One Friday in April Read online

  I remember, as best I can, the houses. I remember the crying, and the thuds on the floor in the next room. If our father kills our mother, and the judge asks me what I saw, what will I say? If our mother kills our father, and the judge orders me to tell, how can I speak? If our father goes to prison, what will happen to Terry and me? If our mother goes to prison, what will we do? How can I prosecute my father? How can I accuse my mother?

  I imagined myself on the witness stand. I was in fifth grade. I was failing math. For a time, I had tutoring, but still couldn’t solve the problems. The tutor was a friend of my mother’s. She talked, and I imagined a courthouse. There was a lawyer, and it was quiet; people waited for me to speak.

  There were knives in the kitchen. I remember a night in Charlottesville, when I was ten and Terry nine, the year in the house on Lewis Mountain Road. I heard my mother scream that my father had a knife and was trying to kill her. My father was a young professor, a T. S. Eliot man, at the university. I don’t have good memories of him, only memories. But even the bad memories somehow don’t include him, though he was right there, hung over, maudlin, a phantom. He died in 2009, of a heart attack, after falling asleep on my stepmother’s shoulder, on a layover in their journey from Fort Worth to Venice for Christmas. He was seventy-three. Maybe the knife that my mother was screaming about that night was the Sabatier that I took from the drawer when I left home, back in the mid-1970s or so, and then, nearly thirty years later, carried from my own kitchen in Brooklyn, through the bedroom, up the hall, past the bathroom and the office that I didn’t use, moving fast, off-balance and stumbling to the living room, where I laid it on the plastic tarp, beside the pills, and then sat on the tarp, next to the pills and the knife, waiting out the day, not yet dead.

  When I was a boy, I brought the covers up to my chin, wrapped them tightly around me, and lay without moving in bed. I held my arms close to my sides, or crossed over my chest. I gazed up at my model airplanes, moonlit, hanging from threads from the ceiling. My chest, my body, felt tight, tight in the sense of a contraction, but also tight in the sense of being bound and squeezed. I felt paralyzed, or not exactly that, though something like that. I wasn’t paralyzed. Was I paralyzed? It was safest to lie still. Nonetheless, I shook, though not in a way that you’d notice—it was more of a hum. I felt numb yet in pain, and breathed shallow breaths, restrained.

  Even now, in my sixties, if I cry hard, I will be frightened, and you may find me in a corner, crouched, and turned toward the wall, my hands raised to protect my face. I will sob and shake, and make myself small, and beg, Please, go away. I will not be able to look at you. If you touch me, I will scream in pain and run from the room. Why can’t you see that it would be better for you without me? If any one feeling has defined my life, it is the feeling, more an awareness than a thought, that only lonely rooms are safe. This is how I feel and imagine shame, not as guilt or regret or remorse, not as some particular emotion or amalgam of emotions, but as a basic provision, abjection, the condition of those who have been neglected, harmed, cast out.

  The sun was down, and I was on the roof. I couldn’t stand straight. I couldn’t walk straight. I couldn’t pull my shoulders back, or take a deep breath. I was forty-seven, middle-aged, in the time of life when, for men living on their own, the incidence of suicide rises. I could see the city in all directions. The summer before, the summer of 2005, I’d finished and handed in my book about my mother. It was scheduled to come out in July. My friends Janice and Nicky had driven from Manhattan across the East River, and Regan had run out of the apartment to the street. That had been earlier, it seemed to me, such a long time before. There had been a plane in the sky. There’d been that helicopter. I realized that I would go to a hospital. I’d been ruminating over hospitals, imagining them, fearing them. The doctors would drug and shock me. Best to stay away from hospitals. On the roof, looking over the city, I pictured gothic piles and state psychiatric prisons, stone dungeons and brick barracks; and the wards, paint peeling, floors stained, locked and dark, fenced in.

