Girl, Interrupted (11 page)

Once I asked him, “Why are you so different? You used to be my friend.”

“Could you say more about that?”

I started analysis in November, when I was still on group. Five times a week I joined a herd of patients headed for doctors and led by a nurse. But most doctors’ offices were in the Administration Building, which was in the opposite direction from the maximum-security ward. So being on group was like being stuck on an inconvenient bus route. I complained. And I got destination privileges.

Now my hour began with a phone call to the nursing station to say I’d arrived in Melvin’s office. It ended with my calling to say I was leaving.

Melvin didn’t like the phone business. He squinted while I talked on the phone. He kept the phone close to him on his desk. Every day I had to ask him to push it toward me so I could use it.

Perhaps he complained, because soon I got grounds privileges—only to therapy, but it was something. For other activities, I was still on group.

So it was that in December, when I joined Georgina and some other people going to the cafeteria for dinner, I discovered the tunnels.

We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren’t there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren’t news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I’d conjured them into being.

It was a typical December day in the Boston area: tin-colored clouds spitting bits of rain mixed with flat watery snowflakes and just enough wind to make you wince.

“Tunnels,” said the nurse.

Out the double-locked double doors and down the stairs as usual—our ward was on the second floor for added security. There were many doors in the hallway, one of which went outside. The nurse opened another one, and we went down a second flight of stairs. Then we were in the tunnels.

First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with windchill (though in the innocent sixties, windchill, like digital time, hadn’t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths. Here and there, on white tiles embedded in the yellow, were signposts:
CAFETERIA, ADMINISTRATION, EAST HOUSE
.

“This is great,” I said.

“Haven’t you been down here before?” asked Georgina.

I asked the nurse, “Do these run under the whole hospital?”

“Yes,” she said. “You can get anywhere. It’s easy to get lost, though.”

“How about the signs?”

“There aren’t really enough of them.” She giggled; she was an okay nurse named Ruth. “This one says
EAST HOUSE
”—she pointed up—“but then you come to a fork and there isn’t another sign.”

“What do you do?”

“You just have to know the way,” she said.

“Can I come down here alone?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised when Ruth said I couldn’t.

The tunnels became my obsession.

“Anybody free to take me into the tunnels?” I’d ask every day. About once a week, somebody would take me.

And then there they were, always hot and clean and yellow and full of promise, always throbbing with heating and water pipes that sang and whistled as they did their work. And everything interconnected, everything going on its own private pathway to wherever it went.

“It’s like being in a map—not reading a map but being inside a map,” I said to Ruth one day when she’d taken me down there. “Like the plan of something rather than the thing itself.” She didn’t say anything and I knew I ought to stop talking about it, but I couldn’t. “It’s like the essence of the hospital down here—you know what I mean?”

“Time’s up,” said Ruth. “I’m on checks in ten minutes.”

In February I asked Melvin, “You know those tunnels?”

“Could you tell me more about the tunnels?”

He didn’t know about them. If he’d known about them, he would have said, “Yes?”

“There are tunnels under this entire hospital. Everything is connected by tunnels. You could get in them and go anywhere. It’s warm and cozy and quiet.”

“A womb,” said Melvin.

“It’s not a womb,” I said.

“Yes.”

When Melvin said
Yes
without a questioning intonation, he meant
No
.

“It’s the opposite of a womb,” I said. “A womb doesn’t go anywhere.” I thought hard about how to explain the tunnels to Melvin. “The hospital is the womb, see. You can’t go anywhere, and it’s noisy, and you’re stuck. The tunnels are like a hospital without the bother.”

He said nothing and I said nothing. Then I had another idea.

“Remember the shadows on the wall of the cave?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t remember them. “Plato said everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can’t see. And the real thing isn’t like the shadow, it’s a kind of essence-thing, like a—” I couldn’t think what, for a minute. “Like a super-table.”

“Could you say more about that?”

The super-table hadn’t been a good example. “It’s like a neurosis,” I said. I was making this up. “Like when you’re angry, and that’s the real thing, and what shows is you’re afraid of dogs biting you. Because really what you want is to bite everybody. You know?”

Now that I’d said this, I thought it was pretty convincing.

“Why are you angry?” Melvin asked.

He died young, of a stroke. I was his first analytic patient; I found that out after I quit analysis. A year after I got out of the hospital, I quit. I’d had it, finally, with all that messing about in the shadows.

Stigmatography

The hospital had an address, 115 Mill Street. This was to provide some cover if one of us were well enough to apply for a job while still incarcerated. It gave about as much protection as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would have.

