by Paula Keogh
Something shifts, and I discover a reciprocal power in myself. Sensations are magnified. I turn with the women to face the men, and I’ve never before felt so strong, so fierce. I stamp my foot down, and again I raise my hands high. My body wakes to a faster pulse as the dancing becomes wilder. Shadows loom on the periphery of my eyes and chandeliers flicker like jewels. I’m in ecstasy, a whirling dervish but with more abandon, more release, and a kind of grace I’ve never felt before. As if my body has its own kind of wisdom, an energy that knows exactly each movement, each step, each turn.
Fireworks explode in my mind; colours thrill me. The bouzoukis play through my soul, vibrate through my body, pound in my blood. I’m possessed by the music and the dance; by a power, primal and sensual.
I lose myself. Raising my hands high, stamping my foot down.
When the music stops, I’m dizzy, blinking fast, the room circling around me. I find my way back to the tables with the others. They’re also breathing hard. Their eyes shine like marbles. I’m disoriented. Elated. Not sure what just happened.
*
The days pass, but I’m still under the spell of the dance. I’ve been winging my way from tutorial to lecture to coffee with friends. Now, in a quiet moment, I stand at the window of my room at Ursula College watching a sunset light up the sky like a visual anthem.
I sense something coming, something big, but I don’t know what it is. Lights are brighter, moods are wilder, and thoughts race across my mind. The world has become stranger and more exciting than I ever imagined it could be. And I want this strangeness, this excitement. It’s as if I’m in a canoe speeding along a river, feeling the rushing wind, hearing thunder moving closer, too exhilarated to care that Niagara Falls is around the bend.
At moments I sense that something isn’t quite right, but it’s impossible to satisfy this appetite, this restless craving for more and more life. I’m not simply happy – I’m euphoric. I’m doing mental cartwheels; my body is singing.
I no longer care about the essays I should be writing. The point is to live, not waste time trying to understand this philosophy, that ideology, this theory. Kierkegaard, Marx, Skinner. I’ve spent months working through my books, staying up late trying to make sense of them. But now all I want to know is, what did their authors feel, how did they live? There’s nothing in the textbooks on that, so I’ve packed them away under my bed.
In my narrow room, I dance to the soundtrack of Zorba the Greek and study the map of Greece pinned to my noticeboard, circling the names of places I just have to go to. I see myself living on a Greek island, swimming in the ‘wine-dark sea’ and learning the language. I stay up all night sitting on my bed, smoking cigarettes and reading Sappho’s poetry. I try to write poems that have the sensual immediacy of hers – fragmentary, impressionistic pieces – but I can’t stem the streams of writing that flow from my pen.
One night, in a sustained burst of energy, I read Prospero’s Cell by Lawrence Durrell. I’m excited by his descriptions of the bohemian lifestyle of 1930s Corfu, and I can’t wait to live there. I decide to buy a ticket to Athens as soon as I have the money, whether or not I’ve finished my exams. I’m thrilled by the idea of myself in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, sitting at an outdoor restaurant on Samos or strolling along the black-pebbled beach on the volcanic island of Santorini. Or maybe I’ll work on a fishing boat off the coast of Ithaca.
In my room crowded with anti-war posters and an overflowing bookshelf, I’m seized by the power I experienced while dancing at Dimitri’s. I want to live like that: connected, open, passionate.
I spin like a top across the surface of my days, unable to resist the energy driving me forward, unable to sleep. Sitting at a desk in my favourite corner of the library, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and make copious notes, heart pounding at the thought of ‘the horror, the horror’. In an English tutorial, feeling reckless and inspired, I share with the other students the ideas racing through my mind. As I speak, I’m there, deep in the African night.
It’s not like me to be so vocal; I’m usually the quiet student who’s done the week’s reading but lacks the confidence to speak.
