by Lindsay Wong
“Can you provide more details?”
“Lots of name-calling and profanity. There was a Jerry Springer moment about an alleged rape. Can I go now?”
“Are you taking this seriously, Lindsay?’
“I really don’t see how this is my problem,” I finally told him, deciding to be direct and honest. But as I leaned forward, the room suddenly flipped upside down, and I had to cling to the desk, desperate to keep from falling off the chair.
Without being nasty or too personal, I could not tell the dean that I had not expected to be housed with someone who might have more than a few people living inside her, someone who was eerily constructed like a messy, genetic Russian nesting doll. And how could he question whether I was serious about the Woo-Woo when I had fought so hard to run away from those who were ferociously afflicted?
I was ill-equipped and not emotionally ready to engage with the subject with any unfeeling distance. I could not separate the Mountain’s Woo-Woo from my family’s psychotic rages. And being coldly reluctant was my built-in defence system, like an antihistamine against all things to do with severe mental illness. I was too frightened to chatter on about the Woo-Woo, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to make it go away.
The spinning seemed to be worsening in his cramped office. Breathe, I thought, my heart exploding. Breathe! Every ditzy nerve inside my head was vibrating, like the atmosphere around us had changed magnificently. Like we had taken a sudden trip to the mangy backwaters of deep space. Nauseated and incredibly dizzy, it took every conscientious scrap of willpower not to hurl on the administrator’s desk, so I frantically looked around for a garbage can, but he mistook my chilling panic for inattention.
“Lindsay, I need you to listen! Your roommate in the law school is hysterical. She says your other unfortunate roommate told her about a hit list and she’s convinced people are going to die. I need to know which students and faculty members are on it. I need to know who she wants to kill in the writing program. We’re talking about people’s lives here.”
I realized that the sensitive topic of a hit list must have occurred in a tense conversation between my two roommates that I hadn’t been privy to. Besides, I didn’t quite know who anyone in the MFA program was. Overwhelmed, I told myself that I couldn’t even tell the dean who was worth killing, because I couldn’t yet distinguish the seriously talented writers from the mediocre from the most poisonous hacks. Based on those I had briefly met, an exchange of mumbled names and foggy pleasantries, I didn’t like half of my peers in the writing school and quite a few of the more disobliging professors, but there was absolutely no reason to have anyone killed, I thought. The Mountain hadn’t failed a class yet or, more importantly, her thesis defence. Like my mother, I thought resentfully, my roommate was acting on some contaminated rage, most likely fuelled by her classmates’ critiques on her unappreciated writing abilities—which I mentioned.
While the student dean scribbled on his legal pad, I made a mental note that I should never be truthful in a workshop setting in case a classmate had an unusually foul disposition and decided to tuck a semi-automatic in their backpack. And if I had absolutely nothing complimentary to say, if I had run out of lukewarm platitudes to repeat by the second hour, it would be much safer just to be smiley and silent among such damaged and temperamental people.
“Jesus, who knew getting an MFA in America was so ominous?” I tried to joke to calm myself, but the dean gave me a strange look.
I gnoring the Woo-Woo, even in someone outside my family, only made it stronger. I had spent the rest of the day after my meeting with the dean slumbering, so I was well rested and only slightly dizzy when the Mountain came back to pick a fight.
“Let me in!” the Mountain screeched, as she threw her body against the front door, and I, gulping, thought the chain would jerk and shatter. “Let me in! I promise I won’t hurt you bitches! I just want to talk!”
Because of some survival trait inherited from my grandparents, who all bragged about surviving the second Japanese invasion of China, I had selected a sharpened knife—a clean utensil that wasn’t too hefty to appear unfriendly or intimidating but medium enough to do some damage in case the Woo-Woo was particularly violent. The Mountain still had her keys to the apartment, but I had deadbolted the door after the police incident in the morning—just in case.
“Here, take a knife,” I suggested to the law student, who was in the kitchen preparing beefy Norwegian sausages for supper. She was swaddled in an off-white, floor-length mink coat and wore a porcupine-sized fur hat.
