Giving Up the Ghost (21 page)

We pass through downtown Gettysburg once more on our way out to another hot spot Mark Nesbitt suggested, Pickett’s Charge. He said it’s easy to find—just follow the road until we get to a restaurant called General Pickett’s Buffets (that’s not a typo, FYI—supposedly having a salad bar
and
a hot-food bar qualifies it for the plural status); the battlefield is just south of the restaurant. As we drive through town, Meghan offers her own narration of Gettysburg history.

“Yeah, I went to a wedding reception over here and got terribly drunk,” she says, pointing to some old-looking building near the town square.

“Oh, Jesus, I used to go out there all the time!” she exclaims as we pass another building.

It’s very clear to me that Meghan sees Gettysburg very differently than I do. She sees ghosts everywhere, just ones that have nothing to do with the Civil War.

We drop the car and walk to the fence surrounding Pickett’s Charge. We stand there for a long time, take a few pictures of the tall grass and blackness, watch the Ghost Meter register nothing, and just stare out into the void.

People claim to witness entire ghost infantry units marching across Pickett’s Charge, see ethereal campfires, and hear orders shouted. I’d settle for one spectral rifleman, lost and asking us for directions, but I get nothing. We see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing. We definitely don’t taste anything, either. I don’t feel the “great crush of souls”—all I feel is the great crush of boredom and the great suck of mosquitoes.

It’s really late when Meghan and I come in and make our way to our rooms at the bed-and-breakfast. No one else in the entire building is up, and the restaurant is long closed. All of a sudden we hear a chirping beep.

I look down and see an orange light glowing through my shorts. It’s the Ghost Meter in my front pocket, and it’s going ape shit.

It stops almost as soon as I pull it out, so I slowly wave it around the room. Whenever it comes in proximity of a particular armchair in the hallway, it beeps and lights up, and the needle slams to the far right. I pull it away from the chair and it goes silent. I put it back down and move it around the area where someone might be sitting, and it goes full tilt again, staying there until I pull it away. I look behind the chair, thinking
there might be a poorly grounded outlet in the wall or something electrical behind it. Nothing. In fact when I run the Ghost Meter right up against the wall, it is totally still. It’s the chair that’s setting it off, or more specifically, something sitting in the chair.

“Oh, shit,” Meghan says. “I don’t like this one bit.”

I try in front of the spa entrance—no signal. In front of my room door—no signal. But whenever it’s pointed at the seat and back of the chair, the meter is slammed to the right and beeping and flashing like crazy.

“Look at it this way,” I say. “That chair is out in the hall. It’s, like, all the way out here, and, well, you know, you’re safe.”

I offer my best attempt at a reassuring smile.

As soon as I get near the doorway to Meghan’s room, the Ghost Meter starts going nuts again. With her standing just inside her room and me standing just outside the threshold, I wave the Ghost Meter around her entire doorway. It goes totally nuts. I have to admit that even though I’ve gotten a little used to being in “haunted” places lately, I’m starting to feel some adrenaline take up residence in the pit of my stomach. I quickly stuff the Ghost Meter back into my pocket, hoping that might make us feel better or perhaps forget that it even went off at all. No such luck. Meghan and I just stand there for a minute, unsure what to do.

I turn to look at Meghan, who is staring at me with her nostrils flared.

“Thanks, jerk,” she says.

“Have a nice night,” I say, reaching into my pocket to shut off the still-beeping Ghost Meter, and head next door to my room.

“Fuck off,” she says, closing the door.

“Would you like a stool softener?” the orderly asked me.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a stool softener,” he replied. “It softens your stool. Would you like one?”

“Will it fuck me up?” I asked.

“More than likely not,” he replied.

After giving me my paper cup of pills, the orderly looked up at the wall and sighed.

On a piece of paper taped above my bed:
ERIC NUZUM IS A VICTIM OF MATHEMATICAL ERROR
.

“I’m going to turn this in to the head nurse,” he said, pulling it down. “You know, when they ask you to stop doing this, you really should listen. They’ll put this in your Progress Plan, you know.”

