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.
Besides, this story is about Crystal, right? Okay, so let’s cut to the part where she entered the cafeteria that evening for dinner, just a few hours after she’d been dragged into Green Ward, screaming and drugged and drooling. She entered the room and it seemed that everyone looked up at her, like she was the guest of honor, or a celebrity. She, in turn, smiled at us. A big, silly smile that radiated… not warmth, but a sort of manic glee. You couldn’t help but smile back, despite whatever psychological impairment you were fighting off at the time. She came straight to my group’s table and sat down, folded her hands in front of her and looked at each of us in turn.
Her hands, I noticed, were bone-white. Her fingers narrow and twiggy. Her exposed wrists and forearms were… rubbery. Freckled. Sickly. She was still wearing the PEACH shirt, and I could see the gray patch above the CH where the drool had stained an amoeba-shaped spot. She sat ramrod straight and her moderate but pointed breasts were pushed out against the tight white fabric. You could tell she was used to thrusting them forward like that, as if she were bellied up to a bar and trying to get the attention of a busy bartender, or a nearby male patron in the hopes of a being offered a free cocktail. My study of her continued to the neck, a goosey stem that was slim and deathly-white as her forearms. Her flesh was… not wrinkled, but sallow. Dry. Like an old person. Or a corpse.
But it was her face that really threw me off.
She’d obviously had some time to apply whatever makeup she’d carried in with her, because her lips were thick and deep-red, her cheeks blushed with some rosy powder, her eyes darkened, her lashes long and stringy as black weeds, her eyebrows drawn-on and arched like highway tunnels. Her hair, that peroxide blonde I mentioned, was dry as a stretched tumbleweed. Frazzled. Also, when you studied the way her face was all… inter-connected, I guess, you could tell she’d had plastic surgery. Lots of it. Her nose was pinched and looked disproportionately small between her cheek bones. Her lips were too full. Her forehead and temples were so tight it reminded me of the woman from the movie Brazil, creating an almost dystopian sense of beauty that was hard to look at for more than a few moments before it became unsettling, like a bout of vertigo.
But it was her eyes – her wide, large, deep brown eyes – that stayed with you, that erased the strangeness of the rest of her. That took you in and held you. They were beautiful and, if we’re being honest, completely mad.
She introduced herself to the group but she and I both knew she was really introducing herself to me, and I, in turn, to her. She was vivacious, energized and hyperactive. I assumed she was bipolar because you can assume things like that when you meet a person in a mental hospital. She was loud and brash and had a wonderfully unhinged laugh that made us the envy of the cafeteria, more than one patient sulking in their suicidal tendencies and wondering how it would feel to experience joy. To laugh, if even for a moment.
Crystal spent a total of three days in the Green Ward, and she and I spent a significant chunk of that time together. At first we’d chat idly over meals, then face each other, cross-legged on the floor, in the rec room. By her second day our shoulders were mashed together on the couch, staring at a black wall where a television would normally sit, making up movies in our heads we couldn’t watch, whispering about our respective suicide attempts and how much we hated the world.
On the day she left she wrote her cell phone number on my hand in red Sharpie, and I promised to call her once released.
And I did.
Dumb, right?
2
WHEN YOU’RE LONELY and socially inept, you don’t choose your friends, you simply glide through life and keep your exterior sticky, hope to hell someone grabs onto you and holds on long enough to eventually discover the real you, the buried you that isn’t so bad, or scary, or insane. Folks like me daydream about this. That someday, just maybe, somebody might really care about you. And wouldn’t that be something?
So while you’re shaking your head and thinking what a terrible idea it was for me to befriend Crystal, my ward-mate, my equal in sickness, my friend in mental disorder, realize that loneliness breeds desperation. Even the deranged need contact with another human or else the illness stays internalized; the delirious voices, the wicked thoughts, the confusion of self, the self-flagellation. It eats you alive.
When I first called her she literally squealed with excitement, which to a guy like me is the most powerful elixir in the world – to know that someone out there is actually excited to hear from you. It’s like no other feeling in the world. The anxiety is blown apart, the social awkwardness releases like a snake uncoiling in your chest and slips away, biding its return. You feel welcomed. Wanted. Maybe not loved… but liked. God damn, it’s beautiful.
We got together that very night and literally did the one thing we were both legally mandated not to do within sixty days of our release from the hospital.
We went out drinking.
