Manic (9 page)

And yes, it was suffering. Despite all my questions to the African sky, when depression finally struck again I not only believed I had the right to suffer, I felt I owned the patent on it. But it would be years before I ever attempted to kill myself again. Each time I thought about suicide, the image of that little Masai girl would flash in my mind. And I still could not argue against that smile.

I woke up strapped to a bed, covered in a thick
gray charcoal vomit and desperately needing to pee. The only part of me that I could move was my head, and I turned it frantically back and forth, searching for some kind of clue as to where I might be. But no matter how hard I strained against them, the heavy leather restraints pinning me to the bed refused to give way. The edges of the straps were tattered and frayed, and the harder I struggled, the deeper they bit into the tender skin of my wrists and ankles. Good torture points, the inner wrists and ankles.

Had I been in some kind of an accident? A car crash? An earthquake? A fire? Maybe I was severely burned. That would explain the restraints, at least: they didn’t want me scratching my skin. I shut my eyes and started to cry. What a horrible thing, to be burned and deformed at such a young age. I sobbed for a while at the top of my lungs, but nobody came. Exhausted, I fell asleep, dreaming of dragon skin.

When I woke, who knows how many hours later (the room had only one overhead light, and no windows), the urge to urinate was so intense I felt sharp shooting pains all around my bladder. I whipped my head back and forth again, but there was no one within the line of my sight. All I noticed this time was the rather peculiar look of the walls. They had a thick, quilted texture to them, almost as if they were…padded.

Now what kind of burn victim needs a padded room? I puzzled a while, and then it came to me. Why, one who is out of her mind, of course. And then it all came flooding back: that terrible phone call, just as I was getting ready to leave the house. Strange how the telephone rings just the same, whether it’s wonderful news or the end of all life as you know it. I heard the doctor’s oddly high-pitched voice: “I’m sorry, Ms. Cheney, but it appears that your father’s cancer has metastasized far beyond what we ever expected. It’s just a matter of months now. You have my deepest regrets.”

I sincerely needed his deepest regrets. I needed everyone’s deepest regrets, because I was the one who was going to have to tell my father. The doctor thought it was better that way. Better for him, no doubt. But first, I needed a Valium. Or two. Or three. That’s what they were there for, after all—for times when you needed the deepest regrets. I waited for the pills to take effect, but after ten minutes my hands were still shaking too badly to pick up a hairbrush. So I popped a couple more. I’d be damned if I was going to tell my father news like this without my hair properly combed and my makeup perfectly applied. Daddy liked immaculate grooming. He liked me pretty as a peach.

I sat down on the bed and tried to rehearse my speech, but the farthest I got was “Daddy, I’m so sorry,” before I burst into tears. Damn the Valium, anyway; it wasn’t helping at all. I cursed myself. Why was I relying on the weakest gun in my arsenal? I went to the cupboard and gathered up several fistfuls of bottles and spread them out on the bed: Ativan, Librium, Klonopin, Xanax, and Stelazine. Surely inside one or more of these bottles resided the calm and the courage I needed to face this task.

By nature I’m rather small-boned and petite, but you wouldn’t know it from my astounding tolerance to medication. I can take enough pills to knock a Clydesdale off its feet, and at the most I’ll just yawn and blink rather drowsily and ask when the next dose is due. So I didn’t see any real cause for concern when I shook out a pill from each of these bottles and downed all five at once. Twenty minutes later, I still didn’t feel anything, although for the life of me I couldn’t seem to get my lipstick to go on straight. It kept wandering up and off my lip line and onto my cheeks. I scrubbed away vigorously at the errant crimson marks, but that only served to smear them further into my already streaky blush.

Bright red cheeks, swollen mouth, and slightly glazed eyes: this was definitely not the look I was going for. I looked like a rather befuddled clown, and my father hated clowns. I started to panic. What if I never managed pretty again? I’d heard of people’s hair turning gray overnight from a shock. Maybe it’s possible to turn sudden ugly, too. I eyed all the bottles spread out on the bed. Surely another dose or two couldn’t hurt. Just to take the edge off this panic. Just to focus my meandering thoughts. Then as soon as I felt a bit more collected, I would drive over to my father’s and tell him the news. But not until then. And certainly not yet. I owed him more than collected. I owed him serene.

