January First: A Child's Descent Into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her (28 page)

A nurse enters.

“Jani, what’s going on?” She sees Jani hitting me. “Whoa, Jani, that is not okay!”

“Bodhi put her stuffed dog in his mouth, and then she tried to wash it off but got it all wet,” I calmly explain to the nurse through Jani’s blows. “I keep telling her we can dry it, but she won’t believe me.”

The nurse puts her hands on her hips and sternly says, “Jani, you need to calm down or your parents are going to have to leave.”

This pisses me off. I’m not leaving while Jani is like this. Jani turns and hits the nurse, who puts out her hands and grabs Jani’s wrists.

“Jani, that is not okay!”

Jani screams and drops to the floor, her arms and legs striking out in all directions. I have seen her do this before. As long as you don’t get within range, you don’t get hurt. I desperately want to believe that this is her way of trying
not
to hurt the people around her.

Of course, rather than standing back like Jani wants us to, the nurse moves in, trying to restrain Jani, and gets kicked in the side of her head.

“Okay,” the nurse says, trying to hold down Jani’s legs. “That’s it. Your family has to leave.”

“Good!” Jani cries back. “I want them to go!”

I am stunned.

I get down on my knees, within range of her blows, but I don’t care.

“Jani, you don’t really mean that,” I tell her, afraid this is the beginning of her choosing Calilini and institutionalization over us, over me.

“Yes, I do!” she screams back. “I want you to go!”

“Jani, that is the schizophrenia talking, not you.”

“It is me!” Jani yells and twists, driving her foot into my chest. I grunt, but hold my ground.

“Jani, I’m not leaving. I don’t care how hard you hit me. I won’t leave.” I want Jani to know that there’s nothing she can do to drive me away. I will never give up. But I am also talking to the schizophrenia, reminding it that I am not about to let it take Jani without a fight.

“I want you to go away!” Jani roars.

“I’m not leaving,” I repeat, with a calmness I don’t feel.

Jani gives her earsplitting scream.

I hear Bodhi crying and look up.

Susan is standing at the door with Bodhi in her arms.

“Get Bodhi off the unit!” I yell at her.

“No.”

“I don’t want him to see this!”

“She’s my daughter, too, you know!” she retorts. “Why don’t
you
take Bodhi and
I’ll
stay with Jani?”

I stare at her while Jani pogos her legs into my stomach. “Get him out of here. This is no life for a baby.”

Susan hesitates. I know she doesn’t want to go, but she needs to. We can’t keep exposing Bodhi to Jani’s illness. But that is not the only reason I want Susan to take Bodhi. I feel possessive of Jani. She is my responsibility. I’m the only one who has the ability to go deep into her world, as far as she goes. She is still going, and I am still going with her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Mid-April 2009

W
hen I arrive at UCLA, Jani is lying in the middle of the corridor, staring up at the lights in the ceiling.

I lie down next to her. “Jani?”

She doesn’t answer but instead continues staring up at the lights.

I put my face above hers and turn to look up. Unable to stare into the lights anymore, I turn back to Jani. She disappears into the two dark spots in my vision.

When I can see Jani clearly again, I see that her pupils are fully dilated, despite the fact that she is staring into bright lights. No drug did this. Whatever she is seeing is not the lights.

“Jani, what’s up there?” I ask.

“Flying dogs,” Jani answers flatly.

I debate if there is any point in telling her dogs can’t fly.

“Dogs can’t fly, Jani.” I decide to confront her with this reality because I’m not willing to let her go without a fight. “They don’t have
wings and their bones aren’t hollow. That’s what makes birds light enough to achieve lift.” I am still trying to reach her the only way I know how: by teaching her.

“These ones can.”

“What kind of dogs are they?” I ask.

“Golden retrievers.”

The doctors here told us they believe Jani has probably always experienced hallucinations, which is why she never reacted to them with fear. If you grew up always seeing something, particularly something benign like dogs or cats, it would never occur to you that they weren’t real. They’d just blend in with everything else and you’d never know the difference between reality and hallucination until you got old enough to realize other people weren’t seeing what you were.

