Chapter Sixteen The Good Samaritan

Chapter Sixteen
The Good Samaritan

The police officers who had showed up at my door insisted politely that I go with them to be checked out at the psychiatric ward of the county hospital. After I realized I had no choice, I went along with them without a fuss. I didn’t change out of my sweatpants or put on a bra, figuring I would be back in a couple of hours, once I talked to the medical personnel and assured them I posed no danger to myself. I was wrong. Convincing the doctor was not so easy. Obviously overworked and more than a little tired, the hospital psychiatrist sat across from me with a look of genuine concern on her face. I had gotten so good at telling lies, but at this most critical time—when I wanted only to go back to the apartment and carry out my plans—I could not lie when she asked me if I still had thoughts of harming myself. She said, not without sympathy, “I’m admitting you to the hospital. You’ll be held here for up to twenty-four hours while we look into your insurance status.”

 

I was at the county hospital for twenty-two hours before being transferred to a private mental hospital; most of that time I spent pacing the waiting room floor. The other patients sat and rocked on the couch or slumped in the grimy chairs. At irregular intervals a man in the corner emitted a hair-raising cackle like the madwoman in the attic. But he was here in a room we shared—all of us mad, all of us here in this locked attic, with its derelict furniture and staff with their turned-away faces.

An intake person had searched me and inventoried my few possessions and then taken them away—my keychain with the marten’s tail, my cell phone, my wallet. I knew Jill would be worried if she called the next morning and couldn’t get hold of me. I told them, “I need my cell phone to call my therapist. Her number is in my phone.”

He waved me away, “No cell phones.”

The guard kept telling me to get back from the locked door, keep behind the red line on the floor, stay away from the Christmas tree. I edged close to the tree again as soon as his back was turned, breaking off a small twig and breathing in its sharp scent that reminded me of the boreal woods. What did he think I might do—impale myself on it? Crack apart one of the plastic ornaments and slit my wrists?

A nurse, an African woman with a musical voice, said, “You look so sad.”

“Isn’t everyone sad to be here?”

“This isn’t a jail. It’s a hospital.” 

I’d been awake for three days, I had not eaten in two, and I felt weightless and insubstantial. I leaned against a wooden railing. Looking at my hand, I was surprised I couldn’t see through it to the wood beneath. It had been hours and hours since I was admitted, and I was still standing up. A girl sat down on one of the soft, filthy couches and within minutes she disappeared beneath the embrace of a man who laid himself on top of her. A nurse descended on them, screaming, “Sexual predator! Sexual predator! Get off of her.”

There were no beds for patients waiting to be processed and then sent upstairs to a ward, as we all were, but there were two rooms—one for women, one for men—with reclining chairs where we were allowed to rest. Under one of the chairs, I found a letter written by a girl who had been brought to the hospital from the juvenile correctional facility. “After your court date, I tripped the fuck out honey. My ass somehow got on the roof of JSI and threant to jump off. Oh my God the whole San Jose Police Department was their in minutes. I feel like shit cause I was doing so good. Why. Why. Me I don’t want to smoke crack Im tired Stephanie I should be back Hopefuly Bye the time your Release. Please forgive me.”

The letter was not signed. It was written by someone as desperate, perhaps even more desperate, than I. Putting the letter in my pocket, I pulled the thin blanket up to my chin and tried to sleep.

Once it was finally determined I had adequate health insurance coverage, I was transferred to Good Samaritan, a private mental hospital in the well-to-do city of Santa Clara. The hospital, nicknamed “The Ritz” by the nurses, was originally designed to provide a peaceful environment for terminal and acutely ill cancer patients, and the rooms looked out on courtyards filled with fountains, graceful palms, and bright birds of paradise and bougainvillea. The corridors, once filled with the dying, were now filled with those who only wished to be dead. To my inflamed and tormented mind, the sterile calm of the ward was like laying my fevered cheek against a cool pillow.

It was almost midnight by the time I was admitted, and I asked the nurse who came to my room, “Do you see the curtain moving?”

She looked at the closed and secured window and said, “No, the curtain is not moving.”

