Prozac Nation (25 page)

There is a chill as I think of the way being deprived of normal feelings has the paradoxical effect of turning me into an emotional wreck. As Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin put it: “Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this: that there is no horror!
”

 

It was during a play on the following Friday night when I really cracked. It was a Sam Shepard play. Ruby had produced it. It must have been four hours long. It was one of Shepard's more obscure works, the kind repertory companies dragged out once the possibilities of
Fool for Love
and
True West
had been exhausted. Not that it would have taken much to upset me that night, as I'd just gotten out of the infirmary a few days before and my uteral lining was still hemorrhaging something awful and I was starting to think that maybe a Red Cross blood bank should open a chapter between my legs. Given the circumstances, all it took was one uncomfortable exchange with Ruby before the show started and I was bonkers.

About that time, Ruby had just started dating Gunnar, this guy in my semiotics class who looked like Cary Grant with long hair. It seems she still hadn't recovered from the time I attempted to steal her boyfriend from her freshman year, and she was convinced that I was trying to seduce Gunnar in the middle of lectures about Charles Peirce's linguistics and Lévi-Strauss's anthropology and the Russian formalists and the Frankfurt School and how it all related to a new way of reading Grimm's fairy tales. With all this intellectual mumbo jumbo going on, I could hardly have paid attention to Gunnar if I'd wanted to. And besides, I already had a crush on this other guy who was the whole reason I was taking this ridiculous class in the first place.

More to the point, I was such a basket case, had just gone through this physically punishing mess, that the last thing on my mind was trying to create a new catastrophe by taking off with Ruby's new boyfriend. But when Ruby, Gunnar, and I stood around the theater lobby before the show, and I reached out my hand to straighten Gunnar's crooked tie—a tie he was wearing in her honor since it was her opening night—Ruby considered this some sort of violation. I wasn't supposed to be touching her man, so she got all huffy and refused to talk to me for the rest of the evening. I apologized over and over again, followed her around the theater as she set brownies and large bottles of wine on tables for the after-show party, offered to carry some trays, but Ruby wouldn't speak to me except to say, “
You
can't be trusted.”

“Ruby, please, I'm sorry,” I kept saying. “Whatever I did, I'm sorry. Please don't be angry at me. I'm not doing very well right now. I need my friends to be nice. I need you.”

After the show, Gunnar's roommate Timothy was talking to me for reasons that I couldn't understand. I mean, there I was, losing a pint of blood an hour, one of my best friends was refusing to acknowledge me, so it seemed unbelievable that anyone would want to be nice. Timothy was trying to engage me in some sort of discussion of the play's dominant motifs, but all I wanted to talk about was how mean Ruby was being. I didn't know why I was having this conversation with him. I barely knew him, and heaven knows this was no way to get a guy interested. You were supposed to be peppy and bright for boys, no matter how bad you felt inside. At least that's what Mother always told me.
Don't let him see how crazy you are
she'd say.
No one wants anyone who's down like you.
But all Timothy was to me that night was anyone ever was to me at that point: a new person to sob to. Someone who hadn't yet heard the spiel someone for whom my depression my problems real and imaginary and everything about me were not just a matter of there-she-goes-again.

“Life is so horrible,” I said, as Timothy and I sat down at an outdoor café, taking in a final bit of Indian summer before the deep freeze. “Life is awful, Ruby treats me horribly, I just want to die.”

“No you don't,” he said. What was he supposed to say? We'd known each other only twenty minutes. Well, no time for small talk these days.

“Really I do,” I insisted. “I have no reason to lie to you. I hardly know you. I had a miscarriage the other day, it all seems like shit to me, and now Ruby, who's supposed to be one of my best friends, won't talk to me. These seem like, taken together, adequate reasons for suicide.”

When he didn't answer me, I realized suddenly that I knew Timothy, that he'd dated Hadley, one of my freshman-year neighbors, a girl who had been doing her first year over again because during her initial try at Harvard she'd tried to kill herself twice and wound up in McLean for a couple of months. Timothy was the one who she, still in a bit of a stupor a year later, would always refer to as the great love of her life.

“God, it just occurred to me.” I asked, “You're not the Timothy that Hadley always talked about?”

“I'm the one.”

And so I prattled a bit about how I'd heard so much about him, and he explained to me that Hadley greatly exaggerated the extent of their relationship in her own mind, mainly because he was really nice to her while she was losing it.

“You know, when Hadley was in McLean, I was the only one who visited her there,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I know you don't really want to kill yourself. You just want to end up at some hospital where you can take a break for a while.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” he said, with force. “
Definitely.
I know what you're thinking.” He was so adamant in that been-there-done-that way that I couldn't argue with him. “Well, I used to go visit Hadley there and that's why I can tell you that it's really horrible. When you get committed, it's not like they send you to some farm in the mountains where you take long walks in the country and quietly reflect. It's not all art therapy either. Mostly you just lie in your horrible bed and do nothing. The doctors check up on you from time to time and you go to group with people who are so much further gone than you are that you can't figure out what you're doing with them. Plus hospitals are sterile, really white, really light blue and light pink. The TVs hang from the ceiling. The food is terrible. If you can get better out here, I don't know why you'd want to go in there.”

“Maybe I don't think I can.” I found myself suddenly annoyed that Timothy was trying to tell me what to do. Maybe I like bad food and sterile decor and TVs hanging from the ceiling. Besides, maybe I really did want to die. How would he know?

“Timothy, listen, this has been fun and enlightening, but I've got to run,” I said. “I've got to write some Space, Time, and Motion papers.” This was true enough. I did have a lot of catching up to do in a physics class that I'd joined two weeks late. I smiled as if to say, What a nerd I am, doing homework on a Friday night.

“Do you really think you're in any condition for that?”

“Sure. Work always makes me feel better.” That was true too. “
Arbeit macht frei,
” I added, realizing that Timothy wasn't Jewish and probably wouldn't get my morbid reference to Auschwitz.

“I'm not going to let you go home alone if you're talking about suicide.”

“No, I mean it. I really do feel better about myself when I'm being productive. I mean, my feeling is that when your friends and everything let you down, there's always worthwhile shit to be done that you've been putting off anyway, so I think I'll go home and do that.”

“Elizabeth,” Timothy said, “it's after one. Why don't you just go home and sleep?”

“Oh, I can't. Can't do anything until I write my papers. I can always sleep tomorrow.”

“I think you need sleep now. I think sleep would make you feel better.”

I gathered my belongings and headed across Harvard Yard toward my apartment. Timothy followed along. “Look, Timothy, I'm going home, I'm doing what I need to do, and I'm gonna be fine.” I smiled. “And if for some strange reason I'm dead by tomorrow morning, be sure to tell Ruby that I'll consider forgiving her in the hereafter.”

“I'm not letting you go back there—” he began to say, but by that time I'd already made a run for it, sprinting across the Yard and speeding down Kirkland Street. At some point, I guess Timothy must have decided I was out of his hands because I made it home alone.

 

When I get home, Alden tries to involve me in some late-night chatter, begins to tell me about some dance performance she went to, as if I might care. Clearly, Alden has no idea that all that matters is Space, Time, and Motion, a class that I have no clue about, though I am still somehow convinced that it can redeem my whole life. I have to write some papers, and everything will be fine.

I walk, surefooted, straight toward my bedroom, but Alden hears that I'm beginning to cry and she follows me. I fall onto my floor, my bag and coat and body all in a pile like a heap of junk, a weeping heap of junk. Alden watches, not sure what to do. Still crying, I walk toward my desk, and pick up a Space, Time, and Motion source book, carry it to my bed, and open it up as if I were going to read it.

“Listen, Elizabeth,” Alden suggests, coming closer, “I think you need to sleep and I think you need to calm down. Why don't you save your work for tomorrow.”

“If I can get through this,” I mumble, “if I can read this Darwin, I'll be all right. If I can do what I need to do, I'll be fine.”

“Elizabeth, this is crazy.”

“And then, if I die any time soon, at least they'll be able to say that I led a productive life and did all my work on time. I may be dead, but I'll be up to date in Space, Time, and Motion.”

I lean back on my bed, put the book against my bent knees, and try to read even though my eyes are blurry from tears. Alden walks over and pulls the book away. “Why won't you tell me what's wrong?”

“Because it doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore.”

“Jesus, Elizabeth, Samantha's asleep, I don't know what to do here. What do you want me to do? I'm worried about you.”

“I'll be fine,” I scream. “I'll be fine if you'll just let me write my Space, Time, and Motion papers!”

She leaves my room and heads for the phone. She calls the emergency room of the infirmary and talks to the psychiatrist on duty. She tells her about my miscarriage, about how unhappy I've been, about how I'm threatening suicide. Finally, Alden pulls me out of my room and puts me on the phone. I'm still crying.

“What's the matter?” the doctor asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I just have work to do.”

“Okay, I understand that, but it's late at night and it sounds like what you really need is some sleep.”

“Goddamnit!” I scream. “Everyone is so fucking fixated on this sleep thing. I'm either writing my papers or I'm killing myself. Got it?”

“Maybe you should come back to Stillman if that's how you feel,” she suggests. “A hospital environment might help you.”

“But I can't.” This is getting very frustrating, I think. “
I CAN'T GO TO STILLMAN BECAUSE I HAVE TO WRITE MY SPACE, TIME, AND MOTION PAPERS, OR I'M GOING TO GET REALLY DERAILED. WHY DOESN'T ANYBODY UNDERSTAND THAT EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE IF I CAN JUST READ DARWIN IN PEACE?
”

The doctor obviously doesn't understand this because she says that she is sending a couple of orderlies to get me and deliver me to the infirmary tonight. She says something about not wanting to leave me to my own devices right now. I'm crying as I listen and I cry even more when I see Alden standing over me nervously, wanting to make sure that I really will be entrusted into safe hands. The doctor says she will give me time to pack a bag and take what I need and that a car will be outside in ten minutes.

“Okay?” she asks before hanging up. “So I'll see you over at Stillman shortly.”

“All right, but I'm bringing my work,” I say. “I have to finish my Space, Time, and Motion papers, or it'll all be over.”

“That's fine,” the doctor says, with just the right amount of condescension. “Bring whatever you want.”

 

There's not a lot to do at Stillman besides read and watch TV. Doctors come in every few hours and interview me, ask me what's wrong and how I plan to make it right. And I say I don't know, because I don't. They administer pills, mostly Dalmane, so I can sleep and stop talking about Space, Time, and Motion and all my overdue papers. And even I have to admit that in this insulated room, things do seem okay. Timothy was wrong. Inside here it is sterile, it is drab, the light is artificial and too bright, but at least no one can touch me.

9

God have mercy on the man

Who doubts what he's sure of.

 

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

“Brilliant Disguise”

 

I don't know if depressives are drawn to places with that certain funereal ambience or if, in all their contagion, they make them that way. I know only that for my entire junior year of college, I slept under a six-foot-square poster emblazoned with the words
LOVE WILL TEAR US APART,
and then I wondered why nothing good ever happened in that bed.

But it wasn't just my bedroom. It was the whole apartment. It felt sickly, shady. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's been turned into a crack house or a shooting gallery since I moved out. Or better still, a halfway house for recovering vampires. The place was as dark at noon as it was at midnight. It was the perfect site for a nervous breakdown. My apartment in Texas, with all its airy, sunny decorator touches, may have been a place for some pretty nasty precursors to disaster, but it took the haunted house I settled into in Cambridge to finish off the job.

Since I barely left my bed after my miscarriage, except to roam the streets of Cambridge late at night, I lived my life, quite literally, in the dark. While our living room, with its southern exposure, was full of sun, no one ever spent any time in there because, ever since we'd decided to hide the ugly brown plaid couches under white cotton sheets, it looked like we were holding a wake. The rest of the house and all of the bedrooms that pimpled off the long corridor in our railroad flat faced a courtyard to the north. And all of us, either because we were depressed or tired or had schoolwork, cocooned ourselves in our dark but, paradoxically, vast rooms, lost in our troglodyte existence. The whole apartment seemed infected with some kind of craziness: Alden with her Zen Buddhism, meditating ten hours a day: and Samantha with her type A, overachiever schedule, afraid that if she slowed down, she'd turn into someone like me.