Madness (23 page)

For a few more blissful weeks of fall, the mania carries me along on the crest of this fabulous wave. By this point I'm a royal pain in the ass, and Jeff is taking the brunt of it. The only thing wrong in my life is Jeff and his constant harping on me for never being home, never doing my share, never paying attention to him. He whines and whines and it drives me absolutely nuts. I'm not doing jack shit around the house. Never mind the dishes. Cleaning be damned. I have no time for such banalities. Jeff is a boring old grump, with his interminable slowness, his inexplicable crankiness. Marriage isn't going to hold me back,
settle me down.
Indignant, I explain to him, loudly, that he's a misogynistic ass. To hell with his resentment of me and his martyrdom.

I come crashing in at three in the morning, wired to the gills on caffeine and the excitement of the night, and slide with exaggerated slickness into bed, fuming at Jeff's sulkily turned back. Irate, I flounce off to the guest room, where I lie with my eyes flickering across the ceiling, plotting my excellent, righteous dismissal of my
marriage, of marriage in general, my takeover of the magazine, my centrality to all things good and exciting in town. Perhaps I should move to New York once I've conquered Minneapolis. I'll write for
The New Yorker.
No, I'll become editor of the
New York Times.
California—now
that
was the time of my life. I wasted it, wasted it foolishly, what a sorrowful loss. But no matter. I see my sorry ways and will rectify them now.

And then, almost overnight, a spider web of cracks starts to spread across my brain. I dismiss all the grandiose plans—what crap! What am I thinking, fooling myself into the belief that I'm capable of anything at all? My moods go careening up and down without warning. I'm manic, I'm blue, I'm dashing around in a panic, I'm curled up in bed in the empty, washed-out light of afternoon—and then I'm bolting back up, manic again. But the mania is painful, sharp-edged—I'm agitated, constantly anxious, gripped by random, sudden fears, and I whip around aimlessly, compulsively making lists, worried that I will forget something, that I'll lose something, that I'll fail at something important, that I won't get something done. I'm irritable as hell, and I snap at anyone who has the nerve to suggest that I'm not doing so well—their stupid comments about my moodiness, their idiotic worries that I'm working too much, their constant harping on the fact that I'm not being reasonable about anything at all. I'm perfectly reasonable. It's just that I'm stressed. It's just that people expect too much of me. I can't handle it. I rage at myself for my incompetence, my laziness. I am a failure and a fraud. They're going to find me out. I laugh sharply, talk too fast, and then suddenly fall silent. The voice of the person talking to me fades away. From far off—
Are you all right?
I snap to, shake my head to clear the fog, put a smile on my face,
Of course! I'm fine!

It's afternoon, and once again the blues wash over me. The office is making me crazy. I can't stand the noise. I have to get out of here. I grab my purse and practically run. Once home, I throw off my suit and crawl into bed. Everything is quiet now. I pull the
covers over my head. My head is pounding, filled with static. There is something wrong with my head. I will myself asleep.

I start calling in sick to work. Home, I whirl around aimlessly. I write dozens of pages every day, and every day I delete them. I pace, I panic, I worry I will get fired.
No, no, you won't get fired,
my editor says. When I go into work, I stay there late into the night. When I don't, I dive into and out of bed, and pace, and talk to myself,
I'm not going crazy. It's going to be fine.

I lie in bed and stare at the wall, bleak, knowing I am going mad.

Stop it. Get up. You're not going mad.

I wake up at four o'clock in the morning every day to find the gnarled old terror in my chest, familiar and despised. I clench my eyes shut, then lurch up and stagger toward my office, start hacking away at the book, get lost in the work, the light slowly rising outside, from black to indigo to violet to a pale, thin winter blue, and the piercing sun comes up, and I look at the clock—fuck! I'm late! And I go hauling into work. My mood swings wildly from fury to desolation, and I'm stumbling around with exhaustion by the afternoon. I pour more coffee down my throat, sick to my stomach all the time, shaking so hard I can barely hold my pen,
What's wrong with you? You're making a fool of yourself, everyone's looking, everyone can see.
The paranoia is back. Everyone hates me, is making fun of me, is disgusted by me, wants me fired, wants me dead. I keep my head down and work, snapping often in meetings, shouting, demanding to be heard—and then, humiliated, I run out of the meeting in tears, back to my desk,
Pull it together, freak! Fuckup! Can't take it, can't deal, failure, they're looking, don't you see? This is simple, do it right, stop screwing everything up, you embarrassed yourself in there, you're going to get fired
—and I either stay at work until midnight or bolt from the office at two
P
.
M
.
To say I'm erratic is an understatement.

