by Lindsay Wong
That fall, my mother, sobbing and yelling non-stop, began using my bedroom as a personal storage unit—she was a pragmatic lady and didn’t think I’d last until Christmas, and I was inclined to agree. My bedroom became a hoarding cell of surplus junk, because we needed more space in the house for all the items she liked to acquire at Costco and Walmart. In her own way, she seemed to be quarantining our family curse, trapping it so that the monsters would not come out—these items were peace offerings for the spiteful ghosts inside me. But my mother also felt bad for me, so she bought me an expensive new bed, which made the vertigo slightly more cozy and restful.
I had been Chosen by the Woo-Woo, and she was going to do her sacred duty to make sure that I did not end up in the psychiatric ward like her beloved Beautiful One.
But being an invalid truly sickened and shocked me. In those days and months, for the first time in my life, I began to have suicidal thoughts. I considered multiple ways to off myself but was too queasy and dizzy to find the household bleach. Research shows that depressives are less likely to commit suicide than people with manic episodes, like those with bipolar disorder. The depressed simply do not have the energy to die by their own undoing. Also, suicide is no easy feat when your own brain immobilizes you. I thought that if I were to expire in the Belcarra, the family curse meant that I would just become another foul-tempered ghost.
Finally, after the four-month wait, my mother silently drove me downtown for my CAT scan at St. Paul’s Hospital. Earlier, the family doctor had casually mentioned that my illness could be caused by a rare brain tumour, which just made me feel numb and more vicious. I bossed my family around for days, shouting orders at them to cut my fingernails and serve me platters of takeout sushi, knowing that I could always blame it on the lump inside me, post-operation.
“You’ll be sorry if I have brain cancer,” I said to a never-silent-before father as I lounged in bed and he fearfully brought me pillows, obese California rolls, and a taro bubble tea with surplus pearls. I was already destined for Chinese hell, so I felt that I might as well enjoy it. Meanwhile, my mother, wailing, made frequent trips to the mall and the Buddhist temple to divert my ghosts.
At this point, I felt that I had a terminal disease rather than a psychotic break because all my relations seemed giddy and rejuvenated during their episodes. Their Woo-Woo was like going to the spa. I mean, their eyes practically gleamed. Mine had the dull, flat, confused look of frozen fish at the supermarket. Despite the sweet vindication, it was almost a relief, though terrible, if I had a terminal illness, because it meant that my brain was my own and not an extension of my mother’s or grandmother’s. It would almost be as if I, sickly but victorious, had avoided the illness that broke Beautiful One.
In an underground parking lot downtown, I had to grasp my mother’s elbow to toddle down the blurry, undulating streets. A few strangers stared at us with pity. Cringing, I saw myself as they probably did: a crippled girl with gremlin skin who needed her mother to walk a few blocks. Scraggly, demented trees and skewered telephone poles began to soar. They were stalking me to the hospital entrance. Everything was tipsy and chaotic; panicking, I could not tell the blackish sky from the cement ground.
After an arduous few steps, we stopped in an alleyway so I could puke near a Dumpster; the nausea of dangerous, gravity-defying objects was utterly unforgiving. It seemed that nothing in the world could stay where it was supposed to. Commercial trucks floated in the sky like futuristic fantasies, and I could feel myself flying backwards at a billion miles an hour, while the urban landscape whooshed by in the polar opposite direction. Everything was surreal and wrong inside my eyelids. It was almost as if sharp-toothed gravity had gnawed a fabulous black hole around my skull and now the cerebrum was somersaulting about. A constant barrage of acrobatic trees and gymnastic motor vehicles.
“This is what happens when you can’t fight your own demons!” my mother admonished, as I wiped vomit off my hair with the tissues that she handed me from her pack-rat purse. I knew that she was trying as hard as she could, but she was too afraid of everything to be a good nurse in a TV medical drama.
Maybe because her rage was as noxious and mean as mine, and her billowing frustration was unbelievable and grating, and because we were much too similar in how we handled disgust and multi-purpose disappointment. But her words detonated some kind of inferno inside me that had been gurgling non-stop.
It really did not help that I had been bedridden for months, and I had not been able to scream at anyone, so I shoved my mother. And of course, being who she was, my mother was up for a quick and dirty fight. It was the first time that I had pushed my mother with so much force. In some ways, assaulting her was like a spurt of demented growth, as it was the only way for her to acknowledge that I was a living person, someone overcome by physical pain and not ghostly possession. My mother looked stunned, and she shoved me back. And this went on, as if we were two seagulls squawking over a rotting french fry, trying our best to resolve years of profound emotional problems.
“You bitch,” I screamed, feeling quite wonderful. “I fucking hate you!”
“I’m a bitch? You are the fucking bitch!!” my mother yelled back, louder. “You think I fucking want you for a kid? I didn’t get to choose, you know!”
Luckily, there was no one around. We must have looked deranged, but the fight helped me, and I think she must have felt happier too. Attacking each other was so much better than passively suffering, which neither of us had the patience for. Fifteen years of anger had culminated into this one public brawl. I am stunned that we did not just murder each other and leave the bodies in the conveniently close Dumpster. Since the commencement of puberty, I had thought I had put a reasonable amount of effort into not becoming her, but fighting her was like thrashing myself in the face. It made me far too ill to think that I was her daughter, her potential mirror.
