Sunday, February 21, 2010

Chapter 16

Full novel for sale at Lulu.

It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body anymore, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch…

“So how are you?” Suspiciously well. At least ok.
“Happy, I guess.”
“That’s good.”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because happiness means depression isn’t far off. It might be a couple of hours, days, weeks, possibly even months, but it will come and the longer I’m happy and the better I feel, the worse it’s going to be when I come down. Besides, I can’t prove that I’m happy. I can only reject the null hypothesis that I am unhappy within an undetermined uncertainty. So, really I don’t know anything.” Am I talking really fast?
“You’ve talked about sleep irregularities before; How is that right now?”
“I am regularly awake.”
“You’re not sleeping?”
“Yes. No. Yes. Can you rephrase the question so it’s not a double negative?”
“You could just tell me what you’re trying to say.”
“How can I answer a question that hasn’t been asked?”
“You already know what the question is. But we’re kind of on a tangent here. So how have you been sleeping?”
“I – have – not – been – sleep - ing – much.” See, I can talk slower if I want to.
“Are you still taking zopiclone?”
“Yup. It slows me down some, but doesn’t make me sleep, unless I take a lot.” It’s annoying actually, when you’re body is forced to slow down but your head won’t stop racing. Paralysing. Like you’re trapped in someone else’s body. “It’s better if I don’t take the pills. It’s not so bad really, having the extra time.”
“What do you do with the time?”
“Sing. Dance. Jump. Paint. Clean. Bake.”
“And you don’t get tired?”
“Of course I get tired. But I’m still full of energy. Weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“I just realised contradictions can exist. Something can be composed of opposites and still be true.”
“I think you’re right. Everything exists in its totality as a spectrum with certain aspects of its character perhaps being more pronounced than others at certain times. Right now, it sounds like you’re experiencing two extreme poles. What you need to do in order balance things out is add in some of the stuff in the middle.”
“It’s not really up to me.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it’s not. I can’t control what I’m thinking or doing. My body says move, so I move.”
“Then say ‘no’ to your body.”
“It doesn’t ask. I don’t get options. It functions of its own accord. I could no sooner tell myself to stop spinning in circles than I could tell myself to stop breathing.”
“Maybe you’re body is telling you it needs more activity and a way to control these outbursts would be to add physical activities into your daily routine. That way the body gets what it needs without having to take away from all the other necessities – like sleep. You can think of it as like taking vitamins. You have to take a little bit every day in order for them to be effective. If you take too many at once, you get sick.” Sick. “Are you still doing your morning walks?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I like my bed better. Outside is…too much information. It’s sad and cold. And my bed is safe and warm.”
“Maybe you could try incorporating a walk into your morning routine. If it’s not at sunrise, then first thing when you get out of bed.”
“That might be more likely to work.” But I’m not going to force myself despite the fact you just said I should. There’s no guarantee it would improve my situation and I can’t take the risk that it would increase my discomfort.
“How have you been eating?” I shake my head back and forth. “No, you haven’t been eating?”
“No. I can’t. I tried, but the food was wrong. I tried to make it right. But. I couldn’t. Came close once and tried to eat, but it wasn’t right when I ate it so I had to throw it out. Up. I threw it up.” I had made some vegetables and rice, but when I saw the food on the plate, it looked disparate. I tried rearranging the food by colour, size, texture, but nothing I did made it look less foreign and more edible and I ended up with a pile of vegetables mixed up with rice. It looked disgusting, like cheap Chinese take-out, but I didn’t want to waste food so I forced myself to eat it. Not all of it. I ate three mouthfuls before my stomach began to agree with my eyes as to the disgusting nature of the food. It was heavy in my stomach. Wrong. I knew it couldn’t stay there, but I also knew it wouldn’t come out on its own. I pulled my hair back into an elastic and positioned myself over the toilet. My finger pressed against tight ridges of my throat and I realised why men must like oral sex. Then I threw up.
“When was the last time you ate?” Not yesterday. Maybe the day before. Each day is the same as the next and the same as the previous, so it could have been yesterday. You want a number though, so on a wild guess…
“Three days.” That’s not right. I remember now. Kayla made me peanut butter and toast yesterday. I tried to help her, but every time I held the knife with its heap of peanut butter against the dry bread, the knife fell out of my unsteady hands. Laura sat with me on the bed as I picked off little pieces of bread, though the smallest crumb I could tear off still seemed too enormous for my stomach. It must have taken me an hour to eat that piece of toast. I couldn’t sit still long enough to chew and swallow repeatedly without boring myself to death. When I had finally finished one piece of toast, leaving a second behind on the plate, Laura kissed me on the forehead, took the plate to the kitchen and said we would try more later. Then she gave me one of the blue pills. I asked Kayla for another, but Laura said I was only allowed one.
“You haven’t eaten anything in three days?”
“No. Yes. Why do you ask questions I don’t understand? I had toast.”
“Just toast?”
“I don’t know. Eating is boring. I can’t be bothered to remember. Can I borrow that?” I am pointing at one of your many medical books on the tall shelf next to the filing cabinet.
“My neuropsychiatry textbook?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. You’re welcome to borrow any of the books here.”
“I might wreck it.”
“That’s ok. I don’t consider a book to be well read unless it shows some wear. I guess this is a good time to end today. Have a good week. Enjoy the book.”
“Thanks.’


