She is suddenly falling, falling from the sky above the house through the dark, her face up to the stars, her skirt open like a bell. Voices ring out, telling her she will die. They crackle in the cold air, laughing. She falls into snow flat on her back, wearing her snow-blue jacket and snow-blue pants. She rests in the heaviness of her relief, watches the snow fall upward in the night. She moves her arms up and down. She reaches up to draw a little circle above her head.
40
It comes to me like a dream, the image of myself moving along beside myself, trying to steady the me who walks as if moving through water.
I slip into my body, hunched in an impossible position up on a window ledge.
I am standing in a line for bedtime medications. I keep having the sensation that I am falling backwards. It is hard to remain standing.
41
Dr. Michael Connelly is just “Michael” now, a boy of fifteen, sitting in a wheelchair with a bright orange blanket over his knees. He has been working too hard and has a heart problem, a flawed heart. All the nurses have asked him to slow down, and here he is, slowed down and much younger. He will have a second chance now.
She moves through the ward, around and over the patients who wander, who shout, who watch a still point on the horizon of the dayroom. She is thirteen. There is no one she can talk to here. She sees a young man in a wheelchair, a bright blanket on his lap. “Michael,” he announces, extending his hand. “The archangel,” she finishes, even as he shakes his head no. They play chess by the hour.
42
Dr. Connelly is talking to my sister again, this time in the presence of another doctor I don’t recognize. He is telling the doctor that my insurance will soon run out, that he will have no choice but to send me to the State Hospital. I can see that Mary does not want this to happen. Dr. Connelly argues that I am getting worse. He wonders if he should cut back on my medication. I hover above this scene, aware that it is me they are discussing.
I remember another me who played outdoors in the sun with a little boy with brown bangs.
I slam myself into my body so hard it hurts and my skull rings with the impact. “No,” I say, “you are not sending me to the State Hospital.”
43
I watch her with pity. She has begun to have nightmares and to remember them.
She dreams of a little black bird flying over the hospital, weeping. Frantic flights back and forth.
She is held under water, and memory slips away, like a boat, and still the sensation of being held under water.
She dreams of music that rises and falls, and of trees marching down green hills, their arms outstretched like little children, of fingers entering her most private place.
She lies under a glaring light and cries out, “Don’t you remember me, don’t you recognize me?”
She wakens bathed in sweat. Sometimes she cries out in her sleep. Sometimes she throws things, when she is awake.
I see that she is terrified of being locked in the “quiet room,” a padded room with a little glass rectangle high up in the door. I see that she needs me.
I find myself looking at her hands from above, for hours on end.
I will myself to move them—my hands.
44
Dr. Connelly sits in front of me in a room I vaguely recognize. Soft light and a big rubber tree in the corner. A television perched overhead, now, fortunately, turned off. I am wearing blue jeans and a light-gray sweater and sneakers. I can feel that I am thinner, and my hair is longer, messy.
“Annie, I am going to discharge you today.” Relief, followed by fear.
“Do you know what day this is?” Dr. Connelly asks, gently.
I have no idea. Day? Month? “Late February?” I guess.
“No, it’s the beginning of April,” he tells me.
“What time?” I ask, meaning the year.
He replies, “Oh, it’s just after eleven.”
My mind whirs in confusion. I remember coming in, the sensation of the top of my head lifting off. A blanket around my shoulders. Cutting out magazine pictures? That is all.
It hits me then—Melanie is gone. I begin to cry, then stop myself with great effort, afraid I won’t be able to stop.
I ask, because I have to know: “Melanie. Did I kill her?”
“No,” he says, and moves his chair closer. “No, Annie, you did not. But you won’t be seeing her any longer.”
“Is she dead?” I ask.
“No,” he says, and sighs. “But I’ve spoken to her and she refuses to see you.”
I swallow, swallow hard to check my tears.
