On that day in Sicily, with the specter of a beautiful, burning boy floating in the back of my mind and a high school arch-nemesis repairing her nails a few yards away, I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to confront the real culprit behind my embarrassing tummy trouble. I didn’t know how to talk back to the voice that had babbled terrible, inscrutable words within my head before the pain in my lower half drowned it out. And so, after I did all the things you’re supposed to do in the restroom and rose from the toilet, the voice came back. It was louder and more distinct.
“You piece of shit,” it hissed. “You fucking loser.”
I turned on the sink and washed my hands, hoping the sound of the water would drown it out. The trouble with screeching internal voices is that they’ve bypassed the whole auditory system and actually emanate from within your brain. Throwing up aural roadblocks doesn’t help. The harsh noise is already inside you.
I raised my hand to open the latch to the bathroom door.
“You can’t go out there,” the voice snapped. “Everything will hurt again. You can’t go out there. It’ll be worse than before. You have to stay here. You have to stay right here. You’ll never make it anywhere. Why did you think you could come here? You’re broken, and everybody knows it. You’ll never see home again. You’re going to die in here.”
People with mental illness are privy to very special knowledge that the rest of the population—poor, average souls that they are—never gets to enjoy. We have the most stunning revelations in the most mundane circumstances. We’re sort of magical, really. Thus was it revealed to me that I could not leave this particular restroom in this particular filling station on this particular giant island in this particular ocean on this particular day in this particular year.
So I sat down on the toilet.
I sat and I sat, and then I sat some more. I sat so long that the nail brigade tired of its labors and boarded the bus. I sat so long that I grew accustomed to the fetid smell of the hot bathroom. I sat so long that Leann gently knocked on the door and called my name not once, not twice, but three times.
“Just a minute,” I said. “Just a sec.”
In reality, I sat no more than twenty minutes. But stuck in that bathroom with only my hateful inner monologue for company, as my heart pounded in my ears and I perspired rivers, as my clothes took on the lingering scent of the shit and piss around me, I felt certain in the knowledge that to leave was to die. So I had to stay.
Then I heard the bus horn honk loudly and violently, four times in a row. Even in my stupor, I was a little surprised. Our driver was a mild-mannered guy. I couldn’t picture him laying on the horn like that.
I heard footsteps approaching the door.
“Hey, Sara?” came a nervous voice that I recognized as Mr. D’Angelo’s. “Um, I know you’re not feeling well, but uh, I was wondering if you were maybe gonna wrap it up in there?”
Then came another voice, equally nervous.
“Sara,” Mr. Brixton said. “I’m terribly sorry to rush you, but your classmates are rather eager to get to the beach and, well, I wouldn’t say one of them has overpowered the driver, but she certainly seems unafraid to express her displeasure with the horn, and these small villages really do not appreciate the buses to begin with, and I’m afraid that the noise will rather antagonize . . .”
“If it’s a woman’s thing,” Mr. D’Angelo offered, talking over Mr. Brixton, “it turns out the station does sell Midol or whatever, so I can go buy you some with a soda, and you can just take a nap on the bus if you don’t wanna come out to the beach with us. It’s just, the gang is getting restless and . . .” His words were interrupted by another blast of the horn.
God bless adolescent rage and peer pressure. If there was one thing in my life that frightened me more than anything my untamed brain could conjure, it was the very real disapproval of my peer group. Amber and her friends had never been on my side, but now it sounded as if the whole group was turning. And I couldn’t abide that, no matter what my inner voice howled in protest.
I rose from my perch on the toilet seat, shakily opened the latch, and stepped out into the blazing sunshine. Then the earth tilted in front of me, and I hit the ground.
It was probably the most dramatic exit I’ve ever made from a lavatory. The response was appropriate: Mr. Brixton let out a very small, very controlled English shriek and Mr. D’Angelo gasped, “Oh, shit!”
“Can she hear us?” Mr. Brixton asked.
“SARA!” Mr. D’Angelo yelled. “CAN YOU HEAR US?”
