The next morning I go to the ward alone, with a suitcase into which I immediately start packing Sally’s notebooks and felt-tip pens, her magazines and pajamas—the objects she accumulated during the course of her stay here.

While she changes into the blouse and jeans I brought along for her to wear outside, her roommate stirs in her bed. Her blanket slides off her like a broken layer of sod, as she sits up and plants her feet on the floor. She rises, wobbles for an instant, and then, trudging, negotiates the five steps it takes to reach the bathroom. It seems a cosmic triumph of action over torpor when she pushes open the beige steel door. And for the first time, I glimpse her face: that of a girl in her late teens, but slack and downward, as if the very muscles that sustain expression have gone dead in her.

At the nurse’s station Sally’s name is still on the erasable board, at Level 3: permitted to go outside for fifteen minutes at a time. Primly she sits down on the little bench near the ward’s locked entrance where the classics professor had sat before his son took him home.

“You made it, girl,” says Nurse Phillips. And to me, as she ducks into the glass-enclosed command post where half a dozen staff members are at work: “I’ll be back in a few minutes with Sally’s prescriptions.”

Julian appears with information about the behavioral clinic in Washington Heights where Sally will continue to receive treatment as an outpatient after she is discharged. “Your doctor’s name is Nina Lensing. I think you’ll like her. I’ve set up an appointment for the day after tomorrow.”

Blushing, he invites me to a recital in which he is to perform as cellist. “We’re doing Beethoven’s Opus 132, one of his great late quartets. There’s every possible emotion in that piece. It’s probably more than we should be taking on. But the music is supernatural.”

He shakes my hand and hurries off.

I sit on the bench next to Sally and we watch a new patient being admitted, a Chinese woman in her late fifties, “hearing voices again,” as the young man accompanying her calmly explains. With Rufus and another nurse, he escorts her down the hall.

Nurse Phillips returns with a fistful of prescriptions. “We don’t want to see you here again, girl. You understand?”

Sally and I walk to Lexington Avenue in silence, pass through the turnstiles of the subway, and take the train downtown. Sally tries to involve the man sitting next to her in some private insight, as if he is naturally aware of what is going on in her mind. He acts interested. I move her to a seat at the other end of the car. The man—well-dressed, bearded, middle-aged—laughs, knowing and possibly nasty.

“It’s dangerous to talk to strangers,” I say, scolding her as if she were a five-year-old.

         

The apartment is empty when we arrive. On the table is a note from Pat: WELCOME HOME SALLY! SEE YOU AFTER REHEARSAL!

Sally is out of breath, having had to rest several times as we climbed the stairs, though they had never presented the slightest difficulty to her before.

A light breeze wafts in from the river three blocks away. Pat has thoroughly cleaned the apartment: everything is neatly in its place.

Sally goes straight to the shelf where the accessories of her crack-up are sitting: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the King James Bible, her notebooks, arranged punctiliously by Pat. Sally picks up her Walkman, handling it as one might a broken vase after a wild party.

She climbs onto the loft bed and lies down.

“Pat put on your favorite sheets for you,” I say.

“Hmmm.”

She slides off her shoes, which fall to the floor with consecutive thuds. When I call her name, she is too far gone to answer.

I drift through the apartment. Our harmless bohemian perch. Everything has changed, yet nothing has changed. She is ours to take care of, but she has always been ours. It hits me that I neglected to drop off her prescriptions at the pharmacy. Now it will have to wait; to leave her alone even for a few minutes is out of the question.

I telephone Jean-Paul, an independent movie producer who approached me a few days before Sally’s crack-up with the idea of my cowriting a script for a young director he’s promoting—a fashion photographer whose ambition is to make “a grand love story that will be an update of Funny Face set in the world of haute couture.”

“Jean-Paul,” I say to his answering machine, “I had to leave town unexpectedly. I’m back now. Let’s get together as soon as possible and pick up our conversation where we left off.”

I don’t have much hope of this call bearing fruit, but it’s a start, I have to get to work again. On the radio, Mayor Giuliani is talking to one of his constituents. “It’s not the terrorists I’m worried about. Terrorists we can control. It’s weirdos like you living in your caves.” I turn the dial to a classical music station. A Bach sonata.

“That’s like the music I listened to before you locked me up.” Sally’s voice drifts down from the loft bed.

With a magnetic tab I attach the Wellness Contract to the refrigerator door, like the marshal’s order of seizure you sometimes see glued to the entrance of disgraced restaurants.

Manic depression is a biological illness. I cannot make it go away because I want it to go away.

I pick up one of her notebooks, with its paisley pattern on the cover—its mark of innocence—and open it to a random page:

I walk and I walk. I can’t stop walking. I am by the pier. If you listen closely enough you can hear life coming from the water. The moon and stars are covered by the bright electric lights that rise into the sky—a blanket that keeps the face of heaven invisible but the world below awake. When looking up, I can see a creation of the world’s future painted across the sky and the many people never resting, just working to complete that painting.

I guiltily put the book down, excusing the violation on the grounds that she is ill, her writing will tell me what I can’t discover from being with her, it will help me to understand. But what have I learned, apart from further evidence of the surpassing poetry inside her?

The door buzzer rings. It’s Robin. At our landing she leans on the banister, groaning comically, spent from the climb.

“Sally’s asleep,” I say.

But in fact she is standing behind me, having climbed down noiselessly from her bed. Her feet are bare, her face pale and shiny and, it seems to me, rounder than usual. She seems less vivid than she used to be, thickened by sleep, more stolid, yet less present, it seems, as if the live wire of her being has been grounded.

