The Eden Express (35 page)

I hate to think I’ve come this far, carefully nourishing my credibility every inch of the way, only to blow it this close to the end. But if I were asked to swear on all that’s holy that I had no extraordinary powers, I could not do it. As uncomfortable as it made me, I had extraordinary powers.

I have no such powers now. I hope I never have them again. I’m glad there isn’t very much concrete evidence to back up the contention that I had such powers then. Mostly there are just some eye-witness accounts a good cross-examiner could make look pretty silly.

The worst thing about the powers was how little control I had over them. They coincided with the blanks. The more rational control I had, the less power I had. So the powers were to me a powerlessness. I didn’t have the faintest idea of what went on in those blanks. I’d come out of them and by the way people were looking at me and the questions they asked, I got bits and pieces of it. The bits and pieces added up to power, power I doubt that I would have trusted myself with even if I had been able to control it.

The power phenomenon had a neat, almost ceremonious ending which sets it apart from other things. The voices, visions, misperceptions, irrationality, bizarre behavior all faded fuzzily, much the way
they had come. Milder versions still come to visit occasionally. I’d just as soon they didn’t, but as long as the powers stay away, I don’t mind too much.

 

It was a few days before Easter. I was in the little windowless room. Why I was there, when I was allowed to go to the bathroom, when food came, when pills came, were all a complete mystery. I had lost any hope that anything nice was going to happen. No one had come to visit me forever. No nurse, orderly, doctor, patient, no nobody wanted anything to do with me. I was hopeless.

But then a miracle. The door opened.

“Bring him in here.” A voice that can open doors. A voice that people with keys pay attention to. It was a lot more than could be said for my voice. And what’s more, a voice that seemed interested in me.

I was taken into the room diagonally across the corridor. It had windows, curtains, flowers, paintings, books, paper, pens. It was all anyone could ever ask for.

To whom do I owe this honor, this reprieve from windowless, everything elseless nothingness?

I owed this honor to Wally.

“Sit down, Mark.” I sat down. “My name’s Walter. Call me Wally.”

“Wally? Wally? My roommate in prep school was called Wally. His last name was Walters. His father fell six stories onto a sidewalk but came out OK except for one leg being shorter than the other which gave him a limp.”

Wally seemed to know all this and a lot more. I didn’t get a chance to find out how he knew all these things. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. But he was answering so many questions there didn’t seem to be much reason to get a word in edgewise anyway.

Most of what he said wouldn’t have made much sense to anyone but me. It would have been just another poor crazy person raving his
brains out. What it boiled down to was that I was being divested of my power.

“You’re not the conductor any more. Someone else is in charge of the train.” He seemed to be congratulating me for having done my part well and saying that now I could relax. He filled me in on lots of the places, people, and things I had been worried about. Told me that for the most part I had caught on beautifully, far better than anyone expected.

He must have been listening to my ravings for the past few days. Maybe he just wanted me to shut up so he could get some sleep. He knew all the key words, all the themes, key players, etc., and how to put them together. It worked like a charm. I don’t think I did any raving after that. I felt great relief. My prayers had been answered. I had no more power. I could not be just one of the fellas.

Meals started coming more regularly. Orderlies and nurses stopped beating me up and sticking needles in my ass. They let me out of the little room more and more. And then my mother showed up and then Virginia.

Wally was gone the day after our visit. I tried to find out more about him but no one seemed to know much. According to the nurses he was just another patient.

Easter morning I was sitting just outside the little room rolling a cigarette, still trying to put together some of the things Wally had said and who the hell he was.

A breeze came through the ward. It smelled like spring. It was the first smell I had noticed in months that hadn’t been death.

Something was saying good-by to me.

“You’re still smoking cigarettes.” It wasn’t the voices exactly.

It wanted me to notice more than the fact that I still smoked cigarettes. It wanted me to recognize myself.

“Cigarettes? Sportsman? Export? Tobacco? Papers?” It was chuck-ling,
almost laughing, feigning amazed disbelief, making sure there were no hard feelings. I almost felt an arm around my shoulder.

“Good-by, sport. Who would ever guess?” And it was gone.

Tears started streaming down my face. They tasted sweet I sat there smoking through the tears, tasting them both, and how good they were.

Two nurses came up and asked if I was all right.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes. Everything is going to be OK from now on.”

They seemed to believe me. They seemed as relieved as was and on the verge of tears themselves. They offered some tea and hot cross buns. I accepted.

 

BIOCHEMISTRY. At first my friends and I were doubtful that there was any medical problem. It was all politics and philosophy. The hospital bit was just grasping at straws when else failed.

It took quite a bit to convince us that anything as pedestrian as biochemistry was relevant to something as profound and poetic as what I was going through. For me to admit the possibility that I might not have gone nuts again had they given me pills when I left was a tremendous concession.

It’s such a poetic affliction from inside and out, it’s not hard to see how people have assumed that schizophrenia must have poetic causes and that any therapy would have to be poetic as well. A lot of my despair of ever getting well was based on the improbability of finding a poet good enough to deal with all that had happened to me. It’s hard to say when I accepted the notion that the problem was biochemical, it went so hard against everything I had been taught about mental illness. At the farm we were coming more and more to seeing physical illness as psychological. A cold or slipping with a hammer and smashing a finger was psychological. Schizophrenia was biochemical?

But the idea had a lot to recommend it. The hopelessness of dealing with it on a poetic level was the start. The doctor who had apparently
been able to bring me out of it was working from a biochemical model. According to most authorities who believed in this or that poetic theory, my case was hopeless. The biochemists said otherwise. The poets in the business gave little hope and huge bills. The chemists fixed me up with embarrassingly inexpensive, simple nonprescription pills. Vitamins mostly. The biochemists said no one was to blame. The poets all had notions that required someone’s having made some mistake.

