July 5th. I wake up in our apartment on Bank Street, a top-floor tenement on one of the more stately blocks in the West Village. The space next to me in the bed is empty: Pat has gone out early, down to her dance studio on Fulton Street, to balance the books, tie up loose ends. We have been married for two years and our life together is still emerging from under the weight of the separate worlds each of us brought along.

What I brought, most palpably, was my teenage daughter Sally, who, I’m a little surprised to discover, isn’t home either. It’s eight o’clock and the day is already sticky and hot. Sun bakes through the welted tar roof less than three feet above her loft bed. The air conditioner blew our last spare fuse around midnight; Sally must have felt she had to bail out of here just to be able to breathe.

On the living room floor lie the remains of another one of her relentless nights: a cracked Walkman held together by masking tape; a half cup of cold coffee; and the clothbound volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which she has been poring over for weeks with growing intensity. Flipping open the book at random I find a blinding crisscross of arrows, definitions, circled words. Sonnet 13 looks like a page from the Talmud, the margins crowded with so much commentary the original text is little more than a speck at the center.

Then there are the papers with Sally’s own poems, composed of lines that come to her (so she informed me a few days ago) like birds flying in a window. I pick up one of these fallen birds:

And when everything should be quiet

your fire fights to burn a river of sleep.

Why should the great breath of hell kiss

what you see, my love?

Last night at around 2 A.M. she was perched on the corduroy couch writing in her notebook to the sound of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations in a continuous loop on her Walkman. I had come home late after celebrating the completion of yet another hack job in my capacity as a freelance writer: supplying the text for a two-hour video about the history of golf, a game I have never played.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked.

A vigorous shake of her head, a cease-and-desist hand gesture, while the other hand, the one with the pen in it, scuttled faster across the page. Stinging rudeness. But what I felt was a pang of nostalgia for that period in my own life when I did something similar with the poems of Hart Crane: looking up all those alien jazz-blown words, immersing myself in the sheer (and to me virtually meaningless) energy of his language. I hesitated in the living room doorway, watching her ignore me: her almond-shaped Galician eyes, her hair that doesn’t grow from her head so much as shoot out of it in a wild amber burst, her hunger for language, for words.

These studious nights, I am convinced, are the release of frustrations that have been building in her since the day, almost nine years ago, when she entered first grade. It may be for the sake of symmetry that I think of that as the day Sally’s childhood faded, like the frame in a silent movie where light shrinks to a pinprick at the center of the screen. But that was the way it seemed. She wasn’t learning to read, but her difficulties went deeper. The alphabet was a cryptogram: R might as well have been a mouth of crooked teeth, H an upended chair. She had as much success reading The Cat in the Hat as she would a CAT scan. The trick of agreement, of shared meaning, upon which most human exchange is based was eluding her.

It pained me to see this submerged look come over her, as if she had lost her sense of joy. And yet the same words that her eyes could not decipher on the page, her tongue, freed from the fixed symbols of language, mastered with a deftness that allowed for puns, recitations, arguments, speeches, if she deigned to deliver them—all attesting to a bewilderingly sharp intelligence.

One day when I went to pick her up at school, the entrance was mobbed with reporters and news crews. A girl in Sally’s class had been murdered by her father. With a jolt, the crime reawakened me to the fragility of my six-year-old daughter, the more so because the killer, Joel Steinberg, and I shared a rough physical resemblance. We were both Ashkenazi Jews—same coloring, same height, same glasses. Tribally, I felt implicated in this crime, guilty by affiliation. In the demonic way that once-unimaginable occurrences have of making their replication inevitable, I felt that Sally and I had been hurled into a new level of danger: in America, Tevye’s great-grandchildren were murdering their daughters.

I pushed through the news crush and found her standing in the middle of the throng holding a classmate’s hand. A reporter had thrust a microphone at the girls, fishing for reactions. Sally’s eyes rolled up at him. Her coat was on backward, her shoelaces untied. Her barrette was dangling uselessly from her hair like an insect that got caught there. I gathered up the girls and shoved a path through the crowd.

It was around this time that Sally’s mother and I split up. We had met in high school and our divorce was like the overly delayed separation of twins: necessary and wrenching. After the upheaval of those months, Sally and I drew closer. I became her advocate, tediously defending her to her teachers, to other parents, to members of our own family flummoxed by the chasm that existed between the way Sally and most everyone else saw the world. Isn’t this chasm the very place where imagination thrives? I argued. Isn’t it the expression of her access to that sublime region of the mind where none of us matches up ever?

“You’re as bright as the rest of them,” I assured her. “Your intelligence is native, it’s inside you, just get through these years, life will change, you’ll see.”

And it did change. We traipsed to learning lab, to affordable specialists at a community center in Chelsea. Admitted to Special Ed., she studied rudimentary word sounds and numbers with the tenacity of a scholar trying to learn a lost language. She seemed to be fighting for capacities inside herself that would die if she failed to crack this code. She succeeded and, seizing on the confidence this inspired, was returned to “the mainstream,” a success of the system. Here the going got rough again, but my promise that sooner or later her dormant talents would spring to life had become credible.

And now it was happening! Bach, Shakespeare, the bubbling hieroglyph of her journals…If she’s up all night it’s because she’s savoring every minute of victory after the trials of those years.

         

I leave the apartment and head downstairs, five flights through a series of paint-gobbed halls that haven’t been mopped since anyone in the building can remember. July 5th. Independence Day weekend. The Village feels like a hotel whose most demanding guests have departed. Those of us left behind know who we are: the sideman, the proofreader, the lady in the straw hat with plastic grapes dripping from it who saves neighborhood dogs…With their owners on vacation, the burnished townhouses look comatose. Bank Street has succumbed to a state of slow-motion splendor.

I walk toward the coffee shop on Greenwich Avenue where Sally likes to hang out in the morning, then almost collide with her as she rounds our corner. She seems flushed, annoyed, and when I routinely ask her what her plans are she turns on me with a strangely violent look that catches me off guard.

“If you knew what was going through my mind, you wouldn’t ask that question. But you don’t have a clue. You don’t know anything about me. Do you, Father?”

She rears back her sandaled foot and kicks a nearby garbage can with such force its metal lid clangs to the ground. A neighbor from across the street raises his eyebrows as if to say, What have we here? Sally doesn’t seem to notice him or care. There’s something oddly kinetic about her presence, though she’s standing still, staring at me, her fists clenched at her side. Her heart-shaped face is so vivid it alarms me. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I’m out of my depth with a daughter. I grew up one of five brothers in a demimonde of half-wild boys. My father spent most of his life dealing scrap metal from a warehouse near the waterfront in Brooklyn. In our home the feminine side of the world was almost nonexistent.

When she goes to kick the can again, I place a hand on her shoulder to stop her. Irritably she shakes me off.

“Do I frighten you, Father?”

“Why would you frighten me?”

“You look afraid.”

She bites her lip so hard the blood goes out of it. Her arms are trembling. Why is she acting this way? And why does she keep calling me Father in this pressured, phony voice, as if delivering stage lines she has learned?

Our neighbor Lou approaches with her even-tempered sheepdog. A welcome sight. Lou’s fondness for Sally dates back almost ten years, when she noticed her instinctive feeling for the vulnerable beings of this world. The more helpless a person, the more Sally poured out her heart to him, sitting with stroke and Alzheimers victims outside the Village Nursing Home, delivering a slice of pizza to the drunk sprawled on Seventh Avenue. Her strongest empathies were reserved for babies. An infant to Sally was an object of reverence. It was as if she understood how easily their lives could be shattered, in some watery moment before memory perhaps, when, on a molecular level, the temperament that determines fate is formed. Given the chance, she would hold a newborn in her arms for hours. It was an affinity I sometimes worried about, as if what she really saw in those babies was the key to some fugitive force in herself that she needed to hold onto and repair.

Lou would have none of that. “You know what naches is? Well, you have it in that girl. She’s a giver, Michael. In a world of grabbers and shitheads, she gives.”

Which is why Lou’s behavior now is so disturbing. She waves to us from down the street, draws within ten feet and pulls up short. Catching an eyeful of Sally, she thrusts out her hands as if to ward off some evil spirit, yanks the leash on her sheepdog, and hurries away.

Her retreat leaves me dumbstruck. Yet Sally seems unfazed. Her normally warm chestnut eyes are shell-like and dark, as if they’ve been brushed over with lacquer. From lack of sleep, I assume.

I ask her if she’s okay.

“I’m fine.”

And I think: Lou must have thought we were having an argument and didn’t want to intrude.

“Are you sure? Because you seem pretty tense. You haven’t been sleeping, and I’ve hardly seen you eat all week.”

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe you should take it easy tonight, lay off the Shakespeare for a while.”

She presses her lips together in an explosive clench and gives a shuddering nod.