“My poor sweetheart,” says Robin. She has brought taped episodes of the television show Little House on the Prairie. She pops one into the VCR and curls up on the sofa bed with Sally.

“You don’t know how to love each other,” says Sally.

By prearrangement, Robin and I ignore this, though I am encouraged by Sally’s allusion to the real past, rather than an idyllic one that never existed.

“I’m going to fill the prescriptions,” I say. “Then I’ll be at my studio for a while. Sally’s next dosage isn’t till evening. You can call me there, if you need me.”

         

It’s with a feeling of hot angry shame that I hand over the full picture of Sally’s mental torment to the pharmacist on Eighth Avenue: the muscle relaxant cogentin, the anticonvulsant valproic acid, the antipsychotic haloperidol, a sleeping pill, an antianxiety agent—everything she was taking at the hospital, and lithium thrown in for good measure in the event that it proves to be therapeutic.

I read judgment in the pharmacist’s cocked brow as he ponders the order, though he may just be happy for the business. When he asks for my insurance information, I inform him that I’ll be paying in cash.

“It’ll come to $724,” he says. “I’ll need a deposit. They’ll be ready for pickup in a couple of hours.”

A flash of panic. I have $3,500 left in the bank. Pat has about $1,500.

After paying for the drugs, I walk to my little workroom, my “studio” as I call it, a boxy space in a building by the river where I have been writing, on and off, for the past ten years. Three stories of scaly white paint on a brick facade, the building stands out on West Street like a man who has quit shaving and cutting his hair. In the late 1960s, it was sliced into “affordable work space for artists,” the rents kept in check thanks to the largesse of a philanthropic organization whose long-term aim was to increase real estate values in an area of tenements and abandoned auto repair and printing shops.

I haven’t set foot in my workroom in twenty-four days, and the space feels different, more vacant, unnecessarily bare. The traffic two stories below on West Street echoes loudly, and mites of dust drift from cracks in the trembling walls.

From a drawer I remove the manuscript of the novel I recently completed—or so I believed. Sleep of Reason I called it. A disgraced big-city journalist returns to his hometown, where he lands a job as crime reporter on the local rag. He ends up writing about burglaries that he himself commits, turns his burglar into a popular figure, and then, masquerading as his creation, seduces the woman who rejected him when he was a younger man. The novel had gone to three publishers with hints of future interest but no immediate sale, and I decided to withdraw it from submission with the idea of making some changes.

Now it seems melodramatic, overromantic, my reporter self-destructive and too desperate for love.

I lay the manuscript in front of me on the desk, a crisp pile 405 pages high, neatly typed and proofed for the eyes of prospective editors. With pencil in hand, I find myself eradicating his voice—eradicating the offending “I”—and replacing it with a third-person narrator, omniscient and bloodless.

A suspicious sentence leaps up at me:

There was a hum in the air, the sonar of panic I called it, that special pitch of brutality you hear when things start breaking down.

Deleted. Along with every other passage I deem too emotional or overwrought. Any whisper of chaos that I come across in the narrative is surgically removed, each excision decided upon in an instant with no thought of its effect on the novel as a whole. It’s as if my aim is to neuter the book, to relieve it of feeling itself.

I work steadily in this vein for several hours, until around five. On the river outside my window are kayakers, sailboaters, water-skiers—a resort town scene that I gaze at as if from the wrong end of a telescope. A garbage scow floats past my window on its way to the landfill on Staten Island, accompanied by a raucous mass of seagulls.

As I am leaving, I pass the studio of Joe, the eighty-year-old abstract expressionist painter down the hall. Joe’s door is ajar, his giant box fan driving a torrid gust of air.

“How’s the work going?” I ask.

“Couldn’t be better!”

He hands me a mug of vodka and we listen to Joe’s ancient Maria Callas LPs, surrounded by his paintings: cheerful explosions of color and abruptly changing lines that are emblematic of Joe’s free spirit and hand.

         

At Bank Street Robin is on the sofa reading a book about the attainment of inner peace. She marks her page and hastily places it in her bag, not wanting me to see it, worried perhaps that I will disapprove. It isn’t serious enough, it isn’t literature. I am oddly pleased; I was under the impression that she had long ago stopped caring about what I thought of her.

Sally is asleep, out of sight, the intensity of her presence as palpable as ever.

“How does she seem?” I ask.

“I think she’s becoming more aware of what’s going on around her. A few hours with Sally and you feel like you’re speeding through a dozen changes. A dozen lives.”

She slings her bag across her shoulder and starts toward the door.

“I made dinner. There’s enough for you and Pat. Sally ate, then said that she couldn’t breathe and would I call an ambulance. I talked her down from that. She told me that we needed to discuss our relationship, but she was going to wait until I calmed down and was myself again. It’s so wild with her. I still haven’t discounted the possibility that she’s in touch with a higher force.”

“I wish she’d get back in touch with the lower one.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to think positively for once in a blue moon.”

As usual, our past overwhelms what the present throws up at us. We remind each other of our younger, unformed selves.

“What she needs now is love, Michael, more than ever, the feeling that she is being cared for no matter what. You know this, of course. I’m not being critical of you, it’s just what I feel from her in the strongest way. I’m very sensitive to her. I have to watch myself. She gets inside me. She always has. Being with her, I sometimes feel as if I’m going to break apart myself.”

I open the door. Robin lingers in the vestibule, inches from me, reluctant to leave. “She lashed out at me when I tried to give her something for her upset stomach. ‘You’re not my doctor!’ It was hard, but I’m proud of the way I handled it. I let it slide away. I’m learning about my emotions—I wish I had done a better job of it earlier. Sometimes you have to let things float by without becoming overattached. It’s a discipline. If you sit quietly you can watch your thoughts drop away like rain. If only I could teach this to Sally. It’s helped me a great deal. You of all people know how emotional I get.”