……….


When I asked to borrow your book, my interest in the subject was genuine, if my motive was contrived. The pages were filled with pretty, colourful drawings of the brain, all the pieces labelled and explained in excruciating detail with additional clinical notes. Hypothalamus, corpus callosum, medulla oblongata. All things I used to know. It was like looking at a photograph of my lost memory. There was a vague familiarity of the subject matter that was difficult to attribute to any body of knowledge I currently possessed.

I tried to relearn the four lobes of the brain, repeating the names to myself – frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal, frontal parietal, occipital, temporal – but I couldn’t make the words stay in my brain, much less remember which part of the brain each label was assigned to. So I indolently abandoned the effort to locate pieces of who I was, who I thought I was, who I used to be, and instead looked for pieces of you.

You had underlined the more important, perhaps more interesting, facts with a red pen and a ruler. It was the ruler I found interesting. Your penmanship is poorly developed and it seemed odd you would take the time to carefully mark your book with such diligence. In some places, you had marked important paragraphs with a single parenthesis in the margin and, if you found what you were reading to be of particular interest, you added an exclamation mark.

Then there were whole chapters that had been left unmarked. You must have lost interest in what you were reading, maybe it was information you already knew and so you grew bored. But there was one chapter near the end of the book where you resumed your marking, only now it was with a blue pen and the wavy lines underlining your choice phrases were quite obviously not drawn with a ruler. It reminded me of the way I used to study, with a lot of effort and concentration in the early stages until I got bored and lazy and realised I didn’t even need the book. If anything it was slowing me down. It’s interesting how much a person leaves behind of themselves in the books they read.

There was also a bonus opportunity to leave an appointment slip with my name on it inside the front cover of your book. It would look innocent, forgotten, unintentional. But maybe you would flip through that book one day and see my name. Probably the little green piece of paper will end up in the recycling without a second thought. But maybe, you will see my name spelled out in your awkward handwriting and think of me. That would be enough. To be thought of. Even if only for a moment and even if I never know.


……….


It was out of control today. I was desperate, like a junkie after more drugs. I had misplaced my ritual razor but needed to cut myself, so I ransacked the house looking for my favourite tool and, in the mean time, using anything else I came across in my hunt that was remotely sharp to injure myself. Only every other sharp object I could find wasn’t sharp enough to satisfy my need.

Nothing hurt enough. Nothing cut deep enough. Even my previous favourite, the serrated paring knife, was unsatisfying. I tried stabbing myself repeatedly with it, lightly. I tried using some shaving razor blades, but the safety guards made cutting deeply difficult. The house was torn apart from my searching – under the sink, at the back of drawers, behind books - for a razor that must be there. When, after half an hour of searching, I couldn’t find any suitable sharp objects, I looked through the house again, dispelling more contents of cupboards and shelves onto the floor.

