The Noonday Demon (14 page)

The insistence on normality, the belief in an inner logic in the face of unmistakable abnormality, is endemic to depression. It is the everyman story of this book, one I have encountered time after time. The shape of each person’s normality, however, is unique: normality is perhaps an even more private idea than weirdness. Bill Stein, a publisher I know, comes from a family in which both depression and trauma have run high. His father, born a Jew in Germany, left Bavaria on a business visa in early 1938. His grandparents were lined up outside the family house on Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, and though they were not arrested, they had to watch as many of their friends and neighbors were sent off to Dachau. The trauma of being a Jew in Nazi Germany was horrendous, and Bill’s grandmother went into a six-week decline after Kristallnacht, which culminated with her suicide on Christmas Day. The following week, exit visas arrived for both Bill’s grandparents. His father emigrated alone.

Bill’s parents married in Stockholm in 1939 and moved to Brazil before settling in the United States. His father always refused to discuss this history; “that period in Germany,” Bill recalls, “simply did not exist.” They lived on an attractive street in a prosperous suburb in a bubble of unreality. In part perhaps because of his practice of denial, Bill’s father suffered a severe breakdown at the age of fifty-seven and had repeated lapses straight through to his death more than thirty years later. His depressions followed the same patterns that his son would inherit. His first major breakdown occurred when his son was five years old; he continued to go to pieces periodically, with a particularly deep depression that lasted from the time Bill was in sixth grade until the time he finished junior high school.

Bill’s mother came from a much wealthier and more privileged German
Jewish family that had left Germany for Stockholm in 1919. A woman of strong character, she once slapped a Nazi captain in the face for being rude to her; “I’m a Swedish citizen,” she told him, “and I won’t be spoken to in that way.”

By the age of nine, Bill Stein was experiencing lengthy periods of depression. For about two years, he was terrified of going to sleep and was traumatized when his parents went to bed. Then his dark feelings lifted for a few years. After some minor lapses, they returned when he got to college, spinning out of control in 1974, during the second term of his freshman year. “I had this sadistic roommate, and the academic pressure was intense. I was so anxious I was hyperventilating,” he recalls. “I just couldn’t take the pressure. So I went to the undergraduate health services and they gave me Valium.”

The depression did not lift during the summer. “Often when I had deep depressions, the control of my bowels would go. I remember that summer was particularly severe in this way. I was dreading sophomore year. I couldn’t face my exams or anything. When I got back to school and went through my first year and got straight As, I honestly thought someone had made a mistake. When it turned out that they hadn’t, it gave me something of a high, and that pulled me out of the depression.” If there are triggers for breakdowns, there are also triggers for turning around, and that was Stein’s. “I came back down to normal again a day later, but I never truly sank again at school. I did, however, withdraw from my aspirations. If you had told me then what I would be doing now, the people I would be working with, I’d have been utterly shocked. I was ambitionless.” Despite this acceptance of his lot, Stein worked slavishly hard. He continued to get straight As. “I don’t know why I bothered,” he says. “I didn’t want to go to law school or anything. I just thought that somehow good grades would make me safe, would convince me that I was functional.” When he graduated, Stein took a job teaching in a public high school in upstate New York. It was a disaster; he couldn’t discipline a class and he lasted only one year. “I left a failure. I lost a lot of weight. I had another depression. And then the father of a friend said he could get me a job, and I took it to have something to do.”

