Sarah:

I was in New York last week. Getting my shit, to use the vernacular. You didn’t know I was there. Naturally, I didn’t tell anyone I would be in town. I rolled in with Melinda in her suburban insult vehicle, we loaded it up with a lot of garbage bags filled with my old clothes, walked to a place in Little Italy to get contraband salami and cheeses, plus my favorite boullion cubes – oh and passed by Bliss and dropped a wad on skin cream – and then we rolled out. We were back in Pittsfield by 10 p.m.

When I unpacked, or rather, when I peeled my balled-up stinking junkie clothes out of the garbage bags, I was surprised and appalled to see so much evidence, in full color, of the condition of my endocrine system when I was out there in the land of nod. One shirt had – well, you know how underarm sweat stains are often described as “half moons”? Well, these sweat stains were planets. Planets of ochre and grey and brown, ugly and reeking as Io herself.

Some of my clothes still smelled of vodka and dope sweat. One nice frock had creamy puke crusted right down the front. I threw most everything out. Actually I brought it to the Christian Center, where the others can have at it. If I see a God-fearing matron, poor as dirt, squeezed into my “She’s With Me Cause She Appreciates Perfection” shirt, galactic sweat stains and all, I’ll look away. I won’t tell.

It’s different now. I’m getting cocky and starting to toy with the notion that I might live. I am prettier, too, since I ditched the three squares and lost some of that halfway-house fat. I might be the prettiest I’ve ever been. And all I can think about is getting laid.

My old roommate in New York said that most of the men she comes in contact with simply don’t register as men. I think I know what she means – many cosmopolitan men don’t seem like Man, in the Adam sense. They have tan ankles. One guy she knows is so rich that when he gets out of his car to go into a store he doesn’t bother to close his car door. He just pulls over and walks away. He goes sockless inside his Belgian loafers. I mean really. I know you know these men.

Going to a livestock fair with Mum last week gave me the idea that I have forgotten to breed. Here, where the men are Man and go to bed wearing their work boots, I have started to regard them in the manner that I appraised the bulls and swine at the fair: hmm. Nice coat. Healthy girth. Bright eyes. Good bloodline. This kind of thinking is not unusual for people who have recently made it out of death. I know the men in my little low-bottom sober community are looking at me the same way. Because they also liked to party till they lost their pulse. They also have died and come back. Grief has made us want to breed.

At the end of the summer I went out with Perez, and we sat in his pickup in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot for about five hours. We listened to REM. We fought for the airspace to talk about ourselves. He usually won. Perez is physically perfect and completely self-centered. He reminded me of the models I used to have to deal with at work. Ceaselessly yammering on about his own little hell. I got a few kisses out of him and he let me put my head in his lap and he stroked my face and hair. That was what I had been waiting for.

He hasn’t called me for months, but to have my head petted by a calloused hand was enough. It was my first kiss since Mink in the cruiser, no lie. You should have seen me fall into his mouth. I practically went in tongue first. Now he is just a myth, for his name is so wonderful to say, to think about: Johnny Perez. Proud to be a Sox fan, a Bostonian, a minority. He sang to me and held my gaze. For a little while.

That was this summer though, and now Johnny don’t look so proud. He has been drinking, he has a stalker – he is still beautiful but there is an empty, spooked look in his eyes. When I think about him my heart knocks in my chest. I saw him at a Halloween sober dance and we slow-danced – I know! I know! – to “Purple Rain,” which was so perfect. He let me lecture him, for once, but I didn’t have the piss and/or vinegar to do it. He stroked my back. I was very dressed up, over-glamorous with my hair up in rhinestones and my ranch mink. Can you believe I didn’t sell it when I was out there getting loaded and going broke?

I don’t know where John Perez is now. He can’t go home and his brother kicked him out. It pains me to see a prideful man get a taste of reality. I told Johnny that his body is hot, he could be brutally handsome, but it’s his joy that is most attractive. And when an alkie drinks after a few years of going without, joy is the first thing to evaporate as soon as the juice hits the palate.

Another dark guy entered the picture, this one just as interested in family crafting as I seem to be. He wants to find a female with athletic genes to guarantee a good throwing arm and full scholarships. This dark guy, well, he just cleaned up about 50 days ago. A very sick junkie. We kissed behind the Dumpster (!) the other night and he told me “easy, easy” because, again, I was trying to climb into his mouth. This man hasn’t had a girlfriend (besides heroin) for years, and was in jail for a long time because of this criminal junk hunger, and he’s telling me easy easy. I love it.

