by Paula Keogh
It’s been a day of raw nerves and fractious exchanges on the ward. Michael was drawn into an intense encounter with Sister G, a clash over him forgetting that he had left his clothes in the laundry dryer. And Marie and Brian, two patients in their teens, exploded in an argument. Later, Brian threatened to kill himself, addressing his threats to Michael, who had tried to convince him that things weren’t as bad as they seemed.
Now, a new patient paces around the room talking loudly to himself, and Lydia’s temper adds to the tension as she rocks on her chair. From time to time she erupts into angry comments directed towards people sitting near her.
We seem to feed off each other’s anxieties and tensions in the claustrophobic day room. At times, the atmosphere is overwrought, as if we’re all waiting for a reprieve from some imminent catastrophe, waiting for someone to walk in the door with news that a dreaded event hasn’t happened after all. Waiting for things to get better.
When everyone has gone to bed, Michael and I sit at a table writing in our notebooks. After a while, he pushes a poem across to me. In the final two verses, he’s written:
love
let live
all who are different or strange
cherish your freaks and bastards
o wicked god of love
exquisite joker cruel as traps
release these iron jaws from
memory and from the spirit.
The poem ends with the note: ‘Writ in the House of Torment / M Ward, Canberra Hospital.’
‘There are only two things that are true,’ Michael says. ‘Love and suffering.’
I want to comfort him, but I see that writing is the only comfort he craves. We sit in our place next to the stereo and listen to Nina Simone singing Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’. And I hope for a breakthrough.
*
Two nights after the doctor’s prognosis, as we’re drinking coffee together in the day room, we talk of Canberra.
‘A weird city,’ Michael says. ‘It’s eerie how organised it is. And so clean and neat. But there’s something sinister about it.’
‘Yeah, like living on a film set,’ I say. ‘The lifestyle here feels like role-plays.’
‘The death style too,’ he says, with an offhand laugh.
‘Death style?’
‘Every city has its own peculiar death style. A Los Angeles death would be by addiction.’
‘What about New York?’
‘You’d get shot there,’ he says.
‘Oh, okay. So I guess Sydney would be misadventure, falling from a cliff top –’
‘– and the death style of Paris would have to be stylish.’
‘It’d probably involve a love triangle.’
‘Absolutely, and a duel.’ He pauses. ‘And Canberra’s death style would have to be something hidden and private – suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.’
I laugh, but our flippancy makes me anxious.
Death feels close to me, as close as life, not something distant and irrelevant. I still carry Julianne’s death within me like another self. And, like Michael, I’m a romantic. I understand wanting to sail over the edge of the world or fly into the sun from an excess of life, an intensity of imagining.
This idea of an extinction of self both dazzles and petrifies me. It’s part of a formula that equates life with suffering and death with its absence – with freedom, with soaring, with release. But death also means falling, descent, the underworld.
Once the thought of death has lodged in the imagination, it’s impossible to ignore. It demands engagement, insists on a response, a dialogue. Michael’s poems of death enter into this dialogue, and he tells me that death stalks him. He can’t come to terms with the grief he feels for his father. In losing loved ones, we’ve lost parts of ourselves.
Sometimes there’s a jubilant intensity to each breath. At others we’re empty and useless as the manic energy of our highs collapses into depressive troughs. We’re ecstatic, and we’re in despair.
*
A week after his arrival in M Ward, Michael was interviewed by a Canberra Times journalist. The article appeared a couple of days later: ‘Poet who lives in the underground’. Michael read out bits to me, enjoying what I thought at the time was a rather bleak picture of a brilliant young poet recovering from a heroin addiction.
Now, I read the whole article, a paragraph at a time because of my eyesight. I’m sitting in the day room, across a table from Michael, when I read a detail that he had omitted: that just before his twenty-fourth birthday, only a month or so ago, he swallowed a bottle of sodium amytal ‘and waited to die’.
The painting of Ned Kelly in his armour appears in my line of vision as I register the grim intention behind Michael’s talk of suicide.
I look over at him, watching as he writes. I see his secretive beauty – the arching eyebrows, the angles of his cheekbones, the curved eyelids. I sense his inwardness.
‘What is sodium amytal?’ I ask.
He glances up at me. ‘The truth drug. It’s a barbiturate, a sedative. Heavy stuff.’
‘It says here you swallowed a whole bottle.’
‘Yeah, had the ta-tas. It was a bad time.’
‘You might have died.’
‘That was the idea – but here I am,’ he says brightly.
I say nothing.
He takes my hand, suddenly serious. ‘And here you are,’ he says. ‘And that changes everything for me.’
‘Yes, I am here. I’ll always be here. And there’s your poetry – no one can take that from you.’ There must be something else I can say, some spell I can cast to take away his despair.
‘There is that. Wrote some more last night – though you couldn’t call them poems. One pointless rave after another.’
‘Some poems are raves,’ I say. ‘Ginsberg’s, for example – you could say “Howl” is a rave.’
‘Yeah, I guess you could. I’ll drink to that.’ He takes a swallow of his cold coffee and looks across the room to the stereo. ‘Hey, let’s put on some music.’
