I had forgotten to take my meds again. I had an “Oh shit” sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach when I found a full bottle of pills on the window sill above the kitchen sink and realized a whole month had passed me by and still I hadn’t opened it, not even once. That explains why I found myself back in the hospital doing the old drill: morning exercises in floppy slippers, group therapy with sobbing anorexic girls, pleasant one-on-ones with nurses who tried to look interested in all my boring crap even though I’d caught them checking their watches, and the arts and crafts time where I used child-safe scissors to cut out pictures of emaciated models while I drifted off into my mid-afternoon stupor, and then, to round out another lovely day, a chat with my psychiatrist, Dr. Melvin, a gaunt man with pale complexion and black hair whose invitation to join him in his office never failed to fill me with a weird foreboding calm, the way I imagined it feels for death row inmates who’ve gotten the first injection—the one that relaxes them—and even though they know the next injection will kill them, can’t help but relax. I figured it’d be a big mistake to let down my guard while I was having a session with Dr. M., although I couldn’t say for sure what would happen if I dozed or daydreamed or gave him any other excuse to step out from behind that big pretentious desk of his and come closer to me. It was just a gut feeling I had, a dark knot that twisted low in my bowels and left me feeling like I might dump everything into my underwear.
I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. There was j.d., too, the bi-polar chick from two rooms down who got admitted by her boyfriend because she thought she belonged on “Dancing With The Stars” and so stayed outside dancing all night every night hoping aliens would whisk her up and away into the night sky. (Nobody told her the show title wasn’t literal.) She had the same sense of Dr. M., although I didn’t need her opinion to back me up; all I had to do was compare the way j.d. looked from one session to the next. Every day she left his office looking a little more flat, with eyes a little more sunken and back a little more stooped, folding in on herself like a doll that’s lost all its stuffing. She’d flop like a Raggedy Anne over a chair, then bitch about how she couldn’t smoke in her own room and how the food tastes like mud with little chunks of dog turd stirred in to add spice and how her sessions with Dr. M. were making her feel worse instead of better. We’d walk together up and down the hallways of the ward, though walk may be an exaggeration, more like a shuffle, the kind of back and forth you’d expect from a couple of sleepwalkers. And we’d talk as we went, though talk may be an exaggeration too, more like a grunt or a nod, the kind of slo-mo jibber jabber you’d expect from people halfway to the funeral parlour.
The next day j.d. was gone—no good-bye, no nothing. I asked at the nursing station where she’d gone, but it was a new girl on duty and she looked at me like I had rocks in my head, or nothing there at all, and shrugged and said she’d never heard of anybody named j.d.
“The girl in room 1313,” I shouted.
The nurse didn’t have a clue. There was no file out for a j.d. It’s like she never existed. The nurse said housekeeping was cleaning things up in 1313 to make space for a woman who tried to kill herself by swallowing a pound of table salt. “You’d be amazed how much damage a pound of table salt can do,” she said. “Sucks the life right outta you.”
I shuffled my way down to room 1313 to see for myself, moping along, head bowed, muttering absently as I went. I hovered near the entrance to the room while the woman from housekeeping—a stout girl with big hips—breezed around the room singing a song and waving her duster like it was a magic wand and she was the housekeeping fairy. She had a big metal cart with separate places to stuff dirty laundry and garbage, and underneath was a stash of cleaning products. I was standing just outside the room when she left, pushing the cart in front of her as she moved on to room 1315 where John the wolf man slept. John wasn’t really a wolf man; he had a schizoid personality disorder and liked to howl at the moon and lick his own genitals. Everybody admired his flexibility but wanted to help him channel it into something more sanitary like yoga. As the housekeeper trundled by me in her cloud of antiseptic smells, I glimpsed the bed sheets stuffed into the receptacle and noticed a large red stain, still wet and glistening beneath the fluorescent lights. Was it juice? Or nail polish? Blood?
