You know when you're on the bus downtown and you've got some Asian kids babbling on one side and a Puerto Rican couple yammering on the other side you can't understand a single word of it? You know? They could be plotting my assassination for all I can tell.The doctors, too. Poring over their clipboard, pointing and nodding and deciding whether a gunshot to the head or poison in the ear would be best. I'd probably go with poison. It would make for a better story.
Body of Poisoned Mental Patient Found
Brain Melted Down And Leaked Onto Pillow
Not that I would mind if that happened. Like, yeah, maybe it would suck for whoever found me. I don’t know what brain matter smells like. Probably not good, though. Especially if the poison reacted with my brain and made some sort of brain-poison soup. Like brains and bay leaves. That would suck I guess. But still, I wouldn’t complain.
I think about these things a lot.
The main doctor, the one who never wears a lab coat, Dr. Mahoney, eventually shakes the other one’s hand and turns to me. I don’t know the other one, but he’s looking at me too, even though he’s walking away. Doctors always look at you the same, like you’re a math problem that they know they can solve but you’re just a really hard type of math that they haven’t studied since math school. Even if you’re doing better, they still kind of just study you like any moment now you might be not-doing-better again. Mahoney walks toward me and tries to cover up the doctor look with an awkward smile. He’s just trying to be a normal human being, but the guy’s a doctor and you can’t hide stuff like that.
I go back to watching the window so he doesn’t feel like I’m waiting for him. There’s not really anything out there I haven’t seen before, but if you concentrate on just the glass and move your eyes around, it looks almost like the whole building is moving and you can pretend there’s something out there other than the hemlock tree and the broken park bench. It’s funny. Before I came here, I always imagined mental hospitals to be ominous brick buildings with overgrown lawns and single trees and broken park benches. I guess that’s because that’s what they are.
“Hey,” his voice sounds like Spock’s, “you ready?”
I nod and he gestures toward the inpatient medical counter. Today’s nurse, the Wednesday nurse, smiles at me and hands Mahoney a bottle of pills. Her smile is way more convincing than Mahoney’s but it seems so out of place. Why would the Doc get his meds from the psych ward? Maybe her smile isn’t so out of place, though. In her situation, why wouldn’t she be friendly? Smile for the crazies! “Smile for the crazies, Beth. Just keep smiling for the crazies and they won’t drool on you.” I return her grin with what I hope is sympathy. I can see how the ward might be disconcerting for some people, but I imagine it’s entertaining for the hospital staff most of the time. I mean, when they’re not on their Cold War-era super-spy missions dealing with one of the real fargone dopes.
But the guys that are good old fashioned cuckoo, they’ve got to be a treat after a day of wiping down that old bird whose only method of communication is to shit on herself and bellow a single note until she can’t feel it anymore. She seemed to have had a stroke. It makes me wonder if she is actually crazy, or just trapped inside her brain, without a way to reach out. Maybe her family just decided to leave her here to rot.
There are guys like Ted, though, who reminds us nightly that he is a tractor and absolutely must get back to Annabelle for the derby. Or Alastair, who maintains that he has been giving Fidel Castro a piggyback for the past four decades, and won’t stop until the floor stops yelling. It might actually be interesting to see the world through his eyes for a day. He can tell a hell of a story, too. Apparently Cuba has great weather this time of year.
A bottle tapping my shoulder snaps me back to the med counter.
Oh. They’re for me.
Nurse Beth-Wednesday is still airing her teeth while Dr. Mahoney waits to escort me out of the ward. Today I get to go back to my old life. Except it’s not my old life...or it’s the same life but in a different world...like the planet and my life are still the same, but I’ll see them different or something? I don’t know. I guess everything I’ve learned in here, I’ve only applied to where I am and everything else outside the ward will be new or something? So same life, same world, same everything but I get to start all over again.
I’m not a brain doctor. Like I'd have any idea.
I’d done most of my rehabilitating by myself apart from what amounted to maybe twenty cumulative minutes with Melly. That’s what everyone calls the therapist on staff, Dr. Melissa. I actually like her. She speaks like she holds you accountable for your own actions, but she’s also personable and gets to the point without making you feel like a math problem. If I would have had more time with her, I think she’d be one of those people get me to care enough to figure out what makes her tick.
