He couldn’t sleep, and when he did he had nightmares, bolting awake as if he were “wound up and then suddenly shooting out of the water like a fish.” For a brief time he thought that he too was hearing voices. “I can see nothing but a dark wall in front of me,” he wrote, “a dark wall or a precipice if you prefer, physically, morally, materially.”
He had spent three-quarters of his royalties from Ulysses searching for Lucia’s cure, coddling her with the most extravagant gestures, responding to one of her episodes with a 4,000-franc fur coat, because fur, Joyce believed, possessed mysterious healing powers. On another occasion he secretly paid for the publication of a book to which she had supplied illustrations, so she might not feel that her life had been wasted.
“Altogether, believe me,” he wrote her, “there are still some beautiful things in this poor old world.” Then, scolding her for her inertia: “Why do you always sit at the window? No doubt it makes a pretty picture but a girl walking in the fields also makes a pretty picture.”
Informed of his death, in 1941, Lucia said: “What is he doing under the ground that idiot? When will he decide to come out? He’s watching us all the time.”
At first light a car alarm starts squalling on Bank Street. On the neighboring roof an elderly man in a woman’s swimsuit is lying belly up on a towel.
A little after 6 A.M. the phone rings.
“You motherfucker! Arrogant prick! I hate you. You and your fucking family. I hope you die!”
It is my brother Steve. He slams down the phone. I was supposed to meet him yesterday evening at the supermarket, our weekly rendezvous to buy his ration of food.
I dial his number. He lets it ring nine, maybe ten times before answering.
“Don’t ever call me like that again,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry, Mikey.”
“I got held up. It was beyond my control. Answer me, Steve, how many times have I stood you up?”
“Just this once. This is the first time.”
“The first time. In two years.”
“You’re the best, Mikey.”
“The supermarket opens at eight-thirty. I’ll see you there.”
“You’re the greatest, Mikey. The greatest brother in the world.”
I’m still waiting for Steve outside the supermarket at ten to nine, gnawed by the fear that he and Sally are alike, that their conditions are connected in some hereditary way that will eventually make itself clear. But what is Steve’s “condition”? He never had a full-blown crack-up like Sally’s; and he’s never been given a definitive diagnosis either. They called him “schizoid” in the sixties, “borderline” in the eighties…“Chronically maladjusted” is the term now for his hopeless middle age. I don’t know anymore. I never knew. Five years older than me, he’s been disqualified from social acceptance since I can remember. Maybe it was how he arrived in the world: a shoteh, as the Talmud would call him, a mental invalid, the responsibility of his tribe.
He finally shows up at five past nine. He isn’t usually this late, but I’m too numb to scold him. All I can think of is Sally. Can this be a version of my daughter in thirty years? Arguing against the possibility, I keep returning to the glaring differences between them; but what if those differences are just varied presentations of the same disease? He looks in worse shape than last week. There are cigarette lighter burns on the tips of his fingers, his T-shirt is dirty and torn. On his cheeks are a series of tiny brownish bumps. When I ask him what they are, he says, “Insects, bugs. They burrow under my skin, mooching off me, Mikey, mooching!” As his caretaker I should be attentive to these problems. But I’ve witnessed his phobias for so long I don’t know how to gauge their seriousness. Nor do I want to right now.
He plunges into the supermarket and commandeers a shopping cart, steering it to the aisle where the tea is displayed. Steve’s weekly ration consists of one hundred bags of Lipton’s (always Lipton’s), which he steeps in a thirty-two-ounce pickle jar, five bags at a time.
He scans the shelves and hesitates for a moment; then it hits him that Lipton’s is out of stock. His lower lip slumps out, a crinkled pouch of disappointment.
“They knew I was coming. They knew it and they took it off the shelves.”
“Who did?”
“The people who work here for fuck’s sake! They saw you waiting outside for me and that tipped them off. So they took it off the fucking shelves.”
“Steve, look at that guy.” I indicate the man in the next aisle, crouching over a shipment of pet food, stocking the shelves. “He’s not thinking about you. He’s got his own problems.”
