Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  flood my eyes with light

  I can feel the wolf growing dirty and sick, gaunt and broken. At night, her eyes glow.

  My music paraphernalia is scattered around this room: picks and strings, cords, bios, guitars, demos, pedals, posters, wire cutters, press, screwdrivers, tuners, notebooks, string-winders—it used to mean something. All of it was infused with potential.

  Now it means nothing. It’s garbage.

  I’m finally numb. That’s something, anyway. I achieved the junkies’ goal all on my own and it didn’t cost me a dime. Just one more step in this direction and I’ll have achieved oblivion.

  ♋ fuchsia wall

  an offer:

  oblivion

  forever

  I hear the music around me, but I don’t listen to it. It’s indistinguishable from the white noise anyway, doesn’t even bother to scream anymore; it just moans and swishes, playing to no one.

  Music hasn’t noticed that I’m not listening, or else it doesn’t care. The songs play on, erratically, torn sails on a lost ship. If they’re outside of me, they’ll fly away, but if the songs are inside of me, they’re trapped.

  I take a razor blade out of Napoleon’s medicine cabinet, sit down on the floor and cut the songs out of me.

  ♋ cathedral heat

  sick as a dog

  shaking like a leaf

  you have to look close

  to see what this disease has done to me

  Carefully, I lift the barbed wire away from the barbed wire directly below it and squeeze my head in between, facing away from the barbs. The sharp metal scratches my face anyway; my hair catches and tangles in it. I wanna be in the open field just beyond, though, so I wipe the blood off my face and let the barbs pull a chunk out of my hair.

  Twisting, I can see our little green house behind me, but I can’t go home-—not with a beautiful empty field just beyond. I have to be alone so I can run.

  When my head is through, I bend over and squeeze my other body parts through, one at a time. My jeans catch, so I free them by tearing a hole in them, then I’m in.

  I’m alone. I can run, I think, straightening up and looking around.

  Six cows are lined up in front of me, staring at me in silence.

  “Imagine that you’re being reborn. Birth is a painful process, but a positive one.”

  ♋ vitamins v

  this lukewarm catastrophe

  is a recipe for rebirth

  or so i overheard

  Mental health professionals all speak the same language and convey the same message in their conversation. This is the gist of their message:

  “Sometimes chemicals go all haywire and send confused signals. This isn’t your fault; it’s just twisted chemistry. And maybe some hurt feelings.”

  This is a good message. A well-thought-out argument and a loving one. The mental health professionals are soothers who come and go, their faces indistinguishable from one another, their conversations melting into each other . . . but they’re always saying something like that. It’s really nice of them.

  “Do you have racing thoughts?”

  I try to think about my thoughts. “Sometimes and sort of. I mean, they might race. Maybe I can’t tell because I race alongside them.”

  “Are your thoughts jumbled?”

  Again, I try to think about thinking. “They were. The first time I saw the snake.” I try to remember that while simultaneously trying not to remember that.

  “Snake?”

  While I never even gave these buildings a second thought, just walked by them over and over again, these people were cooped up inside, under fluorescent lights, helping other people stay here. My god. What a mission.

  So I can’t help but try and rise to the occasion of the soothers’ impressive energy and investment—I keep telling the truth. Which is humiliating. “The songs were definitely jumbled,” I offer. “They raced by and I couldn’t keep up.”

  “Songs?”

  ♋ same sun

  i can’t lie

  some bitch gets through

  and tells the truth

  But the funny thing is, the thing I can’t say is: I did bleed out the noise.

  It worked.

  For a while, I was schizophrenic. The woman who first told me this looked terrified as she spoke. I felt for her, but the full-throttle numb I had going on kept me from caring very much; “schizophrenia” just sounded like a word.

  Later, my sentence was reduced to manic depression. Huh, I thought.

  “But it’s not called that anymore,” she said.

  Huh.

  “You couldn’t be still?”

  I think. “I could be still, but I wanted to run away.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to escape my own skin.”

  “Snakes shed their skin.”

  “Yeah.”

  So I’m not me anymore; I’m bipolar. No matter how okay I feel right now, I’m not okay and I never will be. Apparently. Which means I gotta take drugs, just like hippies and junkies and Betty.

  If they say so. They’re awfully nice.

  A soother tells me that numb happens. That when stress becomes too great, a manic-depressive will shut down. “You shut down,” he says sympathetically.

  Huh.

  It’s difficult to know what to do for comfort when you can’t handle comfortable, or who to turn to for help when you’re shy. Why do you all care so much? You don’t even know me. These people seem almost aggressive in their desire to help.

  This may be the real medicine they offer and it’s powerful. I watch them administer both their drugs and their kindness and the kindness seems just as effective to me, if not more so. Chemicals in the form of medication are interesting, ham-fisted tools, but humans themselves engage in myriad processes we haven’t yet measured. We really are a deeply social species.

