“Not everyone experiences all the side effects,” Dr. Fitzgerald says. “And some people experience none.”
Bunny continues to shake her head well beyond a single no.
“You need to listen to me,” Dr. Fitzgerald says. “I’m trying to help you.”
For the duration of an instant, Bunny goes blind. Everything is black, tar-black and deep purple, which is then followed by a ring of light, a crisp and sharply edged light framed by fire, and the glow bores through the darkness. This is how Bunny sees rage. Slow and measured, she says, “No, you need to listen to me.”
Show Me the Way
Bunny leaves Dr. Fuckherself’s office to find Activities in full swing. The dining room is busy with severely depressed people putting together a jigsaw puzzle, which could raise the question about the chicken or the egg. At another table, three of them are playing Go Fish with a deck with forty-seven cards, a painfully obvious metaphor. But all Bunny can think about is the pressing urgency for solitude, the way it is pressing when you need to find a bathroom fast, or else. Bunny needs a place to cry, to hear herself cry without some woman with a messed-up face telling her it’s going to be okay, without some nurse giving her a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She hurries past the living room where a handful of crazy people doing their daily exercises try to touch their toes.
Yet, she stops and pauses outside the Music Room. A social worker is playing the piano while seven or eight loonies sing about someone or other who’s a singular sensation. Bunny knows it is a song from an old Broadway musical, but she is unable recall which one. If she were to hear more of the song, perhaps she’d be able to identify it, and because all her efforts of concentration are focused on that, on listening to the song, she is unaware that someone else is there, standing alongside her until, in a voice that is neither quite speaking nor quite singing, but with a hint of a tune, he says, “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar, Oh, don’t ask why.”
Bertolt Brecht, Bunny knows, and she brightens at the recollection. Bertolt Brecht, but is it a song from Threepenny Opera or Mother Courage, and then she is unable to remember if Mother Courage is a musical, at which point she is certain that “musical” is the wrong word. Unable to locate the right word, panic sets in, which must show on her face because the man, who is clearly one of the loons—it takes one to know one—says, “I’m sorry.” Tall and lanky, his hair is dark brown, and his countenance is heavy with sorrow so deep as to seem ancient, which makes it difficult to determine his age. Wearing a faded Yale T-shirt tucked into gray sweatpants with a thick elastic waistband, he is dressed for the basketball court, for a game of one-on-one, except that his black Converse high-tops are without laces.
Bunny ignores his apology and she says only, “I know that I know, but I can’t remember. Is it Threepenny Opera?”
He tells her that he, too, doesn’t remember, that he can remember only the lyrics, and even then, only the first three lines. If either of them were capable of laughing, they would laugh. But they are not, and so they don’t.
The Early Bird Special
As if he has never before encountered a baked potato, Bunny’s tablemate is staring at his plate of food as if it might do something like jump up and squirt water in his eye. On Bunny’s plate is white rice mixed with canned peas and carrots. She is not hungry, and she interrupts his meditation on the potato to ask, “Why do they serve dinner at five in the afternoon?”
“I don’t know,” the man says, “why do they serve dinner at five in the afternoon?”
“It’s not a riddle,” Bunny says. “It’s a question.”
The man says that he is sorry, and Bunny lets it go at that.
After Dinner
Visiting hours start at 6 P.M. and end at 9 p.m. except on Sundays when they run from noon until 5.
Albie glances at his watch. “How are you doing with the smoking?” he asks.
Today is not Sunday. Maybe it’s Wednesday. Or Tuesday.
“They give me Nicorette gum.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“No,” Bunny says. “I’m not okay with that. I met with one of the psychiatrists today. She wants to put me on Paxil and Abilify. I said no.”
Albie remembers the Paxil days all too well. “So, now what?” he asks.
“Now nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“What about talk therapy?”
“I said nothing. Nothing is nothing.”
Albie is about to say how that’s not possible, that they must have something planned, after all, this is a hospital, but instead, he asks, “What did you have for dinner?”
