Lights On, Rats Out

by Cree LeFavour

  As for recreation therapy, I’m pacing the halls no less than an hour a day—any break in the monotony of brown carpet underfoot would be advisable. Too bad as I read down I notice that recreation therapy could be more accurately described as aqua therapy. Not even I think it’s a good idea to subject the oozing, open wounds on my arm, foot, and face to the water of a heavily used public pool.

  Looking up from the paper, I meet Dr. Simons’s perceptive eye. I don’t think he’s quite sorted me out, but I suspect he doesn’t like what he’s seen so far. Maybe I’m too together to be in here. Or is that what I hope he thinks? Looking right at me, Dr. Simons explains I will continue to “taper off all drugs” so that over the next fifteen days I can be “observed off Prozac and Trazodone.” I’ll undergo psychological testing. I am “Now released to the status of Hall Escort.” My full schedule of activities can begin. I’m allowed to leave the hall with the rest of the patients on B-1 to take pleasure in their company and in the sumptuous meals waiting in the madhouse cafeteria.

  But I’m still waiting for my answer. The mention of fifteen days is just the psychological half-life of the Prozac (a total of roughly three weeks when added to the ten days I’ve been here drug-free). Under Responsibility Level I hear him say one of my goals is to “learn to be a little bit more dependent” on my peers. He notes, as if in warning, as if he has read my mind, that “an attempt will be made to integrate” me into group activities. My resolute avoidance of speaking with the nurses or other patients thus far and my virtual nonparticipation in or absence from the mandatory daily hall meetings have wormed their way into my file. The sum of what they know is based on the physical evidence of my behavior before I arrived; whatever Dr. Kohl has communicated about my diagnosis; and the thin dossier containing evidence of my behavior on B-1.

  I still don’t have my answer.

  They’re all looking at me. The clincher forms, a bead of moisture on a cold metal surface: Dr. Simons says they’ve determined I have “severe developmental and characterologic disruption and distortion” that could “benefit by long-term inpatient therapy.” What does this mean? “Characterologic?” Is that even a word? I’m well bruised by the time the number breaks from Dr. Simons’s mouth. The words startle me as a bird might, had it escaped his lips: “Estimated Length of Stay: 6 months to 1 year.”

  I contain myself before the gaze of the five professionals holding my present and future in their hands after casually entangling the two in a tight knot I don’t know how to begin to undo. I want to hear myself quoting Herr Settembrini as he admonishes Hans Castorp for his proposed length of stay at the Berghof: “‘Don’t you know there is something frightful in the way you fling the months about?’” But I drop nothing more than my gaze; I’ll merit no further cause.

  CHAPTER 27

  A Thing for Lit Cigarettes

  I cringe at the nurses’ contact with my skin when they change my bandages in the vestibule of their station. Having them see it up close feels like a violation. But it’s not just them. The vast landscape of the wide-open wound ready to be smeared with snowy Silvadene ointment is visible to anyone who passes through the hall. I behave fairly normally; it’s the severity and extent of the burns that seem to earn me legitimacy as a nutcase among nurses and patients.

  There’s a palpable sense of horror at what I’ve done that I pick up in the expression of distaste tinged with fear on the nurses’ faces. I’m not crazy like Bird Man, who sits in the common room talking eloquently to no one in particular, of finches, common and obscure. I’m not claiming to have eight, ten, fifteen alternative personalities who walk, talk, dress, and behave in their distinct ways, as the cluster of MPD (multiple personality disorder) patients do. I’m not the one who tried to kill myself. Once, twice, too many times? And they think I’m spooky because I have a thing for lit cigarettes?

