“Some people lose their ability to interpret taste with neck trauma,” he said. “Fortunately, your nerves appear normal.”
“I don’t want to interpret pudding,” I said. “I want to skate.” But though I only wanted to skate, all anyone could do was talk to me about life, as though it wasn’t something I’d been doing for sixteen years.
“You have your entire life ahead of you,” my mother told me. “You’re young. You’ve never even been in love.”
I told her that you don’t need to make out with something to love it, and she informed me that anger is a critical step in the grieving process. She had been reading books about bereavement and terminal illness. There were chapters dedicated to consoling men who lose their testicles to cancer and discussing the afterlife with agnostics. Chapter one discussed Kubler Ross, chapter two denial. The chapter I wished my mother never read concerned building a support group, which made her rub my back and tell me I was not alone.
“That is exactly my fear,” I told her.
But when I returned to school, it was all sperm and eggs. There were slideshows with stillborns and women in labor. The school board thought the visuals would stop the inevitable. And I couldn’t stand to get out of bed to see these screaming women, to see how it happens every time.
So there I was that morning one year later, beneath sheets cradling myself in glimmers of leaping with hope and unnatural contortions and thinking again! Again! Again! and windmills until finally once I fell from my dream, once I felt once more that it was over, I knew I had to confront another day.
I looked at my clock, seven minutes left, and pulled down the covers. I closed my eyes again until I saw a monster. She sauntered long-legged over— tick tock tick tock tick—and I fumbled for scissors to cut her hair, hair thick and black and wild enough to get lost in, hair that resembled my own.
“You come here often?” she asked, and I didn’t respond.
“I know why you’re in bed. You must be tired, because you’ve been running through my brain all night.” She moved closer, raising her hand to touch the pillow behind my head, a dark, leaning figment, and breathed hot towards my ear until all I saw was a schism of cleavage. Two fingers teasing between my legs, two moving above the thighs—harder, harder until she said she knew I wanted it, she ate figure skaters for breakfast, and a pretty young thing like me didn’t belong in a place like this. Shears raised, I squeezed my knees and caught a glint of light reflecting in the sharpened edges. I squeezed tight through legs and fingers, closing my fist in a snip.
“There’s no one like me,” I said.
And then, I got out of bed.
I woke up in the hospital.
THE Matthew Thornton Medical Center is the only hospital in southern New Hampshire with psych facilities. The inmates are called patients and the food would turn any sane person into a dieter. I’d like to say the selection process is selective, but some people here are not even legitimate crazies. Narcoleptics and delinquents, schizoids and depressives: they admit the gamut.
I wake up in a solo room, trudge rounds through the inaptly named rec room, nauseate in the cafeteria, turn back to my very own abode, three-oh-two, and then, of course, to the good doctor’s office.
Right where I left you, and if we’re going to do this again, there’s something I’ve got to know. Are you of a school? I ask.
Where did I get my degree, you mean?
Of course that isn’t what I mean. On the wall her diplomas hang, this itinerary of hard work and accomplishment: Williams College, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, bachelors, doctorate, masters.
I mean Gestalt, ink blots, it’s all daddy, I say.
Do you want to talk about your father?
Will you only answer in questions?
Will you answer them if I continue? she says. And I’ve got to acknowledge she’s good.
Haven’t I already? I ask. Because good isn’t sufficient.
Indeed, she says.
In deeds I trust. It’s thoughts I don’t.
Let me qualify my statement, she says, unwilling to let me get away with wordplay. You have indeed answered the question of why you’re here, but only to the extent that you’ve noted the most recent incident. We both know that this was not an isolated incident of abnormal cognition, however. This was an incident within a pattern, and there is a history that you cannot deny.
She sounds like Mark: a history that you cannot deny. How much he wanted me to be of my birth instead of my choices. I was born Shawnee yet lived in the culture of myself. But the doctor doesn’t know who Mark is. Mark: a stain, a target, an imprint.
So you admit my file is not so incomplete.
A file is merely a snapshot, she says.
Did you know, Doctor, that cliché translates literally to mean “a snapshot” in French? I eye a brown hanging folder on her desk. Though I’ve lived my entire life with myself just like anyone else, I want to see what my life looks like on paper. Because I’ve always been curious in the manner of the killed cat. Anyway in the end, this is how I’ll be remembered: a date of birth, vaccinations, address, then most importantly, emergency contact.
Well certainly you must know you are not a cliché. You are only a cliché as long as you allow yourself to be the bare bones of a file. I’d like to hear your side of the story. I’d like to hear the details of what makes you you.
You could be anyone, I think. It was something my mother told me once. I was in preschool, and parents were bringing home the younger versions of themselves. When I grow up will I look just like you? My mother stopped in the middle of the parking lot. I don’t know. That’s when she told me I was adopted. Then who will I be like? It occurred to me that I was to become an uncertainty, a stranger. You could be anyone, my mother said. That’s even better to be than to be like me. You could be anyone in the world, anyone.
Miss Doyle? Did you hear me? I want to hear your side of the story.
My side begins with death and ends with birth. It’s life turned backwards, I say.
Your perspective is what matters to me. You needn’t feel self-conscious.
Oh but isn’t that the reason I’m here?
The doctor is quiet a moment. She’s younger than I’d noticed. Maybe she’s never had a patient before she didn’t like, doesn’t know what to do with one. She puts her pencil down.
And what, in your words, are the deeds that brought you here?
Wastes of life.
You feel that we’re wasting your time? she asks.
Time I’ve got all of in the world. My time is all spare, in the sense of extra not the opposite. Nor the saving kind. I look at the clock. It’s better not to look at the clock. It’s better not to wait for someone to sign you out of the mental hospital.
Why don’t we talk about what you did with your time before our sessions? As in before the most recent incident, which led to your hospitalization and our sessions. I need the entire story.
And yet, Doctor, is it not also true that your process as a mental health professional is comprised of me relating a swath of story only so that you can repackage it neatly into a diagnosis? I can see it clearly. An assemblage of symptoms. Checked off warning signs. Everything I say can and will be used against me. In this court, she, the doctor, is judge, jury, witness. I stand accused.
Miss