Manic (8 page)

That’s all I had been doing: blinking. Closing my eyes to reality, refusing to see the truth about Rick and me. No wonder I’d been getting depressed again. The world was full of shooting stars, and I was settling for the blackness.

I was fully awake now and aware of the danger. I reached underwater and began rubbing my legs, rubbing my arms, rubbing all of me. Some feeling returned to my limbs, which hurt like the devil. Why, I wondered, is pain so necessary for survival? But then an enormous wave surged up and slapped me full in the face. I got the point: now was not the time to philosophize. Now, right now, was the time to survive.

I shouted for help, but there was no one to hear—and I didn’t necessarily want to be heard. Men had been rescuing me all my life. For once, I wanted to rescue myself. I plunged toward the shore. I advanced a few feet, only to be sucked back out. I pushed again harder, again, and again, gaining a little more ground each time. Trembling, gagging, spitting up seawater, I finally emerged from the waves and fell onto the beach.

I lay there until my breathing slowed and my pulse returned to a regular rhythm. Then I lifted myself up and over to the rock where my dress still hung, still flapping briskly in the breeze. It took me a few tries, but I finally snared it. It was damp but wearable. I slid it over my head and smoothed it out around my hips and I was suddenly civilized again, notwithstanding my wet and dripping hair. Then carefully, I climbed my way out of the cave and up toward the park, past where my shoes lay patiently waiting, past the Danger sign.

To my shock, the clock on the lobby wall said a quarter past three. Rick would either have called the police by now or fallen asleep. I bet on the latter. Rick could fall asleep anywhere and everywhere after midnight—in a movie theater, a play, my bedroom, his car. Rather than risk waking him up, I decided to ask the desk clerk for a key. He made no comment on my bedraggled appearance. He simply handed me the key and bid me a good night.

When I opened the door, it was just as I expected: Rick was asleep, one arm flung across my side of the bed. I wondered if I’d worried him. I wondered if he’d missed me. And I wondered what I was going to say when he finally woke up.

I went into the bathroom, dried my hair with a towel, and put on a robe. I stepped out onto the terrace, sat on one of the deck chairs and heard a sound from the bedroom. I poked my head through the door. Rick was mumbling and fidgeting in his sleep. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say, but I did hear him distinctly say my name. Then he reached across the bed and grabbed the pillow, the pillow on which my head should have been laying, and he hugged it to his chest.

Did that mean he loved me in his dreams? Maybe I mattered far more than he knew; and maybe I was about to make a horrible mistake. I stepped back out onto the balcony and looked to the sky for answers. Orion had all but disappeared. I couldn’t see the Big Dipper, either. In fact, I couldn’t make out any of the constellations at all. The sky was haphazard and made no sense.

Nothing’s colder and lonelier than a manic morning after. I’m never quite sure what actually happened, and what’s just a by-product of my feverish imagination. Did the sky ever really explode with shooting stars, and if so, what did that mean? Did it mean anything at all?

I chose to let the stars decide. I would lie here and watch the sky until morning. If I saw another shooting star by then, it would mean that I was supposed to break up with Rick. If I saw nothing, then I would just let things go on between us the way they were. I settled in. I didn’t have to wait long: within fifteen minutes, a flash of silver streaked through the sky. It happened so fast, the image barely registered before it was gone. Maybe I was seeing things, I thought. If I saw
two
shooting stars sometime before morning, that would clearly be a sign from God that I should end it with Rick.

Four, maybe five minutes later, another streak of silver shot through the sky. Then another. Then another. Then a sudden barrage of brilliance. Surely this was some kind of astronomical phenomenon, a once-every-blue-moon spectacle like Halley’s Comet or the convergence of Venus and Mars. If so, it wasn’t fair to use it to decide my fate. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t natural. It was loaded dice.

Part of me protested at this. “What better evidence could you possibly want?” I asked myself. Deep down I knew I was probably right. And I also knew that there weren’t enough shooting stars in the galaxy to convince me that I should break up with Rick.