         

An hour or two after Robin has left, Sally wakes up and wanders around the apartment, half lost, trying to orient herself to her new surroundings. For an instant she rests her head on my chest. It lasts no longer than the length of time it takes to receive a peck on the cheek, and I stop myself from extracting from it the promise I am looking for. I am her father and I am her nurse, yet I’ve no idea what this dual role will do to us. The nurse’s competence is predicated on detachment, a necessary coldness of heart.

“How would you feel if right now was the end of the world?” asks Sally.

She takes her meds without a peep of protest and tumbles into oblivion again.

I double-lock the apartment door, like Rufus.

         

Pat comes home churning with a muted energy, and digs into Robin’s vegetable lasagna.

“I’d like you to come to rehearsal at some point,” she says. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready. Probably in a week or two.”

Sally, on the sofa, opens her eyes.

“Welcome home!” says Pat.

She rises, toppling into Pat’s arms like a fallen statue.

Later, when Sally is asleep again, I say, “She’s still far away. I don’t see her coming back. I keep looking for signs.”

“You’re looking too hard, Michael.”

I go back to my studio for a few hours and resume work on the sterilization of my novel.

         

The Outpatient Behavioral Clinic is located in an austere granite building with carved keystones over the windows in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan. The building is mostly devoted to treating ocular diseases, and as we enter, Sally and I nearly collide with a departing patient with a bandage as thick as a dinner roll over his left eye. In the lobby are more people in various phases of macular degeneration and blindness.

The behavioral clinic is a modest suite occupying a narrow sun-drenched corner of the sixth floor.

“Will you be okay, Father, when I’m grown up and it’s time for me to leave you?” asks Sally. And she busses me on the cheek as if she has leaped into an imaginary future in which it is time to bid me good-bye.

After a couple of minutes a woman comes out to the waiting area to greet us: Dr. Nina Lensing, Sally’s new psychiatrist, German-born, in her midthirties, wearing a wrinkled top with spaghetti straps, small scholarly metal-rim glasses, and a helmet of bright blond hair.

As soon as Dr. Lensing has introduced herself, Sally blurts out, “Why did this happen to me? Why me?”

Lensing’s face opens up into a delighted smile. “I’ve asked the same question about myself under different circumstances a dozen times. And you know what? We’re going to work on finding the answer.”

Sally’s leg is shaking at lightning speed.

“I bet you feel as if there’s a lion inside you,” says Lensing.

“How did you know?”

“Have you been pacing a lot?”

“It’s all I do. When I’m not sleeping.”

Lensing nimbly lowers herself into the waiting area chair next to Sally’s and tells her in a tone of woman-to-woman straight talk that mania—and she refers to it as if it is a separate entity, a mutual acquaintance of theirs—mania is a glutton for attention. It craves thrills, action, it wants to keep thriving, it will do anything to live on. “Did you ever have a friend who’s so exciting you want to be around her, but she leads you into disaster and in the end you wish you never met? You know the sort of person I mean: the girl who wants to go faster, who always wants more. The girl who serves herself first and screw the rest. It could be a boy too, of course, I’m just giving an example of what mania is: a greedy, charismatic person who pretends to be your friend. We may not be able to resist her every time, but one of the things we’re going to try to learn is to recognize her for what she is.”

“You’re talking about me. I’m that girl,” says Sally.

“Sally, they don’t make them any smarter than you. Now come on, let’s get cracking.”

To me she says: “We’ll spend about forty minutes alone together, then, if it feels right, I’ll ask you to join us. Okay?”

“Of course.”

After about half an hour, Lensing reappears, inviting me into the sanctum: a large shabby south-facing room with a ripped couch on which Sally is stretching herself and yawning, soporific yet restless.

“Your daughter is a pleasure to work with, Mr. Greenberg.”

They giggle like girlfriends sharing a private joke, and I marvel at the instant rapport Lensing seems to have struck with her. Maybe she is the shaman-therapist I’ve been hoping for.

“Sally and I have agreed upon a goal: for her to be in shape to return to school in September. We have five, maybe six weeks. Right now, for her to try to go to school would be like running a marathon with a broken leg. So that’s our first piece of good fortune: we’re lucky it’s summer.”

         

Four days a week I ferry Sally to the behavioral clinic seven and a half miles up island from Bank Street. Lensing isn’t always as expansive as she was during Sally’s first appointment. Sometimes she’s abrupt, her expression pinched, her eyes dark from lack of sleep behind her professorial glasses. A vague air of dissolution hangs over her. Her invitations to me to join them near the end of their sessions grow increasingly rare. I feel unreasonably spurned when she neglects to say hello to me or even to meet my eye. And I become almost as interested in her moods as I am in Sally’s, craning my head to catch a glimpse of her as Sally steps into their room—Lensing slumped in her therapist’s chair, slightly unkempt, pasty under the punitive fluorescent light, yet sharply attractive.

When she does beckon to me I feel a grateful flutter, entering with my hands held high against the sunlight which hits one in the face in that room like a thrown pie. Lensing occupies the only chair, so I am obliged to prop Sally’s feet on my lap and sit down on the couch beside her. Refreshingly informal. Lensing doesn’t pretend there’s such a thing as a science of insanity; she doesn’t lord it over me as if she harbors some secret expert power. There are no absolutes, no final authorities, she seems to be saying. We’re all in the dark.