We kissed at the Halloween dance too, in the handicapped bathroom. With the lights out. This time he nearly took my head off with his mouth. Then I started to get a little manic and considered faking a seizure on the dance floor, or roaming around pie-eyed in my fur, asking men randomly to make out with me. But that didn’t happen. Now, don’t go thinking I’m desperate because I’m cruising new guys at the halfway house. I am so keeping the focus on getting well. Ha ha.

I’ve moved across the street into graduate housing. I live with Debbie A., and it’s okay – we both get up for work around the same time and sit silently in the living room, awash in a pale lake of cigarette smoke, coughing our two-note coughs. Then she goes to work and I light incense, put it out, drink a glass of milk, take my meds, and go to my new telemarketing job, where I (and fifty other women) sit like brood sows in stalls, hunched over our phones. And we make money for the man, baby.

Okay, Sarah. Don’t tell me I’m slumming. Don’t tell me I’m being cool again. Tell me I’m on the right track. I know I am. I’m so relieved not to be there.

Jessica

Dear Bill:

So this is the night that Jesus (a) got a last name and (b) performed the miracle that every boozer and drugger can relate to, or strive for:

He got up.

March has been a wonderful month. I know that the last time you saw me I was in a blackout and my face was all cut up. I assume I was screaming blue murder and, well, I’m sure you know that it got worse very quickly, especially after I started doing dope again. February ended with me and Mink on a death drive – an argument all over the Back Bay that had us stopped going the wrong way and then arrested for possession of heroin and needles; Mink and I made up in the back of the cruiser, we kissed our last while handcuffed; I wonder if I was the only one to know how bittersweet it tasted, since Mink was way more fucked up than me…after sitting it out in a cage for a few hours and finding nary a cute vignette to sum it up, I surrendered and the night moved on to me sobbing in my father’s arms in the police station (cue strings) and concluded with me sobbing into my step-brother-in-law Jackie’s sweatshirt (my gap-toothed goomba restaurateur-of-Revere savior) after being arraigned in Roxbury and ordered to reappear in late March. Jackie was flanked by another little goomba with struggling hair plugs, gold rings, and a whiffy White Owl clamped in his fingers, and he was saying “Whatsamatter Jessie? You ain’t feelin’ too good? Let’s go to detox, hah?” And then a ride in a new black SUV to a Westboro tox – no I.D., no $, just the clothes I was arrested in, Cate’s suede coat, and three packs of Marlboros to my name.

In I went, Guinevere in dirty braids, defamed, deluded, devirgined, into the nunnery.

It’s okay, Bill. I was sick of everyone saying “you don’t need to be drunk and high for us to enjoy hanging out with you.” What they – the rockers, the publicists, the dominatrices, the grade-C fashion models, the ersatz hangers on – didn’t know was that I needed to be loaded in order to find THEM interesting.

In that freebie detox, it was wake up every morn at 5:45 for a little cup of methadone, humpin’ around with a floor full of equally dirty women – wild-eyed with blown-out pupils, scuffy slippers, chipped polish, crunchberry cereal, movie nites – twin mattresses wrapped in plastic for people who pee their beds at nite, so they sounded and felt like Dorito bags when you rolled over in them. And smoking bummed Newports – borrowing clothes from whores cuz they were pregnant and they didn’t fit into them no more.

From the detox I came here to Pittsfield to visit my Mum, and I ended up getting Section 35-ed to a psych ward, Jones II Psychiatric, where I learned how to sneak smokes in the bathroom and keep my bed in the upright position while I slept, courtesy of the fruitily-named Ambien, some queer opiate. I spent the days reading Emerson (“For I am weary of the surfaces and die of inanition”), working with the sonorously voiced Dr. White who insisted on doing T’ai Chi moves with me as part of my therapy, and crushing the other patients in games of ping-pong, me in cut-off sweats and Laura Ashley scarf worn Big Chief/Let’s Get Physical-style, my boobs flying under a soiled Hanes tee. (There was a gift cart on the ward that had a mound of teddy bears. When you punched them or kicked at them they would start playing “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” If you think about it, that’s pretty tempting, and stupid.)

Twelve days later I came here, to Keenan House, to a wild crew of friends I always had – other losers – Nazi Kirk with a sexy scar and glassy baby blues, a sweet dumpling of a man. There’s Brian, with unfortunate port wine stains on his neck, and a dolorous expression. Kecia, beautiful, gap-toothed, swingy cheerleader hair, a heart thinned to near-collapse by cocaine; Johnny Perez, a shrugging gorgeous beast who drives an oil truck w/ a Marlboro between his good teeth. Mi gente. My people.

All the clothes on my back are borrowed, or donated to us thru Christian organizations.