         

In the afternoon I meet a friend who is visiting from out of town. We catch up over a few drinks and on our way to dinner pass my building on Bank Street. A police car is double-parked outside, empty, its lightbar dark. There is such an air of tranquility on the street that it doesn’t occur to me something might be wrong. A slow night, the cops must be cooping; or else they’ve dropped in on the guy whose Doberman pinschers are a perennial source of complaint with the neighbors.

We continue on to the restaurant where Pat is waiting for us amid a roomful of vacant tables, each with a lit candle cup at its center.

Over dinner Pat and our friend hit on common ground: each is stepparent to a beautiful, unruly daughter. They both have tales to tell: theatrical suicide threats, splattered vats of coffee, the bread knife that sliced flesh from a hand.

“My wife’s daughter is the love of her life,” he jokes. “I’m just the mistress.”

Pat gamely agrees. “It’s like living in a bad folk tale. The evil stepparent. Last in line for affection and the first to be demonized, overruled.”

In fact, most everything about Pat’s relationship with Sally contradicts the evil stepmother cliché. She agonizes over Sally’s schoolwork, lives at the mercy of her moods, and counsels her about the potential catastrophe of charging into womanhood prematurely—warnings that Sally clearly hungers for even when she mounts a token resistance. None of this, however, has been able to resolve one of the ongoing dramas of our household: Sally’s refusal to believe Pat’s devotion to her is sincere. The obstacle, as Sally sees it, is that Pat will never love her as she would a biological child—not physically, not emotionally, not ever. She is alien to Pat’s body, therefore alien to her heart. Our counterarguments (that the umbilical cord is not the only means of maternal attachment; that the connection between her and Pat is all the stronger for having been forged out of the real circumstances of their lives; and, finally, that she already has a biological mother) serve only to increase Sally’s gloom. “Don’t bullshit me, don’t even try,” she says bluntly. “It’s a natural law.”

After dinner, it’s a three-minute walk to Bank Street where we say good night to our friend and start climbing the stairs.

Sally is asleep on her loft bed, more peaceful than she’s looked in days. Her small painted toes hang over the edge of the bed, and her right foot—the one she smashed against the garbage can this morning—is slightly swollen.

Beside her is her friend Cass, who is spending the night, also asleep, sweating lightly.

I go into the kitchen and notice the knives are not in their usual spot on the counter; they’ve been moved to the highest shelf behind a set of rarely used dishes, each blade in its slit of the butcher block rack, black handles turned toward the wall.

I’m trying to make sense of this when Pat says, “There’s a note to call Robin.”

Robin is Sally’s mother. A born-and-bred New Yorker, several years after our breakup she forswore the city to live with her new husband in a remote part of Vermont. Our arrangement about the children was decided along gender lines: Sally would go with her mother to attend junior high school in the country, while her older brother Aaron stayed in the city with me. In a small rural school system, we hoped, Sally might fare better than in New York’s.

That wasn’t the way it worked. In school she felt like a misfit again, and her relationship with Robin, always volatile, took a turn for the worse. The more Sally challenged her, the more passive Robin became. By default Sally “won” every battle (over money, curfew, etc.) until there was nothing left to fight for, and she was desperate to be rescued from her own terrifying precociousness. Robin was exhausted, at a loss, in a state of perpetual surrender. And yet the more pointless their battles became, the more fiercely Sally fought them, punishing her mother for granting her the very freedom she asked for, while all along demanding more freedom, more power, more—fighting, in effect, for her own misery. Inevitably, Sally fell in with an older crowd: rusted cars, coded lyrics about mangled metal and flesh, dead-end dirt roads. Her navel turned black when she stabbed it with a sewing needle, ostensibly a cosmetic piercing. At thirteen, after two years in Vermont, she returned to live with Pat and me in New York.

I dial Robin’s number. “The police brought Sally home tonight,” she says.

And it falls into place: the patrol car parked outside was for Sally. The cops were here in the apartment, moving those knives out of reach, at the very moment my friend and I were blithely walking by.

“Did you talk to them?”

“The police? Yes, I talked to them. Yes I did. They said Sally and Cass were out on the street acting crazy, and they decided the girls would be better off at home.”

Robin’s message is clear: You used to criticize my mothering, but you need the New York Police Department to play Daddy.

We talk a little more and run out of things to say. After a pause, Robin gives a whispering, oddly seductive laugh.

“Michael?”

“Yes.”

Silence. During which I can hear the pulsing stillness of her farmhouse through the wires. I picture the scene: scented candles, framed photograph of her guru, books about mending the soul. Another world.

“Is there something else I should know?” I ask.

“Not really. Just that…I release you, Michael. I’ve been wanting to tell you this, and I think now is the time. I release you. And I bless you with all my soul.”

The next morning Sally has the dazed look of someone who has just crawled out of a car wreck. When I ask her about last night she collapses onto the couch and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes.

I turn to Cass, struggling with the laces of her combat boots, anxious to leave. She avoids looking at Sally and she won’t look at me either, deflecting my questions with a series of shrugs and grunts.

With greater finesse, Pat manages to loosen her up to the point where she choppily tells us what happened. She and Sally were out walking, Sally talking a mile a minute, trying to communicate something weirdly urgent, biting Cass’s head off when she interrupted her or failed to understand. “I’ll show you what the fuck I mean!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, and began stopping passersby on Hudson Street, shaking them, grabbing their arms. When a man cursed Sally and pushed her away, Cass realized it wasn’t a joke. She was begging Sally to cut it out when Sally flew into the middle of traffic, rushing at oncoming cars, sure that she could stop them in their tracks. “I dragged her back to the sidewalk, I don’t know how she didn’t get killed. And when the cops pulled up, she started on them. Same way. All this crazy shit.”

Without saying good-bye to Sally (who anyway shows no sign that she is aware of her existence), Cass hobbles out of the apartment, her boots still untied, and starts down the stairs.

I follow her onto the landing, a rush of questions. The answer to which comes to me on its own, with the force of a total solution. Drugs. Acid, Ecstasy, at the very least some galactic ganja making the rounds.

I press Cass to admit it.

All she gives me, however, is an imploring look. “We didn’t take any drugs. Can I please just go home?”

In the apartment Sally remains on the couch, far away, inert. I sit down next to her, take her hand, concentrate on it. I say her name out loud, not addressing her exactly, but as if to assert a tenuous strand of contact between us.

No response.

“She may have saved Sally’s life,” says Pat, referring to Cass.

But why did her life need saving?

Suddenly Sally pulls away from me, jumps to her feet, and starts pacing around the apartment. She is shivering, not as one who is cold might shiver, but with a bristling inner quake of her being. And she is talking, or rather pushing words from her mouth the way a shopkeeper pushes dust out the door of her shop with a broom. People are waiting for her, she says, people who depend on her, at the Sunshine Cafe, holy place of light, she can’t disappoint them, she must go to them now…

She makes a run at the door.

I throw myself in front of her and she shoves me against the wall. Her strength is startling: five feet four, maybe a hundred pounds, enormous gusts of energy whistling through her like a storm. Wrestling me to the floor, she rips off my glasses, claws my face till it bleeds. Pat lets out a shriek and runs over to help me. Overwhelmed by the two of us, the stretched wire of her body slackens. I break our clinch, still guarding the door, and she scuttles out from under us, retreating to the opposite side of the apartment.

She sits on the floor under a window, and we glare at each other, panting, like animals across a cage.

Recovering her composure, Pat slides down beside her. Who’s waiting for you, Sally? What do you want to tell them?

That’s all the coaxing she requires. She erupts into language again, a pressured gush of words delivered with a false air of calmness this time, as if Pat has put a gun to her head and ordered her to sound “normal.” She has had a vision. It came to her a few days ago, in the Bleecker Street playground, while she was watching two little girls play on the wooden footbridge near the slide. In a surge of insight she saw their genius, their limitless native little-girl genius, and simultaneously realized that we all are geniuses, that the very idea the word stands for has been distorted. Genius is not the fluke they want us to believe it is, no, it’s as basic to who we are as our sense of love, of God. Genius is childhood. The Creator gives it to us with life, and society drums it out of us before we have the chance to follow the impulses of our naturally creative souls. Einstein, Newton, Mozart, Shakespeare—not one of them was abnormal. They simply found a way to hold on to the gift every one of us is given, like a door prize, at birth.

Sally related her vision to the little girls in the playground. Apparently they understood her perfectly. Then she walked out onto Bleecker Street and discovered her life had changed. The flowers in front of the Korean deli in their green plastic vases, the magazine covers in the news shop window, the buildings, cars—all took on a sharpness beyond anything she had imagined. The sharpness, she said, “of present time.” A wavelet of energy swelled through the center of her being. She could see the hidden life in things, their detailed brilliance, the funneled genius that went into making them what they are. Sharpest of all was the misery on the faces of the people she passed. She tried to explain her vision to them but they just kept rushing by. Then it hit her: they already know about their genius, it isn’t a secret, but much worse: genius has been suppressed in them, as it had been suppressed in her. And the enormous effort required to keep it from percolating to the surface and reasserting its glorious hold on our lives is the cause of all human suffering. Suffering that Sally, with this epiphany, has been chosen among all people to cure.

