The Romance of Madness
She is in the handicapped stall in the beige women’s restroom in her nondescript corporate office. She is wiping her ass. She wipes because she is unclean.
Her first wipes bring up only, perhaps, a faint impression of brown on the toilet paper, but now it comes up white. Clean. She is persistent, though. She wipes. She wipes and she wipes and she wipes. She wipes because she is unclean. Steadily, the pain grows, but still the paper comes up white. She has taken to bringing her own paper, to ward off suspicion. She wipes and she wipes and she wipes. Finally it comes: crimson blood. Small spots at first, but she is diligent, and in time the paper is soaking. She grimaces in satisfaction. There is a shade of red that lives only on otherwise spotless toilet paper. She wipes and she wipes until the blood is running steadily from her anus into the toilet bowl. She pauses for a moment and collects herself. She buys several new pairs of panties every week.
In the bad old days, she would have brought other things into the bathroom with her. Astringent chemicals that burned her asshole and cheeks, a plastic scouring pad, steel wool. She ripped her tenderest flesh apart. She had been, eventually, forced to see a doctor. He told her - she was threatening the structural integrity of her rectum. She was risking horrible infection. She would certainly need surgery if she continued; she could plausibly die. He admonished her that few places in the human body were more susceptible to killer bacteria. He wrote her a referral for a psychiatrist, who she never visited, but the incident had sparked a remission all the same. Someone else had seen her, had seen what she was doing to herself, and seeing someone else see her forced her to see herself too. So she had thrown the rubbing alcohol and steel wool away, and after that every time she went to the bathroom was a battle of wills, and for a while, she won. Now, it seemed, remission was over.
She hears someone else come into the stall. She curls herself into a ball on top of the toilet. Blood still drips into the bowl. She knows that the pain now is only the beginning, that later in the day she will double over in agony from the slow steady work she had done busily chipping away at her delicate tissues. If her coworkers ask, she will say she has menstrual cramps. But she knows they will not ask. The trouble is her boss, who has begun asking about her frequent trips to the bathroom, why they last so long, and whether anything is wrong. He has also started mentioning her performance review.
She had told the doctor that the first wounds to her anus had been the result of child sexual abuse. She had said it to save face, to have an excuse for the extent of the damage. Who would do such a thing to themselves? What she can not remember now is whether it was true. She knows she was raped as a girl. She just isn’t sure if that was when the pain really started, if that was the first time she had been made to bleed, if that was why she wiped now.
The other person is still in the bathroom, but she can wait no longer. She wipes again, digging in this time, and gasps. The toilet paper is soaked with blood. She wipes. She wipes again. She wipes because she is unclean.
The 1 train is making its lazy way uptown. He is rocking in the corner, rocking with the rhythms of the subway. No one stands too close to him; shit cakes his leg beneath his ratty sweatpants and his musty old jacket reeks. He has had nowhere to sleep for days, let alone shower, and no money with which to buy new clothes. The shelters are filled with wires. The clothing stores are filled with wires. New York is filled with wires. He is riding the subway to escape the wires - not all of them, of course, even the subway has wires, wires that lead to big old mainframe computers like the kind he remembers seeing in an old catalog some 40 years ago. The wires lead to the mainframes and perhaps into his brain. But here on the tracks the wire infrastructure is less elaborate, and they will catch fewer of his thoughts. He may have a moment to catch his breath.
Some stranger had pressed a pita into his hand in the financial district. His belly is full. He does not beg. He does not talk to the other passengers. He mutters. He mutters about the dog with wires in its mouth that he saw yesterday, or perhaps weeks ago. He mutters about the Knights Templar. He mutters about city hall, about the transit police. He mutters about the wires, the wires, the wires. He mutters about the CIA and he mutters about MKULTRA. But mostly he mutters about the Jews.
“Kike wires,” he says. Someone gets on the train and moves to sit near him, catches sight of him fully, and hustles to the other end of the train. “Kike wires.”
He has a library card, the gift of a particularly ambitious social worker, and when the wires hum less loudly he goes to the library and he reads the stories. He does not really understand what Facebook is and does not have an email address. He has never heard of 4Chan. He finds the sites, the ones with shitty old web design, endlessly spinning gifs, the ones that tell him about the Freemasons, about the moon landing, about chemtrails, and about the Jews. He does not care about Donald Trump, but he has heard of Q. He knows Q will come and remove the wires. He know Q is planning a flood, and the flood will come and wipe away the wires and clean the bugs from out of his teeth, the ones that access GPS and broadcast his thoughts to the Jews. He knows Q’s flood will sweep out President Bush and the Republicans and the Jews that started the Iraq war. The train shakes and he winces; several teeth rot in his mouth and his nerves are exposed. Soon the roots will die and he will not have to wince any longer.
