The Death of Small Creatures (20 page)

I become a flesh and blood person again. It's me. I'm here. But I am a stranger to myself. It's terrifying and liberating at the same time.

And the nurse sings:

When I find myself in times of trouble,

Mother Mary comes to me,

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be…

I flop on a couch and listen.

And in my hour of darkness

She is standing right in front of me,

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be…

I wander these hallways, my sobbing having lost its heartiness; piqued to weeping.

The blue scrubs swallow me.

I am humiliated.

It's these paper booties that are killing me.

I like Dr.
P right away; he's direct and likes to say
fuck
. I trust him.

Our interactions are brief, if not rushed, during his morning rounds. These meetings I suspect are not meant to include intensive therapy, but rather they are meant to gauge and loosely monitor my mental progress and state of mind, and to monitor vitals and adjust medication as required.

He begins our meetings with, “How are you doing today?”

“Fine,” I say.

“You're looking well.”

On our first meeting he finds me sitting in a recliner in the lounge, hair in a ponytail, dishevelled and washed out. There are no nutrients in my skin, no colour in my complexion. My potassium levels are off. They have been monitoring me. I am bleached, churned in a washing machine, wrung out by hand and hung like a sheet between two buildings in a ghetto. I'm not wearing makeup. My lips are dry and my eyelashes feel crumbly.

Take my blood. Give me pills. Feed me at intervals.

Dr. P says, “Trisha?”

How does he know me?

“Yeah,” I say.

I am struck by his stature, his formidable height. I like his looks, brown hair and blue eyes.

“How are you today?” he says.

“Fine,” I say.

I want Dr. P to like me right away, to think I'm interesting, a dynamic individual, to see the heart of me with some omniscient understanding of who I am, because I want this man to know absolutely everything about me, immediately, upon first contact.

To think I am beautiful.

We go to the quiet room. He's tall and walks fast. It's hard to keep up. I'm 5′ 6″ and wearing paper booties, can't get traction on the slippery linoleum hallways.

He is oblivious to this lack of traction, doesn't notice me scrambling to keep up. I'm nothing to him. The shift is illogical and happens swiftly.

The quiet room has taken on a blue tone. No windows. One door. A piano.

“So?” he says, rather cheerfully. He opens my file.

I already have a file, and there is already a lot of paper in it.

I find a
quiet table in the dining room. This is the sacred time between the feeding hours. The room is empty. I don't know where everybody goes during this time. It's a mystery. They just disappear, perhaps lie fetal on their bedroom floors, or cry into pillows, or stare.

My table is sunlit, a perfect space at which to sit down and write.

A boy from the B-Wing crosses the line, chooses this moment to twirl from one side of the ward to the other, humming to himself as he goes, pausing at my table, my rare and private sanctuary, then proceeds to sit down, grab hold of one of my books, Don Domanski's
All Our Wonder Unavenged
, then gets up to leave with it clutched to his chest.

“No,” I say. “You cannot have that. I'm sorry.”

The boy, Sebastian, returns the book to the table and leaves me to my writing, only to return a few minutes later with two fat books clutched to his chest. “This one is okay, but I think it will be too much for you right now,” he says. “I think… this one.”

I feel like such an asshole.

“Oh, thanks,” I say.

Sebastian twirls away, gets on the stationary bike in front of the TV, laughs and speaks French with a kid I will soon learn is his brother—and one of the few people he speaks to.

I sit, brooding, but get up and march over with my prized Domanski poetry book, tap Sebastian on the shoulder. He continues riding, seems unaware of me. I pass over the book: “I think you should have this.”

He nods, takes the book, flips through the pages and puts it down.

My room is
EMP 408A.

I think EMP, which makes me think AMP, which makes me think of electroshock therapy, which makes me think of Sylvia Plath lighting up the western European grid on a dark stormy night.

My current place of residence is the Eric Martin Pavilion, Royal Jubilee Hospital, Victoria, BC. I am sitting on my cot, one of four cots in four areas separated by thin beige curtains.

I have befriended my roommates now: Julie, Renee and Cindy, though Cindy seldom speaks, never eats or rises from her bed, and when she does arise from the dead she slips past you without a word as if you don't exist.

A nice girl who lives in the room next door, Lisa, reads my palms one night, finds two big W's, one on each palm, and says this means great prosperity awaits me. While she is surveying my palms another night, I remember the red scrapes and shy away, lower my hands to my lap.

Lisa is heartbroken, apologizes ten times, saying, “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I have that too.”

I feel bad for making her feel bad, braid her hair as a kind of compensation. Everyone here is so fragile.

From my cot, I have a view of the back-ass of the hospital where the not-so-crazy people reside. I imagine an airplane wing trembling, a fibreglass plank from my room extended out and above the parking lot, its trembling as the engines rev. I look for loose bolts, nuts and screws, superglue, the stuff that keeps airplanes intact. I toss a Hail Mary to the other unimaginable wing on the other side of the building, all of its nuts and bolts and superglue and stuff that keeps that side of the airplane intact.

My time here in EMP 408A is all about establishing intactness.

How can we place so much faith in such flimsy things as wings?

They still will
not give me my clothes.

I am surprised one afternoon when the mean front-desk clerk gets off her ass and hands me shaving cream and a razor.

Leigh has been up to see me a few times. He is listless and appears deeply disheartened, for reasons I fear have little to do with my well-being and much more to do with the general direction of his life, the force of my tide into which he is trapped, pulled out to sea, dragged into oblivion.

Today he has brought me a few toiletries, a nightgown—though not the one I asked for—and a pack of smokes, though not the brand I wanted.

I sense this is his last visit to see me.

To help with
the healing process, my mother brings me a book and a bag of chocolates, which I consume ravenously. Enclosed inside the pages of the book called
The Mastery of Love
, which I will not read, is a paper clip I have uncoiled and transformed into a needle-like object of minor self-mutilation.

I press down harder now that I'm here.

I add a dozen hatch marks and am shocked at how bad it looks, how brazen and tactless.

There is also a copy of
Descant Issue 144: Dogs
.

My sister brings me this journal, quite by chance, because I love dogs and poetry and good writing with equal measure—well, perhaps erring slightly on the side of dogs.

I have become good at finding meaning, code, in everything. The page upon which the inscription is written is red; red is relevant. The inscription begins:
Speculate on the tints of a butterfly's wing… Alexander Rodger (1784–1846) Stray Leaves.

I have never heard of this Alexander, but I have decided to love him. “Stray Leaves” also eludes me, though there is beneath my window an oak whose leaves have in recent days taken on a whimsy—flirtatiousness, rustling illuminated by the industrial lamp bulbs in the parking lot. From where I sit looking out my window at night, the darkness is transformed: leaves and negative space changed into magic and orbs.

I want to get through the glass, climb onto the tree, let go and feel the grass beneath my feet.