It's Kind of a Funny Story (13 page)

“Can I give my son a bag of clothes?”

“What am I going to need clothes for?” I ask. I look in the bag: not only are there clothes, and not only are they the clothes I hate, but Jordan is sitting on them.

“If you want to bring him items, you can bring them to the hospital later in the day,” the nurse answers.

“Where is he going to be?” Mom asks, like I’m not there.

“In Six North,” the nurse answers. “Just ask for him. Come on.”

“I love you, Craig.”

“Bye, Mom.”

A quick hug, and she’s on her way—Chris watches, with his hands on his hips. I’m really curious about his efficacy as a hospital security guard.

“What’s Six North?” I ask him.

“Ah, uh, we’re not supposed to be talking,” he says, and sits back down with his paper. I look out the door for some news, but it’s all the same. You know, this is a crappy place to be. I wish I wasn’t depressed so I didn’t have to be here.

“Mr. Gilner?” someone finally asks. A new guy walks up to the door, a thin, short-bearded, older hippie-looking guy—except without the long hair— with glasses. He’s not wearing a white robe or a blue robe or a cop uniform. He’s wearing jeans, a blue-collared shirt, and what appears to be a leather vest.

“I’m Smitty. We’re ready to take you up now.”

“There’re two!” a doctor says as she passes by. “Twenty-one
and
twenty-two.”

“Well, I don’t have papers for Mr. Twenty-One.” Smitty shakes his head. “So I’m going to be taking up Mr. Gilner, and I’ll be back down, all right? Hey, is that
Jimmy!”

“He’s
back”
the doctor moans.

“Hey, it’s Saturday, baby. Everything is going to be all right. Mr. Gilner?” He turns to me.

“Uh, yeah.”

“You ready to get out of this crazy place?”

“Am I going to see Dr. Mahmoud?”

“Sure. Later in the day.”

“You got this one, Smitty?” Chris asks.

“I don’t think you’re going to give me any trouble, are you, Mr. Gilner?”

“Um, no.”

“Okay, do you have your stuff?”

I check my bracelets, my keys, my phone, my wallet. “Yep!”

“Let’s walk.”

I hop off the stretcher, nod at Chris, and follow Smitty at his slow pace through the ER. We open a door near the bathroom and pierce a seal into an entirely different biome of the hospital—red brick, indoor trees, posters of notable doctors who practiced there. Smitty leads me through an atrium to a bank of elevators.

He hits the up button, stands by me, and nods. I notice a plaque between the two elevators, showing us what’s on each floor.

                                           4 - Pediatrics.

                                           5 - Delivery.

                                           6 - Adult Psychiatric.

Oh, he’ll be up in Six North.

“Going to adult psychiatric, huh?” I ask Smitty.

“Well"—he looks at me—"you’re not quite old enough for geriatric psychiatric.” And he smiles.

The elevator dings; we get in and turn around, each taking a corner. Smitty leads me left when we get to six. I pass a poster with a chubby Hispanic man in blue robes holding his hand over his mouth: SHHHHHHHH! HEALING IN PROGRESS. Then Smitty passes some kind of card in front of two double doors, and the doors open and we walk through them.

It’s an empty hallway, wide enough for a grown man to lie across with his arms stretched up. At the end are two big windows and a collection of couches. To the right is a small office with a glass window that has inch-wide squares of thin wire embedded in it; inside, nurses sit at computers. Just beyond the office, another hall branches off to the right. I follow Smitty forward, and when we come to the crossroads of the two halls, I glance down the one to my right.

A man stands there, leaning on the banisters that line the hall even though there are no steps. The man is short and stocky; he has bugged-out eyes and a squashed face and an almost-but-not-quite harelip. There’s fuzz coming out of his neck and a big swath of black hair on his little head. He looks at me with homeless-person eyes, like I just popped out of a manhole and offered him valuable paper clips from the moon.

Oh my God,
it hits.
I’m in the mental ward.

nineteen

“Come this way, we’re going to take your vitals,” Smitty says, seating me in the small office. He takes my blood pressure off a rolling cart and my pulse with delicate fingers. He writes down on a sheet in front of him:
120/80.

“One-twenty-over-eighty, that’s dead normal, isn’t it?” I ask.

“Yeah.” Smitty smiles. “But we prefer live normals.” He wraps up the blood pressure gauge. “Stay right here, we’ll send a nurse in to talk to you.”

“A nurse? What are
you?”

“I’m one of the daytime directors on the floor.”

“And what is this floor, exactly … ?”

“It’s a short-term facility for adult psychiatric.”

“So like, a mental ward?”

“Not a ward, a hospital. Nurse’ll answer any questions.” He steps out of the office, leaving me with a form: name, address, Social Security number. Then—wait—I’ve seen this before! It’s the questions from Dr. Barney’s office:

Feeling that you are unable to cope with daily life. 1) Never, 2) Some days,
3)
Nearly every day, 4) All the time.

What the hell, I’m in the hospital; I put 4’s down the line—there are about twenty prompts—except for the lines about self-mutilation, drinking, and drug use (I am
not
putting anything about pot, that’s just the rule, told to me by Aaron—you don’t ever,
ever
admit to smoking pot, not to doctors, not to teachers, not to anyone in authority no matter how much you trust them; they can always report you to the FBI Pot-Smoking List). As I’m getting done, a squat black nurse with a kind wide smile and tightly braided hair steps in. She introduces herself with a thick West Indian accent.

