The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

For all the rest of us, Lori's story is a moving account of a very personal journey. It is a story not just of mental illness, but of a human being. It is a story of personal determination, courage and hope.

  —Jane Doller, M.D.

  Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry

  Cornell University Medical College

  New York Hospital, Westchester Division

  Part I

  I Hear Something You Can't Hear

  1

  Lori Roscoe, New York, August 1976

  It was a hot night in August 1976, the summer of my seventeenth year, when, uninvited and unannounced, the Voices took over my life.

  I was going into my senior year in high school, so this was to be my last time at summer camp. College, a job, adulthood, responsibility—they were all just around the corner. But for the moment I wasn't prepared for anything more than a summer of fun. I certainly wasn't prepared to have my life change forever.

  I had been coming to Lincoln Farm for several years, first as a camper, later as a counselor. By day, I shepherded the nine- and ten-year-olds through sailing, canoeing and archery.

  At night after the little kids were safely in bed, the counselors would hang out together in the long, low wooden bungalows we called “motels,” playing cards, eating cookies and drinking a Kool-Aid type of concoction we called bug juice. Some nights the older counselors drove us into town to the Roscoe diner. We laughed, told jokes and fooled around.

  It was just an ordinary summer, and I was just an ordinary girl. Except that sometime during that summer things began to change.

  At first, the change was pleasant. Somehow, without my quite knowing why, everything seemed much nicer than it had been before. The lake seemed more blue, the paddlewheels bigger and the sailboats more graceful than ever before. The trees of the Catskill Mountains that ringed our camp took on a deeper green than I remembered, and all at once the whole camp seemed to be the most wonderful place in the world.

  I was overwhelmed by what life had to offer. It seemed that I could not run fast enough, could not swim far enough, could not stay up late enough into the night to take in everything I wanted to experience. I was energetic and active, happy and bubbly, a friend to everyone. Everything around me was bright, clean and clear. And as for me, it seemed that I too was a part of this beauty. I was strong and attractive, powerful and exciting. It seemed that everyone around me had only to look at me to love me the way I loved them.

  What's more, my memories became more vivid than ever before. It had been here at Lincoln Farm two years earlier that I had fallen in love. As I thought back to that summer, it too seemed wild and bright and wonderful. I had been in love as no one had been in love before. And the man I fell for was like no one I had ever met before.

  He had been an exchange student that year, the summer I was fifteen. He was gorgeous, a real hunk, blond and lanky with bright blue eyes, and a cute little accent. Since I was short and dark, he seemed especially exotic. I really liked him, and could scarcely take my eyes off him. What's more, at twenty-three years old, he was my first older man. I admired him for his courage to come all the way over here alone for a summer, and I was charmed by his sense of humor.

  We really enjoyed each other's company. My memories of those evenings became sweetly sad as I recalled talking about being in love, and how terrible it was going to be when he finally had to return home. We even made up an absurd little song to the tune of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride”:

  He's got a ticket for home

  He's got a ticket for home.

  He's got a ticket for home,

  And won't be back …

  But several weeks later, after camp was over and I had returned home to Scarsdale, he showed up at my house—with a pretty woman whom he introduced to my parents as his fiancée.

  As the days went by, I found myself obsessing on that moment two years ago. Gradually, my mood began to shift, and the brightness of the world began to darken. As I remembered the past, the feelings began to blur the present. Then came the dreadful thoughts. Why had he left me that summer? Why hadn't I been good enough? Maybe it was because I really wasn't beautiful, exquisite and passionate. Maybe I was really ugly. Maybe more than ugly. Maybe I was fat and disgusting, an object not of romance but of ridicule. Yes, that was it. Maybe everyone around me, far from loving me, was instead laughing at me, mocking me to my face.

  My mood began to turn black. A dark haze settled around me. The beautiful camp turned foul, a thing of evil, not of beauty. All around me were shadows, and I was wrapped in a dark haze.

