The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [56]
After a week of this, Leonard had gone to Health Services, where a doctor, accustomed to seeing stressed-out undergrads near semester’s end, prescribed sleeping pills and told Leonard to stop drinking coffee. When the pills didn’t work the doctor prescribed a mild tranquilizer, and then a stronger one, but even this brought Leonard no more than two or three hours of shallow, dreamless, nonreplenishing sleep per night.
It was right around then, Auerbach said, that Leonard stopped taking his lithium. It wasn’t clear if Leonard had done this on purpose or just forgot. But pretty soon he was calling people on the telephone. He called everybody. He talked for fifteen minutes, or a half hour, or an hour, or two hours. At first, he was entertaining, as always. People were happy to hear from him. He called his friends two or three times a day. Then five or six. Then ten. Then twelve. He called from his apartment. He called from pay phones around campus, the locations of which he had memorized. Leonard knew about a phone in the subbasement of the physics lab, and of a cozy telephone closet in the administration building. He knew about a broken pay phone on Thayer Street that recycled your coin. He knew about unguarded phones in the philosophy department. From each and every one of these phones Leonard called to tell his listeners how exhausted he was, how insomniac, how insomniac, how exhausted. All he could do, apparently, was talk on the phone. As soon as the sun rose, Leonard telephoned his early-rising friends. Having been up all night, he called to speak to people not yet in the mood for conversation. From them, he moved on to other people, people he knew well or had barely met, students, departmental secretaries, his dermatologist, his advisor. When it got too late on the East Coast to call anyone, Leonard went through his phone book, looking up the numbers of friends on the West Coast. And when it got too late to call Portland or San Francisco, Leonard faced the terrifying three or four hours when he was alone in his apartment with his own disintegrating mind.
That was the phrase Auerbach used, telling the story to Madeleine. “Disintegrating mind.” Madeleine listened, trying to fit the picture Auerbach was sketching with the Leonard she knew, whose mind was anything but weak.
“What do you mean?” Madeleine said. “Are you saying Leonard’s going crazy?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Auerbach said.
“What do you mean his mind is disintegrating?”
“That’s what he told me it felt like. To him,” Auerbach said.
As his mind began to come apart, Leonard sought to keep it together by talking into a plastic handset, to reach and interact with another person, to outfit that person with a precise description of his despair, his physical symptoms, his hypochondriacal surmises. He called to ask people about their moles. Did they ever have a mole that looked suspicious? That bled or changed shape? Or a red thingy on the shaft of their penises? Could that be herpes? What did herpes look like? What was the difference between a herpes lesion and a chancre? Leonard strained the decorum of masculine friendship, Auerbach said, by calling his male friends and inquiring about the state of their erections. Had they ever failed to get it up? If so, under what conditions? Leonard began referring to his erections as “Gumbies.” These were erections that bent, that were as pliable as the old childhood figurine. “I get a total Gumby sometimes,” he said. He worried that biking through Oregon one summer had compromised his prostate. He went to the library and found a study of erectile dysfunction in Tour de France athletes. Because Leonard was brilliant