“How could you fucking do this to me?” my mother yelled.
That woman was a throaty tornado of horrendous frustration and sadness, and she didn’t know it. Yet she had come for me when no one else had, despite her lifelong fear of airplanes and the homeless/black/homosexual ghosts; she had flown to the strange and terrifying realm of New York City to find me and put me in a cab. Despite her irrational fears, she had done her evolutionary job as a mother when I absolutely needed her to be one. She had finally been dependable and competent and helped me. She would never be maternal, not in the kind, conventional sense, but after our clash in the alleyway, she would stubbornly try to earn my forgiveness by becoming my personal chef: frozen dumplings, coronary-sized casseroles—whatever she could buy from Costco and microwave.
“Why did you let yourself get possessed right after Beautiful One?” she carried on. “Why couldn’t you wait for next year?”
And then, shockingly, she pleaded with the angry ghost inside me, sounding as heartbreaking and desperate as she ever had, offering herself as the ultimate sacrifice, acting as if she liked me: “New York Ghost, come out now! Ghost from New York, get out of my retarded kid’s body! I will let you stay as long as you want in mine!”
After all that fuss, nearly forty-eight hours later, I did not have a brain tumour, not even a lychee-sized wart or ant hole on the cortex. The CAT scan technician claimed that I had “a very unremarkable head.” Was my condition semi-psychological or purely psychiatric? No one knew.
The family doctor firmly advised me to take the year off—“You’re incredibly young, Lindsay. Graduate school can wait until we know what you have for sure.” But his advice rebounded from my mulish ears.
There was no diagnosis for my violent and mysterious illness/curse, but another month in my storage room facility would have made me more irritable if not crazier. I became certain that similar circumstances and environments had bred people like Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper. It would be another twelve months of waiting until I could see a neurologist. I did not want to stay in bed for another year.
So without
telling anyone, when my episodes of vertigo lessened in speed and frequency, I impulsively booked a plane ticket (with my father’s emergency credit card for supernatural disasters) and left Hongcouver in time for the winter semester. Fuck it! I lied to the school administrators and claimed that I was cured—there was absolutely no way I was going to lose my place in the current class, or worse, restart the tribulations of graduate school applications and international student visas from the very beginning. What if I applied to the Columbian University again and was rejected? I felt that my original acceptance, black and unholy, had been a miraculous fluke that did not happen very often to people like me. (I did not yet fully trust in my own book-learning abilities, even though I had straight As at UBC.)
But I was still vertiginous and exhausted and hallucinatory most of the time, bone-achingly tired in what seemed like every rheumatic finger to creaky limb, even though the migraines had receded to a ghostly ache. Despite the frequent dizziness and vomiting, I could fumble to class but couldn’t function without fourteen to eighteen hours of serious bed rest. I told no one of my illness. Instead, I slowly wrote shitty, irrational essays in bed, tried to read without literally puking (words were capable of rearranging themselves on the page, e.g., the eth het hte), and did not leave my apartment except to go to class.
With the ambition of the very young, I had canned soups, beer, and crackers delivered to my doorstep, paid for by the supernatural emergency credit card (my father would analyze the food bill with me each month, lamenting about my spending sixty dollars a week in the Upper West Side on groceries). Like my disappearance to Honolulu, we did not ever speak about my abrupt return to New York City.
Visiting the doctor became a hobby. I saw my general practitioner in the student clinic three times a week, moaning about mysterious fatigue, aches, and fevers, and I was diagnosed with malnutrition. Not once did I mention the vertigo. I was ashamed of my hallucinations. Was I schizophrenic?
Even in my graduate workshops at Dodge Hall, when my brain told me that I was hurling across the long table and my classmates were floating above me like oversized fruit flies in quick, opposing turns, I pretended that I was well.
Don’t fuck this up more, I thought. The professor just told you that your workshop submission needs a quick death.
At the Columbian University, I became a crippled geriatric spider.
In the smallness of my dirty insectoid soul, I knew that I could not go home, as I could not bear to be with my mother and hear about Auntie Beautiful One’s adventures with God and her spice cabinet—she would have said that we were so alike.
CHAPTER 14
THE OTHER MOUNTAIN
The NYPD threatened to break down my door after a roommate/classmate had a psychotic break at two a.m. and stuck her head inside the oven à la Sylvia Plath to gas us “nasty little people” to death.
In New York, once again, I could not escape the Woo-Woo, but this time it had possessed someone else, someone I wasn’t even related to.
Despite my random but chronic episodes of vertigo, I was determined to succeed. Yet I had only been in New York again for two weeks and I already believed that MFAs were the most fickle and melodramatic people on the planet. At the time of the police’s arrival, I was knocked out on sleeping pills and possibly carbon monoxide, but another roommate, a quick-thinking mink-wearing law student from Norway, had alerted campus security, who must have phoned the police. It seemed that if I wasn’t going to acknowledge the sickness bursting inside my skull, it would manifest physically and find me. For once, I was forced to recognize that I was reacting like my family, denying what was debilitating and right in front of me.