  My memories became so vivid that at night as I lay in my bunk wracked by unhappy thoughts and unable to sleep, it seemed as if I really were back in that summer. In my memory we were again down by the huge, dark, romantic lake. Over to the dockside we could hear the water lapping up against the sailboats and giant waterwheels the kids played on during the day. Late at night, the fireflies were gone, but we could still hear frogs croaking along the banks. The sky was heavy with stars I felt I had never seen before. We sat in the thick grass that ran right down to the water's edge and laughed and talked together.

  In my memory, we snuggled and kissed. And then he became more insistent. We lay down together on the top of one of the picnic tables that ringed the lake. His hands began to roam, under my T-shirt, into my shorts. I was excited and worried, terrified and thrilled all at the same time. I wanted more, and I wanted him to stop. We were pushing the limits of my experience and I didn't know how to handle it. In my mind I was back there, rolling and caressing in the darkness, and I was washed over with complicated feelings from past and present—love, embarrassment, rejection, fear.

  Then, in the middle of this chaos, a huge Voice boomed out through the darkness.

  “You must die!” Other Voices joined in. “You must die! You will die!”

  At first I didn't realize where I was. Was I at the lake? Was I asleep? Was I awake? Then I snapped back to the present. I was here at camp, alone. My summertime fling was long gone, two years gone. That long-ago scene was being played out in my mind, and in my mind alone. But as soon as I realized that I was in my bunk, and awake— and that my roommate was still sleeping peacefully—I knew I had to run. I had to get away from these terrible, evil Voices.

  I leaped from my bed and ran barefoot out into the grass. I had to find someplace to hide. I thought if I ran fast enough and far enough, I could outrun the Voices. “You must die!” they chanted “You will die.”

  Frantically, I ran out to the wide, open center lawn. The grass was wet under my feet. I raced for the huge trampoline where the kids practiced backflips and somersaults.

  I climbed on. My head was filled with wild, strange thoughts. If I could jump fast enough and high enough, I thought, perhaps I could jump the Voices away. So I jumped and I jumped, all the while hearing the tormenting Voices ringing in my ears. “You must die. You will die.” I jumped for hours, till I began to see the sun peeking over the hills. I jumped until I was out of breath, exhausted. I jumped until I really was ready to die.

  Yet still they continued, commanding me, pounding into my head. They began to curse and revile me: “You whore bitch who isn't worth a piece of crap!” they yelled at me. I tried to answer them, to make them stop.

  “It's not true,” I pleaded. “Leave me alone. It's not true.” Eventually, both I and the Voices collapsed in exhaustion.

  In the nights that followed this torture continued. In the morning, I was exhausted, drawn and white from fear and lack of sleep. In the dead of night I jumped, pursued by the vicious Voices. Night after night I jumped, unable to sleep, either because of the screaming Voices, or my fear they would return.

  As best I could during the day, I kept a calm but distant front. I spent as much time as I could in my bunk. But gradually people began to notice that something was wrong. My cheerful banter vanished, and I could sense that increasingly people were beginning to wonder what was the matter with me.

&
nbsp; Finally at 9:30 A.M. on August 12 the camp owner, worried about my health, instructed a staff member to drive me home to Scarsdale.

  Since that time, I have never been completely free of those Voices. At the beginning of that summer, I felt well, a happy healthy girl—I thought—with a normal head and heart. By summer's end, I was sick, without any clear idea of what was happening to me or why. And as the Voices evolved into a full-scale illness, one that I only later learned was called schizophrenia, it snatched from me my tranquillity, sometimes my self-possession, and very nearly my life.

  Along the way I have lost many things: the career I might have pursued, the husband I might have married, the children I might have had. During the years when my friends were marrying, having their babies and moving into the houses I once dreamed of living in, I have been behind locked doors, battling the Voices who took over my life without even asking my permission.