In response to my continuous anxiety about Sally’s extreme medicated state, she says in her flawless, German-inflected English: “It’s still a challenge for her to concentrate. No question about it. Nothing’s perfect. But nothing is forever, either. Mania is…” Stumped for the right word, she breaks into a flurry of hand gestures as if trying to grab hold of some elusive object flying about in front of her nose. “…stubborn. Mania is stubborn. It hangs in there, it lays low. I’m no fan of these knockout drugs. I’ll do everything I can to wean her from them. It’s part of the plan.”

Then she reports a setback: lithium, element number three on the periodic table and the most common mood stabilizer for manic-depressives; lithium, the plain gray salt that is the lightest solid element on earth, with its three electrons and cost of five dollars for a month’s supply; lithium doesn’t work for Sally.

“This is not a catastrophe,” says Lensing. “It doesn’t work for thirty percent of manic-depressives.”

As an alternative, she is increasing Sally’s dosage of valproic acid, an anticonvulsant that is sometimes effective for mania for reasons that are unknown.

“If it works as well as I hope, she won’t have to swallow the bombs anymore—haloperidol, prolixin, we’ll taper them off.”

As a supplement, she’ll supply us with tranquilizers, to be taken as needed, during bouts of insomnia and restlessness.

“I’m psychotic, psychotic, psychotic,” says Sally.

“It’s not an identity,” says Lensing sternly.

I imagine sitting with her in a different room somewhere, without the sunshine and the torn couch and the dented radiator cover, and without Sally and the constraints of the fifty-minute hour. In the imaginary room, I am trying to charm her. Sally is forgotten. The image sharpens, and I have trouble getting rid of it, though I know I’m on shaky ground. In an effort to establish a parity of misfortune between us, I think: she’s unhappy, lonely, brokenhearted. She gives more of herself than others do; she has bad luck with men. I work out in my mind that someone in her family was psychotic. It’s the reason why she was drawn to psychiatry, to do battle against madness. What does she think of me, this repository of my family’s woes?

I stop myself. My daughter’s therapist! I tell myself I am engaged in a convoluted transference: if Lensing can heal Sally, she will be my healer too.

         

It is time for Robin to return to Vermont again. George and the bakery beckon. “My daily bread,” she says with a yawn.

“We played Go Fish. Sort of,” she says after her last afternoon with Sally. “Did you ever hear of idiot compassion? You destroy yourself by entering the suffering of others, while doing nothing useful for them.”

Thin to begin with, she has lost weight, becoming gaunt, with deep half-moon bruises under her eyes, though she claims to have napped every day with Sally, and to have slept “like a fallen tree” at night at her aunt’s.

“We’re at opposite ends of the energy field, you and I are, Michael. That’s why we sought each other out. But we couldn’t complete the promise of our polar selves, we couldn’t find the wholeness we craved. Maybe Sally is the result of this failure. In the karmic sense, I mean.”

With a prolonged limp embrace she bids good-bye to Sally.

         

August stretches before us like a desert we haven’t the stomach to cross. Thirty-six days until school begins, a date that seems to belong to an unimaginable future. I worry, as Aaron warned me to, about the reaction of Sally’s classmates to her altered self—the derision, the cruelty, the primal distancing that is a universal response to madness.

Sally’s irate euphoria ignites without warning, in the middle of the night or at one in the afternoon. Tearing out of an unreachable stupor, she berates me for my ignorance, my fear, my helplessness, my attempt to control her, to keep her down. “I feel locked up,” she says, and she doesn’t only mean in the apartment—to Pat, she confesses a powerful desire to rip herself open as if she were zippered inside a fur suit.

Pat and I live in a state of red alert, monitoring her moods, her tone of voice, registering the urgency of her footsteps when she paces—at one moment her terrible indifference, at the next her ornate fantastical plans. We pass on observations to each other in a kind of shorthand, like spies. A constant wave of anxiety runs through me. If I fall asleep, I immediately wake up again, as if I am prohibited from losing consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time.

After one of her explosions, she curls up next to me on the couch, red-faced and weeping.

“I need surgery,” she says.

“Where?”

“In my mouth.”

The television has become the new soundtrack of our household, a frayed chorus of canned laughter, advertisements, and snowy applause, the screen flitting from one shot to the next like a traffic light that has gone out of control. Lying in front of the set, Sally seems to have decomposed. Her incapacitation enrages me. If only there was a middle ground between her explosions and this nullifying slumber. How to contain her, to activate her, to live with her now?

With election day creeping closer, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole appear more frequently on the screen, in varying degrees of damage control and ingratiation.

Dole, in California, is complaining about the Endangered Species Act: “I know all this is very important, the fairy shrimp and the kangaroo rat, but people are important too.”

The audience cheers.

Abruptly I switch the television off.

Sally doesn’t make a peep of protest, and I realize with a new stab of pity that though she was staring at the screen she wasn’t watching it.

         

We follow the Wellness Contract as we would the instructions for some unassembled piece of furniture that has arrived in the mail. Julian was right—it gives us a way of measuring Sally’s progress. What had seemed cartoonishly simple when we drew it up with Julian now feels intricate and complex. It would be nice to have a friend visit, even for fifteen minutes, as step one of the contract stipulates, but Sally doesn’t appear to want one, and Pat and I are reluctant to allow news of her crack-up to get around.

So we have jumped directly to privilege number two: “trips outside in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty minutes on my own.” This allows Sally to sit on the stoop of our building and smoke her cigarettes, a habit she acquired in the hospital, and one that under normal circumstances we would insist she give up. In comparison with Sally’s other woes, however, it seems of little importance.

