We are Wormwood (17 page)

“Do you remember your name?” They asked me.

“Beelzebub,” I tried to say to spite them, but I couldn’t
speak.

I always knew I’d end up here, in paper slippers and a
tongue that refused to work. Just like Atreus would have always cooked the son
of Thyestes. Just like Oedipus would have always fucked his mother and gouged
his eyes out.
Just like Gilgamesh would have always had his
immortality, giving flower, stolen by a serpent lurking in the well.

Just like my mother.

Every hallway led to this hallway.

I wondered if my mother’s ghost passed through me, crackling
neurons, touching me with her schizophrenic cells. If she could see me now,
shuffling down this so-familiar hallway, would she make me hot chocolate, shake
her braided hair, and laugh like she used to? Would she tell me, “We slew the
great
wolf.
Warriors don’t cry, baby”?

The nurses laid me down on a bed underneath a prison window.

“Keep the lights on,” I said.

They turned the lights off.

I expected the psych ward to explode with noises of women
weeping, men screaming. There would be ex-Christ figures, robots, and ghosts.
Girls with the voices of babies, boys who babbled in ancient
Egyptian.
Like in the movies. Yes, I belonged here. I screamed more than
anyone I knew. Bring on the noise.

But nobody screamed or cried. There were no ghosts or robots
that spoke in incoherent languages. Nobody rushed down the hallway, naked and
giggling, a team of doctors with syringes chasing after him.

The only sound in the ward came from the shuffling of the
nurses’ shoes as they patrolled the corridors. The silence was worse than
anything else I imagined.

Every fifteen minutes a nurse shone a bright flashlight into
the room to make sure I hadn’t killed myself. Even with the heavy sedatives, I
couldn’t sleep. If they couldn’t see my eyes from the hallway, the nurse would
stomp across the room, huffing, and stand there until I rolled over and showed
the whites of my eyes.

“Why in god’s name?” I asked.

“You’re on suicide watch.”

“Where were you twenty years ago? That’s when we needed the
miscarriage.”

She huffed again and stomped out of the room. She’d been
spit on so many times by punk girls like me.

The nurses talked in the hallway. They thought we couldn’t
hear them.

“I don’t get paid enough money for this.”

“My son’s going to become a diabetic if he keeps eating so
much chocolate.”

“If only I were prettier. If only I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

“I would’ve been a model. Seen the world.”

“She’s vomiting blood again. Big faker.”

“Take all the anorexics in the world. Put them in
concentration camps. That’ll cure them.”

They woke me at 7 A.M for a cafeteria breakfast that I
couldn’t eat. Doctors sat among the patients, writing notes on thick pads.

Across the table from me sat a girl named Dark Catherine.
She couldn’t eat either. She rearranged her sandwich in the shape of her dead
boyfriend. There were cuts up and down her wrists, across her throat, her
cheeks. Cuts like she’d marked the days off with her skin.

“Dark Catherine? Really?” I said.

“You think that’s funny? Well I’m not giving anyone false
ideas,” she said, “about who I am.”

“You could be anyone you wanted,” I said.

“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be here,” she
said.

She walked her plastic fork across the table. She walked it
in between her palm spread out on the table. All of the doctors taking notes
glanced up at her at once, but their pens didn’t stop moving. One of the
doctors brushed aside her hair, and I saw on the underside of her wrist three
scarred, sharp points.

“You’re like everyone else,” she said. “They can diagnose
everyone’s problems except their own.”

She laid her head down on the cafeteria table as she walked
the fork toward me. She danced it around my food tray, my hands.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, mocking me, “What are you sorry for?
You’re just a stupid girl.”

Later there were pills.
Pills in a tiny
paper cup.
I didn’t need to ask their names. I knew. Risperdal, Haldol,
Xanax. The nurse didn’t wait to see if I swallowed. Someone called her name
from the other side of the building and she ran down the hallway, swearing.

I swallowed anyway. I stumbled to group therapy sick and
dizzy.

