by Trisha Cull
I want to get through the glass, climb onto the tree, let go and feel the grass beneath my feet.
I find Sebastian in the quiet room with another in-patient, Dave, who speaks to trees, learns their names by using his third eye, and who believes in something called the Wonderlock, the day the world will end.
They are conversing openly. Seb speaks only to his brother and Dave. Dave plays guitar and Seb plays the piano. “When I play Bach I feel like a king,” Seb says.
The doctors, nurses and residents gather at the doorway and listen for a while, pause when the music ends, then everyone applauds.
I have been returned my own clothing and sit on my cot, survey the back-ass of the hospital: two banks of windows directly across; on the other sides of those windows is the kitchen, pots and pans, giant cauldrons, other metallic items which I cannot make out from here; several loading bays with yellow lines to mark the way in and out as the linen and food supply vehicles come and go all day with their beeping and grinding; a large heavy-looking metal door above which is written the word Powerhouse, though I have not been able to determine why this particular door is instilled with such power.
Doctors come and go. I have noticed that some of the doctors are healthy doctors who ride into work in spandex and helmets that match their fancy bicycles. They haul their bikes up the loading-bay stairs and disappear, until they return at the end of their day, back in their cycling gear, hauling their bikes down the loading-bay steps again.
Then there are the unhealthy orderlies who slouch about the curb at the edge of the loading bays smoking cigarettes and dressed in blue scrubs.
I wave to the doctors and deliberately undress close to the window, but I don’t think they can see me.
Beyond all this, beyond the roof and cylinder things and metal chimneys and banks of kitchen windows, is the ongoing construction. The work goes all day into sunset. The three cranes glint pink in the day’s last light, and I have hope.
These are my three steely cranes. They belong to me.
These are my heavenward cranes upon which I focus when I press the tip of my secret paper clip down hard, wincing of pain but exalting in the relief that follows.
I cannot see the earth beneath my cranes.
I stare out the window. I welcome any construction worker with good strong arms and a heavy body to lie down upon me.
Because I need to be pressed upon.
Because I’m afraid to be in here.
Because I long to have a man’s weight upon my body—a construction worker, my husband, my doctor—to crush me breathless.
Dr. P comes and goes.
Every day I long for his arrival, have formed an unhealthy attachment to him. I want only to sit across from him, to be in his presence. Only in such close proximity to him do I feel safe, alive, whole.
Our meetings are too short and the intervals of time in between are agonizing.
He says, “Hello, you look well.”
I say, “Thanks, so do you.”
I want to tell him I’m feeling better, that I’ve come to an important realization, that loving yourself is rooted in a process of remembering who you are, not in a process of creating someone new.
But I say nothing. I just sit there glowing in my own sexuality, wanting him to touch me.
I sit at a sunlit table in between the feeding hours, thinking about my rabbits. I think about the time I ate rabbit without knowing it, the injustice of that.
My friend’s stepfather gave it to me when I was ten, watched with a gleam in his eye as I chewed and swallowed, then everyone laughed when I learned the truth.
Another time, I held a rabbit’s foot in my hand. It was attached to a key chain. I held it gingerly on the playground. I was standing underneath the jungle gym. A faceless boy hung upside-down from one of the beams. He reached and tried to steal it.
“Rabbits’ feet bring luck,” Nicole said.
Years passed.
Now I recall the foot’s softness, the crinkle of bones under the softness.
A nurse comes, rests her hand on my shoulder, says, “Honey, are you okay?”
I weep, “I miss my rabbits,” then get up and walk away.
I miss my bunny room: my drug den, my haven, that toxic sanctuary.
I miss my rabbits terribly. Leigh is gone.
Soon, Caravaggio’s upper front teeth will yellow and pierce the roof of his mouth. His jaw could separate.
I want him to be a perfect bunny rabbit, to have those perfect box-shaped teeth that a child draws onto a rabbit’s face: one rectangle next to another rectangle, no space in between, or perhaps one big rectangle through which the astute child might draw a vertical line of division, thus creating two perfect upper rabbit teeth.
No pending disease.
As perfect a rabbit as a rabbit can be.
I want to tell Dr. P that last night I had a dream about braiding Lisa’s hair, that she kept falling asleep so I had to keep telling her to wake up, that it was oddly erotic, my hands moving through a woman’s hair. But I say nothing, tally it up to another neurotic impulse. I can’t help but wonder if the stigma of being in such a place fucks you up more than simply being fucked up.
Dr. P and his Wednesday afternoon group have welcomed me into their sanctum. I keep quiet and listen, feel I must earn my place and my right to speak, and so it is, until he calls upon me directly to compare my marital situation with that of a lovely woman who sits directly opposite me. She is slender and beautiful. My intuitive powers tell me she is stronger than she knows, which in turn leads me to consider that I am stronger than I know too, and perhaps this is Dr. P’s angle.
“Yes, I totally relate to what you’re going through,” she says.
I nod my head, hide my hands in my lap.