My brain went wild with speculations, like piranhas around a floating carcass. Dr. M.’s been after me about that one—the habit of catastrophizing is what he calls it—where I take some insignificant event in my life and then explode it into an apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario, or take something random and interpret it as if it carries special meaning—like when I sometimes see a look in somebody’s eye and wonder what it was for. Was it a look of disgust or annoyance? Did I do something to deserve the look? Was there something I did by accident that ended up offending them? Will they ever speak to me again? Will I be able to keep them from suing me? Afterward, when I sort it all out, I discover that they had a speck of dust in their eye, and far from giving me a look, didn’t even know I was there. But this was different. There was most definitely a red stain on the sheet and I was pretty sure it was a clue something bad had happened to j.d. There was nothing for me to do but to follow the housekeeping fairy around and look for a chance to steal the stained bed sheet from her cart when she wasn’t looking. I’d need it as evidence.
My chance didn’t come right away because John the wolf man’s room was too close to the nursing station where the new girl sat and watched every move I made. I had to wait until the housekeeper was around the other side of the nursing station and half way down the far hall before I made my move. She had parked her cart outside the room of Alison Spendalotte, a bipolar mother of seven who had maxed out her credit cards trying to buy mosquito netting for every child in the world. When the housekeeper went into the bathroom to scrub the toilet, I reached in for the stained sheet, but it was gone. Nothing. Just pillow cases and towels. With all the sheets missing, there must’ve been a cover up somewhere.
Later in the afternoon, I met with Dr. M. He stood tall behind his desk and motioned me to enter and take a chair. The pale complexion, the dark hair, the ruddy cheeks and lips, all of it had a disturbing effect on my imagination. Notwithstanding the warning sirens that went off inside my head, I found myself sharing with him my concerns, but more in a general way. I said how I was going to miss j.d. because we’d gotten along well together, and how it bothered me that she left without saying good-bye, but I held back when it came to the more suspicious things I’d seen, what with the housekeeping lady and the bloodied sheet and the new nurse who’d never heard of j.d. After all, I didn’t want Dr. M. to think I was paranoid or anything. Even so, Dr. M. screwed up his face in a cloudy look that made me feel uncomfortable, and he asked who I was talking about.
“j.d.,” I said.
“Who’s j.d.?” he said.
“You know. The girl in 1313.”
“Right. Right.” And he started scribbling in his notebook.
Along one of the walls is a couch, more like one of those low tables that physiotherapists use—only cushier. Dr. M. had me stretch out on the couch with my back pressed to the cold vinyl and my gut exposed to the tiled ceiling. He said he wanted to hypnotize me. I was worried about what I’d say to him while I was under. I didn’t want Dr. M. to know what I was really thinking, especially about the housekeeper with that satisfied smile of hers and those well-fed hips that went wobble wobble behind her cart. But I couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to go under, so pretty soon I found myself drifting off to the mellifluous tone of Dr. M.’s voice as it described a sandy beach with water licking my toes and a breeze whispering through my hair.
Of course I can’t remember what I said or where I went while I was hypnotized. That’s part of the deal. I woke up to the sound of Dr. M. clapping his hand. As I swung around to sit upright, I asked if he’d gotten anything out of me, but he only smiled and nodded and kept his mouth shut. Then something strange happened. He kind of coughed on something—maybe choked a bit or puked inside his mouth. There was a chuff chuff sound that he muffled by whipping out a white handkerchief and clamping it over his mouth. When he drew the handkerchief away from his mouth, I saw that his lips were ruddy and bright—too ruddy, too bright. He crumpled the handkerchief into a ball and threw it to one side of his desk and there, in amongst the folds of the white cloth, I thought I could see spatters of red. I thought it meant something, like a clue in a mystery novel. All I had to do was stick it together with all the other clues and they would coalesce into some overarching explanation, but I was feeling light-headed and nothing came to mind.
By then, the session was over and it was time for me to go back to my room. As I shuffled down the hall, I could feel it in my back, that feeling like a thousand pounds of rocks was bearing down on me, bending me over, stooping me low, grinding me down. And there was another feeling too, a feeling in my face, like all the skin was drooping off my cheek bones and sagging into bulldog jowls. It seemed to take the rest of the afternoon for me to make it to my room, that’s how slow everything was moving, and when the new nurse waved from the nursing station and said hi, all I could manage in return was a guttural grunt, like a sleepwalking pig. That was when I realized they’d finally gotten to me. Soon I’d be like all the rest of them: wandering around in a fog, one foot in front of the other, moaning and groaning under my breath, not caring whether I was alive or dead.