Giving Up the Ghost (23 page)

As we were wrapping up our call that first evening, I remember her asking, “Well, are you any better?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Being there, does it make you feel any better?”

I had no idea how to answer her.

I called Laura almost every night after that to talk about
what had happened that day. Of all the group sessions and analysis and testing and therapy, the only time anything seemed to make any sense to me was when I tried to explain it to Laura on the phone at night.

It was a few days until she could get a ride to the hospital. It was my first chance to show her everything I’d been talking about. Eventually we settled into the corner of the TV room to talk. While she initially seemed very happy to meet everyone and was intrigued by the quirkiness of life on 5B, the reality of the place started to seep in. She slowly wore her revelation on her face. It was starting to dawn on her that this wasn’t a joke. These people weren’t eccentrics goofing around. I was in real trouble. I had landed in this terrible place, which was potentially just a pit stop before an even more terrible place. I was wearing a thin veneer of jokiness, but she could tell how scared I really was.

“Take those old records off the shelf. I’ll sit and listen to them by myself,”
rang out from the hallway.

“Richie,” I said, looking over at Laura. “It must be cookie time. He always sings ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ when they hand out cookies in the afternoon.”

Richie sang as he walked into the dayroom, rubbing his hands in a blur of motion.

One of the nurses started walking over toward us with a barely polite “It’s four o’clock and visiting hours are over now get the hell out” look on her face. Laura picked up her bag and took a last look around the ward.

She looked at me and touched the back of my hand. “We need to get you out of here,” she said.

For the first time, I felt like she was getting it. She understood why I had fallen to this point, why I felt the way I felt. I noticed her eyes darting around the room as if she was seeing
everything anew. A single tear ran down the side of her face. She got up and walked toward the door.

For the first time in years, I didn’t feel alone.

“Hello,” said a small Asian man standing at the foot of my bed.

“Hello,” I replied.

“You care for milk of magnesssah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Milk of magnesssah … I prescribe for you?”

I looked at the embroidered name on his jacket. It was Dr. Chang. The infamous Doctor Chang. I’d apparently met him several times in my first few days here—meetings, like that with Blumfield, of which I had no recall whatsoever.

Dr. Chang was the kingpin of my stay at Timken Mercy. He was the psychiatrist who admitted me in the emergency room. He was the doctor who oversaw all the other various therapies I was assigned. He was also my Dr. Feelgood, coming up with all the pills and combinations I’d been force-fed since I’d arrived. In short, Dr. Chang was “the Man” in my life. Yet, despite his role as a despicable authority figure, I found him fascinating. I kept wondering how someone with such a limited grasp of the English language could become a psychiatrist in the United States. I’ve never had a complete feel for how the Sharks versus Jets–like relationship between psychiatrists and psychologists works, but I definitely got the vibe that to Dr. Chang, a solid command of the local tongue wasn’t necessary for him to know I was a collection of misfiring synapses and nerves in need of chemical balance.

Now, apparently, he was trying to pimp me some milk of magnesia as well.

“Why are you people always trying to get me to take laxatives?”

Dr. Chang started to write notes on his chart.

“You have suicide thoughts today?” he asked.

“Well, I had been so constipated that I thought of ending it all,” I said. “But now that I have milk of magnesia, I should be good.”

He continued writing, then started to scribble. His pen had stopped working. He put his clipboard down on my bed and looked at me.

“There are two directions here,” he said. “Everyone wants to go 4B. With hard work and cooperation, you go, too.”

Ah, 4B. The way the staff and residents of 5B talked about 4B, you’d think that everyone walked around down there in satin pajamas and ate Ben & Jerry’s all day while getting back rubs and blow jobs from hot nurses in skin-tight uniforms. 5B was kind of like the intensive care unit of the mental ward. Most people started out here with a great amount of supervision and restriction. However, once you got your shit partially together, you’d get transferred to the “open ward”—4B. 4B had board games. 4B had a small library. 4B had visiting hours twice as long as ours. 4B had three TVs, none of which were surrounded by cloudy Plexiglas.