Pat and I are dumbstruck, less by what she is saying than how she is saying it. No sooner does one thought come galloping out of her mouth than another overtakes it, producing a pile-up of words without sequence, each sentence canceling out the previous one before it’s had a chance to emerge. Our pulses racing, we strain to absorb the sheer volume of energy pouring from her tiny body. She jabs at the air, thrusts out her chin—a cut-up performance really: the overwrought despot forcing utopia down the throats of her poor subjects. But it isn’t a performance; her drive to communicate is so powerful it’s tormenting her. Each individual word is like a toxin she must expel from her body.

The longer she speaks, the more incoherent she becomes, and the more incoherent she becomes, the more urgent is her need to make us understand her! I feel helpless watching her. And yet I am galvanized by her sheer aliveness.

Spinoza spoke of vitality as the purest virtue, the only virtue. The drive to persist, to flourish, he said, is the absolute quality shared by all living beings. What happens, however, when vitality grows so powerful that Spinoza’s virtue is inverted, and instead of flourishing, one is driven to eat oneself alive?

With renewed force I grasp on to what I am certain is the answer to this question: drugs. Some havoc-wreaking speed-ball has invaded Sally’s bloodstream, prompting a seizure of violent—and, most important, temporary—proportions.

Troubling as this explanation is, under its shield Sally’s delusion takes on a less malignant cast. My learning-disabled daughter believes she is a genius. Believes all people are geniuses, if we can just reignite the infant fires within us. Not an outrageous notion. The Balinese believe that during our first six months we are literally gods, after which our divinity dissipates, and what is left is a mere human being. And to the gnostics we’re deities who made the mistake of falling in love with Nature, which is why we spend our lives yearning to recapture a state we only vaguely recall. What is Sally’s vision if not the expression of that yearning? She has returned to her idealized instant of existence, before diagnostic tests and “special needs,” before “processing deficits” and personality evaluation—before the word “average” came to denote a pinnacle beyond attainment. She has voided her past, renounced the corruption of influence, turned her back on divorce, betrayal, her mother, me…and who can blame her?

Sally’s sitting on the living room floor, her arms wrapped around her ankles, her head on her knees, shaking slightly, but momentarily quiet. Taking advantage of the lull, I motion Pat to the bedroom where we can talk without being overheard. Here, I lay out my thoughts. Surely we can understand Sally’s need to pump up her ego. Psychiatric literature is filled with such cases: low self-esteem bubbling up in a froth of exaggerated self-regard. Allowing for the distorting effects of the drugs she has obviously ingested, might not her enthusiasm be indicative of a healthy desire for emotional balance?

“If we can just get her to calm down, all this will pass, I’m sure of it. She’ll be back to her old self again.”

“We may have to ask ourselves who Sally’s ‘old self’ really is,” says Pat.

The blank incredulity of her voice stuns me. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not going to like hearing this, but Cass didn’t seem stoned to me. And I don’t think Sally is either. Even if she did take something, it would have to have been at least ten hours ago. Shouldn’t the effects be wearing off?”

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror through the open bathroom door: two strings of flesh hang from my cheek where Sally scratched me.

“I have to tell you, I called Arnold,” says Pat, referring to the Reichian therapist who treated her after she was hit in the leg by a car and her career as a dancer abruptly ended. “He had one piece of advice: ‘Take her to the nearest emergency room.’”

The significance of Arnold’s advice isn’t lost on me, especially in light of his weekly radio show where he voices, among other things, his skepticism toward psychotropic drugs and the biomedical-minded psychiatric establishment. I’ve heard Arnold call “mental illness” a social myth invented to silence a potentially subversive sector of the population.

“I thought he disapproved of emergency rooms.”

“Not in the case of acute psychosis.”

Acute psychosis. The phrase shocks me. By comparison “mental illness” sounds benign. I splash my face with water; a few pale drops of blood swirl down the drain. Then there’s a ruckus as the front door flies open, Pat gives a yell, and the two of us are running down the stairs after Sally.

We catch up to her on Bank Street, speedwalking west with a forward headlong tilt. She is going to the Sunshine Cafe, she explains in answer to our repeated questions, people are already gathered there, soaking in the light, waiting for her to come back as she promised.

She turns down the narrow cobblestone alley near Charles Street and, trotting to keep up with her, I have the powerful sense of having veered out of time, into some luridly accurate painting by Bosch or Brueghel: Two Fools Chasing Madness through the streets of some walled medieval town.

A minute later we’re in front of the Sunshine Cafe, a dingy lunch joint flanked on one side by a flophouse that has been converted to a hospice for people with AIDS, on the other by a pornographic bookstore with a sign in its window announcing a final liquidation sale. “Everything Must Go!” On the disintegrating pier across West Street a half dozen sunbathers are precariously sprawled.

As soon as we enter the cafe, the guy behind the counter rolls his eyes at the ceiling, like he’s had the displeasure of dealing with us before. Then he proceeds conspicuously to ignore us. Sally zeroes in on the only customer in the place, a mild-looking man with a crew cut and leather minishorts, quietly working through a plate of chicken Caesar salad. She sits down and projects her face right up to him. What has brought you today to the Sunshine Cafe?

“To meet a friend, I hope.”

She grips his naked, tattooed arm. “You’ve already found a friend. I am your friend.”

He squirms away from her, startled, then visibly recoils.

Sally reads the opposite message: she thinks he’s hanging on her every word. She gives him a stretched, strangely distant smile. Before she has the chance to launch into him, however, the man behind the counter intervenes.

“Get her outa here. I don’t want to see her fucking face again.”

I absorb the shock of seeing her through his cold glare: a pariah. My heart sinks. Our neighbor Lou, this summary eviction from the Sunshine Cafe…I remember a legend of Solomon: outwitted by a demon, he is thrown out of Jerusalem and the demon takes over as king. Solomon is forced to beg for food, insisting he is really the king of Israel. People take him for mad. They mock and shun him. He sleeps in dark corners, alone, his clothes filthy and torn.

With Pat’s help I try to coax Sally toward the door. She shoots me a murderous look and orders me to be quiet. But she doesn’t turn violent. She allows us to lead her out of the cafe, and we reverse our steps through the hot Village streets, Sally between us now, gesturing imperiously like a captured monarch on a forced march.

We resume our helpless positions in the apartment, shiny with sweat, heat oozing through the ceiling in an almost visible shimmer. Sally, are you hungry? Do you want to lie down? Would you like me to read to you? My voice sounds far away and strange, as if by dint of some self-soothing illusion I have set the clock back to when she was two years old. With each question I await a response, the slightest indication that whatever spell she is under has broken and she is the child I know again. Each time, however, her otherness is reaffirmed. It is as if the real Sally has been kidnapped, and here in her place is a demon, like Solomon’s, who has appropriated her body. The ancient superstition of possession! How else to come to grips with this grotesque transformation?

Another hour passes. The day feels more and more unreal. I keep waiting for some kind of spontaneous remission—the hypnotist’s snapped finger, as it were—but the likelihood of this happening seems increasingly remote. A hermetic silence surrounds us. It is as if we have been struck mute. But the mute have signs, a system of shared meaning. In the most profound sense Sally and I are strangers: we have no common language. Everything is gobbled up in the iron jaw of her fixation; there is no reality apart from it. She’s gone away like the dead, leaving this false shell of herself to talk at me in an invented dialect only it can understand.

“People get up-set when they feel set up. Do you feel set up, Father?”

Her voice pierces me like a dart. She is flushed, beautiful, unfathomably soulless.

“I’m proud of you, Father. There’s so much to cry about. So very much.”

Only when I feel the wet sting in the scratched grooves on my cheek do I comprehend what she is referring to: she thinks I am shedding tears of joy at her epiphanies; that I have embraced her vision; that thanks to her I too have been saved.

By late afternoon there is nothing left to do but follow Arnold’s advice and take Sally to the hospital. Far from resisting this plan, as I expect her to, she greets it with a swell of optimism as if we’re about to embark on a long-postponed adventure. She’ll be able to “share” her discoveries with people who are versed in such matters, experts who will understand. So we’re down the stairs again and scurrying along Bank Street, the neighborhood’s eyes on Sally as she broadcasts her crack-up, engaging all comers, discordant and wired.

At the Bleecker Street playground she stops, grips the bars of the wrought iron fence, and with peculiar severity contemplates the children within. She seems mesmerized as she watches them run through the sprinkler, dig in the sandbox, circle one another in their plastic cars. Her breath is shallow, quick, her eyes glossy and, for the moment, immensely sad. Sad beyond her capacity to recognize sadness (“Glory in miseria,” Robert Lowell called it, writing of his own abysmal elation), what I would come to know as the mixed state experienced by those in the throes of dystopic mania.

