It's Kind of a Funny Story

nineteen

“Come this way, we’re going to take your vitals,” Smitty says, seating me in the small office. He takes my blood pressure off a rolling cart and my pulse with delicate fingers. He writes down on a sheet in front of him: 120/80.

“One-twenty-over-eighty, that’s dead normal, isn’t it?” I ask.

“Yeah.” Smitty smiles. “But we prefer live normals.” He wraps up the blood pressure gauge. “Stay right here, we’ll send a nurse in to talk to you.”

“A nurse? What are you?”

“I’m one of the daytime directors on the floor.”

“And what is this floor, exactly . . . ?”

“It’s a short-term facility for adult psychiatric.”

“So like, a mental ward?”

“Not a ward, a hospital. Nurse’ll answer any questions.” He steps out of the office, leaving me with a form: name, address, Social Security number. Then—wait—I’ve seen this before! It’s the questions from Dr. Barney’s office:

Feeling that you are unable to cope with daily life. 1) Never, 2) Some days, 3) Nearly every day, 4) All the time.

What the hell, I’m in the hospital; I put 4’s down the line—there are about twenty prompts—except for the lines about self-mutilation, drinking, and drug use (I am not putting anything about pot, that’s just the rule, told to me by Aaron—you don’t ever, ever admit to smoking pot, not to doctors, not to teachers, not to anyone in authority no matter how much you trust them; they can always report you to the FBI Pot-Smoking List). As I’m getting done, a squat black nurse with a kind wide smile and tightly braided hair steps in. She introduces herself with a thick West Indian accent.

“Craig, I am Monica, a nurse on the floor here. I am going to ask you a couple of questions about what you’re feeling and find out how to help you.”

“Yeah, uh . . .” It’s time to state my case. “I came in because I was really freaked out, you know, and I checked in downstairs, but I wasn’t totally sure where I was going, and now that I’m here, I don’t know if I really—”

“Hold on, honey, let me show you something.” Nurse Monica stands over me, although she’s so short that we’re almost the same height, and pulls out a photocopy of the form my mom signed downstairs only an hour before.

“You see that there? That signature says that you have been voluntarily admitted to psychiatric care at Argenon Hospital, yes?”

“Yeah . . .”

“And see? It says that you will be discharged at the discretion of the doctor once he has come up with your discharge plan.”

“I’m not getting out of here until a doctor lets me out?!”

“Now, wait.” She sits. “If you feel that this is not the place for you, after five days you can write a letter—we call it the Five-Day Letter—explaining why you feel that you do not belong here, and we will review that and allow you to leave if you qualify.” She smiles.

“So I’m here for at least five days?”

“Sometimes people are just here for two. Definitely not more than thirty.”

Ho-boy. Well, not much to say about it. That is my mom’s signature. I sit back in my chair. This morning I was a pretty functional teenager. Now I’m a mental patient. But you know, I wasn’t that functional. Is this better? No, this is worse. This is a lot—

“Let’s talk about how you came to be here,” Monica prompts.

I give her the rap.

“When was the last time you were hospitalized?”

“Like, four years ago. I was in a sledding accident.”

“So you’ve never been hospitalized for mental difficulties before.”

“Uh, nope.”

“Good. Now I want you to look at this chart. Do you see here?”

There’s a little scale of 0-10 on a sheet in front of her.

“This is the chart of physical pain. I want you to tell me, right now, from a scale of zero to ten, are you experiencing any physical pain?”

I look closer at the sheet. Below the zero it says no pain and below the ten it says unbearable excruciating pain. I have to bite my tongue.

“Zero,” I manage.

“All right, now, here’s a very important question”—she leans in—“did you actually try to do anything to hurt yourself before you came here?”

I sense that this is an important question. It might be the kind of question that determines whether I get a normal room with a TV or a special room with straps.

“No,” I enunciate.

“You didn’t take anything? You didn’t try for the good sleep?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The good sleep, you know? That’s what they call it. When you take many pills and drink alcohol and . . .”

“Ah, no,” I say.

“Well, that’s good,” she says. “We don’t want to lose you. Think of your talents. Think of all the tools you have. From your hands to your feet.”

I do think about them. I think about my hands signing forms and my feet running, flexing up and down, as I sprint to some class I’m late for. I am good at certain things.

“So right now we are getting ready for lunch,” Monica says. “Are you a Christian?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Are you vegetarian?”

“No.”

“So no specific diet restrictions, good. I need you to read these rules.” She drops four sheets of paper in front of me. “They’re about conduct on the floor.” My eye falls on 6) Patients are expected to remain clean-shaven. Shaving will be supervised by an attendant every day after breakfast.

“I am not sure if you notice, but do you see what that first item is on the list?”

“Uh . . . ‘No cell phones on the floor’?”

“That’s right. Do you have one?”

I feel it in my pocket. I don’t want to lose it. It’s one of the only things that’s making me me right now. Without my cell phone, who will I be? I won’t have any friends because I don’t have their numbers memorized. I’ll barely have a family since I don’t know their cell phone numbers, just their home line. I’ll be like an animal.

“Please give it here,” Monica says. “We will keep it in your locker until your discharge, or you can have visitors take care of it.”

I put it on the table.

“Please turn it off.”

I flip it open—two new voice mails, who are they?—and hold END. Bye-bye, little phone.

“Now, this is very important; do you have anything sharp on your person?”

“My keys?”

“Same as the phone. We keep those.”

I plop them in a heap on the table; Monica sweeps them into a tray like an airport security worker.

“Wonderful—do you have anything else you can think of?”

Monica, I’m down to my wallet and the clothes on my back. I shake my head.

“Great, now hold on.” She gets up. “We’re going to have Bobby give you a tour.” Monica nods at me, keeps my charts, leaves me to review the papers, and goes into the hall. She returns a minute later with a gaunt, hollow man with big circles under his eyes and a nose that looks like it’s been broken in about three places. In contrast to floor policy, scruff lines his chin. He’s older but still has all his hair, a stately gray mop, combed half-heartedly. And he carries himself a little weird, leaning back as if he were on a headrest.

“Jesus, you’re a kid!” he says, curling his mouth. He reaches out a hand for me and his hand comes out sort of sideways, thumb crooked up.

“I’m Bobby,” he says.

His sweatshirt has Marvin the Martian on it and says WORLD DOMINATOR.

“Craig.” I stand up.

He nods, and his Adam’s apple, which has some extra gray whiskers on it, bobs. “You ready for the grand tour?”

twenty

Bobby leads me into the bright hall with his odd gait.

“Everybody’s in the dining room right now.” He gestures as we go down the sideways hall, the one that branches off of the one I entered. I look left—there’s the dining room, painted blue, overlooked by a television, full of circular tables, separated from the hall by that glass with the square wire mesh in it. Inside, the tables have been pushed aside, and a panoply of people sit in a loose circle.

I can’t even process them: they’re the motliest collection of people I’ve ever seen. An old man with a crazy beard (what happened to the shaving?) rocks back and forth; a gigantic black woman rests her chin on a cane; a burned-out-looking guy with long blond hair puts his hand through it; a stocky bald man with slitted eyes scratches his armpit and frowns; an older woman with glasses mimes what appears to be an eagle, talking, before turning and inspecting the back of her chair. The small man I saw in the hall twitches his leg. A girl with a streak of blue in her dark hair slumps over her chair like she’s obviously more messed up than the others; a big girl with a wan frown leans back and twiddles her thumbs; a black kid with wire-rim glasses sits perfectly still, and hey—there’s Jimmy from downstairs. He’s still got his stained shirt on, and he’s looking up at the lights. They must have processed him quick because he’s a return visitor.

You can tell who the meeting leader is: a thin woman with short dark hair. Out of a dozen or so people, she’s the only one in a suit. Some people aren’t even in their clothes, but in dark blue robes, loose and V-necked at the top.

“Hey, man,” Bobby says, pulling me down the hall. “If you’re really interested you can just sit in on the meeting.”

“No, I—”

“I’m doing the tour so I can get out.”

“Heh.”

“Now, smokes are at—wait, you don’t smoke, do you?”

“Uh . . . I smoke some things—”

“Cigarettes, I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Did they ask if you did?”

“No.”

“That’s probably because you’re underage. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Jesus! Okay, well, smokes are after breakfast, after lunch, at three in the afternoon, after dinner, and before lights out. Five times a day.”

“All right.”

“Most people smoke. And if you had told them you smoked, they might have given you cigarettes.”

“Darn.” I chuckle.

“It’s one of the only hospitals left that lets you smoke.” Bobby points behind us. “The smoking lounge is in the other hall.”

