Bunny’s roommate Mrs. Cortez is also on the ECT list, but Mrs. Cortez isn’t popular for obvious reasons.
This morning, Chaz and Jeanette underwent a round of ECT, which they refer to as “treatment.” Although the ECT-ites identify as such, they don’t speak about treatment in specifics, as if what goes on there needs to be kept under wraps. It could be it’s too horrible to recount, or perhaps like the secret rituals of the Freemasons or Scroll and Key, it is knowledge you’re forbidden to share with the uninitiated.
For lunch, the choices are chicken potpie or macaroni and cheese, the kind that comes in a box with a packet of orange cheese-flavored flakes, which stimulates Bunny’s appetite no more than would a bowl of lint. Bunny is spreading the always-on-offer single-serving-size cup of peanut butter onto a slice of white bread when a man wearing a bright white golf shirt with the collar flipped up and red pull-up pants, a white stripe running along the outer side of each leg, sets his tray down on their table. Because there are no available chairs, he takes one from another table and wedges it in between Teacher’s chair and Jeanette’s.
Josh digs his spoon into his potpie and hits ice.
Once seated, the golf-shirt guy rubs his hands together as if to herald a fine feast. Something has to be very wrong with this man. He exudes pep.
“No one invited you to sit here,” Andrea says, and he laughs—laughs—as if she were teasing him. “Good one,” he says.
“No,” Andrea says. “Not a good one. Really, we don’t want you here.”
He laughs again, although this time there is an edge of nervousness to it, more armor than mirth. “You won’t say that when you see what I’ve got for later. Pam brought me two boxes of Whitman’s samplers, a Pepperidge Farm assortment, nacho chips. Other stuff, too.”
It’s not an introduction, exactly, but Andrea tells Bunny, “That’s Howie. He’s a hemorrhoid.”
Josh is picking around the chunk of peas and carrots frozen in the center of his potpie, and Howie, leaning in to confide in her, says to Bunny, “I was going to kill myself. Pam, my girlfriend, saved my life.”
“Oh, no.” Teacher says. “Not this again.”
“If it wasn’t for Pam,” Howie blinks, like he’s trying to hold back tears, “I’d be dead.”
“That’s nice,” Bunny says.
Great Expectations
It’s Sunday afternoon and the dining room bustles with visitors unpacking shopping bags, mostly of food but other gifts, too: fresh T-shirts, magazines, and flowers to brighten the soul-crushing color scheme of this place. Flowers are Allowed provided the vase is plastic and the stems are without thorns. The obese girl’s parents come with a big, pink teddy bear for their daughter who, it seems, doesn’t appreciate the thought because she throws it in the trash while they watch. After having heard, by now, several renditions of Howie’s tale of his attempted suicide and Pam’s heroic role in preventing it, Bunny had imagined Pam as Wonder Woman, but Pam the person is five feet tall, built like a fire hydrant, frizzy brown hair streaked with wiry gray strands in a ponytail held together with a pink scrunchie. She sets down her grocery bags as if they contain the weight of the world. Mrs. Cortez pays no attention to her two adult children as they try to make small talk with her. The woman visiting Teacher looks to be his sister, maybe even a twin sister. Chaz’s mother has brought a Tupperware tub of lasagna for his lunch, and she fusses over him as she would if this were Sunday dinner at home, while his father sits there seemingly as broken as his son. Chaz’s father might also be a cop in Inwood because he is wearing shoes that Bunny associates with policemen.
Thus far, in Bunny’s time here, Andrea has never had a visitor. The same goes for Underpants Man, and Jeanette.
Bunny takes careful note of Josh’s friends, three of them, sitting around the table with him like college buddies shooting the shit over a pitcher of beer. Or, maybe they were childhood friends, a group of four boys who made a pact—blood brothers—to be friends forever, no matter what happens. Friends forever, Stella, hits Bunny hard.
Albie rushes to her and hurriedly puts the shopping bag down on an empty chair. “The trains were a mess.” He sits and slides his chair close to Bunny’s chair. Their knees touch, and her weeping subsides into a whimper. When Bunny dries her eyes with the palms of her hands, Albie is struck by how innocent she seems, and as if he were speaking to a child, he asks, “Do you want to see what I brought you?”