I died with Mink that nite, 2/28, choking on those hideous heroin sobs (don’t ever try to cry on junk, it doesn’t work), both of us sniveling over our poor lost families. “We were just little kids!” I wailed and waited for what would certainly come next – and moments later, handcuffed behind the grille in the cruiser, I started to breathe again. I was alive, angry, and in terrible pain.

I love Mink. I’ll not see him again. To watch him play the guitar, to bury his face in his hand as the Les Paul begged for more, Bill – I can’t be with him. He doesn’t get it. He’ll try to beat the system, and pretend, for as long as he can, that it’s possible to shoot dope and piss clean for our P.O. Still, I am glad to be a felon. Kissing my love goodbye in the back of the cruiser while we were both handcuffed was so beautiful. I recommend the experience. It is to know true freedom.

Except he wasn’t really my boyfriend. He was on loan.

So this is what I have been for the past few weeks: a resident at a halfway house, a very clean, cool, tightly run outfit, with a super kitchen – I cook all the time, getting zaftig again. Without the waif powder I can’t be anything but a big old girl. Which is probably a good thing, considering what I looked like when I was hauled in; all scabbed up, a hundred pounds soaking wet, falling out of leather chaps and a sweaty silk shirt unbuttoned to reveal an old-lady chest.

Now I’m jumping with excitement about being clean again, writing again, not breakin’ my fuckin’ face. There’s so much inside. I mean, I’ve got another chance. I’m bursting full with stories – all the delicious things I’ve seen, said; and Pittsfield, so sweet, sad, cheap – we walk it every day – gutted Florsheim shoe stores, dying incense and beanie baby marts where smart sporting goods stores used to be on the now-empty North St., toothless retards waiting for a bus, rat-faced inbred fellas with wiry bodies, polar-bear-sized lesbians in fleecy pullovers giving big hugs that make me giddy.

It has been a glorious year, one of the best. Everything is changing, Bill – everything, and in that there is joy. For me.

Once more, with feeling,

Jessica

Dear Marce,

You’re not the first person to wonder why I’m studying psychology. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t really have an answer. I just keep coming back to this vision I have of myself somewhere in the distant future. I have this vision of me one day being a psychologist and there I am in my little room waiting for my next client and in he comes and he’s tall and handsome and conservatively dressed in a suit and tie and middle-aged and he seems a little nervous. He’s got a beautiful smile, and a very firm handshake, and we say hello and he sits down beside me and then he says it. He tells me he wants to die. And then I know that this is my opportunity to redeem myself. It’s my second chance, and this one I can’t fuck up. What do I say?

I know what you’re thinking. Marj already asked me if this whole idea of mine to study psychology was a “dad thing.” Because why else would someone who feels so dicked around by the entire psych services system want to become a very part of it, another cog in the machine? I’m not sure what to think about that. I already know what a shrink would say: Do you feel guilty for not having prevented your dad from killing himself? (Yes.) Do you feel you need to atone for his death? (Yes.) Do you feel you need to spend the rest of your life helping others like him in order to atone for his death? (Yes.) Do you feel confident that you can prevent someone from taking his or her own life? (No.) Then what makes you feel you could have prevented your dad from taking his life? (I don’t know.) In your opinion, is it rational to feel guilty, then, for not having prevented his suicide? (No, not rational.) In your opinion, then, is it rational to want to spend the rest of your life atoning for something you couldn’t have prevented from happening anyway? (No, not rational.) Do you think your father would have wanted you to be happy? (Yes, of course.) Does it make you happy to feel guilty, to feel personally responsible for not having prevented his suicide? (No, not happy.) Does it make you happy to be wasting my time like this you pathetic little fucker? (Yes, you smug, sanctimonious son of a bitch, some day I’ll have your job.)

But none of that questioning makes me feel any less guilty. So, seeing as how I’m going to feel guilty, why not let guilt be what compels me to study psychology? Why not let guilt be the thing that makes me attempt to ease someone’s pain, however slightly. Isn’t it better than me saying: I think I’m very good with people, I think I’ll study psychology. Or: I’ve had feelings of sadness in my life so I think I’ll be a very good psychologist. Or: I seem to be very good at keeping my shit together, I think I’d be good at telling other people how to live their lives, using my own tremendous success as a type of standard.