Growing up, I was serious and obedient. I tried to be one of the good girls, stay safe, play by the rules. But too much has happened over the past few years, and I no longer believe in that. Goodness doesn’t protect you from loss, from friends dying, from confusion and madness. I no longer care if I break the rules. Earnestness clings to me, though, however hard I try to shed it. Even when I rebel, I go about it in a considered way, more an intellectual position than an inspired act of mutiny.
‘You know you’ll go to hell,’ my mother said when I told her during my first year at university that I’d lost my faith and would not be going to Mass. I was sorry she was suffering on my behalf, but her warning has never bothered me. I no longer believe in the fires of that particular hell.
I believe in this life, and I want to throw myself into whatever it offers. I’m determined to have adventures, travel the world, discover truer ways of being. In the past, I looked up from my books, saw the wilder side of campus life and longed to be part of it. Now, my inhibitions are dissolving. I can dance. I can speak.
*
One evening, a blind is pulled down on this bright world.
On a television set in the college lounge room, I watch a broadcast on the Munich massacre. The world is reduced to a black-and-white screen. The images are graphic, shocking. I’m catapulted back into a world of terror, into the inner turmoil caused by the political and social conflicts of the past ten years – particularly the Vietnam War. I feel I can’t take one more explosion of violence, one more senseless death.
Later, in my room, I sing along with Bob Dylan until I’m numb from the density of emotion in the songs. In the morning I play and replay ‘Farewell Angelina’, looking out at the wintry landscape of the campus, the black lace of tree branches, the sodden lawns. Sitting at my desk, I fill a notebook with pages of poetry, stopping only to press my hands against my eyes for the relief it gives. I read Walt Whitman’s poems and, inspired by his advice, ‘Dismiss whatever insults your own soul’, I throw out my collection of articles and leaflets on the war. I draw a yellow butterfly and tape it to the wall above my desk.
While my inner world is full of poetry and imaginings, the world outside feels distant and empty. I want to take hold of something with both hands, something external to myself, and make it matter to me. But I’ve been unable to reach through to anything solid.
I miss my friend Julianne. She was the one person who really knew me. After she died, I felt on the outside of life. I was standing in the darkness, looking through a window into a room glowing with light and love. I could see the fire blazing in the grate, and people sitting around a table, talking, eating and laughing. But I was locked out.
On the night I danced at Dimitri’s, I became one of the people in that room, at that table. I’m now, inexplicably, on the inside of life. But the energy that’s rushing into me is immense, irresistible, a waterfall, a torrent of sounds and colours, thoughts and sensations that sweeps me up, swirls me around, draws me under. I’m freefalling into the whirlpool at the bottom of Niagara.
*
I wake late in the day, late for my class. I take the quickest route across the campus, rushing along the track to the creek, across the footbridge and between the rows of white poplars, heading towards the building that houses the English department. I run up the stairs and open the door into a room crammed full of students and as stuffy as the under-deck of an old trawler. The tutor lifts his head and glances at me as I take a seat. He murmurs something and looks back at his book. I’m sure he’s just been talking about me.
He clears his throat and begins reading aloud T.S. Eliot’s long poem ‘The Hollow Men’. His voice drones through the airless room, dirge-like and despairing, conjuring images of formless shapes, shadows, rats in dank cellars. His voice is like quicksand. I’m drawn down into
it, and I can’t get traction. It’s dense and sonorous, and it’s suffocating me. I’m in ‘death’s dream kingdom’, and nothing is as it was. I hold on to the sides of my chair. I’m falling.
I hear a crack inside my head – not loud, but long. A splitting sound.
The tutor’s voice is breathy and elongated as if resonating through a pipe. My head is a radio; sounds are coming from inside it, not from the world around me. I look down at my hands and try to steady myself. The voice proclaims: ‘The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars’.
I grasp with absolute certainty the only real thing: I’m alone and freezing cold.
I’m dying.
When the reading ends, silence descends over me like a hood. I have to get back to my room as quickly as possible. I must not talk to anyone. In this valley of dying stars.