My search for a knife, a razor, a pair of scissors, anything to cut myself with, became frantic. Each empty drawer and cupboard increased my anxiety until the room began to spin and I fell to the floor with my head in my hands. There was a noise, silent but deafening. Bright and white, if noises can have colours.

Then I felt hands on mine, gently pulling them away from the ears I was covering. There was a voice, a whisper in my right ear. I could feel the air move around my ear, gently bending the fine hairs around the canal with the sound of the words. Words soft and light, abating the harshness of the silent noise that was filling my head.

“Ssssshhhhhh. It’s a secret.” Kayla offered her hands as a support for me to pull myself up off the floor. Her hand was warm and the close contact of our skin caused my palm to sweat, just a little.

She didn’t have to force me to stand. She didn’t have to order me. She didn’t have to ask me. She had already provided me with quiet relief from the dizzying noises and for that, and wanting more of the same, I would have followed her anywhere.
She led me, the fingers of her right hand intertwined in the fingers of my right hand. It occurred to me what a perfect fit our hands were. Indistinguishable. One hand blending and folding perfectly into another. There was safety and comfort in that similarity; a hand so like my own could not harm me.

She took me to the bathroom and pointed at the medicine cabinet. The mirror had been covered with sheets of white paper a few nights earlier when I couldn’t sleep and the reflected image of my face was more disturbing than usual. I opened the little door of the cabinet and, on the narrow shelves, amidst blue plastic prescription bottles, nail clippers, band-aids, was a small yellow exacto knife. “Thank you,” I said to Kayla, grateful that there was someone in my little world who would take care of me.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Chapter 15

Full novel for sale at Lulu.

One respect in which rabbits’ lives are less complicated than those of humans is that they are not ashamed to use force.