“Rice with canned vegetables.”
“How was it?”
“Are you for real?” Then she tells him, “You’re allowed to bring me food, as long as it’s not in a glass jar.”
Because she can’t think of anything in particular she wants, Albie suggests she make a list. “You can give it to me tomorrow.”
Then, as if this were something like exchanging gifts, she says, “I made something for you in Arts and Crafts, but one of the fruitcakes stole it.”
Albie suggests that perhaps she ought not to refer to the others as loons, fruitcakes, nut jobs or the mentally defective, that perhaps it’s not nice to call them squirrels and psychos, but Bunny disagrees. “You can’t call them squirrels and psychos, but it’s okay if I do it, because I’m one of them.”
Throughout the years of their marriage, Albie’s feelings toward his wife have crisscrossed the emotional range: love, deep affection, joy, anger, delight, frustration, irritation, passion, fear, sorrow, but never pity. Until now; and Albie wonders if to feel pity is something from which you can recover. “Maybe you’ll feel better if you take a shower,” he suggests, as if somehow she would be less pitiful if she were clean.
Again, Albie glances at his watch, and Bunny asks, “Is today Wednesday?”
Something Like Leprosy
Watching television isn’t mandatory. Bunny is free to go to her room, which requires she walk past Underpants Man as he stands guard over the phone mounted on the wall. Although the phone is a pay phone, it doesn’t accept coins because money is Not Allowed. To make calls, the lunatics use prepaid phone cards. However, they can receive calls free of charge. Underpants Man, the self-designated phone monitor, is there to enforce the ten-minute rule, although keeping phone calls to ten minutes might not even be a rule other than one imposed by Underpants Man. Ever vigilant, with one eye on the clock and the other eye on a woman who is talking on the phone, presumably to someone on the other end, Underpants Man squawks, “Two minutes. You’ve got two minutes.” Bunny waits to see what will happen next. “One minute, forty seconds,” he says. “One minute, twenty seconds. Sixty seconds. Fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight seconds.”
When he gets down to thirty-four seconds, Bunny loses interest.
The way it’s said that an atheist who prays every day will come to believe in God, perhaps if she goes through the motions of normalcy, she’ll be normal. To take a shower is normal. In the bathroom, Bunny pulls her T-shirt up over her head, recoiling from the stench of herself. Back when she took showers as a matter of course, she liked the water to be hot enough to fog the mirror and turn her skin pink, but Shawna was right. Warm is as hot as it gets here. Bunny unwraps the bar of motel soap, which is a sickly shade of white, white that has yellowed from age.
The shower isn’t draining properly, if at all. Standing in a puddle that is two inches deep, Bunny wonders if this is how people get tapeworms or parasites or trichinosis. She remembers the word “trichinosis,” and she has a vague notion of an association between it and some disgusting disease like leprosy, which might or might not be an accurate association. Try as she does, she is unable to recall what trichinosis is. Soap scum settles around her feet, but figuring she’s come this
far, she stays in the shower long enough to wash her hair, too.
After patting herself dry, she puts on the fresh pair of paper pajamas.
She does not feel better.
In bed, with her legal pad propped up on her knees, her pen is poised to write down what it is she’d wanted to ask Albie. Something about the water in the shower, but what? What about the water in the shower? She tries to remember but she cannot, and fury goes off like a bottle rocket. She flings the notepad to the floor.
And all the while, Mrs. Cortez sits on her bed, facing the window, as if she’s been there forever frozen, a regal monument of the will not to live.
Cats at Home
Bunny sneaks back to her room for her legal pad and a felt-tipped pen. On the top page are her notes for Albie, things she doesn’t want to forget. Thus far, she has written: 1) peanut butter; 2) what’s that disease you get from standing in dirty water; 3) books; 4) pizza (maybe); 5) did you find out . . . What? What did she want him to find out? Beneath that page are the pages she wrote last night.
