Schizo

by Nic Sheff

  It’s fucking cold in here, so I’m shivering. The shivering runs all the way through me. I don’t know, maybe it’s the fever. All I know is that I want to sleep again so badly it hurts.

  My joints crack and I go on shivering.

  “It . . . ,” I start. “I m-mean, it’s s-so cold. Could we . . . Is there a heater?”

  My parents both look at the doctor, who, again, looks at the nurse. “Could you bring Miles another couple blankets?” he asks him. And then to me: “I’m sorry, Miles. It’s a hospital.”

  I shiver. “Oh . . . okay.”

  “What you need is some more rest,” he says.

  I nod.

  “Yes, good,” he continues on. “That’s good. We just wanted to talk to you very briefly, your mother and father and I, about your aftercare plan. And I believe we’ve found the best possible solution for your situation.”

  I manage to laugh a little. “A brain transplant?”

  The doctor smiles, still looking very kind. “No, I’m afraid not. But we have gotten you on a new medication. It’s called Clozaril and it’s proven to be somewhat of a miracle drug with severe schizophrenic patients. So that’s something to be hopeful about. And we are going to transfer you to our psych ward here at the hospital and keep you on a seventy-two-hour hold where you’ll be seen by our specialist, Dr. Dubonis. Do you understand all that?”

  My attention shifts over to my mom then, who has started crying, however silently. She holds my stare and smiles through her tears.

  “A psych ward?” I ask, my teeth starting to chatter.

  My mom’s eyes remain fixed on mine. She nods slowly. “It’s just for a few days.”

  “Christ, fuck,” I say, the tears coming now. “I’m sorry. Please, can’t I just come home?”

  The doctor clears his throat again. “No, Miles. You need to get well. I’m afraid there’s no choice.”

  My mom puts a hand on my forehead as I start to cry. “Hush, now, hush.”

  She has just the saddest, sweetest smile. My dad, too, really.

  I lie back down on the bed and let my eyes start to close.

  “E- . . . Eliza?” I say, half sleeping already. “Does Eliza know?”

  The sound of the overhead fluorescent lighting is loud, crackling through the silence.

  “Don’t worry,” my dad finally whispers. “That’s all behind you now.”

  He puts a hand gently on my forehead and tells me again not to worry.

  I turn, shivering, onto my side.

  I pull the blanket up over my head.

  I sleep, but do not dream.

  I know now I will never dream again.

  Because in my life, there are no dreams left.

  40.

  THE GROUP ROOM IS pretty much the same as my room in the ward, but with a couple motivational posters on the wall and, instead of beds, a circle of plastic orange chairs.

  Dr. Dubonis, the primary care physician on the unit, sits with his back facing the two caged windows. He is very thin and sickly-looking, with pale yellow pockmarked skin and a scruffy, graying beard. His hands are large and appear to be covered in some kind of sores or blisters that he keeps picking at with his long thumbnail. He is fidgety and jerks around a lot and seems like he should be a patient here, not the doctor in charge of us all. But the little pin on his uniform does read Henry Dubonis, MD, so I guess he must be legit. Plus everyone else seems to be looking at him like he’s in charge.

  There is a whiteboard on wheels behind him with the acronym H.A.L.T. written across it with a nearly dried-up red marker. It’s an acronym I’m familiar with.

  H.A.L.T.: Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired.

  Meaning, in order not to go crazy, you’re never supposed to let yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

  It’s actually pretty good advice, I’d say. Even if it does happen to be in the lexicon of pretty much every goddamn therapist ever.

  At least, that’s been my experience.

  But, anyway, H.A.L.T. Sure, it makes sense.

  Dr. Dubonis explains the whole thing a couple times while everyone takes their seats, and then he goes on and turns his attention to me—which makes me cross my arms and legs and try to make myself just as small as I can.

  “Well, now, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, we have a new patient today, and I thought, before we get started—”

  A girl just to the left of me stamps her foot and leans forward, putting her elbows on her knees, shouting, “Nah, fuck, man, let’s start. Let’s get this fucking over with.”