We come across a third hall, perpendicular to the one we’re in. I see that Six North is shaped like an H: where you enter is at the bottom of the left leg; the nurses’ office is at the junction of the left leg and the center line; the dining room is at the junction of the center line and the right leg; and the rooms line the left and right legs. We’re passing them now, going toward the top right of the H: they’re simple doors with slots outside filled with slips of paper that say who’s living in them and who their doctor is. The patients are listed by their first names; the doctors by their last. I see Betty/Dr. Mahmoud, Peter/Dr. Mullens, Muqtada/Dr. Mahmoud.

“Where’s my room?”

“They probably don’t have it set up yet; they’ll have it after lunch for sure. Okay, so here’s the shower—” He points to the right, to a door with a pink sliding plastic block on it between the words VACANT and OCCUPIED.

“When you’re inside, you’re supposed to put it to OCCUPIED, but people still don’t pay any attention, and there’s no lock on the door, so I like to keep real close to the door. It’s tough, ‘cause the water doesn’t reach.”

“How do I make it say ‘Occupied’? From inside?”

“No, here.” Bobby slides the block. It covers up VACANT and only OCCUPIED appears.

“That’s pretty cool.” I push it back. It’s a simple system, but I wouldn’t know if Bobby hadn’t showed me.

“Is there a guys’ bathroom and a girls’ bathroom?”

“It’s not a bathroom, it’s a shower. You have your own bathroom in your room. But it’s unisex, yeah. There’s a shower in the other hall too”—we keep walking—“but I wouldn’t use it. It bothers Solomon.”

“Who’s Solomon?”

We come to the end of the hall. The windows have two panes of glass with blinds, somehow, between them. Outside it’s a cloud-spattered May Brooklyn day. Chairs line the dead end. As we approach, a wilted little girl with blond hair and cuts on her face looks up from a pad of something and scurries into a nearby room.

“They show movies here sometimes.” Bobby shrugs. “Sometimes at the other end by the smoking lounge.”

“Uh-huh. Who was that?”

“Noelle. They moved her in from teen.” We turn around. “Medications are given out after breakfast, after lunch, and before bed. We take them over there.” Bobby points to a desk across from the dining room, where Smitty sits, pouring soda. “That’s the nurses’ station; the other place is the nurses’ office. All your lockers and stuff are behind the nurses’ station.”

“They took my cell phone.”

“Yeah, they do that.”

“What about e-mail?”

“What?” We’re back by the dining room. I slow my pace. Inside, the stocky bald man with squinty eyes who was frowning is speaking slowly and plaintively:

“. . . Some people here who treat you like they have no respect for you as a human being, which I take personal offense to, and just because I went to my doctor and told him, ‘I’m not afraid of dying; I’m only afraid of living, and I want to put a bayonet through my stomach,’ that doesn’t mean I’m afraid of any of you.”

“Let’s concentrate on our discussion of things that make us happy, Humble,” says the psychologist.

“And I know about psychologists, when they’re writing down what you’re saying they’re really writing down how much money they’re going to get when they sell their latest yacht, because they’re all yuppies with no respect. . . .”

“C’mon,” Bobby taps me.

“Is his name Humble?”

“Yeah. He’s from Bensonhurst.” Bensonhurst is a particularly retro section of Brooklyn, an Italian and Jewish neighborhood where a girl can walk down the street and have a car full of guys cruise up to her: Hey baby, you wanna ride?

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Sheepshead Bay.” That’s another old-time Brooklyn ‘hood. Russian. All these parts are far out.

“I’m from here,” I say.

“What, this neighborhood? This neighborhood is nice.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Man, I’d give my one remaining ball to live here, I tell you that. I’m trying to get into a home around here, at the Y. Anyway—there’s the phone.” He points to our left. There’s a pay phone with a yellow receiver. “It’s on until ten at night,” he says. “The number to call back is written right on it, and it’s on your sheet too, if you need people to call back. If someone calls for you, don’t worry, someone’ll find you.”

Bobby stops a second.

“That’s it.”

It’s really very simple.

“What do we do in here?” I ask.

“They have activities; a guy comes and plays guitar. Joanie comes in with arts and crafts. Other than that, you know, just take phone calls; try and get out, really.”

“How long do people stay?”

“Kid like you, got money, got a family, you’ll be out in a few days.”

I look at Bobby’s deep-sunk eyes. I get the feeling—I don’t know how I know the rules of mental-ward etiquette; maybe I was born with them; maybe I knew I’d end up here—but I get the feeling that one big no-no in this place is asking people how they got here. It’d be a little like walking up to somebody in prison and going “So? So? What’s up, huh? Didja kill somebody? Didja?”

But I also get the impression that you can volunteer the reasons you got here at any time and no one will judge; no one will think you’re too crazy or not crazy enough, and that’s how you make friends. After all, what else is there to talk about? So I tell Bobby: “I’m here because I suffer from serious depression.”

“Me too.” He nods. “Since I was fifteen.” And his eyes shine with blackness and horror. We shake hands.

“Hey, Craig!” Smitty says from his desk. “We got your room ready; you want to meet your roommate?”

twenty-one

My roommate is Muqtada.

He looks about like what you’d expect for a guy named Muqtada: big; straight gray beard; wide, wrinkled dark face; glasses with white plastic rims. He doesn’t have any clothes, apparently, because he’s in a dark blue robe, which smells intensely of body odor. Not that it’s easy to notice any of this stuff at first, because when I go into the room, he’s burrowed into bed.

Smitty flicks on the light. “Muqtada! It’s almost lunch! Wake up. You have a new roommate!”

“Mm?” He peers out from his sheets. “Who is?”

“I’m Craig,” I say, hands in my pockets.

“Mm. Is very cold here, Craig. You not like it.”

“Muqtada, weren’t the men in here to fix the heat?”

“Yes, they fix yesterday, very cold. Fix today, tonight very cold.”

“It’s spring, buddy; it doesn’t get cold.”

“Mm.”

“Craig, that’s you over there.”

The bed in the far corner is made up for me, if you can call it that. It’s the sparsest bed I’ve ever seen: small and pale yellow with a sheet, a topsheet, and one pillow. No blanket, no stuffed animals, no drawers below, no patterns, no candles, no headboard. This reflects the style of the room, which basically has a window (encased blinds again), a radiator under paneling, two beds, a table between the two beds with two funny-shaped hospital pitchers of water on top, lights, closet, and a bathroom. There aren’t any patterns on the wall; only the ceiling has porous tiles that could be fun to look at. I check the closet. Muqtada has a tired pair of pants on the bottom shelf. The rest of the space is mine. I take off my hoodie and stuff it in there.

“Okay?” Smitty asks. “Lunch in five minutes.” He leaves the door open.

I sit down on my bed.

“Please close door, please,” Muqtada says. I close it, come back. He looks right through me. “Thank you.”

“What do we have for lunch?” I ask.

“Hm.”

I’m not sure how to respond to that. I asked him a what question. “Ah . . . Is the food good?”

“Mm.”

“Ah . . . Where are you from?”

“Egypt,” he says in a clipped voice, and it’s the first word I’ve heard him say that he sounds happy with. “Where are you from? Your family?”

“White. German and Irish and Czech. A little Jewish, we think. But I’m Christian, I guess.”

That reminds me: in this sparse room, is it possible that the Gideons have placed a Bible? They put one in every motel in the world; they should have gotten to this place. I check the drawers, under the pitchers of water: nope. Out of range of the Gideons. This is serious.

“Mm,” Muqtada says. “What you look for? There is nothing.” He keeps staring.

I want to lie down, to get the sleep I couldn’t get last night, but something about the way my roommate is lying there makes me want to leave, to walk around. Maybe it’ll be good to be with someone like him, someone who seems worse off than me. I never really considered it, but there are people worse off than me, right? I mean, there really are people who are homeless and can’t get out of bed and are never going to be able to hold a job and, in Muqtada’s case, have serious problems with temperature, all because their brains are broken. Compared to them I’m . . . well, I’m a spoiled rich kid. Which is another something to feel bad about. So, who’s worse off?

I go out into the hall and almost bash headlong into one of the giant metal racks of trays. The rack gives off heat and smells of fresh cooked salty food and is being wheeled along by an attendant in a skullcap.

“Careful!” he yells at me.

Oh, no. Now I have to eat. This will be the first time that they’ll see how bad things are with me—I couldn’t eat that egg downstairs and can’t eat anything now. What if I get stressed and the man pulls his rope in my stomach and I throw up in the dining room? That’ll be a fine entrance.

“Lunch!” the little man with the almost harelip calls down the hall. He pops out of the dining room, walks down to the far window and back, and knocks on everyone’s door, even if they’re awake and right in his face. “Come on, Candace! Let’s go, Bernie! C’mon, Kate! Time to eat! Come on, Muqtada!”

“That’s Armelio,” a voice says behind me. I turn; it’s Bobby in his Martian sweatshirt. “They call him the President. He runs the whole floor.”