I look up at the lights again, trying to imagine what she’s seeing, but I can’t do it. I turn back to her. “What did you do today? Did you make anything in art therapy?”

“I went to Calilini,” Jani answers, still staring at the lights above.

“When did you go?”

“Earlier today.”

“Jani, you’ve been on the unit all day. You never left.”

“Yes, I did,” she answers languidly, as if I am a fading voice in a dream.

“Then how come no one saw you?”

“I go at night.”

I know this isn’t true. Jani sleeps at night because of the medication. I know she is watched and the unit is locked. But I also know that none of this means anything to Jani.

“You mean you go there in your head?”

“No, I actually go.”

“How do you get out?”

“Dogs come and get me. Great Danes.”

“Great Danes are pretty big dogs, Jani. Too big to not be seen.”

“They take me to visit my friends in Calilini. I ride on their back.”

I lie down next to her again, my face inches from hers. “The next time they come, can you call me? I want to go to Calilini, too.”

“You can’t.”

“Why can’t I go, too? I want to see Calilini.”

“You’re too big to ride the Great Danes, and that’s the only way to get there.”

I roll over and sit up, upset. I can’t see what she sees, but I want her to guide me. Sadly, I realize she now equates me with this world.
I don’t want to be part of this world, Jani. I want to go with you
.

“Jani,” I ask, pushing down my emotions again. I need information. “What’s the temperature in Calilini right now?”

Over the past few weeks, I have learned that the temperature in Calilini seems to correlate to her level of psychosis. When it is high, above 140 degrees, it means she’s getting more psychotic. A few weeks ago, when they raised her Thorazine level to 300mg daily, it started dropping: first to 120, then 110, then 100. It got as low as 85 degrees. Her “autistic-like” hand wringing even stopped, but then she went into dystonia again and they had to pull back on the dosage. Since then, the temperature has been creeping up again.

“One hundred and eighty,” Jani answers.

Almost boiling point.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Late April 2009

T
his semester I am teaching two classes, the minimum required to keep my health insurance benefits. I’m at my desk when yet another student enters late. I look up at the clock. It’s 4:45
P.M
. Class started twenty minutes ago, but I still haven’t done anything. I’ve just been sitting at the desk.

He takes a seat in the front row just a few feet from me.

“Where were you?” I ask, my voice deep and dangerous.

He takes out his phone and texts in front of me.

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” He looks up at me. “I was at the gym and then I had to take a shower.” He returns to texting.

I’m silent for a moment. “When I was a student,” I finally say, “I at least had enough respect for my professors to lie when I was late.”

This student looks up at me, a smile on his face because he thinks I’m joking. I glare at him.
My daughter has schizophrenia. It’s getting
worse and nobody seems to be able to stop it. Pieces of my daughter’s mind are eroding like chunks ripped away from the sandy bank of a rain-swollen river
.

“If you can’t make it to a class on time,” I look him straight in the eye, “why should anyone believe you’ll make it to a job on time? Do you really think that when you get that nice little business administration degree your life is going to change? It won’t. You know why?”

He doesn’t answer, his cell phone hanging limply in his hands, his text forgotten.

“Because,” I continue, my voice meaner, “when you graduate from this college, it will be alongside millions of other students with the same degree. This isn’t Harvard. There’s nothing special about you that’ll make you stand out from the millions of other stupid punks with the same degree. Any idiot can get a college degree.”

My eyes scan across the room. “That goes for all of you. What high school guidance counselors tell you about college is bullshit. A college degree doesn’t fundamentally change who you are. If you were a loser before college, you’ll be a loser after it … just a loser with a worthless piece of paper that gives you a false sense of hope that your life is going to amount to something, but you know where you will end up working after college, assuming you can even find a job? Selling insurance, or telemarketing.”

In the back of my mind I’m vaguely aware that I am losing it, but I don’t care anymore. I lean forward over the podium, staring into their stunned faces.

“The truth is you are going to end up working in a cubicle for the rest of your life, until you die. If any of you had brains in your head, I might actually believe you could fight your way up, but look at you! Half of you can’t even make it to an
afternoon
class on time. You’re nothing but a number. Enjoy your cubicle.” I start packing up my briefcase.

“Are you leaving?” a female student asks nervously.

I swing my bag over my shoulder. “I’m done wasting my time with all of you. I have better things to do.” And I walk out.

I’M SITTING IN my car parked in the faculty lot, trying to light a cigarette, but my hands are shaking so badly that the flame on the lighter keeps going out. As I was leaving, I caught a glimpse of the stunned looks on my students’ faces. In four years of teaching, I’ve never lost my cool in front of a class. I was teaching when Jani went into Alhambra and when I got accused of sexual molestation, but I didn’t lose my cool. I was teaching when Jani’s diagnosis officially became schizophrenia, and I didn’t lose my cool. For a year and a half I’ve gone through this nightmare and never lost my cool … until today.

I finally manage to light my cigarette and take a long drag. I’ve been living two separate lives, one as Jani’s father and the other as Professor Schofield, but I can’t do it anymore. I’m the father of a child who is losing her mind to a disease nobody can stop. I can’t fake being the other guy anymore.

I call Susan and tell her what happened.

“Just come home,” she gently suggests. “Come home and we’ll be together.”

I shake my head vehemently. “It’s my night to visit Jani. I have to take her the food she requested.”

“I’ve already called the unit,” Susan replies. “She’s asleep.”

I’m not surprised. She’s already asleep most nights by the time I arrive for visiting hours. The medications knock her out early.

“It was a rough day, but she is fine now. She is sleeping peacefully. Just come home. Please.” She’s begging me to come home, but it doesn’t sound like the old days, when she’d been out with Jani all
day and she would call me constantly, asking me when I was coming home from work. It’s different now. Jani is not there. I don’t need to race back to take care of her.

I realize Susan is begging me to come home because of me. I’m going over the edge and she is trying to pull me back.

“No,” I tell her. “I need to go see Jani, even if she is asleep. I need to do it for me and make sure she’s okay.” My voice breaks and I clear my throat. “I will call you when I’m on my way home.” I hang up.

A NURSE IS sitting outside Jani’s room, and I already know something is wrong. The only reason a nurse would be there is if Jani got assigned a “one-to-one,” meaning she was a danger to herself or others. I have never seen this nurse before. She doesn’t have a UCLA ID. Must be a temp.

“She’s asleep,” she tells me in a heavy West African accent.

“She’ll wake up for the food,” I reply and go into the dark room, where I see the outline of Jani in her bed.

I step forward and hear the sound of paper scuffling under my feet. I reach down and pull the paper from my shoe. I turn on the light and see that it’s a page torn from a Dora the Explorer book, a Ready-to-Read book. Jani has known how to read since she was two. We bought these books for her back then and kept them for Bodhi since she’d outgrown them, but these are the books she asks us to bring now. I don’t know why. I try to bring her educational books, but she doesn’t want those. She wants these simple books where one sentence takes up the entire page. Maybe they comfort her, reminding her of a simpler time, her way of trying to go back.

I look up and see the room is strewn with shreds of paper. I put the food on her desk and start picking them up.

Gillian, the charge nurse whom we’ve come to know, enters the room and sees me picking up the mess.

“She ripped up all her books,” she tells me, sadness in her voice. “She tried to destroy all of her stuff. We had to lock everything away.”

I pick up a crumpled piece of paper and my legs give way. I sit down hard on the floor, staring at the piece of paper. It’s a page from one of her Winnie-the-Pooh books, the original Winnie-the-Pooh chapter books, the page faded into a light yellow. They were nearly sixty years old, given to my father in 1953 for his fifth birthday. When I was a kid, he gave them to me. When Jani was old enough, I passed them on to her. I’m numb. She destroyed books that have been in my family for three generations.

“I’ll have someone come in to clean up the mess,” Gillian says.

“No,” I answer. “It’s okay. I got it.”

“You sure?” Gillian asks. I look at her and realize she, too, is worried about me.

“Yep,” I say, picking up some of the pieces.

“You okay?” Gillian asks me.