Swish (13 page)

When I’m wandering the aisles of Rite Aid and “Without You” comes on the store radio, it’s not such a big deal; I can take a moment, get wistful, and then go back to hoping that if I brush my teeth with Rembrandt Plus Toothpaste I will be more popular.

But in front of a room full of type-A twentysomethings, shrieking, “Around the world! Knees higher! I know you can do it! Show those calories you mean it!” I found that hearing anybody sing
You always smile, but in your eyes, your sorrow shows…. I can’t live if living is without you, I can’t live, I can’t give any more
was unbearable.

Some months ago, several minutes into a class I was subbing for a fellow instructor, a very awkward middle-aged man in the back of the room stopped exercising and went over to lean against the wall. I checked to make sure he was all right and not having a heart attack, and he said everything was fine, but he stayed by the wall for the rest of the hour. After class was over and everybody else had left, I asked him again whether he was okay.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Of what?” I asked.

“Everything.” He looked so forlorn that I put a hand on his shoulder, whereupon he started to cry. I did not know how to respond. This was not a situation that had been covered in my American Fitness and Aerobics Association Primary Group Exercise certification class.

After a few moments he regained control of himself. “I’m starting a new job next month,” he said, “and I’m really worried about it. I’m scared of getting old, I’m scared of losing my boyfriend.”

Under ordinary circumstances I am a very good listener, mixing warm affirmation with insightful questions in whatever ratio seems appropriate. But this man might as well have been talking to the Babylonian Sphinx. I longed to be somewhere else, the sands of the Gobi desert with no water, anywhere but here. “I’m trying really hard to live in the moment,” he said.

“I haven’t lived in the moment since 1999!” I laughed desperately. This did not cure his depression.

Eventually I asked him whether he wanted to try exercising again, just the two of us; he said he did, and I spent fifteen minutes teaching him the most basic routine I could come up with, at which he sucked. He kept getting in his own way, lifting his right knee instead of his left or moving backward instead of forward. Finally he did it right twice through and I said brightly, “Great job I have to go meet my friend for brunch bye!” and fled as if the studio had been in flames. I did not have to go meet my friend for brunch. But I could not bear to look into this man’s eyes any longer and see such voracious need, because what if I realized that I was standing in front of a mirror?

It was on a cold Tuesday in January that I taught my first aerobics class in the group home for the severely mentally ill.

I have been fascinated by mental illness ever since I can remember. It would be inaccurate to say that I am dating my boyfriend Mike
because
he is a psychiatrist, but I cannot deny that postcoital small talk about Capgras’s syndrome (a neurological disorder that leads people to believe that their family members and pets have been replaced by impostors) is not least among the perquisites of our relationship.

The idea of becoming a group fitness instructor to the insane had taken root in my mind when Mike refused, no matter how piteously I begged him, to smuggle me into the Christmas party for his hospital’s psych ward. “Why are you so interested?” he asked.

“Because I would get to see crazy people in their natural habitat!”

“The patients go for a walk outside every day. Why don’t you just hang out in the park and wait for them to show up?”

“That would only be seeing them from a distance.”

“Maybe you could come and teach them aerobics,” he said, and though he was joking I understood at once that he had unwittingly revealed my destiny. I couldn’t teach at the hospital, it turned out, because of the insurance risk, but I asked around and found a group home that was interested.

This wasn’t just a self-serving idea. The medications that control the most severe illnesses also tend to cause serious weight gain and its attendant health problems, so I would be helping the severely mentally ill avoid diabetes, hypertension, and back fat.

Most importantly, though, I would be able to tell people that I taught aerobics in a lunatic asylum.

There are 297 conditions listed in the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,
the resource psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness. To me the most disturbing of these are the psychotic disorders. Depression I can handle; anxiety I can handle; Munchausen by proxy I actually get a little kick out of. But these disorders do not necessarily cut those who suffer them off from reality. A psychotic can hallucinate mocking voices, inhabit imaginary universes, become somebody who died three thousand years ago. I really wish people would stop saying “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” while raising their eyebrows to underscore the deceptively simple profundity of these words. Because insanity is not doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; insanity is thinking you’re the Empress of China.

(Unless of course you
are
the Empress of China, in which case insanity is throwing yourself a thirty-million-tael birthday party instead of strengthening the military, so that in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion it’s a piece of cake for the Eight-Nation Alliance to seize the Forbidden Palace and send you into exile.)

“Psychosis is a protective measure,” Mike told me once. “If you believe you’re Rameses II then you don’t have to deal with the fact that you’re actually really sick and living on the streets and addicted to heroin.”

“So your job is to take people who think of themselves as extraordinary and gifted and amazing and force them to see that they’re actually crazy homeless junkies?”

“Pretty much.”