“Hi, who’re ya?” Armelio asks as he passes.

“Craig.” I shake his hand.

“Great to meet you! All right! People! We have a new person here! Excellent, buddy! My new buddy. Tha’s great! Time for lunch! Solomon, come out of your room, don’t give any trouble, come and eat! Everybody’s gotta eat!”

I move into the dining room with Armelio bellowing and cast myself at a seat next to the bald man, Humble, who is still talking about psychologists and yachts.

twenty-two

What are the chances, in picking a meal for me, that Argenon Hospital gets the one thing I can handle right now? Between fish nuggets and veal marsala and a Technicolor quiche and other items of disgust I see handed out on trays to other people (Armelio, the President, hands out all the trays, announcing people’s names as he does so: “Gilner, Gilner, that’s my new friend!”), I get curry-flavored chicken breast: it doesn’t have real liquid curry, just a lovely infusion of yellow spices and a plastic knife and fork to cut it up. It also has broccoli, the vegetable I like best, and herbed carrots on the side. When I open the plastic lid, I grin, because I know something has shifted in my stomach—not the big Shift, but something concrete—and I am going to eat this. Besides the chicken and vegetables, the tray has coffee, hot water, a teabag, milk, sugar, salt, pepper, juice, yogurt, and a cookie. It’s as good-looking a meal as I can remember. I start to slice the chicken.

“Does anyone have extra salt?” Humble, across my table, stretches his neck to the room.

“Here.” I split him off my salt packet. “I would’ve hooked you up.”

“See, you didn’t speak to me,” Humble says, pouring the salt on his chicken, looking at me through eyes surrounded by thin and purple-hued skin, as if he got punched in both a week ago. “So naturally I assumed you were one of those yuppies.”

“I’m not.” I put chicken in my mouth. It tastes good.

“There’s a lot of yuppies in this place, and you have that look about you, you know—the yuppie look of people with money?”

“Yeah.”

“People who don’t care about other people. Unlike me. See, I genuinely care about other people. Does that mean that I sometimes won’t be inclined to beat the hell out of somebody? No, but that’s my environment. I’m like an animal.”

“We’re all like animals,” I say. “Especially now, when we’re all in a room eating. It reminds me of high school.”

“You’re smart, I see that. We’re all animals, high school is animals, but some of us are more animal than others. Like in Animal Farm, which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others? Here in the real world, all equals are created animal, but some are more animal than others. Hold on, let me write that down.” Humble reaches behind him to the one window in the dining room, which has board games stacked up under it. He pulls Scrabble off the top of the stack, fishes out a pen from the box, removes the board, flips it over, and writes on the back of it, which is already covered with scribbling—

“Humble!” Smitty says from the door.

“Hey, hey, okay!” He throws his hands up. “I didn’t do it!”

“How many times do we have to tell you, no writing on the Scrabble board! Do you need pencil and paper?”

“Whatever,” he says. “It’s all in here.” He points to his head, then turns back to me as if absolutely nothing had interrupted our conversation. “Me and you, we might be equals, but I’m more animal.”

“Uh-huh.” I clearly picked the right place to sit.

“I need to be the alpha male in any given situation. That’s why as soon as I noticed you I made a few judgments. I saw that you were very young. Now in the wild, the lion who sees new youngsters from another pride, another breed, he’ll kill and eat those youngsters so he can breed his own offspring. But here”—he gestures around, as if you need to elucidate what “here” is, as if you don’t just take it for granted once you’re inside—“there unfortunately appears to be a distinct lack of women accepting of my breeding potential. So in your youth you are not a threat to me.”

“I see.” Across the room, Jimmy is trying to open his juice with one hand. The other hand stays at his side; I can’t tell if he can’t move it or just doesn’t want to. Smitty comes over and helps him.

“It’ll come to ya!” he says.

“Do you feel that I’m a threat to you?” Humble asks.

“No, you seem like a pretty cool guy.” I munch.

Humble nods. His food, which was sitting on the plate in front of him, very innocent and oblivious, gets destroyed over the next twenty seconds as he eats half of it. I continue my slow and steady pace.

“When I was your age—you’re fifteen, right?”

I nod. “How’d you know?”

“I’m good with ages. When I was fifteen, I had this chick who was twenty-eight. I don’t know why, but she loved me. Now, I was doing a lot of pot back then, my whole life was pot. . .”

It’s weird how your stomach can come back around. As I tune Humble out, I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it’s there. I eat because that’s what people do. And somehow when the food is put in front of you by an institution, when there’s a large gray force behind it and you don’t have to thank anyone for it, you have the animal instinct to make it disappear, before a rival like Humble comes along and snatches it away. I think, I think as I chew, my problem might be too much thinking.

That’s why you need to join the Army, soldier.

I thought I was already in the Army, sir!

You’re in the mental army, Gilner, not the U.S. Army.

So I should join?

I don’t know: can you handle it?

I don’t know.

Well, you seem to know that you like order and dis cipline. That’s what the Army offers young men like you, Gilner, and that’s what you’re getting here.

But I don’t want to be in the Army; I want to be normal.

You’ve got some considerin’ to do, then, soldier, because normal ain’t no job as far as I’m concerned.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Humble asks.

“What?”

“Do you? Somewhere out there. You got a hot little fifteen-year-old?” He points his food-colored fork at me.

“No!” I smile, thinking of Nia.

“They got cute ones, though.” Humble runs his hand through hair that is no longer there. He has hairy dark arms with tattoos of jokers, swords, bulldogs, and pirate ships. “They just keep making the girls cuter and cuter.”

“It’s all the hormones,” I say.

“That’s right. You’re very smart. You got any sugar?”

I hand over a sugar packet. I’ve finished my chicken and I could eat more, frankly, but I don’t know who to ask. Might as well make the tea. I open the teabag, which is labeled “Swee-Touch-Nee,” a brand I have never heard of and am not convinced actually exists, and stain my water with a bunch of deep dips. As I’m finishing up, Smitty approaches with a second tray of food, identical to the first.

“You look like you could handle some seconds,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“Eat up.”

I tackle the second chicken. I am a working machine. Part of me works that didn’t before.

“The girls, they drink all this milk with cow hormones,” I say between bites, “and they develop a lot younger.”

“You’re telling me!” Humble says. “The crazy thing is how the girls in my day were a lot better than my father’s girls. I wonder what the next generation will be like.”

“Sex robots.”

“Heh heh. Where you from?”

“Around here.”

“This neighborhood? Nice. Must’ve been a quick ride. If you came by ambulance. And I’m not assuming and I’m not judging. I’m just being curious.” He eats two gigantic bites of his food, chews and continues, “How did you get here?”

He’s broken the rule of Six North. But maybe it’s not a rule. Or maybe eating with someone breaks it.

“I checked myself in.”

“You did? Why?”

“I was feeling pretty bad; I wanted to kill myself.”

“Buddy, that’s what I told my doctor the other week. I told him, ‘Doc, I’m not afraid of dying; I’m only afraid of living, and I want to put this bayonet through my stomach,’ and then I stopped taking my blood-pressure medication. Because I have high blood pressure on top of everything else, on top of the drugs they have me on here that keep me whacked out of my mind; if I don’t eat lots of salt to regulate my blood pressure I’ll die, so when I told him I wasn’t taking my medication he said ‘What, are you crazy? Are you trying to kill yourself?! And I looked him right in the eyes and said ‘Yes.’ And they carted me off here.”

“Huh.”

“The problem is I’ve been living in my car for the last year. I have nothing; I have the clothes on my back and that’s it. The only thing I have is the car and now the car has been towed and all my stuff is inside. There’s thirty-five hundred dollars’ worth of film equipment in there.”

“Wow.”

“So over the next few days I have to call the police station, the tow yard, get myself into an adult home, and talk to my daughter. She’s about your age. The mother I’m completely over but the daughter I love to death. The mother I’d like to love to death.”

“Heh.”

“Don’t do me any favors; only laugh if it’s funny.”

“It is!”

“Good. Because right now I don’t have you pegged as a yuppie. You’re something else. I’m not sure what you are, but I’m going to find out.”

“Cool.”

“I’m gonna go get my medication so I can sit through this afternoon with my head completely whacked.” Humble slides away; I finish eating the chicken. When it’s done—clean plate—I feel better than I have about anything I’ve done in a long time, maybe a year. This is all I need to do. Keith was hesitant at the Anxiety Management Center, but he was right—all you need is food, water, and shelter. And here I have all three. What next?

I look across the dining room, and three of the younger people—the big girl, the girl with dark hair and blue streak, and the blond girl with cuts—are all sitting together.

“C’mere.” Blue Streak beckons.

twenty-three

It’s been a while since a bunch of girls asked me over to their table. First time, really.

“Me?” I point at myself.

