Sleeping Awake (4 page)

"Yes,"
Cienna replied, after the journalist made a similar observation. "And yet
I chose to model."

The
woman smiled, set aside her iPad, and said, "The new breed of model:
intelligent, well-bred and beautiful."

Cienna
gave another tiny, bashful smile, looked down at her perfectly manicured nails
and blushed. “Thank you.”

She
should have been an actress.

Still,
there was always something missing from the articles that I read. It was
something that all of the interviewers seemed incapable of questioning. They
never stopped to wonder why the girl who had everything chose to smile for the
camera and have everyone dying to be her and know her. It was obvious that
Cienna never bothered to tell them.

*~*

That night, I dreamed of my
first failed suicide attempt. It could have just happened for how fresh the
memory was. I woke up the next morning after the doctor had pumped the sleeping
pills from my stomach to a look on
Maman's
face that for as long
as I live, I will never forget.

Her eyes were
fluffy clouds, barely able to keep from bursting and bleeding a waterfall of
tears. When she saw that I had woken up, she winced and her jaw tightened. Her
eyes were dull greens in a black hole. The worst thing, however, was the
overwhelming disappointment that she would later express to me. 

I’ll never be
able to look at a rosary again without seeing Maman, clinging to hers like a
Band Aid, weeping while she thought that I was asleep, and demanding that God
tell her what she had done wrong.

**~*~**~*~*~**

When I went down to breakfast the next morning, it was
to find a disturbingly large bouquet of red roses in the center of the kitchen
table. Camelea hovered over it, sniffing away and swooning like a bothersome
fruit fly.

“Your suitor sent you flowers?” I asked.

“You missed Mass,” she replied. I didn’t need to turn
around to see the disapproving glower on her face.

I went over to the coffee press; tea wasn’t going to
be enough today. “I overslept. Forgive me.”

I didn’t bother explaining to Camelea that Mass was
something that I went to in order to appease Maman and that I didn’t believe in
the fairy in the sky. A lecture on the personal furnace that awaited me in the afterlife
was not what I needed after the only time that I had managed to sleep in the
last three days was to dream about my suicidal days of yonder.

“Not drinking tea this morning?”

I turned. Cienna had taken her place at the table. A
bottle of Nutella was soon in her hand.

“These are for you!” Camelea announced, a drugged-up
look on her face as she pushed the bouquet towards Cienna.

Cienna slammed the plastic bottle onto the kitchen
table. “That fucking boy!”

A boy had sent Cienna roses? First Saint Camelea,
patron saint of all psycho-fanatical Christians, had gone out on a date. Now
Cienna, a girl who didn’t seem to have any male friends, much less a boy
friend, was being sent flowers.

Camelea must have recognised the significance of this,
because she ignored the curse word, and in a voice of heightened rapture, said,
“Who is it from?”

“Nicolaas Calisto, He Who Annoys Me The Most, sent the
flowers,” Cienna snapped, teeth snarled as she hastily stood up.

“Isn’t he the one who sent you flowers this spring
when The Westbury Times announced that you were selected to intern at Donna
Karen this fall?” Camelea asked. She looked positively delighted that Cienna
might have a persistent suitor.

“Yes!” Cienna barked, snatching up the vase of
flowers. “The same fucker who also sent a bouquet to my photo shoot last week
in Central Park!”

“Where are you going?” Camelea called, jumping up as
Cienna stormed out of the kitchen.

“To burn these roses with my hair straightener!”
Cienna’s voice came round the corner. “Then I’m going to send them back to him
via FedEx, the stupid fuck!”

“No you can’t do that!” Camelea jumped from her seat
and went after Cienna.

Thankfully, none of them noticed the flood that was
rushing out of my eyes. Cienna and Camelea having men who were interested in
them, while my carnival received no visitors, shouldn’t have reduced me to such
a pathetic state of misery, and yet it had. I sat for ten minutes, convulsing
like an epileptic and trying to stifle my howls.

I thought about calling my therapist at Golden Ridge, confessing
that I was going through withdrawal, and ask for something to help assuage the
symptoms. Instead, I left my untouched coffee and went upstairs to the darkness
of my room. There was no way in hell that I was going to confess to such a
thing. I’d surely end up back in that hellhole, sitting across from that
insipid man.

