Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (3 page)

I could have told them that I had slept with five people in the past day, heard the birds speaking Greek, sold my mother into white slavery and spent the money on dinner. Then they might have opted for Depakote, the big gun of mood stabilizers. But again, I wasn’t ripe for that. I’d been on Depakote before. I had gained way too much weight, for one, and didn’t trust what it would do to me. That wasn’t the way.

But the things you say in psych wards can become a menu for drugs. You have to be careful. I wanted to keep drugs to a minimum, so I reported the virtual truth of my history. Depression, possibly bipolar. I was on 20 milligrams of Prozac, and hoping to get away with nothing more than a dose boost on that—the devil I knew—and maybe a sedative for the p.m.

As it turned out, the medication question was going to have to wait for “upstairs,” the ward itself, spookily referred to, where a team of pros could look me over and make the chin-stroking, wisely nodding call.

Down there in emergency that first night, I had managed to get some Klonopin by request, but I still hadn’t managed to fall asleep.

Nil had migrated to the picnic table, and so was contributing to the noise. He was playing a highly unorthodox game of chess with one of the orderlies, who was complaining loudly and incessantly about Nil’s strategy, which apparently entailed moving more than one piece per turn. His amped-up brain was skipping ahead three moves and making them all at once.

“You can’t do that,” the orderly kept saying, his voice rising in irritation.

The bright lights were kept on all night, so it was like trying to sleep in an interrogation room. The staff, too, went on all night, gabbing and laughing as if there weren’t stranded sick people lying all around them trying to rest. We were invisible, discounted, like baggage or the dead, stowed and impervious. We could tell no stories, the assumption being, I expect, that we were all too drugged or nuts to notice or lodge a complaint.

There were four rooms in there, actually, with beds even, two of which were empty. Who qualified for them or why I wasn’t sure. Perhaps the violent. After I’d been there for a few hours, I would have killed for a bed, or even just a closable door. I asked, at one point, if I could crawl away to one of the vacants for some privacy and quiet, but was told in typical bureaucratic futility-speak that it was impossible. I was, they said, not being formally admitted there, but only being held until a bed opened upstairs.

Somewhere around 3:00 a.m., however, one of the loud gaggle on duty announced that he could use a nap, and crawled off into one of these rooms for a snooze, pulling the curtains and all. Three hours later, just in time for shift change, he emerged, sighing and stretching satisfiedly.

I had managed to drop off somewhere around one o’clock, but had been woken at two for a chest x-ray.

“Why do I need a chest x-ray?” I asked the man who wheeled me in a seat-belted, wooden-backed wheelchair through a maze of green hallways and mauve doors.

“To check for TB,” he said.

Oh, right. As you do.

In the middle of the night?

Passing back through the locked door that said Patient Elopement Risk and Triage in big white letters, I knew that I would not do well if I had to stay in the psych ER for another night. But I had no choice. It would all depend on when a bed became available on one of the main wards upstairs. This special, sequestered, locked ER was where they held you until then, where they processed your insurance or lack thereof, where they kenneled you, like it or not, because you were a risk either to yourself or others. It would take as long as it took.

We were in the bowels of the hospital. There were no windows. No air but the recycled variety, wheezing through vents. No light but bright fluorescents, unforgiving and somehow worse than shadows. Had they not secured my valuables, I might well have made a run for it from radiology. But then, of course, they knew where I lived, and I felt sure they would have followed up if I had made for home in my mad rags.

“Eloped” was priceless, though I suppose only we loons were inclined to do it alone and from a wheelchair, streaking through the streets in our blue issue, like B movie extras run amok.

But, God, it was a strong urge—run!

I thought—and I had this thought many times in the coming days—who wouldn’t look crazy doing that? Yet who, under the circumstances, wouldn’t do it, or at least want to?

I had given them urine at ten, films at two, and blood at six. I was, it seemed, contagion-free, excretion-wise anyway. And the lungs, I was told after breakfast, were clear.