“No, the other new guy,” Blue Streak says.

I’m not sure what to do with my tray. I get up, then turn back, then turn toward the girls, then swivel—

“On the cart,” Blue Streak says. She turns to the big girl. “God, he’s so cute.”

Did she just say that? I put my tray on the cart and sit at the vacant seat with the girls.

“What’s your name?” Blue Streak asks.

“Ah, Craig.”

“So what’s it like to be the hottest guy in here, Craig?”

My body hitches and jerks up as if on a pulley system. She’s got it all wrong—she’s the hot one. It’s tough to tell whether her skin or teeth are the more perfect white. Her eyes are dark and her lips pouty and open; the blue streak accents the contrast of hair and face, and she smiles at me—that’s definitely smiling. I don’t know how I didn’t notice her hotness before, when I looked into the dining room.

“Jennifer,” the big girl says. She leans toward me. “I’m Becca. Don’t take advantage of Jennifer; she’s a sex addict.”

Jennifer smacks her lips: “Shut up!” She turns back. “I’m only here for one more day.” She slithers forward. “You want to spend it with me?”

I think about what Humble would say. He would say Yeah, absolutely, because he’s the alpha male. I try to develop and drop my words, keeping my voice deep and level: “Yeah, absolutely.”

“Good,” she says, and there’s a heat on my knee and a hand moving up my leg. She leans in. “I think you’re really hottt.” The hand encloses my thigh. “I have my own private room because I’m so messed up they won’t let me sleep with anybody else.”

“You have your own private room because you’re a slut!” Becca corrects, and Jennifer kicks her.

“Ow!”

Without warning, the blond girl with the cuts on her face gets up and speed-walks out of the room. I look through the window for her: nothing.

“Forget her,” Jennifer says. “She’s no good for you.” Then, sparking an out-of-body experience that truly makes me question whether I’m dreaming this, or have died and gone to some kind of awesome hell, she flicks her tongue around her lips in a perfect O.

Something flashes out in the hall. The blond girl streaks to the window. I can’t be sure it’s her. I mean, it is a her—it has breasts. And I think I recognize her small body and wife-beater. But I can’t see her face because she presses up a piece of paper against the glass:

The sign slides down as if on an elevator.

“What are you looking at?” Jennifer asks, turning back. I eye her body as she swivels; from the waist up she doesn’t look like she has a penis. I keep my peripheral vision on the hall in case the messenger returns.

“Ha!” Becca is like. “Noelle did it to you again.”

“She what?” Jennifer stands. She has a round and totally female shape. Her legs are encased with jeans that have frills around her butt.

“I can’t believe her . . . hey.” She turns back. “You looking at my pants?”

“Yeah,” I gulp. I’ve lost all alpha maleness. Could I be like a theta male? They have to get lucky sometime. Being on top of the sexual food chain is a lot of pressure.

“I made them myself,” she says. “I’m a fashion designer.”

“Wow, really? That’s like a real job.” My mind spins; it’s somehow fallen off the sex track into grade-school logic. “I thought you were my age; how’d you learn how to design clothes—”

“All right,” Smitty strides in. “Playtime’s over. C’mon, Charles.”

“What the hell!” Jennifer jumps a few inches in the air and stomps her feet. Then, horror of horrors, her voice drops two octaves. “You guys won’t let me have any fun!”

It’s a bad voice, even for a guy, like a frog croaking. Becca laughs and laughs, doubling over on herself, and all I can do is catch my breath and stare goggle-eyed at Jennifer for signs. It can’t be. She’s flat, that’s all. She has big hands; lots of girls have big hands. She doesn’t have an Adam’s apple—oh, wait, she’s wearing a turtleneck.

“C’mon, don’t bother Craig,” Smitty says.

“But he’s so cute!”

“He’s not cute, he’s a hospital patient like you. You’re supposed to get out tomorrow; don’t jeopardize it. Have you taken your medicine yet?”

“Hormone treatments.” Jennifer/Charles winks at me.

“C’mon, enough.”

Becca laughs, sighs. “Oh, she got you good. I’m getting my meds.”

I look down at the table as they leave. I need some meds. I glance up and see patients lined up at the desk next to the phone, the nurses’ station, eagerly passing the time in their own little ways—President Armelio bopping from foot to foot, Jimmy holding the hand that refuses to work—before getting pills in little plastic cups. Jennifer/Charles and Becca eventually appear at the end of the line, chatting and gesticulating, and Jennifer/Charles blows me a kiss. I don’t think I need to be in line behind them right now. Besides, all I take is Zoloft in the morning; if they wanted me on something midday, they would have told me.

When Becca and J/C are gone and I’m still sitting shell-shocked at the table, another sign appears at the window, this one inching up from below as if hoisted by spider threads:

When I go out to find her, she isn’t there. I ask the nurse wrapping up her dispensing duties if I need any meds, and she says I’m not scheduled for any. I ask her if I can have some. She asks what I need them for. I tell her, to deal with this crazy place. She says if they had pills for that, they wouldn’t need places like this in the first place, would they?

twenty-four

“So what’s it like?” Mom asks, holding a tote bag of toiletries, with Dad and Sarah next to her. We’re at the end of the right H leg, me in one chair facing the three of them. Visiting hours are from 12 to 8 on Saturday.

Sarah doesn’t let me answer.

“It’s like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!” she says, excited. She’s dressed up in jeans and a fake suede jacket for Six North. “I mean, all these people look like . . . serious crazies!”

“Shhh,” I tell her. “Jimmy’s right there.” Jimmy is behind her at the window, sitting with his arms crossed as usual, out of his shirt and into a clean navy robe.

“Who’s Jimmy?” Mom asks eagerly.

“The guy I came in with downstairs. I think he’s schizophrenic.”

“Doesn’t that mean he has two personalities?” Sarah asks, turning. “Like, he’s not just Jimmy; he’s also Molly or something.”

“No, you’d be surprised, that’s a different one,” I raise my eyebrows. “Jimmy’s just a little . . . scattered.”

Jimmy sees me looking at him and smiles. “I tell you, you play those numbers, it’ll come to ya!” he chirps.

“I think he’s talking about Lotto numbers,” I explain. “I’ve been trying to figure it out.”

“Oh my gosh.” My sister covers her face.

“No, Sarah, don’t do that, watch,” Mom says. She turns around. “Thank you very much, Jimmy.”

“I tell you: it the truth!”

“I like this place,” Mom turns back. “I think it’s full of good people.”

“I really like it.” Dad leans in. “When can I join?” But when no one laughs, he leans back, clasps his hands, sighs.

“Is that a transvestite?” Sarah asks. J/C is down the hall, like forty feet away, and I don’t know for the life of me how Sarah suspects something out there that I couldn’t see at point-blank range.

“No, now listen—”

“Is it?” Dad squints.

“Guys!”

“Trans-vestite!” Jimmy shrieks. He does it at top range—I haven’t heard him that loud before. The entire hall, which admittedly is just me, my family, J/C, and the older professor-type woman with the glasses, stops and stares.

“I tell you once, it’ll come: it come to ya!”

J/C starts walking toward us. “Are we talking about me?” he asks in his guy voice. He waves at Jimmy. “Hey, Jimmy.” He comes right up between me and my sister. “Craig, your name is, right?”

“Yeah,” I mumble.

“Wow, is this your family?”

“Yeah.” I tip my palm at each of them—it’s at the level of the frills on his pants. “My dad”—he juts his lip out—“my mom”—she nods, all smiles—“and my sister, Sarah”—she reaches out a hand.

“Oh my God, so lovely!” J/C says. “I’m Charles.” He shakes with everyone. “They’re going to take really good care of your son here. He’s a good guy.”

“How about you; what are you in for?” Dad asks. I kick him. Doesn’t he know what not to ask?

“It’s okay, Craig!” J/C touches my shoulder. “My gosh, did you just kick your dad? I never even did that.” He addresses Dad: “I have bipolar, sir, and I had an episode, and they brought me here. I’m going back upstate today. But the doctors are very attentive here, and the turnaround time is great.”

“Wonderful,” Mom says.

“Of course”—J/C gestures to us—“it’s a lot better when you have family support. They want to make sure they discharge you into a safe environment. I don’t have that.” He shakes his head. “Craig, you’re very lucky.”

I look at them: my safe environment. I frankly wouldn’t be surprised to find any of them in Six North.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your afternoon,” J/C says. He walks away slowly.

Jimmy makes an indecipherable high-pitched whining noise.

“That’s applause, isn’t it?” Dad asks, throwing a thumb behind him. “I like that.”

“Those are awesome pants,” Sarah says.

“Okay, so let’s get down to business, Craig,” Mom is like. “What do you need?”

“I need a phone card. I need you guys to take my phone and leave it plugged in so the calls register. I need some clothes, like what you were bringing before, Mom. I don’t need towels; they have those. Magazines would be good. And a pencil and paper, that would rock.”