I don’t know. (Have I mentioned that already?) Maybe it’s not guilt. Maybe it’s just because I have one simple question that interior design, say, or home economics, can’t answer: Why’d he do it? Maybe I’m just the kind of person who hates mysteries. Who would rather try to figure things out than beatifically accept their impenetrability. It’s true, I despise so much of what psychology is about these days, the flakiness of it, the arrogance of it, the expense of it, the lack of it, the stigma of it, the joke of it, all that shit. But then again I know for a fact that I lack the imagination to even conceive of a different system. Maybe I can be a half-assed psychologist within the system, but creating a new one? Not likely. It’s kind of like the day I came home to the news that my dad had killed himself. I had been watching Owen’s baseball game and towards the end of it my head started to ache like never before. I thought I was going to die. I felt like someone was trying to squeeze my cerebral cortex up through the top of my head. I thought for sure my eyes were popping out of my skull. I wanted to scream. And I’d never even really had a headache before in my entire life. (I’m more of a stomach stress person.) So, anyway, I left the game before it was over and asked my mom, who was also there, to take Owen and Georgia home after the game. On my way home I stopped at the seven eleven to buy some Tylenol and a bottle of water. I was only a few blocks from home but I started ripping open the package in the car, desperate to get those damn pills inside me and working. I still hadn’t managed to get them into my mouth by the time I pulled up into my driveway and then I kind of stopped trying because I immediately sensed that something was not right. My sister and her boyfriend and Richard, an Anglican minister friend of my mom’s, were sitting on my back deck. I got out of the car, holding the two little tablets of Tylenol in my hand, and walked into the back yard. What’s going on? I said. And I looked at my sister and she just kind of stared at me and so did Sean her boyfriend and Richard got up and came over to where I was, standing on the back steps, and looked at me, and kind of paused for a second, and then said: Your dad’s dead. He walked in front of a train.

And then I said no, no, no, I kind of yelled it actually, and I remember thinking what a useless fucking word that is, no, and then, for whatever reason, I threw my two tablets of Tylenol at Richard and went into the house and slammed the door.

A couple of hours later, I was back outside sitting on the steps and I saw, even though it was getting dark, my little white Tylenol pills lying there on the ground and I thought: Well, I think I’ll take them now.

That’s my analogy right there, as lame as it may be. That’s what I compare psychology to. When Richard said those words, your dad’s dead, he walked in front of a train, the idea of taking Tylenol seemed ridiculous. Then, I guess, later on it was like well, there’s the Tylenol. What else is gonna get rid of this awful headache? I may as well take them and see and hope for the best. Taking the Tylenol won’t bring my dad back, but at the very least my head might stop hurting.

Well, anyway, that was all so long ago. I’m pretty sure I’m entirely over it by now. I should go. I have to study.

Love,

Miriam.

Dear Margie,

All in all I have been in three psychiatric hospitals as a patient: St. Mary’s in London, St. Anne’s in Cork, and now the Mercy Hospital’s new psychiatric ward in Cork.

In Mercy I met up with Fiona, Sheila, Oona and Theresa – three diagnosed schizophrenics and one anorexic, suicidal alcoholic. I had been in hospital with each of them before and so I had automatic friends this time. I like to make new friends but it’s amazing how many old faces you see back inside again. It’s kind of scary to think that they’re still trapped by their illness too. But what I love about them is the solidarity between all of us, that you are accepted among them and understood for having problems of your own.

The first time I was in hospital with Fiona, in March 1997, she was very suicidal. She tried to kill herself a few times when we were inside together. Since then she has become addicted to alcohol.

Sheila admits that she has schizophrenia, but she’s ashamed of being schiz. She told me about times she would burst out laughing for no reason and how she would bark like a dog in her back garden sometimes.

I call Oona “Joan of Arc” because I could see her hallucinating as she would walk the corridors. I asked her if she was seeing fire and she told me she had been, so I know from that that I truly can see other people’s hallucinations around them. Oona had a lot of electric-shock treatment. Her thoughts are still racing and she is still suffering from depression.

Theresa’s father is dead. She showed me her poetry about him. Also she is very musical and plays the tin whistle a lot. She has many plans and is full of ambition, just like I am.

These girls are all between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. I am not sure of their exact ages because that’s not what we talk about. We don’t talk about our lives outside the hospital as much as our lives inside.

I have always chosen my friends when inside. I figure people out in my mind to see if they are good or bad. I usually judge people very well. However, patients can use you if you are too generous with your smokes, your biscuits, your shampoo, whatever. I gave my walkman to the girl in the bed next to mine a lot. She thought she was the Virgin Mary. She used up my batteries and didn’t thank me for loaning it to her so I felt taken for granted by her.

The smoking room was a place to feel at home. We would listen to the radio there, drinking tea and eating food. Smokers stick together, I find. I would feel so out of place in a mental hospital if I did not smoke. I would feel isolated.