  I opened the door to the stairs, stepped through, and locked the bolt behind me. For months, Regan and others had told me that I wasn’t well, that I needed to get better. What did they mean, better? When had I been better—when had that been? I imagined that I would be in the hospital, in hospitals, for a long time. I’d been seeing my then psychotherapist, M—my third since moving to New York in 1983—on the Upper East Side, as well as, for prescriptions, a psychiatrist connected to a Brooklyn hospital. Sometime around the New Year, my heart started pounding. I checked my pulse over and over with a watch, hour after hour, day after day. Regan assured me that my heart was normal, but I contradicted her, and then asked for reassurance. I paced, and every night at two, three, four o’clock, woke up in fear. Waking was sudden—the new dark day. My gut seized, and I rolled into a ball. I felt as if my body were burning. I wasn’t suicidal, was I? I was only jagged and tired, and my heart beat too rapidly. What a ruthless act, writing about my mother. But I had the comforting thought that at least I wasn’t suicidal. I wouldn’t do anything to myself. I would never do that. Looking back, I see that my apprehension of suicide first came as a denial of it. I’d tried antidepressants, years before, unsuccessfully, and again, also unsuccessfully, during the months leading up to the day on the roof: SSRIs, which target the mechanisms that control the neurotransmitter serotonin; an NSRI, affecting serotonin and norepinephrine; Wellbutrin, a dopamine enhancer; and Lamictal, a mood stabilizer developed to treat seizures, now also used to treat a range of clinical conditions. Klonopin is a strongly sedating drug with a long half-life. Like other drugs in the benzodiazepine family, Valium, Ativan, and so on, it is addictive. Over time I adapted to a schedule, one little yellow pill, four times per day, a schedule around which, over the winter and into the spring, I organized my worsening days and nights, counting down the hours and minutes to each new pill.

  I recall a visit to the psychiatrist in his office. It was March, not long before I ran to the roof. Leaving the house for any reason was scary and difficult; I felt, walking out of the building and down the sidewalk, as if I could not make it to the corner, and often I didn’t. My legs were heavy, and trembled; out on the street, the pain in my chest became sharper and more crushing. I told the doctor that I thought that the Klonopin might be making things worse.

  He was sitting at his desk. He sketched a picture on a piece of paper. It was a picture of crossing perpendicular lines with a waveform running along the horizontal axis, a graph showing a sine curve. The sections of the curve below the axis he labeled “Depression,” and the area above the axis “Anxiety.” The doctor explained that benzodiazepines might worsen depression but help with anxiety, and that I seemed to have more anxiety than depression, and that there should be a middle ground. He pointed to the picture. It was an explanation for a child. He was trying to reach me, as we say, to get through to me. Why couldn’t I understand? His voice was insistent, and I could hear, and feel, that he wanted the session to end. Agony and anxiety. I told the doctor that I understood the drawing, but nonetheless believed that the medication was its own problem. He wanted me to try cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses directly on symptoms, thoughts, and behaviors, rather than on the origins and historical experience of illness in the patient’s life. The doctor asked if I had been thinking of hurting myself. Was I having suicidal thoughts?

  I made it down the first flight from the roof, and then the second. My clothes were filthy, and my hands were black. I held the banister. I wasn’t going to die that day. I padded in torn socks along the landing to my apartment. The door was unlocked. Regan, Nicky, and Janice were in the living room. Janice and Nicky didn’t know each other. Or had they already met? Who told Janice to pick up Nicky and drive to Brooklyn? My friends had reacted to the sound of my voice, that morning when I’d called person after person, called and called, and then run from the apartment to the roof. When I came back down the stairs, I knew only that
they were there. They backed away at first. Where had I gone? Why had I run away and scared them?

  They stood in a circle around me. Nicky told me that we were leaving for the hospital. The psychiatrist had arranged for a room. I told my friends that I wanted a cigarette. My face was dirty, and I must’ve looked wild. Nicky told me to forget the cigarette. I put on my glasses. I put on a belt and a coat, and then we all went downstairs, got in Janice’s car, and drove to the wrong hospital. We ran into the emergency room, got directions to the right hospital, and ran back to the car. You would’ve thought that I was dying. I watched the traffic and the lights.

  We were there. Regan helped with the forms, and later Janice and Nicky drove back to Manhattan. A nurse came with a plastic bag, and I took off my belt and unlaced my shoes and tugged the laces through their holes and handed them over, and Regan and I put laces, keys, change, and the belt, anything that might be used for harm, in the bag. The nurse took the bag, and I was led to a small room. Regan waited with me.