From the shopping bag, he retrieves four Cadbury bars—two with almonds, two without—and sets them on the table, along with a box of crackers and a jar of Peter Pan Creamy peanut butter because all-natural peanut butter comes only in glass jars to be recycled. Bunny says, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Albie asks. “Sorry about what?”
“I mean thank you,” Bunny says. “Thank you.”
From the same bag, Albie next takes out a packet of three legal pads and six black felt-tipped pens. Uneasy, but cautiously optimistic, Albie asks, “Are you writing?”
“Not really,” Bunny says.
“You’re making paper airplanes?”
Bunny rewards Albie’s question with a smile. “I’m just writing stuff down. Stuff I don’t want to forget.”
In another shopping bag are books from home. “I just grabbed whatever off the shelf,” he says. But Albie did not just grab whatever off the shelf. He selected the books with great care, eschewing contemporary novels lest she use them as a measure of her own failure. For obvious reasons, he rejected Jean Rhys and Ernest Hemingway; and Virginia Woolf—don’t even think about it.
Bunny will re-read books she loves, three or even four times, but, although it is one of the rare opinions she’s kept to herself, Pride and Prejudice and The Pickwick Papers are not books she loves, or even likes. The third book in the stack, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, pleases her far more.
“I seem to recall your saying you wanted to read that,” Albie says, “or am I misremembering?”
“How would I know?” Bunny asks. She places Voyage of the Beagle on top of the legal pads and pushes the other books away as if they were a meal with which she was done. “You can throw those out on your way home,” she says.
Later, when Albie leaves, Bunny puts the chocolate, the peanut butter, and the box of crackers in a brown paper bag, on which she writes her name with the black marker there for that purpose. Then, she stashes the bag in the cabinet over the kitchen sink. The cabinet handles are grimy, tacky to the touch.
Out on the street, one block away from the hospital, Albie drops Pride and Prejudice and The Pickwick Papers in a trash can. Then he calls Muriel and asks her, “Do you feel like a drink?”
“Why? Do I look like a drink?” Well aware that her joke, such as it is a joke, is lame, Muriel doesn’t wait for a laugh. “Sure,” she says. “How about Crow’s in a half hour?”
Halfway to the subway, Albie changes his mind. The trains are spectacularly unreliable on Sundays. Instead, he hails a cab.
Things Learned
Also, there is sliced turkey and salad—lettuce, a few bits of shaved carrot and a cherry tomato—served in a small, beige plastic cup like the salad that comes with the meal served on a plane. Dessert is vanilla pudding, which no one eats. Bunny offers her tablemates chocolate, but when she retrieves the bag from the cabinet, the bag with her name on it, the bag she stashed there only a few hours before, she discovers that her chocolate bars are missing.
“I’m sorry,” Andrea says. “I should’ve warned you. You can’t keep chocolate in the cabinets. Some of these whackjobs are like junkies. They’d steal the chocolate out from under your pillow, if they could.” They can’t steal the chocolate out from under your pillow because food is Not Allowed in the bedrooms, but Chaz advises her on how to beat the system. “Chocolate bars are flat,” he says. “All you do is tuck one in your waistband under your shirt or inside a magazine.”
“And
in your room, the best place to hide it is in your laundry bag,” Andrea adds. “That way, if someone finds it, they’ll have to explain why they were rummaging through your dirty panties.”
Teacher blushes, presumably at the word “panties,” and he twists to look at the table behind them. “The rabbi has chocolate cake,” he notes.
The rabbi is the voice in the dark, the voice that, night after night, calls out, “Holy fuck.” It’s not known, and frankly no one gives a fuck—holy or not—if the rabbi is really a rabbi or just some guy wearing a yarmulke. It’s his kosher meals that are the source of speculation, and envy too. Even for a person such as Bunny, a person hardly nymphomaniacal in pursuit of the palatal orgasm, the food here is, in a word, repulsive; a formula for failure as far as the Anorexics are concerned, and you can be sure that when the maraschino cherry turns out to be a pale-green grape dyed red and bleeding out over your vanilla pudding, it’s not doing the Depressives any good, either.