I can't get the chaos of my mind to stop. I'm confused, and don't want to tell anyone. I can't remember conversations, can't
keep tasks straight. Someone at work asks me to do something, and I wind up in a bathroom stall, crying, panicked, because I can't remember what it was. My desk is a sea of Post-Its, each of them with indecipherable notations that are supposed to tell me what to do. I'm afraid of the office, afraid of downtown, afraid of driving, of speeding, of getting stopped and searched, afraid of things being out of place, afraid of the laundry, the dishes, the mail, sharp objects, spirits, sleep, nightmares, afraid of being looked at, afraid Jeff and my friends hate me—I plead with them to admit it, to just get it out of their systems, so I know the truth and can end this incessant uncertainty that's driving me mad.

We throw a Thanksgiving party for fifty people, another one of my blowouts with endless people streaming in and out. The next day, with no sleep, Jeff and I fly out of town at four
A.M.
,to
relax, get away, get me back on my feet.
We get home and I've only gotten worse. Christmas is parties, all-night wrapping, the watchers are everywhere, following me around the mall, I'm hemorrhaging money, I've completely stopped sleeping.

By now, my friends and family are panicked. Jeff, who's never seen me go crazy before, is trying frantically to assuage my fears, keep me calm, get me to sleep. There are times when he has to pick me up from the office in the middle of the day, or night, because I can't figure out how to get home, or am afraid of leaving the building—I am fixated on the unspecified danger of parking lots. Other days, I call him from home, terrified of everything, the sun, the stairs, all the rooms in the house, especially the kitchen. I beg him to get rid of all the sharp things, scissors and razors and knives. I'm afraid they will come at me and slice up my eyeballs. I fail to mention that I'm also afraid of cutting myself up.

And then it happens. On New Year's Eve, Jeff comes home from work. I'm sitting on the bed. He sits down with me. I tip over into his lap. Everything is fine, now that he is here.

And then Jeff looks down and sees dried blood all over my hands. He yanks my shirt off. I've sliced up my arms. I'm as
shocked as he is. I don't remember doing it. I haven't done it in ten years, not since I wound up with forty-two stitches in my arm and no real understanding of whether I'd attempted suicide or not. I am totally confused.

Jeff puts me in the car and drives me to the hospital.

Emergency room. Flashing lights. The cop outside the room. Hours and hours spent waiting. Finally the psychiatrist comes. Jeff watches while they drag me, kicking and screaming, away.

These years are mostly lost to me. Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when. I spend these two years caught in the revolving door of madness, going in and out of the hospital seven times, traveling from my bed at home to a bed on a locked ward, the weird world of the ward becoming more familiar to me than the one outside. This is the best I can do to piece the scattered memories together, to give some semblance of continuous time, to fill the hole in my life that madness made, and will not repair.

Hi,
someone says. He is very gentle. I am in the hospital. It is night. I register that fact and write it down on a small slip of paper:
LOCATION Abbott Northwestern Hospital, TIME Night.
I stuff it
in my pocket with the other crumpled pieces of paper that I keep so I can read them when I get lost.

Hi,
he says again. He towers over me. We are in the lounge, a small triangular room enclosed by unbreakable glass. There are games. The games are always missing pieces. There is no way to play Scrabble. You have to make up your own language, which actually works just as well; none of you makes sense to anyone else, but you do understand one another at some deep level, as if you are all in on some conspiracy or joke. The games underscore the deep futility of all things.

Hi,
he says yet again. I look up at him out of the corner of my eye. It is very black outside and we can see the skyline of the city, where I know I have been, though that was years ago, which might have been a few days before. I am sitting in a pile of magazines, playing solitaire with half a deck and keeping an eye on a man who is no longer towering but has a face resembling a large moon, glowing.

What's your name?
he asks.

This one I know. Very firmly, I say,
Marya. My name is Marya.