  “This music you heard—”

  “I heard noise that thought it was music.”

  “When you heard this noise in your head—”

  “It wasn’t in my head.”

  I listen carefully and try to learn the soothers’ ludicrous vocabulary. “Drug cocktail” is the best—who needs euphemisms?

  According to them, it wasn’t the Doghouse that did this to me, it was actually my fault (“which isn’t your fault”). Same with the witch. She was some old lady who happened to run me over; nobody cast a music spell on me. So songs’re my fault, too.

  I guess. Maybe none of ’em have ever seen a witch before, so they don’t know what one looks like.

  “Are you sure you’ve never been depressed? Maybe you thought you were just sad.”

  “I’ve been sad. Is that depressed?”

  Get this: I coulda been happy in hell. The soothers tell me that most manic-depressives enjoy their time in Up Land. My god. The fact that I had a problem with it indicates to them that I may have been both manic and depressed at the same time. Something that really shoulda worked itself out, if you ask me. Either that or I was just so sped up that I spiraled out into oblivion.

  I thought manic depression was a mood disorder—people who got real happy and real sad. Turns out you get real fast and real slow, and how that manifests is determined by your frame of mind. A fast brain fills in blanks in your visual field, makes stuff up at you. A slow one can’t even cope with what’s already here.

  But they can both make you want to die.

  They also say it didn’t happen suddenly.

  “Are you sure?” I asked them. I went to sleep on Jeff’ s floor and then woke up broken. That’s pretty sudden. But they say I’ve spent the last couple years living with symptoms like . . . well, like my entire personality. I might not even be a spazzy guy. According to them, hyper is a symptom and it goes away. “So you get better? ’Cause I feel better.”

  “You’ll feel better, but you won’t get better. If you don’t take medication, you’ll experience further episodes and you may not live through the next
one. Manic depression is deadly—one in five manie-depressives commits suicide. And like an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, you will always be manic-depressive. But it’s not called that anymore.”

  Okay . . . but high and low, fast and slow? How is that not life? This planet gets very high and very low; it moves so fast sometimes and then so slowly. Sometimes it resonates intensely, sometimes it’s all so strange, it leaves us in the dust. How could it ever be appropriate to feel less than too much?

  I guess you just have to learn to deal. You gotta keep secrets, keep functioning. Gotta keep showing up.

  “You could be heading into a depression right now. Depressions often come on the heels of manic episodes. Do you feel sad?”

  “I feel nothing.”

  “Well, that’s close.”

  The soothers feel very strongly that suicidal people are sad. I understand this point of view, but I still think, well, not necessarily. Couldn’t we just be finding solutions to our own personal equations? Writing the end of our stories?

  Night swimming is mania, wanting to learn everything and live everywhere is mania, feeling warm all the time (the poor band must’ve been so cold), hearing songs, restlessness (my inability to lie on a floor or sit in a chair), a disregard for the future, seeing things that aren’t there, insomnia, racing out into storms, needing to fuzzify the world in order to focus, the Doghouse episode, hating buildings, ranting all night about how bad bad radio is (the poor band must’ve been so tired), thinking I have a calling, that I’m on a mission . . . these are all symptoms of a long-term manic state. How embarrassing. So what’s left? What’s “me”? Anything?

  I’m gonna find out by doing these drugs. That’s probably funny, but I don’t feel like laughing right now.

  “Drug cocktail” actually means “no easy answer.” No one knows quite what to do about brains and chemistry, so they try all sorts of recipes and weigh benefits against side effects, trying to get the combination and dosage right in order to prevent the next “episode.” This takes a lot of time and a lot of soothers and a lot of blood tests and a lot of appointments and a lot of bus rides ’cause the Bullet is gone.

  No drug is a cure, though. Drugs are just big pieces of tape they stick over warning lights.

  I wonder if the junkies know drugs are pieces of tape.

  ♋ civil disobedience

  here’s a big fat aspirin

  maybe you’ll choke

  that’s not funny

  It’s a little frustrating, ’cause I feel like I found a cure: you just bleed a whole lot. You can bleed out noise, heat, visions and speed. This is frowned upon by the medical professionals, however. They say cutting yourself open is a symptom, not a cure.

  And also, it can make you die. They’re pretty upset about me trying to die. Soothers’re really big on staying alive.

  Which is weird, ’cause every one of their drugs wrecks your body in order to save your brain. I guess if I have to choose one over the other.

  Did you ever see “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”? This is like being a severed head in a metal tray, trying to make friends with a monster who could go apeshit at any minute. I gotta be a cold brain, talking patiently to a monster body. And I can’t die.

  “Do you have trouble sleeping?”

  “I have trouble sleeping. And breathing.”

  “Breathing is important.”

  “Yeah.”