“So it says in the notes from Dr. Mahoney that you wanted to kill yourself.”
“Well, that might have been what I wanted, but I don’t really know.”
“Generally, when you pull your chin up on the uncomfy end of a gun, we don’t assume your head just needed a place to rest for a minute.”
“I don’t know.”
“You seem to like that phrase: ‘I don’t know’”
“I guess.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
I think we were quiet for a while here. Either we were quiet and I was trying to figure out how to say it, or we weren’t quiet and I just want to imagine it was this big dramatic “Good Will Hunting” moment. You know, lots of yelling and tears: “I DON’T KNOW! I DON’T KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT ANYTHING, HOW I’M SUPPOSED TO FEEL ABOUT ANYTHING! I don’t UNDERSTAND anymore how I’m supposed to react to ANYTHING!”
It wasn’t that interesting.
“Don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t feel anything anymore and I don’t want to. I stopped feeling stuff ‘cause all feeling does is make you hurt. It works. I was getting by. And without feeling, I wasn’t hurting. ‘Cause everything hurts. It’s how I cope with-”
“You have to start letting yourself feel things again.”
“But my way works.”
“Then why are you here?”
See? She’s smart. Stupid me sat there and let the realization sink in for what felt like ten minutes. The scariest part isn’t that I let myself forget how to feel things, it’s that I had this thing inside me that made me want to just die and I couldn’t understand it enough to even question its presence. It had been so easy to just let go of everything and revel in the anesthesia. That’s what it was, you know? Like an emotional epidural. I guess it’s stupid to have thought that not feeling felt good. But it wasn’t working, wasn’t easy. What I’d thought was armor was the shell of a giant, emotional time bomb. At that point I realized she’d continued talking and I forced myself back into some state of awareness.
“Mr. McColl... Mr. McColl... Tyler?”
I guess she realized I’d been zoned out into what she could only assume was some anti-depressant, anti-anxiety medication-induced stupor.
“You’re an intelligent person, Tyler. I doubt many people would be capable of unlearning the ability to respond to their emotions. However, in doing so, you unlearned any chance you had at wisdom. To be wise is both your emotional mind and your rational mind working together. Depriving yourself of either is foolish.”
And so I spent two weeks in this dump just to figure out that I wanted to die because I was stupid. I guess I have Melly to thank for figuring that out, though.
So, uhm, thanks.
I mean I never really considered myself much of a “therapy person,” you know? They’re such clinical, anesthetic word. Therapy. Therapist. You can’t help picturing some tweed-swaddled mo with a notepad murmuring to a middle-aged elementary teacher who can’t get over the night her dad threw a plate of spaghetti at her mom on her sixteenth birthday. But the doctors want me to go find some now that I’m leaving. I guess after Melly, I could slide into it a little better. The nightmare is going to be incorporating it into my new “real life”. Fitting it in with a job that provides a paycheck that’s only slightly more appealing than living in a cardboard box and fishing for littered soda cans.
And they want me to “get out” more?
Why not pat me on the head and hand me a lollipop when they say it like that? Like I’ve been watching Captain Kangaroo for too long and need to spend more time out in my No Gurlz Aloud fort made from plywood and Kleenex boxes. To be fair, though, running through the woods to my fort and chasing after girls with my slingshot should give me the 2-4 hours of exercise I’m supposed to be getting each day. So my days will consist of working, exercising, and getting out. Which I guess is not the same as exercising? If I go outside and exercise for two hours, do I then have to go somewhere else and not exercise in order to fill my getting out quota? Oh and college! Make-up homework for the last two weeks on top of classes, getting out, working, and exercising. Unless going to class counts as getting out. Not clear on that one yet.