To my disappointment, I found that I had not lost consciousness and could, in fact, hear him loud and clear. I had landed with one cheek on the ground, and I could feel a couple of knee scrapes begin to gently ooze blood. It was my knees that had given out in the first place, so I figured they deserved whatever they got. It seemed a rather inauspicious time for them to take a lunch break, and I dimly thought I might have a talk with them once we reached Heaven or The Great Calzone in the Sky or wherever people go when they die in Sicily.
Mr. Brixton knelt down and rummaged through his briefcase. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of thirty-nine befuddled, fascinated teenage faces pressed against the glass windows of a luxury air-conditioned motor coach. Then he stood up again, blocking my view with a large map.
“There’s a hospital about seven kilometers away,” he said. “I took a traveler there two summers ago when he had a heart attack.”
“Shit,” said Mr. D’Angelo, scratching his head. He held my wrist for a few moments. “Well, she’s not having a heart attack.”
“Probably not,” Mr. Brixton said. “But it’ll be free to visit, and they’re very good.”
“Free? You mean, like, they bill you later?”
“No, it’s totally free. The man ended up needing surgery and he didn’t pay a penny.”
“No shit! Is it like that in England, too? Here, sweetheart, see if you can stand.” While Mr. Brixton educated Mr. D’Angelo on the finer points of socialized medicine, the two men helped me to my feet.
“How you feelin’?” Mr. D’Angelo asked as the three of us, now a unit, slowly moved as one across the parking lot.
“Better,” I said woozily. “How come the ground keeps moving?”
“Oh dear,” said Mr. Brixton.
“She’s talking and breathing and her pulse is okay,” Mr. D’Angelo said. “She probably just ate the wrong thing, or not enough. You know how these girls are.” We were nearly to the bus.
“I certainly do,” Mr. Brixton said with a sigh. “My own niece thinks that Kate Moss is just the most beautiful thing in the world. Hardly eats a thing, and smokes like a chimney.”
“Kate Moss looks like a bag of bones,” Mr. D’Angelo said, shaking his head. “I don’t get these magazines. Why would I wanna be with a girl who looks like she’s dead?”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Mr. Brixton said. Before they could continue their discussion of unhealthy body image in women’s fashion, the driver came down to help them get me on the bus.
My recollection of what follows is a bit hazy. I do remember being deposited in a seat near the front. I have a vivid memory of the driver picking a lemon off a nearby tree, halving it, and placing each half on my wrists. I think it was supposed to help with nausea.
I also remember Mr. D’Angelo announcing, “All right, kids. Another change of plans. We gotta skip the beach.”
An enormous hue and cry arose on the bus.
“What the fuck?” Amber shouted. “Why can’t we just drop her off at the hotel and then go?”
“We’re not going to the hotel,” Mr. D’Angelo replied. “We’re going to the hospital.” He paused. “Now sit down and shut up.” There was a steely note in his voice that did not invite argument, even from entitled, angry, aggressively pretty New Jersey homecoming princesses used to getting their way.
We sped off to the hospital, whizzing around hairpin turns at a pace that would have terrified me if I hadn’t b
een off floating in some la-la land beyond fear. It was very quiet now inside my head. My mind had detached from my body, and any sensation I felt—the tingling, sweating, shaking—seemed to be happening to someone else. My thoughts moved through mud.
If I’d been able to string two coherent ideas together, I might have wondered just what sort of hospital I was about to visit. Sicily is not generally known as the epicenter of First World medical care. I sincerely doubt that any Italian, upon learning of his or her diagnosis of cancer, has ever said, “Well, to Sicily we go! They can fix anything down there.” I’m also fairly sure no one else of any other nationality has ever uttered these words.
Had I been capable of such imaginative thought, I might have envisioned an open-roofed shack with walls woven of leaves and vines. A toothless, wrinkled old brown strega would sit out front with a shotgun, a bread knife, and a jar of fermented blood oranges. The patients who showed promise would have the sickness cut out with the knife, with some booze to dull the pain (and another swig to keep the witch’s spirits up). The direst cases would simply get a swift prayer and a shotgun blast to the temple.
