Manic

by Terri Cheney

  And that, apparently, is how the paramedics got called. All I can remember after that is taking another large handful of pills, a double handful this time, because I was finally starting to feel the effects and the effects felt pretty damned good. Then I crawled back to the refrigerator, caressed the cold tile, and knew nothing more, until I woke up staring with incomprehension at padded green walls.

  A door that was hidden beneath that padding suddenly opened, and a large troupe of white-coated persons walked in. I estimated fifteen or so at one glance, twelve men and three women. Some of the younger white coats held a bit back, so I assumed that they must be mere students or residents. An elderly gentleman with a short grizzled beard stepped up to my bed with a file and a pen and began barking questions. Did I know my name? Did I know where I was? Did I know who the vice president of the United States was? At this point I stopped him and explained apologetically that I really, truly needed to pee. I would be happy to give him all the info he wanted, including the names of all the cabinet members that I could recall, if he would just let me visit the ladies’ room first.

  He sucked on his pen and studied the file. “No, we can’t undo your restraints just yet,” he said. “We have you down as actively suicidal.”

  “You think this was a suicide attempt?” I laughed. “Believe me, if I was going to try to commit suicide, I’d take a lot more than just a few handfuls of pills. I’d take whole bottles, dozens of them, and I’d wash it all down with quarts and quarts of tequila. I have nowhere near enough pills saved up yet to do it right. And I still haven’t figured out how to make a proper noose, or found the right kind of plastic bag to tie over my head….”

  My voice trailed off, as I noticed that several of the younger white coats were scribbling furiously in their little notebooks. The rest of them were just staring at me openmouthed with fascination, as if I were a real live lab rat suddenly granted the gift of speech. I sensed that I was making a losing argument. Certainly my words had not had the desired effect on old Dr. Graybeard. He simply turned and addressed his entourage: “Note the attempt to persuade by hyperbole,” he said. “This is characteristic of the grandiosity we can expect in acute mania.”

  I wasn’t manic, but what did it matter? “Doctor,” I said. “I’m perfectly willing to be manic, or hypomanic, or cyclothymic, or whatever it takes to get these restraints off. But first, could you please just call a nurse to accompany me to the bathroom?”

  He cocked his head and stared at me. “Are you willing to admit to attempting suicide?”

  I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s simply not true. I’ll admit to making an error of judgment, but I wasn’t trying to kill myself. You have to understand: it’s a point of honor with me right now. I can’t kill myself because my father needs me. You see, he’s…”

  “Then I have no other option but to order a fourteen-day hold,” he said. “You’ll have to stay here on the locked ward for now. Maybe in a few days, if we see any improvement, you can be transferred over to the inpatient unit. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  He dashed off a few quick notes on the chart and handed it to the young man standing next to him. “Make sure she gets the Haldol right away,” he said. “And Thorazine PRN.” He turned around and walked out the door, the white coats scrambling in his wake.

  I stared at the place where the door had once been. It was now a seamless expanse of quilted green. Then I heard it: an ominous series of click-click-clicks, the unmistakable chorus of lock and key. Instinctively, I started thrashing from side to side. I wriggled, I squirmed, I tried to wrench myself free, but to no avail. The air was growing increasingly thin, and I couldn’t catch a decent breath. No doubt I was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, but ironically, my bursting bladder came to my rescue. I couldn’t think about anything else—except, perversely, running streams and gushing fountains and mighty, thunderous waterfalls.

  Just give up and go, my body demanded. But one tiny sliver of my spirit resisted, and I knew it was right. There was more at stake here than just wetting my bed. The greatest challenge of being mentally ill is always, despite the enormous odds stacked up against you, to maintain some sense of dignity. But my body didn’t give a damn: it just wanted to pee. I tried shouting as loudly as I could, a range of exhortations from “Nurse!” to “Orderly!” to plain old “Help!,” but no one came. I seriously contemplated shouting “Fire!,” but the lawyer in me wouldn’t cross that line.