*~*

I had to meet with Dr. Stein
every afternoon. His office looked like the inside of a log cabin—there
were even deer heads decorating the walls. We were kindred spirits, the deer
and I, put on display for the world to see and unable to do anything about it.

From the moment that I arrived
at Golden Ridge Hospital, I was poked, prodded and examined by all. I was a
ride at a fair: up and down the Ferris wheel. Everyone came as they pleased,
and when they’d had enough, they left with their notepads filled with furiously
scribbled notes ready to make their prognosis. Everyone was there, supposedly,
to help me, to save me from myself.

“Tell me about school Noira.”
Dr. Stein had us seated before the fireplace.

“What about school?” I asked.

I didn’t want to talk about
school; I didn’t want to talk about anything. Sleep turned my eyelids into wet
cement as I struggled to stay awake. Visions of lying in bed, buried under
miles and miles of comforters, plagued my mind.

Those first few days were like
stumbling through a thick fog with no lights. The Cymbalta rendered me a victim
of insomnia, and the antipsychotics transformed every object into a massively
comfortable bed. I wasn’t allowed to nap in the days either. There were all
sorts of activities that were geared towards my recovery. At Golden Ridge, they
didn’t use words like “insane” or “normal.” I was just “unwell,” and if I
followed their tried and tested program, I would have a speedy recovery and be
able to take on the world just like everyone else who had “graduated” from
there.

I wasn’t unwell; I was a
failure. I knew that they’d never understand, so I kept quiet. Like a string
puppet, I let them pull me wherever they wanted me to go.

“I understand that you stopped
going to class,” Dr. Stein continued.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you tell me all
about that?”

“There was no point.” I said
simply. “I didn’t know what I was going to pursue my degree in. What was the
point of going to class?”

The other students had
direction and knew their purpose in life. I couldn’t pretend as if I gave a
damn about how liberals and realists differed in their opinions on whether or
not states should utilise multilateral foreign policies. If I wasn’t majoring
in politics, what was the point of sitting through an international relations
class?

I explained all of this to Dr.
Stein.

“I see,” he said. His pen ran
from left to right on his notepad as he struggled to keep up.

“And what about your cellular
phone? Your mother says that she stopped being able to contact you in early
October. You had it disconnected? Why?”

 “Must I really go
through all of this? I feel tired. Perhaps after I’ve rested.” I started to
stand.

“Noira,” Dr. Stein said.
“We’re all here to help you, but I’m afraid that we cannot help you if you do
not tell me what happened that day.”

“And then I can go to sleep?”
I looked him in the eyes.

“I promise.”

So I told him everything. I
turned off my cell phone to avoid people and their questions, to give myself
more time to think without them pressuring me and lecturing me about how bright
my future was and all of the potential that I had. I saw darkness in my future,
and my only potential was to end up being an NYU dropout.

“I see.” Dr. Stein said,
scribbling a few notes on his legal pad.

“Based on your medical
records, you’ve lost a lot of weight. Did you stop eating?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Why?”

“I wasn’t hungry. Why else
would I stop eating?”

More scribbles.

“And the cuts on your arms.
How did you get those?”

I looked down at the long,
purple gashes on my arm and fingered them. How had I gotten them indeed?

“I don’t really remember
much.”

“Why don’t you try?” Dr. Stein
smiled. Unlike Anne-Marie, my nurse, his smile did not reach his eyes. There
was nothing loving about him at all. He was approaching retirement, and perhaps
it was from the stress of heading a psychiatric hospital, but his face seemed
to be folding into itself, like he was retreating from yet another crazy
patient. He looked like a ghoul from some unfortunate child’s nightmare: a
ghoul in large, square glasses and a bald-spot in the middle of his head.

“Try to remember a little,”
Dr. Stein prodded.

I closed my eyes, eager to get
away from him. Furniture lounged over me, drawers open; monsters taunting their
prey.

“The furniture was bothering
me, I remember that much; the dresser especially. It kept jeering at me, like a
jackal. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t stop.”

“Wouldn’t stop what?”