  Dr. Simons’s voice reverberates through my skull. Time can waste itself: “6 months to 1 year …” I have no use for all that time puddled at my feet. What matters at the moment is the contest I seem to be losing with myself. A growing part of me wants nothing to do with opening my eyes in the morning, reading my book, picking at my food—even the idea of seeing Dr. Kohl again and returning to my small life in Burlington, Vermont, is receding. Dr. Simons’s sentence feels like a joke I don’t quite get. The prospect of staying in this place for six months, never mind a year, is at once impossible and dangerously appealing. The appeal of being responsible for nothing, free to disintegrate, sleep in my pajamas all day, talk to nobody, never brush my hair, is growing familiar. I’m afraid if I let my resistance down I may never want to leave. As Hans Castorp settles in at the Berghof he tastes this danger, for “at that there swept over him anew, from head to foot, the feeling of reckless sweetness he had felt for the first time when he tried to imagine himself free of the burden of a good name, and tasted the boundless joys of shame.” Ah yes, shame. The 11s are chipping away at my rational self and right now they’re more real and compelling than anything in the confined environment around me. I have nobody to talk to and if I did have someone I wouldn’t risk telling him or her this, the deepest of all secrets. To do so is dangerous, pure folly.

  Exerting my most rational self to stay intact, I again create enough critical distance to calmly study my options as I stare at the cyclamen plant the florist delivered as this week’s alternative to a bouquet. The punctuation marks of crimson blossoms float over the mottled heart-shaped leaves. They testify to my father’s belief in beauty to cheer and strengthen me. I imagine all the flowers I’ve ever seen, cut, wild, and cultivated in a superabundance of color, shape, texture, and fragrance, filling my room floor to ceiling, blocking the view, obscuring the ugly carpet, and drowning out the stink of cigarettes. It’s pure witchery. I keep the image I’ve conjured like a mantra I can return to when I need it.

  I’ve stopped writing what I call “fragments”—unpolished poems spewing rank as bile—because they’re scary thoughts from some other part of me. A disturbing antidote to the 11s called Edlin parades as a named entity come to rescue me. The poems are a devil’s brew containing mistrust of Dr. Kohl, “memories” of sexual abuse, loathing for my mother, and fear of insanity. I rationally deny them all, but when I apply pencil to paper I’m possessed, as if the letters and the words they make are dictated by an alien self speaking in tongues. No, I won’t entertain the ways I could fuck with myself in this place by inviting greater lunacy. There’s nothing I want here other than the liberty to go before I forget I want to.

  I’m escorted to my therapist Dr. Weiss three times a week. I’m not in love with her; I don’t obsess about her, I don’t fantasize that we’re together in bed, I don’t repeatedly dream I have her arms around me only to wake imprinted with a sensual flush. I hardly think about her. She doesn’t know me and she may well not like me. I can’t blame her for that. I’m not all that charming these days. So if there was anywhere to get, we don’t go there. I already have as much as I want from her. She’s a woman in a chair with a pen and a job, gone before she arrives. She’s the keeper of forty minutes three times a week.

  She talks. She listens. Tell me about your dream. Tell me about your mother. Your father. Your sister. Tell me where you grew up. Tell me what you want. Tell me why you want to leave when you’ve only just arrived. Tell all.

  Not so fast. She may think she can bring me back, convince me to settle in. I guess she doesn’t recognize how reckless a locked door feels when it traps you on the inside. I suspect she can’t, not with her keys—hall, car, house, office. Not with her dinner reservation. Grocery list. Laundry load. Dirty dishes. Pretty things to buy. So I tell Dr. Weiss what she expects to hear. I won’t let her too close. She’s expected to write, file, and stuff me into her briefcase as adequately accounted for. I hope she thinks I fit nicely.

  The first ten days on SO felt like a month—everything was new. Since my induction into the hospital, the routine of meals in the cafeteria and of therapy, time has sped
up, but the rapid pace is now as upsetting as its slowness once was. Six months could pass without interruption; even a year could be one steady stream of undifferentiated hours. The undertow of disappearance has been with me for a long time. I’ve dreamed of running away, pulling out without a word, leaving a brief note behind or not even that. Once the desire to give up takes hold the fantasy builds, climaxing in the cowardly luxury of choosing not to live. Staying in here comes awfully close.

  I had quit my job at Community Action. Withdrawn from my grad classes at the University of Vermont. Farmed out my obese cat. Forwarded my mail. Turned off the lights. Set the heat at 55°F. Paid the rent a month in advance. Shaken my shrink’s hand good-bye. Giving up the infrastructure of my daily life was a little death I can no doubt recover from, but having loosened myself thus far, how much easier it would be to leave it all behind forever.