What I got instead was a modern facility with a roof, doors, and electricity—the whole works. Uniformed nurses brought a wheelchair to the door as soon as the bus rumbled to a stop. Mr. Brixton, Mr. D’Angelo, and the driver helped a nurse load me into the chair. The driver returned to the bus, and Mr. D’Angelo shouted over his shoulder, “Everybody stays on the bus until we get back! Anybody gets outta line, I’m sending youse home tonight!”
“Can he put the A/C on, at least?” one of the boys asked. The air was deadly still and oppressively hot.
Mr. Brixton exchanged a few quick words in Italian with the driver and then called back, “I’m afraid not, children. He cannot run the air-conditioning while the bus is parked and off. Perhaps now would be an ideal time for a nap.” He added quickly, “And he has advised me that the windows do not open.”
An exasperated collective whine arose, and the bus door clanked shut behind us.
I remember swiftly gliding into the hospital, which was smaller than the giant places I knew from back home. We had an ever-growing county medical center, as well as the renowned Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, where I went to get some sort of mild, non-scary cancer hacked out of my skin once. It was no big deal, just a local anesthetic and a few snips. I may as well have been at my regular doctor’s office, except for the super high-tech cameras and wide-eyed medical students taking notes. Also, my doctor’s name was Babar, which was kind of awesome.
Other than that, I’d only gone to hospitals to visit new cousins in the baby wing and dying old relatives in the cancer wing. Something about being in that wheelchair just seemed wrong, like I was taking up a real sick person’s space. Even in my hazy daze, I felt like a fraud. I was going to die, sure, but they shouldn’t waste the wheels on me. They could just lay me out someplace. Maybe they could hook me up with a blanket and a stuffed animal and just let me expire quietly.
They did lay me out soon enough on an examining table in a room with spotless steel cabinets and bright overhead lights. A circle of faces peered down at me—Mr. D’Angelo, Mr. Brixton, and no fewer than three suspiciously attractive nurses, each of whom wore bigger hair and more makeup than I’d ever seen on a nurse back home in New Jersey (no small feat, incidentally). Someone took my pulse. Someone else shined a small flashlight in my eyes. A third someone looked at my tongue. I should have told one of them that I was on prescription medication, but my remaining shred of vanity stilled my voice. Besides, I was about to die. That secret could die with me.
“I suppose we ought to give her some space,” Mr. Brixton whispered to Mr. D’Angelo.
“You’re gonna be fine, kiddo,” Mr. D’Angelo said. He patted my hand. “Don’t worry.” The sudden fatherly gesture of caring made a lump swiftly rise in my throat. I felt tears prick the back of my eyes, and had the vague realization that the body to which I was loosely attached was going to begin crying.
I stared up at the lights, blinking. The faces moved away, and the nurses spoke to one another in lovely-sounding syllables that I could not decipher. Soon, I could barely hear them anymore. My ears were shutting down. I was relieved to realize that my body was giving up.
Maybe I could just fall asleep here and not wake up ever.
Then came a sudden whoosh of cold air and a great crashing sound as the examining room door burst open. The energy around me changed suddenly, became electrified. I saw, without seeing, that Mr. Brixton and Mr. D’Angelo stood up straighter. Slowly, I turned my head to the side and gazed for the first time upon Dr. Sophia Loren.
That wasn’t her actual name, of course. I don’t think I ever got her real name. What I got was the same eyeful Mr. Brixton and Mr. D’Angelo were getting: a stunning, deeply tanned olive-skinned woman with huge, luscious clouds of shining brown hair, giant, heavily made-up eyes, pouty lips, and va-va-va-voom cleavage that owed its perkiness to nature, a well-constructed push-up bra, or a talented surgeon. She wore a tight purple V-neck shirt and a black miniskirt beneath an open white lab coat. I dimly noted her large gold hoop earrings and three-inch-high black stilettos.