  I leaned back against the pillow and sighed. “It’s just your body,” I gently reassured myself. “They haven’t touched your mind. They don’t possess your soul. You’re still intact—you’ll just be a little bit wetter is all.”

  I took a deep breath, then let my muscles go. The urine erupted in rhythmic spurts, strong pulsing contractions that gradually eased to a warm steady stream, then to a seemingly endless trickle, before it finally slowed and stopped altogether. I looked down, amazed. Who knew that my body could hold so much liquid? I was soaked all the way from my waist to my toes, and the sheet was not just wet, it was sopping. Released of its burden, my body felt like it was floating. My mind hovered somewhere up near the ceiling, curiously detached from the sodden spectacle that was strapped beneath the sheet. I fell asleep to the tune of urine tinkling from the bed to the floor.

  I woke to a light glaring straight in my eyes. “Wake up!” scolded a voice somewhere behind the light. “Just look what you did. Now was that nice?” A blurry outline of a heavyset woman came into my view. She was gesturing with a penlight to the dripping sheet. “Not nice, but necessary,” I said. “I tried to—”

  “I tried to, I tried to,” she mocked me in a high, snappy voice. “That’s what they all say. Well, we’ll just have to try a little harder next time, won’t we?” Then she whipped the sheet off the bed in one swift, deft motion. The tail end of it slapped me right in the face and I started to cry out, but I caught myself in time. Not now, not with her. I rearranged my features to look as penitent as I could. “I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble,” I said. “But do you have any idea when they’ll be taking off these restraints?”

  “That’s not my job,” the nurse replied. “I’m just supposed to give you the meds—and clean up the mess,” she added, with a look of disgust. The next thing I knew, she’d jabbed a needle in my arm.

  “But wait,” I said, as a warm, woozy feeling began to flood through my veins. “I’m sure there’s been some kind of horrid mistake. I never meant to kill my—” But before I could even finish the word, I had drifted off into a strange, heavy sleep that felt remarkably like drowning.

  When next I woke, it was to Dr. Graybeard poking my shoulder with his pen. I looked around him: yes, the white coats were all assembled, too. “So, now are you willing to admit that you tried to kill yourself?” he asked me.

  I glanced down and noticed that while the sheet had been changed, I was still lying on the same urine-soaked mattress. That decided me.

  “All right, Doctor, I admit it. I was trying to kill myself,” I said. “Now can I get out of these straps?”

  I could swear a fleeting smile crossed the doctor’s face. He pulled a large set of keys from his pocket, fiddled with them for a moment, then matched one to my cuffs. I have never heard a more melodious sound than the four successive clicks that heralded my release. I clapped my hands in sheer delight, then wriggled my legs up in the air. To hell with dignity, just for the moment: I was free! A couple of the white coats way in the back started to giggle. Dr. Graybeard effectively silenced them with a single frown.

  “Now, young lady, since you’ve cooperated, your treatment can finally begin,” he said. “We’re going to transfer you to the inpatient unit. You’ll meet others there with problems just like your own. I’m sure you will enjoy that.”

  Trying hard not to let my eyes betray me, I smiled at him and asked, “If I do well on the inpatient unit, can we renegotiate the fourteen-day hold?” />
  He didn’t smile back, but then he didn’t frown, either. “We’ll see” is all he said, then he stuffed his pen inside his shirt pocket and walked away, his entourage close on his heels.

  “We’ll see.” “We’ll see.” What the hell did that mean? With my mother, it always used to mean no; with my father, it always meant yes. I couldn’t decide which parental figure the doctor more closely resembled. Nor did it matter, I supposed. The point was, I was the child. I curled up into a tight little ball and sucked gently on the sore, inflamed skin of my inner wrist.

  The inpatient unit felt just like elementary school, with plenty of rules and regularly scheduled activities. There were brightly colored beads to string, and pots to paint, and decoupage, and jigsaw puzzles—lots and lots of jigsaw puzzles. Sandwiched somewhere in between the fun and games was “group.” That’s what we called it, “group.” I wouldn’t call it therapy, because not much of a healing nature took place in those cramped and airless rooms. Somebody sobbed. Somebody else went on about his mother. Nobody talked about the here-and-now, the unbearable truth of where we were and what we thought about each other. Mostly we struggled against the stupor, stifling overmedicated yawns and twitching and fidgeting in our chairs like restless six-year-olds.