“But it’s rippling from top to bottom, can’t you see that?”

“No,” she said, “I can’t, but it’s okay. Just close your eyes and I’ll turn out the light.”

I didn’t want the light off because I knew something with a humped back like a Tasmanian devil waited for me in the dark. I had seen this thing in my dreams and in my waking hours and in the times in between. Increasingly, I was becoming unable to tell the difference. Asleep or awake, I existed in some nether world where shapes shifted and things moved and morphed into other things. The Tasmanian devil with an evil leer would appear and disappear, its face the last thing to go, like Alice’s Cheshire cat. 

The next morning, the nurse told me they’d notified Jill, as well as my psychiatrist, as to my whereabouts. I called Billy from the pay phone in the hall. He sounded greatly relieved I was somewhere safe. He said, “Thank you for not taking my friend away from me.” I phoned Thomas and lied to him, yet again, telling him my downstairs neighbor had called the police to check on me, and they had brought me to the hospital. I explained about the 72-hour hold; legally, if they determined I was a danger to myself they could keep me for three days, or even beyond. Thomas saw it as a bureaucratic bungle: I was caught in some nightmare of paperwork; it was all a mistake. He believed I was no more depressed than I’d ever been. The mix-up would all be straightened out soon, and I could go back to my apartment and buckle down to work on the book.

The only family member I called was my younger sister, Ingrid, in Idaho. I asked her not to tell my other siblings that I was in the hospital. There was nothing they could do to help, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I had told Thomas not to tell our boys I had been planning to kill myself. “Just say I was really, really depressed.”

Waking that morning in the narrow hospital bed draped with a white cotton blanket that smelled of bleach, I had thought at first I was back at the New England artists’ colony where I’d been almost one year earlier, sleeping in my virginal single bed beneath the white coverlet. I got up and looked out the window, half expecting to see not the tile-covered roof of the hospital with brown hills in the distance but a snow-covered field, its surface glazed with ice and a small studio in the distance where a well-known writer was cranking out yet another novel. 

In the coming days, I found, there was much about the hospital that reminded me of the artists’ colony. Like the taxi driver in the movie Harvey who brought patients to the mental hospital, there were cab drivers who occasionally brought artists and writers to the colony. The day a new cabbie came, he stood in the main lodge looking around at the posh but isolated place populated by eccentric-looking people, each of whom walked about with an abstracted air, lost in his or her own world. He’d asked in confusion, “What is this place?” If we had told him it was a loony bin, I’m sure he would have believed it.

Here too, at the hospital, we had our separate rooms where we descended into the often-frightening depths of our minds for hours at a time, and here too, we gathered for meals in a common room. There was the same TV room with its old magazines, and evening board games and visitors coming at appointed times bringing favorite foods that were stashed in the fridge. Each morning, both at the mental hospital and at the artists’ colony, we discussed our goals for the day. At the colony it might be a photographer saying she planned to hook up volunteers to a lie detector and take pictures of them to see if she could tell when they were lying; here in the hospital, it might be a man working up the effort to take a shower or shave.

Also at both places, there was talk of suicide. At the colony, the conversation had centered on famous writers who had killed themselves. At the hospital, the discussion centered on the nuts and bolts of how. The arthouse and the nuthouse, the private studio and the locked ward. What do we get from either but a respite from the world that has no place for artists or sensitive souls? These places exist to remind us we have value, that by offing ourselves we diminish the beauty and variety on this earth.

That first morning, as soon as the staff was out of the dining room, the subject turned to “what works.” 

“Phenobarbital,” said a woman with a cascade of chestnut hair down her back. “But it’s hard to get.”

“If you can get a doctor to prescribe MAO inhibitors, there’s a whole list of things you can’t eat or it’ll kill you,” offered a petite woman dressed in pink fuzzy slippers and jammies decorated with blue bunnies.

“Like what?”

“Cheese. Wine. Chocolate.” The table fell silent as the women contemplated death by chocolate. There was a collective sigh.

“The problem,” she continued, “is you might have a stroke and be a vegetable for the rest of your life.”

Harsh laughter all around. We already felt like walking vegetables. 