In the smoking room, we often talk about our illnesses and the doctors’ and nurses’ treatment of those who may fly off the handle. For example, in the Mercy last week, there was one middle-aged lady called Mary who wouldn’t stop chasing everybody around and gripping on to them with an iron hand. She was very strong and it was a bit scary to be gripped by her. She had lost her son and was going on about prayer and him a lot. I think she thought some of us were actually her son. This woman was very ill and was the main topic of conversation in the smoking room. At times the nurses would lose their patience with her and lock her into our bedroom and she would bang and pound on the doors for ages. We thought the nurses weren’t handling her right and that all she really needed was someone to talk with her through her confusion. I guess they did their best, but at the same time, they seemed so inexperienced when it came to handling her properly. By the time I was leaving, Mary was much calmer around everybody. Sometimes the patients are better nurses than the nurses themselves.

I am still on 25 mg of Zyprexa. Admittedly, before I went into hospital I had only been taking my medication occasionally, because I had begun to believe that I am my own cure. Also, I hate taking medicine because of my father. I hate the way he asks me if I have taken my medicine. I hate the fact that he thinks that without my medicine, I would be crazy. I completely disagree with that. I KNOW I can cope without medicine. I think anti-psychotic medicine damages just as much as it aids because of all the bad side effects. The side effects I experience are a groggy head in the morning, not being able to remember my dreams, memory loss in general, and also tardive dyskinesia where my lower jaw grinds itself off my upper jaw all the time. I don’t need or want to be drugged up for the rest of my life. I want to be healed. I want to cure my schizophrenia. There simply has to be a cure for it. I believe if there is an illness, there is also a cure. That’s Karma to me. For all there is bad, there is all that is good.

My doctor wants me to go on another drug called Clozaril, which would be a major step for me. I don’t think I am ready to commit to a drug that is so demanding. I would have to commit to going to the hospital to give blood once a week. (Apparently Clozaril affects the white blood cell count in your blood and so that has to be monitored regularly.)

I will have to be weaned off my Zyprexa and put on Clozaril over a period of three weeks, which I will have to spend in hospital so that I can be monitored properly. And they don’t even know that Clozaril will work any better. They merely think they should try me on a new drug because none of the others like Respirdal and Dolmatil and Zyprexa are getting rid of my “delusions.”

The doctors want Oona, Sheila, and I to go on Clozaril together so I would have the company of others who are trying it for the first time also but I have so many doubts about it. I know ultimately it’s my choice but for me, in reality, it’s my parents’ decision. I know my Dad, who believes in medicine so much, will more or less force me to make this life change.

In St. Mary’s, I was put on Chloropromazine, which is the most mind-numbing drug there is. I was a complete zombie when I had to take it. I would go completely blind for up to thirty seconds after rising from my bed. It made me feel like an animal being drugged up like that. I just pray that I don’t turn into a zombie under Clozaril.

Now that I am out of the hospital, I am living with my Mum and Dad again. Because I can’t hold down a job, I have no money and thus can’t move out. I love home as I do have a lot of freedom here but I can feel suffocated sometimes. I rebel against my parents at times. I always honour them but really I can’t be my true self in their house. I would so much more prefer to have an apartment but as I am broke, I am dependent on my parents all the time.

My Dad is completely anti-smoking and anti-drinking, which he likes to lecture me about. I am curious about everything, so I try anything, which goes against my Dad’s principles. I have done lots of drugs like ecstasy and speed. My Dad thinks I live in a world of fantasy, and I do, but I love my world…usually. My mother adores me as I adore her, but when I am in a bad mood, she annoys me with her “s-mothering.” I love my parents, but I know they will never understand me properly, the way I want to be understood by a partner. That keeps me searching through the darkness.

All in all, I am glad to be out of the hospital. I believe in myself as an individual, and I don’t think categorising myself as a schizophrenic is totally apt. I may have schizophrenia but that is not a totally appropriate label, in my point of view, for what goes on in my mind. It’s more a madness or an insane river of emotions, rather than something schizophrenic.

At home I stay in my room most of the time talking to people while I am listening to music or watching television. I am always talking to my soul-mate, Rebecca. She is in me twenty-four hours a day. We go to sleep together. We eat together. We go to the toilet together. We have a bath together. We drink together. We have sex with ourselves together. We talk and laugh and play together. We are apart but yet we are together all the time.

My own bedroom at home is done in the same way I decorated the walls of my rooms in St. Mary’s. At home now, I have pictures up of Bono, Madonna, and Tori Amos. I tore these photos from magazines and pinned them up because I believe they love God as much as I do and sing about Him. I hope to meet all of these people one day. I feel I will, too.

I am tired now. So I will send this even though I am not totally happy as it ain’t perfect.

Love, M.