“Simple enough. What kind of magazines?”

“Science magazines! He loves those,” Dad says.

“He might not be up for science magazines right now,” Mom answers. “Do you want anything lighter?”

“Do you want Star?” Sarah asks.

“Sarah, why would I want Star?”

“Because it’s awesome.” She reaches into her purse—her first one, black, a recent Mom purchase—and unrolls a glossy pink monstrosity, complete with pictures of the most recent spectacular outing of a celebrity breast in public.

I hold it up for Jimmy.

“Mmmmmm-hmmmmmm!” he says. “I tell you! I tell you! It come to ya!”

“That’s very nice,” says the professor woman with bugged-out eyes, who I somehow didn’t realize had migrated right behind me. “Oh, excuse me,” she looks up. “I wasn’t listening to your conversation at all.” She walks to her room.

“Um . . .” Sarah says.

“I’ll take it,” I say. I put it under my seat. “I think the floor will enjoy it.”

“Is it just me, or are you starting to develop a sort of allegiance to the tribe?” Dad asks.

“Shhh.” I smile.

“Craig, the next order of business: have you called Dr. Barney?”

“No.”

“Have you called Dr. Minerva?”

“No.”

“Well, they both need to know where you are, for health insurance reasons and because they’re your doctors and they care about you and this is going to be very important to them.”

“Their numbers are in my phone.”

“Well, let’s call them; we picked up your phone from the front,” Mom reaches into her bag—

“No!” Dad grabs her hands. “Don’t take out the phone!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, honey. Craig’s the one who’s not allowed to have it, not us.”

“Well, uh, I don’t think we want to be getting our son in trouble. This isn’t the kind of place you want to be getting sent to a time-out.”

I look at him. “That’s really not that funny.”

“What? Oh, sorry,” he says.

“No, Dad, seriously. It’s not . . . I mean, this is serious business.”

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood, Craig—”

“Well, that’s what you’re always trying to do. Let’s just, not do it here.”

Dad nods, looks me dead in the eyes; slowly and regretfully, he banishes all the smiling and joking from his face, and for once he’s just my dad, watching his son who has fallen so low. “All right, then.”

We stay quiet.

“Is that the truth, Jimmy?” I ask without looking at him.

“It’s the truth, and it come to ya!”

I smile.

“We’ll handle the phone later,” Dad sums up.

“Next order of business?” Mom asks.

“How long I’m going to be in here, I think.”

“How long do you think?”

“A couple of days. But I haven’t seen the doctor yet. Dr. Mahmoud.”

“Right, how is he? Is he good?”

“I don’t know, Mom. You met him for as long as I did. He makes rounds soon, and I’ll get to talk with him.”

“I think you need to stay here until you’re better, Craig. You don’t want to come out early and have to come back; that’s how you get ‘in the system.’”

“Right. I won’t. I think that’s actually a big part of places like this: they make them so you don’t want to come back.

“How’s the food?” Sarah asks.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” I look at my family. “I’m . . . I know I shouldn’t be proud about this; it’s like really sad that this is my big accomplishment of the day . . . but I ate everything at lunch.”

“You did?” Mom stands up, pulls me up and hugs me.

“Yeah.” I pull away. “It was chicken. I actually ate two helpings of it.”

“Son, that is a big one,” Dad gets up and shakes my hand.

“No, it’s not, it’s really simple, everybody does it, but for me it’s like a stupid triumph—”

“No,” Mom says, looking me in the eyes. “What’s a triumph is that you woke up this morning and decided to live. That’s a triumph. That’s what you did today.”

I nod at her. Like I say, I’m not a crier.

“Yeah, cause if you had died . . .” Sarah is like, “that would have sucked.” She rolls her eyes and hugs my leg.

I sit back down. “Once the food is in front of you it’s just like, eat. I mean, they’re professionals here; they know how to take people and put them in a routine that gives them something to do.”

“That’s right,” Mom says. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I think there are activities—”

“Hey, Craig, is this your family?” President Armelio steps on the scene. His half-harelip and hair shock my sister, but his relentless enthusiasm for just—I don’t know—living—would knock the fear out of anybody. He shakes all the hands and says we’re a beautiful family and I’m a good guy, he can tell.

“Craig’s my buddy! Hey, buddy—you want to play cards?”

President Armelio holds up a deck of playing cards like he just fished it out of the sea.

“Yeah, absolutely!” I say. I stand up. When was the last time I played cards? Before the test, probably—before high school.

“All right!” Armelio says. “My kinda guy! Let’s do it. I’ve been looking and looking: nobody here likes to play cards like I do! What do you want to play? Spades? I’ll crush you, buddy; I’ll crush you.”

I look at my parents. “We’ll call you,” Mom says. “And hey—what about sleeping?”

“I’m wired right now,” I say. “But I’ll crash. I’m starting to get a headache.”

“Headache? Buddy, once I crush you in spades, you’re going to have a lot bigger headache!” Armelio toddles away to the dining room to set up the cards.

“See ya,” Sarah says, hugging me.

“Bye, son.” Dad shakes my hand.

“I love you,” Mom says. “I’ll call you with the doctors’ phone numbers.”

“And bring a phone card.”

“And I’ll bring a phone card. You hang in there, Craig.”

“Yeah, I will.” And as soon as they’re around the bend, I head into the dining room and learn how to play spades for the rest of the afternoon, which Armelio absolutely does crush me in.

twenty-five

I’m afraid of making phone calls. The phone on Six North is a hubbub of activity, with Bobby and the blond burned-out-type, who I learn is named Johnny, fielding calls from, I assume, their respective female counterparts. Bobby starts off his calls happy and says “Baby” a lot, but then he gets angry and slams the phone down saying “bitch”; Smitty tells him not to do that; Bobby walks away leaning back with a particularly potent aura of not caring. Five minutes later, another call comes in for him, and he’s back to “Baby.” He doesn’t ever answer the phone, though; President Armelio has that job. When he answers, he always says “Joe’s Pub,” and then finds whoever the call’s for.

In a rare moment when Johnny and Bobby leave the phone open, I walk up to it with the phone card that Mom brought me twenty minutes after she left with Dad and Sarah. I pick up and hear the dial tone, dial the 800 number for the phone card . . . and then stop. I can’t do it. I just don’t want to deal with it.

People on the outside world don’t know what’s happened to me—I’m in a sort of stasis right now. Things are under control. But the dam will break. Even if I’m here just through Monday, the rumors will start flying, and the homework will pile up.

Where’s Craig?

He’s sick.

He’s not sick, he got alcohol poisoning because he can’t handle real liquor.

I heard he took someone’s pills and freaked out.

I heard he realized he’s gay and he’s coming to grips with it.

I heard his parents are sending him to a different school.

He couldn’t handle it here, anyway. He was always such a loser.

He’s freaking out in front of his computer. He can’t move or anything. He’s catatonic.

He woke up and thinks he’s a horse.

Well, whatever, what’s question three?

There were two messages on my phone when I came in, and now there are probably more, each one necessitating a call back, and the call back possibly necessitating another call back—Tentacles—leading me right back to where I was last night. I can’t go there, so I wait. I can wait five minutes. But then Bobby’s on the line. And then I wait another five minutes. And the messages are piling up. And this isn’t even counting e-mail. What sort of hellish assignments have my teachers e-mailed out?

“Excuse me, are you using the phone?” the giant black woman with the cane asks as I stare at it.

“Yeah, uh.” I pick up the receiver in my hands. “Yes. Yes I am.”

“Okay.” She smiles, rolling her gums, not showing teeth. I start dialing, enter my PIN, enter my own number.

“Please enter your password, then press the pound sign.”

I obey.

“You have—three—new messages.”

One more than before. Not so bad.

“First new message: message marked urgent.”

Uh-oh.

“Hey, Craig, it’s Nia, I just, um . . . we talked and you were sounding really bad. I just wanted to make sure you were doing all right, and since you’re not answering—it’s like two A.M., I mean, why would you be answering?—but I’m kinda worried that maybe you went and did something stupid because of me. Don’t. I mean, it’s sweet, but don’t. Okay, that’s it, I’m with Aaron, he’s being a total dick. Bye.”

“To erase this message—”

I hit 7.

“Next message.”

“Craig, it’s Aaron, call me back son! Let’s chill—”

I hit 7-7.

“Next message.”

“Hello, Mr. Gilner, this is your science teacher, Mr. Reynolds. I got your phone number from the student directory. We really need to talk about the lack of your labs; I’m missing five of them—”

7-7.

“End of messages. “

I put the phone down like it’s a dangerous animal. I pick back up, call home. Can’t stop now.