During one of these cigarette breaks, a half hour passes before I notice that she has not come back upstairs. I rip through the streets trying to track her down—to the river’s edge, where she spent so many hours before entering the hospital, and to the Sunshine Cafe, where the owner who threw us out that terrible day is hunched over the counter reading the sex advice column in the Free Press.

I finally catch sight of her at the corner of Hudson and Morton Streets, staring placidly into the window of a children’s bookstore called Time of Wonder.

“Sally, were you running away?”

The question seems to perplex her. “To where?” I think I hear her ask. Clasping her hands in front of her, she peers at the images of Babar and Celeste, and the Old Lady and Zephir the monkey in their idyllic kingdom.

We ponder them together for a while, their comforting emanations of goodness. Then I take her hand, drawing her away, past the playground on Bleecker Street, where she insists on pausing to take in the squealing delight of a group of children running through a rising arch of water pouring from a sprinkler planted in the ground.

At home, she puts on water for coffee. It takes her an eternity to raise the mug to her lips, and then it slips from her hand, crashing against the tile on the kitchen floor.

“I can’t hold on to anything,” she mutters. And this is true. At Dr. Lensing’s suggestion, we have assigned her the chore of washing the dishes, and the shattering of dinner plates, saucers, ash trays, has become another element in the soundtrack of our apartment. The dishes that survive Sally’s attention we rewash when she is napping, to remove overlooked streaks of food. Her eye for details, so keen at one time, has vanished. It’s as if she has been rendered half blind, groping her way through a chemically imposed carelessness.

         

Unable to bear waiting any longer for Sally to get out from under her pitiless ball of fire, I try to see the world as she does, and swallow a full dose of her medication.

It’s around ten in the morning, and I am sitting in the living room with Sally, when it begins to hit me—in waves. I feel dizzy and far away, as if I am about to fall from a great height but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice, so that the rush of the fall itself is indefinitely deferred. The air feels watery and thick, until finally I am neck-deep in a swamp through which it is possible to move only with the greatest of effort, and then only a few feet at a time.

I pick up the New York Times, which I had bought earlier in the morning:

Scientists studying a meteorite that fell to Earth from Mars have identified organic compounds and certain minerals that they conclude are evidence of primitive life on early Mars.

I read the sentence several times, so baffled by what the words “primitive,” “meteorite,” and “Mars” have to do with one another, that I start again at the first word, determined to make sense of it. By then, however, I’m lost, flailing away in my head, unable to gain any momentum of thought or meaning. The frustration reminds me of what I felt as a boy when my older brother would press his foot to my chest, holding me down. This goes on for what seems like an hour, but when I glance at the clock—and it takes another thirty seconds to read it—I see that only a couple of minutes have elapsed.

I am sitting on the couch, while Sally is at the table tapping her right foot, an expenditure of energy that seems profligate and amazing. So this is what it is to be on meds, I think dimly. Robert Lowell, describing the effects of chlorpromazine, wrote: “I could hardly swallow my breakfast because I so dreaded the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bed making were more upsetting than the physical…My head ached…I felt my languor lift, then descend again.”

To block dopamine in a brain such as mine, which manufactures more or less normal amounts of the stuff, is different from blocking it in a manic brain such as Sally’s or Lowell’s. But I have the powerful sense of understanding something of what she is going through. On some fundamental level I have, like Sally, been barred from experiencing the impact of being fully alive in the world.

I rise from the couch to prove to myself that I am able to, take three steps across the room, and then, yawning uncontrollably, rush to sit down again. I make an effort to care about the simplest things—preparing lunch for Sally, returning a phone call—but an ungraspable panic comes over me, a panic of indifference, if such a thing is possible, as if I have been relegated to a bit part in the drama of my own existence and, moreover, have missed my cue to step onstage.

Gazing at Sally, I feel as if my impotence is indistinguishable from hers. I understand exactly what she meant when she said to Dr. Mason, “I feel like I’m packed in foam rubber.” And I understand the allure to her of cigarettes: the stimulating flare of the struck match, the raw tingle of the smoke when it hits the lungs, the quickened heart beat when the blood vessels contract, and the narcotic lift of the nicotine. It offers its instant of actuality, of existence sharpened and in focus.

Later, when the meds have worn off and I have time to see Sally in the context of my few hours in that numbed world, I realize that the drugs release her not from her cares, but from caring itself. For caring, exorbitant caring—about the meaning of a passing glance from a stranger, the look in a news broadcaster’s eye on television, the fixed fired thoughts in one’s head—is the psychotic’s curse. (“Skinless” is a therapist’s term for those who cannot tolerate stimulation.) “To depart from reason with the firm conviction that one is following it,” reads a definition of madness from an eighteenth century encyclopedia. And indeed, inordinate conviction is the chief warning sign of our delusions. For the patient to burn low, to be half asleep, to take no notice, is the medical goal—for the patient to live in a kind of emotional cordon sanitaire. Psychosis is the opposite of indifference. Indifference, therefore, would seem to be its logical cure.

Now, however, while I am still under the boot of Sally’s medication, the phone rings, and I have to call upon buried reserves of energy to answer it.

I hear myself say “Hello,” like someone with a pillow over his face.

“I’m sorry to wake you, but it’s after eleven, mon frère.”

“Jean-Paul,” I manage to say, recognizing the voice of the movie producer with whom I left a message several days ago seeking work.

“Can we meet this morning, at my apartment?” he asks. “We have some business to talk over. I may as well warn you, I don’t intend to play the usual games and hide the excitement I’m feeling. I’m almost certain you won’t find it a waste of your time.”

