The Lives of Others
I’m sitting in a bland room with no frames or lamps. Just two beds and a window. He leaned over from his bed and said “They won’t let me out of here.”
I don’t say anything, but from the look on the face in front of me, I don’t doubt what he is saying.
“If I do something that gets the cops here, I’m sure they won’t have a choice.” Then he smiles, and it’s not friendly. “My name is M, what’s yours?”
Panic. That’s what I wanted to say, my name is panic. I made a mistake the previous night, but my faults shouldn’t lead to homicide. To the left of me, almost-dried spackle covers a hole where a fist once was, not mine, a previous occupant. No lights but the full moon, casting two long shadows across a now-silent room, and I’m no longer thinking that I’m the most dangerous person to myself.
The next morning.
“Spell world backwards.”
“I’m going to say three phrases: ‘beach ball’, ‘frog’, and ‘rubber duck’.”
“What year is it?”
“Who’s the President?”
I know I’m being evaluated and I choose my answers carefully. I’m thinking about what they are looking for. I can spell backwards, I know the year, the President. She asks about any compulsive behaviors and I hold back my habit of calculating if the messaging on billboards are divisable by 3, my compulsion with counting letters in sentences as I speak them.
“None that I can think of”, I say, and a millisecond later think to myself “19″.
“What were the 3 phrases I said?”
I repeat the 3 phrases and she proceeds with more questions.
“What do cars and planes have in common?”
Cars and planes can both kill you in an instant, but I go with “my preferred methods of transportation”. She tilts her head to the side and let’s out a “hmm, nice.”
“What do pens and pencils have in common?” Pens and pencils can both puncture, but I go with “items used to transcribe”. And right then I feel like I blew it, because I tried a bit too hard. But I get a nod and another “good”, and she is genuinely intrigued by my thought process and I figure I’m halfway home. I’m transferred almost immediately away from the loons with ill-intent smiles and habitual pacing to the normal people with needle tracks and mangled livers.
Now I’m with the Vietnam vet whose wife just died, the high school jock who’s a cutter, the couple whose love revolves around heroine. The girl sees my IV bruises and shows me her tracks, up and down both arms, tiny holes that trace the path of underlying veins. And she’s 23. And the trazedone is keeping her down, holding her down, and the layers and layers of clothes and blankets are futile. She cries in group because it’s HEROINE, and not something like depression.
Her first question to me, “So why are you here? Do you have problems, or are you just sad?” I look at her, and her face, innocent and unmoving, without a single wrinkle. I look straight into her eyes and without the slightest hint of self pity, but with more than a trace of shame, I say “I guess I’m just sad.”
T from the desert, who took 50 Ibuprofens, with the 6 month old and 5 yr old, and the visiting boyfriend who seems a tad too happy. We play Scrabble and I avoid words that are symbols of this place we are in. I want to play “loneliness” off her “line”, but I choose “linen” instead and use “soil” on my next turn. She keeps setting me up for Triple Words, and I evade them.
I win 260 to 259 and I realize the game is over and there is nothing more to do. We look at the board, at each other, and smile as if to say “that’s it”. For thirty minutes, in our matching royal blue uniforms, there was a purpose, and our minds were disconnected from our individual realities. We put the letters away, push back from the table, and search for the next distraction; the scale, the blood pressure machine, the falling snow outside, the MP3 players with Norah Jones, the magazines, the phones (but who to call?), the rows of movies that have no business in a place like this like “Dead Poets Society, “Girl, Interrupted”, and “The Natural”. A couple adolescent “I’m inadequate” flicks and one about attempted murder, about dark secrets held back from the past that corrode people’s insides. And despite what Redford did in the movie, in the book he strikes out. I’m amazed they don’t have “The Virgin Suicides”.
D starts crying because he can’t make the depressed nurse smile. He spent the previous week completing a corporate merger worth millions, but after a 48 hour alcohol binge he is a soiled mess and all he wants from the nurse is a smile, and can’t get it. And his world is crumbling. He clings to his AA book like it’s his oxygen. We try to comfort him, all the while avoiding saying anything about the nurse and his irrelevance.
We sing Happy Birthday to M, his Mother is there. After we sing, there is an uncomfortable silence and M says “it’s not my birthday”. It’s actually his Mother’s. She brought her own cake for her own birthday to celebrate with him.
She reaches for his hand, fights the lump in her throat, and through her own inner turmoil, manages to choke out, “It’s ok, his is tomorrow.” Nobody knows what to say. I don’t eat my cake. We were set on celebrating something, anything, and we screwed it up. I can’t remember the last time I saw my own Mother. I was told it was the previous morning, but I wasn’t myself, I wasn’t aware. But she was there I’m told, holding my hand.
One of the nurses is talking about her ex-husband “I love him” she says, and she is trembling. We try to get her attention because it’s lunch time, and only she can unlock the doors, but she is obviously overwhelmed and finally has the attention she’s been looking for so we all sit and wait, because we know in a few days we won’t be too different from the people that are allowed to have laces in their shoes. We don’t distract her because a few of us know everyone is just one small misstep from being where we are.
More evaluations, more calculated answers, and then I’m outside, and suddenly I realize I haven’t outsmarted anyone. Being outside isn’t so great. I’m back in the world of questions about phone bills, blood tests, and home equity loans. I’m listening to what is around me, but I’m wondering if G has enough blankets. I’m wondering if A abandoned her child again for more black tar in tiny balloons. I’m wondering if F is still wishing he was with his dead wife. Will the fullback slash open his stomach? And what about me? I’m trying to think of a logical explanation for someone like me, who did what I did, to possess what I possess, to be back on an airplane headed to San Francisco for the kind of week that I will be having. Time moves at a different pace for everyone, and mine is a pace that isn’t waiting for me to be ready for it.