There are all kinds of riptides, and love is surely the most powerful. I’d been sucked in so deep I could barely find my footing anymore. For the second time that evening, I was in danger of drowning. I was fully conscious, and I knew exactly what I was doing. I was doing the wrong thing.

I thought back to my epiphany earlier that night. “Don’t blink, never blink.” Manic epiphanies are like shooting stars: flashes of brilliance that are gone in an instant.

It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably
stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking.

My search began in Africa. I hadn’t planned on going there, but then, I hadn’t planned on being alive at all. In early 1991 I’d made a sincere but thwarted suicide attempt (amateurish in comparison to the attempt I would make several years later in Santa Fe). Not long afterward, a girlfriend called to ask me if I’d be interested in going on safari with her. She was supposed to go with her boyfriend, but he was having problems. She knew I was unhappy at work, wasn’t a vacation just what I needed?

Lisa didn’t know anything about my recent suicide attempt. No one did, except my doctors and the paramedics who had saved me. But she was right about my unhappiness. For the past two years, I had become increasingly miserable, in spite of my promotions and pay raises. The worse I felt on the inside, it seemed, the greater my success. Part of this was due, ironically, to the depression: I had to try harder than everyone else, and trying harder ultimately had its rewards. But the rest of it—the finest part—was all David’s doing.

David was a senior associate in my law firm. He was one year ahead of me, my assigned professional mentor. But his protection extended well beyond the confines of our careers. I already knew that I was different. David was the first person who ever taught me that different might also mean special.

David had come out of the closet when he first started with the firm several years before, and he had braved it with an unfailing dignity and self-respect, until he was finally just “David,” just one of the guys. He was the only associate in our buttoned-down, striped-tie firm to wear red silk shirts with the occasional paisley cravat. But on him, it looked great. Everything he ever wore looked great, he was gorgeous. I wouldn’t say he was altogether good, and he certainly didn’t like everyone, which made it so special to be one of the few who was welcome to gather in his office after hours to bitch about a nasty partner, commiserate about a stubborn judge, or, in my case, despair about life altogether.

David was the first professional colleague I ever told about my manic depression, and he took it in stride. He checked up on me whenever I didn’t show up at work and never criticized me for not returning his calls. Sometimes he tucked little notes in my desk drawer or inside a file, so I got a sudden jolt of love just when I least expected it. He taught me all about tulips and burgundy wines. And most important of all, David thought I could write. He pushed me to write as a career, and damn near convinced me to do it. But then he got sick, and nothing else mattered; and nothing else would, for a very long time.

AIDS was just a scathing rumor back then—a scourge somewhere far on the other side of the world, devastating but nothing any of us need worry about. At first David’s persistent coughs and headaches and assorted aches and pains yielded to medication, but inevitably came the day when the drugs stopped working. I, of course, had great empathy for this tortuous scenario, having been through my own version of it with the depression drug regime. But all at once David suddenly got much sicker, so sick he couldn’t come to work anymore. The next time I saw him, a week or so later, his hair was falling out, and he was unable to eat. Over the next three weeks he stopped eating altogether, and the lithe gymnast’s body became cadaverously thin, while that thick, wavy head of hair was nothing but a memory in his bedside photograph. And then his mind succumbed, and he no longer knew me; and heartless or not, I have to admit I was glad that the end came soon after that. I had never known death so intimately before.

My depression, bad enough before David’s illness, tripled in intensity after his funeral. Nothing about my lifestyle, not even the large bonus I got when I was promoted into David’s position, brought me any comfort. All I could think of was death. It would mean an end, at last, to this impossible façade. Plus, I figured, David would be there. I held off two weeks until David’s birthday, then quickly gulped down all the pills I could get my hands on. Then I lay back on my bed and waited.

My boyfriend found me sprawled on the carpet the next morning, and the paramedics were quick on the scene. The very next day my brain chemistry kicked into overdrive and I began a brand-new love affair with life. So overwhelming was my newfound desire to experience life to its fullest that two weeks later, when Lisa asked me to go on safari, all I could think of was how wonderful! How absolutely marvelous!