  Sometimes these Voices have been dormant. Sometimes they have been overwhelming. At times over the years they have nearly destroyed me. Many times over the years I was ready to give up, believing they had won.

  Today this illness, these Voices, are still part of my life. But it is I who have won, not they. A wonderful new drug, caring therapists, the support and love of my family and my own fierce battle—that I know now will never end—have all combined in a nearly miraculous way to enable me to master the illness that once mastered me.

  Today, nearly eighteen years after that terrifying summer, I have a job, a car, an apartment of my own. I am making friends and dating. I am teaching classes at the very hospital at which I was once a patient.

  Still, I have been to a place where all too many people are forced to live. Like all too few, I have been permitted to return. I want to tell others about my journey so that those who have never experienced it will know what life inside of my schizophrenic brain has been like, and so that those who are still left behind will have hope that they too will find a path out.

  2

  Lori Scarsdale, New York, August 1970” Augyst 1977

  As I look back on my childhood, one memory plagues me. It is the memory of the afternoon of the dog.

  I remember that when I was young my family had a medium-sized black mongrel. He was kept chained to a door, unable to move very far in one direction or another. One day as I was in the kitchen with him I suddenly grew very angry.

  In a burst of rage, I grabbed a nearby golf club and began beating the dog furiously. At first he barked hysterically. But because of the chain, he could not escape. He began to foam at the mouth. As I beat him, one by one his legs collapsed. He kept struggling to rise, but I wouldn't let him. I kept hitting him, and hitting him, and hitting him. He fell to the ground. Then he stopped barking. His body writhed in horrible spasms, blood dribbling from his ears and mouth. After a while he stopped moving. Dead.

  To this day I do not know why I did it. I try to imagine the evil impulses and anger that must have led to such a crime. In my thoughts over the years, I have punished myself over and over again for having committed such a terrible sin against an innocent creature.

  But there is one big problem with this memory: It isn't true. It never happened.

  My mom and dad say we never had such a dog. They say that the incident I remember so clearly never took place. My younger brothers, Mark and Steven, agree. We had only one family dog when I was growing up—not medium-sized and black, but a tiny gray miniature schnauzer. She died, not a brutal death, but a poignantly normal one when Steven took her to the vet to be put to sleep in her old age after a long, comfortable life. The vivid memory of the dog I murdered, my family tells me, is something my troubled mind conjured up years later, long after I became ill.

  My increasingly healthy mind tells me they are right. The further I progress toward sanity, the more such dark images are fading, letting my real memories of my real childhood peep through.

  Instead of such horrors, when I look back today on my childhood I find few signs of the illness that was secretly growing within me. I don't find a past filled with fear and violence and conflict. I don't find a troubled childhood of abuse and rage.

  What I find instead is an exceptionally happy childhood, filled with love and comfort, fun and friendship. And the most compelling images of my past are not those of rage and hurt, but are instead of a girlhood of the most ordinary and tranquil sort.

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer … you take one down and pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles …”

  It was the summer of 1970, we were driving across the country, and I thought we would drive my father crazy. Between our endless singing and our endless demands for bathroom stops, we kids were being wickedly, deliberately, irritating.

  “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom again.”

  “I'm hungry.”

  “I'm Yugoslavia.”

  “That's stupid.”

  “You're stupid.”

  “Mommy, Mark called me stupid.”

  “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.”

  My father threatened, my mother suggested car-spotting games. But still we persisted. “I have to go to the bathroom, Daddy. I have to go to the bathroom.” Finally, after a couple of hours of this, Daddy snapped.

  “I don't want anyone to mention bathroom to me for the rest of the trip,” he announced in exasperation. Well, that held us—for about two minutes. Then in somber tones one of us shouted over the front seat: “I have to go to the bathroom—Bob,” and collapsed in fits of giggles. And for the rest of the trip we made our bathroom requests, not to our dad, but to our new imaginary friend. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob,” we shouted, knowing from the look on our parents’ faces as they tried to stifle laughter that we had won. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob.”