  She’s Japanese, I think—with an accent and everything. Punk-looking with short-cut hair dyed different shades of red and all these tattoos and white scars up and down her arms. She wears a ripped-up tank top and loose-fitting pajama bottoms. Actually, pretty much everyone is wearing pajamas. Even the tranny with his/her makeup done and a long black wig and press-on nails is wearing pajamas and fuzzy little slippers. Well, not that little. His/her feet are at least a size twelve or thirteen.

  “Ha, where you got to go, Yuka?” he/she calls out. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Shit.”

  A couple of the other patients laugh, but the Japanese girl, Yuka, just kind of scrunches her face all up and then kicks the ground again.

  “Fuck you, Sweet Pea,” she yells. “I got places, man, fuck you.”

  There’s some more laughter, and then Dr. Dubonis clears his throat a couple times.

  “Sweet Pea, Yuka, please,” he says, but not angrily. “We have a new patient, and—”

  This real weird-looking psycho kid cuts in, “You said that already.” His head is shaved, with cuts all over it.

  “Yes, well,” Dr. Dubonis continues, picking more at his scabby hands. “Nonetheless, this is Miles Cole. He’s going to be with us for a while.”

  I shift around in the hard plastic seat, feeling all the eyes turned on me—eyes like the crows’ eyes, black and vacant and darting.

  Dr. Dubonis leans forward, talking to me gently.

  “Would you like to tell us about yourself, Miles? Can you tell the group why you’re here?”

  “Uh . . . yeah . . . I’m . . . uh, Miles.”

  That’s my brilliant introduction.

  “Fucking said that already,” the psycho kid with all the cuts says, rolling his eyes.

  A shy, sweet-looking kid chews on his dirty fingernails and stutters, “L-l-let him t-talk.”

  Dr. Dubonis smiles, encouraging. “Yes, thank you, Max.” And then to me, “Go ahead, Miles.”

  I nod. “Well . . . uh . . . I tried to kill myself,” I say. “But I didn’t.”

  There’s some laughter.

  One girl, small, with mousy brown hair, tells me, “Congratulations,” all sarcastic-like.

  “Well, would you like to share your diagnosis with us?” the doctor asks me, not letting up.

  I shrink back into my chair a little more. “Sch- . . . schizophrenia.”

  A few of the patients clap.

  Dr. Dubonis smiles. “Good. Very good. Should we go around, then, and introduce ourselves and tell Miles why we’re here?”

  Yuka stands up suddenly, knocking her chair over and then kicking it when it’s down.

  “Fuck this!” she shouts.

  Dr. Dubonis is up then, too, but like he’s aware of keeping his distance from her.

  “Do you not feel like joining us today, Yuka?”

  She flips him off and yells at all of us, “Fuck you, fucking assholes.”

  She stomps toward the door, but then almost instantly there are two men in white uniforms grabbing hold of her as she screams and kicks and flails her arms.

  “Get off me! Get the fuck off of me.”

  “You’ll come back to group when you’ve calmed down a little bit, okay?” the doctor says.

 
And then the two men carry her off, screaming all the way down the hall about how we could all go fuck ourselves.

  Dr. Dubonis goes and sits back down and smiles, and no one else seems to care that someone was dragged from the room against her will—though, I figure, maybe they’re just used to it.

  “Okay, sorry all,” the doctor says cheerfully. “Where were we?”

  As if in response, this one boy, who’d been sitting very quietly, suddenly jerks up and makes this terrible screaming noise super loud that startles the shit out of me. Well, actually, no, it’s not a scream exactly. It’s like the sound is forcing itself out of his body. He trembles and shakes and then the vocalizations come pouring out of his mouth, like, “Awwwaaaaahh . . . awwahhh!”

  It happens two or three times in a row.

  “Jesus Christ,” this super overweight goth-looking girl says, rolling her eyes. “This is such a waste of time.”