The AMA had no particular affection for megavitamin therapy. That was something. Anything the AMA hated couldn’t be all bad.

The more research I studied, the more impressed I was. I remain converted.

 

It’s impossible to say whether full insight and understanding would help a schizophrenic or not. We all have vastly greater capacities for experience than for understanding. A hundred of the best shrinks in the world working day and night for years would be doing well to scratch the surface of a day in anyone’s life. Schizophrenia multiplies the problem manyfold and disability makes the problem more pressing. Since there is always so much more to be understood and dealt with, the notion that understanding will clear up the problem can’t be tested.

 

They used electroshock on me. There was nothing I or my parents or any of my friends could do to stop them. I was scared to death of it. It probably did me some good.

I was given no advance warning about it. One morning my breakfast tray didn’t show up and I knew what that meant. The rationality of my efforts to avoid it is the best proof I have that I was already in pretty good shape. I talked to the nurses perfectly logically. I remembered phone numbers and talked with my mother and then Virginia, trying to get them to do something about it. I think it was another case of hierarchy lag. The nurses knew I was OK, the orderlies knew I
was OK, but the doctors who gave orders for such things hadn’t caught on. They were several days behind.

I thought the purpose of it was to make me forget things that were bothering me. I composed a series of ten rhyming couplets that included all the most awful things that had ever happened to me and scratched the first letter of each line in the wall behind my mattress. For the experience itself, I was knocked out with sodium pentothal. Just before I went under I remember saying to the doctor in charge that I didn’t think this was such a good idea. When I came to, about fifteen minutes later, I was disoriented for a bit but remembered my ten rhyming couplets without having to look at the wall. Except for a bitch of a headache, I felt fine.

I think that maybe a lot of the horror people feel about shock comes from confusing its effects with those of mental illness itself, or some of the other medications often used. The dull, glazed look, the amnesia and confusion found in mental patients may be caused by a number of things, but electroshock is what people usually blame because it sounds so awful.

If I found myself going under again, I’d choose electroshock ahead of a lot of things. My only complaint is that they made no attempt to clear up my misconceptions about it and that they didn’t use it earlier. I really didn’t need it by the time they got around to using it. This isn’t to say that shock isn’t grossly misused in some situations.

 

GETTING OUT RIGHT. “This time we’re going to do it right.” Virginia said it so often I started thinking there might be some sort of hidden meaning or message. “This time we’re going to do it right. We’re not going to make the mistakes we made last time.”

I, for one, wasn’t all that sure we had made mistakes. They were the ones who blew it. If they had given me a little more information and some pills, everything would have been fine.

If we had just listened to Dr. Dale, everything would have been OK. That was certainly the version he and lots of the other staff were trying to put over. He never came out and said it in so many words. He didn’t have to. We all felt it hanging over our heads.

 

When I was finally released from the hospital, I bore little resemblance to the dynamo of assertion I had been on my first release. I had nothing but a feeling of extreme fragility and vulnerability and a little hope that some day things would be different.

I didn’t adjust well to being fragile and vulnerable. Virginia or my parents or anyone else could break me inadvertently. Just a slight bit of human clumsiness and
snap
.

I was once again completely financially dependent on my parents. There were the hospital bills, and the prospects of my being able to handle any sort of job in the near future seemed slim. Dale said at least a year.

I was cramping Virginia’s style, the farm’s style, everyone’s style. And for what were all these people going out of their way? A hollow, shaky shell that didn’t know what to think about anything.

We got a little apartment in Vancouver. Dale said it wasn’t such a hot idea to just head right back up to the farm. Virginia still kept saying, “This time we’re going to do it right.”

My mother and Virginia took care of most of the arrangements. I just sort of dragged along.

Taking Thorazine was part of doing things right. I hated Thorazine but tried not to talk about hating it. Hating Thorazine probably wasn’t a healthy sign. But Thorazine has lots of unpleasant side effects. It makes you groggy, lowers your blood pressure, making you dizzy and faint when you stand up too quickly. If you go out in the sun your skin gets red and hurts like hell. It makes muscles rigid and twitchy.

The side effects were bad enough, but I liked what the drug was
supposed to do even less. It’s supposed to keep you calm, dull, uninterested and uninteresting. No doctor or nurse ever came out and said so in so many words, but what it was was an antihero drug. Dale kept saying to me, “You mustn’t try to be a hero.” Thorazine made heroics impossible.

What the drug is supposed to do is keep away hallucinations. What I think it does is just fog up your mind so badly you don’t notice the hallucinations or much else.

My father sent me an article in
Psychology Today
on an experiment with schizophrenics to evaluate the effectiveness of Thorazine. The conclusion was that patients who before their illness had been well socialized, able to make friends and function effectively on a social level, actually recovered more quickly without Thorazine than with it. People who had been all fucked up before their illness benefited from Thorazine.

I was so fucked up on Thorazine at the time that I had a great deal of difficulty figuring out to which group I belonged, but I knew I hated Thorazine.

I managed to cheat on the Thorazine some. Very whimpy unheroic cheating. I deliberately misinterpreted what some nurse had said and skipped a few days. I felt great. My mother and Virginia both remarked on how fast I was recovering and how chipper I was getting. The spirit of our little apartment jumped a hundredfold. I wasn’t cramping anyone’s style any more. I even got chipper enough to tell them why I was so chipper. They were a little worried about that, but I was so obviously in a good state of mind they almost started questioning Dale’s judgment.

When I went to see Dale that week it was far and away the nicest visit we’d ever had. He said I was making a remarkable recovery, I was putting on much-needed weight, color was coming back into my face, I was in better shape than he had ever seen me. If I just stuck with his
regimen and kept improving, I could maybe visit the farm for a few days in a couple of weeks.