“However, there other alternatives if you cannot try here,” he said.

He didn’t need to say another word. In one direction lay 4B. In the other: Massillon State Hospital.

I’d heard of Massillon State Hospital before coming here. People would tell jokes about it or you heard about it on the news. One thing was clear: It was chock-full of seriously fucked-up people. It was a padded-cell-and-restraint kind of facility. From what you heard about the place, it was a lot like the Hotel California. People went there but rarely left.

The staff and residents of 5B really didn’t color in any details on Massillon; they didn’t need to. The reality of a hospital mental ward made it pretty easy to imagine what a worse version might be like. All the 5B staff had to do was remind me that if I couldn’t or wouldn’t function at Timken Mercy, they would place me in a facility that “better matched my care needs.”

“Choice is yours.”

But was it?

Choice
was often an odd word for me then. There were times, like that moment, when I felt that implying choice gave a glow of false hope. Most times, I reasoned, there aren’t choices at all; everything is just following an obvious and unavoidable outcome. In those moments, choice was theoretical. Technically, it existed, but I felt that only a fool would think that events are that easy or able to change.

There were other times when choice indicated that there were unlimited options available at the whim of the chooser. It could imply freedom and range that rarely existed in reality. In truth, having a choice often meant picking your pain. Choice really meant that there was more than one non-great option. It could also imply that you were the one who got to make a decision that pleased you. Especially in this case, I did not feel in charge of the decision or the options at all.

Dr. Chang reached out to shake my hand. Immediately after doing so, he walked directly to the sink to scrub his hands. Then he left my room without another word.

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

“Sure, what the hell,” I replied. “Bring it on.”

He handed me a stool softener, along with eight other pills.

“What the fuck is this? I just took another handful of pills four hours ago,” I said. “How come every day I’m in here, you give me more and more pills?”

“These are what your doctor wants you to have,” he replied. “Sometimes they change medications, or combinations of medications, to see what works best for you.”

“I mean, I almost fell down this morning from being so damn dizzy,” I said. “How am I supposed to get better if you people have me fucked up constantly?”

“You can discuss this with your doctor,” he said. “For now, I need you to take these pills.”

I pulled each pill individually out of the tiny paper cup, looked it over, sniffed it, put it into my mouth, and swallowed it with some water. Toward the end of my medication-taking regime, I picked up a tiny blue pill.

“Why am I getting this?” I asked.

“It’s a sleeping pill,” he replied. “Did you mention anything to your doctor about not being able to sleep?”

“Yeah, but you don’t understand,” I said. “I used to buy these. I mean, I took a lot of these.”

“But the doctor wants you to have this,” he said. “You need to take it.”

I declared I wouldn’t take it and threw it down on the tray. The orderly gave me an “Are we really going to start this again?” look. I said that I thought the point of being here was so that I wouldn’t take this stuff anymore. If Dr. Chang wanted me to take that pill, he could come down here and hear me say no to his face.

“Fine,” the orderly said, taking a moment to rearrange the cups and pills on his tray. “You know, you would move along faster on your Progress Plan if you just did what you were asked to do.”

“I’m sure I would,” I replied.

Later that day I was due to be in Blumfield’s office. It was the second visit since my last blowup. In the previous visit, we’d actually had a good conversation about my life over the previous few years. I was honest with him. I answered every question truthfully. We talked about everything. Toward the end, he asked me to complete an MMPI mental health test.

“Look at this thing,” I protested. “There are, like, four hundred and fifty thousand questions.”

“Actually, it’s more like six hundred. Six hundred questions,” he said.

“Six hundred?” I proclaimed. “How about one question, ‘Are you fucking nuts?’ Check: yes or no.”

“It doesn’t take as long as you might think,” he said. “You can take it back to your room and work on it in your free time.”

It didn’t take as long as I thought it would—it took longer. Hours longer. I sat there checking boxes following statements like “I am easily awakened by noise,” “I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be,” “I am very seldom troubled by constipation,” and “At times I feel like swearing.”