I can feel him churning, fortified to reject any attempt by me to contradict his suspicions.
“We’re in luck,” I say, “they have Tetley’s. Tetley’s is good too.” Tetley’s, I assure him, employs the same growers as Lipton’s, in the mountains of India and Sri Lanka, entire villages devoted to supplying these giant buyers with tea. “The two brands are completely alike. Believe me, you’re not being shortchanged.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do,” I lie. “I read it in the New York Times.”
“Okay, forget it. Just fucking forget it!” He seizes a box of Tetley’s and throws it into his cart.
I follow him through the supermarket while he chooses the rest of his staples: eggs, bread, fruit, soup, a tin of Captain Black tobacco. In Aisle 4 he wraps his fist around a container of Advil. “You gotta get this for me, Mikey, I’m in such pain. It’s my tongue. It feels like a blanket in a washing machine, swishing around, all heavy and wet. It’s driving me crazy.”
I’ve heard this complaint before. The swishing tongue, tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of thirty years of chlorpromazine and its various pharmaceutical descendants. Nevertheless, I refuse; Advil won’t help. And the last time he had some he took twice the maximum daily dosage.
We pay for the groceries and go back outside, air conditioners dribbling stale water from their window berths, the river simmering two blocks away, the Village like some choked backwater town. Seething about the Advil I wouldn’t buy him, Steve rests his shopping bags on the pavement. He removes his baseball cap, its inner seam dark with sweat. His skin is papery and yellow. There’s a black hole where an upper front tooth used to be. His jeans are stiff with grime. Looking at him, I remember the boy who would sit for hours in his darkened bedroom two steps down the hall from mine. He was more delicate than the rest of us brothers, with his fair coloring and large timorous eyes. I remember being infatuated with his almost reptilian stillness. But what was behind such stillness in a young, otherwise healthy boy?
“We’ve got to wash your clothes,” I say. And though I know he’ll spend it on Advil, or malt liquor, or some broken toaster oven for sale on the street, I give him twenty bucks for the Laundromat.
Steve looks glumly at the money, twisting the plastic handles of his grocery bags around his fingers.
“Remember Dad used to say I couldn’t hack it with people because I never tried? Well, I’m trying now, little brother, I’m trying to hack it. You’ll see.”
He shoots me a parting smile, picks up the bags, and rushes away up Hudson Street, his eyes darting around as if he’s being pursued.
I watch him go, wondering what he means by those words, yet not wanting to find out. I’ll shop for him again next week. It’s almost eleven now. Visiting hours at the psych ward are in an hour.
I return to our apartment. Pat sits at the table, sipping coffee. She looks exhausted, concerned.
“I tried to get Sally on the phone,” she says. “They wouldn’t let me talk to her.”
“Was she asleep?”
“They wouldn’t say.”
She has packed a bag for Sally: pajamas, a toothbrush, shampoo, slippers…the first innocent necessities of her confinement.
We hail a cab and arrive at the clinic, patients and hospital workers smoking in self-segregated clusters outside the front door. 11:50. Ten minutes till visiting hou
rs begin. We wait in the lobby: gray linoleum floor, Van Gogh sunflowers on the walls. At twelve o’clock sharp a large family of Hasidic Jews comes through, a bearded man leading the way, the knotted strings of his prayer shawl hanging out of his shirt. He nods to the guard and they pile into the elevator, laden with bags of food.
Pat and I start to follow them, but the guard stops us. “We’re here to see our daughter,” I tell him. “Sally Greenberg. She was admitted last night.”
He ducks into a small alcove and makes a call on the house phone. Then he turns to us. “You can’t go up right now. Someone will be down to explain. Wait here.”
We wait, standing, until the elevator disgorges a sturdily built woman, keys hanging from a leather cord around her neck, and a pin in the lapel of her jacket: “Local 1199,” hospital workers union, one of the toughest in the city.