Adjacent to the playground is a small square with seventeen silver linden trees rising fifty feet and higher from what must be the deepest tree pits in the Village. The leaves of these lindens weave a roof so thick over the square the sun can’t get through, even in July. It’s as dark as a cave in there, and perpetually cool, a haven for can gatherers and anyone else in need of a place to curl up and be left alone. A half dozen bodies lie fetally on the benches, while others rummage through plastic sacks, change their clothes, fry sausages on portable burners, drink liquor concoctions with names like Tequiza and Pink Lady, all with an air of bedroom leisure, radios playing low, ripe odors rolling out from under the trees.

As I ungrip Sally’s hand from the playground fence, a woman from the square wanders over. I’ve seen her before, on my way to the bank, the subway, her sea lion body sheathed in dirt, a protective armor against sadists and thieves. I go to put a coin in her outstretched hand, then see she isn’t begging for money: sitting in her palm is a dead sparrow, its tiny brown claws pointing straight up at the sky. I flinch involuntarily, while with a contradictory lurch my heart goes out to her. I look in her eyes: two shiny shellacked stones, at the center of a world that to her is the only world. How unknowable we are! I start to say something to her but the chasm between us seems impassably huge.

Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word “schizophrenia”) once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they’re strangers to us, what are we to them?

Indignant, Sally hisses the woman away. “Don’t let her bother you, Father, she’s totally out of her mind.”

         

After sweating it out for a while in the hospital ER, with the kidney stone, the detoxer, the rollerblader with a chipped bone, we’re summoned into one of a series of partitioned modules.

“Let me do the talking,” orders Sally, confident that the admitting nurse will grasp the importance of her message in a way Pat and I cannot. She starts out in the lecturing tone of a schoolmarm, primly smoothing the creases in her dress: the parody of a woman in control. Within seconds, however, speech shatters like a dropped glass.

“Are you this girl’s father?” asks the nurse.

“Yes—yes I am.”

“Go through those doors and make a left. Take seats in one of the examination rooms. An empty one, of course.”

Following her directions, we enter a brightly painted wing, strips of yellow crepe paper strung across the ceiling, Berenstain Bears cavorting on the walls. Pediatric ER.

We find an examination room and sit tight, Sally curled up on the padded table, her head in Pat’s lap, as if trying to endure the fibrillation of her brain without imploding. Afraid. Frayed. Why are you so a-frayed? she keeps asking. I repeatedly tell her I’m not afraid. Then the logic of her insistence dawns on me: she wants me to be afraid for her. I am custodian for the terror that the hollow exuberance of her mania won’t allow her to feel. This exuberance, I begin to understand, is the opposite of the truth. She is beleaguered by certitude because she is certain of nothing. She thinks she’s eloquent, when she can’t put together a coherent sentence. She demands control because, in some interstice of her psyche, she knows she is hurtling out of control.

This realization brings me closer to her. I can’t witness her disintegrations without somehow taking part in them, and, closing my eyes, I feel myself racing too, as if her flutter has lodged inside me. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” she says in an almost casual whisper. Pat whispers something in return, gently stroking her hair. The gesture seems to soothe the agitated solitariness that, it’s increasingly clear, is her chief terror. Sally’s need to feel understood is like one’s need for air. (Isn’t this everyone’s struggle? To recruit others to our version of reality? To persuade? To be seen for what we think we are?) I envy Pat’s ability to make her temporarily believe she has penetrated her mind, but I couldn’t do it myself. I don’t want to enter her world, I want to yank her back into mine.

         

A very young doctor peeks in, talks with us for about fifteen seconds, and rushes off. “I’ve paged the psychiatric resident. She’s on her way over.”

Another forty minutes drag by. Pasty light pours down from long tubes in the ceiling. The protective paper on the examination table is shredded from Sally’s tossing.

The psychiatric resident arrives: short, early thirties, her eyeglasses held together with tape. She politely asks us to leave so she can interview Sally in private.

After five minutes she emerges and leads me to a tiny windowless room, a supply closet really, crammed with IV bags, exam gloves, sterile pads, soap refills…We sit facing each other on folding chairs, our knees almost touching.

When did I first notice Sally was acting strangely? I tell her about her recent insomniac nights, her poem about “the great breath of hell,” and the kicked garbage can yesterday morning. “She wasn’t incoherent yet, you understand.” And then, uncomfortably aware of how unobservant I must sound: “I have a high tolerance for aberrant behavior, I suppose.” I immediately regret that statement too. My every utterance, I fear, will incriminate me further. But for what crime exactly?

“It’s not unusual,” says the resident, “for this kind of illness to break very suddenly into the open like a fever. When it happens, it’s shocking, I can imagine how you must feel.” I give her a grateful look, but our physical proximity makes eye contact awkward. “Sally’s condition has probably been building for a while, gathering strength until it just overwhelmed her.”

When I ask what this “condition” is, she gives a pallid smile. “What we call Sally’s disease is not what’s important right now. Certainly many of the criteria for bipolar 1 are here. But fifteen is relatively early for fulminating mania to present itself. What I do know is your daughter is very ill. I strongly recommend she be admitted so she can get the treatment she needs.”

“To the psych ward?”

She nods curtly and I immediately feel myself balking. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, I’ve had my heart set on a last-minute reprieve. My first line of defense, drugs, has crumbled, but why not a rare metabolic disorder, like King George’s porphyria, that could be routed by a strict dietary regime? Or a glandular imbalance, the chaos of conversion that marks a girl’s fifteenth year? To hear the actual verdict is crushing. But how final is it? How can she accurately make such a judgment about Sally in the space of five minutes, as if she were diagnosing a case of strep throat or bronchitis?

The resident excuses herself and returns a few seconds later with a sheaf of photocopied papers, which she hands to me.

“Since your daughter is under eighteen we’ll need your consent to admit her.”

She unclips a pen from her side pocket—“Risperdal” it says, the latest antipsychotic medication—and hands that to me too.

Each page is marked with an X where I am to sign my name. But if I do what will it mean? I can’t conceive of Sally as a mental patient; my mind refuses to accept it. I have an idea of the treatment she’ll undergo—a powerful narcoleptic cocktail, chemotherapy of the brain. I’ve seen the result of this cocktail, we all have. I can’t imagine Sally being blunted like that: staring at the world from behind a scratched shield of plastic, the bulletproof kind you see in liquor stores and cabs.

“Give me a minute, Doctor.”

“Take all the time you need.”

I return to the examination room to talk it over with Pat, still hoping to figure out a way to take Sally home. A nurse is drawing her blood. When she removes the needle a single drop falls on Sally’s dress: an oblong crimson stain. “Look what you’ve done! Clean this up! Clean it off me! Now!” She pushes the hem of her dress under the nurse’s nose, evidence of her heinous crime. Her expression is homicidal, as if this blood were a smear of shit corrupting everything she’s been crusading for, her purity, her vision, instantly defiled. She is trembling wildly. What Sally has been experiencing, I realize, is a fragile and horrendous triumph over doubt, and this stain somehow has brought this “triumph” into question. It’s the crash to come, the worm in her rose, threatening her florid bloom. And Sally won’t have it.

“Get it off me!” she cries as if her life depends on it.

“Clean it yourself, sweetheart,” says the nurse. Unfazed, she drops a tube of Sally’s blood in her pocket and walks out the door.

Pat removes a paper towel from the metal dispenser on the wall, wets it, and rubs at the stain, thickening it into a pale watery blob.

Sally continues screaming.

I snap at her to shut up.

Pat raises her head, questioning, frazzled. What do we do now?

Sally looks at me for a split second as if she doesn’t know who I am. Then, without warning, her voice goes soft and operatically tragic. With broad, exaggerated strokes she caresses my cheek with the back of her hand. “Poor, poor Father. Trying to get back your lost genius. When all you had to do was come to me. It was right here, under your nose.” And she bursts into tears.

         

Accepting the truth, I complete the consent forms and thank the resident for bearing with me. No problem, she says. Just give the administrator your insurance card.

My insurance card. In the upheavals of the day I had avoided thinking about this detail: Pat recently left her teaching job and our insurance has lapsed. With no apparent catastrophe on the horizon (didn’t we know catastrophe is always on the horizon?), we have been shopping for a provider for months. On a shelf in our apartment a pile of benefit booklets is gathering dust.

“No coverage? Nothing?” asks the administrator.

I turn to the resident. “Whatever the bill comes to, I’ll pay it. I give you my word.”

“Apparently your word is all you can give me.”

She half turns from me, shivers slightly, and confers with another resident: male, also young. I feel like a fish wrapped in yesterday’s want ads as he looks me over. I repeat my vow—I’ll pay every penny—with stentorian sincerity this time. I hold their eyes: I’m a stand-up guy, a good father who happened to get caught in a temporary insurance gap…

She snaps the Risperdal pen, signs the forms, and, with an audible intake of breath, walks briskly away.