  I was eleven years old, Mark was eight, Steven was five, and the whole Schiller family was on the move again. I had been born in Michigan where my father, a graduate student from the Bronx finishing up his Ph.D. in psychology at Michigan State had met and married my mother, the daughter of a prosperous department store owner. When my dad graduated and got his first job, the three of us moved to Chicago where Mark was born. When I was six, my father was promoted, and we all moved to Los Angeles, where .Steven was born.

  Now, five years later, Daddy was being promoted again and we were all moving east. For us kids, this trip was great fun. For two weeks, we were trekking past the Petrified Forest, to the Grand Canyon, through Indian reservations in New Mexico and the seemingly endless drive across Texas. We saw men in cowboy hats, had our pictures taken with oxen in reconstructed villages, played the license plate game, and—despite my father's warnings—continued to beg Bob for bathroom stops, especially when they could be combined with forays for hamburgers and fries at McDonald's.

  But underneath, we were all a little uneasy. We had loved California. Our house had been modern and bright and airy, and we had a big yard and swimming pool.

  New York seemed so foreign, and far away. Even my normally confident mother and father seemed a little unsure. They had decided Dad should accept the new job, had flown to New York, bought a house and returned in just a few days. So it was only partly a game when they began pointing out the most outlandish, tumbledown houses, teasing us and each other.

  “Is that it, honey?” my father asked my mother, pointing at one old farmhouse with a sagging front porch. “Is that what our new house is like?”

  And then a few miles later, my mother caught sight of a broken-down trailer. “Marvin! Marvin! That's it! That's it!” she cried excitedly to my father. And then, twisting around to address us kids in the back seat: “That's what our new house is like.” Later, they lapsed into stand-up comedy-type routines.

  “Did we buy the house with the bathroom?” my mother asked my father.

  “Yes, I think there's a bathroom,” he answered, deadpan.

  All the way across the country, they ban
tered on like this until, as we neared New York, none of us was quite sure what to expect. We all knew they were joking, of course. But all the same, we almost collapsed with relief when we pulled into the driveway of the beautiful old white Colonial with black trim and a big backyard.

  I ran through the house, eagerly inspecting the stairs up to the second floor, the family rooms downstairs and the bright bedroom that was going to be mine. “This is a cool house,” I told Mom and Dad.

  As it turned out, we were very happy in Scarsdale, the New York suburb where we settled. Mom and Dad made friends. I settled in at school, sometimes walking there, sometimes biking. Little Steven took to kindergarten as if he had been going there all his life. And even Mark, who at first felt awkward and shy in his new neighborhood, eventually began to feel comfortable. The house really began to feel like home to us, with its big yard for snowmen and leaf piles, and even a kid's playhouse out back.

  My mom and I made excursions to museums in the city, both dressed alike in red and white checked blouses and wire-rimmed sunglasses. We ate foot-long hot dogs and chocolate milk shakes, and laughed at people's outfits on the train on the way home. Dad played paddle tennis or shot hoops with Mark and Steven. On Sundays he played golf, and he often let me come along to drive the golf cart or walk the course with him and keep score.

  Of course, I think our family could have been happy just about anywhere. Maybe it was because we moved so often that we never really got to know our other relatives. For us, the word “family” meant the five of us. We were all very close. One day when Daddy was taking pictures around the fireplace, he got irritated and raised his voice at me. I started to cry. And then, because I was crying, Steven started crying. Then Mark began sobbing, and pretty soon the whole family was in tears. No one of us could even feel anything without everyone else feeling it too.

  We had a whole private language, that only we could understand. When someone was sick, we'd call the sick person Ill-ke Sommer. A Telly was a short haircut, as in Telly Savalas. If someone yelled “GPY,” it meant “God is Punishing You.” That was what happened when someone, say, Mark, stole the biggest French fry off my tray, and then burned the roof of his mouth.