I get it; I really do. But I still believe that there are ways in which the disease is preferable to the cure. The people whose voices order them to hurt others, or whisper to them that passersby are actually witches trying to kill them, them I can understand medicating. But I would rather die in two months as king of the elves than live for years watching everything I have worked to become go to wrack and ruin.

Because one of the most troubling aspects of psychotic disorders is that, though medicine can slow them down, it seems to be unable to halt their progress. Today’s antipsychotic drugs are somewhat less likely than their forebears to induce things like sustained painful muscle spasms and irreversible facial tics, but even with medication the odds are apparently one in three that if you are schizophrenic your mind will sooner or later turn to gruel.

“Would you still love me if I developed schizophrenia?” I asked Mike.

“It’s probably too late for you. Schizophrenia usually shows up in men by the early twenties.”

“Well, would you still love me if I developed late-onset schizophrenia?”

“We would always be very good friends.”

I know patients are seriously ill when Mike calls them cute. “We had the cutest kid come in today,” he’ll say. “She was an intergalactic supermodel.”

“What did she think of Tyra Banks?” I’ll say.

“Totally over.”

The Dorothea Dix Home for Assisted Living was only a few blocks from where I lived, and when I found the address I immediately began to envy the severely mentally ill for living in a fabulous Victorian High Gothic mansion. The interior decorating scheme, unfortunately, featured not mosaics and girandoles but a great number of linoleum tiles, though their flattening effect was mitigated by the light that streamed in from the wide windows. A large man named Kyle led me downstairs to the activity room, where he pushed the couches to the walls and against the pool table and pointed me to the electric outlet.

People started trickling in as I set up the boom box; by four-thirty, the official start time, I had nine students, six women and three men, facing me in two rows. I asked their names, forgot them at once (except for Doug, who impressed himself upon my memory by drooling on my hand when he shook it (drool being a common side effect of antipsychotic medication)), and started the CD. As we warmed up by marching in place, I told the students to breathe deeply on my count. “Breathe in,” I said, lifting my arms, and then “Breathe out,” lowering them to my sides.

“Breathe in breathe out?” asked a tall caramel-skinned woman in the back row.

“Yes.” I demonstrated a couple more times and then we started.

At Mike’s urging I had put together the simplest routine I could think of, but I hadn’t gone nearly far enough. These people had trouble moving in time to the music and in the right direction; if I forced them to attempt grapevines, chassés, or mambos I would surely regret it. Thinking quickly, I replaced all the traveling steps in the routine with kicks, knee lifts, and hamstring curls, accompanied by peppy arm movements. We also did some finger and toe exercises, to help forestall diabetic breakdown in blood flow to the extremities.

The severely mentally ill seemed to be having a really good time. Three of them never stopped grinning. One gazed off into the middle distance but a smile played at the corners of his lips. A short woman in the front row started whooping in excitement (whooping is always heartening to an instructor).

After twenty minutes or so, we stopped and took a few minutes to cool off. “Arms slowly above your head,” I said, “and then down.”

“Breathe in breathe out,” said the tall woman in the back row. It wasn’t clear to me whether she was asking if she should breathe in breathe out again along with the arm movements or admonishing me for neglecting to instruct the class to breathe in breathe out.

“Yes. Breathe in, breathe out,” I said.

“Breathe in breathe out!” she said again.

“Right!”

“Breathe in breathe out!”

“Breathe in breathe out yes now everybody go sit on the couches.” I turned the lights off, put on the cooldown CD I had grabbed on my way out the door, and forwarded it to C.H.H. Parry’s setting of Psalm 84.
Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs,
sang the choir,
for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.
I instructed my students to shut their eyes and imagine pools of water and relax their muscles and let their heads slump down onto their chests and feel the stress of the last week drain from their bodies.

I let the CD track play to its end as my students sat in the dark. “Okay, I’ll see you guys next Tuesday!” I chirped, and left.

As I walked home, I tried to figure out how I would frame this story to my friends. I had laughed to them beforehand, “Yeah, I’ll be all like, ‘I don’t care if Napoleon is telling you to hold your arms above your head, I want you to move them in circles!’” But nothing remotely like this had been called for.

It would be simple to say that, having thought of the severely mentally ill as a joke, I had been forced to confront our shared humanity. But that wasn’t what was going on. I had already known very well that mental illness doesn’t change the fundamental makeup of human character. I had cracked jokes about my students-to-be, yes, but I had done so recognizing, at the back of my mind, that laughter is a powerful defense against the threat posed by the hideous disintegration of personhood. If I can keep at a distance the man walking down the subway car pouring orange soda from a two-liter bottle onto each seat and carefully wiping it up with newspaper, if I can think of him as fodder for humor, then I do not have to ask how the world can be so pitiless as to have allowed one of its children to come to this. All those starving-Ethiopian jokes in the eighties were popular for a reason.