by Emma Janson
Emma Janson
DISCOVERING SANITY
a novel
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, places, incidents, and dialogue are the product of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real, or I f real, are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © December 11, 2017 by Emma Johnson. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For more information, to inquire about rights to this or other works or to purchase copies for special educational, business or sales promotional uses, please write to:
Incorgnito Publishing Press
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300 E. Bellevue Drive, Suite 208 Pasadena, CA 91101
First EDITION
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-944589-67-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
DEDICATION
To the people who give “free fish”.
MOVING UPSTATE
Ignacio Cheyez picked up a brochure from the passenger seat of his uncle’s borrowed car. He wanted to double-check his destination’s address since the roads were simply empty highways lined with trees. Upstate New York in 2016 was definitely “The North Country” like everyone had told him, since the land stretching between farmhouses seemed to last forever. As he drove past signs descending in miles toward Canada, though, he really began to question whether he was on the correct path to better health.
When his favorite Latin radio station fell to complete static, Ignacio changed the channel to Canadian pop hits in protest. Some of the commercials were spoken in French.
And the road kept going. Ignacio had been on the road for so long that he’d even forgotten about the beanie on his head and how much it irritated his scalp, despite his shoulder-length hair. He stretched his neck the best he could while thinking of his mother and the reason he was driving upstate at all, and the car began to veer off to the right of the slow lane. This jolted him upright for better focus on the road, but he couldn’t help being somewhat distracted. His mother had long been his obsession since her own mental diagnosis had institutionalized her by the time she’d turned seventeen. Unlike Ignacio, she was a threat to society, but this didn’t hinder his thirst for answers. His youth was plagued by an overwhelming sense of longing to know her.
By the time he’d turned seven, in fact, his disrupted mind and unanswered questions about his mother had begun to melt together into truths and lies. The trauma of witnessing her homicidal attempt on a dusty VHS tape had itself catapulted a deep curiosity that had formed into his current obsession. At twenty, now, and driving to a specialized behavioral health facility, he didn’t even know what the beginning had been or where his story began. Oh well – he’d have to figure it out. The announcer on the radio posed a question in French and Ignacio answered in the style of a rap.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, yo. Driving upstate for me. Faking insanity. Be the intake for me. Fuck all humanity. Burning mistake, you see. It’s a calamity. I do know what I’m doing, though.” His beat, boxing between phrases and fragments, put him in a better mood, but 8 hours of gas station food was irritating his stomach. He hoped that his navigational system was correct, as it displayed only a few hours left until his arrival at the vineyard-based mental health facility he was headed toward.
After another pit stop to fill his gas tank, Ignacio scurried back to his uncle’s car. There was something about the air in upstate New York that made it feel colder than the city. Had the elevation changed? Was it the realization that he was so far away from home? Were the wind currents really that different when it came to the space between buildings or along land without obstructions? Regardless, he was cold; he turned the heater up to calm the chill that permeated his bones, and then he put his crumpled beanie next to the Northern Lights brochure he’d received in the mail.
This time when he picked it up, he opened the brochure to read more than just the address. Ignacio read back over the information about the early years of the institution – it was reassurance that this was the place for him to get out his maternal angst. According to their brochure, Northern Lights was a premier licensed residential mental health facility in a remodeled mansion surrounded by vineyards, and not a mental institution. Opening its doors in 2005, the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Reed, had revamped and re-designed the luxurious establishment as an alternative to a traditional clinical setting. The care they provided was designed to treat people suffering from psychiatric disorders and emotional disabilities. Flexible with admissions, their deluxe facilities welcomed walk-ins once a week, but their focus remained on patients in need of extended stays. Some of their treatments included: Art Therapy, Yoga, Adventure/Exposure Groups, Specialized Nutrition, and Pottery Classes. Additionally, there was a fitness center and an indoor pool on the premises. The Reeds had thought of everything necessary to making a mental health visit as comfortable as possible for their patients.
He smiled while thinking of this stay as a two-month vacation from being poor, because not everyone could afford such a posh mental health facility as Northern Lights. Ignacio Cheyez was certainly in the category of people who, prior to this, had sought treatment through free state programs. Northern Lights had only entered his world through the trauma of his mother’s homicidal urges, his own inability to let it go, and researchers looking to validate links between mental disorders and genetic predisposition; in other words, he’d kind of gotten lucky, in some weird way. Globally, researchers had actually fought to sponsor him, but in the end it had been a group out of Germany that was subsidizing his September stay and looking to study his condition. He’d been chosen due to his “unique circumstances” – a repeated phrasing that appeared throughout his file.
Ignacio didn’t directly blame his grandmother for their living conditions, but the truth was that Northern Lights was a luxury resort compared to her hoarded New York City house on Elliot Street. And without his backstory, he’d have been trapped with her rather than driving from the chaos of the city to a mansion.