“Sarah, can you get the phone numbers of Nia and Aaron out of my cell? And look through the recent missed calls for something from Manhattan; I have to call my science teacher.”

“Sure. How are things over there?”

I look to my left. A Hasidic Jewish guy, complete with the white pants, yarmulke, tassels hanging off him, braided hair, and sandals, dashes down the hall toward me. Scraps of red food dot his dark beard, and his eyes are wild and unhinged. He says to me: “I’m Solomon.”

“Um, I’ve heard about you. I’m Craig, but I’m on the phone.” I cup the receiver.

“I would ask you to please keep it down! I’m trying to rest!” He turns and races away, holding his pants.

“Oooh! Solomon introduced himself to you!” hoots the woman with the cane. “That’s big.”

“It’s normal,” I tell my sister.

“Okay, here.” She gives me Nia’s and Aaron’s and the teacher’s numbers; I write them down on a scrap of paper that Smitty has given me. I should’ve known these before. Nia’s looks good written down—wholesome and useful. The science teacher’s looks jagged and hateful. I may not be able to call him until tomorrow.

“Thanks, Sarah—bye.”

I hang up and look toward the lady with the cane.

“Hey, I’m Craig,” I say.

“Ebony.” She nods. We shake hands.

“Ebony, it’s cool if I just make one more call?”

“Of course.”

I dial the 800 number, enter my PIN, dial Nia.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Nia, it’s me.”

“Craig, where are you?”

It’s funny how people ask that as soon as they get you on the phone. I think it’s a byproduct of cell phones: people—girls and moms especially—want to nail you down in physical space. The fact is that you could be anywhere on a cell phone and it shouldn’t be important where you are. But it becomes the first thing people ask.

“I’m at a friend’s house. In Brooklyn.”

I wonder, too, how many lies cell phones have contributed to the world.

“Uh-huh, Craig. I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?” I wipe sweat off my brow. The sweat is starting again. This isn’t good. I was sweating down in the ER, but I wasn’t sweating at lunch.

“You’re not at any friend’s house. You’re probably at some girl’s house.”

I look at Ebony. She smiles and leans forward on her cane. “Yeah, totally.”

“I know you. Last night you had me on the phone; tonight you’re out hooking up with some girl.”

“Sure, Nia—”

“Seriously, how are you? Thanks for calling back. I was worried.”

“I know, I got your message.”

“I don’t want you to freak out over me. I think you just need some time to decompress a little bit, and not think about me, and think about someone else. Because, like, I know we might be good for each other, but I’m with someone else, you know?”

“Right . . . um . . . I wasn’t freaking out about you last night, actually.”

“No?”

“No, I was freaking out about, like, much bigger things. I was having kind of a crisis, and I wanted to reach out to somebody who understood.”

“But you asked me if we would ever have been able to be together.”

“Well, I was trying to clear that up because, y’know . . . I wanted to do something stupid.”

She drops her voice: “Kill yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanted to kill yourself over me?”

“No!” I scowl. “I was just in a really bad place, and you were part of it, obviously, because you’re a part of my life, just like Aaron is a part of it and my family is a part of it, but I thought you could clear something up for me before I. . .”

“Craig, I’m so flattered.”

“No, you have the wrong idea. Don’t be flattered.”

“How could I not be? I never had a boy want to kill himself for me before. It’s like the most romantic thing.”

“Nia, it wasn’t about you.”

“Are you sure?”

I look down, and the answer is right there in my chest and it’s resounding. “Yes. I have bigger problems than you.”

“Ah, okay.”

“And you shouldn’t assume that everything is always about you.”

“Whatever. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Everything’s a lot better now, actually.”

“You’re acting like a total dick. Do you want to come out tonight?”

“I can’t.”

“Did Aaron call you? We’re having a big party at his house.”

“Right. I’m probably not going to be partying for . . . like . . . a while. Like ever, maybe.”

“Is everything okay now?”

“Yeah, I’m just. . . I’m figuring some things out.”

“At your friend’s house.”

“Correct.”

“Are you like in a crack den, or something?”

“No!” I yell, and just then President Armelio walks up to me: “Hey, buddy, you want to play spades? I’ll crush you.”

“Not now, Armelio.”

“Who’s that?” Nia asks.

“Leave him alone, he’s talking with his girlfriend.” Ebony taps Armelio with her cane.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I whisper at her.

“Who’s that?”

“My friend Armelio.”

“No, the girl.”

“My friend Ebony.”

“Where are you, Craig?”

“I gotta go.”

“All right. . .” Nia trails her voice off. “I’m glad you’re doing . . . uh . . . better.”

“I’m doing a lot better,” I say.

She’s done, I think. She’s done, and you’re done with her.

“See ya, Craig.”

I hang up.

“I think that’s over,” I say to myself.

Then I decide to announce it to the hall: “I think that that’s over!” Ebony stomps her cane, and Armelio claps.

Something deep in my guts, below my heart, has made a shift to the left and settled in a more comfortable place. It’s not the Shift, but it’s a shift. I picture Nia with her gorgeous face and little body and black hair and pouty lips and Aaron’s hands all over her but also with her pot smoking and the pimples on her forehead and making fun of people all the time and the way she’s always so proud of how she’s dressed. And I picture her fading.

I play cards with Armelio in the dining room until Bobby pokes his head in:

“Craig? It says on your door Dr. Mahmoud is your doctor? He’s making his rounds.”

twenty-six

“I don’t want to be here,” I tell him at the entrance to my room, where I catch him before he visits Muqtada. “I don’t think it’s the place for me.”

“Of course not.” Dr. Mahmoud nods. He has on the same suit he had on earlier in the day, although that feels like last year. “If you liked it here, that would be a very bad prognosis!”

“Right.” I chuckle. “Well, I mean, everybody’s friendly, but I feel a lot better, and I think I’m ready to go. Maybe Monday? I don’t want to miss school.”

Also, doc, right now the phone messages and e-mails are bunching up and the rumors are flying. I just talked to this girl—and I did okay—but the Tentacles are coiled and the pressure is rising, getting ready to pounce on me when I leave. If I’m in here too long, I’ll have that much more to do when I get out.

“We can’t rush it,” Dr. Mahmoud says. “The important thing is that you get better. If you try to leave too soon—suddenly, everything is better?—we doctors get suspicious.”

“Oh. Well, you don’t want the doctor who can sign you out of the psychiatric hospital getting suspicious.”

“Right. Right now, to me, you look much better, but maybe this is a false recovery—”

“A Fake Shift.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A Fake Shift. That’s what I call it. When you think you’ve beaten it, but you haven’t.”

“Exactly. We don’t want one of those.”

“So I’m going to be here until I have the real Shift?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’m going to be here until I’m cured?”

“Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner.” Dr. Mahmoud leans in. “Life is managed.”

“Okay.”

I’m apparently not as impressed by this as he would like. He arches back: “We don’t keep you here until you are cured of anything; we keep you here until you are stable—we call it ‘establishing the baseline.’”

“Okay, so when will my baseline be established?”

“Five days, probably.”

One, two, three . . . “Thursday? I can’t wait until Thursday, Doctor. I have too much school. That’s four days of school. If I miss four days I will be so behind. Plus, my friends. . .”

“Yes?”

“My friends will know where I am!”

“Aha. Is this a problem?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Because I’m here!” I gesture out at the hall. Solomon shuffles by very quickly in his sandals and tells someone to be quiet, he’s trying to rest.

“Mr. Gilner.” Dr. Mahmoud puts a hand on my shoulder. “You have a chemical imbalance, that is all. If you were a diabetic, would you be ashamed of where you were?”

“No, but—”

“If you had to take insulin and you stopped, and you were taken to the hospital, wouldn’t that make sense?”

“This is different.”

“How?”

I sigh. “I don’t know how much of it is really chemical. Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.”

“Ah. This is why you need to be in here longer, to talk about these things,” Dr. Mahmoud says. “You have a psychologist, correct? Have you called your psychologist?”

Shoot. I knew I was forgetting something.

“You need to call; your psychologist will come here to meet with you. What is her name? Or his?”

“Dr. Minerva.”

“Oh!” Dr. Mahmoud says; his lips curl into a far away smile. “Wonderful. Get Andrea down here.”

“Andrea?” I never knew her first name. She keeps it like a big secret. It’s blanked out on all her degrees. She says it’s part of policy.

He waves his hand. “Make an appointment with her; then we’ll be that much closer to coming up with your treatment plan and getting you out of here as soon as possible. We will try for Thursday.”

“Not before Thursday.”

“No.”

“Thursday,” I mumble to myself, looking across the room at Muqtada’s prone lump.

“Five days, that’s it! Everything will be fine, Mr. Gilner. Your life will wait. You just participate in the group activities and call Dr. Minerva. And when you grow up to be rich and successful, you don’t forget me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Can please you close the door?” Muqtada asks from his bed.

