The Noonday Demon (78 page)

In the year that followed, Angel moved out of Norristown, first to an intensive assisted-care setting and then on to a less intensive setting, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. For more than fourteen months, she did not cut her arms. Her catalog of medicines seemed to be working to keep the dread voices away. Before leaving Norristown, she had told me, “What really scares me is that I’m not going to be able to get it together enough, do things like shopping, and the steps, three flights of stairs. And the people too. All of it.” But she made the transition with surprising grace. “Right now,” she told me about a month after her move, “I’m doing better than I’ve ever done.” And then she just went on getting better bit by bit, acquiring a confidence she had never anticipated. She continued to hear a voice that called her name, but it was not the demonic, torturing voice she had heard before. “Mostly, I don’t have any inkling of hurting myself. It was like a compulsion. And now, I think about it, but not like it used to be. Not at all like it used to be, the way if somebody sneezed, I’d cut myself. Now I feel like I want to be around, hopefully, for the rest of my life!” she told me.

I was struck that Angel, unlike many self-destructive patients, never sought to destroy anyone else. She never hit anyone in all her years in the hospital. She described once setting herself on fire by lighting her pajamas. Then she panicked that as she burned, she might set the building aflame. “I thought of the people I’d burn up and I put myself out real fast.” She got involved with the Consumer Satisfaction Team at Norristown, the hospital’s internal advocacy group for patient rights. She went out with her doctors, terrifying though she found it, to speak at schools about what life in the hospital was like. When I came to spend time with her in her supervised housing, I observed that she was the one who taught the others how to do things: she showed them how to cook (peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches) with an almost infinite patience. “I’ve got to live life,” she said to me. “I just so badly want to help people. And maybe in time, I’ll feel, I’ll be doing something for myself too. This woman who I’m sharing a room with now, she’s got such a good heart. When you call and she answers, doesn’t she sound like a little sweetheart? She’s got a lot of problems; she doesn’t even cook or clean. She doesn’t do much at all. But she’s sweet, you can’t be mean to her. I’ve been trying to teach her for like two months how to peel a damned cucumber, but she can’t get it.”

Angel writes poems and is a true devotee of trying to give voice to her experiences:

I went to see Angel just before she moved from her supervised housing to her lower-supervision housing. She had made me a present—a birdhouse painted bright blue with a note tacked on the back that said, “Rent Due.” We went for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the shopping mall in Pottstown. We talked about
Pippin,
the show she had seen the one time she traveled to New York. We talked about her application for a job, part-time, helping out with sandwiches in a deli. She had been turned down and she was crestfallen; she had been so excited by the idea of working, though she was afraid of the cash register and of having to do the arithmetic of giving people their change. “I’ve got a third-grade math level,” she confided. “It’s horrible. And a pretty short attention span too, like a three-year-old. It’s the medicines doing that I think.” We talked about her favorite book—
The Catcher in the Rye.
We talked about the dreams she was having. “I dream about the ocean all the time,” she said.
“It’s like this room, and there’s a wall. And in back of the wall, there’s an ocean. And I can never get over on the beach in there, to the water. I struggle and struggle to get to the water, and I can’t get in it. Other times I dream about this heat. The sun is starting to burn me and my hair is getting singed. I’m afraid of the heat of the sun. You know, even in real life I try to go to places where there are no windows during sunset, when the sun turns red. It terrifies me.” We talked a little bit about the flaws in her memory. “I am godmother to one of my nieces,” she said, “but I can’t remember which one, and I’m too embarrassed to ask.”

After that, I was in and out of touch for six months, and when we next met, Angel asked me what had been going on. I told her that I had had a little bit of a relapse. It was not long after the dislocated shoulder and my third breakdown. We were back at the Chinese restaurant. Angel rearranged the wilted bok choy on her plate. “You know,” she said after a minute, “I was really worried about you. I mean, I thought you might have killed yourself or something.”

I tried to comfort her. “Well, it wasn’t really quite like that, Angel. It was horrible, but it probably wasn’t that dangerous. Or at least it turned out to be not quite that dangerous. You know, I took the Zyprexa and shifted around a bunch of stuff and they turned it around really quickly.” I smiled and spread my arms. “You see, I’m fine now.”

Angel looked up and smiled. “That’s great. I was so worried.” We both ate. Then, “I’m never going to be fine,” she said doughtily. I told her it was one step at a time, and that she was doing awfully well. I told her that she was a thousand times better than she’d been when I first met her two years earlier. I said to her, look, a year ago you couldn’t even have imagined going out and living in a place like where you’re going. “Yeah,” she said, and for a minute she was bashfully proud. “Sometimes I hate the drugs so much, but they help me.”

We got ice cream and went to a dollar store next to the restaurant. Angel bought some coffee and a few other things she needed. We got in the car to drive back to the place where she was living. “I’m really glad you came,” she said to me. “I didn’t think you’d come out here today. I hope you don’t feel like I’m dragging you out here.” I said that it was kind of exciting to see what was happening to her, and that I too was glad I’d come. “You know,” she said, “if I could only get well enough to do stuff, I’d like to go on one of the big shows, like maybe
Oprah.
That would be my dream.”

I asked her why she wanted to be on a talk show.

“I just want to get my message out to people,” she said as we got back in the car. “I want to tell everyone: don’t cut yourself, and don’t hurt yourself, and don’t hate yourself. You know? It’s really so important. I
wish I’d known that much sooner. I want to tell everyone.” We drove for a little while in silence. “Will you try to tell people that when you write your book?” she asked me. And she laughed a little nervously.

“I’ll try to tell people just what you said,” I replied.

“Promise? It’s so important.”