I did know.

The ward staff seemed very tired of me and my signs. I’d write them on the back of some form or report, steal tape from the nurses’ station, and hang them above my bed.

After putting up signs reading
QUESTION EVERYTHING, GO AWAY
, and
ANARCHY IN THE 5B
, I was warned that putting up signs above my bed was not acceptable. When I asked why, I
was given the same excuse I heard for everything, from walking around with my bathrobe over my regular clothes to playing the piano during breakfast: It will cause a disturbance among the patients.

There was already
plenty
of disturbance among the patients, I’d argue. My signs weren’t going to make any difference.

After the nurses and therapists started to frown on me posting these signs in my room, I started branching out into the ward itself. Signs started to appear above the TV (
DON
’
T LOOK UP
!!!), on the back of the couches (
THE PUDDING IN THIS PLACE TASTES LIKE DOG SHIT
.
HMMMM. WONDER WHY
?), and elsewhere. After putting up
EAT ME
in glued macaroni (my first occupational-therapy project), I was warned that one more sign would result in having the issue of sign making added to my Progress Plan: the list of “goals” (read: requirements) that needed to be achieved in order to get out of here.

ERIC NUZUM IS A VICTIM OF MATHEMATICAL ERROR
wasn’t the first sign I’d made since receiving my final warning. It was the fifth.

I was begging them, taunting them in fact, to whip out the Progress Plan and add the sign making to my list of goals.

The Progress Plan was one of the many euphemism-laden forms, charts, and outlines that the staff dutifully filled out to document my daily routine, goals, and activities. My Progress Plan contained four items:

On my second day in ward 5B at Timken Mercy Medical Center, a nurse presented me with my Progress Plan and asked that I sign it. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept thinking, if I sign this, what am I admitting about myself? That what they were saying was right? That I believed that being here would make any difference in my life?

Every doctor, nurse, and social worker repeated the same explanation: I wasn’t going anywhere until we agreed on a Progress Plan and fulfilled every single item. I explained that while it was very kind of them to put together a Progress Plan, this was all a mistake and that I wanted to leave. They explained that when I was admitted, I’d signed away my ability to make that decision until my doctor had determined that I was no longer a threat to myself and others. I explained that I was fucked out of my gourd when I was admitted here. They produced a statement signed by two witnesses (both hospital staff) attesting to my lucidity and recognition that I understood all the paperwork and was made aware of my rights. I’d explain that they could fuck off.

It didn’t go well from there.

At that point, I’d been in 5B, the “high observation” ward (another euphemistic title for a level of care and oversight that was just a small step up from a straitjacket and padded room) for five days. I still had only a sketchy idea of the circumstances involved in how I got here. The morning I was admitted, I had driven my car up my parents’ driveway, scraping against the house a few times before coming to a stop. Damage to the house was incredibly minor, a small scratch mark, one chipped chimney brick, and a corner taken out of a limestone stair in the back. However, the process had torn the front driver’s-side wheel from my car and chewed up the surrounding body panels. Supposedly, I then tried to drive the car back down the
driveway. I got about ten yards in two or three tries, dragging along on the broken axle, before I passed out in the car. Somebody called my mother at work, who came home and announced that we were going to the emergency room. I told the admitting nurse that I’d been carrying around a vial of sleeping pills with the idea that I’d use them to kill myself. I talked with a couple other staff people and was presented with papers to voluntarily commit myself.

The information was sketchy because no one seemed to want to tell me what had happened. Outside of hitting the gas pedal in my parents’ driveway, I remembered exactly none of this and very little of the preceding days. I just knew I was in a mental ward of a hospital, which, for the most part (minus the chocolate pudding and gelatinous fried chicken), had exceptionally tasty food.

The doctors and staff were pretty flummoxed about my complete lack of withdrawal and DTs after being in the hospital for five days, consuming nothing stronger than unsweetened iced tea. Shortly after I was admitted, they sent a social worker to inventory the alcohol and substances I had taken in the seven days prior to my admittance. At first, the social worker looked a little perturbed.