And in between all of that, I’m supposed to feel. Not even between, I have to feel stuff while I’m doing those things. I mean working doesn’t have a feeling associated with it. School doesn’t have a feeling associated with it. Exercising doesn’t. Honestly, if you bounce around wearing a sweatband, grinning all over the place and saying things like "oh yeah!" and "wheeeee!", go fuck yourself. But seriously, certain things are supposed to make you feel a certain way, right? These things, though, they just seem like they’re more things. More things to keep me from doing things that might actually give me a chance to feel some stuff. I don’t have the sort of friends who want to go out and do things with me. Our unspoken contract is that they go places and I come along to keep up appearances and we let me call it a social life. Are we supposed to now sit around my living room afterwards so we can discuss how we felt about it? I’m a very Point-A-to-Point-B kind of person. I mean except for the brush with the ol’ tres-deuce. Point A to Point A1/2? Necessity seems like the only thing that’s really...necessary. You go see friends because otherwise they won’t see you. You go to school because your job stinks and there aren’t many better options to finding a better one. You work because school costs a metric shload and as we already covered, you kind of need the school. Necessity’s a driving force.
I guess Mahoney decided the pill bottle hadn’t conveyed the degree of persuasion that he’d hoped for. A heavy hand budged its way, not unlike an overweight cab driver at 7-Eleven, onto my shoulder and gave me a squeeze that was probably supposed to whisper something like, “Alright, whenever you’re ready, let’s make those steps forward we’ve been discussing,” but sounded more like, “My wife asked me to pick up her dry cleaning on the way home and I don’t need a night of explaining why she’s going to have to pick up herself in the morning.”
We sign a packet of last-minute legal papers and the Doc slides me an envelope with his notes for whoever ends up being my therapist. We push through the doors to the ward together and commence our obligatory trudge down the long, 1920s-style, aquamarine-tiled hallway that maintains the mental image of an asylum in your mind so that the reality of it being a run-of-the-mill hospital remains slightly blurred. I mean it was legitimately spooky. There was an unsettling disconnect from the polished look of the rest of the hospital and the hallway to the psych ward. Like they wanted to scare away any wandering normal patients. But it really wasn’t so bad as like a prison in an old French Revolution film. Just spooky.
To be honest the hallway could have been a mile long. Being out of the ward was like crawling through the wardrobe to Narnia for the first time. It was a new place, but it wasn’t really all that new, but I knew that the door on the other end held something foreign. We stepped through the door at the other end, though, and it wasn’t really all that strange. But my parents were there and that was odd. The people who admitted me waiting to take me away. I mean it wasn’t weird the times when they visited. That’s what people do to people they know who are in hospitals. But it feels weird that they’re picking me up. Is that significant? I broke into their house because I knew that the gun cabinet was there and that the key to the cabinet was there and that everything would go according to plan. Easy peasy. I didn’t expect them to be awake at 1 in the morning. They’re like, old people.
I mean obviously they heard me break in, my dad rushing into the room with a baseball bat, all on edge while my mom stood behind him, scared. Since then, there was being dropped off and having a hot lunch and doing slow laps around the ward. Most of the time just sprinkled with a light smattering of lame conversation.
“Gramma won $40 on the penny slots at the casino last week .”
“Oh, cool.”
“Your father finally fixed that ceiling fan in the basement.”
“Yeah, finally.”
“We care about you, you know.”
“I know.”
I knew. But still, to see them standing there now, smiling like anything other than a smile would hurt me. Underneath the smile it’s clear my dad’s still on edge and my mom’s still standing beside him, trying to pretend she’s not scared. Seeing them that ready to coddle me is almost sickening, but I do appreciate them being there because things are already starting to feel different.
The reception area was just another drab room when I got here. A collection of walls that people had filled with the stuff they needed to use to do the things they needed to do. Now, though, it’s bright and noisy and full of people waiting in chairs. Phones going off and screaming reminders at the people that they’ve got busy lives and important shit to do. Maybe it’s the medication, but everything seems like it’s telling me I don’t belong out here. The waiting room wants me to know that my unshaved face, my unkempt hair, my general aesthetic resemblance to a missionary that spent the past decade living with a primitive tribe of native Peruvians...it all gives off a strong scent of belongs-back-in-the-psych-ward. Maybe I did fit in better there, shelled off from the world in my bubble of moaning, babbling misfits. I guess there’s really no going back now, though.
It’s time to go home.