“Look, Annie, you’re not really ready to go home. But your insurance ran out weeks ago. I can’t keep you here any longer. You’ll be staying with friends, not by yourself.”
“I want to go home,” I say.
“I know, and you will in a few weeks or so.” He pauses. “Listen, Annie, I want you to stay away from psychotherapy. It could even be dangerous for you.”
I look at him, puzzled. I have known this man since I was an adolescent. “What do you mean?”
“What’s wrong with you can be changed only with medication and time. By the time you’re in your mid-thirties, you’ll be out of the woods. For now, just stay on the medication, OK? And stay away from psychotherapy. Promise me?”
I sigh, “All right, I promise.” I pause. “Do you remember, or did I imagine this—you reading my test reports?”
He laughs. “Oh yes, I remember them. They were good. Very good. The staff here could hardly grasp that you wrote them so recently. I brought them in one day—to show them who you were, and will be again.”
I remember being driven through streets festooned with light green in Sarah’s car, with Mary in the backseat.
Yes, it was early spring. I was not going to my apartment, but to the house of friends. I thought I’d be home in just a few days. I could hear snatches of conversation between Mary and Sarah, but I could not follow the drift of it.
Time confused me, the time that had gone by without my living in it, and the gaps in time in this day.
But the interminable winter had come to an end.
45
This April day is cold, cloudy. On either side of the walk up to the house, flowers bloom—brilliant red, yellow and purple—and the light seems to come from within the colors. I bump into the doorjamb coming in. The door opens into a first-floor waiting room. Inside, I find several stuffed green chairs around an old fireplace, books and magazines, a box of stuffed toys, a green plastic alligator that stares out from one side-eye, and a fish tank filled with tiny iridescent fish. It hums at a treble pitch.
Green gauze bandages the bare branches of the trees outside. That green burns into my skin and thrusts a thousand tiny pins beneath its surface.
In less than a week I am already breaking my promise to Dr. Connelly. The need to understand what is happening to me overrode my promise.
The man I am waiting to see is an analyst, Dr. Sam Blumenfeld, someone my friends have unearthed for me after a careful search. Apart from that, I know nothing about him. I called him to ask for an appointment only the day before. Now I wait in the timeless way that one waits for something or someone unknown, to the soft steady ticking of a clock on the mantle, the world’s time set against my own, more jarring, inner time.
Dr. Blumenfeld pokes his head around the wall, or perhaps he comes all the way out, but like other things that jump out at me, only his head appears. “Annie,” he says, and I follow. I enter a smaller room and take a few steps inside. I turn as I hear him slip a brass latch into place on the door.
He sits down on a black leather chair at the foot of the classic black couch. I choose an identical chair, across from him and at the head of the couch. His chair, if I’d thought about it at all, but I did not. The chair holds me, lifts my feet slightly off the ground as I lean back.
My eyes fall to his knees and then to his polished black shoes. The light is dim, with only a single soft
lamp lit behind him. The stillness in the room grows full.
A line flies through my mind: “Light blooms from gray darkness.” I pause, and ready-made-for-me thoughts continue: “Late in the day I keep the company of a red enamel chair.”
These words, disconnected from every other thought coming into my mind, seem unspeakable. I push them away, even as I feel Dr. Blumenfeld lean in a little to listen, as if he is hearing what I have not said, what are not, in all honesty, even my thoughts. I don’t look directly at him. On the periphery of my horizon of awareness, I pick up every gesture and every shift of breath. I have learned that this way I know far better what someone is thinking and feeling.
“I took a gun and a knife to my therapist and I threatened to kill her.” These words come out of me into the room, the first words I have spoken. They startle me even as I speak them.
“You must have had a very good reason for wanting to do that,” Dr. Blumenfeld says calmly, as if this is true.
“I didn’t want to. There were voices that told me to do that, and I, I felt compelled to follow them.”
Even my straightforward explanation frightens me.
He laughs, a light laugh. “Ah, they must have had a very good reason.”