His grandmother, Maria, was a short matriarchal woman who’d never thought his mother Juana would get pregnant at such a young age. She’d felt Juana would become a cop or a Marine because she was so consistently fearless of all things that frightened other children. Her attempt to kill the boogie man formed only one of the stories that had solidified this way of thinking. At six years old, Ignacio’s mother had hidden in the closet with a knife, an extremely elaborate booby trap winding throughout her room. According to Maria, el cucuy wouldn’t have stood a chance – if there’d been such a thing as a boogie man. To Maria’s disappointment, though, the path that her daughter could have excelled on didn’t come to fruition. Rather, Juana’s rebellion began shortly thereafter, and lasted eight years…until the birth of her only son, just before her fifteenth birthday.
The family had assumed her pregnancy was a youthful mistake, Ignacio knew, but it had really been planned, and viewed as something else altogether in the eyes of a girl suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness. Juana’s son, whom she would name Ignacio, had for her represented the highest point reached in the heavens by her celestial body – a zenith. He became the capstone to strange ideologies. Essentially, Ignacio had been born from a child with a tormented mind, this event serving as Part One of the unique circumstances that were leading a dimple-cheeked twenty-year-old to Northern Lights.
When Juana had been institutio
nalized, Maria had become the guardian of baby Ignacio. She’d raised him like her own, loving him as if she’d borne him with her own body. When he became inquisitive about Juana’s disappearance, Maria explained with mixed emotions that it had occurred on the day her daughter had “died” and her new son, Ignacio, had been born. Each elusive answer had a tidy, uplifting bow. Maria and other relatives were equally vague about the incident that had changed Cheyez family history, but what was made clear to Ignacio was that Juana had been a rebel, mentally unstable, and needed to be locked up forever. The details in between were a blur of shame, denial, and secrets that he was not allowed to discover because he was just too young. However, Ignacio was always searching for the truth.
At seven years old, he thought he was a big boy – big enough to know what had happened to his mother. What was the Cheyez incident that his grandmother spoke of in whispers on the phone? Why did she cry sometimes for no reason, and collect newspapers and books on psychology that she didn’t understand? His mind was lost, and he only wanted to know the simple truth…where was Juana? Who was she? Since he was big enough to discover the truth about Santa Claus, why not so for the facts about his mother?
Merely a child that Christmas, he followed his questions until his mother’s reality presented itself in a shockingly raw manner. While searching for presents, as every seven-year-old does, he found a shoe box buried deep under Grandma’s bed. It was surrounded by psychology books and newspapers. Nearby lay neatly wrapped gifts labeled for Ignacio. The shoe box didn’t have wrapping paper, though; instead, it had been hastily taped shut and was covered with dust. With his body tucked halfway under the bed, Ignacio scanned the brightly colored images of snowmen and his favorite cartoon characters in elf hats, but they didn’t hold his attention.
At seven years old, he should have grabbed any brightly colored package, but he didn’t. Between his curiosity and some overheard conversations from months before Christmas, he chose to push the snowmen aside in order to get at the dirty shoe box. His decision to choose truth was a compulsion developed from his family’s hushed words. He’d learned that his mother had been jumped into a female Latina gang just before her tenth birthday. She’d been violently beaten by all members as part of the initiation. At the time, Grandma hadn’t believed her daughter’s gang affiliations were true, as she was convinced that her strong-willed child was better than the rumors. She was adamant about Juana’s strength…until the second jumping resulted in two broken ribs and an embedded false fingernail in her daughter’s cheek. No one denied the meaning of the crescent shaped indentations – not even Juana’s mother, Maria.
Juana catapulted herself through the ranks via her high pain tolerance, her thirst for mischief, and eventually her own demands for respect. Once she’d been inducted into the gang, there was nothing Maria could say or do to pull her daughter away from the life. By Juana’s fourteenth birthday, she was a rank away from being the leader of the sisterhood, and in celebration of her right-hand position being obtained at such an unheard of age, she was given a boyfriend of her choosing from another local gang. Since she couldn’t decide between the five top choices of young boys, she then lost her ‘virginity’ several times. No one ever agreed upon the true identity of Ignacio’s donor – not that it ever mattered.
When Maria came out of the bedroom after that fateful conversation which Ignacio overheard, her makeup was freshly done over swollen eyes, and Ignacio never held another false fantasy regarding his conception. He was seven when he discovered there was no Santa Claus, and seven when he discovered that he was the result of a planned pregnancy of a crazy girl with moons on her face.
THE CHEYEZ INCIDENT
Given the curious nature of little boys, Ignacio was eventually bound to discover the secrets in the box under his grandmother’s bed, but he wasn’t ready when he did. No seven-year-old boy would ever have been ready. Inside the mysterious box was a plastic evidence bag marked “Exhibit A” which held a VHS tape.
He was ashamed to discover it.