         

The ambulance is waiting, an unnecessary extravagance. Pat and I could easily take Sally in a cab to the psychiatric clinic ten blocks away. Now that she is officially a patient, however, standard procedure kicks in. (Add five hundred bucks to my tab.)

While the paramedics strap her to the gurney, Sally races on about her epiphanies, the piercing nature of light, the lightness of light, the genius in us all…

The medics lift the gurney into the ambulance and lock it down. Mummy-strapped, staring at the roof of the van, she is festive and reassured. Pat and I climb in after her. It’s 2:14 A.M. The street is so still I can hear the East River, about a hundred feet away, rushing against the concrete embankment. The doors swing shut.

We glide cozily over the deserted East Side streets, no siren, no traffic laws, a thick moonless night. The ambulance pulls up at an undistinguished white brick building, squeezed between two similar 1960s eyesores. The building jogs my memory: I have the odd sense that I’ve been here before, but I can’t place when or why.

On the fifth floor we’re passed through two solid steel doors, each with a tiny rectangular eye slit. A double-locked ward.

A skeletal night crew is on duty, all female, a tight cabal. Ignoring Pat and me, they instantly take possession of Sally. They have the drill down to the minutest detail. Physical contact: minimal. Tone: brusque, commanding, but not unkind. Any authority I may have had is annulled; she belongs to them now. If the resident’s tendency was to exonerate us for Sally’s illness on biomedical grounds, the nurses seem to view us as vectors of instability: parental failures at best, at worst suspects for mental illness ourselves. My anxious, competing claim over Sally clearly annoys them. As far as they’re concerned, the sooner we get out of their ward, the better they’ll be able to do their job.

They usher Sally into a tiny shoebox of a room. A gated window, disproportionately large, looms over a narrow bed: a surrealist painting in which the dream is enormous, the dreamer inconsequentially small. I start to follow them into the room, when one of the nurses bars me with an unequivocal gesture and shuts the door. I am reminded of my stint, some years ago, as a Spanish–English interpreter at Manhattan Criminal Court. When the officers took custody of a remanded defendant, they did so with a peculiar solicitude very much like that of these nurses: careful not to damage what they have no particular feeling for.

Pat and I wait uselessly in the hallway. The place is quiet, dozens of patients sleeping their medicated sleep behind rows of beige doors. On the wall near the nurse’s station hangs an erasable white board with patients’ privileges posted on it. D can go out to smoke (Level 3). R can eat at a restaurant with a visiting relative (Level 5). M is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. The video tomorrow will be A Fish Called Wanda.

Sally emerges from her room in a thin hospital gown, snap buttons, no laces or ties. She suddenly looks ageless. The only other time I’ve seen her in a hospital was the night she was born. By that point in our marriage her mother and I were like two people drinking alone in a bar. Not hostile, just miles apart. Yet when Sally appeared a huge optimism came over us, a physical optimism, primitive and momentarily blind. She was her own truth, complete to herself, so beautifully formed that the jaded maternity nurses marveled at what perfection had just slid into the world.

Though she has never set foot in a psychiatric hospital, there is the tacit sense from Sally that these women understand her, she is where she belongs. She acts as if a great burden has been lifted from her. At the same time she is more elevated than ever: feral, glitter-eyed. In 1855 a friend of Robert Schumann observed him at the piano in an asylum near Bonn: “like a machine whose springs are broken, but which still tries to work, jerking convulsively.” Sally appears to be heading toward this maimed point of perpetual motion. Her sole concern is to get her pen back, which has been confiscated with most of her other belongings—belt, matches, shoelaces, keys, anything with glass, and her comb with half its teeth snapped off by her potent hair. She initiates an agitated negotiation with the nurses which immediately threatens to boil over into a serious scene. The nurses confer like referees after a disputed call. Then they grant her a felt-tip marker and march her back to her room.

With assurances that we’ll be permitted to visit her tomorrow, they give us the bum’s rush through the double-locked doors.

In the lobby, I again experience the sensation of having been in this building before, but the memory squirts away before I can grasp it.

         

Back at Bank Street the air conditioner won’t work: I forgot to buy fuses. Pat undresses, lies down on our bed. I lie down beside her, close my eyes, then immediately sit up, my blood pounding.

Wide awake, I go into the living room. The apartment feels like the shadow of a home, provisional, funky, bearing the merest imprint of our lives. The windows are rotted; last winter one of the panes fell out like a bad tooth, narrowly missing a man who was dropping his clothes off at the laundromat five flights below. After discovering the wood was too decrepit to accept glazing putty, I reinforced each pane with duct tape. The place is literally bandaged.

Our tenancy is just as precarious. In exchange for my below-market rent, I fulfill various duties for the building’s owner, such as keeping an eye out for boiler breakdowns and appearing at city agencies in response to code violations or overdue tax bills. I am forbidden to substantially improve the apartment or even to introduce a few new sticks of furniture—the owner’s theory being that to do so might cause us to start thinking of it as our permanent home. He’s a friend from high school, the owner, and our Byzantine housing arrangement is the kind that New York is famous for—antiregulatory in spirit rather than outright illegal. The price of my freelancer’s ticket. But at what price to Sally? I have done a poor job of concealing my anxieties, living at the whim of a man who can, by our own agreement, evict us tomorrow.

Surely she has internalized this instability at the very center of our lives.

I keep picturing her in the hospital, in that gown, gripping the felt-tip pen she fought for. The resident was right, we didn’t have a choice. Yet I can’t stop thinking of her as a prisoner on that locked ward, where I put her.

         

James Joyce’s daughter Lucia once told him that the reason she was mentally ill was that he had given her no morale. “How can I give you something I don’t have myself?” was Joyce’s mournful reply. Lucia had been variously diagnosed with schizophrenia and rapid cycling mania, but Joyce insisted that her mental distortions were nothing more than the growing pains of a gifted girl. With a gullibility that may be interpreted as an attempt to protect them both from the truth, he accepted whatever she told him at face value, once going so far as to ban every male visitor from his home because Lucia accused them—all of them—of trying to seduce her.

One day at the Gare du Nord in Paris it became impossible to continue ignoring that something was seriously wrong. With their bags already loaded onto the train, Lucia launched into an unprovoked tantrum, screaming at the top of her lungs for forty-five minutes while her parents looked helplessly on. Shortly after, at a party in her honor, she collapsed on a sofa, where she remained for days, open-eyed and catatonic. She threw furniture at her mother, Nora, the main recipient of her wrath. She sent telegrams to dead people, lit her room on fire, and would disappear into the streets for days.

Joyce was merciless in blaming himself for her troubles. Lucia, he believed, was the victim of his monomaniacal existence. He had dragged her around Europe, living in a succession of tiny apartments and hotels, turning her into a woman without language or settled home—a rootless, polyglot soul. A feature of her psychosis was a penchant for speaking in neologisms and puns that added up to an incomprehensible, almost infantile babble. No one could understand what she said. Except Joyce. He listened to her attentively, responding with the utmost seriousness and respect, seeming to enter the garbled workings of her mind with an intuitive sympathy that often left others bewildered and embarrassed.

An irresistible notion took hold of him: that his work on Finnegans Wake had infiltrated his daughter’s brain and deranged her. He had conceived Finnegans Wake as a novel of the unconscious night (as opposed to the day of Ulysses), a novel of nocturnal wordplay and associations that might come as close as literature can to the sealed world of psychosis, without itself being insane. Surely this had precipitated Lucia’s cryptic utterances. “Whatever spark of gift I possess,” he said bitterly, “has been transmitted to her and has kindled a fire in her brain.”

His superstition was rooted in the almost telepathic empathy between them. He instinctively understood the scorched loneliness of Lucia’s condition. Madness wrenches us from the common language of life, the language that Joyce too had departed from, or surpassed. We all fear at some point that “our” world and “the” world are hopelessly estranged. Psychosis is the fulfillment of that fear. One is reminded of the manic patient in a lie detector test who was asked if he was Napoleon. “No,” he replied. The lie detector recorded that he was lying. Joyce’s immersion in the workings of Lucia’s mind was an attempt to rescue her from that double lie, an attempt to show her that he too spoke her language. If he spoke it then how could she be insane, or alone?

Guiltily, Joyce reversed the equation of their relationship, turning Lucia into the superior one. “Her intuitions are amazing,” he remarked, though he alone was capable of deciphering them. She was “a vessel of election,” an innovator, foreshadowing a new literature.

It was his last line of defense against hopelessness. In 1936, when Lucia was twenty-nine, she was carried away in a straitjacket. Joyce visited her at the hospital every Sunday, trying to cheer her up with presents and Latin phrases. But his heart was broken. His drinking increased beyond his habitual wine in the evening; now it was Pernod in the afternoon. On several occasions his wife Nora walked out on him. He begged her to stay, weeping. “I feel like an animal who has received four thunderous mallet strokes on the top of the skull,” he said. “There are moments and hours when I have nothing in my heart but rage and despair, a blind man’s rage and despair.”