Group therapy consisted entirely of women, some in their
street clothes, some in paper gowns like mine. They sat in chairs with their
bodies curled inwards, some looking down at their shoes, at others. The
therapist sat at the center of the circle, cross-legged in a high backed chair.
She wore a sleeveless blouse revealing the bluebirds tattooed up and down her
arms.

There were no more chairs left. I sat against the wall.

“Tell everyone your name,” the therapist said.

“They let you be a therapist? With all those tattoos?” I
said.

“Your name, sweetheart.”

“I had a teacher once who told me nobody would hire you if
you got a tattoo.”

“That’s right,” she said. “We’ve all been told a lot of
hurtful, untrue things in our lives.”

Nothing seemed real against white halls, white walls.
Nothing seemed real in paper gowns, sitting in a
circle,
around inked birds flocking onto pale, Ph.D. trained arms.

“My name is Lily,” I said. “You’re the most beautiful
therapist I’ve ever seen.”

Afterwards I tried to listen to the stories the women told,
but their words were like chopped records, the consonants cut away.

After the meeting was over and the women filed out of the
room, I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move. Vertigo kept me from
understanding how my legs worked. The therapist leaned down next to me.

She smelled of the woods.

“I can’t move,” I said. “They gave me my mother’s drugs.”

“Sweetheart,” she said.

Sweetheart became a slow, thin line that stretched across
the room until it was no longer a word, but white noise.

“I need to get out of here,” I said. “This place is making
me crazier.”

“Oh sweetheart.”

Sweeettthhheeeaaaaarrrttt.

“You’re too dangerous,” she said.

I spent another night on the thin mattress underneath the
barred window. They’d relegated to checking on me every half hour instead of
every fifteen minutes. There were no comfortable positions to lie down in
anymore. I tossed and turned, my spine a churning sea. I called for more pills.
Nobody came. I bit down on my foam pillow and screamed.

I saw the harsh glow of the flashlight as it came through my
door, but no stomping or huffing accompanied the light. The behind the
flashlight was thin, and quiet. Their feet made no sound as they crossed the
linoleum floor.

The flashlight travelled up and down my body. I buried my
face into my pillow.

“You’re not a nurse,” I whispered into my pillow.

“You called for pills,” she said. “Take your medicine.”

If I didn’t look, she would go away. That had always been my
problem. I looked, and the spider children stirred in the leaves. I looked, and
the earth ruptured out from underneath me. I looked, and Charlie jumped one
last glorious jump into the dark river, arms outstretched like waxwings.

The flashlight hovered on my face, the light passing through
my eyelids. The insides of my eyes burst with red and yellow spots.

“Take your medicine.”

I opened my eyes, blinking into the harsh light. The
flashlight did not waver. It appeared to be suspended in mid-air, without a
hand to guide it.

A palm extended toward me from the light.
 
A tiny, childlike
palm.
Empty.

“You were stupid,” she said, “to leave your friends.”

She dropped the flashlight. I lunged out of bed and tried to
grab her. My hands grasped emptiness. The flashlight still spun on the floor
from when she’d let go of it. I picked it up and fumbled for the switch to turn
it off.

A nurse saw me from the hallway.

“What are you doing?”

I still couldn’t find the off switch.

“Someone was in my room,” I said.

She huffed. Stomped. She grabbed the flashlight out of my
hands and turned it off. The room plunged into darkness; her face resembled a
child’s crayon smear.

I couldn’t understand why everyone here was a bad
caricature.

“I need to get out of here,” I said. “Someone is after me.”

Then I started laughing. Because I was a bad caricature as
well.

She gave me more sedatives.

She said, “This will be noted on your chart.”

“I’ve never met a chart that mattered.”

I lay down, because this was all a bad dream. It had to be.
My entire life, a bad dream.

***

I finally met with my Consultant Psychiatrist, four days
after being admitted into the ward. We sat in the cafeteria after lunch. I knew
they’d increased my dose of pills, without telling me, after the incident with
the stranger in my room. At this dose, I could barely sit on the bench. I could
barely eat. If I closed my eyes, vertigo could make me believe I sat on the
ceiling.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t visit with you until now, Lily,” he
said. “We’ve had some trouble getting information on you.”