  A doctor came. The doctor asked how I was feeling. I named the wrongs I’d done in my life, the people I’d hurt, catastrophes and losses. He told me to try not to worry about all that—I needed to get well. I asked him why he didn’t hear what I was saying, and he told me that when I felt better I might take a different view of my life. I asked him how long I would be in the hospital, and he said that he didn’t know. Then Regan had to go. It was late at night. I told her that I didn’t want her to leave me. After a while, a man arrived with a wheelchair. He rolled me through the halls to the elevator. Upstairs, on the ward, I told the nurse that I’d been taking Klonopin, but thought that it was having a bad effect, and asked for Ativan, a shorter-acting benzodiazepine, and she saw her way to that, and I woke up the next morning in a white room with a narrow view of rooftops.

  I was in a room of my own. There wasn’t much to it. The ward was rectangular, with a nursing station and medication dispensary, an isolation room for stressed or threatening patients, and, behind the scenes, offices, supply cabinets, closets, restrooms, and, presumably, a communal area for the staff. Patients’ bedrooms lined the hallways. A common area doubled as the dining room. The television was on all day. Patients leaned in doorways and sat on beds. Nurses checked the rooms, counting us every twenty minutes throughout the day and night. Many of us had had more than one hospitalization. Some knew each other from earlier stays. Had I been admitted before? What was I taking?

  By Saturday afternoon, my body felt lighter, and my thoughts, I thought, were pretty clear. Was it the Ativan? I stayed on my bed, or talked on the pay phone down the hall. I called my father and my sister and my friends, and told them where I was, and then joined a table with male patients and a supervisor who gave us disposable razors, shaving cream, and water in cups. My hand shook; the razor scraped my face. I remember a young man who had brain damage from sniffing chemicals from a paper bag. He told me that he was Dominican. He looked like Jesus. He had long black hair, and spoke with kindness, but his sentences ended before communicating much meaning. He passed me a pocket Bible. I still have it. I keep it in a drawer in my bedroom. Regan came during visiting hours. A few old friends were with her that Saturday. Or was it Sunday? The nurse unlocked the door, and my friends showed their backpacks and bags, and signed in, and then we all visited, as my Tennessee relatives used to put it, in the common room. My friends told me that I would get better. What did they know? I wore my own pants and shirt, not a hospital gown. I was ashamed, and they seemed abashed. I felt that. Or I should say that we shared in that.

  On Monday, the inpatient doctors and their residents came. The ward busied, like any workplace at the start of a new week. My own doctor, the prescribing doctor, was not at the hospital. I told his colleague that I was all right, and that I believed I could go home.

  We were in my room. The doctor was doing morning rounds. I sat on the bed, and she sat on a chair that she’d dragged in from outside. There were no chairs in those rooms. “Do you think you’ll be safe?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I told her that I’d had a scare, but that I didn’t think it would happen again.

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “Much better.”

  I wasn’t lying. I’d slept some.

  “Are you having thoughts of harming yourself?”

  “No.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “I think I’ll be OK.”

  “Can you tell me what brought this on?”

  I told the doctor that my mother was an alcoholic who’d lived a horrible life. I told her about losses and errors of my own, and the doctor watched my face and listened for frequency compression in my voice. Later that day, the hospital approved my discharge. A nurse brought the plastic bag, and I laced my shoes and signed the papers and sorted my things back into my pockets. I put on my coat. The nurse with the keychain led me down the hall and unlocked the door. I left the ward and walked toward the elevators. The door closed behind me, a heavy sound, and then I heard the key in the lock.

  I rode the elevator to the lobby. I left the building, crossed the street, and got in a waiting car. Sometimes, when I think of that day, I recall Regan coming to get me, and our going home together. Mainly, though, I remember that I was on my own. It was about three o’clock. I was wobbly. The sun was out, and the sky was blue. I was breathing fast. My skin felt prickly. The world did not look right. Brooklyn was unfamiliar. I don’t mean that the driver took a novel route. Was it the brightness in the light, a seeming sharpness to the day, that Monday afternoon? People walked on the sidewalks and crossed at the lights. It was early spring. The houses and shops were in rows, and the trees, a few already flowering, pink, violet, white, stood planted. I recognized Prospect Park, and my neighborhood, and my street. Surely I would be all right. I paid and thanked the driver, and then hurried upstairs, shut the door, and turned the lock. The living room was as I’d left it. Things were where they belonged. The view out the windows hadn’t changed. I crumpled onto the sofa. Where was I?