“Looking at me,” I replied.

“The dresser would not stop
looking at you?” Dr. Stein said.

I decided that I despised him
and his thinning brown hair and U-Haul-sized nose.

“Yes, and why are your
repeating what I am saying?”

I wanted to end the session,
even if it meant not recovering and never leaving. Anything to not have to sit
there across from him as he scribbled in his notepad and repeated me. I didn’t
need a mimic.

“I’m sorry, Noira. Please
continue.”

I gave him an appraising look
before continuing. “I decided to get rid of it. I pushed it out of my loft, but
it couldn’t fit in the elevator. I shoved it down the stairs instead. I assumed
that watching the dresser shatter into pieces would bring me relief, but I was
wrong. The impact of the dresser hitting the landing made my ears ring. The
ringing started to vibrate through my body. I grabbed my ears, but it wouldn’t
stop. I could feel it moving through me, and I tried to stop it.”

Dr. Stein looked up from his
notes as I paused. “How did you try to stop it?”

I eyed the purple gashes on my
arms again. “That’s how I got these,” I explained. “I started to scratch at my
skin… I still felt the vibrations, so I dug deeper with my nails. The midget
next door came running out of her loft. She started screaming when she saw me.”

“Calling people ‘midget’ isn’t
polite, Noira,” Dr. Stein interrupted me.

“She’s a legal midget,” I
snapped.

“Please continue.”

I glared at him.

“Noira…”

“Her husband grabbed me while
she called the police,” I said. “I tried to explain to him that the ringing was
what was bothering me. All I needed was for him to let me go so that I could
dig beneath the surface and stop the vibrations. He didn’t seem to hear me
though—he kept shouting to his wife about my bleeding…”

I stared down at my arms and
ran my fingers along the welts. They felt like silk against the sand of my dry
skin. It had been two weeks since the incident had occurred, and yet pain
sliced through my body, as if I were still digging away at my flesh. So acute
was the sensation that I still cannot remember the event without involuntarily
spasms.

“Continue,” Dr. Stein prodded.

I swallowed, continuing in my
deadpan voice. “The ringing seemed to be getting louder; it was escaping with
the blood. I felt as if I was drowning in it. I tried to get free of the
husband so that I could stop it, but he wouldn’t let me go. He didn’t
understand; no one did.”

“I understand that you had an
altercation with the paramedics when they arrived?” Dr. Stein asked.

“There was no altercation,” I
said, sitting up in my seat. “I was simply trying to explain to them about the
ringing, but no one would listen to me. I pushed them away from me, because I
was trying to show them where the ringing was coming from. One of them stabbed
me with something, and then everything became dark. I woke up at Beth Israel.”

“And then what?” Dr. Stein asked, looking up.

“And then I was taken here, obviously.”

We were back to the foolish questions.

“And why do you think that you were taken here,
Noira?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Stein,” I said coldly. “You’re the
one with the PhD, and I barely made it through my second year at university.
You tell me.”

*~*

I didn’t want to go back to
Golden Ridge any more than I wanted to take the medication that made me dead
inside. I resigned myself to the tears, the nausea, the mini-electrocutions and
the dizzy spells. I stayed in bed that day, sweating as if I was lying in the
middle of the Sahara, and receiving periodic jolts to my brain. When Cienna came
in to call me down to dinner, I faked a headache and pretended to be sleeping.
I didn’t sleep. My mind was a motion picture of my depressing days, and every
reel brought on even more tears.

Maman was
waiting for me when I woke up at Beth Israel last November. As if sculpted into
a gothic statue, her hands seemed frozen in their grip around her rosary, her
face, molded into the folds and wrinkles of misery. She was in all black. The
only sign of life were the feverish movements of her lips as she prayed.

I tried to call
out to her, but I might as well have been a baby for the gurgling that came
out. Maman’s eyes opened. Almost reverently, she stood and left. Dr. Rosenfeld,
an elderly man with a receding hairline, appeared a few minutes later. I lay
there with my eyes closed as he explained that he’d already spoken with Maman
and had made the necessary arrangements to have me transferred to Golden Ridge.

“Do you understand everything
that I have said, Noira?” he asked.