The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [73]
Down from one fifty-five to about one twenty-five pounds, deaf, dumb, and blind, convulsing in my own puke, shit, and piss. If something wanted me to suffer, how much more could they want? If there was a finite amount of suffering in the world, I was sparing someone somewhere something. I was a first-rate safety valve.
I don’t pretend to know any more than anyone else about what happens after death, but if there is such a thing as hell and it’s anything like some of the things I went through when I was nuts, and you can avoid it by doing things as pretty as not coveting your neighbor’s ass, by all means, DO NOT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ASS.
At some point I gave up clothing. It was just too sticky and confining, almost like drowning. No clothes would have maybe been OK if I hadn’t taken it into my head to make a break for it. André and Simon tackled me before I got very far, but a neighbor saw me and told them if he saw me anywhere near his kids, he’d shoot me. Other neighbors were going to call the cops about all the noise I was making, but the Sunshine Boys always managed to calm them down. Somewhere in there I threw a huge rock through the living-room picture window.
Gradually it became clear even to Simon that they might have to put me in a hospital, if only to save their own sanity.
TEA PARTY. Twelve days without food or sleep, twelve very active days, hadn’t done wonders for my physique. Even when my eyes were seeing fairly straight, I had a hard time recognizing myself in the mirror. I looked a lot like pictures of refugees from Hitler’s concentration camps. I wasn’t as alarmed by the weight loss as amazed and curious. But there were so many amazing curious things happening that I didn’t spend much time on it.
My friends were alarmed. Mental illness being a myth and schiz a sane response to an insane world was all well and good, but this kid’s about to starve to death.
As we found out later, death by starvation wasn’t a far-fetched possibility. According to doctors at the hospital, another week or two would have done the trick. In the good old pretranquilizer days a fair number of schizies went that way. A few still do. Your brain, only about 2 percent of your body weight, consumes 20 percent of your energy. No one’s brain is moving like a schizophrenic’s, not to mention the calories burned running amuck. Stop eating, make it a twenty-four-hour, no-time-out day, and you’ve got one hell of a quick weight-loss program.
How to get some food into Mark? Their opening ploys were simple enough. Cook food for everyone, give me a plate too, and make like it was a normal meal. The funny thing was how uninterested they were in their own food. All I had to do was shift my weight slightly or lean forward, all eyes would rivet on me and my plate. I teased them some. Pick up the fork, get a little rice on it, start bringing it toward my mouth (you could have heard a pin drop), drop the fork back on my plate, and roll on the floor laughing. It was just too damn funny. Besides, I knew full well that thousands of Bengalis bit the dust for every bite I took. Besides, there wasn’t much point in eating when I wasn’t really hungry.
Having everyone so eager to have me eat might have very logically led to thoughts of poison, but it didn’t. Even though it smelled a little strange, I knew it was real food. To have eaten it would have proved I was just another jerk raving his brains out, that the world was unsavable, that humanity had no class. Explaining how would take a lot more space than it’s worth. Take my word, it was crystal clear.
Later, when I did feel sure they were poisoning me, I hummed down my tea without a second thought. Refusing the poison would have been exactly like accepting the food.
Since the communal dinners were such a flop, they tried a few more things and eventually arrived at the tea party. The tea parties were anything but casual. They were ceremonial rituals. Everyone had his