Albert, mother and the doctor all exchanged knowing glances.
“I didn’t sleep with her,” I argued, trying to keep my voice from shaking too badly. Trying to sound persuasive as I quickly thought of a fib. “It was Tommy from back home. I lost my virginity to him two summers ago.”
Mother scoffed, shaking her head. “Since when have you ever gone out with a boy?”
My eyes burned. “It was at camp, all right? It happened at camp Halloway when I was fifteen. We got drunk and did it. Ask anybody.”
“I don’t buy it,” she snapped, sniffing to Albert for consolation. Not that he was of any help to her, instead choosing to just stand there and give me a disgusted look, as if to say, What a whore you’ve turned out to be.
“Well, you can’t prove it wasn’t him!” I retorted.
Dr. Kefir pushed the papers across the table, then took his ballpoint pen out of his breast pocket and leaned over to hand it to me. “Now listen carefully, Diana, we all want what is in your best interest. Nobody here wants to deliberately harm you, do we, folks?”
He looked expectantly at my mother and both her and Albert shook their heads adamantly. “No, of course not, we all love Diana,” my mother said hollowly.
Dr. Kefir glanced back at me triumphantly. “You see? We are all here for the good of your health. Your mental health, that is, as well as your physical well-being. None of us want you to be endangered in that…that sort of environment –” his voice trailed off as he gazed in the distance momentarily, chin trembling slightly.
This only took place a fraction of a second, after which Dr. Kefir regained his composure and cleared his throat. “Now see here, you sign these papers and we’ll just forget all about your little Mexican friend.”
Albert looked as though he would protest, but Dr. Kefir shook his head at him surreptitiously. “It’s easier that way, Mr. Rassmuller. She signs the self-committal documents and we don’t have to be concerned about her running off and getting into God-knows-what kind of trouble. It’s a small price to pay for the good of your daughter’s health,” he said, the last sentence aimed at my mother.
She bowed her head, wringing her white-gloved hands. Then she looked up, having made her decision. “I just want what’s best for Diana.” She leaned down, her rouged mouth just inches from my nose. “My dear, please don’t humiliate me like this. Let’s sign these and we can forget all about your history. It will be just like starting anew.” She straightened her spine, proud of herself.
“How do I know you’re not lying?” I asked through the tears.
Dr. Kefir gave me a serious, I-mean-business look. “I give you my word that if you voluntarily cooperate, we will forget about taking steps to have your friend arrested.”
“And what if I don’t believe you?”
He crossed his arms impatiently.
“Look, let’s not beat around the bush here. If I picked up the telephone right now and had your friend picked up, would I honestly expect you to come into my office twice a week and trust me with your therapy? We have to establish a patient-doctor relationship here, and if you are willing to work at it, so am I. It’s quid-pro-quo.”
At first I didn’t believe him, but there was a glint of seriousness in his eyes that caught me by surprise. My God, the bastard actually took himself seriously. I could not save myself at this point, but if I could keep them from hurting Rosario and her future, I would do anything.
“For how long?” I asked shakily.
Kefir’s expression told me he already knew I had lost. “Only a few weeks,” he answered. “It’s all quite standard. Nothing to be afraid of.” He nodded to a little valise next to the desk leg. “Your mother has brought along a few of your things.”
So they had orchestrated all this, to blackmail me into submission. I reached over and scanned the paper, my brain not absorbing the fine print. It didn’t matter, I had no choice but to sign it and perhaps it was better for me not to know what I had just agreed to.
I picked up the pen and wrote my name shakily across the dotted line. Showing a look of satisfaction on his face, Dr. Kefir snatched the papers back, and with that my fate was sealed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After a while you tend to lose track of days, especially when there are no calendars or newspapers around to remind you of the amount of life you are wasting away locked up on a psychiatric ward.
