Paxil CR: Get back to being you
If I’d been a big talker, I would have begun with the Bell’s palsy and worked my way through my first semester of sickness. Then the second. Then the summer. Then fall semester again, all the way until you were up to date. It would have been a talking marathon, disease after disease after disease, and we would have been there all day.
I couldn’t bring myself to have that conversation, though. I remember wanting to play all that down. So I went out to the file cabinet at the nurses’ desk, and I got my folder. I was a little embarrassed that it was soft and furry like cotton from so much use, but I brought it back into the room anyway. I figured it was pointless to hide.
Inside, my illnesses were bulleted. They looked like a list of things to do, and I thought you’d be less alarmed by the format.
I handed you my folder, and you thumbed through it, looking up five minutes later with a starry expression. “And your bruise up here,” you said, gesturing to your own forehead. “Where’d that come from?”
“I got in a fight.” Your unflinching eye contact was confusing me. To avoid it, I concentrated on a lock of your hair that was glued to your forehead from when you went down face first in the snow.
Most people’s eyes dart around me. I mean that both ways. They dart around my body when they’re trying to see how I’m holding up. And they dart around me, the presence, when they don’t want to look.
“You got in a fight?”
“Yes, just like you.” I punched into the air for effect.
Then I heard a cry from the hallway, which was Vivian’s, and I was relieved to have an excuse to break away. When I got out to the desk, I understood from pieces of her phone conversation that the house next door to hers was on fire. C.C. was walking all over her desk, catching his feet on charts and prescriptions.
“Should I come down there?” she asked. “I know. But . . .”
I could tell that the policeman on the phone was explaining that he was sorry, but there was no point in coming and watching her house burn down. Vivian burst into tears.
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said, and I went over and sat down next to her because I knew she was talking more to me than to him. I hate sympathy, and anything I hate, I never give to anyone else. Vivian looked over at me and nodded, then pressed the phone to her chest. I could hear the policeman’s voice buzzing his version of comforting talk.
Vivian said to me, “I can’t stop thinking about my boyfriend’s reaction. He’s going to pull me to him and kiss my head, and then I’m really going to cry hard.” I just listened. She returned the phone to her ear and listened, too.
“Yes, I have insurance,” she said after a pause. “I wasn’t even going to stay there long. The plan was always that I was going to fix it up and rent it out.” I knew that by the time she saw her boyfriend tonight, Vivian wanted to be dry-eyed and stoic, since she hated the idea of being a wimp in front of him. That’s why she was practicing with the policeman, trying to put some rationality into the loss.
There was a meow from the kitten in the closet. I had heard that animals were supposed to be able to sense earthquakes, but I’d never heard anything about house fires. “And I have my animals,” Vivian said, stroking C.C.’s breast with her pointer finger.
Then the Health Services doorbell rang.
“How much time would you give it?” Vivian asked.
The doorbell rang again, the bing which I’ve always thought sounds like glass, and the bong which I’ve always thought sounds like copper.
“No. I’m not interested in seeing that,” Vivian said.
I hate sympathy, but I can stomach empathy, which I think I, more than most people, am in a realistic position to possess and dish out. But empathy takes weird forms in me. On that day it took the form of me reaching out to press the hang-up button, disconnecting Vivian from the police.
“You seemed like you didn’t want to talk anymore,” I said.
“My house—” she whispered back.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“They estimate that my porch is going up in two minutes.”
“You just painted it that green, too,” I said.
“How’d you know I painted it green? I never talked about that here,” Vivian said.
“You must have told me,” I said. “Do you need to watch your house go down?”
“The police said I couldn’t come,” Vivian said.
“Fire is public property,” I told her. “The house is your private property. You’re entitled to watch it either way.”
Down the hall, near the blood-drawing closet, I saw a hunched kid with longish black hair shuffle past in a bathrobe. I squinted but couldn’t make out his face, and then he disappeared into the room.
“Who’s that?” I asked Vivian.
She looked where I was looking, but there was no one left to see. “Who?”
“I just saw a guy in a bathrobe. Is he a new infirmary patient?”
“Not that I know of. Where’d he go?” Vivian asked.
“Into the blood closet”
“He shouldn’t be in there,” Vivian said, perking up now that she had something new and impersonal to freak out about. “He might be stealing needles. I should go confront him.” The doorbell sounded again. I think it was the first time she became aware of it. “Will you get the doorbell?”
“Sure,” I said. Now someone was pounding to get in.
I knew that I was taking the staircase like a person five times my age. Or like a zombie fresh out of the ground, reacquainting itself with mobility. But I could bag on myself all I wanted, and it wouldn’t make me go any faster. I had to clutch onto the rail with both fists and make my way down while turned toward it.