  The boy does his weird vocalization thing again. “Awwaahhaaa!”

  The tranny, Sweet Pea, crosses and uncrosses his/her legs. “Ain’t that the truth?”

  The boy screams out.

  He keeps on screaming.

  He screams for all of us.

  41.

  LOOKING OUT THE SMALL, caged window above my bed, I can see crows gathering in the treetops, silhouetted by the perpetually gray sky.

  The sun is obscured by the heavy mist coming in from the ocean. There is only the gray and the tops of the trees and the crows circling there and the cage around my window.

  My window in my room.

  My room in the goddamn psych ward.

  I stand on the frame of my bed, watching as the crows dive and circle.

  I think about Eliza.

  I try not to think about Eliza.

  I feel sick in my stomach.

  I feel like I could cry, maybe.

  The door opens behind me.

  I turn around.

  It’s that kid, Max, from the group earlier.

  He must be my roommate.

  He’s real thin and hollowed-out-looking—his hair all choppy, like he cut it himself.

  He keeps his eyes on the ground when he talks and has a super bad stutter. I figure he must be maybe a year or two older than I am, but definitely not more.

  “Oh . . . uh . . . y-y-you’re in here, then?”

  “Yeah, is that okay?”

  He walks over to the closet where he takes a wool cardigan off one of the wooden hangers. “Uh . . . uh . . . of course.” He sits down on his bed, clearing away some of the magazines. “H-h-have you b-b-been shown where everything is yet?”

  Really, he seems nice enough, so I smile and sit down on my own bed. “Yeah, thanks, I think so.”

  We sit quietly for a few moments.

  He crosses his legs, and so I cross mine, too.

  “So, uh,” I say, “what are you doing here? You don’t seem crazy like the rest of them.”

  He smiles shyly. “I c-can’t function in the r-real world.”

  “Yeah. Me neither.”

  42.

  THE STAFF ROOM IS tiny and cramped and overcrowded with filing cabinets and stacks of patients’ charts and VHS tapes. The door is half open, and I stand there for a few seconds waiting to be noticed by the giant woman looking at a People magazine or the paunchy white guy with greasy hair thinning on his head. The name tag pinned to his chest reads Carl. The one pinned to the woman’s chest reads Edna.

  Edna and Carl.

  I knock gently on the door. Edna looks up and squints at me through her thick horn-rimmed glasses. She doesn’t appear to be too thrilled about me having interrupted her.

  “Yes?” she asks. “Can we help you with something?”

  Her skin is creased and leathery like an old, worn-out suitcase. Her eyes are black fading to gray around the edges. She’s wearing a lot of lipstick and has painted-on eyebrows.

  She taps her white orthopedic hospital shoes like she wants me to get to the point.

  “Sorry,” I say, my voice faltering. “I just . . . uh . . . Someone paged me?”

  She takes off her glasses, cleaning them on the white thermal undershirt she’s wearing beneath her blue scrubs. She turns to look over behind her at this big whiteboard hanging on the wall. There’s a list written on it of a bunch of patients’ names cross-referenced with time slots where different appointments have been filled in. I see my own name, since it’s at the top of the list, and then next to it, in red marker: Doctor S. Frankel.

  “You see that?” Edna asks me.

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re gonna have to hurry, okay? You’ve got your meeting with your doctor.”

  “Dr. Frankel?”

  “Yes, he’s your private psychiatrist, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but . . . what’s he doing here?”

  She lets her shoulders rise and fall. “Guess your parents must’ve set it up.”

  I nod.

  “So you better get down there, huh?” she continues, kind of sarcastic-sounding. “You know the way?”

  I tell her I don’t, and so, begrudgingly, she pushes up from her chair with considerable effort and tells me to follow her.

  She walks out the door, and so I do, too.

  43.

  DR. FRANKEL IS SITTING in a hard plastic chair in one of the visiting rooms. He looks the same as ever, wearing that stupid tracksuit, with his short, stubby legs dangling inches off the ground.