“Mister Muqtada, you are the next: how come you are always sleeping sleeping sleeping?”

Dr. Mahmoud walks past me. I call Mom to report the news, and then I call Dr. Minerva. She says she’s sorry I took this turn for the worse, but it’s always two-steps-forward, one-step-back.

“If this is my one step back,” I tell her, “what am I going to do next: win the lottery and get my own TV show?”

That’d be a good TV show, actually, I think. A guy winning the lottery in the psych hospital.

Dr. Minerva can’t come in tomorrow, because it’s Sunday, but she says she’ll be in on Monday. I’m momentarily surprised by the distinction. In Six North, there probably won’t be much difference.

twenty-seven

“They say there’s gonna be a pizza party tonight,” Humble tells me at dinner. Dinner is chicken tenders with potatoes and salad and a pear. I eat it all. “But they say that every night.”

“What’s a pizza party?”

“We all chip in the money and get pizza from the neighborhood. It’s tough, because no one ever has any cash. It’s like a big deal if we get pepperoni.”

“I have eight dollars.”

“Shhh. Don’t go announcing it!” He stops chewing. “People in here don’t have any money. I don’t have two cents to rub together.”

I nod. “I never heard that one before.”

“No? You like it?”

“Yeah.”

“What about: I don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”

“Nope.”

“What about: I got Jack and shit and Jack left town.”

“Heh. No! Where do you get them all?”

“From the old neighborhood. Gimme a ringy-ding. Catch ya on the flipside. It’s the best way to talk.”

“A ringy-ding, what’s that—a call?”

“Don’t ask yuppie questions.”

Humble scans the room for people to talk about. He enjoys talking about other people—he just enjoys talking, I’ve discovered, but he especially enjoys talking about other people—and when he does so, he puts on a peculiar sort of voice that’s not quite a whisper, but is pitched at such a low monotone that no one notices it. He also seems able to throw it so it feels like he’s speaking into my left ear.

“So I suppose you’ve become familiar with our lovely clientele here on the floor. President Armelio is the president.” He nods over at Armelio, who has finished his food first and is getting up to return the tray. “You see how fast he eats? If you could harness a quarter of his energy, you could power the island of Manhattan. I’m not joking. He should really work in a place with people like us. He has such a good heart and he’s never down.”

“So why is he in here?”

“He’s psychotic, of course. You shoulda seen him when they brought him in. He was screaming his head off about his mom. He’s Greek.”

“Huh.”

“Now there’s Ebony, She of the Ass. That is definitely the biggest ass I’ve ever seen. I’m not even into asses, but if you were—man, you could lose yourself in there. It’s like its own municipality. I think that’s why she needs the cane. She’s also the only woman I’ve ever known who wears velvet pants; I think you have to have a butt like that to wear velvet pants. They only make them in extra extra extra large.”

“I didn’t even notice them.”

“Well, give it a while. After a few days you start to notice people’s clothes, seeing as how they all wear the same stuff every day.”

“Things don’t get dirty?”

“They do laundry on Tuesdays and Fridays. Who gave you your tour when you came in?”

“Bobby.”

“He should’ve told you that.” Humble swivels his head, then turns back. “Now Bobby and Johnny”—they’re at a table together, as they were at lunch—“those two were some of the biggest meth-amphetamine addicts in New York City, period, in the nineties. They were called Fiend One and Fiend Two. The party didn’t really start until they showed up.”

That must’ve been such a feeling, even through all the drugs, I think. To come into a house and have people well up and greet you: “All right, man!” “You’re here!” “What’s up?” That was probably as addictive as the amphetamines. People sort of do that to Aaron.

“What happened to them?” I ask.

“What happens to anybody? They got burned out, lost all their money, ended up here. Got no families, got no women—well, I think Bobby has one.”

“He talks on the phone with her.”

“You can’t tell from that. People pretend to be on the phone all the time. Like her”—he pitches his head at the bug-eyed woman who was standing behind me when I was talking with my family—“The Professor. I’ve caught her on the phone talking to Dr. Dial Tone. She’s a university professor. She ended up here because she thinks someone tried to spray her apartment with insecticide. She has newspaper clippings about it and everything.”

Humble turns: “The black kid with the glasses: he looks pretty normal, but he has it bad. You notice he doesn’t come out of his room a lot. That’s because he’s scared that gravity is going to reverse and he’s going to fall up into the ceiling. When he goes outside, he has to be near trees so, in case the gravity stops, he’ll have something to hold on to. I think he’s about seventeen. Have you talked to him?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t really talk. I don’t know how much they can do for him.”

The guy looks up at the ceiling fan above the dining room, shudders, and forks food into his mouth.

“Then there’s Jimmy. Jimmy’s been here a lot. I’ve been here twenty-four days, and I’ve seen him come and go twice. You seem to like him.”

“We came in together.”

“He’s a cool guy. And he has good teeth.”

“Yeah, I noticed that.”

“Pearly whites. Not a lot of people in here have that. I myself wonder what happened to Ebony’s teeth.”

“What’s wrong with them?” I turn.

“Don’t look. She has none, you didn’t notice? She’s on a liquid diet. Just gums. I wonder if she sold ‘em, tooth by tooth. . . .”

I bite my tongue. I can’t help it. I shouldn’t be laughing at any of these people, and neither should Humble, but maybe it’s okay, somewhere, somehow, because we’re enjoying life? I’m not sure. Jimmy, two tables away, notices my stifled laughter, smiles at me, and laughs himself.

“I toldja: it come to ya!”

“There we go. What is going on in his mind?” Humble asks.

I can’t help it. It’s too much. I crack up. Juice and chicken tender bits spray my plate.

“Oh, I got you now,” Humble continues. “And here comes the guest of honor: Solomon.”

The Hasidic Jewish guy comes in holding up his pants. He still has food in his beard. He grabs his tray and opens a microwaved packet of spaghetti and starts shoveling it into his mouth, making slurping, gulping groans.

“This guy eats once a day but it’s like his last day on earth,” Humble says. “I think he’s the most far gone of everybody. He’s got like a direct audience with God.”

Solomon looks up, twists his head from side to side, and resumes eating.

Humble drops to a true whisper. “He did a few hundred tabs of acid and blew his pupils out. His eyeballs are permanently dilated.”

“No way.”

“Absolutely. It’s a certain cult of the Hasidics: the Jewish Acid-Heads. There’s like a part of their holy writings that tells them it’s the way to talk to God. But he took it too far.”

Solomon gets up, leaves his tray disgustedly at the table, and moves out of the room with alarming speed.

“He’s like the Mole Man, back to his hole,” Humble says. “The real Mole People are the anorexics; you don’t even see them.”

“How many people are in here?” I ask.

“They say twenty-five,” Humble says. “But that’s not counting the stowaways.”

I look around. Charles/Jennifer isn’t in the room.

“Did the, uh, you know, Charles? Did he leave?”

“Yeah, the tranny’s gone. Left this afternoon. Tranny hit on you?”

“Yeah.”

“Smitty lets him do that. Gets a kick out of it.”

“I can’t believe he’s just gone. They don’t, like, throw a party for you when you leave?”

“No way. People here don’t want to get out. Getting out means going back to the streets or to jail or to try and fish their things out of an impounded car, like me. Your kind of situation, with the parents and a house: that’s rare. And also, with so many people coming and going, we’d be nuts to try and have a party every time. We’d end up like Fiend One and Fiend Two.”

My tray is a mess from the food spraying out. “You crack me up, Humble,” I tell him.

“I know. I’m a great time for everybody. Too bad I’m in here instead of onstage getting paid for it.”

“Why don’t you try going onstage?”

“I’m old.”

“I have to get some napkins.” I rise and go out to Smitty, who hands me a stack. I return, wipe off my tray, and start in on the pear.

“You have a secret admirer,” Humble says. “I should’ve guessed. I know how you operate.”

“What?”

“She was just here. Look at your chair.”

I get up and check it. There’s a piece of paper lying there, face down. I flip it around, and it says HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A GOOD TIME. VISITING HOURS ARE TOMORROW FROM 7:00-7:05 P.M. I DON’T SMOKE.

“See? Your little girl with the cut-up face just left it.” Humble gets up. “I had a feeling. Now you’re starting to look like a rival male. I might have to keep my eye on you.”

He deposits his tray and gets in line for his meds. I fold the paper up and put it in the pocket where my phone used to be.

twenty-eight

“Craig! Hey buddy! Phone!”