Some time in the night, the cops had brought in a shirtless man in handcuffs. He had, apparently, threatened his family. I saw him come in, but since we were separated by sex, I did not see him again.

Somehow, though, perhaps because of his long hair and Zen demeanor, Nil had managed to stay on the women’s side with me for much of the night. He told me he had been to the bin many times before. Since adolescence, he said, he had been in and out of places like Meriwether. He knew the routine well, which was a great help to me, who didn’t.

I had managed to smuggle in a pen but had forgotten that I should not be seen with it, and so it was promptly taken by a nurse, officious and smug.

“You can’t have that,” she sighed, flicking her fingers to her palm impatiently. “Give it here.”

I was a kid to her, cheating at school. And that is how it felt. I was not yet practiced at subterfuge, and surrendered the pen with a shrug. This was a false position, though, since I was not indifferent. Losing the thing made me panic. It was not a small loss to me, though, a petty one on her part, and she knew it, took pleasure in it.

Or was that the beginning of paranoia?

I didn’t know what I was going to do if I couldn’t write. Nil knew this feeling, and reached into the paper bag he had found to house his few pilferings from around the ward. They included, aside from the brown marker, the dog-eared paperback book that he was using as a notebook, some rolls and milk kept from dinner, and a small square blanket someone had snatched from the maternity ward, which he was using as a meditation mat. This was when I saw and used my first Crayola, the blunt tip acceptable in a place where a ballpoint was a weapon, or could be.

“You can do a lot of damage with one of these,” a nurse had said to me, holding up her pen. As soon as she said it I had visions of stabbing a person in the neck, maybe myself. The jugular is pokeable and fatal, and what’s more, neatly self-inflicting if you’re so inclined. Just then, I was not. But too long in that place and you might be—probably would be. That was clear.

They had a metal detector at the door, though they did not put me through it. Maybe this was a perk of being white, or of being thought too thin to hide weapons in my flesh. Or maybe the guards were too busy with the fat Muslim woman in
hijab
to bother with me. They put her through twice. They didn’t even pat me down. But as I told the admitting nurse, I’ve never been violent, so who’s counting?

“Have you ever lost your temper?” she asked.

Was that a test? A bout of cognitive lock-picking? A measure of my faculties? Later, in this vein, they would ask me: Who is the president? What day is it?

Don’t get smart, I decided. Be as honest as you can.

“Um . . . yes.”

From where I was sitting, I could see another sign I enjoyed. “Please do not walk through triage area while triage in progress.”

Was this triage in progress, or was that when you lost your temper?

“Do you have a psychiatric history? Do you know your clinical diagnosis?”

“Yes and yes,” I said, looking away.

A man in the hallway had crapped himself, a brown seep the shape of Lake Michigan hanging low in his bottoms. He was shouting into the nurse’s station, which was a fort of Plexiglas from which the RNs rarely emerged unbidden. Patients tended to loiter there and stare, ignored. If you needed something, you had to knock. Or shout. Or crap your pants, I guess.

I had gawped there, too, earlier, just for something to do, mesmerized by a computer whose crawling screen saver said—ungrammatically—“Always borrow money from a pessimist. They never expect it back.” I spliced it like a chant in my head, coding it for meaning. “Always borrow . . . never expect . . . money, money . . . a pessimist’s back.”

This was one of those nutty hallmarks that began to make sense to me in there. Babbling. Boredom was a scourge and the enemy. You fended it off with anything, the brain leaping on word games for food: scrambles, iterations, puns. It was, oddly enough, a defense. Not so much the evidence of a mind gone awry, as the ditch of a mind trying not to, like a verbal rocking that puts confusion to sleep, the language center calming itself, whistling a tune in the dark.

No one moved to help the befouled man, so Nil, ever eager to be of service, offered shampoo.

“I need a towel,” the man grumbled ungratefully.

“Sorry. Just shampoo.”

“Can’t you get me a towel?”

“I’m a patient, too.”

