brain begins to drip from his nose and eyes. Is he crying? Anders is not sure. All he knows is how much he wants to touch the woman’s long blonde hair and maybe her skirt, the skirt that flies up in the wind. That’s all. Just touch her hair and her skirt.
But Anders knows this is not all he wants to do.
Anders wants to keep on doing a good job. That’s most important. But what Anders also wants to do is touch what he’s not supposed to touch. He wants to touch because he wants to know. To know what it feels like to be soft and gentle and flowerlike and blonde and wet in the rain and under a skirt that changes color because it gets wet and it flies up in the wind and it comes off. It comes off and becomes something else because it is no longer there. He wants to touch what can change so he can change too.
The moon pulls at the blood rushing around inside Anders and the water from his head drips out a little at a time until he feels emptied and hollow. He continues to squat behind the can that looks like a palm tree, waiting. He waits for the woman to come out of the building.
He waits for whatever will happen next.
13.
“Ever since my teens I’ve had these random desires. Almost like compulsions, but not quite,” Ben is telling them. He has stopped gobbling cookies and slurping coffee and sits hunched forward in his chair. Sasha is sitting forward too. So am I.
“Everyone has them,” reassures Sasha. I nod in agreement.
Here we are, three people sharing feelings, opening up. We are practically putting our heads together. This is what the Malaise Group is supposed to be all about but never is.
“I know. That’s why I’m here,” says Ben. “I want to know what it all means. And why it’s all getting so much worse now. Like for me. I mean, now I’ve developed this really weird desire, or like a compulsion that is super focused.” He pauses, looks down at his plate. “Okay, well, right now I’m totally focusing on the number one hundred and eleven.”
His eyes dart back and forth. Sasha and I say nothing.
“I mean, when I feel stressed or out of it, or if I wake up after a certain kind of dream, or sometimes if I just let my mind wander, it happens. The urge happens. And no matter where I am or what I’m doing, no matter what time it is or even if it’s the middle of the night, I have to go. I have to go out and find it. I have to go out and walk and walk and walk. Until I find it. Until I actually see the number. The number one hundred and eleven, I mean.” Ben holds up his hands as if to say, don’t shoot. “I’ll leave my class or a party or my job or my dorm and I’ll walk and walk. I’ll keep walking until I see it on a mailbox or an apartment building or a billboard or a menu for an all-night restaurant. Until I fina
lly see the number one hundred and eleven I just keep walking. But then I see it and the super focused, hard-driving desire just dies right down and the compulsion fades and I heave a huge sigh of relief. Then I just turn around and go back to school or work or the dorm.” He shakes his head, smiles. “And I feel good. After.”
Ben looks hard at Sasha, then at me. He is trusting us with this information.
“I mean I go crazy looking for my number, then I find it and I feel an inner release and I can relax again. I know this is strange but I don’t think I’m losing it. I mean, I’m not developing a personality disorder, am I?” He shrugs, glances at me, then away. “I sleep real well and my dreams stay in their own reality, my dreams don’t merge with my life. And I care about things. I care about school and my job at the bar and looking good and all that.” Ben blushes. “I mean, I’m just telling you why I’m interested in psychology and mental disorders.” He laughs, obviously uncomfortable.
“You probably have a mild stress-induced obsession,” I tell him. “It’s like a tic, a nervous tic. But, for you, seeing a certain number rather than making a specific body movement relieves the stress.” My voice is gentle, reassuring. “This kind of ritualized behavior is not uncommon these days. But even if your compulsion magnifies, even if you begin to develop an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, this is not necessarily a stepping-stone to SIPD.”
Ben is fortunate. He is still one of the healthy ones.
“Maybe. But what’s with the randomness?” Ben asks. “Everyone knows the randomness is getting worse. I mean everyone’s talking about it. And what’s with the number one hundred and eleven? I’ve been obsessed with girls in the past and, well, other stuff. More normal stuff. But a number? Don’t you think that’s like really weird?”
“You’ve come to the wrong place if you’re looking for someone to tell you your behavior is weird,” volunteers Sasha. She has tiny smile wrinkles at the corners of her small dark eyes. “At least you’re able to handle school and a job, and you have a normal life. That counts for something.”
Songs of the Maniacs Page 5