And he will rise, burning like the golden sun.

ID

1

WE MET IN a mental hospital.

Wow. What an opening line, right? Doomed from the get-go. Why go on?

It’s okay, it’s okay. It all ends up just fine.

Trust me.

SO YEAH, I was suffering from a spike in my lifelong battle with chronic depression, one that led to a sad attempt to kill myself by popping twenty-plus Ativan while blasting Foghat and drinking a bottle of cheap California Merlot before settling myself into a hot bath in a lightless bathroom save for a flickering scented candle (that was supposed to smell like vanilla but came off more like perfumed cake batter) while waiting to pass out and drown. I woke up at 3 a.m. freezing my ass off and jittery as a blue bottle fly high on cocaine. I took a walk around the block, lugged a brick through an ex-girlfriend’s window then drove myself to the ER where they promptly admitted me for an abnormally high heartrate and a nasty hard-on for classic rock suicide.

When I say admitted me I don’t mean for general health care. I mean they admitted me for psychological evaluation. Which I passed with flying colors, ha-ha.

THE MENTAL WARD was part of the main hospital. To get into the mental ward, however, you needed to run a gauntlet of locked, oversized metal doors that separated the sane and stable from the confused and emotionally-challenged. Upon entry, security would beep you through the first door, which literally said MENTAL WARD on it, plus there was a big red lightbulb that popped on when the door buzzed open for access, and a security camera so the guard inside could see you clearly. Once through, you entered a stunted hallway, not unlike the cleansing chambers you sometimes see in movies when the guys in white hazmat suits get sprayed down before going back into society so as not to carry any rogue bacteria that might be clinging to them.

Once you’re in the decontamination chamber, you must sign in with the glass-shielded guard before being escorted through one of two internal doors.

The first door had a green stripe across it and the tightly stenciled words: Green Ward. The words hovered carelessly above a small, likely bullet-proof, window, that revealed only a maddening tease of what lay beyond. This was the door for depressives, the socially anxious, mildly disturbed, paranoid, moderately delusional, fringe psychotic, et cetera, et cetera. This was the path for the soft ones. The passives, you might say. My diagnosis was clinical depression, anxiety and mild schizophrenia. In other words, soft.

The other door went to the Blue Ward. This area housed the folks you see in horror movies. Guys bumping their heads against concrete walls, patients in white gowns shouting curses, dudes in straightjackets… you get it. These were the psychotic and borderline dangerous, the patients who would not only hurt themselves, but potentially others. Not murderers or anything, but the ones who lived nowhere but in their own heads. The ones who could hurt you and not even know they were doing it.

If they steered you toward the Blue Ward, you were nine kinds of fucked, to put it mildly. If they steered you toward the Green Ward, you most likely had bandaged wrists or a sullen disposition, potentially comatose. Maybe you heard a voice or two, but nothing, you know, too crazy.

By the way this isn’t foreshadowing. You’ll never see the Blue Ward. Not in this story. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.

My first night in the Green Ward my roommate was a guy named Milo, a pretty laid-back fella, especially since he was strapped to his bed at his wrists and ankles and force-fed meals. We didn’t talk much.

I remember that first night vividly because Milo woke up screaming. A few nurses came in and gave Milo a needle to shut him up. I was so absorbed by my own depression and altered circumstances I barely registered the experience before falling back into an anxious sleep.

The next morning Milo was gone. I never did get another roommate.

Which brings us to Crystal. The moment you’ve been waiting for, right? Yeah, well, it wasn’t that glamorous, believe me. Don’t bother cueing the slo-mo.

My third morning in the bin I was ditching the group session (again) and sitting in the hallway sort of rocking and moaning (again), my brain anesthetized by hospital-grade tranquilizers and mood suppressants. I was just debating going back to my Milo-less room to groan in private when I heard the already too-familiar buzzing of the entry door.

Then I heard loud, urgent voices. Then screaming.

A nurse ran toward the inner door that stood between the decontamination area and the ward to assist in whatever the hell was going on at the entry.

Let’s take a moment here to note two things for imaginative purposes. First, the nurses. These are not skinny ladies in hip-tight starched white dresses with napkin-fold hats and a bobbed-head of hair full of pins, their tugged follicles stretching the skin so tight as to force a permanently scowled appearance. Don’t picture Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. No, in reality, the nurses are primarily dudes in pale blue scrubs with hairy arms and bored eyes.

The other thing was the ward itself. It wasn’t that bad, honestly. Imagine a cross between a Motel 6 and a community college commissary and you’re close. The floors were carpeted. There was a large recreation room with plush chairs and couches, but no television (not allowed). There was a pool table, but it was missing one of the balls. The red 3 I think. The cue sticks themselves were warped and cracked and no one ever played. It was still sort of comforting to have it nearby, though. Just the idea of being able to play a game of pool made you feel a little bit normal.

