“How about castor oil?” said the head nurse. She was overworked.
“This place is a fascist snake pit,” said Lisa. “Give me a double dose of Ex-Lax.”
Now she had six Ex-Lax and she was ready to bargain. She stood in front of Daisy’s door.
“Hey, Daisy,” she called. “Hey, Daisy.” She kicked the door.
“Fuck off,” said Daisy.
“Hey, Daisy.”
Daisy hissed.
Lisa leaned close to the door. “I got something you want,” she said.
“Bullshit,” said Daisy. Then she opened the door.
Georgina and I had been watching from down the hall. When Daisy opened the door we craned our necks, but it was too dark in Daisy’s room to see anything. When the door shut behind Lisa, a strange sweet smell wafted briefly into the hall.
Lisa didn’t come out for a long time. We gave up waiting and went over to the cafeteria for lunch.
Lisa gave her report during the evening news. She stood in front of the TV and spoke loud enough to drown out Walter Cronkite.
“Daisy’s room is full of chicken,” she said. “She eats chicken in there. She has a special method she showed me. She peels all the meat off because she likes to keep the carcasses whole. Even the wings—she peels the meat off them. Then she puts the carcass on the floor next to the last carcass. She has about nine now. She says when she’s got fourteen it’s time to leave.”
“Did she give you any chicken?” I asked.
“I didn’t want any of her disgusting chicken.”
“Why does she do it?” Georgina asked.
“Hey, man,” said Lisa, “I don’t know everything.”
“What about the laxatives?” Polly wanted to know.
“Needs ’em. Needs ’em because of all the chicken.”
“There’s more to this than meets the eye,” said Georgina.
“Listen! I got access,” said Lisa. The discussion degenerated quickly after that.
Within the week there was more news about Daisy. Her father had bought her an apartment for Christmas. “A love nest,” Lisa called it.
Daisy was pleased with herself and spent more time out of her room, hoping that someone would ask her about the apartment. Georgina obliged.
“How big is the apartment, Daisy?”
“One bedroom, L-shaped living room, eat-in chicken.”
“You mean eat-in kitchen?”
“That’s what I said, asshole.”
“Where’s the apartment, Daisy?”
“Near the Mass. General.”
“On the way to the airport, like?”
“Near the Mass. General.” Daisy didn’t want to admit it was on the way to the airport.
“What do you like best about it?”
Daisy shut her eyes and paused, relishing her favorite part. “The sign.”
“What does the sign say?”
“ ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’ ” She clenched her hands with excitement. “See, every day people will drive past and read that sign and think, ‘Yeah, if I lived here I’d be home now,’ and I will be home. Motherfuckers.”
Daisy left early that year, to spend Christmas in her apartment.
“She’ll be back,” said Lisa. But Lisa for once was wrong.
One afternoon in May we were called to a special Hall Meeting.
“Girls,” said the head nurse, “I have some sad news.” We all leaned forward. “Daisy committed suicide yesterday.”
“Was she in her apartment?” asked Georgina.
“Did she shoot herself?” asked Polly.
“Who’s Daisy? Do I know Daisy?” asked the Martian’s girlfriend.
“Did she leave a note?” I asked.
“The details aren’t important,” said the head nurse.
“It was her birthday, wasn’t it?” asked Lisa. The head nurse nodded.
We all observed a moment of silence for Daisy.
My Suicide
Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk.
My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.
The debate was wearing me out. Once you’ve posed that question, it won’t go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t.
Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.
Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
I didn’t figure this out, though, until after I’d swallowed the fifty aspirin.
I had a boyfriend named Johnny who wrote me love poems—good ones. I called him up, said I was going to kill myself, left the phone off the hook, took my fifty aspirin, and realized it was a mistake. Then I went out to get some milk, which my mother had asked me to do before I took the aspirin.
Johnny called the police. They went to my house and told my mother what I’d done. She turned up in the A&P on Mass. Ave. just as I was about to pass out over the meat counter.