Dr. Kefir thought it wise to begin me on a low-dose regime of Prozac, the new wonder drug as he called it. It was a longish pill, half white and half as jade-green as the scaly back of a cricket. Over the course of a month, give or take some days, he would augment my regimen with additional medications that kept me foggy-headed and in a perpetual state of numbness.
During our early sessions I snapped at him, anger seething in me, frothing cold like an uncontrollable brook. Secretly, I dug my fingernails into my skin where it wasn’t visible – along my arms or above my knees, where my skirt could cover up all the little scabs. My hair hang limply over my shoulders, unwashed and uncombed.
Dr. Kefir seemed to be increasingly upset at my lack of progress and sub-par grooming habits, but the medicines interfered with my ability to discern what he considered progress and to play along accordingly. At first I tried not to take them, but the nurses who administered them made me open my mouth and checked that I wasn’t stuffing pills inside my cheeks like a squirrel.
“It’s a strange name, Kefir,” I laughed at him one afternoon, swinging my feet onto his desk. He frowned and gestured at me to remove them at once, but I played stupid. “Isn’t that a yogurt or something? It figures, I’m allergic to milk,” I giggled, twirling a strand of hair round my index finger.
“Please, Diana, off my desk,” he said again, waving his hand at me.
“Okay, okay, don’t have a bird,” I said, rolling my eyes. My feet hit the floor with a dull thud, like tree trunks fallen in a forest.
“Thank you,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “Kefir is a Turkish name actually. My parents came from a village near the Black Sea.”
“How very interesting,” I replied, scanning the books on his shelf, then the diplomas on the wall. “Can I see a picture of your daughter? You talk about her so very often.”
“We’re not talking about my daughter right now, we are talking about you,” he said, irritation darkening his voice.
I snorted. “So what about me?”
“The pills I have prescribed you are not working. You showed some initial promise with the Prozac, but the Chlorpromazine gave you a seizure and we had to take you off that right away.”
Fuzzily, I recalled walking down the corridor toward his office several days earlier and feeling a strange sensation suddenly bubbling up in my chest. My tongue had grown a life of its own, turning toward the back of my throat. I grasped for the wall but collapsed, and I didn’t remember anything after that except waking in bed hours later with a cold compress on my head.
“Ah, so that’s what that was. A seizure. Bad pills.”
Dr. Kefir leaned forward and crossed his hands together on his desk. “We don’t have a lot of options here,” he said in disapproval.
“Isn’t homosexuality okay in your country? I mean, aren’t there bathhouses in Istanbul where men go to hang out with each other?”
Dr. Kefir’s eyes flashed with anger. “Homosexuality is a grave illness, and not something to speak lightly of. And besides, I am not from Istanbul – my parents actually came here before I was born. But we are not speaking about me. I have to tell you that I frown upon this behavior of yours, this blatant turning of tables. Let’s not beat around the bush, all right? You are a very sick girl, Diana, and I have promised your mother that I will do whatever is in my power to bring about your restoration.”
My restoration. Like the porcelain ballerina I had accidentally dropped when I was five. She had shattered into more than a dozen pieces and sent my mother into hysteria for days on end. Finally, she took her dolly to a restorer, w
ho crazy-glued her back to unattainable perfection, and then she was placed high on the fireplace mantle, away from my prying hands.
“Can’t you see I’m fine,” I said. “What the hell do you want from me?”
”I just want you to feel better, Diana.”
I forced a false grin on my face. “Look, I feel better. Now can I go?”
“This is a serious conversation we’re having, and I expect you to cooperate with me here. Frankly, I would like to recommend electroconvulsive therapy.”
“What’s that?” I asked warily.
“It is the deliberate and controlled induction of a seizure of brain function for the purpose of psychiatric treatment.”
“You want to give me electric shocks?”
“Now look, this therapy is very popular and effective today. It’s as common as a tonsillectomy in many women your age.”
“Are you kidding me? You want to strap me down and put a spoon in my mouth while you fry my brain?”