  I stayed out of the hospital for five weeks. The symptoms that I’d gone in with, that I’d lived with for months, returned and worsened. I didn’t sleep that first night home. Regan told me that I would be all right, it would be all right, but I knew that I wasn’t safe. I remember waking, startled, burning with sickness, the sheets and pillows soaked with sweat, the worst kind of waking. I got out of bed and fled up the hall to the front of the apartment, then paced the living room, where I sat down and got up, sat and got up.

  It went that way every night, and the same in the daytime, not just most days but every day. The itch in my temple, the need for a bullet, was constant. The itch wasn’t topical. It wasn’t itchy skin. It lay deep. If I scratched it, if I could somehow dig into my brain and scratch the itch, then I might feel clarity and peace. Without the bullet, I would never have either. But when had I ever felt clear? When had I been peaceful? How long until it was time for another Ativan? Some days, I lay in bed, picturing the bullet moving slowly through my brain. The image soothed me. Outside the window was the fire escape. How to die? Who would find me? Who would have to look back on that scene? I would leave a note, begging Regan not to unlock and open the door, not to come inside the apartment, but to call the police instead. Children played and yelled on the rooftop of the school down the street. My hips and back, my arms and legs felt stiff, though loose, somehow. Later, Regan would come over, and I would try to eat. But my jaw was tight, and it was hard to swallow. I had no appetite. Regan and I spoke less and less. She stayed in the front room, the living room, and I mainly went in back. Sometimes I took out my cell phone and dialed person after person. Or I left long messages.

  One day in mid-April, Regan and I took a walk to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. I’d been out of the hospital only a short time. It was a Saturday morning. I didn’t want to go. How would I make it? How could I escape, if I needed to, from the outdoors? Walking, any movement, seemed too difficult, and I didn’t
think that I could go far without turning back. The day was bright, and Regan urged me to look up at the blossoming trees. But I couldn’t; I couldn’t hold my head up. I could not form a smile. I could not tolerate touch. Merely standing was excruciating, and I could only peer at my feet. I felt as if I were immensely heavy. Stumbling through the gardens with Regan, I saw flowers in bloom, and ponds and people, couples and families, but it was exhausting to look. I raised my hands to my forehead, shielding my eyes. Regan was disappointed, and I was afraid; my chest felt sunken and tight, and I needed to sit, but couldn’t bear sitting. I could neither move nor stay still. I did not feel safe in the gardens, or over coffee, or back home. It must have been around this time that I told Regan that this was what rigor mortis might feel like, were one able to experience that in awareness, in life.

  What were my crimes? What are yours? What do you look forward to? I looked forward to poverty, abandonment by my remaining family members, the inability to write or work, the dissolution of friendships, professional and artistic oblivion, loneliness and deterioration, institutionalization and the removal from society—abjection and the end of belonging with or among others. I would be alone. The calm that I’d had for a moment in the hospital was gone. I slept two or three hours, and then sat up watching the light change with morning; and, later, during the day, took the death position, phoned those who might answer, or sped from back to front in the apartment, dragging the tarp. It was April, and then May, an eternity in real time. I worried about my shoulders. Over the spring, the joints had seemed to weaken. I could control my arms, but felt also that they were somehow just hanging there. Perhaps this was, as it were, an instance of hypochondria—I’d had a history of dislocations when younger. But what to make of the strange fluctuations in balance when walking, the tipping sideways, one way and then the other; or the effort required to hold a cup or a glass, or write with a pen? How had I become so clumsy and uncoordinated? Why did sounds hurt? Why the adrenaline, the ruminations on death, the bullet and the knife? Were my thoughts of dying intrusive, as we sometimes describe them, or were they simply the only thoughts that I had? When had the light begun to feel like sand thrown in my eyes?