His father was Lebanese and his mother was Black. Some sooty substance cakes the left side of his face. Passengers robotically shuffle onto the train, move toward the void around him, and then change their minds. His mother took care of him when he first lost his mind, kept him close to her, made him stay in her studio apartment in East New York so he was off the street, pushed him to the clinic, tried to get him help. For a time in his late 20s he held down a job sweeping up for the local BID. He has been on Thorazine and haloperidol and risperidone and Seroquel and Geodon, but now he is on nothing and has not been for years. When he was working his job he came home one day and found his mother slumped over on her recliner, eyes vacant and staring, strange white foam oozing from her lips. Not knowing what better to do he sat with her, one day two days three days four, going out only to scrounge for food. Eventually his neighbor asked after his mother, how she was doing, and so he simply told her. Then the paramedics came, and they were wheeling her body away, and he ended up on an involuntary hold. He ate Jello and watched Jeopardy in the common room and told the doctors about the wires. Then one day they walked him to the door. “No beds,” someone had said to him sympathetically. “No beds.”
“Brother brother brother brother,” he says, reaching for the bottle of whiskey in his ratty jacket pocket. “Brother brother brother.”
In his head a symphony of furious instruments plays him a tune of paranoia and fear. Everything about his life is dictated by that fear. Everything he thinks and does is a product of that fear. He is being watched and the watchers want to open up his brain and scrape out his thoughts. The doctors use spoons and they open up brains and they scrape the spoons along the insides of the skull and they pull out thoughts, things only he knows, and they will have his Social Security number and his mother’s maiden name and then they will have him, body and soul. He starts to vomit, spontaneously, catching it in his hand and pushing roughly through the door to stand between the trains. He thinks he hears a woman gag behind him as he goes. Vomit spills out of his mouth and covers his beard. He lets his body convulse until it passes. Now he is between the trains and he can’t tell if there are any wires. He cannot decide if it is safer to stand here between trains or to get off at the next station. For a moment he hangs over the thin shaking coil that separates him from the brink and thinks it over.
He gets out at the next station. Somehow he is already at 137th. He thinks he will go look at the gargoyles, the fake white gargoyles, or perhaps they are monks. It always makes him think of his mother. She was the light of his life; someone once told him that his father had died alone in a motel far away, and anyway his mother had always raised him alone. He loved his mother but he blamed her and could not let that blame go. She was there when they implanted the bugs in his fillings. He could almost remember it, when he slowed down enough. They had taken him as a baby to a dark room filled with wires and implanted the bugs and why had she not stopped them? He drinks what is left of the whiskey and mutters his way down the quiet uptown street.
Perhaps there was talking, first; perhaps they had asked him questions. Perhaps he had even answered. Soon enough all he knows is that there are hands on him, hands attached to disgusted people, cops who press him against a brick wall and handcuff him. He screams and raves. “Crazy fucker,” someone says. He feels himself convulse. It has happened. They have found him again. They were going to scrape his brain. He had lost focus, distracted by the whiskey and the clattering in his head, and he had failed to track the gang that was stalking him. Now he shudders and buckles and cries real tears. Finally he surrenders fully. The symphony plays in his brain. The cops drag him towards an ambulance.
“MPS,” says the medic as he is strapped to a gurney. He is roused by this.
“No,” he says. “RUMC. RUMC.”
The walk away from RUMC is long, through frightening eye-filled streets, but it leads to the ferry, and on the ferry he could feel reprieve, even in the winter - there are no wires strung on the ferry. He would like to feel the spray up on his face, cold and bracing, and watch as the great grey canyons of the financial district grow steadily larger. Perhaps a seabird would even fly by, catching an airstream beside the great plodding boat, animal and unhurried.
“MPS,” says the medic again, as they load him into the ambulance.
He cries again, big and wet. He is in their clutches now - the CIA, the Illuminati, or perhaps the Jews. He smells his own body for the first time in days. He grinds his teeth. He listens to the wires.
