Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (92 page)

But to say I returned to the world is even a bit misleading, for all my life the world has seemed off-kilter. On Prozac, not only did the acute obsessions dissolve; so too did the blander depression that had been with me since my earliest memories. A sense of immense calm flooded me. Colors came out, yellow leaping from the light where it had long lain trapped, greens unwinding from the grass, dusk letting loose its lavender.

By the fourth day I still felt so shockingly fine that I called the Prozac Doctor. I pictured him in his office, high in the eaves of McLean. I believed he had saved me. He loomed large.

“I’m well,” I told him.

“Not yet. It takes at least a month to build up a therapeutic blood level.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.” I felt a rushing joy. “The medicine you gave me has made me well. I’ve — I’ve actually never felt better.”

A pause on the line. “I suppose it could be possible.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s happened.”

I became a “happening” kind of person. Peter Kramer, the author of
Listening to Prozac
, has written extensively on the drug’s ability to galvanize personality change as well as to soothe fears or elevate mood. Kramer calls Prozac a cosmetic medication, for it seems to reshape the psyche, lift the face of the soul.

One night, soon after the medication had kicked in, I sat at the kitchen table with Adam. He was stuck in the muck of his master’s thesis, fearful of failure.

“It’s easy,” I said. “Break the project down into bits. A page a day. Six days, one chapter. Twelve days, two. One month, presto.” I snapped my fingers. “You’re finished.”

Adam looked at me, said nothing. The kitchen grew quiet, a deliberate sort of silence he seemed to be purposefully manufacturing so I could hear the echo of my own voice. Bugs thumped on the screen. I heard the high happy pitch of a cheerleader, the sensible voice of a vocational counselor. In a matter of moments I had gone from a fumbling, unsure person to this — all pragmatism, all sure solutions. For the first time on Prozac I felt afraid.

I lay in bed that night. From the next room I heard the patter of Adam’s typewriter keys. He was stuck in the mire, inching forward and falling back. Where was I? Who was I? I lifted my hand to my face, the same motion as before, when the full force of obsession had struck me. The hand was still unfamiliar, but wonderfully so now, the three threaded lines seams of silver, the lights from passing cars rotating on my walls like the swish of a spaceship softly landing.

In space I was then, wondering. How could a drug change my mind so abruptly? How could it bring forth buried or new parts of my personality? The oldest questions, I know. My brain wasn’t wet clay and paste, as all good brains should be, but a glinting thing crossed with wires. I wasn’t human but machine. No, I wasn’t machine but animal, linked to my electrified biology more completely than I could have imagined. We have lately come to think of machines and animals, of machines and nature, as occupying opposite sides of the spectrum — there is IBM and then there’s the lake — but really they are so similar. A computer goes on when you push its button. A gazelle goes on when it sees a lynx. Only humans are supposedly different, above the pure cause and effect of the hardwired primitive world. Free will and all.

But no, maybe not. For I had swallowed a pill designed through technology, and in doing so, I was discovering myself embedded in an animal world. I was a purely chemical being, mood and personality seeping through serotonin. We are all taught to believe it’s true, but how strange to feel that supposed truth bubbling right in your own tweaked brainpan. Who was I, all skin and worm, all herd? For the next few weeks, amidst feelings of joy and deep relief, these thoughts accompanied me, these slow, simmering misgivings. In dreams, beasts roamed the rafters of my bones, and my bones were twined with wire, teeth tiny silicon chips.

I went to Drumlin Farm one afternoon to see the animals. A goose ate grass in an imperturbable rhythm. Sheep braved robotically, their noses pointing toward the sky. I reached out to touch their fur. Simmering misgivings, yes, but my fingers alive, feeling clumps of cream, of wool.

Every noon I took my pill. Instead of just placing it on my tongue and swallowing with water, I unscrewed the capsule. White powder poured into my hands. I tossed the plastic husk away, cradled the healing talc. I tasted it, a burst of bitterness, a gagging. I took it that way every day, the silky slide of Prozac powder, the harshness in my mouth.