“Craig, I am Monica, a nurse on the floor here. I am going to ask you a couple of questions about what you’re feeling and find out how to help you.”

“Yeah, uh . . .” It’s time to state my case. “I came in because I was really freaked out, you know, and I checked in downstairs, but I wasn’t totally sure where I was going, and now that I’m here, I don’t know if I really—”

“Hold on, honey, let me show you something.” Nurse Monica stands over me, although she’s so short that we’re almost the same height, and pulls out a photocopy of the form my mom signed downstairs only an hour before.

“You see that there? That signature says that you have been voluntarily admitted to psychiatric care at Argenon Hospital, yes?”

“Yeah . . .”

“And see? It says that you will be discharged at the discretion of the doctor once he has come up with your discharge
plan.”

“I’m not getting out of here until a doctor
lets
me out?!”

“Now, wait.” She sits. “If you feel that this is
not
the place for you, after five days you can write a letter—we call it the Five-Day Letter—explaining why you feel that you do
not
belong here, and we will review that and allow you to leave if you qualify.” She smiles.

“So I’m here for at least
five days?”

“Sometimes people are just here for two. Definitely not more than thirty.”

Ho-boy.
Well, not much to say about it. That
is
my mom’s signature. I sit back in my chair. This morning I was a pretty functional teenager. Now I’m a mental patient. But you know, I wasn’t that functional. Is this better? No, this is worse. This is a
lot
—

“Let’s talk about how you came to be here,” Monica prompts.

I give her the rap.

“When was the last time you were hospitalized?”

“Like, four years ago. I was in a sledding accident.”

“So you’ve never been hospitalized for mental difficulties before.”

“Uh, nope.”

“Good. Now I want you to look at this chart. Do you see here?”

There’s a little scale of 0-10 on a sheet in front of her.

“This is the chart of physical pain. I want you to tell me, right now, from a scale of zero to ten, are you experiencing any physical pain?”

I look closer at the sheet. Below the zero it says
no pain
and below the ten it says
unbearable excruciating pain.
I have to bite my tongue.

“Zero,” I manage.

“All right, now, here’s a very important question"—she leans in—"did you actually try to do anything to hurt yourself before you came here?”

I sense that this
is
an important question. It might be the kind of question that determines whether I get a normal room with a TV or a special room with straps.

“No,” I enunciate.

“You didn’t take anything? You didn’t try for the
good sleep?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The good sleep, you know? That’s what they call it. When you take many pills and drink alcohol and . ..”

“Ah, no,” I say.

“Well, that’s good,” she says. “We don’t want to lose you. Think of your talents. Think of all the tools you have. From your hands to your feet.”

I do think about them. I think about my hands signing forms and my feet running, flexing up and down, as I sprint to some class I’m late for. I am good at certain things.

“So right now we are getting ready for lunch,” Monica says. “Are you a Christian?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Are you vegetarian?”

“No.”

“So no specific diet restrictions, good. I need you to read these rules.” She drops four sheets of paper in front of me. “They’re about conduct on the floor.” My eye falls on
6) Patients are expected to remain clean-shaven. Shaving will be supervised by an attendant every day after breakfast.

“I am not sure if you notice, but do you see what that first item is on the list?”

“Uh … ‘No cell phones on the floor’?”

“That’s right. Do you have one?”

I feel it in my pocket. I don’t want to lose it. It’s one of the only things that’s making me me right now. Without my cell phone, who will I be? I won’t have any friends because I don’t have their numbers memorized. I’ll barely have a family since I don’t know their cell phone numbers, just their home line. I’ll be like an animal.

“Please give it here,” Monica says. “We will keep it in your locker until your discharge, or you can have visitors take care of it.”

I put it on the table.

“Please turn it off.”

I flip it open—two new voice mails,
who are they?
—and hold END.
Bye-bye, little phone.

“Now, this is very important; do you have anything sharp on your person?”

“My keys?”

“Same as the phone. We keep those.”

I plop them in a heap on the table; Monica sweeps them into a tray like an airport security worker.

“Wonderful—do you have anything else you can think of?”

Monica, I’m down to my wallet and the clothes on my back.
I shake my head.

“Great, now hold on.” She gets up. “We’re going to have Bobby give you a tour.” Monica nods at me, keeps my charts, leaves me to review the papers, and goes into the hall. She returns a minute later with a gaunt, hollow man with big circles under his eyes and a nose that looks like it’s been broken in about three places. In contrast to floor policy, scruff lines his chin. He’s older but still has all his hair, a stately gray mop, combed half-heartedly. And he carries himself a little weird, leaning back as if he were on a headrest.

“Jesus, you’re a kid!” he says, curling his mouth. He reaches out a hand for me and his hand comes out sort of sideways, thumb crooked up.

“I’m Bobby,” he says.

His sweatshirt has Marvin the Martian on it and says WORLD DOMINATOR.

“Craig.” I stand up.

He nods, and his Adam’s apple, which has some extra gray whiskers on it, bobs. “You ready for the grand tour?”