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By Root 1341 0

their lives, much less draw connections between events. One guy had a facial tic so pronounced that it seemed to literally shake coherent thoughts from his head. He would twitch and forget what he’d been saying. His problems were physiological, the basic wiring of his brain faulty. Listening to him was like listening to a radio tuned between channels: every so often a non sequitur came barking in. Leonard paid sympathetic attention as people spoke about their lives. He tried to take comfort in what they said. But his main thought was of how much worse off they were than he. This belief made him feel better about himself, and so he clung to it. But then it was Leonard’s turn to tell his story, and he opened his mouth and out came the most nicely modulated, well-articulated bullshit imaginable. He talked about the events that led up to his breakdown. He recited swaths of the DSM III that he’d apparently committed to memory without trying. He showed off how smart he was because that was what he was used to doing. He couldn’t stop himself.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up. As he was speaking, for instance, Leonard noticed Wendy Neuman cross her arms over her chest, as if to defend herself against the blatant insincerity of what he was saying. To win her back, Leonard admitted to this insincerity, saying, “No, I take that back. I’m lying. Lying is what I do. It’s part of my disease.” He eyed Wendy to see if she was buying this, or if she regarded it as further insincerity. The closer Leonard monitored her reactions, the further he got from telling the truth about himself, until he trailed off, feeling embarrassed and hot-faced, an eyesore of denial.

The same thing happened in his sessions with Dr. Shieu, but in a different way. Sitting in the scratchy armchair in Shieu’s office, Leonard wasn’t self-conscious about his educated manner of speech. But his mind kept up its play-by-play analysis of the contest under way. In order to be released from the hospital, Leonard had to make it clear that he wasn’t suicidal. He knew, however, that Dr. Shieu was on the lookout for any attempt to disguise suicidal ideation (suicidal people being brilliant tacticians when it came to obtaining the opportunity to kill themselves). Therefore, Leonard didn’t want to seem too upbeat. At the same time, he didn’t want to appear to be not getting better at all. As he answered the doctor’s questions, Leonard felt as though he were being interrogated for a crime. He tried, when he could, to tell the truth, but when the truth didn’t serve his cause he embellished it, or outright lied. He noted every change in Dr. Shieu’s facial expression, interpreting it as either favorable or unfavorable, and shifting his next response accordingly. Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet’s back.

Visiting hours provided no relief. The friends who showed up divided into two groups. There were the emoters, mostly girls, who treated Leonard gingerly, as if he might break, and there were the jokesters, mostly guys, who thought the way to help him was to make fun of hospital visits in general. Jerry Heidmann brought him a saccharine get-well card, Ron Lutz a smiley-faced helium balloon. From the things that came out of his friends’ mouths during visiting hours Leonard gradually understood that they thought depression was like being “depressed.” They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it. People brought him chocolate bars. They urged him to consider all the good things in his life.

True to form, neither of his parents flew out to see him. Frank called once, having been given his number by Janet.