Because of the deep anxiety hurtling inside me, I wanted to be prepared. Besides, I thought holding something sharp might make her feel better, if not safer. But she wouldn’t take a helpful knife or even a protective metal spoon. I began to gather up all the jagged kitchen implements in a paper shopping bag so we’d have access to a wide arsenal of disposable IKEA weaponry. There was no cellular reception inside our building, so we could not call 9-1-1 unless one of us made it outside. This was assuming either of us would still have our dialling fingers if we managed to escape.
“LET ME IN!” the Mountain was screaming now, as she hurled herself against the door with astounding earth-like willpower. “You stupid little bitches! I am going to fuck you up for telling on me! Come on, just open the door. I just want to talk to you. That’s all.”
When we did not open the door, she became even more incensed: “YOU STUPID BITCHES! YOU NASTY LITTLE GIRLS! Open up! I said, open up! I live here too, you know.”
All our first-floor windows had iron bars on them except for the tiny kitchen, and there was no back exit. Whoever had turned the building into university housing hadn’t planned for slighted MFA students. I listened to the planetary thudding—it was as if angsty Jupiter had exploded into grievous Mars. The Mountain crashed against our apartment’s entry point, and our train-track hallway shivered from her zealous global quake.
Shit, I thought. This is a horrible way to die. But at least it’s not on the subway.
From the Belcarra Institute, I had multiple PhDs in intensive horror-movie survival, and I thought I knew what to do. I may have felt completely lost and flailing in my Ivy League graduate studies at the Columbian University, but I thought if I had been the victim of a psychotic murderer, I’d be the very last person alive. If I had faced Jack the Ripper, I felt I would have ended up standing over his gory remains with a fork or butter knife. Anyway, I liked to think that I possessed the killer instinct to outwit any homegrown psychopath, as well as a horde of brain-munching zombies at the end of the world, which was similar to this astonishing start-of-semester incident.
Even if I were stranded on an island after a debilitating plane crash, I told myself, there was no doubt that I’d survive.
Because the difference between me now and only a month ago, I would later recognize, was that I was more aware of what I could be—I was not just some insignificant mosquito or fat louse. I was a grubby human being who didn’t deserve to be injured or maimed like a dusty, small-eyed cockroach—and that was why I had run all this time. No one, not even a psycho with a grudge, would get in my way of living what I hoped would be a dull and unexciting life. I realized that I could try to flee from the Woo-Woo, but I could not escape. I might not be able to prevent the Woo-Woo from bursting within my own flailing brain, but I could possibly outwit the lunatic who was trying to bulldoze my front door. Without the Mountain trying to force her way inside, I might never have possessed the bravery to insist on a medical diagnosis for my own internal sickness, for fear it was Poh-Poh’s uncontrollable schizophrenia. The shrieking Mountain was a reminder of an alternate future, another self, if I did not figure out a way to fix my hallucinations. If I survived this ordeal, I promised, I would no longer ignore my vertigo.
“What do we do?” the law student shrieked, jolting me back to the crisis at hand. “Lindsay, what do we do?”
I began stripping the gas stove elements of their heavy, blunt co
verings (they could easily bash in anyone with an average-sized head) and inventoried all the kill items in the kitchen. I knew from personal experience that the tiny stove lighter could be a powerful tool when wielded like a wild cheerleading baton. I assumed that a fork or spoon could carve up someone’s skin like a flabby Christmas turkey, and crushed glass could seriously dismember or kill.
If I shattered the mosquito screen in the kitchen window, if I long-jumped a miraculous three feet to land on the feeble courtyard stairs, I’d only fracture both my ankles and be able to log-roll to safety. Admittedly, this was a terrible escape itinerary, but some of my PhDs in survival had been earned by blatant, improvisatory idiocy.
The law student had worked for the United Nations and was fluent in eight or nine languages yet knew nothing about psychotic breakdowns and was ineffective in a Woo-Woo emergency. So I shoved her in front of me and told her to leap out the window first.
“I’m going to die!” the law student shrieked, but she made no exertion to help herself.
I screamed as sharply as I could, sounding embarrassingly like my father when he wanted to athletically motivate someone: “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! MOVE!”