You probably have to know me to know just how bizarre this is. I am not at all an outdoorsy kind of girl. I consider hailing a taxicab to count as strenuous exercise. I went camping once—when I was six years old and couldn’t get out of it. Ever since, I’ve boycotted any activity that doesn’t come with a blow dryer and might possibly involve spiders. Even so, I agreed, aware that even the most well-appointed safari would probably mean bad plumbing and bugs. Such is the power of postsuicidal euphoria: anything seems possible, even hiking boots.

So I said yes. Yes to Lisa, yes to Africa, yes to life itself.

I got stuck
with a big preliminary injunction, an emergency favor for a senior partner, the week before I was supposed to leave for Kenya. I had no choice but to take it, which meant that I had to work nonstop, night and day, for five days before we took off. I wasn’t worried about exhaustion. I had survived on far less sleep before. But I knew that prolonged sleep deprivation does all sorts of funny things to your brain chemistry when you’re manic-depressive. Sometimes it sends you tumbling down into depression; sometimes it kicks you straight up into mania. In any event, it almost always destabilizes you in some way. Add the long flight over, the multiple time zones, and I knew I was tempting fate. I just didn’t know in which direction.

I thought I would sleep on the plane, but I was too wired from both excitement and five days’ worth of caffeine. Lisa slept beside me, and I wondered whether I should tell her that oh, by the way, I was manic-depressive and there was a better-than-average chance that my brain chemistry might be going slightly haywire in the very near future. But then we started our descent and the moment was gone.

We were in Africa. My brain was flooded with euphoria, and all the worries and concerns slipped away. Africa! It was just as I had hoped it would be. For the first time in my life, I could actually feel my ribs expand when I took a breath. Sunlight permeated everything. It soaked through my pores and drenched my skin. Our very first day out on safari, a family of elephants came lumbering down out of the hills and played in the water not fifteen feet away from our jeep. I could feel their monstrous, pounding footfalls deep inside my body. I started to cry, for no reason except that I was so supremely happy. Lisa looked at me, concerned, but I waved her away. “It’s just so hopelessly beautiful,” I said, and continued to cry throughout the trip. Zebras, gazelle, white rhino, wildebeest: each animal brought new tears.

It was the lions that finally did me in. They were so golden and glorious, it was all too much. Too much beauty. I started to sob and couldn’t stop. Our guide looked at Lisa, and she just shook her head. Had I crossed the invisible line that separates me from “normal” people?

I was probably manic, I realized. It added up: None of the other people on safari had started bawling at the sight of two cheetahs humping. Nobody else kept standing up in the jeep and making sweeping pronouncements like “Surely this is how God meant the world to be.” And nobody else was spending all night camped outside in a deck chair, staring at the African sky, expecting the stars to speak to them. But recognition of mania is one thing. Doing something about it is something else altogether.

I could double up on some of my medications, I thought. But then, did I really want to miss out on this experience? Who in their right mind would give up the chance to feel Africa so intensely? This was God’s country, and I was God’s creature. Did I really want a pill to act as a buffer between us?

The danger of mania is always its grandiosity. If nothing else, Africa puts you in your proper place. I felt thoroughly in perspective, a tiny smudge beneath that infinite sky. So no, I concluded, there was no danger of my grandiosity running out of control. But just to be safe, I should probably take my awe and exuberance down a few notches to fit in with the rest of the group. And then I’d let Africa itself act as my antipsychotic: surely it would keep me in better check than any pill ever could.

This worked well enough for the next five days. I toned down my reactions, quieted my pronouncements, and Lisa and the other tourists stopped acting so anxious around me. But marvelous as my experience had been so far, it was all just picture postcard epiphanies. I wanted more. I had come to Africa, like centuries of explorers before me, for answers.

