Giving Up the Ghost (25 page)

Blumfield just smiled, then lowered his head to write some
notes, probably something like “Has trouble expressing abstract concepts and ideas.” In truth, I had no idea what “happy” and “normal” were, and I doubted I’d recognize either if I found it, let alone be able to express it. And I was positive that whatever would constitute “happy” and “normal” in my life would make no sense to anyone else.

I could hear some guitar chords reverberate from down the hall in the dayroom.

It was Jesus H. Christ singing David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”

For thirty minutes every day Jesus H. Christ was allowed to play his guitar. He wasn’t allowed to keep it in his room or play unsupervised. But for a half hour a day, the nurses would let him set up in front of their station and play. Jesus H. Christ knew a lot of songs.

“Would you mind terribly if we picked this up later?” I asked Blumfield.

“Tell me where you’re at. What are you feeling right now?” he asked me.

Over the several days he’d been allowed to do it, Jesus H. Christ’s thirty-minute strumming had slowly evolved into unsanctioned sing-alongs. I loved the sing-alongs. There is something about singing in a group that brings you a kind of peace and release that little else can equal.

Stan was also surprisingly well versed in song lyrics. Silas would stand in front of everyone, pretending to conduct the 5B chorus. The sing-alongs were probably the most joyful parts of every day. Patients who hadn’t responded to or acknowledged anything since they arrived would suddenly perk up and sing along with “Folsom Prison Blues” or “Let It Be.” Nothing brings people together like the shared love of a song.
Our sing-alongs were made even sweeter because we knew that anything we enjoyed doing this much would eventually, and irrepealably, become forbidden. Some doctor or nurse would come up with a reason that singing together would cause a disturbance and suggest some other activity, like checkers or watching TV, and that would be the end of it.

“I guess right now I’m feeling a lot of things,” I said. “But I guess more than anything I feel like I want to go sing with Jesus H. Christ.”

Blumfield put down his pen and extended his arm toward the hallway.

I was already singing as I ran toward the dayroom.

My therapy sessions continued almost every day, as well as my occupational therapy, moderated study group, and group therapy. In each, I basically learned to tell the counselors and therapists what they wanted to hear. It wasn’t like I was lying to them, but I simply learned to convey things in the way they could understand, almost like speaking in another language.

The only time I really expressed myself was during Laura’s visits. She came every day or two, and we just sat in a corner by ourselves. By this time, our conversations were less about gossip from the ward and more about untwisting the mess of knots I’d tied through my life. Laura rarely gave advice. Instead, she’d just ask questions about the way I felt and constantly probe by asking me to explain what I meant in deeper detail. She really, never once, pushed or suggested I do anything, but she would quietly nod with approval when she heard things she liked. I learned to live for those nods.

After ten days in 5B, I was moved to 4B. For the most part, I behaved myself, with the notable exception of secretly forcing
myself to throw up all my medications. One morning I had woken up to an orderly who wanted me to swallow nine pills—plus a stool softener. Fuck it, I said. No way.

This led to a mini-conference with the nursing staff, then a hallway consult with Dr. Chang, then everyone marching into my room to tell me that I needed to take these pills. If I did not, there would be serious ramifications for my Progress Plan.

Fine.

I took the pills just as I was told.

Then, a few minutes later, I walked into the bathroom, stuck my finger down my throat, and threw them all up again. I repeated this for three days.

Of course, eventually I was discovered; Dr. Chang ordered that I had to take all my medications in the presence of a staff member, then sit by the nurses’ station for thirty minutes. Basically, now even my digestion was a supervised activity.