I am extremely satisfied with this name. No one ever knows how to pronounce it except for the other patients on psych wards.

Marya,
he says in wonder.
That's a pretty name.
He holds out his hand.
I'm the prophet Jeremiah,
he says, and we shake hands very seriously.

He looks away thoughtfully, gazing into the broad expanse of night. He turns his face to me.

Have we met already?
he asks. He holds out his hand.
My name is the prophet Jeremiah. I mean, I am the prophet Jeremiah.
He pauses, laughing softly.
That's why my name is Jeremiah.

I nod, understanding that he is mad, and I am grateful that I know my name, which is
Marya.
I am in the
Hospital,
where all the nurses know me, and I am safe, for this particular moment in time. It is
Night.

***

There are four rooms in this world, and I don't know how they are connected—my room, the main room, the padded room, and the room with the Plexiglas walls. There is also a hallway, but I don't know where it leads or how it is related to the rooms. I have flashes of places: there is the view of the ceiling when I am lying on a bed with white sheets and a crinkly sound (the plastic-covered mattress). I can feel the bedsprings in my back. I worry they'll eventually start coming upward in a screwing motion, twisting into my back and right through me, screwing me to the bed. And then there is the main room, where I sit all day and all night. Beyond that is the room with Plexiglas walls, which upsets me a little; if I were in that room, I could be seen, so I stay out here where I am invisible. Except at night. At night, the Plexiglas is bright and safe, the light at the end of the tunnel, and the fluorescent lights move into your skull with their comforting crackling buzz. Sometimes I stand outside it and press my face against it, looking in. Sometimes I go in and press my face against it, looking out.

I am at my best at night. I have strange, fleeting meetings with the other people on the ward. I play a complex game of solitaire and do not look at the people behind the desk. I get in the habit of making myself a cup of orange tea. I sit with my back to the desk. I put my feet on the heater, my Styrofoam cup between my hands, and look out into the dark, which is made of velvet so soft and heavy you could gather it up in your hands if you weren't locked in. When I get up and go to the window, I see the ground some number of stories below, and it is blanketed with snow, which looks blue in the moonlight. The trees are bare. This is how I know it is winter.

Here on the ward, the pacers pass through the main room on their way up and down the halls. Some of them mumble to themselves, or shout and fling their arms, only to be shushed by the staff. Others are quiet, heads down, thinking whatever thoughts they think. The twitchers sit for a second, then bounce up, turn
circles, sit back down again, twitching, in contrast to the ones who are motionless, hunched over their laps, staring dully at their feet or the floor. Then there are the people like me, wrapped in blankets or robes or hospital gowns over their pajamas. Some of us have loved ones in our lives who will bring us things like slippers, or clothes; some of us get dressed, but others stay in pajamas all day. Occasionally you'll have your screaming, your frenzy, your drooling torpor, your bizarre, loud commentary, sometimes delusional, sometimes threatening, and then you'll have your padded room. From that padded room, you hear muffled screaming, or muffled roars, and the dull thump of the person inside pounding on the heavy metal door.

I am sitting here on my heater, peaceful, bothering no one. I am listening to the hum in the room and in my head. My mind is slow and sticky. Sometimes a thought tries to go through it, but its feet get stuck as if in mud. I don't remember if I came in manic or depressed. I have always felt this way. I have been in here forever. There was no life before this life, here where the twitchers and the pacers and the still ones wash over me like a stream, and I am a small stone, worn smooth.

From out of nowhere a woman comes flying at me. She wants my seat. She wants to be by the window. She is shouting, waving her arms. She is leaning toward me, and her face seems to veer close and then far away. It is not attached to her body. Her body is near, threatening. She is angry with me, furious, she hates me, she will kill me if I don't move, I am looking at her funny, I am watching her, she says, she
knows
what I'm thinking. She hits me. It takes me a minute to register this fact. I watch her hand move toward my face, batting me with her fist the way a cat bats a ball with its paw. The feeling of being hit comes to me, delayed. I find I have lifted my hand to my face as if to be certain that it's there, that it has been hit. Magically, instantly, the staff is hauling her away. Where did they come from? They drag her by the arms, she
is still leaning toward me, her face contorted and red. Her shouts fade away and I sit looking at my hand.