Dr. P nods his head, sits next to me in the circle. I can’t help it, but I feel drawn to him, needy, wish he was physically touching some part of me—my hand, my elbow, my wrist.
I want every man I know to love me.
The slender lady says something else, but I look out the window to Mount Washington, its snow-covered peak. I can see the gleam of Cadboro Bay, just barely, a silver line at the base of the mountain and the plume of a white sail filled with a gust of wind, miniature, far away, dwarfed against the horizon.
The lady is telling the group about her marriage, her kids. I think about how Leigh and I eloped, just the two of us, got married in Cuba, and I realize it meant nothing to me, not the gown or flowers, or gazebo overlooking the Caribbean, not even the vows, how as Leigh was saying something important to me I was thinking of being twelve years old, standing on skis in the North Bowl of the Kimberley ski hill, specks of snow and ice flecking my face, foggy goggles, crystals forming in my long blonde hair.
“I love you,” he said. And maybe I did love him; I loved him and the small white flower pinned to his lapel.
The swish of my skis angling down the safe side of the mountain.
I was just a girl.
Dr. P is talking to me in the quiet room. I am sensually aware of his proximity, but my thoughts are elsewhere.
“Are you feeling ready to go?” he says.
I say, “Well, maybe next week?”
He appears surprised.
I am thinking of junior high, Prince George, BC, Mr. DeWolf’s environmental education class, learning to use a compass in the school field, then learning how to find True North in a forest outside of town by determining first the light side of bark, where the sunlight strikes it the longest throughout the day, thus indicating the rising of the sun in the east and its westerly trajectory above the shadows.
From this we establish our north, south, east and west, and find our way home again.
I am there in the forest, but I am also here. I am here and there, wanting Dr. P to wrap his arms around me.
“Well, okay,” he says. “How about we let you go next week after group therapy?”
I think of Mr. DeWolf teaching me how to pull the trigger on a twenty-two-gauge shotgun in environmental ed. when I was fifteen and really into Bon Jovi.
I feel the butt of the action against my shoulder that day in the woods at the target range, the crackle of shot in my heart and the bruise on my shoulder from the surprising kickback.
“Sure, next Wednesday is good,” I say.
I feel Mr. DeWolf close up against me, helping me with the weight of the thing, levelling it off my shoulder, guiding my vision through the scope, compelling my finger upon the trigger and urging me, “Whenever you’re ready… now gently, squeeze.”
I think pavilion and equate the word with a sense of joviality: a place of happy gathering; an oval gleaming under moon and stars like an untouched ice skating rink, that shape that is not quite a circle and upon which no blade has stricken, the perfect untainted arena; a place of dreams and magical animals; a circus; a fairy tale. It is, in my mind, everything but what it aspires to be here. We all know it’s really just another institution.
Who do they think they’re kidding?
Pavilion comes from butterfly, as in French, papillon.
Butterfly translated into Italian means a woman’s farfalla, like a butterfly’s wings.
This place is becoming strange to me now, its halls, rooms and locked doors, its quiet despair and latent hostility, its silent rage, its long ticking nights and eerie stillness when everyone disappears. I am seeing it for what it is, and surely that means it’s time to go.
I sense a delicate opening.
The nurses gather us all together in the lounge area. People are murmuring, whispering. I hear the words morphine, death and sleep. Dave pulls me aside. He looks stunned, teary. Renee is crying, and Kathy is holding Renee. “Lisa died last night,” Dave says.
The head nurse appears and everyone falls silent.
Maybe it’s all a bad rumour. How can she be dead? How can someone I know be dead?
“We’ve just spoken with the coroner,” the nurse says, “and he has confirmed that Lisa died in her sleep last night.”
Kathy and Renee cling to each other and sob. Dave wanders away with his hands in his pockets. I don’t know what to do. I stay for a while then go to my room, lie down and write.
Dear Lisa,
Who read my palms and gave me prosperity, whose long blonde hair I braided three times, I did not feel the death in you, not even your peril or pain. Even as you slumped forward in the recliner and I had to keep tugging your braids to keep you from slumping into a morphine-induced stupor, I felt nothing of you.
What happened?
I pulled your braid hard.
I examined your highlights and split ends, your overall lovely deadness. I wanted to say “It’s okay,” and “I love you,” that night you read my palms and I pulled them away, embarrassed of my gashes, because you looked so sad, so sorry for having made me feel uncomfortable. I wanted to say, “I love you,” because if I can’t say it to myself, maybe I can say it to somebody else.
Kathy and I are going to the hospital chapel. I am going to leave a note for you, where all the other goodbye notes have been left, on that alter by the burning candle.
Thank you for letting me braid your hair.
Dear Lisa,
I braided your hair three times while you were still alive, anchored to me the way one woman is anchored to another woman; a girlhood fascination with the art of weaving hair.
We own that, don’t we?
I will light a candle for you and leave my note behind, pin it among the farewell notes that have also been pinned to the bulletin board for all of the dead who became dead before you.
RIP.
My things are gathered at my feet, packed in plastic, Pavilion-issued bags.