  Still, I have to admit, there’s something kind of comforting about seeing him again.

  “Miles, my boy,” he says. “I’m so sorry about all this.”

  He gestures to the seat across from him and so I sit down, crossing my legs and arms.

  “It was my fault,” I tell him. “I stopped taking my medication. I flushed it. All of it.”

  He reaches out his hand as though to comfort me, but then stops himself—I guess remembering some doctor/patient bullshit or whatever.

  “It wasn’t your fault, my boy. It was nobody’s fault. Can you tell me what happened?”

  I nod. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Just take your time. It’s all going to be all right.”

  I nod some more, staring down at my shoes, chewing at the inside of my cheek. But as soon as I start talking, it all comes pouring out of me, everything: about the crows, the voice, Eliza, Teddy being dead.

  “Teddy.” Dr. Frankel stops me, holding his hand up. “You’ve talked about him before, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  He clears his throat. “Yes, but who is this Teddy?”

  “What do you mean? Teddy. My brother—the one I thought was kidnapped.”

  He squints at me. “I . . . I didn’t realize you thought he was your brother.”

  It’s my turn to ask him now, “What do you mean, thought he was my brother? He is my brother. He’s dead, though. I’ve come to accept that.”

  Dr. Frankel stares at me for a moment as though turning something around in his brain.

  “Miles . . . you don’t have a brother. You have a sister.”

  I clench my fist tightly.

  “Of course I do. . . . Or did. Teddy Bryant Cole. He went missing the same day I had my first episode at Ocean Beach. I thought he’d been kidnapped. I’ve been trying to track him down. But now I know he must’ve drowned. Everyone tried to tell me. I wouldn’t listen.”

  “Teddy Bryant?”

  “Teddy Bryant Cole—yeah. My brother.”

  He breathes in through his nose. “Miles . . . I’m sorry, but you have no brother. I don’t know how to make you understand. But you have no brother. This is . . . It must be a delusion brought on by your illness.”

  I jump to my feet then, knocking over the chair behind me in the process. There’s this heat burning t
hrough me, and I feel my heart pounding in my head and I can’t even hear as I yell, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. What the hell are you talking about? Jesus Christ, you’re all fucking crazy. You’re fucking crazy.”

  He says something to me I can’t hear, but I don’t fucking care. I scream, “Fuck you—just leave me alone,” and I storm out. There is a sickness in my stomach and I feel my head spin and a sweat breaks out all over my body.

  This is crazy. This whole thing. The world spins around and around, and then my eyes roll back and it all goes black.

  44.

  THROUGH THE BLUR OF too-bright light I see Dr. Dubonis looking down at me. He smiles then and helps me sit up, and I see that I’m lying on the couch in his office. Dr. Frankel is there looking through a stack of papers behind Dr. Dubonis’s rolltop desk in the corner.

  “Here, Miles, drink this,” Dr. Dubonis tells me, handing over a paper cup filled with water and what I think is some Emergen-C, electrolyte whatever.

  I do as I’m told and then I try to stand up, but it’s like my legs don’t work.

  “Just hold on,” Dr. Dubonis says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Dr. Frankel and I . . . We want to talk to you about something.”

  My jaw clicks back and forth. “About my brother?”

  “Miles,” Dr. Frankel says, “I know this is hard for you, but . . . listen. That name, Teddy Bryant, I knew it sounded familiar.”

  “Yeah, duh, my brother.”

  “Miles, please, just listen,” Dr. Dubonis tells me.

  Dr. Frankel leans forward, handing me the stack of papers. “Teddy Bryant,” Dr. Frankel says, “is the name of a child who did disappear. You’re not wrong about that. But . . . he’s not your brother.”

  I look down at the papers in my hands, but the words are all blurred out. There is a picture of Teddy, though. That’s certain.

  “This is him,” I say. “This is Teddy.”

  “Yes, Miles. Yes. It is Teddy. But, look, Dr. Dubonis printed these just now. They’re from the Chronicle website. Can you see what it says there?”