The ward had a small tangerine-colored cafeteria where a lot of patients hung out, opting for the sanitary round tables and plastic chairs over the soft pleather furniture of the rec room. And it was more comfortable in there for some reason. Couldn’t tell you why. It’s also where we ate, of course. Personally, I spent most of my time there building puzzles. Building them as fast as I could, all my senses totally focused on putting the pieces in the right places, creating a picture that offered a sense of cohesion. I burned through all the puzzles they had in just a few days, and then they brought in more just for me. Nice, right? I guess it must have been helping. Cathartic, perhaps. Or maybe it just kept me from groaning in the hallways.

There were no computers or cell phones, and the only way to reach the outside world was via this one sort of beat up, solitary payphone. And the only way you could use that is if you asked a visitor to bring you a calling card, or by calling collect. The second day I was there a woman I hadn’t seen before, wearing the standard newcomer uniform of blue gown and bandaged wrists, stood dopily in front of the payphone, staring at it with lost eyes. Without a word between us I took a calling card out of my pocket – one that I had found on Milo’s nightstand after he was taken away – and placed it beneath the phone, just inside the faux wood cabinet that housed it. She looked at me and smiled, then called someone. I wasn’t even sure it would work, I hadn’t had time to try it. She didn’t offer it back and I didn’t ask. I never saw her again after that, which is saying something because there weren’t many of us in the Green Ward. Not as many as you’d think. Twenty tops. The regulars, folks who stayed more than a day or two, counted to no more than eight or nine. In a strange way, they became my friends, despite my not really knowing them at all.

But I digress. Someone was screaming, right?

Okay, so the door banged open and here came two nurses carrying this girl along between them. Peroxide blonde, thin and pliant as a tent pole. She wore a loose V-neck T-shirt that had the word PEACH written across the front in glitter and skin-tight blue leggings. I couldn’t see her face very well, but noticed her mouth was sort of hanging open and her eyes were heavy-lidded. They’d obviously stuck her with something to calm her down, because a thin line of drool leaked from her mouth, strung like a glistening spiderweb from the corner of one dark-red lip down to the hint of a left breast lumping her shirt just above the CH.

I watched sullenly as they walked her past me and then, just as quickly, forgot about her before she’d even turned the corner and disappeared from view. Just another nutjob in a room full of them, I thought. And I was right.

IT WASN’T UNTIL dinner that evening, when we all gathered in the linoleum-floored cafeteria with the steel-countered kitchen and the pale orange walls, that I saw Crystal again. This was only my third night at the ward, but I’d already found a clique of friends who I sat with at meals. Even in the loony bin you form tribal connections. Although, studying each of the faces at my table, I couldn’t tell you what our common denominator might possibly have been.

There was Charlie; a pimply, overweight teenager with long black hair and thick-framed glasses who liked to smile but rarely talked. He wanted to write children’s books, a fact he confided to me one day during breakfast. But Charlie also suffered from seizures and bouts of screaming at voices, so they ended up treating him with electroshock therapy. Yes, they still do that, believe it or not. For twenty-four hours or so after one of those sessions, Charlie’s brain was “reset,” and he’d sort of slump over, expressionless, unable to remember my name much less any of his fanciful story ideas. He still sat with us though. I suppose habits die last.

Then there was Sarah, a housewife with three kids and an investment banker husband. They lived in Bel Air and were disgustingly wealthy. She’d tried to hang herself using a towel hook and the belt of her bathrobe but was discovered unconscious, and very much alive, by her oldest daughter. “Just choked myself out, I guess,” she said one night, unperturbed. That very same night she checked herself into the psych ward. She said she was “taking a break while I figure some things out.” Weren’t we all.

Lastly, there was Stan, who I think of as a close friend even though I never spoke with him once since I left the hospital. Stan was a homeless guy who, before his admission, had been spending nights in a prostitute’s motel room, paying his rent with dope and babysitting her little girl while she, you know, worked. Stan would put the kid in a grocery cart, cover her in a blue tarp and wheel her around Hollywood while he gathered recyclables and did small menial tasks. Or begged. Once he squirreled away enough money, he’d buy a little dope, go back to the hooker’s motel and they’d shoot up.

He had a dog as well, at some point. It was hit by a bus.

Or maybe it was the little girl who was killed by the bus.

Maybe there was no dog.

These things get jumbled up in my head, to be honest.

The other thing about Stan was that he volunteered for an experiment being done at the hospital. It was all very Kubrickian. They’d give him drugs, strap his arms and ankles to a chair and make him watch movies and old news footage, just like in A Clockwork Orange. It’s true! They’d gauge his responses to see how the different drugs (or placebos on some days) affected him. According to Stan, they were paying him for this guinea pig service, and all-in-all he said it wasn’t so bad. I visited his room once and he showed me the chair with the straps, and the television, and talked about how it all worked. It was the only time I ever went into Stan’s room. I never wanted to see that chair again.

But none of these folks are important to this story. Sorry, they’re just more drab window dressing. B-characters whose roles – whose lives as seen through your eyes – ended the second I left the hospital. Like them, we are narrow. Snuff out one perspective, and you likely snuff out the whole lot. We are shadow’s opposites; our stories need the light to survive. I adjust the beam, and you follow.