She is working her email job and she is in pain and she is ashamed of both. Her job mostly involves resetting people’s passwords for their car insurance accounts. She used to always tell everyone who would listen that the gig was only temporary, but now she is 34 and though she endlessly browses online job boards she cannot imagine a reason anyone would ever choose her for anything. So she works a job that entails doing very little and earning even less. Her pain entails depression, chronic crushing blinding all-destroying depression, and anxiety, chronic shaking endlessly-accelerating enervating and all-devouring anxiety.
At work she can’t stop sucking down the coffee that she knows contributes to her constant feeling of a racing heart, the fear that lands with an empty thud deep in her stomach whenever her boss emails her, running up and down a list of everything that will probably go wrong and everything that could go right but won’t. She can’t help it; the anxiety is in her heart and with each beat it travels along her arteries and spreads throughout her whole body, and then the blood is sucked back up into her veins and straight back to the source of her anxiety again. She can’t stop thinking of everything that might go wrong, even sitting alone in her cubicle on a Friday afternoon when no one is asking a single thing of her. She is haunted by the dooms she always imagines and never endures. The haunting is doom enough.
At home she slips into her depression like an unnoticed child slipping quietly below the water at a crowded beach. The familiarity of the quiet cold ever-spreading sadness helps to blunt the force of her relentless self-hatred. But not enough. She lies down on her already-sagging IKEA couch and counts the particles of vermiculite in her ceiling. The thought that arrests her is that she is not worthy of depression. Depression is for the chic, for brilliant artists. Great poems have been written about depression. Nothing in her life will ever feel like a great poem, she is sure of it.
She does not pity herself for her plight. She does not extend herself empathy. She is embarrassed. She is embarrassed to have anxiety and depression. She has never seen them as “real” mental illness. She has never felt that her pain rated highly enough to call herself suffering. She has mentioned her issues to her PCP, offhandedly saying that she feels gripped by psychic forces that every day rip her apart. He had asked her how bad these problems were, and she laughed as she lied and called them minor. They could try an SSRI, he had suggested; no, she laughed him off again, no no. Not for her. People like her did not merit such treatment. Then he had recommended St. John’s root, perhaps more exercise.
Recently she has enjoyed a special level of shame, which is fine, as shame is the bad feeling she wants to feel. Some bitter blogger had mocked people who suffered from depression and anxiety, had made them seem like attention-seekers, fakes. It hurt to read it, and she was glad it hurt. He had made people like her out to be trivial, and she liked it. She liked to be told that she was trivial. That her pain was trivial. She would tell anyone it was trivial, pawn it off to herself as trivial. What she would not mention, even to herself, is that she felt pain enough to end it all, to finally wrap it all up. She has not really comprehended what she was planning until the night arrives.
She has searched for the appropriate tool. The chef’s knife would be too clean, too simple. She had read that it would not hurt, if she did it quickly in a nice hot bath, and she wants it to hurt. She had trawled online for the right implement, but every knife she came across had been too baroque, too dramatic. She does not deserve a picturesque suicide; she hopes only that when they find her, her body is not too grotesquely bloated and puffy. She has settled on using her corkscrew. Something about it seems fitting, perhaps only that it is crooked, and that it has lately brought her the only kind of pleasure she still understands.
She pours that bath. She uses the corkscrew for its intended purpose one last time and gets drunk on half a bottle of wine. She takes two oxycodone left over from getting her wisdom teeth out. She lays in the tub and feels her pain, her brutalizing anxiety, her crushing depression. She feels the horrible feeling of being washed with worry, as she has for so long; she feels the weight of pain and self-hatred pressing down over her entire body, and she feels that she’s not even good enough to deserve the relief of the death she desperately desires. Some dim part of her brain tells her that she has pain enough for others to take her seriously, pain enough that someone might want to save her. But she can’t give herself permission to seek help. What if they laughed? She wonders if she has courage enough to end it. She finds that she does.
Dutifully she works the tip of the corkscrew down her left wrist. The pain is excruciating. She has read that serious people do it vertically, and she wants to be taken seriously. But cutting her wrist with a corkscrew does not allow for precision, and she carves out a meandering path as her bathwater slowly grows pink. When she has finished, she admires her work; the crookedness feels appropriate. For one last moment she permits herself to wish that she loved herself enough to ask for help, but her final thoughts are again to admire the art she had just etched into her wrist. Yes, she thinks. She has had her vision.