In the living room, the television is on. Mrs. Cortez and an older man wearing a yarmulke sit on opposite sides of the front-row couch watching an infomercial for a vacuum cleaner. The Bertolt Brecht guy is sitting in one of the armchairs that are arranged in every which way. He waves and motions for Bunny to join him. She hesitates. She was banking on time to herself, but she doesn’t know how to refuse the gesture. With him is a woman sitting sideways, her back resting against one arm of her chair and, as if the armchair were an inner tube and she were drifting on a lake, her legs dangle over the other side.
Resting on the woman’s lap, unopened, is a tattered copy of Martha Stewart Living. The cover features Martha standing in a pumpkin patch wearing a plaid jacket and a jack-o’-lantern grin. “It’s not even from this past year,” the woman says. “It’s from, like, two Halloweens ago.” Her fingernails are painted bright red. She might be the same age as Bunny, although she looks, not older exactly, but worn thin and color-faded like the cover of the Martha Stewart magazine. Her name is Andrea, and she introduces the Bertolt Brecht guy as Josh.
A point in their favor, neither of them comment on her name, and Bunny asks her, “They let you have nail polish?”
“Fat chance,” she says. “Nail polish is like a controlled substance in here. Like we might drink it. For the formaldehyde. Yeah, right. Though,” she concedes, “if you sniff enough of it, you can get a little buzz going.” She splays her fingers, and tells Bunny, “Twice a week Beauty is an Activity. That’s where you can get your fingernails painted and your eyebrows tweezed. You can get your hair done there, too. Curled, with rollers,” she adds.
Grooming for the men is scheduled for every day except Sunday, but it’s all about shaving. “Because unsupervised we might slit our throats with the electric Norelco,” Josh says.
Andrea is, was, a nurse, in the gastrointestinal unit of this same hospital. Now, she’s a patient in the psych ward because, at home in her kitchen, she put her head in the oven. “My neighbor couldn’t mind her own business,” Andrea says. Her neighbor smelled the gas and called the fire department. “I explained to them it was because my cat had died. I keep telling them that when they let me out, I’ll get a kitten and then I’ll have something to live for.”
“Don’t they believe you?” Bunny asks.
Andrea shrugs. “Maybe. But they’re all freaked out about the codeine, too. I was addicted to codeine. They’re acting like it’s a big deal. Yeah, right. Codeine. Codeine is nothing.”
Although the mental ward is not unlike a prison, the inmates don’t much discuss what they’re in for. They don’t have to ask. Depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia—it’s right there in plain sight. What they are interested in is the cure, which is why Andrea asks Bunny what medication she’s on.
“None,” Bunny says, and Andrea concludes, “You’re an ECT-ite.”
“A what?” Bunny doesn’t understand.
“An ECT-ite. The people who are getting ECT are the ECT-ites. ECT,” she clarifies, “you know. Electroconvulsive therapy.” When Andrea says, “Josh is an ECT-ite,” she sounds like a mother bragging, as if ECT were something like a PhD.
Electroconvulsive therapy gets bad press, and really, how could it not? The vocabulary alone—electroconvulsive, electroshock, brain seizures, convulsions, electrodes, fits—is enough to scare away any sane person. We’ve all seen the movies, the black-and-white photographs of broken people with blank faces wearing soiled hospital gowns, we’ve heard the stories about how it zaps away who you were, leaving behind an empty shell, like a conch shell, and only the dim sound of a faraway ocean remains.
Bunny tries not to stare at Josh. “No, no,” she says. “It’s just that I refused Paxil and Abilify. But they’ll put me on some other drug.”
With the authority accorded to her profession, or maybe it is the authority of someone who’s been in and out of the nuthouse more than once or twice, Andrea warns her against Trazodone and Seroquel. Josh says they put him on lithium the last time he was here, and he has nothing good to say about it. Andrea is now on Lamictal, but she can’t tell if it’s working or not, and Bunny says, “I have a cat. At home. Jeffrey.”
Andrea brightens considerably and asks, “Do you have a picture of him?”