In the end, it was the apartment’s repairman who saved us; he was fixing some broken tiles in the lobby when he witnessed the Mountain screaming and throwing herself at our door. And I suppose you’d have to be very hard of hearing not to also notice the obscene shrieking from our apartment. He was a robust man carrying a tool box; he shooed the Mountain away.
After the repairman assured us that it was safe, the law student suddenly became unstuck from the window. Hysteria had solidified her muscles.
“You saved my life!” she exclaimed, and then she embraced me, as if we were pals in some campy horror movie.
It was technically the repairman who had saved us, I thought; all I had done was get her wedged into a window frame. But I guessed there was nothing like an attempted assault by a crazed person to make you best friends for life, or until the semester was over.
“Oh, Lindsay,” she gushed, “you and I are both proper, well-behaved girls from good families. We don’t have outbursts when we are upset! I just don’t understand why Columbia would allow in someone like that.”
I only saw the Mountain once more before she was rumoured to have been sent off to the psych ward for the semester. The dean had allowed her in the building to fetch her mail. I had a public safety restraining order against her, which might explain why she panicked and smashed into a hard-to-miss wall. She smushed her face and hoisted her hands over her head, as if I had pointed a semi-automatic at her back. I felt like I was ordering her bleak execution.
But I could not think of her desperation, while she moaned, “No, no, no, no” in the hallway, as if trying to calm herself. The ground under my feet had begun earthquaking non-stop, so I grabbed onto a staircase railing to stop myself from falling over. Help, I thought, frantic, as the walls of Dodge Hall imploded. The world is collapsing.
Seven days had passed since the police incident, and I had deleted emails marked with Highest Priority: Please Respond! and at least ten or twelve urgent voice messages from the Dean’s Office asking to meet. They had also sent maintenance over to change the apartment’s locks, but of course it had been much too late. I had thought I had been handed a rare gift with a graduate school acceptance in a faraway place, but the Big Apple was as dangerous as the suburbs of Hongcouver.
Fatigued in the aftermath of the incident, and now suffering from insomnia, my nausea and vertigo returned with unparalleled force. A spooky yellow-orange light permanently coated the edges of my vision like a flashlight, making me feel vicious but faint.
Afraid and ashamed of my weakness, I retreated. I spent a week in my dormitory-style bed, a freshly delivered pizza cradled on my stomach like an open mess of ribboned guts. Even though I was too nauseated to eat, I liked the weight of the cardboard box on me. I was so angry with myself for regressing, but in that moment I was too unsettled to know why. I fiercely debated quitting graduate school and clearing out of the apartment. I had not paid my rent with my father’s emergency credit card in more than three months. So I ignored my father’s weekly phone call, because he would have said, in another attempt to strengthen my aptitude for suffering, “Oh my God, Lindsay, your future is saying, ‘Just suck it up.’”
Swiftly, again, the diagram of my world was churning. This was not fearsome indigestion. My bedroom tilted and warped, and I felt like I was rocking on a wicked ferry. The illicit grease from my pizza had stained the sheets a telltale orange. I wiped my chapped lips on my tumbling sail of bedclothes and belched. I could feel block-like continents suffocating me again, and everything began to float. My bed started to propel forward, as the sadistic hand of the Woo-Woo god picked me up and plunked me backwards. My desk and chair began to crash and slither in every direction. A floor lamp flew at my head like a meteorite. The feral fuzz of my blue floral rug and the adjoining walls began to palpitate, as if they were panicking in a dry, wombatty vibrato.
Help, help, I thought. I’m flying!
Bundled in my cheap cotton sheets, I became an airborne corpse. Immobilized, I spun with uncanny velocity—the most severe spinning I’d had in months. There was terror grumbling inside me, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
As if to escape the Woo-Woo again, I accepted the law student’s invitation to skip a few weeks of classes. We went on vacation—flying to raucous, claustrophobic Miami from La Guardia and then ferrying to the soft, blistering Bahamas.
None of our professors gave a shit about our prolonged absence or missed assignments.
For a while, my vertigo and hallucinations retreated. I returned to the MFA program to finish the semester, believing that I had (barely) outrun the Woo-Woo. Feeling brazen, more socially savvy, I decided to take on a publishing internship, reluctantly declining the law student’s offer to spend the four months of summer galloping around her estates in London and Paris before fine-dining through northern Europe.