  Of all the rules they handed to me when I checked in—there were dozens of mimeographed pages—they forgot to tell me the most important one: never stare at a paranoid schizophrenic. I discovered this my very first day on the unit, when I made the mistake of staring at Chuck, a big, burly young man with silver-blond hair and the whitest skin I had ever seen. Extremely pale people are always inherently interesting to me, since as a redhead I’ve spent my whole life defending my pallor.

  We were sitting in the cafeteria, at opposite ends of a long metal table, when Chuck’s enormous arm suddenly reached all the way down past the other diners, past the trays and cups and assorted utensils. He grabbed my Styrofoam cup of Coke and crushed it slowly in his fist. Brown liquid spouted everywhere, landing not just on me but on several of the other people sitting at the table. No one said a word except Chuck, who stared unblinking at me as his fingers choked the life out of my Coca-Cola.

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” he growled.

  “Absolutely nothing,” I quickly replied.

  “If I ever catch you looking again…” His fingers finished the sentence for him, as they dropped the mangled remains of my cup onto the table.

  I instantly averted my eyes, but it was hard to know where to look, since four of the other six patients were schizophrenics, too. Fortunately, there were also two obsessive-compulsives, who didn’t seem to mind if my glance rested casually on them in passing. But the truth was, I didn’t much like looking at them. One was a cutter, or rather an eraser, to be exact. He had rubbed off every exposed inch of skin and was frantically picking and gnawing at the sores. The other was a young woman who might have been pretty were it not for the bald patches dotting her scalp and her utter lack of any eyelashes or brows. That didn’t keep her from plucking, though. Pluck, pluck, pluck, pluck, all day long, with an almost orgasmic moan of satisfaction each time she managed to pull out a hair.

  I knew the clinical term for this, of course: trichotillomania. But a fat lot of good my fancy education was doing me now. There was no one to impress. I was as isolated in here as I was in the outside world. I didn’t dare say much to the clinicians assigned to my case for fear I’d never see daylight again. And I didn’t dare talk to the patients, either, because they didn’t feel like real people to me. They felt like walking diagnoses, and quite frankly, they terrified me. I didn’t belong here, and I certainly wasn’t one of them—not yet, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  I didn’t have any visitors, by choice. When I was finally allowed access to a phone a few days into my stay on the unit, I only called two people: my father and Jeff. Daddy, of course, was too sick to come and too doped-up to understand what had happened. I finally told him I was on vacation, a concept he still understood. I debated calling a few other people, but to be honest, I was too ashamed to let them see me like this, doing the Thorazine shuffle in frowsy old hospital slippers. Better to wait until I was back home and could turn it all into a story.

  There was certainly no lack of material. The latest arrival on the unit was a bearded young man in his early thirties, with piercing blue eyes. I was hoping for another manic-depressive, but as soon as he opened his mouth, I knew I was in for a different diagnosis entirely.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Jesus Christ. You can call me Jesus. Or Lord, if you like.”

  “Lord what?” I asked, lamely trying to be funny. I mean, it had to be a joke, right? Jesus Christ in a mental asylum. What a cliché.

  “Why, Lord God, of course,” he said, with a puzzled frown. “Or perhaps you are Jewish? If so, it’s okay if you just call me Christ.”

  “No, I’m born and bred Catholic all right,” I told him.

  “Then you should have genuflected when you walked in,” he admonished me. He quickly made the sign of the cross in the air. “I forgive you this time,” he said. “But don’t let it happen again.” Then he looked at me with those laser beam eyes, and a sudden chill seized hold of my heart. What if Jesus was indeed alive today—was this where he’d end up? There’s a very fine line, indistinguishable at times, between charismatic and crazy.