I hold the Descant journal, flip through the pages, and glance upon the reddest gash on my wrist. A superficial wound, nothing perilous.
This will scar.
Dr. P’s voice is soft but intelligent, caring but direct. I am not the worst he sees in a day.
He pulls his chair in closer to me but maintains an appropriate distance between us.
How I want him to kiss me.
After twenty days in the ward, he signs my release papers.
“You are free to go,” he says.
I am free to go.
But what do I do?
I look down at the journal again, read the inscription: What is there to do but this: to pause, to speculate on what exists outside of one’s self (the nature of a butterfly’s wing), or to descant in rapturous terms on the various properties of a bit of stone.
To dream of a woman’s long hair moving through my hands, and my hands moving gently through a woman’s long hair.
I think upon leaving but do not say: I love you. I love you. I love you.
Journal
May 28, 2009
Discharged. Back into the world. I’m temporarily staying with my parents in the valley until I can move into the suite in my sister’s house.
My life has no familiar characteristics. No husband. No house. No job.
This may all hit me harder later.
Nine
The Wonderlock (Summer 2009)
Leigh is gone. My sister is looking after my rabbits. What now?
For the next month or so my life will be all about lugging, toiling, moving from one temporary abode to another: my parents’ place in Abbotsford, a campground with Dave, my friend Megan’s, then finally a little suite in the basement of my sister’s new house I’ll tentatively call home. I will be unloading myself on others for some time. It’s harrowing, humbling.
After the brief sojourn at my parents’ place in the Fraser Valley, I find myself as if by accident at the campground with Dave.
My mom doesn’t want me to go. “You’re not ready,” she says. “Someone needs to be looking after you.”
“I’m fine,” I say, knowing it’s a lie, knowing I could fall off the face of the earth at any moment.
After some deliberation she concedes, drives me to the ferry and drops me off hesitantly with only a backpack and a couple plastic bags full of toiletries.
Dave meets me at the Swartz Bay ferry terminal on his bicycle. He loads his bike onto the front of the city bus, and the bus takes us to a stop off the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. On the other side of the highway is farmland, rows upon rows of neatly tilled soil, sprouts shooting up here and there. I wish to know what is growing in there. It is a fierce desire to know all things that consumes me now, a way of keeping the world in order: to know the speed of vehicles whizzing by, the temperature of the air, the depth of soil, the root of all things working together in some orderly fashion to make this terrifying period of my life more tolerable. We cross the highway and begin an ascent up the long hilly road that leads to the beach and the campground.
Dave believes the world will end next spring. He calls it the Wonderlock. He will cover himself in mud and wear a tinfoil hat. He believes aliens are coming. He believes we are all doomed. He believes Bob Dylan is the second coming of Christ.
That night Dave passes me the crystal meth pipe. It’s hot. He says to Becky, “Babysit Trish, okay?” Becky rolls her eyes. She is the dealer’s girlfriend. The dealer, we’ll call him Andrew, has a green Mohawk and a nose ring.
Becky shows me how to smoke crystal meth, how to hold the pipe with one hand and block off the airway with a finger, then hold the lighter under the crystal until the globe fills with that silky white smoke. I suck hard, wanting as always the best, the most, of everything because I am a perfectionist and I need this. I want to fill my life with this smoke now that everything that was once familiar is gone.
I exhale. A huge white cloud of smoke fills Dave’s cam
per. It’s comical.
“Holy shit, woman,” Dave says. “Jesus.”
It comes so gradually you don’t notice that you’re high. The process of getting there, for me, is mellow; it’s that languid white smoke. But the effect is frenetic. You find yourself talking a mile a minute. Your skin prickles. It’s always this way with me and drugs, slow at first then sparkly and wonderful.
I am high, watching the sky, awestruck, sitting on driftwood waiting for the clouds to dissipate and for the ship to appear, to make itself known to us, just Dave and me, out here on the beach before the Pacific Ocean.
The smoke churns in the crystal meth pipe the way the clouds churn in the sky up there. It’s a little dream inside a ball of glass. It’s my crystal ball.
“Just watch, keep watching,” Dave says.
“I am,” I say, only partly believing the ship will come forth, sort of stunned however by the possibility that it might, just maybe, appear, and that I have come to believe in such a thing.
I clench sand in a fist until my knuckles turn white, worry the grains through my fingers.
“There are faces up there too,” Dave says, and he points to a massive configuration of clouds that do in fact look like the face of God, the traditional version of God, that forlorn Santa Claus with the great white beard, wavy hair.
“Yes, I see it,” I say.
God’s eyes are set wide apart, making him appear slightly alien. God’s eyes are two milky blue ovals of sky.
“And there too,” Dave says. “See the alien, the big oval head, the small mouth, the big eyes?”
“Yes, I think so,” I say.
“Oh, watch for the ship.”
There is God, an alien and an alien ship in the sky. The tide is coming in. The ocean is encroaching upon us. I’m cold and hungry, have not slept in three days, have eaten only a handful of cereal—forced myself to eat it because when I looked at myself in the camper mirror this morning I thought I was dying.