Mornings now, I got up early to jog, showered efficiently, then strode off to the library. I was able to go back to work, cutting deli part-time at Formaggio while I prepared myself for divinity school the next year by reading. I read with an appetite, hungry from all the time I’d lost to illness. The pages of the books seemed very white; the words were easy, black beads shining, ebony in my quieted mind.

I found a book in the library’s medical section about obsessive-compulsive disorder. I sat in a corner, on a corduroy cushion, to read it. And there, surrounded by pages and pages on the nature of God and mystery, on Job who cried out at his unfathomable pain, I read about my disorder from a medical perspective, followed the charts and graphs and correlation coefficients. The author proposed that OCD was solely physical in origin, and had the same neurological etiology as Tourette’s. Obsessive symptoms, the author suggested, are atavistic responses left over from primitive grooming behaviors. We still have the ape in us; a bird flies in our blood. The obsessive person, linked to her reptilian roots, her mammalian ancestors, cannot stop picking parasites off her brother’s back, combing her hair with her tongue, or doing the human equivalent of nest building, picking up stick after stick, leaf after leaf, until her bloated home sits ridiculously unstable in the crotch of an old oak tree.

Keel keel
, the crow in me cries. The pig grunts. The screen of myself blinks on. Blinks off. Darkens.

Still, I was mostly peaceful, wonderfully organized. My mind felt lubed, thoughts slipping through so easily, words bursting into bloom. I was reminded of being a girl on the island of Barbados, where we once vacationed. My father took me to a banquet beneath a tropical sky. Greased black men slithered under low poles, their liquid bodies bending to meet the world. Torches flared, and on a long table before me steamed food of every variety.
A feast
, my father said,
all the good things in life
. Yes, that was what Prozac was first like for me, all the good things in life: roasted ham, delicate grilled fish, lemon halves wrapped in yellow waxed paper, fat plums floating in jars.

I could, I thought, do anything in this state of mind. I put my misgivings aside — how fast they would soon come back! how hard they would hit! — and ate into my days, a long banquet. I did things I’d never done before: swimming at dawn in Walden Pond, writing poetry I knew was bad and loving it anyway.

I applied for and was awarded a three-month grant to go to Appalachia, where I wanted to collect oral histories of mountain women. I could swagger anywhere on the Zack, on Vitamin P. Never mind that even before I’d ever come down with OCD I’d been the anxious, tentative sort. Never mind that unnamed trepidations, for all of my life, had prevented me from taking a trip to New Hampshire for more than a few days. Now that I’d taken the cure, I really could go anywhere, even off to the rippling blue mountains of poverty, far from a phone or a friend.

A gun hung over the door. In the oven I saw a roasted bird covered with flies. In the bathroom, a fat girl stooped over herself, with out bothering to shut the door, and pulled a red rag from between her legs.

Her name was Kim, her sister’s name was Bridget, and their mother and father were Kat and Lonny. All the females were huge and doughy, while Lonny was a single strand of muscle tanned to the color of tobacco. He said very little, and the mother and daughters chattered on, offering me Cokes and Cheerios, showing me to my room, where I sat on a lumpy mattress and stared at the white walls.

And then a moon rose. A storm of hurricane force plowed through fields and sky. I didn’t feel myself here. The sound of the storm, battering just above my head, seemed far far away. There was a whispering in my mind, a noise like silk being split. Next to me, on the night table, my sturdy bottle of Prozac. I was fine. So long as I had that, I would be fine.

I pretended I was fine for the next couple of days, racing around with manic intensity. I sat heavy Kat in one of her oversized chairs and insisted she tell me everything about her life in the Blue Ridge Mountains, scribbling madly as she talked.
I am happy happy happy
, I sang to myself. I tried to ignore the strange sounds building in my brain, kindling that crackles, a flame getting hot.

And then I was taking a break out in the sandy yard. It was near one hundred degrees. The sun was tiny in a bleary sky. Chickens screamed and pecked.

In one swift and seamless move, Lonny reached down to grab a bird. His fist closed in on its throat while all the crows cawed and the beasts in my bones brayed away. He laid the chicken down on a stump, raised an ax, and cut. The body did its dance. I watched the severing, how swiftly connections melt, how deep and black is space. Blood spilled.