“Look, I’ve heard about you,” he said. “You need to cut it out and give me the actual list.”

The numbers were so high he thought I was making it all up. Just to be difficult. To be fair to him, I did do that kind of stuff, but this time I wasn’t.

Looking at it now, I believe there are two very clear, rational reasons why I was having no withdrawal or cravings.

First, I was not an addict. By now, it’s kind of an addict cliché for said addict to declare, “I can stop whenever I want.”
However, I actually could stop whenever I wanted, and I did. I never felt the physical need to drink or take drugs. It was an emotional need. There were times when drugs felt like an answer. They felt like a way out or a method to dull my senses into a blissful void of nothing. My world would somehow darken or Little Girl would show up, and I’d scramble to find a way to cope. Coping usually involved a mixture of substances—a cocktail of inebriation—that would make it all better, if only for a little while, until it didn’t anymore. Then I’d stop again. I’d kind of lose my taste for it. I’m not saying that I wasn’t abusive—with drugs, alcohol, or other things—just that I wasn’t addicted. Drugs were never the problem in my life; they were a symptom.

All this considered, take it from me, if you are ever in a circumstance where you are being evaluated for possible substance abuse,
the last thing
you want to tell them is that you aren’t an addict. As soon as you try to explain all this and those words—“I am not an addict”—come out of your mouth, opinions are sealed and there is absolutely nothing you can do or say that will convince anyone that you are actually, in fact, not addicted to any substance. I would tell them, over and over again, that I was not an alcohol and/or drug addict and could, really, honestly, stop using whenever I felt like it. They would slowly nod, pat my hand, and tell me they would be ready to talk when I was ready to confront my problems. I’d exclaim that I wasn’t being difficult, but that I really, double-swear, was not an addict. They’d offer me some blandly affirming gesture and tell me they were there for me. I’d tell them to eat my ass. They’d decline.

Second reason I didn’t suffer for lack of drugs once I was admitted to the hospital: I was high all the time. Three times a
day an orderly would show up with a tray of paper cups. At every one of these pill feedings, I would be given, at minimum, four to six pills to take.

“The doctor just wants to determine the right combination of medications to help you.”

A lot of the time I felt like a zombie, stumbling around the ward trying not to slip and fall in my own drool trail. I’d have the spins so bad that sometimes I couldn’t even contemplate going to sleep at night. I needed to sit upright in a chair, or I’d be throwing up for hours. The staff would tell me to lie down in my bed. I’d tell them I couldn’t, that I’d get sick. They’d shake their heads. They’d heard about me: uncooperative. Three times a day an orderly showed up, each time pumping me full of new drugs or new combinations of drugs. Each day I just seemed to get more fucked up than before.

I spent a lot of time asleep or watching television. There were no Little Girl dreams.

The fact that I had no Little Girl dreams once I entered Timken Mercy was odd to me but not nearly as odd as the reason I was given as to why I had nothing to fear while staying there. Shortly after I was admitted, I had told a nurse that the reason I couldn’t sleep was because there was a dead girl who would find me there. The nurse reassured me it would be okay.

“These walls and windows?” she said, standing up to run her hand along the plaster. “Ghostproof. No ghost can enter. You are safe.”

“Ghostproof?” I asked.

“Sweetie, I’ve worked here for twelve years; no one comes in or out of here without me saying so.” She gave me a reassuring smile.

The one good thing that I saw Timken Mercy providing me
at that point was a break—a break from school and people … and even from Her. I was so desperate to believe that She could not bother me there that I was willing to accept the nurse’s claim of ghostproofing as reasonable. I really didn’t want to apply too much scrutiny. She wasn’t there; that’s all I cared about.

When I wasn’t being grilled by doctors, therapists, and social workers, or trying (and failing) to sleep, or swallowing dozens of pills, I basically spent most of my time roaming around the ward.

If you weren’t suicidal when you arrived in ward 5B at Timken Mercy, a few hours there would definitely get you in the right mood.