He couldn’t sleep, and when he did he had nightmares, bolting awake as if he were “wound up and then suddenly shooting out of the water like a fish.” For a brief time he thought that he too was hearing voices. “I can see nothing but a dark wall in front of me,” he wrote, “a dark wall or a precipice if you prefer, physically, morally, materially.”

He had spent three-quarters of his royalties from Ulysses searching for Lucia’s cure, coddling her with the most extravagant gestures, responding to one of her episodes with a 4,000-franc fur coat, because fur, Joyce believed, possessed mysterious healing powers. On another occasion he secretly paid for the publication of a book to which she had supplied illustrations, so she might not feel that her life had been wasted.

“Altogether, believe me,” he wrote her, “there are still some beautiful things in this poor old world.” Then, scolding her for her inertia: “Why do you always sit at the window? No doubt it makes a pretty picture but a girl walking in the fields also makes a pretty picture.”

Informed of his death, in 1941, Lucia said: “What is he doing under the ground that idiot? When will he decide to come out? He’s watching us all the time.”

         

At first light a car alarm starts squalling on Bank Street. On the neighboring roof an elderly man in a woman’s swimsuit is lying belly up on a towel.

A little after 6 A.M. the phone rings.

“You motherfucker! Arrogant prick! I hate you. You and your fucking family. I hope you die!”

It is my brother Steve. He slams down the phone. I was supposed to meet him yesterday evening at the supermarket, our weekly rendezvous to buy his ration of food.

I dial his number. He lets it ring nine, maybe ten times before answering.

“Don’t ever call me like that again,” I tell him.

“I’m sorry, Mikey.”

“I got held up. It was beyond my control. Answer me, Steve, how many times have I stood you up?”

“Just this once. This is the first time.”

“The first time. In two years.”

“You’re the best, Mikey.”

“The supermarket opens at eight-thirty. I’ll see you there.”

“You’re the greatest, Mikey. The greatest brother in the world.”

         

I’m still waiting for Steve outside the supermarket at ten to nine, gnawed by the fear that he and Sally are alike, that their conditions are connected in some hereditary way that will eventually make itself clear. But what is Steve’s “condition”? He never had a full-blown crack-up like Sally’s; and he’s never been given a definitive diagnosis either. They called him “schizoid” in the sixties, “borderline” in the eighties…“Chronically maladjusted” is the term now for his hopeless middle age. I don’t know anymore. I never knew. Five years older than me, he’s been disqualified from social acceptance since I can remember. Maybe it was how he arrived in the world: a shoteh, as the Talmud would call him, a mental invalid, the responsibility of his tribe.

He finally shows up at five past nine. He isn’t usually this late, but I’m too numb to scold him. All I can think of is Sally. Can this be a version of my daughter in thirty years? Arguing against the possibility, I keep returning to the glaring differences between them; but what if those differences are just varied presentations of the same disease? He looks in worse shape than last week. There are cigarette lighter burns on the tips of his fingers, his T-shirt is dirty and torn. On his cheeks are a series of tiny brownish bumps. When I ask him what they are, he says, “Insects, bugs. They burrow under my skin, mooching off me, Mikey, mooching!” As his caretaker I should be attentive to these problems. But I’ve witnessed his phobias for so long I don’t know how to gauge their seriousness. Nor do I want to right now.

He plunges into the supermarket and commandeers a shopping cart, steering it to the aisle where the tea is displayed. Steve’s weekly ration consists of one hundred bags of Lipton’s (always Lipton’s), which he steeps in a thirty-two-ounce pickle jar, five bags at a time.

He scans the shelves and hesitates for a moment; then it hits him that Lipton’s is out of stock. His lower lip slumps out, a crinkled pouch of disappointment.

“They knew I was coming. They knew it and they took it off the shelves.”

“Who did?”

“The people who work here for fuck’s sake! They saw you waiting outside for me and that tipped them off. So they took it off the fucking shelves.”

“Steve, look at that guy.” I indicate the man in the next aisle, crouching over a shipment of pet food, stocking the shelves. “He’s not thinking about you. He’s got his own problems.”

I can feel him churning, fortified to reject any attempt by me to contradict his suspicions.

“We’re in luck,” I say, “they have Tetley’s. Tetley’s is good too.” Tetley’s, I assure him, employs the same growers as Lipton’s, in the mountains of India and Sri Lanka, entire villages devoted to supplying these giant buyers with tea. “The two brands are completely alike. Believe me, you’re not being shortchanged.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” I lie. “I read it in the New York Times.”

“Okay, forget it. Just fucking forget it!” He seizes a box of Tetley’s and throws it into his cart.

I follow him through the supermarket while he chooses the rest of his staples: eggs, bread, fruit, soup, a tin of Captain Black tobacco. In Aisle 4 he wraps his fist around a container of Advil. “You gotta get this for me, Mikey, I’m in such pain. It’s my tongue. It feels like a blanket in a washing machine, swishing around, all heavy and wet. It’s driving me crazy.”

I’ve heard this complaint before. The swishing tongue, tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of thirty years of chlorpromazine and its various pharmaceutical descendants. Nevertheless, I refuse; Advil won’t help. And the last time he had some he took twice the maximum daily dosage.

We pay for the groceries and go back outside, air conditioners dribbling stale water from their window berths, the river simmering two blocks away, the Village like some choked backwater town. Seething about the Advil I wouldn’t buy him, Steve rests his shopping bags on the pavement. He removes his baseball cap, its inner seam dark with sweat. His skin is papery and yellow. There’s a black hole where an upper front tooth used to be. His jeans are stiff with grime. Looking at him, I remember the boy who would sit for hours in his darkened bedroom two steps down the hall from mine. He was more delicate than the rest of us brothers, with his fair coloring and large timorous eyes. I remember being infatuated with his almost reptilian stillness. But what was behind such stillness in a young, otherwise healthy boy?

“We’ve got to wash your clothes,” I say. And though I know he’ll spend it on Advil, or malt liquor, or some broken toaster oven for sale on the street, I give him twenty bucks for the Laundromat.

Steve looks glumly at the money, twisting the plastic handles of his grocery bags around his fingers.

“Remember Dad used to say I couldn’t hack it with people because I never tried? Well, I’m trying now, little brother, I’m trying to hack it. You’ll see.”

He shoots me a parting smile, picks up the bags, and rushes away up Hudson Street, his eyes darting around as if he’s being pursued.

I watch him go, wondering what he means by those words, yet not wanting to find out. I’ll shop for him again next week. It’s almost eleven now. Visiting hours at the psych ward are in an hour.

         

I return to our apartment. Pat sits at the table, sipping coffee. She looks exhausted, concerned.

“I tried to get Sally on the phone,” she says. “They wouldn’t let me talk to her.”

“Was she asleep?”

“They wouldn’t say.”

She has packed a bag for Sally: pajamas, a toothbrush, shampoo, slippers…the first innocent necessities of her confinement.

We hail a cab and arrive at the clinic, patients and hospital workers smoking in self-segregated clusters outside the front door. 11:50. Ten minutes till visiting hours begin. We wait in the lobby: gray linoleum floor, Van Gogh sunflowers on the walls. At twelve o’clock sharp a large family of Hasidic Jews comes through, a bearded man leading the way, the knotted strings of his prayer shawl hanging out of his shirt. He nods to the guard and they pile into the elevator, laden with bags of food.

Pat and I start to follow them, but the guard stops us. “We’re here to see our daughter,” I tell him. “Sally Greenberg. She was admitted last night.”

He ducks into a small alcove and makes a call on the house phone. Then he turns to us. “You can’t go up right now. Someone will be down to explain. Wait here.”

We wait, standing, until the elevator disgorges a sturdily built woman, keys hanging from a leather cord around her neck, and a pin in the lapel of her jacket: “Local 1199,” hospital workers union, one of the toughest in the city.

“Sally can’t have visitors today,” she informs us. “She’s too agitated. She needs time to calm down.”

“But we were promised we’d be able to see her.” I feel myself enter a delayed, almost frozen zone. We’ve entrusted her to the wrong people, we don’t know what they’re doing to her, they don’t want us to know…“We were promised…last night…when we signed her into the ward. If there had been any doubt we never would have—”

“I didn’t promise nothing. I wasn’t on duty last night. Like I said, she needs more time.”

“How much time?”

“That’s up to the doctor.”

She stands with her legs planted firmly, arms crossed over her keys, the guard right behind her, in family management mode, ready for a scene.

“Then let us speak with the doctor.”

“I’ll see what I can do. It’s a holiday weekend, a lot of the staff are off.”

She presses the elevator call button and the doors rattle open at once. An empty box. We follow her ascent on the panel. Fifth floor, Sally’s ward, a hidden world from which we are suddenly barred.

I sit down, stunned, the guard watching me out of the corner of his eye, as more visitors wander in: a young Asian couple, upright and handsome; a late-middle-aged hipster; a forlorn woman in a gold linen suit…They’re all allowed upstairs. We’re the only ones shut out. I try to picture Sally’s ward: the double-locked steel doors, her shoebox of a room, the erasable board with each patient’s status: Sally Greenberg. No Privileges. No Visitors. Level Zero. At the nadir of madness.