No one replies when he asks the patients sitting nearby if they’d object to him playing Carole King. We listen to Tapestry, the sound low. I hold Michael’s hand in both of mine and rest my head on his chest. We don’t speak.
Love isn’t only a feeling, I realise: it’s a decision about a way of being, a commitment to living, to each other. After all the talking, we come back to the simplicity of being together now, just us and the music, no past and no future. I’m determined that our love will be stronger than death. Michael’s right – the fact that we’re together does change everything.
*
A couple of days later, I sit at the breakfast table in the day room waiting for Michael to appear. He’s usually here long before now. I ask the Man from Kosciuszko to check the men’s dormitory. He’s not there. I ask a nurse if she’s seen him, but she’s only just come on duty. I ask a few patients. Someone says he’s sick.
Then Andy, the other recovering addict, tells me that Michael overdosed in the night and was taken to another part of the hospital.
I head straight to the nurses’ station. I want information, and I’m not going away until they tell me where he is. When I say I want to see him, they insist I needn’t worry, that he’s being looked after and isn’t allowed visitors. I panic. I repeat that I need to see him. They tell me that it’s almost medication time and I should go back to the day room.
I wait at a table with other patients as the medication trolley is brought in. From their chatter, I know it’s now all around the ward that Michael overdosed. I’m convinced that he’s dead. My mind sifts through the details of yesterday, trying to find some clue, trying to understand what happened.
When the nurses offer me water and tablets, I knock them away. They spill on the floor. I’m shouting, at my wit’s end. I want someone to tell me what’s going on.
Two nurses escort me to my room, hold me on the bed and pull down my jeans as another nurse injec
ts me with a tranquilliser. I lie on the bed, numb and remote from myself. I’m a pinpoint in a body that feels like stone. Impossible to think of Michael, impossible not to think of him. His absence is a siren I can’t turn off.
*
Michael appears and stands in my doorway like an exclamation mark. Two days have passed. ‘Been sick,’ he says, leaning against the doorframe.
‘Sick?’ My voice sounds hollow.
I sit up, grab a cushion and hug it to my chest. I stare at him standing there, a ghost of himself, his face drawn and grey, his eyes cloudy. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. When he coughs, some part of my mind accepts that he’s real, although I can’t feel that it’s true. My mind is stuck at the crossroads of cognition.
‘Feel weak as a kitten,’ Michael says. He remains where he is, leaning at an angle to the doorway as if reluctant to enter. He looks as though he’d collapse if I touched him.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing really. OD’d. Too many nembies. Not enough nembies.’
I don’t reply. The blood drains from my brain. The siren returns.
When he sinks into the chair under the window, I ask him again what happened.
For him, it’s simple. He just wanted to be ‘out of it’ for a while, and was able to score some speed and Nembutal from Andy. Michael’s angry that the police were called and that people went through his belongings while he was unconscious. He collapses in his chair like a shadow puppet, all stick legs and arms. When I get up from the bed and place my hand on his shoulder, he leans forward and rests his head in his hands.
*
Although I’m reassured by Michael’s presence, his overdose, like the doctor’s prognosis, is a shadow hanging over us that we don’t discuss. Fear grows in the silences between us. I am so afraid for him, for us.
The day after his return, Michael is again sitting in my easy chair. I’ve put on a Nina Simone record. He’s wearing a faded checked shirt, jeans and boots, and I can see the pointy bones of his knees through the denim. He’s just said something and, as he waits for my reply, his eyes rest heavily on me the way they often do, as if they can’t bear the weight of what he’s thinking. He takes a drag on his cigarette as Simone begins to sing ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. Her voice is plaintive, the music dirge-like and painful. Michael retreats into a far-off inner place, his eyes becoming small with distance.
It seems that drugs meet a need in him that goes far beyond physical addiction, a need linked to his devotion to Rimbaud’s poetry and his idea of what it is to be a poet, his fascination with myths and his identification with mythic figures, Icarus and Leander and other tragic heroes. A need to live beyond himself, escape himself.
But now I find myself looking at him differently, coming to the understanding that he’s in the grip of a dangerous and powerful compulsion.
Simone finishes her last song, and we go out for a walk around the lake. The sky is overcast, and at the tip of the peninsula we stand looking into the grey expanse of water. Our conversation skims the surface of our misery, then sinks into silence. Michael hunches his shoulders and closes his eyes as he exhales cigarette smoke. He lets the butt fall to the ground. ‘I’m fucked,’ he says, grinding it into the dirt with his boot.
I lean into his thin body, and he puts his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. We hold each other, staring at the lake. Crows are cawing in the gum trees, and useless waves lap against the stone wall at the water’s edge. Never in my life have I felt this hopeless.
*
A dull, cold pain has lodged in my chest. I wake up to it in the morning, and it’s still there at night when I’m lying in bed in the darkness. One night, as I’m drifting between sleep and wakefulness, I’m jolted into a memory of lying in my downstairs bedroom at my parents’ place. I recognise the pain in my chest – it’s been there since Mrs Gilroy rang to tell me Julianne was dead.