Sitting by the nurses’ station kind of felt like wearing a dunce cap in the corner of the classroom. All the 4B residents wanted to know what I’d done and why I was sitting there. After a while, I started to notice how that chair was kind of a perfect vantage point. Jesus H. Christ’s new medication had made him calm and no longer interested in screaming and running around naked at night. Therefore, he, too, had made his way downstairs and was now happy escorting his very pregnant girlfriend and his parents around 4B, showing off all the wonderful new features like doors on the bathrooms and leather stamping tools in the occupational therapy room (excellent for customizing the wallets and belts we were instructed to make). There was a blond guy who looked like a roadie for Lynyrd Skynyrd, who’d sit in front of a window rubbing his lower lip for at least three hours. A woman in the corner of the dayroom would start to look very upset, get up and sit in a different
chair, and seem fine for another few minutes until she got distressed and moved again. Some dude was playing with himself while watching
The Price Is Right
. Stan was flirting with a woman who’d been brought in a few days earlier. To be honest, the residents of 4B weren’t that much better off than the residents of 5B—in fact many of them had been on 5B when I arrived—but 4B had a more relaxed vibe, a feeling that things were a bit more under control, less frantic, panicked, and harsh, as well as mildly less depressing.

I kept wondering to myself what these people’s lives would hold. They, like me, were just a few days from getting tossed back into the world. What would happen to them? How would they cope? How long would it be before one of them was back here? Or somewhere worse?

One day, as I digested my meds, I saw a girl named Sarah smiling at me from across the dayroom. She was sitting at a table with a tray in front of her. The natives of 4B had gone into quite a flutter when she arrived. The waves of people, specifically men, who paraded over to wherever she was dwindled a tiny bit when word spread that she was seventeen. Simply because she was the subject of so much ward gossip, I’d pretty much avoided her. It seemed that the only people more gossiped about than Sarah were the men who went over to talk to her.

I looked away for a moment, then looked back. She was still looking at me and smiling.

What the hell, I thought.

As I approached I could see that food on the tray in front of her was barely touched. Her arms were spread out away from her and lying on the table, making the mounds of gauze and pads wrapping her wrists even harder to ignore. She seemed like she was in pain whenever she tried to move them.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is the chicken casserole so delicious it’s blowing your mind?”

She laughed. “No, it’s still just kinda slow going with this,” she said, rolling her palms up. I could see some seepage coming through the bandages. “I asked the orderly to help me, but I guess he got busy. They keep fucking with my meds.”

“Amen to that,” I said, sitting down next to her and picking up her spoon.

I scooped up a small bite on the spoon, brought it up to her mouth, then slowly swung it over to mine. Just before it reached my mouth, I gave her a look of faux shock.

“Oh, did you want this?” I asked.

She laughed again.

I brought the spoon up to her mouth. She backed away slightly and looked into my eyes, then slowly opened her mouth and took in the bite. We just sat there silently for a few minutes. Me scooping up spoonfuls and feeding them to her. Her smiling between bites.

“Hey! Hey!” we heard some staff person yell from the nurses’ station. “What are you doing? You aren’t permitted to feed another patient!! Stop that right now! Stop!”

“In about thirty seconds they are going to force this spoon out of my hands,” I said softly, continuing to serve her while I spoke. “And if they forget to feed you at breakfast, I’ll be back.”

“Put that down!”

As I expected, an orderly grabbed my hand and took the spoon, while a nurse quickly looked over Sarah.

There was some yelling back and forth, and the scene ended with me walking back to my room before they had a chance to order me there. I didn’t act out or throw a fit. It was the first time in years I’d made an effort toward anything that wasn’t
meant to fuck things up. It was the first time in years that I’d stood up for someone other than myself.

“Well … you ready to go?” Laura asked.

I thought for a moment.

“No,” I said. “I doubt it.”

Both of us sat there, looking toward the door, neither of us sure what we were supposed to do next.

If there is one thing I’d learned about hospitals, it’s that they aren’t interested in healing you. They are interested in stabilizing you, and then everyone is supposed to move on. They go to stabilize some more people, and you go off to do whatever you do. Healing, if it happens at all, is done on your own, long after the hospital has submitted your final insurance paperwork.

While I was in Timken Mercy, I often expected that when I was discharged I would walk out to a bright sunny day and simply skip off into my newly retooled and absolutely perfect life. The reality was far different. After twenty-two days of almost constant confinement in the mental ward, I was what could loosely be defined as “stable,” but that’s about it.