“No!” I say. Yet in the silence that follows, I find that I believe this myself. He sounds as if he is on their side, which is also my side.
I look up. His eyes are blue-gray, almost the lilac color of the sky before it snows. The silence wraps itself around us.
“I can hear you in whole sentences!” I exclaim. “My hearing has been messed up. Sometimes I can’t hear people in whole sentences. In my journal, there are a few lines like that, whole sentences. But they are surrounded by—words that make no sense to me—gibberish!” I spit out the word, hating the sound of it. “And no one in the hospital could understand me when I spoke.”
“No one there knew that gibberish is a language too?”
His questions come, like little animals, up into my lap. Tears abruptly fall down my face, and I want to stop them. I have the sense that it is not me who is crying, but I look for a Kleenex.
“I don’t have any,” he says. “I don’t want you to wipe them away. Let the tears be.”
I sit and let them drip off into my hands.
After a long time, I begin my story again, from another angle. “The woman who was my therapist, she won’t see me, not ever again.”
“She has abandoned you,” he says simply.
“No, she loved me,” I argue, swallowing hard.
“Love? What is love then?” he asks.
The room tilts, as if a huge wave hit us. “I don’t know. I don’t know what love is, or what is real anymore.”
“How could you possibly know?” he asks.
His words come to me like my own unspoken thoughts. I am dizzy, then flooded with relief.
We enter a long silence. He waits, as though he is waiting for himself.
“You are shattered,” he says finally. I nod. “When you came into the room, I sensed the little pieces, but I was afraid to address them. I didn’t want to injure them with my clumsiness.”
“The little pieces,” I repeat quietly.
“Yes, the little ones who came to see me.”
I suddenly have the sense that I am all there, if in pieces, at least all there.
As I get up to leave, he asks, “When would the little pieces like to come back?”
“Tomorrow?” I ask so softly, he asks me to repeat it.
“Good, tomorrow,” he says.
Sarah is waiting for me. She drives me back to the house where I am staying, the home of a professor and his wife, old friends of mine, and their two teenage sons.
I climb the stairs like a toddler, one foot up followed by the other, holding the banister. The stairs won’t hold still in space.
I crawl into bed in my upstairs room and, after days and nights of restless sleep, I sleep soundly.
It is late afternoon when I awaken. The sun has come out. Pepper, the old family dog, a black Lab flecked with gray, whines to go out as soon as I am out of bed. I want to go out too. No one else is home. I’m not sure if I can navigate the neighborhood without getting lost, though I know it well.
But Pepper insists, and I go with him, down the wide, wet board steps. Puddles loom up on the sidewalk. I walk around them, careful not to break them or look into their endless depths. Trees drip on my light jacket. Sunlight beads on the sleeves. As I walk, I repeat over and over, “I don’t want to see Dr. Blumenfeld” like a chant, or a prayer for Melanie to return. Yet my shoulders drop down so that my arms swing easily. The breath drops down deep in my body. Without knowing how, I walk with Pepper and find my way home again.
I did not know, after this first meeting, that I had already launched myself into a three-year relationship that would give me new ground to walk upon and the knowledge of a story that had hidden itself from me all my life.
I had just come out of a time of living outside time and memory, living as if in a waking dream. Words still confounded me. It was difficult for me to speak at times.
When I came to Dr. Blumenfeld I was migrating, like birds who hear far below our range of hearing—earthquakes and shifting magma beneath the earth’s surface—and feel shifts in the tiniest electromagnetic fields, using this knowledge to orient themselves in flight. I was migrating from a waking dream into the familiarity of “reality.” Wordless, yet words dropped into me. Voices came from within and without—as presences, vital and truthful and compelling, and also terrifying at times—and this was not a new experience for me. The physical world around me embodied and spoke to me about a knowledge I was rapidly losing. My senses blurred and sharpened and blurred again.