I wiped at my mouth. Drool.

Of course.

“You were found on the bad side of town.
Unconscious,
in a ditch.
It appeared you’d tried to kill yourself by stabbing
yourself in the stomach and uterus.”

“The bad side of town?” I said. “Maybe to a rich doctor.”

“The night nurses heard you talking to people who don’t exist.
Expressing paranoid thoughts.”

“I know. I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. I guessed it. Do I
win the prize?” I said.

Yes, there were names for people like me, but only one that
mattered. Hopeless.

“These conditions. They’re very manageable with the right medications.
And we don’t lock people up anymore. Not for things like this.”

“Then let me out of here.”

“It doesn’t quite work like that, either,” he said.

“I don’t have a family,” I said. “My mother is crazy. I have
no money. Just let me go.”

“Trying to kill yourself is a serious thing.”

“You’d want to kill yourself too, if you were me.”

And then I swore he said:

“You’re dangerous, sweetheart.”

Sweeettthhheeeaaaaarrrttt.

THIS
COULD BE THE
rest of my life.
The rest of a long, boring,
terrifying life.
Take the pills. Soft pills, red pills, blue pills.
Pills to make you blind. Pills to make your eyes fall out of your head.
A buffet of pills.
Go to therapy. Listen to women, as sad
and scared as you, talk about kids they left behind, talk about how they might
be cured by picking up crocheting or learning astrology. Watch, as their hands
turn wrinkled and pale from lack of sunlight. Ignore the scraping and
shuddering at the barred window. Tell the lady therapist with the bird tattoos
that she looks beautiful everyday. Know that, you could never get a tattoo
yourself, because they’d probably start tearing into your skin and trying to
eat you.

I lay on my bed, spinning, when the demon came and brushed
her fingers against my face.

“Oh god, thank you,” I said. “It’s been so boring here.”

Her face was ragged and red. Dead insects fell out of her
hair.

“Nightcatcher,” she said.

The bars of the window bent. The river rushed toward me,
angry and boiling. If it could have a face, it would have the face of an old
woman, a boil on her nose, her teeth made of galloping horses.

No. No. No. The drugs aren’t working.

Something’s after me.
Stop
forgetting. It’s something that’s been searching for me for a long time,
possibly forever, running circles around the earth. Around the entire galaxy,
huffing dark matter to fuel its mad hunt. It would distort space and time in my
head to slow me down. It needed to devour me, strip by strip, not only my body but
also my mind. Own me. Own everything of
me, my past, my
present, my nightmarescape, my skin, and the hunter’s poise
. To force me
to lay out everything that belonged to me so it could hold it up to the light
and admire it.
To preserve me in glass and resin, my bones
crystallized and waiting for its touch.

Nightcatcher. The name I’d forgotten.

I heard my mother screaming. Poison in the sunlight. Poison
on the bleach soaked apples. Nightcatcher.

“Someone came to me.” I said, “A few nights ago.”

“And you’re still alive?”

The wind outside the window howled loud enough to give me a
nosebleed. The bars of the window crumbled.

We ran out into the hall. There were no nurses on duty, of
course. And even if every patient on the ward screamed at once, I wouldn’t be
able to hear them over the noise of the wind and the river. If the earth turned
up the volume a little louder, my fingers in the demon’s grasp might
disintegrate.

The linoleum ruptured. A carnivorous plant shoved its head
through the crumbling tiles and dirt.

Acid dripped onto my hands and burned my skin away. Again.

Because of my medication, I saw it happening from far away,
through a thick veil of unreality. I would’ve kept staring at my hand, watching
the skin bubble like a research project, if Saint Peter hadn’t called for me.

She stood at the end of the hallway, the hunter’s bow in her
hands. She knocked an arrow back as a plant burst from the ceiling above her
head, moving out of the way before it could snare her blue hair in its fibrous
mouth.

The entrance behind her blew open.