“I promise.”

We went to her new place then, the lower-supervision housing, and toured around it and looked through the windows, and I climbed a flight of outdoor stairs to see the view from a terrace affixed to the back of the building. It was so different from the slightly dilapidated place where she’d been living. Recently refurbished, it looked like a hotel: each two-bedroom apartment had new wall-to-wall carpeting, a big TV, an armchair and a sofa, a fitted kitchen. “Angel, this place is pretty great,” I said, and she said, “Yeah, it’s really nice. It’s so much nicer.”

We drove back to the location she was soon to leave. We both got out of the car, and I gave Angel a long hug. I wished her good luck, and she thanked me again for coming down to see her and told me how much my visit had meant to her. I thanked her for the birdhouse. “God, it’s cold,” she said. I got back in the car and watched her trudge slowly from the parking lot to her front door. I pulled out to go. “Good-bye, Angel,” I said, and she turned around and waved. “Remember, you promised,” she called to me as I left.

It seemed a happy picture, and it remains one in my mind—but within six months, Angel had lacerated her wrists and stomach, been returned to the hospital, and gone into intensive psychiatric care. When I drove down to see her back at Norristown, her arms were covered in volcanic-looking blood-filled blisters, because she had poured boiling coffee onto the gashes to alleviate an anxiety overflow. While we talked, she rocked back and forth in her seat. “I just don’t want to live at all,” she said over and over. I dug up every helpful remark I could think of from this book. “It won’t always be like this,” I said to her, even though I suspect that, for her, it will be like this much of the time. Heroism and light in your eyes are not sufficient in the depression business.

A schizophrenic woman kept joining our conversation, protesting that she’d killed a ladybug and not a lady and that her family had raped her because they’d misunderstood and thought it was a lady. She wanted us to set the record straight. A man with weirdly large feet kept whispering conspiracy theories in my ear. “Go
away
,” Angel finally yelled at them. Then she wrapped her disfigured arms around herself. “I can’t stand this,” she said, angry and miserable and abject. “I’m never going to be free of this place. I want to just bang my head against the wall until it opens up and spills, you know?”

Before I left, one of the attendants said, “You optimistic?” and I shook my head. “Me neither,” he said. “I was for a while, because she isn’t acting crazy like most of ’em. I was wrong. She’s pretty well in touch with reality at the moment, and she’s still so sick.”

Angel said to me, “They got me out of the worst once, so I guess they’ll do it again.”

Within six months, this storm had cleared and she was free again, back in the nice apartment. She was full of good cheer. She finally had a job—bagging groceries—and she was so proud. At the Chinese restaurant, they seemed glad to see us. We avoided words such as
always
and
never
when we chatted.

Why, people kept asking me, why are you writing a book about depression? It seemed to them incomprehensible that I would submerge myself in this unpleasant topic, and I must say that as I set about my research, it often seemed to me that I had been foolish in my choice. I came up with a number of replies that seemed to meet the occasion. I said that I thought I had things to say that hadn’t been said. I said that writing is an act of social responsibility, that I wanted to help people to appreciate depression and to understand how best to care for those who suffer from it. I admitted that I had been offered a generous book advance and that I thought the topic might engage the public imagination, and that I wanted to be famous and beloved. But not until I had written about three-quarters of the book did my purpose fully reveal itself to me.

I did not anticipate the intense, shattering vulnerability of depressed people. Nor did I realize in what complicated ways that particular vulnerability interacts with personality. While I was working on this book, a close friend got engaged to a man who used his depression as an excuse for riotous emotional self-indulgence. He was sexually rejecting and cold; he demanded that she provide food and cash for him and run his personal life because it was too painful for him to take responsibility; he brooded for hours while she tenderly reassured him—but he could not remember any of the details of her life or talk to her about herself. For a long time, I encouraged her to put up with it, thinking it would clear with the illness, not recognizing that no cure on earth could transform him into a person of character. Later, another female friend of mine reported being physically attacked by her husband, who beat her head on the floor. He had been acting strangely for weeks—had responded in paranoiac ways to ordinary phone calls, and had been spiteful to the dogs. After his vicious physical attack, she called the police, terrified; he went into a mental hospital. It is true that he had some kind of schizo-affective
disorder, but he is still culpable. Psychiatric illness often reveals the dreadful side of someone. It doesn’t really make a whole new person. Sometimes the dreadful side is pathetic and needy and hungry, qualities that are sad but touching; sometimes the dreadful side is brutal and cruel. Illness brings to light the painful realities most people shroud in perfect darkness. Depression exaggerates character. In the long run, I think, it makes good people better; it makes bad people worse. It can destroy one’s sense of proportion and give one paranoid fantasies and a false sense of helplessness; but it is also a window onto truth.

The fiancé of the first friend and the husband of the second have little place in this book. In and out of my research, I met plenty of depressed people for whom I had negative feeling or no particular feeling, and by and large I decided not to write about them. I have chosen to write about people I admire. The people in this book are mostly strong or bright or tough or in some other way distinctive. I do not believe that there is such a thing as an average person, or that by telling a prototypical reality one can convey overarching truth. The quest for the nonindividual, generic human being is the blight of popular psychology books. By seeing how many kinds of resilience and strength and imagination are to be found, one can appreciate not only the horror of depression but also the complexity of human vitality. I had one conversation with a severely depressed older man who told me that “depressed people have no stories; we have nothing to say.” All of us have stories, and the true survivors have compelling stories. In real life, mood has to exist amid the clutter of toasters and atom bombs and fields of gazing grain. This book exists as a more protected environment for the stories of remarkable people and their successes—stories that I believe can help others as they helped me.