Our guide
had promised us a treat for the last day of our safari: we were going to visit a Masai village. “The real thing,” he assured us. “Very special, very rare.” This village was not usually accessible to tourists, but the guide was related by marriage to one of the tribe and thus was able to get us in. We could smell it long before we arrived: that sharp and savage odor peculiar to the Masai diet of cattle milk and blood. Then a hazy black cloud appeared on the horizon. “The cattle?” I asked the guide. “No. The flies.”

I thought he was exaggerating, but when we were within one hundred feet of the village we had to raise our voices to be heard above the angry, buzzing swarm. Flies everywhere. And not your well-mannered American house fly, either. These flies were half the size of my fist. They came at you and stuck to you with a single-minded purpose you had to admire. We were hopelessly outnumbered, but we still slapped and kicked and karate-chopped ourselves until we reached an uneasy truce.

But the flies didn’t seem to bother the Masai natives. At first I thought the whole tribe was tattooed; that is, until the tattoos started moving. The villagers simply allowed the flies to crawl all over them, even in and out of their noses and mouths, as if they were a second skin. This might have been picturesque through a viewfinder, but I was far too close to see it for anything but what it really was: a hideous harbinger of disease. Just beneath the crawling black coats were masses of oozing red sores. The little children, in particular, were covered with large, weeping ulcers.

The only other time I had seen skin like this, although on a much lesser scale, was on my last visit with David. Toward the end, the bedsores on his back, buttocks, and thighs had become grossly infected with no hope of healing. But at least they were covered in ointment and sterile gauze bandages, and unpleasant as the sharp ammonia smell permeating his bedside was, it was still an odor my mind could catalogue and place. Whereas this stench had no counterpart in my memory. It smelled of one thing: death.

A wave of nausea flooded me. I could taste the heavy cream and butter the chef had used to scramble my eggs that morning. Breakfast had been delicious. For that matter, dinner the night before had been delicious, too: the tournedos Rossini lightly seared to perfection, the lemon soufflé a marvel of spun sugar and air. In fact, everything about this trip had been delicious—until now. I could feel my mood beginning to plummet.

What right? I asked myself. What possible right have you ever had to be depressed? I thought of my therapist’s office, and the thousands of dollars I spent each year, complaining about my life. I thought about the handful of antidepressants I swallowed each morning: one pill alone cost me almost four hundred dollars a month. Add to that the psychopharmacologist I saw every six weeks or so, at three hundred dollars per visit. All totaled, the price of my depression was staggering, more than enough to feed and house and clothe several Masai families for an entire year. What right, what right?

But the question went far deeper than cost. What right did I have to own despair, with such genuine suffering before me? I looked around me at the pockmarked children, and all I could think was, a six-figure lifestyle drove me to suicide.

It’s chemical, I told myself. I didn’t choose to be manic-depressive. It’s as much outside my control as the color of my skin or where I was born. I knew at some primal level that this was logical, and therefore likely to be true. I gradually began to feel a little bit better.

A tug on my shirt made me look down. A little girl, entirely naked but for the beaded hoops in her ears, was standing directly in front of me. Her entire body was covered in sores. Yet she smiled, a smile wide as the savannah, open as the sky. And all the logic in the world made no sense after that. I had no arguments to compete against that smile.

The only question now, and I knew it was the one I had come to Africa to ask, was why? Why in all its many vast permutations: Why did the plague visit this village? Why did my darling David have to die? And why, above all else, was I manic-depressive? Or perhaps the real question was, why did I deserve to be sane?

I fully expected something cataclysmic to happen—a sudden flood, a stampede, a gust of locusts. I waited. Nothing happened. The next morning, the trip over, I left Africa for home.

It was weeks before my dreams finally stopped buzzing. For a while, I truly appreciated my life: I savored every smell, lingered over every sensation, marveled at every creature comfort. Then inevitably, my brain chemistry shifted and my mood plunged back down to despair. Africa, apparently, was not a cure for depression. It only added a new level of guilt to my suffering.