It takes me a long moment to puzzle together the meaning of Jean-Paul’s words.

“My daughter is sick. I can’t leave her alone,” I say feebly, after an interminable telephone pause.

“Then I’ll come over to your place. I’m only around the corner.”

This is true. I’ve spent many an evening in the lavish garden of the duplex on West Eleventh Street where Jean-Paul holds court to a cacophonous guest list of fashion models, photographers, writers, and various New Age clairvoyants.

“Does it have to be today?”

“Yes. Today. Now. If you have any regard for me, Michael, you won’t play hard to get.” And, saving me from the arduous effort of responding to this, he announces that he will be over in fifteen minutes and ends the conversation.

In an attempt to mobilize myself, I put on the kettle for coffee, but when it whistles I am momentarily perplexed by the sound. Then I understand, though the logic required to measure and prepare a cup nearly defeats me. Before I am able to fill it with water, the cup falls out of my hand. The shattered glass looks tiny, and the prospect of getting out the dustpan and broom is as challenging to me as that of scaling a ten-foot wall. I ponder it for a few seconds, not caring. It is a picture of broken glass, not actual broken glass. It almost doesn’t exist. Then, momentarily appalled at the extent of my detachment, I stab myself in the hand with a fork. It hurts! I hear myself cry out as if from across the room. To alleviate the itching rubbery dryness in my mouth, I drink straight from the kitchen tap, soaking my shirt.

The door buzzer rings, and I consider, without much concern, the picture Sally and I will present to Jean-Paul. In some muted place inside me an immense anxiety has begun to wriggle about, like a man with duct tape over his mouth, straining to be heard. I desperately need the work Jean-Paul can provide, and it is up to me to perform for it in some way, to persuade him to give it to me.

I stand on the landing and listen to him climb the stairs, a rite of passage for any visitor to my apartment, and an especially difficult ordeal for Jean-Paul, who pauses every fifteen or twenty seconds before wheezily resuming his ascent.

He appears in stages: his wiry gray hair and beard, the spin-art splashes of burst capillaries along the corners of his sharp nose, his compact Balzacian frame huffing into view, and then Jean-Paul offering me his limp, child-sized hand to shake.

In my dullness, I allow the hand to hang in the air for an insulting amount of time, until Jean-Paul withdraws it with a frown and employs the hand to flick away the sweat that is dripping from his forehead.

“Jean-Paul,” I say with the belief that I am shouting his name in welcome, yet hearing myself in a barely audible whisper.

He takes in Sally lying narcotized on the sofa, and then, after following me into the kitchen for a glass of water, the smashed cup on the tile floor.

“She’s been running a fever,” I explain through the epoxy of my lips. “It’s been rough sledding for her—especially in this heat.”

In response to Jean-Paul’s expression of concern, I add, with a haste that could be interpreted as callous: “She’ll be fine.”

We sit down face to face at the table and I am able to pick up that Jean-Paul is uncharacteristically nervous. He has read my novel about the reporter who covers his own crimes. I completely forgot that I had given it to him, three or four months ago it must have been, in its pre-edited version, with all the unseemly emotion that I have been erasing still intact on the page.

Jean-Paul talks excitedly about the wonderful movie it will make, “a story about identity, about how we see ourselves and how we try to get others to see us, a classic movie,” he says, “a noir but not stylized like a noir because that’s a trap that dozens of filmmakers have lost their shirts falling into.”

Trying to act attentive, I build my face into what I hope comes across as my most engaged crinkled expression, then feel the tremor of an oceanic yawn coming on, and devote all the feeble force of my concentration to keeping it from breaking the surface.

“With your permission, Michael, I would like to option the property and develop it into a film. Would you be willing, under a separate deal, to write the screenplay?”

The property. The screenplay.

“That would be…wonderful.”

“Excellent! I’ll be in touch with your agent to hash out the terms. As long as I know you’re on board.”

My agent. Am I still on her radar? My last communication with her was to convey my decision to take my novel off the market—a message left on her answering machine to which she never responded.

“I have to tell you, Michael, you’ve become so admirably calm. If I had any doubts about entrusting you with this project, they have been completely dispelled.”

He rises, flushed, pleased, enjoying his sweat now, it seems, like a successful hunter or athlete.

“Get well soon, Sally,” he says, and starts off on the descent to Bank Street.

         

After my experience on Sally’s meds, I press Dr. Lensing to wean her from them even more quickly than planned. I offer the example of my brother Steve, who has ingested, by my calculation, more than six million milligrams of Thorazine over the past thirty years.

“They gave him sledgehammer doses,” I say. “It went on for too long and I think it may have permanently changed him, quite apart from his emotional problems. It’s true that Sally’s concentration remains poor,” I add, “but how can it be otherwise when the medication makes concentration impossible?”

Lensing listens politely. I become uncomfortably aware of the fervor in my voice, and suddenly feel observed, like a patient. I decide not to run the risk of telling her of my experiment with Sally’s drugs. We are alone in her office and I am sitting on the couch where Sally usually sprawls, the two of us half blinded by the sunlight, Lensing with a new hairstyle, I notice, the blondness shot through with black streaks, and the tattoo of a small exotic bird on the back of her ankle which I note for the first time. Hints of her other life…

“I’m starting to gain momentum with Sally,” she tells me after a decorous pause. “She doesn’t want to be isolated, her impulse is outward, which I can tell you is extremely good news. Her desire is to be understood, and not only by us, she wants to understand herself as well. She’s still attached to her mania, of course. She’s remembering the intensity of her experience, and she’s doing her damnedest to keep that intensity alive. She thinks that if she gives it up, she’ll lose the great abilities she believes she’s acquired. It’s a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. There are things she’s not telling me, I suspect, because she doesn’t think I’ll believe her, and she doesn’t want to be disbelieved. Especially not by me.”