“Sally can’t have visitors today,” she informs us. “She’s too agitated. She needs time to calm down.”
“But we were promised we’d be able to see her.” I feel myself enter a delayed, almost frozen zone. We’ve entrusted her to the wrong people, we don’t know what they’re doing to her, they don’t want us to know…“We were promised…last night…when we signed her into the ward. If there had been any doubt we never would have—”
“I didn’t promise nothing. I wasn’t on duty last night. Like I said, she needs more time.”
“How much time?”
“That’s up to the doctor.”
She stands with her legs planted firmly, arms crossed over her keys, the guard right behind her, in family management mode, ready for a scene.
“Then let us speak with the doctor.”
“I’ll see what I can do. It’s a holiday weekend, a lot of the staff are off.”
She presses the elevator call button and the doors rattle open at once. An empty box. We follow her ascent on the panel. Fifth floor, Sally’s ward, a hidden world from which we are suddenly barred.
I sit down, stunned, the guard watching me out of the corner of his eye, as more visitors wander in: a young Asian couple, upright and handsome; a late-middle-aged hipster; a forlorn woman in a gold linen suit…They’re all allowed upstairs. We’re the only ones shut out. I try to picture Sally’s ward: the double-locked steel doors, her shoebox of a room, the erasable board with each patient’s status: Sally Greenberg. No Privileges. No Visitors. Level Zero. At the nadir of madness.
Finally the doctor comes down, late forties, with the vague air of futility that I would come to recognize in many psychiatrists who have been at it for a while. He explains that he’s only filling in for the weekend, long-term decisions about Sally’s diagnosis and treatment will be made when regular staff returns to work on Tuesday. Then he answers our primary question, our only question really.
“She’s in isolation. What we call the Quiet Room.”
“You mean you’ve locked her up,” says Pat.
“She’s not unsupervised. Staff looks in on her every fifteen minutes. It’s for her own good.” Appearing to wince at the cliché, he sits down next to us on the edge of a chair, less officious than sad, an old hand at delivering bad news. “As soon as she works through her current phase she’ll be permitted to join the other patients. That may require a few days, or only a couple of hours. I wish I could be more exact.”
Permitted. Required. The language of punishment. Of custodianship. My heart sinks. How much worse than last night can she be? Where is the end point? My daughter in isolation, that ancient place of confinement, descendant of dungeons and barred holes in the ground. My only recourse is to revoke my consent to hold her. But can we really take Sally home? I imagine Pat and me marching her through the lobby, into a cab. Then what? We have no isolation room, no training, no sedatives or meds…The blunt weight of the fact stops me cold: we need this place.
I ask for the chance to see her. “Not a visit,” I explain, “just to look at her, to assure ourselves she’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, policy won’t allow it.” He shrugs ambiguously, lowers his eyes. “You may find this hard to believe, but you’re doing the right thing. The only thing. Sally’s a young girl. People can take advantage of her in her current state. They might get the wrong idea. If she were my daughter I’d be giving her the exact same treatment.” He moves toward the elevator, detaching himself from our despair—clinical, not cruel, an act of self-preservation. “Eventually the medication will start doing what it’s supposed to do,” he says, and rides back up to the ward.
Pat looks stricken, but steeled, fighting back tears. We agree not to leave. What if they decide to let us see her and we’re not here?
We walk around the block to kill time. A nondescript street on the eastern edge of the Manhattan grid, indistinguishable from those around it. A woman enters a dry-cleaning store, presents the man behind the counter with a red ticket, and is handed a box wrapped with string, containing her blouse neatly folded perhaps, a laundered gift to herself, spotless and renewed.
When we return, nothing has changed. Visitors are leaving: the Hasidic family, the hipster. A few patients shuffle out for a smoke, the privileged ones, as I think of them, heavy-eyed, out of focus, like smudged photographs of themselves.
The nurse with the union pin comes down on her break, unexpectedly sympathetic now, as if we have passed some kind of preliminary trial. “Take it easy on yourselves, really, go home. You can always call. Just ask for Cynthia Phillips, I’ll let you know how she’s getting along.”