Bill Stein is a man of quiet, powerful intelligence and an entirely restrained ego. He is self-effacing almost to a fault. Bill suffered repeated depressions, each about six months long, somewhat seasonal, usually hitting a low point in April. The worst came in 1986, precipitated by turbulence at work, the loss of a good friend, and Bill’s attempt to get off Xanax, which he had taken for just a month but to which he had become addicted. “I lost my apartment,” Stein says. “I lost my job. I lost most of my friends. I couldn’t stay in a house by myself. I was supposed to be
moving from my old apartment I’d just sold to this new apartment that was being renovated, and I just couldn’t. I crashed so quickly and the anxiety devastated me. I would wake up at three or four in the morning with these sort of rushes of anxiety that were so intense it would have been more pleasurable to jump out the window. When I was with other people, I always felt like I was going to faint from the stress. I’d been whizzing around the globe to Australia,
fine,
three months earlier, and now the world had been taken away from me. I was in New Orleans when it really hit and I suddenly knew I had to get home, but I couldn’t board a plane. People took advantage of me; I was a wounded animal in an open meadow.” He broke down completely. “When you’re really bad, you have this sort of catatonic look on your face, as if you’ve been stunned. You act strangely because of your deficits; my short-term memory disappeared. And then it got even worse. I couldn’t control my bowels and I would make in my pants. Then I was living in such terror of that that I couldn’t leave my own apartment, and that was a further trauma. In the end, I moved back to my parents’ house.” But life at home was not ameliorative. Bill’s father crumpled under the pressure of his son’s illness and ended up in the hospital himself. Bill went to stay with his sister; then a school friend took him in for seven weeks. “It was horrendous,” he says. “I thought, at that point, that I would be mentally ill for the rest of my life. The episode lasted for more than a year. It seemed better to float with the down than to fight it. I think you have to let go and understand that the world will be re-created and may never again resemble what you knew previously.”

He went to the doors of a hospital several times but could not bring himself to register there. He finally signed in at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York in September of 1986, and asked for electroconvulsive therapy. ECT had helped his father but failed to help him. “It was the most dehumanizing place I can imagine, to go from life on the outside to not being allowed to have your shaving kit or your nail clipper. Having to wear pajamas. Having to eat dinner at four-thirty. Being talked down to, as if you’re retarded in addition to being depressed. Seeing other patients in padded cells. You can’t have a telephone in your room because you might strangle yourself with the cord and because they want to control your access to the outside world. This is not like a normal hospitalization. You are deprived of your rights on the mental health ward. I don’t think the hospital is a place for depressives unless they’re totally helpless or desperately suicidal.”

The physical process of the shock treatments was awful. “The man who administered them was a doctor who looked a lot like Herman Munster. The treatments were given in the basement of Mt. Sinai. All the
patients who were going to get them went down there, into the depths of hell, and all of us wore bathrobes, and it felt like we were in a chain gang. Since I kept my composure pretty well, they made me the last, and I stood around there trying to comfort all the terrified people who were waiting around, while the janitorial staff came in and shoved past us to get to their lockers, which were also located down there. If I were only Dante, I’d be great explaining what it was like. I had wanted the treatments, but the room and the people—I felt like it was a barbaric Mengele scene of experimentation. If you’re going to do this stuff, do it on the fucking eighth floor with light windows and bright colors! I wouldn’t allow it now.

“I still mourn the loss of my memory,” he says. “I had an exceptional memory, nearly photographic, and it has never come back. When I got out, I couldn’t remember my locker combination, my conversations.” At first, when he came out, he also couldn’t even do filing at a volunteer job, but soon he began to function. He moved to Santa Fe for six months and stayed with friends. In the summer he returned to New York to live alone again. “Perhaps it is just as well that my memory was clearly suffering permanent deficits,” he says. “It has helped me to blunt out some of the lows. I forget them as easily as I forget everything else.” Recovery was gradual. “There is a lot of volition but you can’t control the recovery. You can’t figure out when it will happen, any more than you can predict when someone will die.”

Stein took to visiting a synagogue, going weekly with a religious friend. “I was substantially assisted by faith. It somehow relieved the pressure on me to believe in something else,” he says. “I had always been proud of being Jewish and drawn to things religious. After that big depression, I felt that if I believed hard enough, things might come about that would save the world. I had to sink so low there was nothing to believe in but God. I was slightly embarrassed to find myself drawn to religion; but it was right. It’s right that no matter how bad the week, there’s that service every Friday.