In search of serenity, I swallowed the next ten pills with a big glass of orange juice, figuring I probably ought to have something in my stomach to help them dissolve. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—this morning? yesterday? the day before? Who cared? Food was just one more item that used to matter that meant nothing to me anymore. Food, sex, books, movies—all those reliable little pleasures of life before the cancer seemed somehow absurd and trivial now. Watching my father’s eyes flutter and close when the morphine finally kicked in: now
that
was joy. A ninety-eight point six thermometer reading: that was ecstasy.

I knew that a prolonged lack of appetite is usually a good indicator that I’m manic, but that was certainly not the case at the moment. My current mood on a scale of one to ten was a minus five. But who wouldn’t be depressed under these circumstances? Sure, I was secretly suicidal. I longed for death, I daydreamed about it, it was all I thought about in my spare time. But I had no intention of acting on my fantasies—not yet, not while Daddy was still alive. He needed me. I loved him. It was as simple as that.

So when I tossed back the next big handful of pills, there was nothing suicidal about the gesture. I’d simply forgotten about the last dose. I was finally starting to feel twinges of serenity—a warmth in my toes, a pleasant humming in my ears—and I just wanted to speed the process along. But when I went to put the orange juice away, the ceiling and floor suddenly tilted at odd angles, and the next thing I knew I was flat on the linoleum. The cold, smooth tile felt good against my flushed cheeks. It dawned on me as I lay there that I was actually happy, happier than I had been in months. I knew that there was something I was supposed to be doing, something important I was supposed to remember, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what that thing was. All that really mattered was the here and now: the cool kiss of the linoleum, the soothing song of the refrigerator. I closed my eyes and was about to drift into sleep when the telephone rang, jolting me awake.

The phone didn’t ring very much anymore, except when it was news from the doctors. As Daddy grew sicker and I became more depressed, I pulled away from the world I’d known. My friends meant well, but their expressions of sympathy only made me feel more alone. They were never quite the right words somehow, and they were never anywhere near enough. The truth was, the battle lines had already been drawn. It was my father and me against the world. There was no room for anyone else.

The phone kept ringing, and I tried to get up, but the bones in my legs had melted to mush and wouldn’t support my weight. So I crawled on my hands and knees across the kitchen floor, and into the bedroom. I noticed when I went to reach for the phone that my hand was still shaking rather violently.

“Hello?” I mumbled. I couldn’t quite decipher the words, but I recognized the voice immediately. It was my ex-boyfriend Jeff, making one of his ubiquitous bicoastal checkup calls. Ever since my father had been diagnosed several months before, Jeff had taken to calling me at odd hours just to make sure that I was still alive and able to answer the phone. It was kind, and I sincerely appreciated the gesture, but I didn’t feel like talking just then. I felt like crawling back to the kitchen floor and listening to the refrigerator sing its sweet hymn. I explained just that as clearly as I could into the receiver. Jeff later told me it came out sounding like one long sodden slur of vowels, without a single consonant.

“Have you taken any medication tonight?” he asked me, and for some reason I found that question so hilarious I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard that tears coursed down my face. When I raised my hand to wipe them away, I suddenly remembered other tears, from times that were not so funny. I began to cry in earnest. “No!” I shouted. “I don’t remember, and you can’t make me!” Then I slammed down the phone as emphatically as I could, so hard I actually cracked the receiver. That struck me as funny for some reason, too, and all at once I was laughing again, laughing until I sobbed—but careful this time not to touch the tears.

And that, apparently, is how the paramedics got called. All I can remember after that is taking another large handful of pills, a double handful this time, because I was finally starting to feel the effects and the effects felt pretty damned good. Then I crawled back to the refrigerator, caressed the cold tile, and knew nothing more, until I woke up staring with incomprehension at padded green walls.

A door
that was hidden beneath that padding suddenly opened, and a large troupe of white-coated persons walked in. I estimated fifteen or so at one glance, twelve men and three women. Some of the younger white coats held a bit back, so I assumed that they must be mere students or residents. An elderly gentleman with a short grizzled beard stepped up to my bed with a file and a pen and began barking questions. Did I know my name? Did I know where I was? Did I know who the vice president of the United States was? At this point I stopped him and explained apologetically that I really, truly needed to pee. I would be happy to give him all the info he wanted, including the names of all the cabinet members that I could recall, if he would just let me visit the ladies’ room first.

