The Two Kinds of Decay

Kimiko

I awoke on my first Sunday on the psych ward to find a roommate. She was Japanese and she didn’t speak. In one hand she held a slip of paper with some sentences printed on it in pencil. One of them, I read later, was I understand I need to talk for discharge but I don’t like to talk when I have pain in my heart. She held up the paper while she sat in a chair, folded almost in half.

Her face and neck were blue.

What I mean is that she had come in during the night and found the whiteboard and the sweet-smelling blue marker we used to write down each other’s phone messages, if anyone called, and if we could remember what to write, and if we remembered it’s a good thing to be seen doing if we wanted outdoor privileges.

Kimiko found the marker and — I was not there, I am only filling in the narrative based on the part I could see — her desolation was so total that the only relief she saw was to scrub her face out with the blue marker. Her whole neck and most of her face: small blue vertical scrub marks.

The doctor was explaining that she had to wash it before she’d be allowed to participate in Group. I wondered what this doctor understood and hoped it was something, because I am not a doctor and I understood Kimiko needed to have a blue face.

Also she would not put on any clothes. The doctor seemed not to understand a person can be too sad to wear clothes. I asked the doctor to go away.

Kimiko wasn’t allowed food unless she left our room, so she sat in the corner of the dayroom all day, naked and wrapped in a sheet, her blue face visible under her white hood.

My parents visited. That Sunday was the day of an important football game, and my father sat in the dayroom with the other mental patients and watched it. While he was there Ed the psychotic came out of his room in hospital pajamas and asked Betty, a near-catatonic depressive, what she was going to be for Halloween, since it was only a week away. Ed said, I’m going as a mental patient. He’d been on electroconvulsive therapy and Haldol since 1976.

On Monday Kimiko had ECT and on Tuesday declared she felt better. Her husband was a scientist in the States on a fellowship. I got her to teach me how to say I am not insane in Japanese: wa-ta-shi-wa ku-ru-tte i-nai.