Then I started to think about what I was really saying about myself.

When asked if “I am scared of what others think of me,” I had to answer yes. When asked if “at times I have fits of crying that I cannot control,” I had to answer yes. When asked if “I see people around me that others do not see,” I paused but eventually answered yes for this as well. The more I read, the sadder I became. For every odd statement such as “I like mechanics magazines,” there were hundreds of tiny confessionals about my life—things that I didn’t like having to put a black or white answer to.

About halfway through, I just started filling in random dots. I stopped bothering to even look at the remaining questions. “Yes.” “Yes.” “No.” “Yes.” “No.” “No.” “Yes.” No one was going to learn anything from this test that couldn’t be learned from talking to me for a fraction of this time. The next morning I took it to the nurses’ station, complete, and asked them to give it to Dr. Blumfield.

“Let’s talk about this ghost business,” Blumfield said at the start of our next session.

I’d kind of expected Blumfield to bring up the test. But he made no reference to it.

“What about it?” I replied.

“When did you start seeing her?” he asked.

“I’ve told you before,” I said. “I never saw Her.”

“Yes, you did,” he replied quickly. “You told me you saw her in your dreams, repeatedly.”

“Dreams aren’t real, Blumfield,” I said. “You of anyone should know that.”

We talked more about Little Girl. Going over the dreams again. Going over the feelings of Her presence again. My answers became increasingly short. We’d been over and over this. Why did I have to tell him about it again?

“Have you ever contemplated that the Little Girl wasn’t what you thought?” Blumfield asked. “Have you ever entertained that it all may not be real?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, have you ever entertained the idea that it could all be an illusion … or a hallucination—not real?”

“Of course it’s real. What are you saying?”

Blumfield stopped and looked at me, then he grabbed a
book on the corner of the desk and turned it to a page marked with a slip of paper.

“That blue sleeping pill? The one you handed back to the orderly and wouldn’t take?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

Blumfield turned the book toward me and dropped it onto the desk.

“Triazolam,” he said. “A favorite of uptight housewives and pill poppers across America.”

I scanned through the gobbledygook on the page without really reading it.

“Yeah, so?”

“So …,” Blumfield said, taking the book back. “Twelve percent of patients report experiencing severe hallucinations from triazolam. The effects could be even more pronounced when mixed with alcohol.”

“What are you saying?”

Pause
.

“Have you ever thought that, perhaps, this is all the result of chemicals you put in your body?”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “I’ve been having those dreams and hearing Her since I was, like, a kid … years. I wasn’t taking those pills when I was thirteen, for Christ’s sake.”

“And you think that it isn’t possible to hallucinate a history? Sometimes hallucinations relating to past events are just as powerful as the ones our minds place in the present.”

I think I knew, even at that moment, that what Blumfield was suggesting was at least possible. The idea that it all could be a product of my imagination really didn’t have to be true. To me, Little Girl was the most horrifying thing I could imagine.
It was even more horrifying to consider that I may have invented Her myself.

“Are you suggesting I made all this up?” I yelled. “Well, fuck you. I didn’t lie about this.”

“I’m not suggesting you lied. A powerful hallucination could feel as real to you as us sitting here right now. I’m just asking that you consider the possibility that—”

“Enough!” I yelled, standing up. Blumfield reached out and picked up his cigarette case and notes—the things he didn’t want to see end up on the floor. “I know who I am. I know what happened to me.”

Blumfield made a short attempt at calming me down but soon gave up. I stormed out of the room, yelling back at him as I stomped down the hallway in a fury. I ended up in my room, curtains drawn. I skipped dinner, mostly out of fear that I would be confined to my room anyhow. I ended up just sitting there sobbing until my eyes were almost swollen shut and I couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore.

If the Little Girl in a Blue Dress was an illusion, I thought, then anything could be an illusion. If I was wrong about Her, I could be wrong about anything. The reasons I ended up in the hospital in the first place could all be a farce, built off delusions and hallucinations.