I’m sitting with Humble outside the smoking lounge for the 10 P.M. cigarette break, thinking about where I was at the last 10 P.M.: just getting into Mom’s bed. Humble doesn’t smoke, says it’s disgusting, but everyone else in here does, practically, including the black guy who’s afraid of gravity; and the big girl, Becca, both of whom I thought were underage. Armelio, Ebony, Bobby, Johnny, Jimmy . . . no matter how nuts they all seem, they have no problem migrating to the upper left of the H and sitting down on the couches quietly to wait for their particular brand of cigarettes, which I learn the hospital does not, in fact, provide for them—they come in with the packs themselves and the nurses keep them in a special tray. Once they pull a cigarette out of their respective packs, they walk single file through a red door, passing Nurse Monica, whose job is to light everybody up. When the door closes, the smell drifts out from under it and you hear talking—everybody talking all at once, as if they saved their words for a time when there was smoke to send them through.

“How’re you doing for your first day, Craig?” Nurse Monica asked me five minutes ago, as she closed the door. “You don’t smoke, I see.”

“No.”

“That’s good. Terrible habit. And it happens so much to people your age.”

“A lot of my friends smoke. I just, you know . . . never liked it.”

“I see you are adjusting quite well to the floor.”

“Yeah.”

“Good, good, that is so important. Tomorrow we’re going to talk more about your adjustment and your situation and how you’re feeling.”

“Okay.”

“You gotta watch out for this one,” Humble said. “He’s crafty.”

“Oh yeah?” Monica asked.

I was looking for the blond girl, Noelle—I had to remember to meet her—but she wasn’t around. Neither was Solomon. Next to Humble was the woman he identified as the Professor, watching us with her bugged-out eyes. Unprompted, Humble started talking with me and Monica about this old girlfriend of his, who had, in his words, “pig-tail nipples, like curly fries, I kid you not.” Monica laughed and laughed. The Professor said Humble was disgusting. Monica said it was okay to laugh once in a while, and did she have a story to share?

“Yeah, we all know you had some indiscretions in your youth, Professor,” Humble prodded.

The Professor got a dreamy look in her eyes. I almost thought she was going to have a seizure. And she said, in a light little voice, with a nasal twinge: “I had a lot of guys, but I only had one man.”

I was wondering where I’d heard that before, when Armelio interrupted.

“C’mon buddy! Phone is for you!”

“Right.” I get up.

“You’re lucky, buddy. It’s after ten. They usually shut the phone off at ten.”

Shut the phone off. I picture a big lever in my mind, a man heaving it down.

“What happens if someone calls and the phone’s off?”

“It just rings and rings,” Humble yells out, “and people know they’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I walk down the hall. The pay-phone receiver is hanging and swaying. I pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Hey, is this the loony bin?” It’s Aaron. It’s Aaron, high.

“How’d you get this number?” I ask. The man with the beard, who I saw rocking in the dining room when I first came in, is pacing the central hall, staring at me.

“My girl gave it to me, what do you think? What’s it like in there, dude?” Aaron asks.

“How do you know where I am?”

“I looked it up, man! You think I’m an idiot? I go to the same school as you! I did a reverse number search and found exactly where you are: Argenon Hospital, Adult Psychiatric! Dude, how’d you get in adult? Do they serve beer up there?”

“Aaron, c’mon.”

“I’m serious. How about girls? Are there any hot girls around—ow!”

I hear laughing in the background, above rap. “Gimme the phone!” Ronny’s high-pitched bleat comes through the line. “Lemme talk!”

Ronny comes into focus: “Dude, can you get me any Vicodin?”

Howls. Howls of laughter. And in the background, Nia protesting: “Guys, don’t bother him.”

“Gimme—Craig, no, seriously.” Aaron is back on. “I’m really sorry dude. I . . . just, how are you, man?”

“I’m . . . okay.” I’m starting to sweat.

“What happened?”

“I didn’t have a good night, and I checked myself into the hospital.”

“What’s that mean, ‘didn’t have a good night’?”

The man in my stomach is back, tugging at me. I want to vomit through the phone.

“I’m depressed, okay, Aaron?”

“Yeah, I know, about what?”

“No, man, I’m depressed in general. I have like, clinical depression.”

“No way! You’re like the happiest guy I know!”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s a joke, Craig. You’re like the craziest person I know. Remember on the bridge? But, you know, the problem is you don’t chill enough. Like even when you’re here, you’re always worried about school or something; you never just kick back and let things slide, you know what I mean? We’re having a party tonight—where are you gonna be?”

“Aaron, who’s in the room?”

“Nia, Ronny, Scruggs, uh . . . my friend Delilah.” I don’t even know Delilah.

“So all these people know where I am now.”

“Dude, we think it’s awesome where you are! We want to visit!”

“I can’t believe you.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Don’t be a girl. You know if I was in the mental ward, you’d call me up and rag on me a little. It’s because we’re friends, man!”

“It’s not a mental ward.”

“What?”

“It’s a psychiatric hospital. It’s for short-stay patients. A mental ward is longer.”

“Well, clearly you’ve been there long enough to be an expert. How long are you staying?”

“Until I have a baseline established.”

“What does that mean? Wait, I still don’t get it: what was wrong with you in the first place?”

“I told you, I’m depressed. I take pills for it like your girlfriend.”

“Like my girlfriend?”

“Craig, shut up!” Nia yells in the background.

“My girlfriend doesn’t take any pills,” Aaron says.

Ronny yells, “The only thing she takes is—” The rest is cut off by laughter and I hear him getting hit with something.

“Maybe you should talk to her a little more and figure out what she’s actually like,” I say. “You might learn something.”

“You’re telling me how to treat Nia now?” Aaron asks. I hear him lick his lips. “What, like I don’t know what this is really about?”

“What, Aaron. What is it really about?”

“You want my girl, dude. You’ve wanted her for like two years. You’re mad that you didn’t get her, and now you’ve decided to turn being mad into being depressed, and now you’re off somewhere, probably getting turned into somebody’s bitch, trying to play the pity card to get her to end up with you . . . And I call you as a friend to try and lighten your mood and you hit me with all of this crap? Who do you think you are?”

“Yo, Aaron.”

“What.”

I’m going to do a trick Ronny showed me. He used to do it a long time ago, and I think Aaron’s forgotten it.

“Yo.”

“What?”

“Yo.”

“What?!”

“Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo—”

I pause. Hold it, hold it. . .

“Fuck you.”

And I slam the phone down.

It hits my finger and I go howling into my room, next to Muqtada.

“What happened?” he asks.

“I don’t have any friends,” I say, jumping and holding my finger.

“This is tough thing to learn.”

I look out the window, through the blinds, into the night. Now I’m really screwed. I run my finger under cold water in our bathroom. I didn’t think I could get more screwed than last night, but here I am. I’m in a hospital. I’ve sunk to the lowest place I can be. I’m in a place where I’m not allowed to shave by myself—even if I needed to shave biologically—because they’re worried that I’ll use the razors on myself. And everyone knows. I’m in a place where people have no teeth and eat liquid food. And everyone knows. I’m in a place where the guy I eat with lives in his car. And everyone knows.

I can’t function here anymore. I mean in life: I can’t function in this life. I’m no better off than when I was in bed last night, with one difference: when I was in my own bed—or my mom’s—I could do something about it; now that I’m here I can’t do anything. I can’t ride my bike to the Brooklyn Bridge; I can’t take a whole bunch of pills and go for the good sleep; the only thing I can do is crush my head in the toilet seat, and I still don’t even know if that would work. They take away your options and all you can do is live, and it’s just like Humble said: I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of living. I was afraid before, but I’m afraid even more now that I’m a public joke. The teachers are going to hear from the students. They’ll think I’m trying to make an excuse for bad work.

I get in bed and put the single topsheet over me. “This sucks.”

“You are depressed?” Muqtada says.

“Yeah.”

“I, too, suffer from depression.”

I feel the Cycling starting again—I’m going to get out of here at some point and have to go back into my real life. This place isn’t real. This is a facsimile of life, for broken people. I can handle the facsimile, but I can’t handle the real thing. I’m going to have to go back to Executive Pre-Professional and deal with teachers and Aaron and Nia because what the hell else do I know? I staked everything on that stupid test. What else am I good at?

Nothing. I’m good at nothing.

I get up and go to the nurses’ station.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

“You’re not able to sleep?” The nurse is a white-haired little old lady with glasses.

“No, I know I’m not going to be able to sleep,” I respond. “I’m taking preemptive action.”

“We have a sedative, called Atavan. It’s injectable. It’ll relax you and make you sleep.”

“Let’s do it,” I say, and with Smitty’s supervision, over by the phones, I sit down and have a small needle attached to what looks like a butterfly clip stuck in my arm. I stare forward as something yellow is pumped into me and then I stumble off into my room—stumble because I can feel it hitting me even as I get up from the chair. It’s some kind of powerful muscle relaxant, and loving hands pull me down as I crash into bed past Muqtada, but the last thought I have before I go to sleep is:

Great, soldier, now you’re depressed and in the hospital and a drug addict. And everyone knows.