“What sort of things?” I ask.

“Oh…incidents that may or may not have actually occurred. Voices perhaps.”

“Voices?”

“It’s a possibility, yes. Don’t be shocked. It happens sometimes in cases of acute mania. The voices may be warning her not to repeat what they say. You’ll think it strange to hear me say this, but I actually feel encouraged by them. They provide an opportunity for Sally to comprehend that this tempest in which she’s been living was created by her.”

I tell her of the plan Pat and I have made to take Sally for an outing. A day at the beach.

“That will be splendid. For all of you,” says Lensing. She advises me to buy sunglasses for Sally. “You want to keep her in the shade, away from brightness. You want the sun to go down.”

Laughing, she brushes something invisible from her bare arm. Starkly pale, Lensing herself appears to have gone out of her way to avoid sunlight.

“And oh, yes, be sure she wears plenty of sunscreen. Antipsychotic medication makes the skin highly vulnerable to being burned.”

         

And so, in a rented car, we embark on our day trip, to the beach at Rockaway where I lived as a boy. Restless and volatile, Sally argues with me from the rear seat in a weaponized voice that makes my stomach turn over. “Are you monitoring my symptoms, Father? Are you inside my head?”

She leans toward me from the back of the car, her hands gripping the head rest, her mouth an inch or two from my ear. It is more than a noise, it is her noise, our noise, that impostor’s voice, with its pressurized bristle—how deeply I have grown to hate it!

Pat occupies the passenger seat beside me, concentrating on the book she is reading—another arcane volume to fuel her choreography, this one by the medieval alchemist Paracelsus—tuning us out.

As we are crossing the drawbridge that connects Rockaway Beach to Brooklyn, Pat says, “That’s enough, Sally.”

Sally fumes in silence for a few seconds, then revs up again.

I grip the wheel so tightly my hands begin to burn. I am driving slowly, plodding along, afraid to speed up, to let go. I would explode at Sally if it would shut her up, but I’ve learned to wait for these attacks to pass over, and not to push against them.

Pat, with an expression of infinite forbearance, returns to her book.

We make it to the beach, crammed with day-trippers like us, half-naked, dripping with salt and oil. It’s the same pageant that used to thrill me in August when I was growing up in this part of town and the entire city seemed to travel to my outpost of New York, laying claim to every inch of sand—the same sand I walked on when the beaches were deserted the rest of the year.

I want to tell Pat and Sally of those summers, when, waking at just after dawn, I would set out wooden umbrellas and chairs for the paying regulars, then gather them up again at dusk, chaining them under a tarp. Afternoons, I sold Eskimo pies from a steel box with dry ice in it that I strapped across my shoulder. I was too slight for this kind of work, and I would invariably end up dragging the box through the sand, but I wanted to be out there among the show-offs and fast girls, the screaming kids in the surf, and the transistor radios blaring a competing cacophony of doo-wop, jazz, soul, and rock and roll. I want to paint a picture of that world for Pat and Sally, but it’s as if I’m talking about someone who told me these stories, and I’m unable to capture their attention.

We trudge across the hot sticky sand until we find a space to lay out our towels thirty feet from the water. Pat continues reading. Sally takes a walk along the edge of the surf looking like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, with her sunglasses and high-wattage gaiety, slapping the water with her feet and flapping her arms like a bird at liftoff—an image I may once have found endearing, if overdramatic, but that I can no longer see as anything but ominous. I try to see her through the eyes of the strangers who are watching her—a girl who is unapproachable in her self-absorption, beyond sexual provocation or insult.

I collapse on the sand. Pat lies next to me, studying her book with an intensity that annoys me because I believe it’s feigned. Maybe she’s hoping, as I am, that order will miraculously restore itself, that what is skewed will somehow be set right. We exchange a strained glance from our respective towels. All that we used to look forward to at the end of a day—the shared anecdote, the random event analyzed and recounted, the narrative order, if not meaning, that our conversations seemed to give to our workaday lives, the jokes and arcane put-downs that were really expressions of tenderness because they bespoke the extent to which we took each other in—all the erotic, argumentative energies that supplied the frisson of our marriage have been submerged under the fallout of Sally’s psychosis.

I ask her with a trace of facetiousness whether the book she is reading is interesting. “You seem so absorbed in it,” I say.

“Why do I feel criticized by that observation?”

I close my eyes and listen to the hubbub of the beach, and the jetliners rumbling in and out of JFK Airport only a few miles away—familiar childhood sounds.

         

When we get back to Bank Street our landlord Eric is there waiting for me. A shiver of animosity passes between him and Pat as she disappears into the bedroom at the back of the apartment with Sally—to protect her from Eric’s scrutiny, I’m sure.

Eric seems wrought up and peevish, and I have an idea of why when I spot him holding a copy of a literary magazine with a story of mine.

“You must be pleased about this,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t give it much thought. To be honest, I’m not sure if I even like the story.”

This was the wrong answer: to dismiss its importance only magnifies the imagined insult. Why haven’t I done more to get him published is Eric’s perennial complaint, though I have taken pains to explain to him that since I am not an editor I have no power to do so.

“Have you looked at my novel?” he asks.

I completely forgot about it! Yet Eric’s novel is more central to our tenant–landlord relationship than the rent. He is counting on me to make a favorable pronouncement about his latest rewrite, though at a glance I could see that, like the last time he gave it to me, very little has been changed.