As I walked the five blocks to the A&P I was gripped by humiliation and regret. I’d made a mistake and I was going to die because of it. Perhaps I even deserved to die because of it. I began to cry about my death. For a moment, I felt compassion for myself and all the unhappiness I contained. Then things started to blur and whiz. By the time I reached the store, the world had been reduced to a narrow, throbbing tunnel. I’d lost my peripheral vision, my ears were ringing, my pulse was pounding. The bloody chops and steaks straining against their plastic wrappings were the last things I saw clearly.
Having my stomach pumped brought me around. They took a long tube and put it slowly up my nose and down the back of my throat. That was like being choked to death. Then they began to pump. That was like having blood drawn on a massive scale—the suction, the sense of tissue collapsing and touching itself in a way it shouldn’t, the nausea as all that was inside was pulled out. It was a good deterrent. Next time, I decided, I certainly wouldn’t take aspirin.
But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.
My airiness lasted for months. I did some of my homework. I stopped seeing Johnny and took up with my English teacher, who wrote even better poems, though not to me. I went to New York with him; he took me to the Frick to see the Vermeers.
The only odd thing was that suddenly I was a vegetarian.
I associated meat with suicide, because of passing out at the meat counter. But I knew there was more to it.
The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And, though I had a six-month respite from thinking about it, so was I.
Elementary Topography
Perhaps it’s still unclear how I ended u
p in there. It must have been something more than a pimple. I didn’t mention that I’d never seen that doctor before, that he decided to put me away after only fifteen minutes. Twenty, maybe. What about me was so deranged that in less than half an hour a doctor would pack me off to the nuthouse? He tricked me, though: a couple of weeks. It was closer to two years. I was eighteen.
I signed myself in. I had to, because I was of age. It was that or a court order, though they could never have gotten a court order against me. I didn’t know that, so I signed myself in.
I wasn’t a danger to society. Was I a danger to myself? The fifty aspirin—but I’ve explained them. They were metaphorical. I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a kind of self-abortion with those aspirin. It worked for a while. Then it stopped; but I had no heart to try again.
Take it from his point of view. It was 1967. Even in lives like his, professional lives lived out in the suburbs behind shrubbery, there was a strange undertow, a tug from the other world—the drifting, drugged-out, no-last-name youth universe—that knocked people off balance. One could call it “threatening,” to use his language. What are these kids doing? And then one of them walks into his office wearing a skirt the size of a napkin, with a mottled chin and speaking in monosyllables. Doped up, he figures. He looks again at the name jotted on the notepad in front of him. Didn’t he meet her parents at a party two years ago? Harvard faculty—or was it MIT? Her boots are worn down but her coat’s a good one. It’s a mean world out there, as Lisa would say. He can’t in good conscience send her back into it, to become flotsam on the subsocietal tide that washes up now and then in his office, depositing others like her. A form of preventive medicine.
Am I being too kind to him? A few years ago I read he’d been accused of sexual harassment by a former patient. But that’s been happening a lot these days, it’s become fashionable to accuse doctors. Maybe it was just too early in the morning for him as well as for me, and he couldn’t think of what else to do. Maybe, most likely, he was just covering his ass.
My point of view is harder to explain. I went. First I went to his office, then I got into the taxi, then I walked up the stone steps to the Administration Building of McLean Hospital, and, if I remember correctly, sat in a chair for fifteen minutes waiting to sign my freedom away.
Several preconditions are necessary if you are going to do such a thing.
I was having a problem with patterns. Oriental rugs, tile floors, printed curtains, things like that. Supermarkets were especially bad, because of the long, hypnotic checkerboard aisles. When I looked at these things, I saw other things within them. That sounds as though I was hallucinating, and I wasn’t. I knew I was looking at a floor or a curtain. But all patterns seemed to contain potential representations, which in a dizzying array would flicker briefly to life. That could be … a forest, a flock of birds, my second-grade class picture. Well, it wasn’t—it was a rug, or whatever it was, but my glimpses of the other things it might be were exhausting. Reality was getting too dense.
Something also was happening to my perceptions of people. When I looked at someone’s face, I often did not maintain an unbroken connection to the concept of a face. Once you start parsing a face, it’s a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. This was the reverse of my problem with patterns. Instead of seeing too much meaning, I didn’t see any meaning.