The hospital psychiatrist came to see me. He was dressed in a well-fitting suit and wasn’t wearing a white coat. As I stared at the floor, I noticed he had very shiny shoes.

“It says here,” he said, glancing at my chart, “that you haven’t been sleeping.”

Then he asked me three questions, which he was to repeat every morning at 5 a.m. as long as I was there.

“When was the last time you slept?”

“Last night, for a few hours. Before that—I think I went to bed about three days ago.”

 “Are you seeing things or hearing voices?”

“Not right now.”

“Are you having thoughts of hurting yourself or anyone else?”

“Not right now.”

 He pursed his lips, appearing dissatisfied with my answers. 

“Mixed manic episode,” he said, scribbling on my chart. He must have misinterpreted my blank look for incomprehension, because he explained. “That’s the most dangerous state for bipolar patients. It’s when you have depression deep enough to cause suicidal ideation and the manic energy to carry out your plans.”

He told me what medications he was putting me on but the names meant nothing to me. If he could guarantee the pills would vanquish the gargoyles and the splooshing frog, I was willing to take anything.

“I’ll see you tomorrow on my rounds.” Then he was gone, leaving the scent of aftershave in the air, like the slow-vanishing smile of the Tasmanian devil that had haunted me for weeks.

At group therapy, we were supposed to introduce ourselves, say a little something and tell why we were there. A slight man drooping in the chair across from me said his name and then stated he was a vegetarian. The woman next to him asked him why he was there and he turned his head toward her like an owl, his eyes fixed, his face blank. He answered, “The voices.”

The woman with chestnut hair said she had an obsession with her hair. She had recently sold her condo and bought a house for the sole purpose of installing a five thousand dollar water softener so she could wash her hair with soft water. She had tried to kill herself because she had spilled some bleach and, in the process of cleaning it up, had gotten some on her hand and then accidentally touched her hair. “They said I have ‘body dysmorphia.’” She paused, tossing her shiny mane over her shoulder. “I used to be a hair model,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Nothing explained anything, as far as I was concerned. Diagnoses, names of conditions or disorders meant nothing. Stories of outbursts, arrests, breakdowns were all the same: random acts committed by the brain against itself. If depression was, as I’d heard, your brain trying to kill you, then my brain had been on a murderous rampage. 

We were not allowed shoelaces, belts or anything metal, including jewelry, barrettes, combs, fingernail files, or coat hangers, or anything glass, including cosmetic mirrors or framed photos. We were allowed to use nail clippers, hair dryers, electric razors, and knitting needles only under supervision. On the list of things we could have “with permission” were suitcases with straps removed, stuffed animals with ties or ribbons less than twelve inches long, and false teeth. I tried to imagine someone desperate enough to harm themselves or others with false teeth. I looked at my real teeth in the mirror with a new appreciation. Despite all these precautions, the travel-size tubes of toothpaste they issued us were made of metal, which, I noted, had the potential of making nice and effective sharp-edged implements. There was also a list of things visitors could not bring, such as flower arrangements in glass containers or with bows containing metal wires. Anything with caffeine, including chocolate, was forbidden. How did they expect anyone to get well in here without chocolate?

We were allowed to have only three changes of clothes at any one time. I did not have any other clothes other than what I was wearing. The nurse had trouble believing I had no one to bring me any clean clothes, but she gave me an old t-shirt and sweatpants from the lost and found. The chestnut-haired woman’s parents had come from Philadelphia to see her. The vegetarian’s parents had come all the way from New Zealand.

“My parents are dead,” I explained at group, “My husband’s in Alaska.”

When the social worker came to my room, I talked for an hour and a half. She said matter-of-factly, but sympathetically, “What you have is not a marriage. Your marriage has been over for a long time.”

“I hang onto things, people, places too long. I don’t know when to quit,” I admitted.

“For whatever reason, you wouldn’t let the marriage break up, and something had to give. You did—you broke.”

I could only nod, my tears flowing.

The next day at group we had to name one of our strengths.

“Perseverance,” I said.

The vegetarian said, “A sense of humor.” 