  It sounds to me like manic depression is . . . soul sickness. Like sometimes your soul is too big to fit inside you and too magic to follow earth’s rules. Clairvoyance is a symptom of mania, for example. How do they explain that?

  And then sometimes your soul is too small to find. Too small to fill your sad little outline.

  “St. Francis was bipolar.”

  How do they know that? “St. Francis of the Sissies? Alright . . . he was great.”

  “And Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Wow . . . cool.”

  “Vincent van Gogh, Dostoyevsky.”

  “Geez, what a list.”

  “You’re in good company, anyway.”

  Soothers see their patients as suffering from exposure, standing out in the pouring rain with no protection, so they rush outside with drug umbrellas to try and protect them from the elements as best they can. Then everybody waits for “therapeutic levels” to kick in. When they do, the soothers say it’ll be wonderful—better than ever before. “Therapeutic levels” is like the chorus to the mental health professionals’ soothing song. They all sing a different verse, and then chime in on the “therapeutic levels” chorus.

  I listen ’cause I want to trust these caring people, but I can’t sing along until I understand what’s going on. My head’s still sitting on a metal tray, trying to imagine what it’d be like to care enough to make friends with a monster.

  ♋ mania

  i need an umbrella

  if i’m gonna stand in the rain

  All I do now is ride buses to and from Napoleon’s, keeping appointments, bloated with medication, the snake bag on my lap. The snake bag was my idea. It gives me an in-between, a tiny little bit of control. It’s a homemade-looking hippie bag I bought at St. Paul’s thrift store so that I’d always know where the snake was: in this bag where I can deal with it. It’s allowed to exist, so long as it doesn’t jump out and surprise me anymore. The noise is gone, and the speed, but I feel like the snake could show up at any minute and start the whole thing all over again.

  The soothers don’t think the bag is helping me get better—believing in “magic” is another symptom of mania—but so far, they haven’t come up with an antisnake pill, so I thought I’d take matters into my own hands.

  It’s definitely superstitious sacrifice to carry the bag around, but I believe in the snake and the soothers don’t. I almost tried “just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” but stopped myself. They’ve probably heard that before.

  I know the wolf is there, too, even though I can’t see her. She just is—it’s hard to explain. And the songs are there whether I hear them or not. And the bees. I believe in them.

  Anyway, lots of people carry bags. This one just happens to have an invisible snake in it.

  And it keeps me from losing. You can’t say I’m winning, either, but I am trying to stay here, and that feels like flexing muscles I haven’t used in a while.

  On the bus, as the sun and shadows flit across the backs of seats, I stare out the window at a world that looks pretend—a human habitat version of reality.

  Oddly, the buses I ride are full of people who seem much more likely to see robot bees than me. They look incapable of flexing trying-to-stay-here muscles. I mean they’re seriously nuts. I know what normal looks like; I’ve been looking at it my whole life. Normal’s on TV, for Christ sake. I know how to imitate it. How do these people forget to act normal? And when did they stop keeping secrets? They’re not even trying to deal. Do they feel no shame? If so, I envy them.

  ♋ listerine

  i couldn’t wait to come down

  there’s nothing here but the ground

  The soothers said I was being reborn. But really, I’m still here.

  I sit on the examination table watching the doctor’s eyebrows. They look like hair tubes, or little animals crawling across his face. These are really spectacular eyebrows, sticking way out from his forehead . . . mesmerizing.

  The doctor jokes nonstop and I get none of the jokes.

  “I’m a bear,” he growls. “Open your mouth!”

  He’s not a bear. Why does he think he’s a bear? Maybe ’cause of his eyebrows. Why would a bear want me to open my mouth anyway?

  I open my mouth.

  “This is a tongue depressor!” he announces, holding up a tongue depressor. “My goodness, you’re a lousy tongue!” he makes it say to my tongue. “I’m so disappointed in you!” Then he asks, “Is your tongue depressed yet?”

  What’s his problem? He’s disappointed in my tongue?


  Crane, sitting in the corner of the room with a magazine on her lap, chuckles. “Just laugh, Kristin. You can pretend to be normal.”

  On the bus, I sit with shavedy-headed, tattooed punk-rock girls in kilts and black boots, their backpacks full of comics and chocolate, but also old ladies, lonely and chatty, sometimes a little batty. I keep my snake bag on my lap and listen to my seatmates talk. The shavedy-headed girls are comforting; they come from the world of sweet goth knitters who hang in the back of clubs. But the old ladies I love’ cause they remind me of Betty. I’m sure that if I had any feelings, one of’ em would be Missing Betty, but I’m not ready to let her see me yet.

  I’m in limbo, straddling the strange and the mundane. I do wanna live here, with these great old ladies who never seem bored. I wanna be like them. They have enough time in their day to look around and be impressed or disgusted. They think something about everything. And these women can talk.