“So how are you?” I keep finding necrotic pieces of my mind. Septic, black, grotesque, and infectious. They begin to take on identities of their own, resembling and destroying what is left of me. Like any disease that threatens the whole, they must be removed. “Fidgety.” Too much coffee maybe. I’ve been drinking up to six cups a day. But it helps keep me calm. Calmer.
“Fishy?”
“What? No. Fidgety.”
“I thought it was another of your strange analogies. So what would you like to talk about this week?” You have a box of Kleenex with pictures of squash on it and another with pictures of spices. Maybe patients find food less threatening than the happy scenes of butterflies and pretty colours that usually decorate the cardboard boxes. I pick up the box on the table next to me and hold it up for you to see.
“What,” you ask as if it weren’t obvious.
“Your Kleenex has squash on it.”
“Yes it does.”
“The zucchini is a small summer squash approximately 20cm in length. Both the green or yellow fruit and the yellow flowers are edible and can be cooked in a variety of ways including boiling, frying, and grilling.”
“Quite.”
“I don’t think the pills are working.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, on account of nothing has changed. Sometimes I can go as long as two weeks without cutting myself. But that’s really pushing it. I want to hurt myself long before that. Then for a while, I need to do it nearly everyday. But the pills don’t seem to have an effect either way.”
“It might be wise to stay on the medication for longer if your moods are on a predictable cycle. It’s like needing to have a slit longer than the wavelength of light in order to avoid diffraction.”
“I’ll stay on the pills, but I’m not holding out for any sort of relief. Happiness inevitably leads towards pain. It’s like a warning sign. I can’t control happiness any more than I can control any of my other feelings, but I least I know to prepare myself for what’s coming next.”
“Joy doesn’t always need to be followed by pain.”
“Yes it does. It’s a circle. And it repeats over and over again.”
“It’s not a circle. It’s a propagating waveform. It has predicable, regular oscillations, but the overall mood-wave follows a generally increasing path.”
“But I don’t feel any increase.”
“Then you’re stuck. All you need to do is readjust the magnetic field that is your perception so that your mood-wave moves in a linear as opposed to circular pattern.”
“The knobs are broken.”
“What knobs?”
“The ones controlling the settings.”
“Well, then, I give you new knobs. You just have to attach them to your machine.”
“Are they shiny?”
“You’ll have to put up a net to keep crows away they are so brilliant.” You tell me such beautiful stories, fairy tales, of the possibilities awaiting me. I want to believe you. You display ideologies before me and I feel like a child in a toy store who is not allowed to play with anything. But stories are no more than wordy illusions and I can only suspend my disbelief for so long, about fifty minutes to be precise. “What have you been doing this week?”
“Painting.”
“You painted your walls?”
“No. A picture. Not a picture. It wasn’t even really painting, I just mixed up a bunch of different colours of paint on a piece of canvas.”
“Do you paint often?”
“Once in a while.”
“Why have you never brought in any of your art?” I didn’t think this was a gallery. I especially didn’t think you would at all be interested in seeing what I had created.
“They’re too big. It’s awkward and inconvenient. But I guess I could bring in some pictures of my paintings if you want.” Are you actually taking an interest in me?
“I didn’t say I wanted you to, but I do think it can be a therapeutic process to talk about your art.” No, I guess not.
“If you don’t care, I don’t see the point.”
“I never said I didn’t care.” These games of rhetoric always make me laugh. It’s as if you’re trying to trick me into believing the opposite of what you’re saying, but it’s just so damn obvious.
“No. You said you didn’t say that you wanted to see it.” Apparently, judging by your laughter, you are amused as well. Only you’re probably just embarrassed you’ve been caught trying to deceive me.
“I would be interested to see your art, and I do believe there is a significant amount of therapeutic value in sharing and discussing creative activities, but the motivation has to be yours, not because I asked you to.”
“I don’t want to be a disappointment anymore.”
“You’re not a disappointment.” You don’t know me well enough obviously.
“You can’t know that.”
“What makes you think I’m lying to you?”
“If what you said was true, that would mean I am quite possibly the most magnificent person in the world. If that were true then someone would have to love me.” Since you’re the only one who talks to me, that person would have to be you. Unless it’s like algebra where x + y = z doesn’t necessarily imply that z must equal x + y.
“There are probably a lot more people out there who love you, or who would love you if you gave them the chance, then you realise.” I think that’s supposed to be a compliment. Usually, compliments coming from you make me giddy, as if they actually mean something because they came from you. But this one just makes me feel lonely.
“I didn’t see a line of people standing outside my door this morning.”
“I challenge you to do a survey this week asking people whether or not they would like to get to know you. I bet you’ll find that almost no one declines the offer.”
“They would be lying.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Nobody is going to say ‘No, I don’t really like the way you come off and I think I would do better not wasting my time discovering that I don’t like you.’”
“Then make it an anonymous survey. Post an ad on the internet.”
“I’m not going to do that.’
“Why not?”
“Because it’s pathetic. It’s one thing to need to external validation, but it’s quite another to be desperate enough to solicit compliments. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to trust the validity of the responses anyway since most men on the internet think that posting an ad is an invitation to sexually inappropriate comments.”
“How do you know that’s how people will respond? You’re fortune telling again.”
“No, I’m not.” I’ve been that desperate before.
“So you have posted an ad before?”
“Yes.”
“And how did people respond?”
“I just told you.” Please try to keep up.
“I’m sorry your experience was less than satisfying.” Not having anybody interested in me only saved me time discovering I wasn’t interested in them. Not that I did anything productive with that time. “Well, that’s all for today. Have a good week.”
“Thanks.”

……….

I had a dream about you again last night. I was early for session, very early, by about an hour. You had a patient coming in before me, but you said I could stay in the office while she was there. The woman you were seeing was young, with curly auburn hair, and was quite spirited and talkative. She sat across from you at the required distance of three feet, while I sat on a blue couch to the side. As the session progressed, I realized I was tired (it was early in the morning) so I lied down on the couch to listen to the two of you, mostly the young woman, talk. When she left, I told you that you had a great job and you seemed pleased by that.

The next thing I remember, we were both on the couch. I think you were lying down, possibly with your head in my lap. Maybe you were sitting next to me. You looked like you wanted to kiss me. You moved your face closer to mine with your lips slightly parted. Figuring I was imagining it, I made no reciprocating motion and you retreated. Fortunately, you made a second attempt. When our lips touched, there was an awkward adjustment period as we synchronized the gape of our mouths and the movement of our tongues. When we both accepted that what was happening was happening, you led me out of your office into another room. The lovemaking was unremarkable, but you were there, with me, and that assurance was fulfillment enough.