  This unhappiness, the discomfort I feel in my own skin but hide so effectively behind an intact self-sufficiency, is less plausible when the hall hushes and its stealthy hours mount me like I’m their cheapest syphilitic whore. Listening to Herr Settembrini’s advice to leave, I try not to ingest the air. I need to channel the clear-headed Joachim speaking truth to Hans Castorp’s persistent question: “So no one had left?”

  “No one was purposing to leave—nobody did leave very much, up here, as a matter of fact.”

  I strain to remember I belong on the outside. I’m busy declining the magic that’s getting sweeter and greedier the longer I stay. Rest. Quiet. Acquiesce. I push to go but the other side plays to win; my resolve slips away, however hard I try.

  To escape myself I shower often, even if getting there requires contact with the nurses. Patients must sign themselves, the key, and their contraband toiletries in and out: shampoo, conditioner, soap, safety razor. A nurse checks on me at least once while I’m in there, just to be sure I haven’t choked on soap, drunk shampoo, or bludgeoned myself with the showerhead. I’ve come to love the shower room better than any other space on the hall. Hot water spilling down, light off, it’s as alone and invisible as I can get on B-1: unalloyed blackness and complete privacy, even if only for a few minutes before the nurse knocks and unlocks the door to peer at my shiny wet nakedness through the steamy triangle of light flooding in from the hall. They hate it when I turn off the light; it freaks them out and breaks the rules. This makes me a little happy.

  CHAPTER 28

  Quiet Rooms

  The dead zone of another weekend—no rounds, no therapy, no movement. This is number four and counting. The neurons I depend on are locked in a centrifuge set on High as I try to sort out the reverse hierarchy of B-1. There’s no nice normal here or even the pretense of it; just degrees of irregularity. Symptoms are the measure of a twisted class system placing the sickest patients—dramatically unwell and in possession of the longest list of diagnoses and hospitalizations—in power.

  Unsurprisingly the lifers—those who have come and gone so often they don’t have a home beyond halfway houses and hospitals—form a tight clique. The price of belonging to their privileged group is maintaining the status of “super-sick.” As Mann observes, “It was easy to understand that each patient inclined to make the most he could of his individual case, even exaggerating its seriousness, so as to belong to the aristocracy, or come as close to it as possible.” The aristocracy. Yes, the women I call the Dowagers keep dramatic acts and gruesome symptoms on order.

  This clutch of Axis I anorexics whose Axis II label reads MPD stick together the way the prettiest, most popular girls in high school do. I’ve learned to be cautious, quiet, and as invisible as possible in their presence. It’s how I am, but never more so than here. I can only hope the social remove I instinctively maintain acts as a buffer against the practically inevitable iatrogenic effect of the psychiatric ward—that is, symptoms caused by the cure itself.

  The uncontested Dowager of B-1 is a spectacularly wasted anorexic, Sherry. When I’m angry and bitter, hardened against my fate, I see violent red hair falling over sickly, pallid skin draped in loose folds over bones like unironed curtains. When I feel stronger I see her fiery hair as pretty, her pallid skin as like that of an old-world fairy. I discern in her demeanor gentleness that makes me sorry for the irreparable damage of starvation. To be here for as long as she has been is to suffer crib death—silently suffocating in her cage despite her youth and potential vigor. Whatever I’m feeling, when I pass her in the hall I erect a wall of indifference that’s my most trusty defense. Avoid me. Avoid me. I keep my eyes on the carpet and walk, tall as my six feet will allow. I’m the Jolly Green Giant, twice or three times her weight, six inches taller. I make it my business never to speak to her, touch her, or touch anything she’s recently touched, whether it’s a couch cushion or a door handle. Anxiety over her illness contaminating me—as if that were in any way possible—leaves me feeling cruel and unworthy. She’s abundantly unwell.

  Sherry has been on B-1 for more than a year and that’s just this round. She has the lead in the infamous cluster of MPD that Sheppard Pratt is becoming notorious for under Dr. Richard Loewenstein. There’s an epidemic of sexual abuse at the core of the “recovered memories” that prop up the diagnosis. These dangerous snippets of fantasy-cum-fact mess with memory—that deeply unreliable source when it comes to sorting through one’s own past. Even without the help of sodium amytal, age regression, hypnosis, or guided imagery what might I come up with if encouraged to do so? Dr. Kohl has never encouraged me to “remember” things that might have been no more than sense impressions, a valence of eroticism that could have been mine or someone else’s.