More Waiting
Again, Bunny waits for the dog. This time it is Ella, the tall, gangly nurse with the round head, who tells her that the dog isn’t coming today. “Hon,” she says. “I don’t think the dog is coming today. How about Arts and Crafts?” Bunny doesn’t want to go to Arts and Crafts. The other Activities scheduled are Jigsaw Puzzles and Creative Writing. Jigsaw Puzzles? Bunny is depressed enough without Jigsaw Puzzles, and Creative Writing—you’ve got to be kidding me.
Antipsychotic
Bunny doesn’t recognize the nurse who escorts her beyond the Group Therapy rooms to the conference room, which is at the far, far end of the hallway. There, Dr. Fitzgerald is seated at an oval table made of the same laminated particleboard as the desk in her office, but these chairs have armrests and padded seat cushions, like chairs in a restaurant; and like a basket of bread, there is a box of tissues on the table. Sitting next to her is a bald man, bald except for the monk-like fringe of hair semi-circled around the back of his head. It is impressively nuanced, the way Dr. Fitzgerald introduces the man as Dr. Grossman, the head of psychiatric medicine, if to say, yes, he is the head of psychiatric medicine, but he’s not really up to the job, as if she, Dr. Fitzgerald, should be the head of psychiatric medicine. But she is not the head of psychiatric medicine, and she has to defer to the chain of command, no matter how unjust.
Dr. Grossman speaks first. “I understand that you’re not comfortable with the advised drug protocol,” he says. “Is that right?”
“Bunny is concerned about the side effects,” Dr. Fitzgerald butts in. “Please explain to her that whatever the side effects are, when compared with . . .” Dr. Fitzgerald doesn’t finish her sentence because Dr. Grossman cuts her off with a look that says, Have you considered urology?
As if he and Bunny are now co-conspirators, as if he were deliberately shutting out his colleague, Dr. Grossman leans in and says, “You’re right. The side effects are not insignificant. Some people can tolerate them. Others can’t.”
Bunny decides she doesn’t hate Dr. Grossman.
Dr. Fitzgerald interjects, “We could try lithium carbonate.” Does she think that Bunny does not know perfectly well that lithium carbonate is plain old lithium?
“How about we table drug protocol, at least for now,” Dr. Grossman suggests. “Let’s take a look at the other options.”
Option one is to do nothing. Over time, the episode could potentially subside on its own. Potentially means that it might subside on its own, but it might not. “And,” Dr. Grossman points out, “you do run the risk of the depression worsening.”
Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which is the preferred form of Group Therapy (MDD) here is a goal-oriented form of therapy that seeks to modify distorted cognitions and change destructive patterns of behavior, is option two.
As Bunny hears it, Cognitive Behavior Therapy could be effective if she were a moron.
“That’s it?” Bunny asks. “There’s nothing else?”
With his fingertips pressed together—here is the church, here is the steeple—Dr. Grossman asks what does she know about electroconvulsive therapy. E-C-T. Because she doesn’t respond, the doctor goes on to explain what it is and how it works, debunking the myths, relating the new methods and greater understanding, and chronicling the efficacy of electroconvulsive therapy; all the while, Bunny is turning the letters E-C-T around and around in her head. E-C-T; T-E-C; E-T-C; C-E-T.
“The anecdotal evidence for recovery is very strong.” Dr. Grossman tells Bunny the truth as he knows it. “However,” he admits, “there is no way to achieve a scientific standard of proof.”
Bunny can’t find a word to be made from these letters. T-E-C. T-C-E.
Despair can’t be monitored like blood pressure or measured in centimeters like a tumor.
T-E-C
Dr. Grossman urges Bunny to talk it over with her husband. “All we want is for you to get well,” he says. “And you want to get well, don’t you?”
But Bunny can’t say for sure if she wants to get well. To get well will take effort, so much effort, and she is weary. And what if she does try, tries her very best, and fails nonetheless? To try and to fail is all too familiar to her. All her life, she has tried and tried, and now she is tired, dog-tired, of trying.
Capital Punishment
That night, when Albie asks Bunny how she is feeling, she says, “They want to electrocute me.”
Bored Games
The Monopoly board is open on the table. Pink, blue, yellow, and green money is divided up more or less equally between Josh, Andrea, Chaz, and Bunny who are not, and have no intention of, playing Monopoly. But to sit around an open game board gives the appearance of Activity engagement, which is enough to keep the aides, nurses, and occasional doctor hurrying by from hounding them about Activities. Josh has been worrying the dice in his hand for about twenty minutes. Andrea is picking off bits of the red polish on her fingernails, and Chaz says, “Someone is watching us.”
Bunny twists around to look in the direction of Chaz’s line of vision. A young girl is there; eleven years old, maybe twelve, decidedly prepubescent, and Andrea perks up. “Nina,” she says. “I knew she’d be back.” Andrea knows Nina from before. Andrea says that the mental ward is like a minimum-security prison for repeat offenders of non-violent crimes. “It’s a revolving door,” she says.
Nina resembles nothing more than a newly hatched sparrow; prominent veins protruding through translucent skin covering bones so light as to seem hollow, short downy hair on her head. Bunny imagines her craning her neck, her mouth open improbably wide like the beak of a baby bird ready to be fed a worm, although if Nina were to open her mouth wide like that, it wouldn’t be for food; rather, it would be to emit a primal scream, an endless scream with the intent to purge herself of herself.
“Do you believe she is twenty-six, at least twenty-six?” Andrea says. “She might even be twenty-seven by now.” Nina is anorexic, but not your run-of-the-mill anorexic. She is also bipolar and not your run-of-the-mill bipolar either. Sometimes, she cycles in a matter of minutes, and even worse, the cycles sometimes overlap, so that her depression is manic, a depression on speed. “She’s a mess,” Andrea says. “The last time we were here together, she spent half her days banging her head against the wall. She really wanted out.”
“Who doesn’t want out? No one wants to be here,” Bunny says, but Josh disagrees. “Howie wants to be here,” Josh says. “He loves this place,” and not for the first time Bunny gets the idea, although she’d be hard-pressed to explain where she got such an idea, that Josh is someone who would go ice-skating for the fun that comes with falling down; he would’ve done such a thing.
“I didn’t mean here,” Andrea says. “I mean that she wanted out of life. She doesn’t want to be alive.”
Bunny and Josh, both, make a point to look away from the other.
It is true what Josh said about Howie. Howie does want to be here
, here in life and here in the hospital, which, you could say, makes him the most mental of them all. Twice already, the doctors agreed that Howie was ready for discharge. Pam was here to pick him up, take him back to New Jersey. All he needed to do was answer one last question, sign on the dotted line, and he’d be home in less than thirty minutes, assuming that traffic on the George Washington Bridge wasn’t at a standstill. But Howie—he sat in the conference room across from the doctors and lowered his gaze. “Not to others,” he said. “I’d never hurt anyone else. But myself, I think about it. I had my gun out, and I was ready to do it, but my girlfriend stopped me. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be dead. But I still think about it. About doing it. A lot.”
Although Howie and Pam had been together for almost seven years, and he is now forty-four and she is thirty-nine—neither of them spring chickens—he wasn’t willing to marry her. Tired of waiting around, Pam signed up with Match.com, which was when Howie called her and said, “I’ve got a gun, and I’m going to kill myself.”
Howie’s gun might well have been a toy gun, the kind that looks authentic but shoots foam rubber pellets or bits of raw potatoes. Howie was never going to kill himself for real. Not then, not now, not ever. Howie is mental, but his mental illnesses—decidedly nuts and a wicked case of mindblindness—are not among the entries in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He is a different species of crazy, entirely.
Regardless Pam raced as fast as her short legs could carry her to his house, hustled him into his car, and drove across the bridge to the best hospital with a psycho ward in the tri-state area. Pam now atones for having signed up with Match.com by bringing him bags of food and doing his laundry. Never again will she press him to marry her.
Howie, meanwhile, is having the time of his life here. He goes about his days as if the loony bin were a Carnival Cruise ship, and he is the Activities Director full of vim and vigor and in charge of games like charades and Simon Says. All he needs is the whistle hanging from a lanyard around his neck, which, of course, he can’t have. Lanyards are Not Allowed.
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