The nurse put a statement in front of me. It said that I would not harm myself or others while being evaluated. I signed it—smiling—with her ballpoint pen.

Time had passed slowly after that. Sitting. Staring. And then more questions. The questions were much the same. Condition. History. Temper. First the nurse, then the doctor. The doctor explained what voluntary meant: (a) you can be discharged if and when the doctors agree; (b) if the doctors disagree, you can be discharged against medical advice—though how or if this ever happens is unclear, given that (c) if you insist on being discharged and the doctors still disagree, you must write a three-day letter expressing your wishes, in which case, you will be brought before a judge within seventy-two hours. In theory, at least, this is the law, but I made no use of it.

In short, voluntary did not mean free. It meant I had not come there in cuffs, but I could not leave when I chose.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Sign here.”

Voluntary means will. An act of will. Free will. I will this and it is so. Or so it is in the free world. But there, in Meriwether, it meant a resignation of will, the last free act until they discharged you. And this, to my mind, was the worst part about being there, the worst part about being mad, or deemed mad.

Madness is a disease of the will, of judgment. That is what is impaired. And so, in there, along with so much else, your will was taken away, like a pen, because you could not be trusted with it. Yet your will is the thing that makes you feel human. Without it you cannot be well, which is why no one in there really got well, or, arguably, much better.

This is the paradox of asylums, and their fatal flaw. Put a person in a cage and you cannot help him. But leave him to his devices and he cannot help himself, or will not. Freedom is a prerequisite for healing a broken mind. It cannot be fixed against its will. Yet a broken mind is a broken will, a freedom that does harm, even potentially serious physical harm to itself and possibly others, a freedom that can attack or maim. So, how else to heal but by force?

I looked at my wristband. White, with my name, date of birth, my age, too (for the lazy), and a code I couldn’t decipher. MXE. Again, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to play at breaking this code: methotrexate enema; maximal xenon eczema (a rash of computers; could be bad). But that’s what crazy people supposedly do, right? See cryptograms everywhere. And when you are looking, you will find them.

It’s like learning a new word. Someone uses it—“Esperanto,” for example—and you say, “What the hell does that mean?”

They tell you, and you are amazed. “It was a language made up by linguists in 1884. It was supposed to be something that the whole world could learn, so that we could all speak to each other.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that before.”

“Haven’t you?” they say. “How odd.”

Then, as if by public consensus, it’s everywhere. Someone brings it up in conversation. A newspaper article tells you it’s in
Finnegans Wake.
And then, there in Meriwether of all places, where the TV was blaring above my head all day and evening, it was the daily double on
Jeopardy!
No joke.

“What is Esperanto?”

Fuck me. Don’t tell that to the nurses.

I have my pet theories like everyone else. Madness as the extension of sanity, the same propensities, only more so. A mental game gone too serious and scary, a dream we cannot wake from, or better, a somnambulist’s midnight lack of sense running prime time and permanent in the day.

Maybe you, the normal man, walk into the kitchen in the wee hours and eat jelly by the tablespoon right out of the jar, and have no memory of it in the morning, only the weird evidence in the sink. Or maybe when you wake, you turn to your wife and say, “I had the strangest dream last night. I was flying in a tiger suit over Wall Street and your mother was there wearing a turban.”

And she will nod at you understandingly, knowing the oddity and cogency of dreams. You get up and go to work, sit in board meetings. You are sane.

But a mad person will say the same thing in the middle of the day, all day long, and he will find it more convincing because unshakable after a shower and a cup of coffee. Is he wearing his subconscious on his sleeve, as he tells you (or usually himself, aloud) of tigers and turbans? Has his mind turned itself inside out, switched night and day, abstract expression and photo real?

Maybe our art is his life. Maybe he lives every day in the stream of consciousness we so admire in Joyce, with little breaks of coherence in between, the precise opposite of our daily grind, the stone-dry workaday that we relinquish so happily for a bit of science fiction fantasy on TV. Maybe the madman is a model of rationality in his dreams, while you are all over the map.