Because of the Columbian University’s liking for randomly assigning international students to apartments on West 114th Street, none of us liked each other very much. I was twenty-one years old, a decade younger than both of my roommates, who found my youth and chronic vertigo somewhat off-putting.
The Mountain, a depressed-looking 300-pound girl from Montreal, had been very meek; she suffered from a twenty-first-century form of kleptomania (stealing food and money and then apologizing via text messages). Every few weeks, she would have an uninspiring workshop critique at our writing school, which meant that she would express her suicidal urges in flamboyant, artistic ways. For instance, she might flop backwards on the kitchen table while you were eating dinner, spreading her legs like a sea monster, splitting them into an enormous rubbery V, while bumping over a chipped glass or plate. She did not care that she was seated in a runny casserole dish of wet chicken and gravelly potatoes. Her hair would be in saintly yellow ringlets, garish lipstick blotching her corpse-coloured teeth.
“I’m dying today,” she would announce, unafraid. “I’m going to kill myself after workshop. Just you wait.”
A few hours before the police arrived, she had begun to scream and cry and accuse the law student and me of breaking into her room and routinely raping her. Her voice had changed, become deeper and more controlled, before she had collapsed into a trembling ball outside my bedroom. I looked at her twitching face, saw the lipstick stains like crusty cranberry sauce, and decided that I did not want to be associated with someone so reminiscent of home. Quickly, I hurtled over her and locked myself inside my room. I was already terrified to acknowledge my own sickness, so how could I confront a stranger’s? I craved normalcy and thought I could achieve it by denying my own visual hallucinations. Meanwhile, the law student had gotten hysterical and charged outside to wait at Butler Library across the street.
Angry and shaking, I waited for the Mountain to leave, but she sat outside my door for hours, smoking and screaming sporadically.
“Open the door, Lindsay!” she shrieked. “I just wanna talk!”
I put my headphones on and read a book. I knew the drill: total and absolute inattention would allow me to ignore the wailing outside. The Mountain was blocking my door, but I had my college graduation present: a fantastic plastic chamber pot. My New York grandparents, whom I had only met once before, had mailed this pragmatic and wonderful gift, much more useful than cash. Mah-Mah, my grandmother, had assured me that everyone needed a chamber pot from time to time—this was NYC, and really, how naive was I? I used my pale pink pot while waiting several hours. I had no idea how people in previous centuries managed it—squatting on something so small was incredibly difficult.
It took six police officers to get the Mountain dressed and escort her to the psychiatric ward.
“Bitches!” she screamed at the law student and me. “How dare you tattle on me, you bitches!”
The doctor at the psychiatric ward called shortly afterwards to question me about her symptoms. Hallucinations? Most definitely. Suicidal urges? Yes. Homicidal? God, I hoped not.
I wanted to hang up the phone, because it was like talking about Beautiful One again. I could not handle the fearful reminder. I threw up.
The student dean and I were both in our pyjamas in his office at the Columbian University to discuss the Mountain’s assassin-style hit list and the troubling events of the early morning. Without my fourteen hours of requisite sleep the previous night, I was attacked by full-scale vertigo, so I forced myself to believe that I was not plummeting through the air and this interview would be over soon.
The administrator was dressed in his cheerful red flannel because he had picked up the Mountain from the psychiatric ward around four a.m. Not delusional or psychotic enough for the hospital to keep her, my troubled roommate was being lodged in the college’s isolated emergency housing quarters. Uncertain and weary, I had thrown a long coat over my pyjamas and yanked a beanie over my unwashed hair as soon as the dean sent his assistant to fetch me at seven. She was accompanied by the college’s public safety officers, who threatened to break down the door after I hadn’t responded to the dean’s emails or multiple voice messages.
“I apologize for how I’m dressed,” the dean said when he ushered me into his office. I shrugged, unsure how to respond.
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br /> Neither of us had slept after the police incident, and the dean was acting as if someone had just been murdered only a second ago. He was visibly uncomfortable, and so was I. I suppose he was worried about the legal penalties and public relations backlash for the college, but I was not going to sue him; I just wanted to crawl back into bed and forget about the incident ASAP. I wanted to reassure him that there was nothing extraordinary about this early-hours incident, except the Mountain seemed to have multiple personalities, or “many demons,” as my mother would have cheerfully said, which made a boring 2 into an exaggerated 4 on the Wong scale. But I had a feeling that this answer would not terminate our meeting, and I did not want to seem insensitive, so I said nothing and stared at the ground. Besides, a fury was burgeoning inside me because I did not want to confront the issue at hand. My Chinese family blatantly ignored our problems, and I had never had to talk about a psychotic episode before. My instinct was to run away and pretend that there was nothing wrong, and this urge made me ashamed.
“Can you please summarize the breakdown you witnessed last night and this morning?” the dean asked, sounding concerned.
“It was like The Exorcist,” I said, desperate to be back in my apartment. As I blinked, my vision abruptly shifted, and I could feel another sharp spinning. Thankfully, this time it was brief, though unsettling. I inhaled.