Dear Margie,

This time when I entered the doors of the psychiatric ward in the Mercy Hospital, I was not afraid. I was prepared. This time I knew it was not like all the other times. This time I knew I was as sane as I ever will be.

My psychiatrist encouraged me to go into hospital when I confessed my vomiting, which she was very concerned about. It was worrying me, too, as I couldn’t keep anything down and sometimes the food I was eating tasted like dead bodies, which is a right turn-off.

But I think the main reason she wanted me to go into hospital was that I told her about my secret life in my mind. I told her that I can talk to God, that He does magic for me and that He is making Heaven on Earth. My psychiatrist listened to me and suggested in good faith that I should take some time out to relax and allow time for my vomiting to cease. Our conversation was the same as all the other times:

“Will you go into the hospital for a while, Mairead?”

“I s’pose so, if I have to.”

To be honest, I discuss very little with my doctor. She’s a middle-aged Roman Catholic mother. She knows her stuff on psychiatry, but that ain’t satisfactory for me. I believe in magic and God – things that can’t be explained by psychiatry. Sometimes I tell her my serious delusions, other times I just tell her I am feeling fine, working 9 to 5, and taking my medicine. Then she writes a prescription for me.

When I get the chance to let it all out of me, I bawl crying to my doctor. But usually I keep what’s in my heart in and try not to bother her with too many of my troubles. I can’t trust her fully when the inside of a psychiatric hospital looms in the background should I confess too many of my thoughts. What’s the point when I know how she is going to react, when I know she is going to tell me my thoughts are disturbed?

I have a choice as to whether I go into hospital or not, as I sign myself in voluntarily, but I really don’t have a choice. It’s either hospital, or big trouble at home. I feel I should get out of my parents’ way when I need help with my illness, so I just comply with my doctor’s advice even though a psychiatric ward is one of the most boring and frustrating places in the whole world. You have to do absolutely everything you are told to do by the nurses and doctors. You have to be so careful not to appear mad to them. You have to be good all the time in order to be let out again.

This time I was in for nine days.

Before I went into hospital I was working in a factory here in Cork, testing computer boards for Intel to see if they were functioning properly. I loved the job, and may go back to it again, but I am still not ready for a permanent commitment to a full-time job. I like to work so that I have money, but sometimes I can’t handle the job because my mind goes out of control, I suppose.

All in all I have been in three psychiatric hospitals as a patient: St. Mary’s in London, St. Anne’s in Cork, and now the Mercy Hospital’s new psychiatric ward in Cork.

The worst time for me was definitely St. Mary’s, because I was under one-on-one observation and in a locked ward. The night I was admitted to St. Mary’s, three years ago, I was brought to the Accident and Emergency section, and there I thought I saw Hitler waiting for a doctor. I started to panic, because I thought I was in Hell, and began screaming at my sister, asking her where the damned doctor was. The nurses put me into a white room that I christened the “Suicide Room.” I was left inside there on my own. I felt like everyone in the world wanted me to kill myself. There was only one thing in there besides a chair and a table, and that was a baby’s pacifier. I picked it up and gritted it with my teeth as hard as I could. When I looked out the window, I could see a type of generator which I thought was some sort of nuclear-bomb factory. There was smoke coming out of the chimney and I began to scream while banging my fists against the window.

The noise brought my sister and the nurses in. The Suicide Room was dead scary to be left all alone in with only a baby grip to soothe my pain, especially when I thought I was being admitted to Hell.

In that hospital the people were crazy. “Mohammed” would rattle off the Koran all the time. There were loads of Jesus freaks there too who would wear Jesus T-shirts and listen to the Christian radio station. I would tear out photographs of famous people and glossy advertisements from magazines and paste them up on the walls around me. Then I would have something to look at. It made my lonely bedrooms more personal for me.

The Mercy Hospital was a lot better than St. Mary’s. I’ll write you about it tomorrow.

Love, M.

Dear Marce,

You’re not the first person to wonder why I’m studying psychology. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t really have an answer. I just keep coming back to this vision I have of myself somewhere in the distant future. I have this vision of me one day being a psychologist and there I am in my little room waiting for my next client and in he comes and he’s tall and handsome and conservatively dressed in a suit and tie and middle-aged and he seems a little nervous. He’s got a beautiful smile, and a very firm handshake, and we say hello and he sits down beside me and then he says it. He tells me he wants to die. And then I know that this is my opportunity to redeem myself. It’s my second chance, and this one I can’t fuck up. What do I say?