Finally the doctor comes down, late forties, with the vague air of futility that I would come to recognize in many psychiatrists who have been at it for a while. He explains that he’s only filling in for the weekend, long-term decisions about Sally’s diagnosis and treatment will be made when regular staff returns to work on Tuesday. Then he answers our primary question, our only question really.

“She’s in isolation. What we call the Quiet Room.”

“You mean you’ve locked her up,” says Pat.

“She’s not unsupervised. Staff looks in on her every fifteen minutes. It’s for her own good.” Appearing to wince at the cliché, he sits down next to us on the edge of a chair, less officious than sad, an old hand at delivering bad news. “As soon as she works through her current phase she’ll be permitted to join the other patients. That may require a few days, or only a couple of hours. I wish I could be more exact.”

Permitted. Required. The language of punishment. Of custodianship. My heart sinks. How much worse than last night can she be? Where is the end point? My daughter in isolation, that ancient place of confinement, descendant of dungeons and barred holes in the ground. My only recourse is to revoke my consent to hold her. But can we really take Sally home? I imagine Pat and me marching her through the lobby, into a cab. Then what? We have no isolation room, no training, no sedatives or meds…The blunt weight of the fact stops me cold: we need this place.

I ask for the chance to see her. “Not a visit,” I explain, “just to look at her, to assure ourselves she’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, policy won’t allow it.” He shrugs ambiguously, lowers his eyes. “You may find this hard to believe, but you’re doing the right thing. The only thing. Sally’s a young girl. People can take advantage of her in her current state. They might get the wrong idea. If she were my daughter I’d be giving her the exact same treatment.” He moves toward the elevator, detaching himself from our despair—clinical, not cruel, an act of self-preservation. “Eventually the medication will start doing what it’s supposed to do,” he says, and rides back up to the ward.

Pat looks stricken, but steeled, fighting back tears. We agree not to leave. What if they decide to let us see her and we’re not here?

We walk around the block to kill time. A nondescript street on the eastern edge of the Manhattan grid, indistinguishable from those around it. A woman enters a dry-cleaning store, presents the man behind the counter with a red ticket, and is handed a box wrapped with string, containing her blouse neatly folded perhaps, a laundered gift to herself, spotless and renewed.

When we return, nothing has changed. Visitors are leaving: the Hasidic family, the hipster. A few patients shuffle out for a smoke, the privileged ones, as I think of them, heavy-eyed, out of focus, like smudged photographs of themselves.

The nurse with the union pin comes down on her break, unexpectedly sympathetic now, as if we have passed some kind of preliminary trial. “Take it easy on yourselves, really, go home. You can always call. Just ask for Cynthia Phillips, I’ll let you know how she’s getting along.”

Pat hands her Sally’s night bag, a meager thing, yet for the time being our only point of contact.

“I’ll see that she gets it. But you two go easy. You look like hell. She’s going to need you, that girl.”

Back at Bank Street I call Sally’s mother and give her the news.

“No! You didn’t put her away, Michael. You didn’t!”

Put her away. The phrase has its impact. I remember it as a threat from childhood, usually directed at my brother Steve: We’ll have to put you away. Do you want to be put away? Like some unwanted household object, I used to think, that for vague reasons of moral attachment can’t be discarded outright.

“It’s a hospital, Robin. There was no choice. She’s very sick.” I try to give her a sense of the past twenty-four hours, but how can I accurately convey the extent of Sally’s transformation? Robin can’t seem to follow me or fathom what I’m saying. And why should she? I wouldn’t be able to fathom it either, our daughter suddenly out of reach, locked away with the severest cases, in some haunted place where we’re not allowed.

I hear laughter in the background, Robin’s husband good-naturedly scolding their dog. I imagine them sitting barefoot, on the back steps of their farmhouse.

“Michael, listen to me. Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Sally is having an experience, Michael, I’m sure of it, this isn’t a sickness. She’s a highly spiritual girl, I’m not the only one who says so, I have friends, psychically sensitive friends, who have met her and they say the same. One friend told me the heat radiating from Sally was more than she could bear. She never felt anything like it. And she’s not a fake, Michael, I know what you’re thinking, she’s just a person like you or me with a gift for seeing what most of us can’t. What’s happening right now is a necessary phase in Sally’s evolution, her journey toward a higher realm.”

Her evolution. Her journey. I wanted to believe this too, in my way, when she was shivering with her Sonnets, awake all night. I wanted to believe in her breakthrough, her victory, the delayed efflorescence of her mind. But how does one tell the difference between Plato’s “divine madness” and gibberish? between enthousiasmos (literally, to be inspired by a god) and lunacy? between the prophet and the “medically mad”?

Though I sense Robin wants to get off the phone, I prolong our conversation. “It’s so beautiful here,” she says, “so perfectly still. The mountains are like smoke. I’m starting to paint again.” Her voice is like Sally’s before all this began; their similar stops and inflections give me the odd feeling of being in contact with her. A momentary illusion.

I fall asleep on the couch, then wake up with a rush as if I’ve been shot from a cannon. I keep seeing Sally as a child, her tenacity, her warmth, her brushfire temper that I used to regard with exasperation—and sometimes with awe. Then the holding pen, the dungeon, where the maniac is restrained. Isolated behind a third locked door. Separated even from those who have been locked away from the world.

Pat wanders in from the bedroom, also unable to sleep. We sit together in the dark.

“Has she changed so completely or is it that I never knew her?” I wonder.

“You knew her,” says Pat. “You still know her. She isn’t gone.”

I keep asking myself the obvious question, the helpless question. How did this happen? And why? One has cancer or AIDS, but one is schizophrenic, one is manic-depressive, as if they were innate attributes of being, part of the human spectrum, no more curable than one’s temperament or the color of one’s eyes. How can something so inherent be a treatable disease? And how does one defeat such a disease without defeating oneself?

At 8:00 A.M., when the day shift comes on, I call Sally’s ward. The woman who answers is guarded. When I ask for Cynthia Phillips, she says, “Cynthia’s not available right now,” and hangs up the phone.

At eleven we’re at the hospital again, occupying the same plastic chairs. The guard gives no indication that he remembers who we are. At noon, however, he motions us over.

“You can go on up. Fifth floor.”

         

Sally is transformed again, lying on her bed as if she’s just been dropped from the sky, her hair splayed wildly around her. I sit down next to her, call her name. Minutes pass without a response. I call her again, touch her shoulder. She opens her eyes with great effort, lifts her head a few inches, and gives a gaping, slow-motion yawn.

“They think I’m crazy…did you tell them I’m crazy? Were you so afraid, Father, you told them to lock me up?”

She means to sound indignant but her voice is stifled and wobbly like a warped LP. Pat and I look at each other, stunned by the change. An immense apathy flows out of her. Her head falls back on the mattress. Her eyes close against her will, like dropped blinds.

“They stole my words,” she says.

When we ask her what she means, she purses her lips and gives a sly, irritated laugh, a glimmer of her psychotic self that makes my stomach quail. Clearly she is in the throes of a second metamorphosis, every bit as violent as the one that brought her here. She sits up, the hectic glitter in her eyes wavering in and out of focus as if some battle for supremacy over her being were raging behind them.

I repeatedly try to break through to her, to establish some point of agreement between us (any point would do, an observation about the weather, or about the sky outside the gated window looming over her bed), each failure stabbing me as if for the first time.

Pat does better, but not by much. “Have you been sleeping, Sally?” she asks.

“I’m not sure,” comes the delayed, foreign reply.

After a while, we both stop trying, the three of us sitting in the room like passengers in the compartment of a train. I hold her hand. “Sally, we’re going to take care of you. You’re going to be okay.” She gives a muffled laugh that abruptly turns into a groan.

A nurse comes in to take her temperature and blood pressure. The room is so narrow that to make space for him Pat and I have to sidle over to the door.

“Ninety-eight-point-six,” he says as the thermometer emits its little digital beeps. “Perfectly normal.”

When he leaves, Pat decides to launch into action. From under the bed she retrieves the night bag we left with Nurse Phillips yesterday afternoon. It’s obviously been searched. “They took the dental floss,” Pat says. “And the lotion, probably because it was in a glass bottle. I should have known.” Sally’s hospital gown is twisted around her, half the buttons unsnapped. The plan is to get her showered and into a pair of fresh pajamas. Pat coaxes her out of bed and leads her to the bathroom, shooing me out of the room.