I ran inside. I was far from a phone or a friend. Maybe I was reminded of some pre-verbal terror: the surgeon’s knife, the violet umbilical cord. Or maybe the mountain altitudes had thrown my chemistry off. I don’t really know why, or how. But as though I’d never swallowed a Prozac pill, my mind seized and clamped and the obsessions were back.

I took a step forward and then said to myself.
Don’t take another step until you
count to twenty-five
. After I’d satisfied that imperative, I had to count to twenty-five again, and then halve twenty-five, and then quarter it, before I felt safe enough to walk out the door. By the end of the day, each step took over ten minutes to complete. I stopped taking steps. I sat on my bed.

“What’s wrong with you?” Kat said. “Come out here and talk with us.”

I tried, but I got stuck in the doorway. There was a point above the doorway I just had to see, and then see again, and inside of me something screamed
back again back again
, and the grief was very large.

For I had experienced the world free and taken in colors and tasted grilled fish and moon. I had left one illness like a too tight snakeskin, and here I was, thrust back. What’s worse than illness is to think you’re cured — partake of cure in almost complete belief — and then with no warning to be dashed on a dock, moored.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about Prozac. The drug, for many obsessives who take it, is known to have wonderfully powerful effects in the first few months when it’s new to the body. When I called the Prozac Doctor from Kentucky that evening, he explained to me how the drug, when used to treat OCD as opposed to depression, peaks at about six months and then loses some of its oomph. “Someday we’ll develop a more robust pill,” Dr. Stanley said. “In the meantime, up your dose.”

I upped my dose. No relief. Why not? Please. Over the months I had come to need Prozac in a complicated way, had come to see it as my savior, half hating it, half loving it. I unscrewed the capsules and poured their contents over my fingers. Healing talc, gone. Dead sand. I fingered the empty husks.

“You’ll feel better if you come to church with us,” Kat said to me that Sunday morning. She peered into my face, which must have been white and drawn. “Are you suffering from some city sickness?”

I shrugged. My eyes hurt from crying. I couldn’t read or write; I could only add, subtract, divide, divide again.

“Come to church,” Kat said. “We can ask the preacher to pray for you.”

But I didn’t believe in prayers where my illness was concerned. I had come to think, through my reading and the words of doctors, and especially through my brain’s rapid response to a drug, that whatever was wrong with me had a simplistic chemical cause. Such a belief can be devastating to sick people, for on top of their illness they must struggle with the sense that illness lacks any creative possibilities.

I think these beliefs, so common in today’s high-tech biomedical era in which the focus is relentlessly reductionistic, rob illness of its potential dignity. Illness can be dignified: we can conceive of pain as a kind of complex answer from an elegant system, an arrow pointing inward, a message from soil or sky.

Not so for me. I wouldn’t go to church or temple. I wouldn’t talk or ask or wonder, for these are distinctly human activities, and I’d come to view myself as less than human.

An anger rose up in me then, a rage. I woke late one night, hands fisted. It took me an hour to get out of bed, so many numbers I had to do, but I was determined.

And then I was walking outside, pushing past the need to count before every step. The night air was muggy, and insects raised a chorus.

I passed midnight fields, a single shack with lighted windows. Cows slept in a pasture.

I rounded the pasture, walked up a hill. And then, before me, spreading out in moonglow, a lake. I stood by its lip. My mind was buzzing and jerking. I don’t know at what point the swans appeared — white swans, they must have been, but in silhouette they looked black. They seemed to materialize straight out of the slumbering water. They rose to the surface of the water as memories rise to the surface of consciousness. Hundreds of black swans suddenly, floating absolutely silent, and as I stood there the counting ceased, my mind became silent, and I watched. The swans drifted until it seemed, for a few moments, that they were inside of me, seven dark, silent birds, fourteen princesses, a single self swimming in a tepid sea.

I don’t know how long I stood there, or when, exactly, I left. The swans disappeared eventually. The counting ticking talking of my mind resumed.