He should have believed in Santa another year. He should have returned the box and its evidence bag to beneath the bed and chosen instead to peek at the year’s Christmas presents. But he didn’t. All of those brightly colored gifts hid strange books and a curiously dusty box. He knew it was a clue to his mother’s story that no one would tell him, unless such knowledge came through an adult conversation he was never meant to hear…but this box was a shortcut to all of that knowledge he’d been dying to retrieve.
He gingerly walked the box and its VHS tape to the television at the other side of Grandma’s room. Clutter overwhelmed the home, but Ignacio was used to it, and he knew where to step so that nothing was disturbed. He carried the tape past books on conscious theory, circa 1926 - 1997, and right by stacks of unopened bundled newspapers. He placed the tape into the VCR’s slot and watched it descend, and then he removed the remote from the stack of new magazines on top of Grandma’s dresser. He could hear his grandmother banging pots and pans around in the kitchen for another meal’s preparation, so he exhaled and placed his finger on a button.
Play.
White noise on the television flashed and faded. Darkness lightened into images he didn’t recognize. The remaining contents of the tape split his world apart then, essentially exposing him to the beginning of his current mental status.
In Latino cultures, the Quinceñera of a girl marks the transition from childhood to womanhood, much like the celebration of an American girl’s growth on her sweet sixteenth birthday. The tradition comes from either presenting the girl to her future husband or presenting the girl as available for marriage, back in the time when it was acceptable to do so. That purpose has since passed, but the formalities of today are just as rich as they once were. Most of them are as prescribed, if not more so, than those for a wedding. The ceremony varies from culture to culture, but generally three things are consistent: a formal gathering with elaborate dresses, lots of formal dances, and toast.
When the video played, the beginning showed Juana waving to the camera in her beautiful Quinceñera dress. Dimples appeared when she smiled, as did crescent shaped scars on her left cheek. Young Ignacio glanced over to his grandmother’s mirror and smiled. Their faces were the same. For what seemed like a lifetime then, Ignacio stared at the image of his fifteen-year-old mother in the mirror and then on the television, back and forth. His fingertips touched the screen where little moons were sunken into her cheek.
Ignacio could see that his mother’s birthday venue had been beautifully decorated by family members who’d traveled from upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He smiled at seeing his two-month-old self in the arms of his great aunt, the surrounding family cooing over his precious dimples.
The family had made an impressive effort to pull together a memorable setting filled with twinkling lights, draped fabric, and delicate flower arrangements so that Juana would always remember her special day. A custom archway had been built, stained, and assembled by uncles and nephews for her grand entrance into womanhood. The food which filled the ballroom and tantalized the noses of those excited to feast on this occasion had been prepared by Maria’s sister. She and three elder family members had made sure favorite traditional dishes were prepared to perfection. In the video made to commemorate the birthday, family members were recorded waving the air into their noses and taking deep breaths. The sister proudly displayed a dish for the camera and presented it as if it was a pot of gold. When the operator of the camera, Uncle Carlos, reached his hand out to sneak a taste, the woman smacked his hand away. They both laughed. These dishes had been coordinated to be finished and set at the tables just after the candle ceremony; in their family, the candle ceremony was considered to be the most important aspect of the whole celebration.
In this ceremony, traditionally, the birthday girl distributes candles to the people whom she considers to have been most influential in her development. The gesture is accompanied by
a speech dedicated to each of the people she gifts. Each candle symbolizes the years the girl has left behind and a special memory with any person who is invited to join the ritual.
As Ignacio watched the event unfold on the video, he felt warm and loved. Everyone was happy, festive, and fondly reminiscent of the past celebrations they’d all shared together. It was light and fun, yet proper and traditional. Juan III escorted Juana through the archway in place of her father, who’d lost his battle with cancer the year before. It was an emotional moment for everyone to view, Ignacio could tell, and also emotional for Maria, who kept dabbing a tissue under her eyes and assuring everyone that she was okay.
Juana was beautiful, walking through the arch on his arm. When it was time for the speech, everyone gathered around to give Juana the floor as the lights dimmed in anticipation. Select family members and girlfriends stood to her right. Male friends stood to her left among designated men in the Cheyez family. All of them were very respectful and dressed appropriately – despite fidgeting more than anyone should in their formal attire. Everyone else was an observer to the proceedings, spread out in a horseshoe formation as close to the main, highlighted event as possible. Mothers cradled and hushed their young, fussy children. Fathers lovingly nudged their daughters as they reminisced and smiled over the speeches they themselves had been a part of so many years before. Elders were respectfully given seats as others constantly asked if they were comfortable.
Uncle Carlos, at nineteen years old, had been given the camera; he zoomed in on Ignacio’s baby face and then pulled dramatically away as Juana began her speech. He slowly scanned around the room to the family’s faces while they listened intently, their loving smiles clear.
