Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [102]
Nearly everyone agreed I had made real progress. But progress at what cost? Simply keeping the symptoms in check was sapping all my energy and exhausting me. And the Voices were still always with me. Their pummeling talk of hellfire and punishment was my constant companion. In addition, their crazy crooning had taken on a sensual, voluptuous quality: “Talk to us, darling little cunt,” they whispered. “Talk to us.”
Sounds echoed through my head like thunder. There was a hailstorm in my brain, with tornado winds knocking down telephone poles and trees. I heard bomber planes overhead and braced myself against their destructive roar. I was overwhelmed by every sound I heard around me. I couldn't tune out any noise; each one pounded my brain with equal intensity. Traffic. The wind. Water flowing down a sink's drain. Birds. Windows opening or closing. They all rattled in my head like artillery fire.
But the worst torment these days was not the things I heard, but rather the things I saw. I saw fire, lightning, colored bolts of light. I saw people hanging in the window, and body parts hanging from the trees. I saw fire around people and walls and faces. Sometimes I felt I had projector eyeballs, shooting things and shapes and colors straight ahead of me. Sometimes I saw things as if they were movies floating before my eyes. Sometimes I saw things that looked as real as my bed or my lamp or my tennis shoes.
I couldn't sleep at night because of the creatures in my bed. I sat at my desk writing in my journal one night because I was afraid to go near my bed. “There are four of them sitting on the bed,” I wrote.
Usually I saw creatures with faces that were like the scariest Halloween mask ever made or creatures with big blubbery, hairy, slippery green faces. But sometimes I saw people I recognized. I saw the face of my parents’ friend Dr. Arnie Maerov melt into a caricature. Why him? Was it simply because he was a psychiatrist, or because he was a friend of my parents? I saw my seventh-grade science teacher, Fred Zaltas. I had had a crush on him when I was thirteen, but I hadn't thought of him in ten years.
I saw my childhood Jerry Mahoney doll. Jerry was like my pal. I played with him, acted out fantasy conversations with him as if we were really friends. We entertained people as I had back in another life so many years ago. We made people laugh. And then he too melted like syrupy wax into a gruesome ghastly figurine, almost like a three-dimensional mind puddle.
And then I saw Charles Manson, staring at me from the walls of my room just as he had once stared at me from the front page of the newspaper back in California when I was a child. He penetrated my entire mind and body with his fierce and frenzied eyes. Patients in the hospital mocked other patients who seemed to have a psychotic stare. But no patient that I had ever met had about him the look.that Charles Manson did. His eyes were stilettos piercing through my soul. I couldn't escape his gaze. Every time I tried to look away he commanded my eyes to stay fixed on his. I was unable to break his psychotic stare.
I screamed in terror. The staff on the unit came running to my rescue. I couldn't do this alone. My fists had already begun pummeling against the wall. I heard sick laughter coming from everywhere, and realized it was me. The nurse in charge gave me a pill to swallow. I was out of control. I knocked the cup to the floor. Time meant nothing. Suddenly I was being held down on the Quiet Room mattress and given an injection to make the faces go away. I drifted into sleep and when I awoke Charles Manson was gone.
I had come to believe that my Voices were just a part of me. But I still had a terrible time distinguishing them from reality.
On one freezing night in January, I heard a baby crying outside in the courtyard. It was sobbing away, and wouldn't be still. The more I heard it, the more upset I became. I went to the nursing station.
“There's a baby outside,” I said frantically. “We've got to go save