Afterwards, you took me to a dinner at your family home. The house was typical of a wealthy family – large and immaculate with a view of the ocean from high up on a cliff. The party itself was a large gathering of people. Most of the time, you ignored me, once to watch sports, which I thought was out of character.
There was a full service bar and when you bought yourself a drink, you didn’t offer to buy me one. I would have declined anyway as I don’t drink, and it was strange you were drinking, but the slight did not go unnoticed. Still, there were times when you showed me some kindness such as when you put a gentle arm around my waist.

There were children, of course, at this family affair and I was playing with a group of them, a young girl with dark curly hair in particular, having a wonderful time pretending to belong to a family to whom I was a stranger. I had never been introduced to anyone. It was simply accepted that I was there with you and was to be treated as any other member of the family.

At some point, it was daylight but I’m confident the following event occurred after the dinner scene during which it was night, we climbed to the top of a steep hill covered with patches of dry grass and bumps and holes. We were sitting, talking but I don’t remember what about, when you suddenly threw yourself down the hill, rolling as children do when they are playing, only much more violently with your head rebounding of mounds of dirt.

The dream ended before I had the chance to discover your intentions with me. You were, obviously, upset. You never told me why, but I had the impression your wife had left you. Most likely you were only using me as an immediately accessible comfort. Though, you may also have been using me as a tool of self-destruction. Whatever it was you were using me for, you pursued me knowing I would be willing. And I was, willing.


……….


There was a spider in my bathroom sink when I went to brush my teeth in the morning. A big spider. Big, black, and scary. But as he was in the sink, I wasn’t able throw a shoe at him, the only defence I had developed against arachnids. There were alternatives of course, all of them involving me leaving the house. There was a coffee shop a few blocks away where I could use a bathroom. My toothbrush was out of reach being on the other side of the eight-legged horror, so I wouldn’t have been able to brush my teeth, but there was gum in my purse. However, if I left him unsupervised and alive, when I returned home there would be no way of knowing where he would be lying in wait, his sole purpose of existence of course being to terrorize me. Also, I really wanted to brush my hair. I was like one of those girls in the movies where there’s an attack and the good guy and the bad guy are fighting while the woman cowers until she, shakily, manages to pick up the gun that fell across the floor and kills the bad guy. Only I didn’t have a gun.

But I did have a shower hose. Eventually, the creature was destroyed with high pressured hot water from where I maintained a safe three foot distance standing in the back of the bathtub. However, shower hoses at that distance are not incredibly accurate and the bathroom floor also received a fair amount of water.

Flooding aside, the objective had been reached and the spider was dead. Only now there was the problem of removing his gigantic carcass, which was too large to be washed down the drain. Dead or not, I was not about to pick him up, not with any amount of tissue for any length of time. So, reasonably, I poured a bottle of Drano onto his corpse. Apparently, if your drain becomes clogged with dead spiders, Drano will not be the best method with which to clear the pipes, because half an hour later, his black, curled body was still in the sink, completely undeteriorated.

Still unable to gather my courage to remove the body with my own hands, I left him in the sink, figuring by the end of the day the cat would discover free meat and dispose of the body for me. Though, now covered in Drano, there was a risk of poisoning the cat, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

All of the commotion and screaming (there was a lot of embarrassingly feminine high pitched shrieks during the spider adventure) must have alarmed the man upstairs because shortly after the demise of the arachnid, he knocked on my door. Shyly, afraid of declaring my frailty, but even more afraid of not being able to use my bathroom sink ever again, I sent him into the bathroom on a search and destroy mission while I waited far away outside on the steps, in the event the spider had been religiously resurrected and was now invested with a purposeful vengeance directed at me.

I heard the toilet flush and, shortly after, the man reappeared to inform me that my bathroom was once again safe for activities of personal hygiene. So I carried on with my day, in quite a pleasant mood, as if nothing had happened.