But I wasn’t simply going nuts, tumbling down a shaft into Wonderland. It was my misfortune—or salvation—to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality. I never “believed” anything I saw or thought I saw. Not only that, I correctly understood each new weird activity.
Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber.
This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.
Something had been peeled back, a covering or shell that works to protect us. I couldn’t decide whether the covering was something on me or something attached to every thing in the world. It didn’t matter, really; wherever it had been, it wasn’t there anymore.
And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I’d accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn’t, if I couldn’t say for certain that a curtain wasn’t a mountain range?
I have to admit, though, that I knew I wasn’t mad.
It was a different precondition that tipped the balance: the state of contrariety. My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn’t matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
So the opportunity to be incarcerated was just too good to resist. It was a very big No—the biggest No this side of suicide.
Perverse reasoning. But back of that perversity, I knew I wasn’t mad and that they wouldn’t keep me there, locked up in a loony bin.
Applied Topography
Two locked doors with a five-foot space between them where you had to stand while the nurse relocked the first door and unlocked the second.
Just inside, three phone booths. Then a couple of single rooms and the living room and eat-in kitchen. This arrangement ensured a good first impression for visitors.
Once you turned the corner past the living room, though, things changed.
A long, long hallway: too long. Seven or eight double rooms on one side, the nursing station centered on the other, flanked by the conference room and hydrotherapy tub room. Lunatics to the left, staff to the right. The toilets and shower rooms were also to the right, as though the staff claimed oversight of our most private acts.
A blackboard with our twenty-odd names in green chalk and spaces after each where we, in white chalk, entered our destination, departure time, and time of return whenever we left the ward. The blackboard hung directly across from the nursing station. When someone was restricted to the ward, the head nurse wrote RESTRICTED in green chalk beside the name. We got advance warning of an admission when a new name appeared on the list—sometimes as much as a day before the person of that name appeared on the hall. The discharged and the dead stayed on the list for a while in silent memoriam.
At the end of the terrible hall, the terrible TV room. We liked it. At least, we preferred it to the living room. It was messy, noisy, smoky, and, most important, it was on the left, lunatic side of things. As far as we were concerned, the living room belonged to the staff. We often agitated to move our weekly Hall Meeting from the living room to the TV room; it never happened.
After the TV room, another turn in the hall. Two more singles, one double, a toilet, and seclusion.
The seclusion room was the size of the average suburban bathroom. Its only window was the chicken-wire-enforced one in the door that allowed people to look in and see what you were up to. You couldn’t get up to much in there. The only thing in it was a bare mattress on the green linoleum floor. The walls were chipped, as though somebody had been at them with fingernails or teeth. The seclusion room was supposed to be soundproof. It wasn’t.
You could pop into the seclusion room, shut the door, and yell for a while. When you were done you could open the door and leave. Yelling in the TV room or
the hall was “acting out” and was not a good idea. But yelling in the seclusion room was fine.
You could also “request” to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to “request” to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.
The seclusion-room etiquette was, If you weren’t locked in, anybody could join you. A nurse could interrupt your yelling to try to find out why you were yelling, or some other crazy person could come in and start yelling too. Hence the “request” business. Freedom was the price of privacy.
The real purpose of the seclusion room, though, was to quarantine people who’d gone bananas. As a group we maintained a certain level of noisiness and misery. Anyone who sustained a higher level for more than a few hours was put in seclusion. Otherwise, the staff reasoned, we would all turn up the volume on our nuttiness, and the staff would lose control. There were no objective criteria for deciding to put someone into seclusion. It was relative, like the grading curve in high school.
Seclusion worked. After a day or a night in there with nothing to do, most people calmed down. If they didn’t, they went to maximum security.
Our double-locked doors, our steel-mesh window screens, our kitchen stocked with plastic knives and locked unless a nurse was with us, our bathroom doors that didn’t lock: All this was medium security. Maximum security was another world.
The Prelude to Ice Cream
The hospital was on a hill outside of town, the way hospitals are in movies about the insane. Our hospital was famous and had housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?
Ray Charles was the most famous ex-patient. We all hoped he’d return and serenade us from the window of the drug-rehabilitation ward. He never did.