Spilling into the hall from the room next door is the Hasidic family we saw in the lobby. There are at least eight of them, the women in long skirts, their shaved heads covered in ritualistic wigs and scarves, the men in payess or side curls and black hats. They’re all eating from kosher plates they’ve brought, with the exception of the patient, their shoteh, who is poring over a black leather-bound Torah with a hollow intensity that reminds me of Sally with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. His family surrounds him like a protecting herd: the curse of madness collectively borne by the tribe. Or so I imagine. I feel a surge of admiration and envy—for their solidarity, their numbers, their devotion to one another in the face of this bewildering storm. If only Pat and I could form such a phalanx around Sally! I nod to one of the men. He shoots me a sharp, disapproving look as if I’ve done something to harm him, and turns quickly, almost disgustedly, away.

Farther along the hall I come across the Quiet Room, easily identifiable even without the nameplate on its door. “Isolation.” A tiny, fluorescent-lit cell, the walls padded with beige plastic foam, a single rubber-sheathed mattress on the floor. Shadowless, efficient, numbingly bland—a mockery of the Gothic chamber I had imagined.

A janitor is scrubbing what appear to be words off the floor, scrawled there apparently with a felt-tip marker. Nurse Phillips passes by, keys jangling. She smiles at me and continues on without pausing.

During the next few days I will piece together (from nurses, the attending psychiatrist, and in a fragmented way from Sally herself) what transpired after we left her in the ward that first night. Clutching the pen that the nurses had permitted her to have, Sally furiously began writing in her notebook. At the same time, the doctor ordered her first dose of haloperidol, a powerful narcoleptic widely used in the most acute cases of psychosis. Haloperidol is a direct descendant of chlorpromazine, the ur-drug of the psychopharmacological age. Its psychiatric value is its ability to induce indifference. (“The chemical lobotomy,” psychiatrists called it when it was introduced in 1952, referring to the procedure that it rendered obsolete: the severing of nerve fibers in the brain’s frontal lobes with a household ice pick inserted through the eye sockets.) And if excessive conviction, grandiosity, and fixed irrational ideas are among the symptoms of our most potent delusions, then indifference would seem to be a natural corrective, if not cure.

Indifference, however, isn’t the only effect of these drugs—they also rupture much of the process of sequential thought. On chlorpromazine, the poet Robert Lowell was unable to build a three-letter word on a Scrabble board or follow the count of balls and strikes in a televised baseball game. Sally would experience a similar intellectual paralysis. Yet the drugs are necessary, the only way to wrench one from the grip of acute psychosis. In prescribing haloperidol for Sally, the doctor was responding to a medical emergency. Peter C. Whybrow, in his book, A Mood Apart, describes patients with “fulminating illness” like Sally’s “who had dropped dead from manic exhaustion.”

As it turns out, she was nearer to the abyss than we knew. Haloperidol blocks the production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose excessive presence in the brain was responsible (in purely chemical terms) for her distorted behavior. The brain’s initial response to this blockade, however, was to produce more dopamine, faster (an attempt to compensate for the sudden stifling jolt), so that in a very short time Sally’s mania shot higher, catapulting her to levels of psychosis she might never have reached without medication. She filled the pages of her notebook and continued writing—on the floor, the walls, the door. Thoughts rushed at her with unsustainable speed. But “thoughts” is the wrong word. They were more like explosions, as Sally would later describe them, visionary bursts in which the interconnectedness—the oneness—of the world was instantly revealed. The hospital became the place where genius is hospitably housed, the nurses the nurturers, the ward The Word…Zen Buddhists speak of satori, the rare instance when a novice is struck with the totality of the world in one. But what struck Sally was a kind of anti-satori: her instant of epiphany shattered at once into chaos, only to reassemble and self-destruct again.

After crushing the tip of her pen, she ran out into the hall, her urge to impart, to enlighten, propelling her in every conceivable direction. She roused sleeping patients out of their beds, gripped them by the shoulders, led them staggering back into the hall. We are components of a single creative force, she tried to tell them, natural geniuses because this force is the embodiment of genius. When she opened her mouth to speak, however, what came out were not words, but a series of cracked, almost hesitant cries.

Responding to the disturbance, the night crew locked her in isolation, where she remained until the haloperidol successfully quashed the dopamine in her brain—a process that took about thirty hours.

         

When I return to the room Sally is freshly showered, wearing the silk fuchsia pajamas my mother gave her last month for her fifteenth birthday. Her head is on Pat’s shoulder, her hair shiny and wet.

“I don’t know who I am,” she says.

“Did you ever know?” asks Pat.

She shakes her head, No.

“Then nothing’s changed.”

At 7:30 P.M. she is summoned by a nurse. Medication time. She gets up and walks into the hall. Another shock: two days ago she was coiled and lithe, wrestling Pat and me to a draw. Now she walks with a Parkinsonian shuffle, tentative and stiff. (A side effect of the haloperidol, I will learn; in A Mood Apart, Whybrow describes how dopamine helps drive the motor system and determines the fluidity with which we move our arms and legs. With her dopamine blocked, Sally’s limbs have become like wood.)

She gets in line with the other patients in front of a booth where the meds are stored. A hushed decorum prevails; conversation, when it occurs, is conducted in a barely audible murmur. Along with Pat and me a few visitors are still hanging around. We give each other a wide berth, avoiding eye contact, tacitly agreeing not to pry. We have something in common that we’re not eager to share. And what would we talk about if we were so inclined? There are no emblems of objective illness in the psych ward—no oxygen tanks or IV bags, no cardiac monitors or surgical wounds. Symptoms feel like intimate secrets; causes are elusive, cures unknown.

A dark, attractive woman in a wheelchair is in line in front of Sally. When her turn comes she stands without difficulty, swallows her meds, chats with the nurse. Gently, coaxingly, the nurse suggests she try walking to her room on her own. On hearing this, the woman’s legs immediately turn to jelly and she slumps back into her wheelchair, her head in her hands in a gesture of sorrow so complete it seems to obey its own natural law.

Sally is handed her pills in a paper cup with ridges like a chef’s hat. She takes them in front of the nurse and moves on.

“The halls are a maze,” she says as we head back to her room. “Isn’t that a-mazing?”

At eight o’clock we’re politely told to leave; visiting hours are over. We ask Sally if there’s anything she wants us to bring tomorrow. “Artichokes,” she says. “And chocolate.”

She climbs stiffly into bed, her mania wriggling under the surface like a cat in a zippered bag.

         

The Hasidim are in the lobby. To my surprise, the one who gave me a dirty look on the ward motions me over.

“What I’m about to say is not against your daughter. She’s a friendly girl and I’m sure she means no harm. But she is disturbing my brother’s peace of mind. In my religion, you see, contact with strange women is prohibited.”

His brother’s “peace of mind”? Has he forgotten where we are? I don’t like his reference to Sally as a “strange woman,” as if she were tainted, a she-devil distracting his brother from his righteous path. Nor do I like his use of the term “my religion,” excluding me from a practice that I too was brought up in, having spent eight years reading the five books of Moses in Hebrew as part of my daily diet in elementary school.

“How did she disturb him?”

She invaded his brother’s room, he explains. She put her hands on him and forced him to look in her eyes. “She has no right to talk to him about what he believes. My brother is a gifted man. He has achieved devaykah,” he adds cryptically, “the state of constant communion with God. Tell your daughter to leave him alone!”

“I’m sure the staff is equipped to handle these matters,” I say curtly, and excuse myself, aware of his family watching us by the door.

On reflection, however, I understand where the Hasid is coming from: he has no choice but to believe his brother is holy; the biblical alternative is to be outcast from God. When Moses announced the penalties for disobeying God’s laws, madness was first, before blindness and poverty, before the death of children, before war. Like the Hasid, I try to improvise my own area of protection around Sally. But I have little faith to draw from, either in medicine or God.

Putting his faith in the former, James Joyce took his daughter Lucia to an unending succession of doctors, certain that he would find her cure. One doctor gave her seawater to drink. Another ordered injections with a serum of bovine glands. In 1934 Joyce took her to see Carl Jung at his sanitarium near Zurich. To subject Lucia to psychoanalysis, concluded Jung, would be catastrophic. Successful analysis required the wounded sanity of the neurotic; it was useless in the face of psychosis. Instead, he was determined to analyze her father. Joyce’s anima, or unconscious psyche, said Jung, was too identified with Lucia for him to accept that she was mad; to do so, thought Jung, would be for Joyce to admit that he himself was psychotic.

It was a questionable opinion, but it didn’t contradict what Joyce himself had come to believe: that in some ineffable way he was responsible for Lucia’s condition. Jung compared father and daughter to two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling, the other diving.

Yet the deeper Lucia fell, the more adamantly Joyce insisted that she was mentally sound—no madder, in fact, than he was. “Her mind is as clear and unsparing as lightning,” he assured his son Giorgio. “She has the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove.”

Joyce removed her from Jung’s clinic and looked elsewhere for her cure. To no avail. Four years later he was telling Samuel Beckett that her mental distortions were caused by an infection in her teeth. “She’s not a raving lunatic,” he insisted, “just a poor child who tried to do too much, to understand too much.”

I spend a fitful night on Bank Street, shuttling between dread for Sally’s future and hope that somehow everything will be restored.