I know what you’re thinking. Marj already asked me if this whole idea of mine to study psychology was a “dad thing.” Because why else would someone who feels so dicked around by the entire psych services system want to become a very part of it, another cog in the machine? I’m not sure what to think about that. I already know what a shrink would say: Do you feel guilty for not having prevented your dad from killing himself? (Yes.) Do you feel you need to atone for his death? (Yes.) Do you feel you need to spend the rest of your life helping others like him in order to atone for his death? (Yes.) Do you feel confident that you can prevent someone from taking his or her own life? (No.) Then what makes you feel you could have prevented your dad from taking his life? (I don’t know.) In your opinion, is it rational to feel guilty, then, for not having prevented his suicide? (No, not rational.) In your opinion, then, is it rational to want to spend the rest of your life atoning for something you couldn’t have prevented from happening anyway? (No, not rational.) Do you think your father would have wanted you to be happy? (Yes, of course.) Does it make you happy to feel guilty, to feel personally responsible for not having prevented his suicide? (No, not happy.) Does it make you happy to be wasting my time like this you pathetic little fucker? (Yes, you smug, sanctimonious son of a bitch, some day I’ll have your job.)

But none of that questioning makes me feel any less guilty. So, seeing as how I’m going to feel guilty, why not let guilt be what compels me to study psychology? Why not let guilt be the thing that makes me attempt to ease someone’s pain, however slightly. Isn’t it better than me saying: I think I’m very good with people, I think I’ll study psychology. Or: I’ve had feelings of sadness in my life so I think I’ll be a very good psychologist. Or: I seem to be very good at keeping my shit together, I think I’d be good at telling other people how to live their lives, using my own tremendous success as a type of standard.

I don’t know. (Have I mentioned that already?) Maybe it’s not guilt. Maybe it’s just because I have one simple question that interior design, say, or home economics, can’t answer: Why’d he do it? Maybe I’m just the kind of person who hates mysteries. Who would rather try to figure things out than beatifically accept their impenetrability. It’s true, I despise so much of what psychology is about these days, the flakiness of it, the arrogance of it, the expense of it, the lack of it, the stigma of it, the joke of it, all that shit. But then again I know for a fact that I lack the imagination to even conceive of a different system. Maybe I can be a half-assed psychologist within the system, but creating a new one? Not likely. It’s kind of like the day I came home to the news that my dad had killed himself. I had been watching Owen’s baseball game and towards the end of it my head started to ache like never before. I thought I was going to die. I felt like someone was trying to squeeze my cerebral cortex up through the top of my head. I thought for sure my eyes were popping out of my skull. I wanted to scream. And I’d never even really had a headache before in my entire life. (I’m more of a stomach stress person.) So, anyway, I left the game before it was over and asked my mom, who was also there, to take Owen and Georgia home after the game. On my way home I stopped at the seven eleven to buy some Tylenol and a bottle of water. I was only a few blocks from home but I started ripping open the package in the car, desperate to get those damn pills inside me and working. I still hadn’t managed to get them into my mouth by the time I pulled up into my driveway and then I kind of stopped trying because I immediately sensed that something was not right. My sister and her boyfriend and Richard, an Anglican minister friend of my mom’s, were sitting on my back deck. I got out of the car, holding the two little tablets of Tylenol in my hand, and walked into the back yard. What’s going on? I said. And I looked at my sister and she just kind of stared at me and so did Sean her boyfriend and Richard got up and came over to where I was, standing on the back steps, and looked at me, and kind of paused for a second, and then said: Your dad’s dead. He walked in front of a train.

And then I said no, no, no, I kind of yelled it actually, and I remember thinking what a useless fucking word that is, no, and then, for whatever reason, I threw my two tablets of Tylenol at Richard and went into the house and slammed the door.

A couple of hours later, I was back outside sitting on the steps and I saw, even though it was getting dark, my little white Tylenol pills lying there on the ground and I thought: Well, I think I’ll take them now.

That’s my analogy right there, as lame as it may be. That’s what I compare psychology to. When Richard said those words, your dad’s dead, he walked in front of a train, the idea of taking Tylenol seemed ridiculous. Then, I guess, later on it was like well, there’s the Tylenol. What else is gonna get rid of this awful headache? I may as well take them and see and hope for the best. Taking the Tylenol won’t bring my dad back, but at the very least my head might stop hurting.

Well, anyway, that was all so long ago. I’m pretty sure I’m entirely over it by now. I should go. I have to study.

Love,

Miriam.

Dear Paul,

It is late afternoon and I have just emerged from finishing a draft of The Book. Now I am in limbo, coming down from the terrible and exhilarating hard work of finishing. I fedexed it this morning to my agent and my editor. I do not know if they will like it or hate it or if they will say, Well, this has potential. Well, uh, this is different. All I know is I have been wearing the same dirty dress for three days straight, and my cats have gone feral, waiting for me to come out of my office and talk to them.