The rubber soles of my slippers kept sticking to the marble, so I put extra effort into kicking my legs forward. I think the doorbell went off at least three more times, and there were a few more rounds of knocking, too. When I finally reached the front door, I used both hands again to turn the lock, and then to hold the knob and pull on it with everything I had left.
The sunshine I let in was staggering. The day was so brilliant that I almost didn’t believe in it.
I saw your friends Marna and David on the doorstep. Mama’s stud earrings twinkled in the light like her head was a switchboard. She looked foreign, and I expected to hear a Swedish accent. David’s cigarette was dangling from his mouth, and the light at the end of it seemed too bright, like a flare in front of his face.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“I’m sorry we rang the doorbell so many times,” said Marna.
“Why are you apologizing to her?” asked David out of the side of his mouth. “I’m sure part of her job is answering the door.” To me he said, “We kept ringing the doorbell because we didn’t hear any kind of movement inside.”
“You can’t hear anything through these doors,” I explained. “They’re thick. Can I help you?”
“Is this Health Services?” Marna tried to peer inside.
“Yes. Are you sick?”
“Actually, it’s our friend. Chess Hunter. He was struck in the knees last night—”
“I know Chess. He’s upstairs.” I stepped back and pulled the door with me, inviting them in. Marna and David entered tentatively. They looked like kids going into a haunted house. I wondered what I looked like to them.
“When you get to the second floor, make a right and sign in,” I told them, and I started to release the door so I could follow them up. Except a breeze hit my cheeks right then. It bent backwards and returned outside, where it belonged, and I felt the force of its leaving like a boomerang taking some of me with it. I felt like a string of tissue was being pulled from my stomach and stretched down the walkway.
Glancing over my shoulder, I watched Marna and David climbing the stairs, talking quietly, but the space bounces voices everywhere:
“I had no idea this was even here,” Marna said.
“Me neither,” David said. “I’ve never had more than the flu, and then when I do, I just stay in bed and sleep it off.”
“My doctor from home prescribes everything over the phone. I fill it at CVS.”
“Same here.”
I looked back outside, and the world seemed so interesting. It used to be that I rarely followed a lot of my impulses, but that day, all of a sudden I was on the other side of the door. I was hearing it shut behind me. The feeling I had was that the bulk of the door was pressing on the back of me like a magnet, expelling my north pole from its own.
First I stood and rolled my head in a circle, noting the lack of ceiling above me. After that I grasped onto the iron rail, which was pretty cold, and lowered myself down the steps. Then I let go (I had no choice—the rail ended) at the start of the walkway. Snow took a nose dive into my slippers. My feet were numb and wet by the time I hit the corner of Brown and George, and I was thrilled about that.
I hovered on the curb, realizing that I had to come up with a goal. I needed somewhere to get to before I could feel okay about turning back. In under a second I thought of the V-Dub—all people talked about were the waffles there.
“You can make yourself waffles there,” said this girl who was admitted into the infirmary last year for never-ending bloody noses. She’d been bleeding through all her classes and dealing with it, mostly dripping onto linoleum floors and those cheap desk-chair combinations. But when her nose bled out onto this big decorative rug in the reading room at the John Hay Library, the university told her that her situation had gotten out of hand and forced her to take care of it.
Whenever a nurse practitioner offered her toast from the Ratty, she’d say, “I’d give anything to be eating a waffle from the V-Dub. You can make yourself waffles there. The stuff is like crack.”
I’d ask, “What, you heat them up yourself?”
Bloody Nose said, “No, there’s a gigantic vat of batter and you use a Dixie Cup to pour it into the waffle iron, and then you set the timer on the machine. Lately, I’ve found that I have a better sense of knowing exactly when my waffle is ready than it does. I’m dying for a waffle. I wonder if the school puts something in the batter, and that’s why I want it so bad.”
Health Services put Bloody Nose on prescription medication and soon she was Clean Nose. On the morning that she checked out of the infirmary, she told me, “You know where I’m going.”
I felt the inertia of my life strongly as she left. I’d liked Bloody Nose. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her, and she would have gone on bleeding and sticking tissues up her nose except the university said it would consider her negligent if she didn’t look into her problem. They made a phone call to her parents stating their intention to start billing them for damaged property unless she sought help. I could see myself having breakfast with Bloody, whether dripping or clean. I could picture the two of us in a corner, sharing a pitcher of syrup, and I thought I’d love it.
I stepped down into the street and crossed it, eager to make a waffle.