“Diana, it isn’t as dramatic as you make it out to be. It’s fairly painless actually, when done in a clinical setting. In fact, the surgeon general has just put out a report that states there are no absolute contraindications.”
I shook my head. “I won’t agree to this.”
“It’s a common procedure, my dear. The only side-effect you might experience is a slight bit of memory loss afterwards. Then everybody feels better.”
“Dr. Kefir, you can’t make me agree to do this. I thought you were asking me for my permission, or is that redundant now too?”
“Let’s make a deal here. You agree to a course of six sessions, and if you make the expected progress, you may get to go home.”
“I may go home…if I make progress…you don’t sound so sure of anything.”
He was silent but I could tell that one way or another he wouldn’t let up until he got his way.
The horror of the procedure flooded my consciousness. “What about the medication? I can barely think with all those pills. Are you going to stop forcing me to take them?”
He thought about it for some time, then nodded. “If you undergo the shock therapy, I will take you off the drugs. Just until we see if things are improving.”
“No. You take me off the pills now, and then I’ll agree to the shocks. But I won’t agree to six. Why can’t we take them one at a time?”
“It doesn’t work that way, Diana…”
“Then I am done talking about this,” I said, crossing my arms.
“Fine, we’re done for today,” he replied, waving at me to go.
I didn’t wait for a second invitation. Going to the door, I stopped and turned to face him again, my hand on the knob. “Remember when I signed myself in here? Well, I wish to unsign myself.”
“That’s not as easy as you think. Your mother has already signed papers to hold you here in that circumstance. Even if you tried to leave, there is a court order in place.”
“What?” I gasped. “She had me locked up?”
He nodded. “And she has signed off on the electroshock treatment procedure. It was only out of courtesy that I discussed it with you today. But it is going to happen, Diana, and I want you to be prepared.”
“You fucking bastard,” I yelled, then turned around and ran out of his office, slamming the door behind me and nearly taking it off its hinges.
I spent the day following my first electroshock session slumped in a wheelchair parked in the common area by the nurses’ way station. I felt myself drool but lacked the energy to wipe my face. After shift change, a kind-faced young nurse walked over to me and cleaned my face with a washcloth, but a dried-up, crusty rim of saliva remained on my chin.
Sticky goo from the conductive gel matted my hair. All my muscles felt bruised and torn on the inside. A great boulder could have come down a hill and crushed me. Dr. Kefir was right, I remembered nothing of the actual procedure, only the feeling of being terrified as they had come to get me. Crying and holding onto the side rail of my bed, and having my fingers pried off of it one by one. Just thinking about how scary it had been made my eyes sting again, so I pushed the thoughts out of my mind.
The nurses liked to play light, bouncy music out of a little portable radio on the way-station desk next to the cabinet where they kept the medications. They kept it cranked up through the day to set the mood in the place, to give the impression that we were all having fun. That the loony bin was a regular sock hop. Most of the time I tuned the jazz and jingles out, but this one afternoon I became flooded with the sound of Mickey and Silvia blasting through the air. Love, mmm, love is strange, lots of people take it for a game…”
An irrepressible urge to laugh bubbled up through my chest and exploded in peals of giggles. I laughed so hard I thought I’d pee myself, until my sides split and I began to cough.
“Diana, what is going on here?” Nurse Brown stood in front of me, hands on her hips. I looked at her and giggled uncontrollably. Tears streamed from my eyes.
“Do you need something to calm you down?” she asked.
I shook my head, gasping, and gestured with a finger toward the radio. “Love is strange,” I said, my eyes bright as candles. “It is, isn’t it? Strange, that is.”
Shaking her head, Nurse Brown returned to her desk and turned down the radio.
I stood and began to dance, whirling around the hall, singing at the top of my lungs. “Many people don’t understand, no, no…that love is strange.”
“Settle down, Diana,” I heard a voice behind me but it didn’t matter. Love was strange – I was in love with a girl, and yes, that was pretty outlandish. In the most bizarre, wonderful way.