As I lay in my bed on the third day, I kept hearing a faint but persistent scraping sound coming from inside the walls of the bathroom. I felt like Chief Bromden in One

Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Listen,” I said to the nurse. “I hear something inside the wall. Do you hear it?”

She looked doubtful and I dreaded her answer.

“Yes,” she said, to my relief. “There is definitely some kind of sound coming from inside there. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the ventilation system.”

My seventy-two hours were up, but I was still staying awake for most of the night. The psychiatrist said he was going to keep me for a few more days and up my sleep medication. I continued to roam the halls long after the others were in bed. Sometimes I saw the woman who never got out of her pajamas. She had been there many times before, and she padded down the hallway in her fuzzy slippers, as at home as if she were just going down to her kitchen to get a cup of warm milk. 

Sometimes I lay in bed, recalling one of Billy’s stories that had stayed with me. I heard his voice in my ear and could picture it all exactly as he described. He told me about working at the Eagle checkpoint for the Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race. The volunteers’ job was to clock the mushers’ times and to make sure they were warm, comfortable, and well fed during the six-hour mandatory layover on their grueling thousand-mile journey. Billy’s preferred shift was the middle of the night, when he kept a bonfire blazing in front of the old schoolhouse, waiting for the next musher and his team to arrive. It was usually well below zero, and everything was pitch black beyond the circle of fire.

I imagine I am there. First I can hear the faint jingle of the dogs’ harnesses. Then I see a tiny pinprick of light in the dark. It gets closer and closer and it’s the musher’s headlamp. He’s coming through town, just getting off the river after coming all the way from Whitehorse, Canada. Six hundred miles in five days, with five more to go til Fairbanks, if he’s lucky. He pulls up in front of me and the dogs drop right where they are. They’re beat. But the musher—it’s like seeing the survivor of a shipwreck, except his beard is frozen. I’ll never forget the look on his face, ever.

Most of the patients stayed in their rooms as much as possible. We all wanted to be left alone. After the chaos of the city and the noise of my apartment, I was grateful for the quiet on the ward. Often the only sound was the aggressive click of a nurse’s shoes as she walked quickly down the hall. All the nurses wore high heels—not the comfortable white shoes I associated with medical personnel. They didn’t wear smocks but dressed in smart, professional-looking clothes. I wondered if this was part of an illusion they tried to maintain that this was just a friendly hotel, albeit one with locked doors.

At mealtimes, a nurse said in a coaxing voice over the loudspeaker, “Dinnertime. Will all of you come out of your rooms and go to the dining room?” She sounded like Glinda the good witch saying, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” But instead of charming little munchkins, what emerged was more like badgers in bathrobes, blinking in the sudden light.

At group, we were asked about our hobbies. When the vegetarian answered in his usual low monotone, there was a muffled snicker. I asked him to repeat what he said. He swiveled his head slowly to the right and looked at me blankly. “Stand-up comedy,” he said without emotion. The group leader drew it out of him that he had a little comedy routine he did for his friends after he’d had a few drinks.

I couldn’t name a hobby. “I used to play the piano,” I said.

At night I heard music from the common room as one of the patients improvised at the piano. It went on and on in a looping, spiraling form, just like the way he twirled down the hall every day, swooping and dancing in a world of his own. He was a high school music teacher, and one time I walked past the pay phone as he was calling in sick to work, saying he had picked up a flu bug and wouldn’t be in for a few days. With his crisp, business-like voice, he gave the impression he was standing there in a suit when he was actually in a bathrobe, his hair on the back of his head matted from too much time in bed.

On the phone, my own music man—Thomas had always been my music man—asked, “Are they fixing you? Are you cured?” as if he was a child asking if a broken bone had been mended with a Band-Aid. He was sure I’d go back to my apartment soon, my mental problems solved, my ability to write restored. 

I called Billy every day. “Hi, it’s me,” I said.

“Hello, you.” This was his typical greeting, and I had grown to love the sound of it. I didn’t have much to tell him, and when we were finished talking, he would say, “Goodbye, my tender friend.” When I called Thomas, he always hung up without saying goodbye. The sudden disconnect left me holding the phone, feeling still more alone.