“No, but I’ll ask my husband to bring one.” On the top page of her legal pad, Bunny writes: 6) picture of Jeffery.
Andrea peeks at Bunny’s list and asks, “How about chocolate? Chocolate is like gold here.”
Bunny adds to the list 7) chocolate; and then, as if she is on to something; 8) legal pads; 9) pens.
“How about some magazines?” Andrea says. “People or Glamour. We have no idea here what’s going on in . . . I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t get a lot of visitors.”
“I don’t mind,” Bunny says. “People and Glamour.” Then she asks Josh, “What about you?”
As if he’s just woken up, or as if time stood still for a minute or two, Josh says, “Me? I had a dog when I was a kid. He got hit by a car, and the guy who hit him didn’t even stop.”
It is all too apparent: wounds never heal, but rather, in a torpid state deep inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, grief waits for fresh release.
Prompt: A Business Meeting (300 words or less)
On a frigid day, a late morning in mid-January on Sixth Avenue near Fourteenth Street, Stella paused at the SeXXX shop where, in the window, three blow-up dolls wearing white fishnet stockings and red Santa hats were positioned around a pink tinsel tree decorated with nipple clamps and topped off with a vibrator in lieu of a star. Stella could not linger, however. Late for a meeting, she had to rush, practically run, which was why she didn’t notice the wide crack in the pavement where one of her four-inch spiked heels got caught, and fell flat on her face.
“Talk about lousy luck,” she told me. “A bump on my forehead and a scraped knee. Not even the lowest bottom-feeding lawyer would take this case. One broken finger, was that too much to ask?”
I commiserated with her misfortune. It was a dream of hers, to sue to the city. Then I asked if she got to her meeting on time.
“Yeah, I did. But John sent me home. He didn’t want me there looking like a wreck,” she said. “My stockings were torn up. My hair was a mess.” Then she yawned. “Must be the excitement wearing me out. I’m going to take a nap. I’ll call you later. Maybe we can grab dinner.”
“I can’t tonight,” I told her. “How’s tomorrow?”
“Sounds good,” Stella said.
While Stella napped, the small bump on her forehead bled backward, into her brain, and she died.
I was listed as next of kin. When the doctor called, I said, “No.” I said “no” in a way in which you would have expected a polite “thank you” to follow.
I said no, and then I said nothing.
Homecoming Queen
The way it can happen to the new girl at school, to be appropriated by the popular kids claiming her as one of their own, Josh and Andrea steer Bunny to their table. Although she has yet to figure out if this is something to worry about or not, it’s clear that Bunny is in with the in-crowd. With the authority of a queen bee Andrea introduces her to Evan and Jeanette. Evan is a sweet, tubby guy with thinning red hair and the red-rimmed eyes of someone with bad allergies on a day when the pollen count is through the roof. Also, people who cry a lot have the same kind of red-rimmed eyes. To sit at the cool kids table is something of a step up for Evan, even if it’s the cool table in the loony bin. In real life, Evan is a junior high school math teacher, and who wouldn’t go crazy with that job? The fact that Evan is a teacher sticks with Bunny in a way that his name does not. Teacher, she remembers. Jeanette is the same Jeanette with the fucked-up face. The man with a two-day stubble and sculpted biceps is Chaz. Chaz is a member of the New York City Police Department; he’s a beat cop in Inwood. “They’re all ECT-ites,” Andrea says.
It would seem that here in the psycho ward, ECT is like a fraternity. Epsilon, Something or Other, Tau. And, in direct opposition to sanity, it has much to do with what distinguishes the cool kids from the not-cool kids. Never mind that they are as batty as an old attic, their dining room table the equivalent of the high school cafeteria table commandeered by the football team and the mean girls. Andrea is not on the ECT list, but she watches over Josh, protecting him as if he were a kitten, although even without that bond, Andrea would’ve had a seat at the ECT table because Andrea has had a seat at every cool kids’ table since kindergarten.
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