He sucked on his pen and studied the file. “No, we can’t undo your restraints just yet,” he said. “We have you down as actively suicidal.”

“You think this was a suicide attempt?” I laughed. “Believe me, if I was going to try to commit suicide, I’d take a lot more than just a few handfuls of pills. I’d take whole bottles, dozens of them, and I’d wash it all down with quarts and quarts of tequila. I have nowhere near enough pills saved up yet to do it right. And I still haven’t figured out how to make a proper noose, or found the right kind of plastic bag to tie over my head….”

My voice trailed off, as I noticed that several of the younger white coats were scribbling furiously in their little notebooks. The rest of them were just staring at me openmouthed with fascination, as if I were a real live lab rat suddenly granted the gift of speech. I sensed that I was making a losing argument. Certainly my words had not had the desired effect on old Dr. Graybeard. He simply turned and addressed his entourage: “Note the attempt to persuade by hyperbole,” he said. “This is characteristic of the grandiosity we can expect in acute mania.”

I wasn’t manic, but what did it matter? “Doctor,” I said. “I’m perfectly willing to be manic, or hypomanic, or cyclothymic, or whatever it takes to get these restraints off. But first, could you please just call a nurse to accompany me to the bathroom?”

He cocked his head and stared at me. “Are you willing to admit to attempting suicide?”

I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s simply not true. I’ll admit to making an error of judgment, but I wasn’t trying to kill myself. You have to understand: it’s a point of honor with me right now. I can’t kill myself because my father needs me. You see, he’s…”

“Then I have no other option but to order a fourteen-day hold,” he said. “You’ll have to stay here on the locked ward for now. Maybe in a few days, if we see any improvement, you can be transferred over to the inpatient unit. We’ll have to wait and see.”

He dashed off a few quick notes on the chart and handed it to the young man standing next to him. “Make sure she gets the Haldol right away,” he said. “And Thorazine PRN.” He turned around and walked out the door, the white coats scrambling in his wake.

I stared at the place where the door had once been. It was now a seamless expanse of quilted green. Then I heard it: an ominous series of click-click-clicks, the unmistakable chorus of lock and key. Instinctively, I started thrashing from side to side. I wriggled, I squirmed, I tried to wrench myself free, but to no avail. The air was growing increasingly thin, and I couldn’t catch a decent breath. No doubt I was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, but ironically, my bursting bladder came to my rescue. I couldn’t think about anything else—except, perversely, running streams and gushing fountains and mighty, thunderous waterfalls.

Just give up and go, my body demanded. But one tiny sliver of my spirit resisted, and I knew it was right. There was more at stake here than just wetting my bed. The greatest challenge of being mentally ill is always, despite the enormous odds stacked up against you, to maintain some sense of dignity. But my body didn’t give a damn: it just wanted to pee. I tried shouting as loudly as I could, a range of exhortations from “Nurse!” to “Orderly!” to plain old “Help!,” but no one came. I seriously contemplated shouting “Fire!,” but the lawyer in me wouldn’t cross that line.

I leaned back against the pillow and sighed. “It’s just your body,” I gently reassured myself. “They haven’t touched your mind. They don’t possess your soul. You’re still intact—you’ll just be a little bit wetter is all.”

I took a deep breath, then let my muscles go. The urine erupted in rhythmic spurts, strong pulsing contractions that gradually eased to a warm steady stream, then to a seemingly endless trickle, before it finally slowed and stopped altogether. I looked down, amazed. Who knew that my body could hold so much liquid? I was soaked all the way from my waist to my toes, and the sheet was not just wet, it was sopping. Released of its burden, my body felt like it was floating. My mind hovered somewhere up near the ceiling, curiously detached from the sodden spectacle that was strapped beneath the sheet. I fell asleep to the tune of urine tinkling from the bed to the floor.

I woke to a light glaring straight in my eyes. “Wake up!” scolded a voice somewhere behind the light. “Just look what you did. Now was that nice?” A blurry outline of a heavyset woman came into my view. She was gesturing with a penlight to the dripping sheet. “Not nice, but necessary,” I said. “I tried to—”