All the things I’d known by heart fell away after I heard the news: the smell of the morning, the warmth of family meals, the inwardness of music. In my world, Julianne would soon return. The effort of keeping her alive required all my energy, absorbed every breath. Only the conditioning that preserves social manners and roles kept me going.
I was in shock; the news of Julianne’s death failed to penetrate my consciousness. The arc of the event was stilled, like an axe the instant before it falls, its motion stopped in mid-air though its trajectory through space is already drawn. Impossible to go back, impossible to go forward. In this liminal, suspended space, I thought of a stalactite growing for thousands of years in a dark cave. I imagined the slow path of the water hardening along the neck of the icicle-like formation in a slow, repetitive ritual, one drop after the other, dripping endlessly in the darkness. And I grew old in that thought and unbearably tired.
I was moving on the treadmill of ordinary life, fitting my actions to whatever was happening around me. But the axe remained suspended.
I didn’t go to Julianne’s funeral. I didn’t even think to go. I have a vague memory of my mother standing at the kitchen door and asking me if I was going, but I can’t remember my response. I only have a sense of myself insisting that everything be just as it had always been. In the reality I’d constructed for myself, there was no funeral to attend. I couldn’t experience my grief or share it with others who had loved her, and so that grief turned in on itself, an ouroboros devouring its own tail.
About a week after her death, I was in a lecture theatre waiting for a philosophy class to begin. Julianne and I would normally have been there together. The lecturer entered the room, walked across the podium with his signature silk scarf billowing out behind him, and wrote on the board, Do I exist? He then launched into a long summary of Descartes’s arguments on existence.
Somewhere around me was a disturbance. Someone was talking loudly, throwing their hands about and shouting at the lecturer. People were turning in their seats, straining to see what was happening. Then I was led outside, and someone drove me home. My mind’s wiring had fused and misfired. There was only static and broken sounds coming from a distant transmitter.
When I was a small child, I knew that another world existed beyond the one I was familiar with. The everyday world where people smiled and everything had a place existed only on the surface; day turned into night and morning came again and life resumed its daily routines. But beneath all of this is the world inside darkness. Here you’re blind because there’s nothing to see, you have no hands because there’s nothing to touch, and there’s no tongue in your mouth because there are no words and no food. Only your ears let you know you’re alive. There are sounds and voices inside the darkness, and silences. And they are all terrifying.
As a child, I’d sensed the world inside darkness while watching bath water whirl down the plughole. I’d felt it as I went to sleep at night.
After that philosophy lecture, I found myself living in that world.
The axe had fallen. The question ‘Do I exist?’ had cut through my denial, and Julianne’s death had become a reality. Madness took over. I paced around the house, wringing my hands and pounding my head to try to stop the noise. I no longer had any idea who I was. I sat in the lounge room, my long hair covering my face, my legs jerking back and forth. The chaos in my head was loud and unremitting.
I don’t remember the weeks that followed. Sometime later, I learned that my parents had been advised by a local psychiatrist to take me to a private psychiatric clinic in Sydney rather than M Ward. In the hospital environment, I began to think I was Julianne. I was convinced that, like her, I would be killed by ECT. And, like her, I couldn’t stop talking loudly. Thoughts tore through my mind like a firestorm.
Before Julianne died, I never thought that we could die. Never thought that we could lose ourselves and become mad. After leaving the Sydney clinic, I wrote in my notebook:
Death is personal. No one can die for you, or live without you. It’s also logical. Death is the ultimate process of e
limination.
I keep going back to Julianne because I can’t go back.
*
On the ward, suicide and death are recurring conversation topics. All breakdowns involve a kind of death. Out in the world, people don’t talk about it; only the mad and the dying talk about death – and even the dying don’t talk about it that much. Here in M Ward, it’s risen to the surface from deep in our cultural underworld. With its one living eye, it stares us in the face.
After Michael’s overdose, the presence of death is insistent, and for me it signifies far more than simply the end of life, that final breath. Death takes everything away except my life: it’s the end of hope and the beginning of the madness that invaded me when Julianne died. Maybe I stole her death from her and made it my own so that I could be closer to her and avoid the burden of myself. The loneliness.
Michael seems to have been in thrall to death for some time, and in him it appears in many guises. Death is an old ruin he’s taken shelter in, the end of his search for home. It’s a poem he throws away, convinced that poetry has abandoned him. Death is his thin and trembling body, and the cough that saws through it, relentless and mean. When Michael talks of death, he’s really talking about his sense that he can’t keep on living.
How much of this state is caused by his addiction, and how much is the cause of his addiction? What I know is that death persists in him as a powerful melancholy.
In the face of its presence, we begin to talk of being survivors. We want another chance. In a new poem, Michael writes, ‘Survival is the password, spread it around.’ And I see that, in a previous one, he had written ‘the ultimate commitment is survival’. But while we talk privately about love and the decision to survive, when we’re with friends like Kate and Andy, Michael still raves about drugs. I reach for a cigarette and inhale deeply to smother my fear. My faith in our future falters.
I’ve died to my old life – there’s nothing left of the person I was. And I know what it’s like to want to die. But since I met Michael, I want to live. I’m occupying a space between a life that’s gone and a new life with him. I’ve invested all my hope in it.