  But our Jesus seemed to be harmless enough, unless you forgot to genuflect when you approached him, in which case he would burst out screaming—eerie, high-pitched, rhythmic shrieks—and he wouldn’t stop until the offending party knelt, or a nurse administered a sedative, whichever came first. But once appeased, his eyes returned to their old limpid blue, his face relaxed into a beatific smile, and he proceeded to walk around the room bestowing blessings on everything in his path: the patients, the armchairs, the coffee urn, the jigsaw puzzles.

  A word about those puzzles. There were at least a dozen of them stacked up on the tables, waiting to be assembled, and a dozen or so more spread out on the floor in varying degrees of completion. We were strongly encouraged, even urged, to work at them. Jigsaw puzzles, I later learned, were not really jigsaw puzzles at all. They were “occupational therapy,” and I was billed three hundred dollars an hour for the privilege of playing with them.

  But the truth was, I was so bored out of my mind, I was grateful for anything that kept me even minimally occupied. So I took to the puzzles with a vengeance. I didn’t care what the final picture was supposed to be: English farmhouse, Egyptian pharaoh, Mt. McKinley, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, sunrise over Montebello, sunset over Malibu. It didn’t matter, I worked them all. Or at least I tried to. But without exception, a handful of pieces was always missing from each puzzle. If you weren’t already crazy by the time you started, you were certain to be so by the time you finished—or rather, failed to finish. For an ardent perfectionist like me, it was absolute torture. For the obsessive-compulsives, who couldn’t stop trying to make the same wrong piece fit over and over and over again, it bordered on cruel.

  Little things like a missing puzzle piece matter when you’re no longer in control of your environment, when every decision is made for you, from what you eat to what you wear to when you sleep to whom you are allowed to associate with. I found myself jealously guarding my work in progress. It was my own little sphere of autonomy, however flawed and unfinished. In fact, despite all my efforts to be the perfect mental patient, I nearly lost my composure one day when I walked into the puzzle room and discovered one of the schizophrenics eating an ice cap off my Mt. McKinley. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, forgetting that one should never confront a schizophrenic directly. It activates all his well-oiled alarms. “I was thirsty,” he said, and I was so charmed by the Alice in Wonderland logic of that, I smiled and broke him off another big piece.

  Smiles were hard to come by on the ward. I had been there seven days already, and I could count my smiles on the fingers of one hand—my g
enuine smiles, that is. I was nothing but smiles when I dealt with the doctors. I figured the only way to escape the fourteen-day hold was to claim a sudden epiphany, so when I met with them I was all aglow with my newly discovered appreciation of life. Since I rarely saw the same doctor twice in a row, it was hard to tell what kind of overall impression I was making. But I did overhear them once talking about me out in the hall. “Excellent insight,” one of them said. “Strong motivation.” “Self-imposed integration.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what that last phrase meant, but I figured any kind of integration was probably good. So why in the name of all that was fair and just was I still on a fourteen-day hold? Seven more days. It was impossible to imagine seven more days of beaded leather moccasins; of menacing albinos and screaming messiahs; of interminable empty daylight hours and drugged-to-oblivion nights. I should be with my father now, I thought, and a desperate ache shot through me. Seven more days, and I was sure my sanity would explode all over these walls, mingling nicely with the bilious green wallpaper.

  For the first time since I’d landed in the hospital, I craved the suffocating black nothingness that followed my nightly shot. I couldn’t bear the pretense anymore of planning, manipulating, scheming to get free, when the truth was, I was trapped on a psycho ward and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. It didn’t matter that I’d successfully litigated countless civil rights cases over the years, including one that had gone all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. This wasn’t a courtroom. This wasn’t even real life. This was Kafka-land, where all the puzzles have pieces missing.

  I woke up early the next morning, decidedly depressed. I hoped I didn’t have any doctors’ interviews that day. It was going to be hard enough just to maintain my civility with the rest of the patients, let alone try to sparkle with newfound drive and resolution while a thick-witted white coat took notes. I glanced in the mirror, stuck my tongue out at my reflection, and halfheartedly dragged a comb through my hair. Then I shuffled down the hall to join the rest of the patients at breakfast.