“Oh, just come with me!” she pleaded, sounding uncomfortably like my former friend C.C. “My family is so grateful that you saved me from that lunatic flatmate. They’ll take very good care of you, Lindsay! I keep thinking about how Columbia could let in someone like that. She just doesn’t belong.”
After her aristocratic invitation, I was filled with gross toadish hope, thrilled that I had somehow fooled her into thinking I was normal and proper and unpsychotic.
For a while, I believed that my bleak and terrifying world could finish earthquaking.
CHAPTER 15
BAD, BAD BRAIN
Fourteen days after my visit to the neurologist in New York, I had no choice but to return to rain-drenched Hongcouver. The specialist had just diagnosed me with the most severe case of migraine-related vestibulopathy that he had ever encountered, and I was bone-shakingly terrified at the prospect of a permanent brain disease. At first, I had been giddy that it wasn’t paranoid schizophrenia, but I could not function on my own in New York City. The spinning made me confused, and when I wasn’t falling, I was slurring my words as if heavily intoxicated. Without explanation, I quit my summer internship at the midtown publisher and turned down a job offer at a prestigious talent agency.
On the exterior, I looked like a young publishing assistant: uptight, fast-talking, speed-and-Adderall-toting, with a designer purse and matching shoes. When I wasn’t in workshop, I made notes about what to say, what to wear, how to appear hard-working and polite. I even had a fake origin story, which I had been prepared to tell in case my boss or co-workers asked (they didn’t): only child, parents dead!
Yet inside, I was still fifteen years old—unsure and scared. Afraid that they would discover that I was grossly under-qualified and not smart enough. Being accepted to the Columbian University had taught me that I could fake it well enough to camouflage myself. But now, I was going to quit graduate school and the start of a publishing career.
In Hong
couver, I thought I’d crawl into bed and stay there in perpetuity, feeling like I had failed in NYC, but there was another extravagant dinner party at the oldest auntie’s house (attendance was absolutely mandatory), where I saw all the Woo-Woos, and we were paraded in like exotic animals at a zoo. The extended family assumed that I was deeply mentally ill, had, like, one or 200 ghosts inside me, and all my cousins (Flowery Face wasn’t there) were afraid to talk to me. This was what it was like to suddenly go Woo-Woo in suburban Hongcouver. To suddenly become something unacknowledged and feared. My cousins avoided eye contact as they swarmed the tables with enough roasted suckling pig, beef, duck, and fish to feed ninety-five people.
“I’m not crazy,” I said, but no one was listening, and I repeated myself like Auntie Beautiful One. “I have headaches that make me dizzy. It’s the headaches that make me see things that aren’t there. It’s just a fucking headache that’s making me like this.”
“Bull-fucking-shit,” my mother said, and I sighed, frustrated. I could not convince her otherwise.
“I have a serious brain disease,” I explained. “Want me to Google it for you?”
“No such fucking thing as brain disease,” she said. “That neurologist is crazy. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He’s just giving you bullshit because you paid him. It’s the American way. Not like Canada. Besides, white people don’t know anything about ghosts. That’s why they have so many problems. I am wondering why they don’t run out of names for all their different sickness.”
My mother had seemingly recovered from her sister’s breakdown, despite still being easily panicked. As usual, she kept saying that she was scared for me—I was not safe from the supernatural. What had happened to Beautiful One was now happening to me, she said, handing me a plate of greasy pig ears and chow mein.
I should not have been surprised, but I was suddenly invisible, grouped with the sickly Poh-Poh and starving Beautiful One, who had been sent to sit in a corner of the living room. Muttering to herself, Poh-Poh was heavily medicated on a cocktail of antipsychotics—maybe a new psychiatrist’s orders, because she seemed less panicked than usual. Beautiful One was also medicated, and she told anyone who would listen that she had taken up fingerpainting and now thought she was the greatest artist in “the whole wide world.” Claiming that she did not need art lessons, Beautiful One proudly presented her impenetrable scrawlings of psychedelic rocks and mutant shrubbery to her family.