“But the thing that saved me was Prozac, which came along in 1988, just in time. It was a miracle. My head suddenly felt, after all these years, as if there wasn’t a huge crack in it that was being pulled wider and wider. If you had told me in 1987 that a year later I’d be taking planes, working with governors and senators—well, I’d have laughed. I couldn’t even cross the street.” Bill Stein is now on Effexor and lithium. “My biggest fear in life was that I would not be able to handle my father’s death. He died at the age of ninety, and when he died, I was almost euphoric to find that I could handle it. I was heartbroken and I cried, but I could do the normal things: play the son in the family, talk to the lawyers, write a eulogy. I handled it better than I would ever have thought possible.

“I still have to be careful. I always feel as though everyone wants a little piece of me. There’s just so much I can give and then I’ll get really really tense. I think, perhaps wrongly, that people will think less of me if I am completely open about my experiences. I still remember being avoided. Life is always on the edge of falling down again. I’ve learned to hide it, to make it so no one can tell when I’m on three drugs and about to collapse. I don’t think I ever feel really happy. One can only expect that life not be miserable. When you’re hugely self-conscious, it’s hard to be fully happy. I love baseball. And when I see other guys at the stadium, swilling beer, seeming so unconscious of themselves and their relation to the world, I envy that. God, wouldn’t it be great to be like that?

“I always think about those exit visas. If my grandmother had only waited. The story of her suicide taught me patience. There is no doubt that no matter how bad it gets again, I will get through it. But I would not be the person I am today without the wisdom I have gained from my experiences, the shedding of narcissism they’ve brought about.”

Bill Stein’s story has had considerable resonance for me. I have thought of those exit visas often since I first met Bill. I thought of the one that was never used and, also, of the one that was used. Getting through my first depression had involved holding on. A brief period of reasonable peace had followed. When I began to experience anxiety and major depression the second time around—while I was still in the shadow of my first depression and not yet clear where my flirtation with AIDS might have left me—I recognized what was happening. I became overwhelmed by the need to pause. Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand—all the things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once. The Russian poet Daniil Kharms once described hunger: “Then begins the weakness. Then begins the boredom. Then comes the loss of the power of quick reason. Then comes the calmness. And then begins the horror.” In just such logical and terrible stages did the second bout of depression begin—exacerbated by real fear of the HIV test I’d scheduled. I didn’t want to go back on medication, and for a while I tried to ride it out. Then one day I realized that it wasn’t going to work. I knew about three days ahead of time that I was heading for rock bottom. I started taking the Paxil I still had in my medicine chest. I called the psychopharmacologist. I warned my father. I tried to make the practical arrangements: losing your mind, like losing your car keys, is a real hassle. Out of the terror, I heard my voice holding on tight to irony when friends called. “I’m sorry, I’ll have to cancel
Tuesday,” I said. “I’m afraid of lamb chops again.” The symptoms came fast and ominously. In about a month, I lost a fifth of my body weight, some thirty-five pounds.

The psychopharmacologist thought that, since I had felt light-headed on Zoloft and highly strung on Paxil, it was worth trying something new, so he put me on Effexor and BuSpar, both of which I am still taking, six years later. In the throes of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between one’s own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of character. I am melodramatic by nature; on the other hand, I can go out and “seem normal” under the most abnormal of circumstances. Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, “Never real and always true,” and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. It’s very confusing.

By the week of the HIV test, I was taking twelve to sixteen milligrams of Xanax (I had squirreled away a small cache of the drug) every day, so that I could sleep all the time and not be anxious. On Thursday of that week, I got up and checked my messages. The nurse from my doctor’s office said: “Your cholesterol is down, your cardiogram is normal, and your HIV test turned out fine.” I called her immediately. It was true. I was HIV-negative after all. As Gatsby said, “I tried hard to die but have an enchanted life.” I knew then that I wanted to live, and I was grateful for the news. But I went right on feeling terrible for two more months. I gritted my teeth against suicidality every day.