I could not read whole sentences. The words stood out in short phrases or one by one they dropped into my mind and vanished. The young spring, transparent and translucent, burned under my skin. The spring brought to life the knowledge of feelings—beneath my skin, in my muscles and bones. It was as if my body carried an unspeakable story, and the logic and order of spoken language had become treacherous. The language I knew lived encoded in my body. It held my knowledge and story intact, but I could no longer speak it. This language was not only untranslatable, it never occurred to anyone that it was a language and in need of translation. As if I were an idiot, it was called “gibberish” and “word salad.”
Now, as I reentered the English language, beginning to hear in full sentences (yet in a disconnected way), beginning to read again (though only the simplest of children’s books), I was disoriented in time and space. The silence of amnesia, like an overnight snow, had fallen and covered over the preceding six weeks. Once again I had lost time in the world. And I was in danger now of losing the language that held an unknown story intact. I was, as Dr. Blumenfeld said, “in pieces.”
The Laplanders once traced the landscape in song, followed their songs out into the Arctic and safely back. They did this for centuries before they learned to read. After they began to read, however, they could no longer make their way in the Arctic without getting lost. Without the songs of my voices, and with every step into reading and speaking the English language, following its laws of order and time, I felt increasingly lost. Like an animal who has wrenched free of a trap and survived, yet goes back to its trap to find the missing foot, I ached to find a way back to myself.
Dr. Blumenfeld heard the first two lines of my story and identified it as a story about love and abandonment. He knew that “gibberish” was a language and he trusted my voices. His chair held me. He listened at the very edge of my own knowledge and then spoke to me. He welcomed my tears. After seeing him, I could sleep. His words dropped deep into my body and worked like a tiny, hidden compass to orient me within myself for the next twenty-four hours.
46
I see Dr. Blumenfeld each day that week. “Dr. Blumenfeld” seems too pompous a name for such an ordinary looking man. “Sam,” his first name, seems too casual. So I sh
orten his name to “Blumenfeld.” In those early sessions, I sit in the same chair and listen to his breathing, in rhythm with my breathing, a quiet ripple. In that dim room, everything in me is attuned to the quality of his silence. I do not speak to him much. The silence opens up, clean and spacious around me. Then suddenly, I feel that we are treading through a thick bog, in danger of being pulled underwater. When I think I will drown in the silence, I find him kneeling next to my chair, speaking soft words.
I know already how to listen to different silences. There is a silence that lies in hiding, waiting for words, but the words of the speaker are carefully censored, for all but the ones the listener waits for go unheeded, denied, into this silence. This silence leaches confidence and vision from the speaker, so that the telling itself becomes unnatural, estranging, annihilating. This silence is a bog, thick. There is no breathing space within it. But there is also a silence that opens out, as a simple wood door opens out on a clean white field, cold, its long slope strewn with stars. This silence breathes and expands. This silence waits for words too, and it welcomes the unexpected ones, the uncanny, disturbing, and surprising ones.
I begin by entering Blumenfeld’s silences. I experience both kinds of silences with him, but what I notice most is that his silence breathes and clears an opening for me. It is white, light, a haven from the world—like the ceilings of my childhood.
It is, in fact, up on the ceiling where Galle first came to me. She comes to me now, in Blumenfeld’s leisurely silences.
When I first knew her, she was quite small, five years old. She would lie at the bottom of a doorway, not caring if she dirtied her blue school uniform and white blouse. There she would lie, her head almost touching one side of the doorframe, her skinny legs propped up against the other side. There, she lived and played in the white world of ceilings. The center of gravity was somewhere above the ceiling and under her feet, but she was so light, she could leap and fly over doorways, the highest places between the rooms, like a rabbit. She could make that white empty world of ceilings any season, any place, any time. There she rode the high plains of a world of green, golden and purple grasses, of constant wind and endless blue sky, on the back of a lion. She called herself Galle, my middle name, a name no one called me, so that it became fully hers.
A Shining Affliction Page 10