I kept hearing the social worker’s words “It’s over.” Each time, my heart hit my chest wall with a thunk like a dampened bell. “It’s over. It’s over.” Where does one spread the ashes of twenty-five years worth of trips and meals and movies and conversations and concerts and tucking in children and walks and poor health and money troubles and shared dreams and secret jokes?

I spent my days pacing from one locked door to another at the far end of the ward where a patient—a former army medic—taught tai chi to a few of the other patients. Without my coloring books to keep my hands busy, I made collages. I was not allowed to use scissors so I spent hours in the TV room ripping pictures out of old magazines and juxtaposing them in ways that seemed fitting to me. A diver in flippers plumbed the depths of the sky, plunging past a sign from a ski slope saying, “Going beyond this point may result in death.” A bright yellow saw blade lay against blue points of jagged ice, two bear hunters peered from the brush, a girl crept through the grass, a man whispered confessions to a priest, a hand showing its lifelines flew with wings into the clouds.

After several days, my sense of dislocation slowly lifted. My thoughts became less jumbled. I felt wrung out but relieved the visitation from the gargoyles and the undulation of the curtains were gone. I was not the only one returning to the real world. The vegetarian lifted his head and started looking people in the eye. One day I saw the “vegetarian” meal delivered to him consisted of a plate piled high with nothing but rice. He looked at me and shrugged. “The kitchen isn’t too accommodating,” he said. I nodded sympathetically and unwrapped my napkin with its plastic fork and two spoons. We weren’t allowed knives with our meals, even plastic ones. It was as if, in some strange equation, two spoons equaled one knife.

The former hair model was discharged, as was the woman with the bunny pajamas. After a week I, too, was doing better, the psychiatrist told me, though I felt far from my normal self. The doctor had said he didn’t want to release me until I was sleeping through the night, but he had already tried everything, doubling then tripling the dose of my heavy-duty meds. I swallowed the pills each night, wishing I could be adding them to the secret stash at my apartment. The doctor finally gave up and said it was good enough when I reached the point where I was sleeping a couple of hours at a stretch. It was time to go “home.”

Whenever someone was discharged, we had a debriefing to discuss the challenges he or she would face Outside. (In Alaska, Outside meant the Lower 48. Here it meant anywhere beyond the confines of the hospital walls.) The group leader went over the patient’s plan for dealing with these contingencies as they came up. Everyone expressed a fear of being alone. I didn’t see how I could be more alone than I already was. Part of my “post-treatment plan” (otherwise known as the terms of your release), was that I had to participate in a domestic violence support group. I didn’t see the need for this, but I didn’t argue. The social worker concurred with Jill: Thomas had been verbally and emotionally abusive to me. I thought of Billy’s words: “He doesn’t feel your pain when he lays into you and browbeats you.” The social worker went on to say that the impact on me had been profound because it had continued for so long. What about my impact on him? I wanted to say. 

The last formality before leaving the hospital was signing a form stating I would not be allowed to own a firearm in the state of California for a period of five years. 

Even though the woman with the bunny pajamas was married and had children, her mother had taken a six-week leave from her job to fly out from Baltimore to care for her. Everybody had someone to take them home. I had no one, and it struck me like a blow across my face that I had been abandoned, truly abandoned. I didn’t even have money for a taxi. I got a chit from the social worker to pay for a cab to my apartment.

The taxi driver was from New York. His accent seemed more out of place, more foreign in San Jose than the hesitant formality of the Africans or the quick chatter of the Vietnamese. He said he brought visitors to the hospital but had never picked up a patient before. He looked surprised that I didn’t appear crazy. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. What was normal to him was not normal to me. There were dark circles under my eyes and my pupils looked large and empty. He used to drive cabs in New York, he said, but this was a much tougher town. Everyone was uncaring, stressed, and just plain lonely. He’d never seen so many lonely people, even—no, especially—the high tech workers.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of them in the hospital,” I said.

He nodded. “I can see why.”

“At least you have a job dealing with real human beings.”

He shook his head. “This ain’t New York. People don’t talk to you.”