Then she whipped out a pair of black-rimmed glasses that looked more like a prop than a necessity, and it dawned on me that I had unwittingly wandered onto the set of a porno movie. There was nothing about the scenario that didn’t scream adult film, down to the bevy of hot chicks in nurse costumes. Out of deep-seated Catholic guilt and terror, I had long resisted my occasional feelings of sexual attraction toward women. But in my weakened state, I found myself vaguely turned on.
Then Mr. D’Angelo opened his mouth and promptly took the wind out of my Sapphic sails.
“HELLO. ARE YOU THE DOCTOR?” he asked in the loud, slow voice that Americans reserve for non–English speakers (as if screaming in a foreigner’s face is going to increase his or her comprehension of our mongrel tongue).
Dr. Sophia cast the most dismissive glance at him that I have ever seen a woman give a man, and I’m including women who roll their eyes at cat-callers on the street. She didn’t roll her eyes, but she did look straight through him, like a lioness who had heard the sound of a small, non-delicious animal but couldn’t quite place its origin.
A hush again fell over the room. Mr. D’Angelo shut his mouth. Mr. Brixton uttered not a peep. Even the three lovely nurses were completely quiet. Had this been a BDSM porno, it would have been clear who was the dom and who were the subs.
Dr. Sophia’s eyes came to rest on me, and she raised an eyebrow slightly. Regally, she held out her hand. A nurse quickly skittered up and gave her a clipboard and a chart. Dr. Sophia looked down at it, frowned slightly, and approached the table slowly, with her head cocked slightly to one side. She was wearing a significant amount of perfume, and her scent reached me before she did. She smelled like the most annoying part of a department store, but on her it was somehow sexy. With a body and a face like that, she probably could’ve carried off Eau de Raw Sewage.
Then she was right beside me, staring at me with an emotionless, analytical curiosity. I felt like a crossword puzzle. She bent down low, then even lower, until her face was mere inches from my own and the scent of her perfume threatened to overwhelm my nostrils. We locked eyes for a long moment.
I blinked first.
“Homesick!” she exclaimed in lightly accented English, straightening bolt-upright. Behind me, I sensed Mr. D’Angelo and Mr. Brixton jump in tandem.
“Sedative!” she ordered, scribbling something on the clipboard and handing it back to a nurse. Within a minute, a nurse handed me a cup of a yellow liquid and a cup of water.
I drank the yellow stuff, which tasted bitter and astringent, and then the water. Dr. Sophia smiled broadly and touched me for the first time. It was probably too early for the yellow stuff to have begun to work, but I felt a narcotic sense of calm wash over me.
“Better now,” she said, smoothing some hair back from my foreh
ead. “You go rest, take deep breaths, walk by the ocean. No stress!”
“No stress,” I repeated, awed.
She turned to Mr. D’Angelo and Mr. Brixton.
“No stress!” she said firmly, glaring at them.
“No stress!” Mr. Brixton replied promptly. Mr. D’Angelo nodded mutely.
And then the queen swept out of the room, followed swiftly by her three ladies-in-waiting. It was as if none of them had even been there at all.
The room was silent for a few moments. Then Mr. D’Angelo said, “And this is all free?”
“Completely,” said Mr. Brixton. “Of course, they pay very high taxes to fund it.”
“See, that I wouldn’t like,” Mr. D’Angelo said.
I sat upright and grinned at both of them.
“Are you feeling better then, Sara?” Mr. Brixton asked.
“Yesssss,” I said. I stretched out the s because I realized I’d never taken note before of how fun it was to make that sound.
“Yesssss I ammmmmmm,” I added, delighting in the m sound.
“Excellent!” Mr. Brixton said, clapping his hands together.
“You look much better,” Mr. D’Angelo said. “More color in your face. Let’s go back to the hotel and call your mom and dad. And you just take it easy for the rest of the day, okay? No stress.”
Agorafabulous! Page 4
