The Quiet Room (13 page)

My tormenters were real. I didn't want people telling me they were false or unreal. I wanted help in making them go away. That's what they should have been doing. But since they weren't, I just wanted to get out of there, and fast. I was twenty-four years old, and it was time I got on with my life.

But how could I?

I didn't even know what my life was. The one I had left behind a thousand years ago didn't exist anymore. I didn't have a job. I didn't have an apartment. I didn't have friends. I didn't have a life.

It had been nearly a year since I had lived outside a hospital. I wasn't even sure how to do it anymore. I was used to having my life move with the rhythm of the hospital. Someone else had told me what to do and when to do it. Now that I was home, I didn't know exactly how to begin to make those decisions on my own. When I woke up in the morning, I just didn't know what to do with myself. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do? I found myself literally just standing around.

Because the medications made me at once lethargic and restless, I often just stood in one spot, moving my weight back and forth from one foot to another. I was taking so much medicine that I found it difficult even to smile. I walked around the house sluggishly, doing what I had to do like a robot.

Now that I was out, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to react to other people. In the hospital, I had had contact only with doctors and nurses, and with other patients. With the doctors and nurses, I was a patient. They would ask me questions, and I would answer them. The other patients were crazy. I had as little to do with them as possible. Outside the hospital were other normal people like me. But I couldn't figure out how to connect with them. I felt very awkward around people, even around Mom and Dad.

There was no one for me to hang out with. My old friends couldn't help me. I didn't really even want to see them. It hurt too much. When my old roommate Lori Winters came to visit me in the hospital, she looked like the Dove Soap girl, all slender and pretty with her clear peachy skin. I was so fat and ugly I could barely stand to be in the same room with her.

Everything had changed. Nothing was the same. Even my childhood plans with Gail Kobre. Ever since I could remember, we had planned to be each other's maids of honor when we married. We talked about it, laughed about it, planned what dresses we would wear, and who we would marry.

But on one of her visits to me in the hospital, Gail had some news for me. She and David were getting married in the spring. But I wasn't going to be her maid of honor. No one was sure if I would be out of the hospital in time. And no one thought I could handle it.

Well, I was out of the hospital in time. She was married in May, just over a month after I came out. And I was there in the audience with everyone else, not up near the chuppah by Gail where I belonged. After the ceremony, the photographer took a picture with Gail and me together. He caught a big smile on my face, but he didn't catch the Voices that were shrieking in my ears, nor the sad feeling that everyone was moving on and leaving me behind.

Of course I did have my family. But even that had changed.

There we were again, 6:30
P.M.
sharp around the dinner table, just as I remembered it from my childhood. But it was a pretty pale imitation of the old days. Like my friends, both my brothers were growing up and moving on with their lives. Mark wasn't there. He was in New Orleans, finishing up his senior year at Tulane, about to return to New York City to business school. Steven still lived at home. But he was at the end of his senior year in high school, had already been admitted to Johns Hopkins, and was hanging out with his own friends, doing his own thing.

So that left just me and Mom and Dad around the dinner table. And in place of the lively conversation I remembered from my childhood, there was now strained silence. What was I supposed to say to Mom and Dad? I felt a huge gulf between us. They had changed. They weren't proud of me. They hated me. I knew they loved me, of course, but they hated me too. They hated me, and they were afraid of me. The Voices told me so.

When my release from the hospital was first discussed, people in the hospital brought up the idea of a private-duty nurse. Shouldn't I have someone to stay with me while they were out of the house? Mom and Dad asked. I got angry with them. I would never consider such a thing. Never. Never. Never. I didn't need any more bodyguards. I had had enough of that in the hospital. I was out of the hospital, remember?

So at first, they took turns spending a lot of time with me. My dad took some time off from work, then my mom did. There was always someone around at first. What is Lori going to do? I was being watched like a prisoner, like a crazy person. When they began to leave me alone it was in frightened little jackrabbit bursts. Mom dashed to the country club across the street to drop off her golf shoes, and was back in eight minutes. I was okay. The next day a kamikaze run to the supermarket. Back in twenty minutes flat. Still okay. Was Lori going to bug out and try to kill herself again? No, Mom and Dad. That's over. I won't do that anymore. I promise. I'm better now. Really. Prettysoon, I got them to believe me. So Dad went back to work in the city, and Mom followed soon after.

They tried so hard to please me. They knew that food was one of the few pleasures left in my life, so they took me to eat anything I liked. General Tsao's chicken and moo shu pork with pancakes and hoisin sauce; pizza with the works and spaghetti; soft-shell crabs, and burgers and fries—I'd wolf down anything.

They also did everything they could to help me put together the pieces of my life. My mom took me shopping for clothes, and tried to encourage me. “Go out and meet young people,” my Dad said. “You won't have any kind of social life sitting around your room.” He even encouraged me to hang out where young people hung out. “Go to a bar,” he said. “You don't have to drink. Order a Diet Coke. Talk to people.” He was always giving me some pep talk. And at the end, he always said the same thing: “It's better than being in the hospital.”

But was it? I knew I hated the hospital. But the fact was, my memories of the past year were so foggy that I wasn't even completely clear what had happened in the hospital.

My last clear memory was of a morning in my apartment in the McAlpin. Lori Winters and I were leaning out the window, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade roll by just beneath us. We were so close that the three-story-tall balloons were bobbing just about at eye level. Then the next clear memory I have is of lying strapped down in an ambulance, a pregnant nurse at my side, being transferred from the Payne Whitney Clinic in Manhattan to New York Hospital in Westchester. People told me that in between those two memories I had tried to commit suicide twice, and that I had already been in the hospital for several months. I didn't know whether to believe them or not.

These gaps in my memory were enormously frustrating. It was like everyone on earth was in on some secret about me. I knew that there were people around—doctors, nurses, my parents, my friends—who remembered things about me that I couldn't remember about myself. It made me paranoid and angry. What else did they know that they weren't telling me? What else were they hiding from me?

Again, I knew where the problem lay. It was with the doctors and the hospitals. While I was in Payne Whitney, I had been given shock treatment, lots of it. I knew that because the doctors at New York Hospital told me. That's what had destroyed my brain cells. They had fried my brain, fried me, fried away all my memories.

I was angry. I told the doctors what they had done to me. They always said the same thing. Shock treatment doesn't do anything to long-term memory, they said. They took me downstairs in New York Hospital, gave me tests, measured my responses and looked inside my brain. It's not the electroshock, they said. Bullshit, assholes! I knew better. They had electrocuted the memories right out of me.

It was awful. They had taken away big chunks of my life. Not only could I not remember being in Payne Whitney, there were all kinds of earlier memories I had lost too. Gail Kobre had visited me in the hospital, bringing with her a scrapbook filled with pictures of our time in London. Pictures of us together. In Trafalgar Square. Before the Queen's Guards. Skipping down the street, laughing. I must have been there. There was my picture. But where was the picture in my brain? Zapped. I felt like an outsider watching other people's memories in a movie that had nothing to do with me.

What did I remember from the hospital? I remembered the attendants assigned to be close to me at all times. I remembered the formal gardens, one of the few pleasures I was allowed while I was there. I remembered bingo and pizza nights in the hospital auditorium. But as for the rest, all I had was a mass of fuzzy impressions that bounced around in my head: Sound. Absence of sound. Jiggling keys. The dinner bell. Whispering. Yells. Tranquilizers. Visiting. Out of control. Showers. Walks. Sunshine. Reflections from outside off a freshly plowed snow bank. Mom. Dad. MEDICATION! MEDICATION! Cheek those pills. Tip the scale every Wednesday. Lithium vampires drawing my blood Tuesdays. Faces watching from the nursing station. Two packs a day. The final chapter. Nothing to do. Carly Simon. Babies crying. Me crying. Tears of a clown. Forever and a day. Keys. Escape. Alcatraz. Nothing to do about nothing. A post office mug. Coffee in the morning? Spelled with two Fs, two Es. No thank you. And you're welcome. Blaring silence. Bomber planes. Sky blue. I love you. SHUT THE FUCK UP. Smiling faces. The sixties. Bouncing laughter. Can't breathe. This planet. Too terrified. Charles Manson. To die, they say. To die. Help me. Help me. Help me. Please. Tick. Tick. Tick. Goodbye.

Smash that window.

I can fly.

I desperately wanted to leave the hospital, so every time anyone asked me, I told them the Voices were gone. I would have been stupid to do otherwise. If I told them what the Voices were doing and saying, I would have been sent straight off to a state hospital for the rest of my life. That I was sure of. If, on the other hand, I was successful in convincing them that the Voices were gone, I could go home and live a normal life. What choice did I have?

By this time, I had become very skilled at concealing my Voices. I needed every ounce of skill I had. For days at a time, the Voices bombarded my brain with their nasty, raucous shouts. Concealing the Voices in college had been easy because the episodes were so few and far between. This time, however, it was much harder. The Voices were so much more frequent, so much louder, so much more forceful than they had been before. With practice, however, my concealment skills increased.

Many times they didn't work, of course. If someone addressed me while the Voices were actively assaulting me, there was nothing I could do. The Voices’ power was too fierce for me. There was almost nothing from the outside that could pull me away. I had to listen to the Voices, had to engage in their world. For as long as these Voices chose to hold me, they were the most powerful thing in my world.

But in between these acute episodes, I usually could muster an adequate response to whomever was addressing me. When anyone—doctors, nurses, my parents, other patients—spoke to me, I learned to focus on the very end of their statements or questions, and respond to that. Usually I could manage quite an appropriate response. And then I would go back to the Voices.

Even though the Voices were far more intense in the hospital than before, in some ways they were less frightening. When I was in high school and college, they had sneaked up on me, blasting out of the airwaves almost without warning. By now, they had become almost familiar. I hated them. I suffered from them. But they seemed almost a normal part of living. I knew them. I understood them and they understood me.

When I got out of the hospital, the Voices were much softer, much less frequent than before. In the hospital, the doctors told me that it was because of the medicine I was taking, that the medicine was helping to fix whatever it was wrong in my brain. I knew better. I knew that this was just another sign that being in the hospital made me crazy. Wasn't it obvious? When I was in the insane asylum, I heard Voices that made me insane. When I got out, I felt better.

Still, I was so far from being the old Lori everyone knew and loved that I was constantly caught up in a storm of self-hatred. I was fat. I was ugly. Everyone hated me. My friends hated me. My parents hated me. They told me they loved me, but I knew they were lying. They hated me because I was a pathetic loser. I knew my brothers were afraid of me. I knew my mother was ashamed of me. I knew my father was disappointed in me. I was no longer the star my parents could show off to their friends. No more guitar. No more straight As. No more entertaining our friends with the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. I wasn't sick. I was just a loser. Everyone wanted me to go away. Or die.

It was part of the deal everyone made with me on my discharge that I would continue to see a psychiatrist three times a week. Whoever I chose, they said, would help me work out the problems I was having, and would explain everything to me.

In the final weeks of my hospitalization, I chose the psychiatrist I would be seeing. My dad had always told me to go right to the top, try for the best, seek out the most professional help. So I chose Dr. Lawrence Rockland, the unit chief of 3 North, the unit where I had been hospitalized. While he and I hadn't been really directly involved when I was in the hospital, I used to see him walking through the unit, or coming to meetings. He was always friendly, saying hello when passing by, and taking extra time to touch base with me, and show interest in my condition and progress. I knew he was the boss, so he must be the best.

When I approached him with the idea of being my shrink, he was surprisingly enthusiastic. I didn't know the doc real well but I liked that he seemed to be the epitome of a descendant from the world of Freud, a cigar-smoking professional from the old, traditional days of psychiatry. He was bald, in his fifties, with a great sense of humor. He reminded me of ray dad.