  I don’t blame Sherry, Sweetie, or any of the other Dowagers for what they’ve become. Sweetie is my favorite for her gentle demeanor—all there is to discern from her virtually blank, clearly crushed affect. What she and the others are up to without meaning to be goes far beyond malingering, a particularly nasty term for faking psychiatric illness to gain attention. You can’t fake anorexia, nor can you fake most mental illness. But the subjective quality of self-reported symptoms and the malleability of the mind up against the awesome authority of a doctor put many patients to the test. This is particularly true if they’re ambivalent about who they are and what it might mean for them to get better. I should know. Being mentally ill, becoming a diagnosis, can so easily supplant the hard work of building a viable identity.

  I’m not at all sure how well or ill I am. Deciding to pull myself together can’t be reduced to nor accomplished by making a simple choice. I’m sure the Dowagers are trapped in a similar maze where motives, desires, fears, and hopes are laid out in confusing trajectories. The MPD patients aren’t engaging in a conscious strategy to be sicker than they are; it’s just that it’s too easy to lead a patient with a weak, porous identity to various conclusions about herself. Presenting the option that there are two of them—or more—must be terribly appealing. I feel completely at odds with various parts of myself most of the time. It would be a relief to slap a diagnosis on this confusing state.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  As part of my education Sherry gives a lesson in what the quiet rooms are for. Padded floor to ceiling, one of the two rooms has a cushioned table not unlike a massage table, but this one comes with four straps attached to padded leather cuffs to secure wrists and ankles. The other quiet room is just one big, empty, soft space. Romper room. The walls and doors of both are soundproof—sort of.

  I’ve learned that earning a trip to the quiet room takes little effort. A fight with a nurse or patient will do it. Hurting yourself in any way. Even a verbal threat is enough. I’m not sure what Sherry did this time. She’s visible through the porthole-size observation window strapped down from her red hair to her bony ankles, like a frog in a witch disguise pinned for Bio I dissection. Before she goes in there’s noise, nurses shouting, shrill tones, an alarm buzzer signaling for additional staff and a doctor. (MDs must authorize use of the quiet room—it takes an expert to know when a patient is a r
eal inconvenience, if not a danger.) All the other patients are told to return to their rooms.

  “Lockdown!”

  As usual I’m already in my room. To escape the emergency I read harder, focusing on Hans Castorp’s pleasure as he admires Clavdia Chauchat from afar:

  When he thought of her (though thinking is far too tame a word to characterize the impulse that turned all his being in her direction), it was as though he were sitting again in his boat on the lake in Holstein, looking with dazzled eyes from the glassy daylight of the western shore to the mist and moonbeams that wrapped the eastern heavens.

  I’m reduced to reading the sentence three times before the feel of Mann’s vision takes hold, forcing back the noisy farce playing out in the hall until it recedes into my chosen fictive universe.

  As it turns out, Sherry cut herself—for the third time and that’s counting only this admission. Despite the precautions, a determined patient can usually find the means to slice open tender skin. A janitor in a blue work suit arrives with a bucket to scour the blood from the bathroom tiles, the stench of ammonia permeating the hall as he pours Clorox over grout.

  When the agitated hall returns to a quieter than normal hush I pass by the tiny window, my full bladder standing in for bloodless curiosity. Glimpsing her, I’m not sure what to think of Sherry in that room, all strapped down and presumably sedated. Muted and stilled. I know I’m relieved she’s not out here with me. I don’t have to worry that she might sit near me or talk to me in the common area. It’s less than nice I feel this way considering her misery, but I’m short on compassion these days.

  The girl is a mess, as are the other Dowagers, any one of whom provides sufficient inspiration not to hang around B-1 too long lest I wake up one morning to find myself part of their sad cabal. Unfit for life—that’s what I’ll be if I stay too long or come back too often. As Herr Settembrini explains to Hans Castorp: