The Death of Small Creatures (24 page)

Clinical Note:

Staying in a suite in sister's house. Met David on 4A. Had a brief relationship with him. She did crack and crystal meth with him. “I really loved crack. I had to get out of there.” She thinks she has Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder II. She is depressed. Chronic sleep disturbance. I advised her to discuss referral to sleep lab and see her GP.

I am living
in the basement suite of my sister's new house located in a shifty area of the city. The house is beautiful, but the city's most prominent drug house is six doors down. We are on the ambulance route to the hospital, so the sirens blare all through the day and night.

I'm high on NeoCitran, again, fifteen packets in. My resurgence in early July has given way to bad habits. I haven't done Neo since before being admitted to the hospital, but that numbing sensation has lured me back inside its dextromethorphan haze.

The July sun is setting pink, golden, beyond the rooftops of houses across the street. The green shingles on my sister's house are illuminated in an orange slant of light as the sun drops out of view. Orange light bends into my new living room, across the green carpet. In the living room is a yellow floral-print love seat, a little wood coffee table, an old tube-style TV, a small wood desk with a black leather seat in front of it, and a tall white halogen lamp.

The hallway is white linoleum and leads to a washer and dryer, above which is a shelf where I have arranged my dishes. I have only a couple of water glasses, small plates, popcorn bowls, one pot, one fying pan and a microwave. I have a toaster oven and a hotplate that sit on top of the washing machine. There is no counter or kitchen sink. I do my dishes in the bathtub.

I get high, write my blog, check my email obsessively hoping for some small interaction with the outside world. I feel numb and hopeless at the same time, long to feel the skin split to obliterate the numbness if only for a few seconds, search for something to ease the anxiety and depression.

I have been corresponding with Richard for months. We've never met in person or exchanged photographs of each other. I am drawn to his intellect and wry sense of humour. He seems to like me just as I am. I'm not sure what that says about him. He is either a saint or a fool.

I take my pulse at intervals, set the microwave timer for ten seconds and count my heartbeats as the time winds down to zero, multiply this number by six to get my heart rate per minute.

I have learned how to induce manic highs by combining Neo and snorting Wellbutrin, the kind of manias one experiences in Bipolar I episodes. So these nights I careen from Bipolar II into Bipolar I by way of drug overdoses.

I am waiting for a complete psychotic break. One night I am so manic I believe without a doubt that I am in love with Dr. P. It hits me like an epiphany. I write it all down and read it aloud to him at my next appointment:

How do I say this? I've just had the most authentic, truthful experience, and it has to do with you.

I realized I am in love with you.

I've never experienced this sensation before, not with any man, this intensity of a connection I have with you.

I know I'm going to be okay in this world now, because you exist, whether I can have you or not. And the funny thing is that once I realized I was in love with you, you were the first person I wanted to run and tell.

It's beautiful here.

This kind of beauty is utterly unsustainable.

It's immaculate.

I told myself after I realized that I'm in love with you to remember that it doesn't matter whether we're together or not (although I'd love to spend the rest of my life with you) because it's enough just that I love you.

Marcello and Caravaggio live under a wooden table in the foyer, in a narrow hallway as you walk into the suite. Under this table is their litter box, hay, kibble bowl, water bowl and a soft blanket folded into a rectangle where they spread flat on their tummies and sleep. They have free run of the suite though, hop around the living room and down the hallway and into my bedroom off the hall, jump on my bed, hide under the couch, chew the baseboards. I try to clean up after them, but it is an endless trail of shit and piss wherever they go. I don't have the heart to put them in cages. No creature should live in a cage.

Clinical Note:

Since last appointment Trisha visited her GP and got another prescription for benzos. Her pharmacy called and informed me of this. Unfortunately, by the time I got back to them they notified me that the prescription had already been filled. I told them not to fill any others. I suggested to her GP that it would be helpful if her psychiatrist managed her psychiatric meds from now on. Trisha had been abusing Ativan and clonazepam in the past. She recently abused crack and crystal meth. She was an alcoholic three years ago but recently borrowed a corkscrew from her sister. She agrees to let me manage her meds. She is currently not certifiable.

Journal

September 21, 2009

Today, I walked up Fairfield, under maples and cherry blossom trees. The maple leaves were translucent, red, purple, burgundy, wine-colour, backlit by sun and sky. Wine like Pinot Noir (Lang Vineyards, cherry oak, the kind you can only get on Oak Bay Avenue across the street from the Penny Farthing Pub where Leigh and I used to go to drink giant pints of beer and listen to Irish music live, across the street from the chocolate shop). Pinot Noir leaves, luminous.

I think of burgundy wine, or Fruit Roll-Ups.

I wanted to eat the leaves.

I walked through the Ross Bay Cemetery, sat on a bench, stretched out my legs, these legs that will never, no matter what I do or how far I run, be what I want them to be. The ocean shone, a sheet of white light flickering, a sailboat way out there, a blue spinnaker blooming as the boat jibed and harnessed the wind again.

I felt dizzy, feverish, nauseous, have felt this way for a few days.

My mind feels more anchored, though. I caught myself today feeling like myself. This wasn't so much an epiphany of realization as it was an epiphany of remembrance.

There you are… I missed you. I think I missed you.

Small intervals of relief, these moments of remembrance, the weight of the universe lifted, my chest opened. I can breathe more easily. A great burden of self-loathing and yes, such lack of self-respect, lifted.

To be unburdened.

Is this how other people live?

I decided tonight that I would like to learn to play the cello.

I still want to take French classes, re-ignite the language in my brain, get a grip on the verb tenses, retrieve the vocabulary, develop my ear. I have been listening to CBC Radio, the French station, to that end.

I have four canvases here. The easel takes up a considerable part of my living room. It is really a bedroom converted into a living room. I want to make a series of bunny paintings, simple paintings, bunnies indicated in charcoal, shaded in, blurred into the background, varying numbers of bunnies in each painting. One canvas will contain only one bunny.

Eighty percent of the time I sleep on the love seat in the living room, curl up, hug a pillow, fall asleep easily. Oh, I love you, trazodone. I have a double-sized bed, but I have this weird need to be in the living room, need to be here, central. The love seat hugs me.

Ten

Notes from Within

Richard and I
agree he will take
The Clipper
ferry over from Seattle. He is still living with his wife and two sons, but will soon tell her he's seeing me.

I walk along Vancouver Street, past the swimming pool. I smell chlorine in the air and hear children laughing. Then through the seedy district of Pandora Avenue, past churches and homeless shelters, addicts shooting up in sunken doorways, past the McDonald's that reeks of cooked meat and deep-fried chicken McNuggets. The scent of cooked meat makes my nauseous stomach turn. I am ill, high, still stoned from last night's Neo and Wellbutrin. My sinuses burn and there is snot running over my top lip. I sniff hard, rub my nose. My movements are twitchy—the Wellbutrin acts like a mild amphetamine and the Neo creates in me an odd combination of lethargy and mania.

I walk along Government Street against the flow of tourist traffic, am jostled and bumped by shoulders and purses, a stream of label clothing—American Eagle, Ralph Lauren, Claiborne, Louis Vitton, Gap—a sea of American flag insignias on the fronts of T-shirts and polo shirts. Our American friends to the south come in droves. The street is narrow, bordered on both sides by lovely red cobblestone sidewalks. The air smells of confectionary, sweetness and perfume, warm pretzels and hoagies. I float through it in a haze, suspended in a kind of summer requiem, propelled onward by the sounds of street musicians—the xylophones in Bastion Square, the ten-year-old girl playing violin outside of Bay Centre and the boozy sax on the corner overlooking the Inner Harbour.

I cross into a clearing, gaze out at the harbour. Still, after so many years in this city, I revel in the vision of boats warbling against the wood docks, the sunken concrete boardwalk, harnessing the water, curved in an arch and dotted with street vendors selling necklaces and artwork, the Parliament Buildings in the background and the Empress Hotel covered in ivy, a great castle wall to the west.

The beauty of this place hurts me now.

When I was eighteen and new to this city I wore Body Shop Dewberry perfume and tie-dye T-shirts, walked along Dallas Road all the way to Beacon Hill Park, sat on a bench and watched the ducks and geese drift across the lake under the wishing bridge. I tossed a penny into the water and said, “Succeed. Don't stop until you get there. Leave the past behind. Just go.”

I wait for him on a grassy knoll outside the gates to the ferry terminal. The sun bleaches me. Everything feels glary and austere. Perhaps it's the anxiety of this moment, of meeting for the first time this man with whom I've corresponded for months, or it's the drugs in my system.

The first time I talked to Richard on the phone was a few weeks earlier. I called him late one night from my parents' place. I dialled and waited. His voice came back to me, hearty and smooth. In the background was the noise of some obnoxious band. “I'm at a concert in downtown Seattle,” he said. “Can I call you back from outside in a few minutes?” He sounded happy to hear from me. He called me back, and we discussed a time and day to meet in person, both of us giddy with the knowledge that we would finally meet, after months of the kind of vague correspondence that email perpetuates, all those words—however poetic and heartfelt—lacking immediacy and context. He missed two ferries back to Bainbridge Island, stayed on the shore where the reception is still good, so he could continue talking to me that night. We talked for two hours.

He appears from a crowd of passengers, a very tall slender man carrying a small black leather suitcase. He is smiling, sweet and endearing. We nervously embrace each other.

“Hello,” I laugh, and he laughs, “Hello!” Neither of us remembers now whether or not we kissed.

It is beyond me why he would risk so much for me. He is risking his marriage, his children, but this makes me love him right away. I want to be beautiful to him, sexual, smart and seductive. This is the way I regard all men who have ever come into my life. I want all of them to want me, passionately.

Dr. P adorns
his walls with artwork, paintings he has made on his own time, acrylics and oils, impressionist works mostly, thick layers of paint swirled together or spattered as if flung off the end of a paintbrush. He likes to use bright colours, glosses over some of his paintings with varnish. Just now I comment on one particularly blue painting on the wall behind his chair; it's a mixture of many different kinds of blue and purple—aquamarine, indigo, cornflower. “I love that,” I say.

“It's chaos,” he says.

“Chaos?” I say. I love his philosophical leanings, that on top of being a doctor, a psychiatrist, he has a master's degree in philosophy, speaks three languages, plays guitar and piano, paints, reads diligently, travels the world and goes to yoga once a week.

“What do you want to talk about today?” he says.

I gaze into the painting, think about chaos, imagine flying through the cosmos in a white gauzy gown, my wedding dress perhaps, my hair flailing behind me, the planet Earth a swirl of blue stretched oblong across a black carp. When will I break free of this desire to be kept, my fervent desire to be loved and defined by so many men? My mother once said, “Trisha, you need men to love you so much that they drain the life from you.”

“I want to talk about my love for you,” I say. My lust resonates, high-pitched and silvery, from a pinprick in blackness, expands, circular, into spheres of vibration widening into vapour, becoming part of everything.

He appears neither surprised nor offended. He is the consummate professional. How I want him to throw caution to the wind. How I wish he would forego his career and marital obligations and take me in his arms, kiss me passionately, undress me gingerly in the dim light of his office, push me gently to the floor, that flat, grey carpet, and make love to me there. “Okay,” he says. “When you say love, what does that mean to you?”

“I think I'm infatuated with you,” I say. “I understand my neurosis. But I still think it's love, not just transference.”

Erotic transference: a phenomenon characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another; the inappropriate repetition in the present of a relationship that was important in a person's childhood.

“Can you agree that were I just any ordinary man, and not your psychiatrist, you would not likely have such intense feelings for me?”

“I think I would be in love with you if you weren't my psychiatrist,” I say.

“How can you be so sure?” he says.

“I just know,” I say. “I knew it from the first time I saw you walk across the ward back in the hospital, before I even knew you were my doctor.”

“Why?” he says.

“It was something about your gait, the way you seem to lean forward into whatever path you're taking, your steadfastness, your inherent will of motion, as if you cannot get where you're going fast enough, as if you are larger than the life which imposes itself before your every step. Because I love you,” I say.

The hotel room
is spacious and dimly lit. The drapes are ochre, decadent, the bed large and inviting. There is a red rug in the middle of the room.

I take off my shoes. My bare feet press upon the rug, leave little impressions. My feet have been hot and sweaty, and it feels good to have them bare.

A fan whirs somewhere in the room; perhaps it's the ventilation, hotel air-conditioning. I am keenly aware of this breeze upon my bare arms and legs.

Richard busies himself with a box of pastries we have picked up along the way. He places the cardboard box in the middle of the bed. As he moves back and forth across the light of the lamp, the atmosphere flickers in and out of darkness, and his long shadow stretches across the floor. I am stricken by his height, reminded of Dr. P's stature, only Richard is more slender and agile. I pull back the drapes and gaze out the tinted window. Johnson Street bustles six storeys below.

“I've never seen the city from this vantage point before,” I say. Richard is sitting on the end of the bed, removing his black loafer shoes one at a time. I look upon his shoes, the formality of them. They are chosen with care by a gentle man, the shoes of a gentle giant. I fall in love with these shoes and feel faintly aroused. “Let's lay on the bed,” I say.

I curl my body into his, his heat, his slenderness. We seem instinctively drawn to each other, despite the relative lack of familiarity, despite that we have never laid down with each other before. I feel compelled to touch him, to be familiar with this strange man with whom I have shared only online communication and a few phone calls in the past months of our correspondence. I am so hungry for physical and emotional connection that I forego any sense of formality and slip into his gravity without hesitation. I forego self-authority once again, choosing to be enclosed instead of set free.

“Is this okay?” I say.

“It's fine,” he whispers. His blue eyes squint back at me through the lenses of his glasses. I remove his glasses, sense his tentativeness, his fear. I have to remind myself that he is a married man and has not to my knowledge touched another woman intimately like this since his wife.

I run my hands over his forehead and back to the nape of his neck, lean in, kiss him on the cheek, then again on his neck. I close my eyes and lay little kisses gently and slowly on his neck and chest, press my lips against his T-shirt, inhale the scent of him. I feel my humanity, and I feel his humanity, the essence of what we are to each other in this moment the way only two strangers can feel the essence of each other. We are raw and tenuous, corporeal and luminous. But the more I kiss him, as I move down the length of his body now, the less I want to know about him.

We are human, that's all.

He sighs, places his hand on my head. I think I feel him shaking.

Clinical Note:

Trisha abuses alcohol and especially over-the-counter cold remedies. I have discussed this with her GP's office who has agreed to not prescribe her benzos. I weaned her off benzos during her stay on 4A. I have provided her with the details of the Quadra Addictions Clinic and insisted that she present herself there for immediate assessment.