Out in the light of the world, I look at myself in the mirror and I look crazy. Maybe if I was from a different family I would look at myself in the mirror and see a Writer, worn out from the creation of a masterpiece. But what I see is a girl on the edge. And the edge surrounds me and calls to me like a mother’s voice. My mother’s voice.

It’s the five-year anniversary of my mother’s manic panic summer. That was the summer I turned twenty-nine, when she found herself in police custody in a fancy hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon, the city where our family has lived forever, the city which haunts us and reclaims us. Before the cops got to her she had been seriously manic for months; changing the locks on the house, staying up all night listening to Sting full blast, kicking my Dad out so he had to go live temporarily on an empty Christmas tree farm; moving into hotels and flooding the bathrooms over and over; calling me in the middle of the night and chastising me for being a selfish little feminist.

One night, calling at 3 AM, she asked my husband, “Do you think I’m crazy?” and he replied, in an attempt to lighten things up, “Well, Jean, you listen to Sting, right?” This bit of music-snob humor was lost on her, but nevertheless my husband successfully defused the situation, one of his many gifts.

My mom had a manic break with reality; it culminated in a party she threw one June night when she believed everyone in the world was her friend and she was on the verge of a religious epiphany. My parents live in the same house where I grew up with my two sisters, a beautiful, sprawling mansion on the hill, a place with too much history in the basement. This manic party took place on the blue front porch, and my younger sister Julia was there playing hostess, being a good girl, trying to figure out what the hell was happening as strangers and friends and my mom’s co-workers from her middle-school job commingled. A few of the guests she’d met hours earlier at the supermarket: An old busker playing guitar, two deadheads who could tell they had stumbled across a lady having some kind of bad acid trip. The principal of her school was there, as were old family friends who had no idea what they were in for when my mom called to invite them. Mom almost lost her job after that. Heavy medication and tenure saved her from this fate, which surely would have ruined her, since she loves being a school librarian and is fantastically good at it.

These days, five years after the fact, Claire and I still give Julia extra credit points for actually being there for this surreal party. Like a soldier who has been on the front lines, Julia saw the worst and lived to tell the tale. Claire was in Japan, Dad was out among the Christmas trees, and I was up in Seattle working a high-pressure job, behaving like a Success. Julia was in limbo, between jobs and boyfriends, and so she was sucked directly into the storm of my mom’s mental illness. It was the most powerful thing happening in her life at that moment. She didn’t have anything to hold her back from it.

She has never quite recovered from that head trip. She still gets spooked. She still thinks when the chips are down, when everyone is at their worst, she is going to get stuck playing hostess, holding the whole meaningless party together by herself.

There was a moment when my mom thought we were trying to poison her; this was after months of not eating or sleeping, her face like a mask, a thin smooth crust over her angry skull. We had gone downtown to her flooded hotel room to talk to the cops about what to do. I handed her a glass of water and she said, Did you put something in this? These days, she has her old face back, and I am not particularly afraid of her or for her, and we never talk about it. But sometimes the summer itself, the pale Pacific Northwest, people having barbecues and acting too too happy, these things can bring it all back.

Since that time I have learned a lot about mania and about what brought on my mother’s attack: too many prescription drugs, a quack psychiatrist, lots of whiskey, and an anger which might run in the blood of the family, which might be part of our tribe.

Like my sister Julia I get spooked; maybe there is something inside me, too, waiting to come undone. While I was trying to finish the book, I drank too much and smoked joints as if they were cigarettes. I marched around the house and terrorized my husband; it was like a long, drawn-out PMS. I was so far inside my own head, my eyes seemed to be sinking into my face. This strange and regrettable behavior makes me wonder if maybe I am too much like my mother ever really to come into my own. To know what storms will happen in my brain. To predict the weather and prepare for it. I spend a lot of time feeling like I need to be forgiven.

Periodically I hope my mother will talk to me about what happened, address the darkness that opened up in our family, ask to be forgiven. But five years after the fact I have pretty much realized that this will never happen; it cannot happen. From here on out, it is a matter of keeping our heads above the poisoned water. My Dad long ago moved back into the house, Lithium brought things “back to normal,” my mother switched from Prozac to Zoloft and whiskey to beer, and now she is “balanced.” As a family we are supposed to be over it. We convene at the coast and crack millions of jokes. Mom gets mad if we watch her too closely, if we bust her sipping whiskey, or look slightly alarmed if she starts inviting people over for no reason. “Don’t treat me like I’m crazy!” she says. Okay, we say, calm down mom, calm down, calm down, calm down.

Yours truly,

Emily