Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [15]
I met first with a counselor at Tufts, and then with a psychiatrist in private practice. Week after week I met with him, yet I couldn't speak. I couldn't talk about the Voices. It was too dangerous. The Voices were twisting themselves around me. It was hard to tell where they left off and I began. They threatened me, and I believed them. If I squealed on the Voices, they might kill me. If I ratted on them, the person I told would have to die.
My thoughts grew increasingly confused and poisonous. Session after session I sat in the psychiatrist's office wondering: Who the hell is this guy? What is he going to do to me? Send the white coats for me? Send me to Rikers Island? Was he going to take a scalpel and dissect the wrinkles of my brain? Do a lobotomy? What could he do about the stuff rotting there in my head? He gave me Valium for my anxiety. I took it, and grew steadily more anxious.
Things began to spin out of control. Trying to flee the Voices, I took to my car, racing up the old Hutchinson River Parkway, and the narrow Merritt Parkway. I wanted to see how fast I could go without being killed. Yet I half wanted to get myself killed. Driving up the Mass Pike on the way back to school, I was pulled over by a cop for speeding. I rolled down my window. He asked for my license and registration.
“You are going to kill yourself driving like that,” he said. I began to laugh hysterically. Right before my very eyes, the state trooper with his hat and sunglasses and uniform had changed into a fantastic creature with bugged-out eyes and hair standing up wildly on end.
On Saturday, April 25, in honor of my twenty-second birthday the following day Tara and Lori woke me up at 5:00 A.M. and handed me a scroll. “Congratulations,” it read. “You have won an all-expense-paid vacation in the company of two people who love you very much.” They hustled me into my clothes, handed me my overnight bag all packed, and carried me off to Provincetown. We stayed at an inn, ate lobster and curled up at night under striped sheets eating Oreos.
Six weeks later we all graduated and headed to New York City, Tara to Columbia University's School of International Affairs, Lori and I to live together and work. My last memory of college is of graduation day, caps flying in the air, mellow music playing, a frantic round of goodbye parties, and the Quad filled with parents, relatives and friends, all gathered around to wish us well in our new lives.
Part II
I Can Fly
4
Lori Winters New York City, July 1981–March 1982
Lori Schiller and I loved being roommates when we were together at Tufts. So we should have been perfect roommates in New York the year after our graduation. We were both just starting out in the big city. We both had interesting jobs: I had been accepted into a training program at Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Lori had a job as a Spanish translator at the Miss Universe Pageant. We were the same age, came from the same sort of background, and we enjoyed each other's company. We even shared the same first name.
And at first glance, Lori and I both thought the renovated McAlpin Hotel was an ideal place for two recently graduated college girls like us to make our first home. It was right in the heart of midtown Manhattan. It had a doorman. It was near the subway, and right across from Macy's huge department store. By day, the streets teemed with people, busy commuters and shoppers going about their business. The price was right too—about $500 for a one-bedroom, which in New York was downright cheap.
Still, there was a lot of fretting when we moved in together that summer. Lori's parents hated the idea of our moving into an apartment building located in a commercial, rather than a residential, neighborhood.
And to tell the truth, I wasn't too crazy about living there with Lori either—but it wasn't the building I was worried about. It was Lori. I kept quiet about my concerns, but they were growing every day. Lori had been