Pat hands her Sally’s night bag, a meager thing, yet for the time being our only point of contact.
“I’ll see that she gets it. But you two go easy. You look like hell. She’s going to need you, that girl.”
Back at Bank Street I call Sally’s mother and give her the news.
“No! You didn’t put her away, Michael. You didn’t!”
Put her away. The phrase has its impact. I remember it as a threat from childhood, usually directed at my brother Steve: We’ll have to put you away. Do you want to be put away? Like some unwanted household object, I used to think, that for vague reasons of moral attachment can’t be discarded outright.
“It’s a hospital, Robin. There was no choice. She’s very sick.” I try to give her a sense of the past twenty-four hours, but how can I accurately convey the extent of Sally’s transformation? Robin can’t seem to follow me or fathom what I’m saying. And why should she? I wouldn’t be able to fathom it either, our daughter suddenly out of reach, locked away with the severest cases, in some haunted place where we’re not allowed.
I hear laughter in the background, Robin’s husband good-naturedly scolding their dog. I imagine them sitting barefoot, on the back steps of their farmhouse.
“Michael, listen to me. Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Sally is having an experience, Michael, I’m sure of it, this isn’t a sickness. She’s a highly spiritual girl, I’m not the only one who says so, I have friends, psychically sensitive friends, who have met her and they say the same. One friend told me the heat radiating from Sally was more than she could bear. She never felt anything like it. And she’s not a fake, Michael, I know what you’re thinking, she’s just a person like you or me with a gift for seeing what most of us can’t. What’s happening right now is a necessary phase in Sally’s evolution, her journey toward a higher realm.”
Her evolution. Her journey. I wanted to believe this too, in my way, when she was shivering with her Sonnets, awake all night. I wanted to believe in her breakthrough, her victory, the delayed efflorescence of her mind. But how does one tell the difference between Plato’s “divine madness” and gibberish? between enthousiasmos (literally, to be inspired by a god) and lunacy? between the prophet and the “medically mad”?
Though I sense Robin wants to get off the phone, I prolong our conversation. “It’s so beautiful here,” she says, “so perfectly still. The mountains are like smoke. I’m starting to paint again.” Her voice is like Sally’s b
efore all this began; their similar stops and inflections give me the odd feeling of being in contact with her. A momentary illusion.
I fall asleep on the couch, then wake up with a rush as if I’ve been shot from a cannon. I keep seeing Sally as a child, her tenacity, her warmth, her brushfire temper that I used to regard with exasperation—and sometimes with awe. Then the holding pen, the dungeon, where the maniac is restrained. Isolated behind a third locked door. Separated even from those who have been locked away from the world.
Pat wanders in from the bedroom, also unable to sleep. We sit together in the dark.
“Has she changed so completely or is it that I never knew her?” I wonder.
“You knew her,” says Pat. “You still know her. She isn’t gone.”
I keep asking myself the obvious question, the helpless question. How did this happen? And why? One has cancer or AIDS, but one is schizophrenic, one is manic-depressive, as if they were innate attributes of being, part of the human spectrum, no more curable than one’s temperament or the color of one’s eyes. How can something so inherent be a treatable disease? And how does one defeat such a disease without defeating oneself?
At 8:00 A.M., when the day shift comes on, I call Sally’s ward. The woman who answers is guarded. When I ask for Cynthia Phillips, she says, “Cynthia’s not available right now,” and hangs up the phone.
At eleven we’re at the hospital again, occupying the same plastic chairs. The guard gives no indication that he remembers who we are. At noon, however, he motions us over.
“You can go on up. Fifth floor.”
Sally is transformed again, lying on her bed as if she’s just been dropped from the sky, her hair splayed wildly around her. I sit down next to her, call her name. Minutes pass without a response. I call her again, touch her shoulder. She opens her eyes with great effort, lifts her head a few inches, and gives a gaping, slow-motion yawn.
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