*
It’s been night for a long time. I’ve put an extra blanket on my bed, and I’m wearing a jumper over my pyjamas but I can’t get warm. I’m so cold I can’t move. The college is asleep; the only sound I hear is the distant humming of the central heating system.
It’s clear that, like Julianne, I’ve died.
As though I was awake one moment and asleep the next, I have no memory of the transition. But it happened. All life has left me. Even my room is lifeless, the ghost of a room, with my bedside lamp throwing shadows on the walls and moonlight reflecting in the mirror like the pearly sheen of an abalone shell.
Being dead feels real to me. It feels right. I’ve crossed the river, and I know who I am. I’ve come home. I’m dead. I’m Julianne. With her eyes I see the bookcase and the desk as if for the first time. I see how forthright the angles are, how precise the junctures, how smooth the flat planes of the wood. And these hands in front of my eyes are her hands. My hands. I’m free at last of the hollow world, the meaningless gestures. This death is true. I know who I am.
But as the night wears on, I fall into another kind of death. It’s no longer a relief to be dead – it’s terrifying. Thoughts attack me, a tirade of accusations and profanities that see betrayal in the things around me. The books on the shelves are full of lies, my coat on the back of the door will never keep me warm, and the drawing of a yellow butterfly has no meaning. I see the world now as the dead see it.
There are no eyes here.
In the morning, I try to wash my face in the bathroom sink, but I can’t make sense of the water spiralling down the plughole into darkness. All is sinister, uncanny. I see death in everything, as if it has always been there but I haven’t noticed it before. I’m seeing with Julianne’s eyes now, and information is crashing in from all directions.
At breakfast in the college dining room, I line up along the buffet counter. The mouth of the woman behind the trays of food is making sounds in a language I don’t recognise. I take some cereal and find a chair at an empty table. As I eat, I realise that the thoughts in my head are being broadcast from a distant site. I feel a bit sick. I’m sure war has been declared. Something terrible is about to happen. Across the room, people’s eyes are communicating in code; everyone’s blinking and glancing. The girl who’s taken a chair at the other end of my table keeps looking at me as if she’s about to say something obscene. The air is dense. It’s hard to breathe.
When I return from breakfast, I can’t go into my room. The door handle has become a silver orb with sinister powers. I can’t move. People try to help, but I’m dead, unreachable, under the power of the orb.
It’s all part of a huge, impossible problem I have to solve. But my head is full of noise coming from somewhere else, breaking into my thoughts and replacing them with threats, coded messages, commentary. This noise hates me. In some part of myself, I’m aware of it coming out of my mouth and the bizarre faces of people pressing in on me.
The next thing I know, I’m lying on a bed in a hospital ward. I don’t know how I got here or how long I’ve been here. A doctor in a white coat is holding up a needle, preparing to inject me. A nurse stands to the side of a trolley that supports a rectangular black box with dials and cords. I recognise it from the last time this happened, four years ago. It’s the machine they use for electroconvulsive therapy. As I watch a second doctor adjust the knobs, I realise you don’t die once only. Death is not a one-off event.
*
I tell them I’ve been raped. Mind rape. But they don’t want to know.
I sit on the couch in the day room, my arms wrapped around my chest, holding myself tight, trying to cope with the pressure of the thoughts and images behind my eyes. I’m trapped in the underbelly of the mind, tormented by a relentless monologue. Words with no reason to be here. Red mud blood, thick wet blood, red, shit oh shit, the bastard horror, take it off, idiot, off. My head is full of this noise; spiders dance on my skin, electricity surges along my nerves. The sensations in my body are unbearable. A huge spider is crouching on my hair, crushing my head with its legs, laying eggs in my brain.
All I know for sure is that I’m Julianne and I’m dead.
My life has disappeared; no one recognises me for who I am. While my family members and friends seem familiar, I don’t really know them. I’m Julianne. But who am I to tell me who I am? There are no words to say what my life is like: the thoughts that attack me, or the way that curtains and electric lights are possessed by threatening powers. The safety net of language has holes in it, and I’ve fallen through. Whenever people visit me, someone starts speaking in tongues. I don’t know if it’s me or them. Words are potent and hostile. Language betrays me, and people’s faces are carnival masks of confusion and distrust. Eyebrows especially catch my attention. They are the face’s punctuation marks, signing off on the threat in the eyes. I can’t look. I turn away.
Attending to my existence takes all my attention as I defend myself against chaos in sleepless dreams of war. Images from films, books and visits to the Australian War Memorial torment me: Pozières where my grandfather lost his leg, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai. Visions of battlefields. Word grenades exploding in my head. The cries of dying men. My grandfathers in the trenches of the Western Front. Bodies of concentration camp inmates. I’m in a ward or a war – I can’t think which, or what the difference might be.
When nurses respond in their firm way to my erratic behaviour, I’m sure they’re going to kill me. When I’m particularly agitated, I’m held facedown on the bed, pants pulled low so they can inject me with a tranquilliser.
Turn off, turn off, stand up, up, orders from headquarters, the head’s exploding, the head, someone’s pulled the plug.
At times I’m taken to the locked isolation room: a small cell-like room with a mattress on the floor and a square peephole in the door but no handle. High on one wall is an oblong window. Whenever I look up, a rectangle of light moves towards me, becoming bigger and more intense as it approaches. What does it mean? Where is the undertaker?
Every second day after a night of thirst and fasting, they come and take me to the female dormitory, used in the mornings for ECT. The beds are stripped to the undersheet. The anaesthetist in his white coat stands at the end of the bed beside the ECT machine. Something plastic is pushed inside my mouth. Gel is placed on my temples. Then I’m dragged under, into unconsciousness.
There are no eyes here.
I’m Persephone, abducted by Hades into the underworld. I’m dead, and nothing will ever be the same again.
*
doctor says how are you today
I say, am I today
he says, we’ll start another
series of ECT treatments on Monday
I say, another series of ECT
he says, you responded
well to the last lot
I say, the last lot
he says, that’s
all for this week
can’t get up from the chair
so he gets two nurses who
pull me up and steer me out
one says, is anything wrong
<
br /> I say, wrong
the other one says
here’s your medication
and I swallow the pills
I have conflicting attitudes to the medication. There are days I would swallow any drug available, take anything at all, to get rid of the chaos. At other times I’m suspicious, sure that the drugs and the ECT will kill me. So I pretend to take the pills, then spit them out later. The psychiatrist says that the treatment will silence the noise in my head but, instead, it silences me.
The hospital staff move as if they don’t want to be here. They’re not unkind, though; at times they’re sympathetic, and there’s a moment of contact, a shared understanding. The exception is Sister G, a middle-aged woman with a jutting chin and thin lips, a sharp tongue, and a uniform that’s belted tight around her waist. She can be nasty and she sees everything. She seems to believe her job is to obey a system that considers us a management problem. When she’s off duty, the place relaxes; sometimes, down the corridor, the nurses can be heard chatting and laughing together.
The passing of time is marked by medication rituals, doctors’ appointments, visiting hours, and bells that announce meals. When the nurses bring in the medication trolley, we line up like communicants to receive a cup of water and a smaller paper cup containing our syrup or pills. We each take a mouthful of the water and swallow the drugs, watched intently by the senior nurse. Afterwards, one by one, we turn away from the line, crush the containers in our hands, and throw them in the bin. The ceremony is complete. We go back to our place at a table or around the edges of the day room, sedated and tranquillised, returned to our personal agonies.
Some patients talk to one another, but mostly we’re locked away in our isolated and isolating inner worlds. Group therapy is held to get us talking, but it’s a torturous experience that just leaves me feeling even more remote from other patients. We tend to avoid eye contact, staring into the distance or pacing around the day room and along the corridor. We see ourselves in one another and want to keep our distance, respectful of our shared need for privacy.