I’d been allowed outside the ward on two occasions. Once, I was given a one-hour pass to walk around in the hospital’s garden with my mother. The second trip was a six-hour “day visit” back to my parents’ house. My brother was away from the house all day, and my father barely spoke to me. Basically I spent the entire visit listening to my records and walking around the backyard alone.

Dr. Chang had decided to try out a new drug mixture for the day of my visit home, which had left me barely able to stand. He’d finally cut back on the number of pills he was prescribing. I was now down to three pills, three times a day. But
they must have been horse tranquilizers or something, as within an hour of taking them, I could barely spell my name.

In hindsight, I can see that numbing me up before sending me back into my real world might not have been all that bad an idea. Before going into the hospital, I’d managed to turn my life into a huge shell game. It wasn’t until I went into the hospital that my family really figured out the extent of what was going on. For example, no one was aware that in the few weeks before I was admitted to the hospital, I’d written all over all the posters and artwork I had hanging on my bedroom walls. After covering them with ramblings, I’d slashed them to shreds yet left them hanging. I’d also scorched a ventriloquist doll and then hung the charred remains from the ceiling light fixture with an improvised noose. Those surprised by these discoveries initially included me, as I had, at first, no recollection of doing any of these things. Though once I was reminded of them, I knew I had done them. It is one of the strangest memory experiences I’ve ever had, then or since, almost as if my mind has erased any detail of these acts yet somehow managed to hang on to the utter certainty that they were my own.

My parents had decided to move me out of the attic into a room across the hall from their bedroom. I was pretty livid when my mother told me, but even I realized I was lucky to have a place to go to after leaving the hospital. T.J. Maxx was going to let me have my job back, which I equally didn’t deserve but was grateful for. It wasn’t really an act of compassion on their part—they were probably just happy to have someone to do the cleanup work.

At the ward there really was no big goodbye. With the exception of Jesus H. Christ, most of my original 5B brethren had already gone, tossed back into the chaos of the lives they’d
left. No exchanged addresses or phone numbers. Our time together was simply over. The only person I ever saw again was Silas, when I went down to the courthouse to pay a parking ticket a few weeks later. Despite our having been roommates for most of our time at Timken Mercy, Silas pretended he didn’t remember who I was.

I was set up to see both Blumfield and Dr. Chang again within a week, so they didn’t feel the need for a goodbye either. The nurse simply told me that I was free to go home whenever I chose. Since both my parents were at work, I asked Laura to borrow a car and come pick me up.

We were sitting on my bed talking when she suddenly looked at me.

“Wait, do we even need to be here?”

“I don’t know, I guess not,” I said.

When we stepped outside, the sun was bright, blindingly bright. It would disguise what lay in front of me. Broken relationships that would take years to heal. Questions I wasn’t ready to answer. The previous twenty-two days hadn’t really solved anything. All my problems and issues were still out there, waiting patiently for me. The only real question was whether I was now any better prepared to deal with them.

As we got up and started toward the door, one of the nurses ran up to me.

“I almost missed you,” she said. “You got a package this morning. We didn’t want you to leave without it.”

The package had been opened and checked for contraband, like all incoming packages were. I reached inside the open envelope and fished out a piece of paper.

“Hear you are getting out,” it said. “Thought we’d send you a little something to celebrate.” It was signed by Phil and
Ben. I reached inside the envelope to pull out the present they’d sent me.

It was a single-serving box of Cap’n Crunch.

She came back on my first night home from the hospital. I saw a flash of Her in a dream. As soon as I saw Her, I was awake, and stayed that way for the rest of the night, upright in my bed in my new bedroom, shivering, staring into the dark stillness, waiting to hear another noise or for the door from the attic to open.

I don’t think I ever really expected that She’d stay away forever, but the Little Girl dreams I began to have seemed different. Sometimes I was blind, my head was covered, or my eyes could not open, and the scenes of the Little Girl dream would play out around me, though I couldn’t see them. The new abbreviated ones terrified me just as much as every other Little Girl dream I’d had. As long as She remained upstairs, I figured I could deal with it—just hold on and bear it. If She started showing up in other places again, I had no idea what I’d do. That would definitely be a big problem.