“Let’s see, nineteen years old, living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—Hey! That’s the White House!”

This was the sort of look we got from prospective employers, except not pleased.

In Massachusetts, 115 Mill Street is a famous address. Applying for a job, leasing an apartment, getting a driver’s license: all problematic. The driver’s-license application even asked, Have you ever been hospitalized for mental illness? Oh, no, I just loved Belmont so much I decided to move to 115 Mill Street.

“You’re living at One fifteen Mill Street?” asked a small, basement-colored person who ran a sewing-notions shop in Harvard Square, where I was trying to get a job.

“Uh-hunh.”

“And how long have you been living there?”

“Oh, a while.” I gestured at the past with one hand.

“And I guess you haven’t been working for a while?” He leaned back, enjoying himself.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been thinking things over.”

I didn’t get the job.

As I left the shop my glance met his, and he gave me a look of such terrible intimacy that I cringed. I know what you are, said his look.

What were we, that they could know us so quickly and so well?

We were probably better than we used to be, before we went into the hospital. At a minimum we were older and more self-aware. Many of us had spent our hospital years yelling and causing trouble and were ready to move on to something else. All of us had learned by default to treasure freedom and would do anything we could to get it and keep it.

The question was, What could we do?

Could we get up every morning and take showers and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us?

Some of us could; some of us couldn’t. In the world’s terms, though, all of us were tainted.

There’s always a touch of fascination in revulsion: Could that happen to me? The less likely the terrible thing is to happen, the less frightening it is to look at or imagine. A person who doesn’t talk to herself or stare off into nothingness is therefore more alarming than a person who does. Someone who acts “normal” raises the uncomfortable question, What’s the difference between that person and me? which leads to the question, What’s keeping me out of the loony bin? This explains why a general taint is useful.

Some people are more frightened than others.

“You spent nearly two years in a loony bin! Why in the world were you in there? I can’t believe it!” Translation: If you’re crazy, then I’m crazy, and I’m not, so the whole thing must have been a mistake.

“You spent nearly two years in a loony bin? What was wrong with you?” Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I’m not crazy.

“You spent nearly two years in a loony bin? Hmmm. When was that, exactly?” Translation: Are you still contagious?

I stopped telling people. There was no advantage in telling people. The longer I didn’t say anything about it, the farther away it got, until the me who had been in the hospital was a tiny blur and the me who didn’t talk about it was big and strong and busy.

I began to feel revulsion too. Insane people: I had a good nose for them and I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I still don’t. I can’t come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise.

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist. He might give me a call too. But I’m not going to pick up the phone.

If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?

New Frontiers in Dental Health

My one-and-a-half-year sentence was running out and it was time to plan my future. I was nearing twenty.

I’d had two jobs in my life: three months selling gourmet cookware, much of which I dropped and broke; and one week typing in the Harvard billing office, terrifying students by sending them term bills for $10,900 that were meant to read $1,900.

I made these mistakes because I was terrified by the supervisor. The supervisor was an elegant and attractive black man who roamed all day among the aisles of typists, watching us work. He smoked while doing this. When I lit a cigarette, he pounced on me.

“You can’t smoke,” he said.

“But you’re smoking.”

“Typists are not permitted to smoke.”

I looked around the room. All typists were women; all supervisors were men. All supervisors were smoking; all typists were not.

When break time came, at ten-fifteen, the bathroom was stuffed with smoking typists.

“Can’t we smoke in the hall?” I asked. There was an ashtray outside the bathroom.

But we couldn’t. We had to smoke in the bathroom.

The other problem was clothes.

“No miniskirts,” said the supervisor.

This put me in a pickle, as I had only miniskirts, and I had as yet no paycheck. “Why?” I asked.

“No miniskirts,” he repeated.

Smoking was Monday, miniskirts was Tuesday. Wednesday I wore a black miniskirt with black tights and hoped for the best.

“No miniskirts,” he said.

I scooted to the bathroom for a quick cigarette.

“No smoking except on break,” he muttered as he passed my desk on his next round.

This was when I began making my high-priced mistakes.

Thursday he beckoned me over to his desk, where he sat, smoking.

“Making some mistakes,” he said. “We can’t have that.”

“If I could smoke,” I said, “I wouldn’t make so many.”

He just shook his head.

Friday I didn’t go in. I didn’t call either. I lay in bed smoking and thinking about the office. The more I thought about it the more absurd it became. I couldn’t take all those rules seriously. I started to laugh, thinking of the typists jammed into the bathroom, smoking.