What morons, I thought as I looked around me. None of them could see it, and it was so obvious! Love, my love for Rosario, their love for who-knows-who, all of our loves were strange in their own way. And I was crazy, as loopy as the biggest fruitcake in the place. Crazy in love!
After that first shock, the world looked like a different place. More vivid, vibrating with various shades of white: the white of nurses’ uniforms, the white painted on the walls, the white of my bedsheets. Such different hues of white – one was for desperation, the white of little pills and detergent soap in the showers; the other, a white of shadows long against the walls, as opal as the whites of my eyeballs as I stared in the mirror into a sallow, colorless face unrecognizable to myself.
Who are you? I whispered to the girl staring back at me blankly. I traced the curve of her pale eyes, her nose, her bluish lips in the glass.
Do I know you? Are you Diana?
I heard the drip-drip sound of fat globes of water falling from a tap and smashing against a cracked white porcelain sink. That water was white too, a white-blue like the purple veins running along my arms, tiny spidery things that seemed disembodied from me, like little snakes had crawled under my skin while I was sleeping and were now racing toward my heart, eager to eat it.
Wake up, Diana! WAKE UP!
I communicated with Rosario through my dreams, through messages transmitted on invisible wires, on the wings of hummingbirds, through the pollen carried on the backs of striped honeybees through the air, floating on the wind, crossing the span of the San Fernando Valley to reach her. I mouthed letters to her, wrote them on tables and walls using fingers dipped in invisible ink.
She had to be out there, and I reached for her presence through my sleep – long hands protruded through my ribs, broke through the bones, then the walls like monstrous vines, slicing into the night, reaching further, further still, fraying into a gazillion pieces at the ends, each piece like a disjointed member that probed the amethyst ether for her presence.
Dear lovely one,
A month has come and gone since we have been apart. I don’t know what you made of my disappearance, but for me it’s been unbearable. The hospital here is decrepit and silent save for the occasional screeching of those unfortunate crazies they bring in here a few times a week. They scream until they are restrained, chaine
d down to gurneys and shot full of horse tranquilizers, and then I listen out for that soft blubbering that comes over them, for that moment when their eyes roll in the backs of their heads and the particular reasons and unique fantasies that account for their suffering just go away.
There is mercy in that euthanasia of thought, Rosario. When you stop thinking, analyzing the world around you, when you stop caring –the enormous waves of that great ocean above your head just settle back into the water, and then the water pours right out the drain and there is nothing left. And you don’t feel like you are drowning anymore, you just feel empty and oddly still.
The strange looks I get have ceased to bother me. I sit next to the window of my fourth-floor room most times now, that crazy part of me still hoping that I will see you walking up these steps, the sound of your footfalls crunching down on those little yellow buds that fall from the trees overlooking the stone walkway. But I know you will not come because you don’t know where I am, and even if you did, they won’t let you see me.
But just to see your face! You could just sit there on that bench next to the fountain, sit there and eat an apple and then leave afterwards, but just to see you in that time, the time that it takes to devour a single piece of fruit, a serenity would come over me. Fear would lose its grip over my lungs, because I’d know that someone like you is out there and I am no longer alone, so insufferably and dreadfully alone.”
After the second shock treatment, I wanted to die. To crawl away into some little hole like a hurt animal, and just wait there for death to take me. Unresponsive, I barely opened my lids when two orderlies rushed me out of the therapy room and submerged me, hospital nightgown and all, into a steel tub of ice water.
Metal rods of pain pierced through my ribs. I watched the gown stick to me, outlining a bony chest, small lumps of breasts, a concave stomach. This wasn’t my body, it belonged to some other being in some alternate universe. The ice seared my skin and everything went numb. Hands were slapping my face, splashing water in my eyes, but I let go. Inundated in coldness, I was back in that desolate snow field, under the weight of an emerging blackness.
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