“I was planning to read it tonight.”

He looks resentful and hurt, and I find myself thinking of my own novel which I have been slashing with the illusion that I am improving it.

“Let’s go have a drink,” he says.

We walk over to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street and sit at a table under the crude, gray, unframed portrait of Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death here in 1953.

Eric drains his first bourbon in two gulps, and then regales me with his latest theory about his tenants: we love the address but hate our apartments, a paradox that makes us reluctant to move on even when it’s a matter of personal growth for us to do so.

“My building is meant to be a way station,” he says. “Eventually you have to leave. That’s your moment of truth—either you have the guts to take the next step for yourself and relocate or you hang on, defeated.”

I think I know what’s coming, yet can’t help but admire the acrobatic logic that has allowed Eric to blend his position as landlord with his higher vision of himself as the benevolent director of our lives. His tenants are the characters he really cares about, not the ones in his novel; on more than one occasion I’ve seen him act against his own financial interests in order to deepen his involvement with us, asserting himself as a central factor in our lives. After five years at Bank Street, my moment of truth has come: it’s time for me—and Pat and Sally—to move on.

He delivers the news with the demeanor of a kind person who has been forced against his will to be harsh—grinning uneasily, avoiding eye contact, apologetic and awkward. “I’m only pointing out what you already know. It’s for your own good. Anyone can see Pat’s not happy here. She wants to make her own home with you, and she’s right, you should. She only resents me for standing in the way.”

He reminds me that when I moved in we agreed this day would come. “I’m not double-crossing you. It was part of our deal.”

This is true. I’m indebted to Eric for offering me a place to live after my marriage with Robin broke up and money was scarce.

“I’ll need some time,” I say.

“How much time? Two months? Ninety days? Let’s set a date. It’s always better that way.”

“All I can promise is that I’ll move as soon as I can.”

Eric has to defer; the timetable, at least, will be mine. Even though I have no lease, New York City’s housing laws make eviction difficult. I could stir up legal hassles for Eric if I reneged on our deal, something I have no intention of doing.

We drift out onto Hudson Street and Eric immediately peels off. “I’ll be staying uptown tonight,” he says, mentioning the apartment of a mutual friend.

Impressive of him to have had the foresight to consider this detail.

Returning to the apartment, I feel a bitter tipsy pleasure at the extent to which my world has fallen apart.

“Freedom,” says Sally, tapping the side of her skull. “Freedome. Free mind. Think about it, Father.”

She plugs her ears with the Walkman which she has furnished with a fresh set of batteries, and slides to the floor under the window with her chin resting on her knees.

Pat is on the phone.

I take in the partially stripped molding, the water-stained ceiling, the bandaged windows—a collage of disrepair. Our only contribution to the decor are the bookshelves I built into the walls; our other attempts to spruce up the place have been invariably discouraged. The apartment is like Eric’s novel, I think, it exists as a token of the future, a perpetual possibility, incomplete and therefore unthreatened by a final verdict of its worth.

All we need to do is put our books in boxes, pack a few suitcases, and we’ll be gone without a trace.

But where are we going? There is little prospect of finding a place in New York we can afford.

Pat emerges from the bathroom where she has been talking on the phone, another quirk of the apartment. It had been a bedroom previously and is large enough for a clothes dryer, a wooden bureau, and a huge bathtub with a wide, tiled ledge on which rests various books, shampoos, soaps, and candles. During its conversion, the apartment’s sole phone jack was left there, next to the toilet.

“You reek of bourbon,” she says. “Which can only mean that your crony isn’t far behind.”

“He’s not staying with us tonight.”

“No complaints from me on that score.”

“He wants us out, Pat.

“I’m sure it was just one of your lovers’ squabbles.”

“It’s for real. He took me to the White Horse, bought me a couple of drinks, and evicted us.”

“Oh. I see.”

She actually sounds pleased. In a spasm of suspiciousness it comes to me that she has engineered this in some way, nurturing her little battles with Eric, and too contemptuous of the both of us to pay her share of the “rent” in the form of propitiating him with subtly subservient gestures of friendship.

“You practically forced this to happen!”

“How? By refusing to pander to Eric like some kind of courtier? Or by expecting him to treat us with basic courtesy even if we’re nothing more than squatters to him?”

“It’s our home,” I say miserably.

“It was never home. That’s what you fail to understand.” In a goading caustic voice she blurts out something about the “traumatizing” end of my “little bachelor paradise.”

I slap her face, a hard nasty snap.

With a quaking, startled screech she throws a boot at my head. It hits the mark, knocking off my glasses. My head is roaring. The tensions of the summer seem to mass in me, and it is as if I am walking beside myself, hollow and enraged.

I pound the top of the table until my hand throbs, while Pat stands there watching me, smug or terrified or both, shaking her head in a tsk-tsk of incredulity, crossing her arms over her chest as if my loss of control proves her most uncharitable opinion of me and she is waiting for the brute hurricane either to kill her or to pass over.

The room is a blur. I grope along the floor for my glasses, then give up in a thick myopic mist.

“Look at yourself,” she says.

I lunge at her, pushing her against the wall.

“Don’t touch me!” she shouts, and runs into the bathroom, locking the door.

I kick and smash at it, calling for her to come out, until the panels splinter and I take each cracked piece and break it into smaller pieces and the better part of the door is lying in a pile of spearlike fragments.

Pat is sitting in the dry tub, with her hands around her legs, watching me with an odd mix of dread and anthropological detachment.

I sit down numbly on the floor for what seems like a long time. Then four policemen come panting into the apartment, in a racket of jiggling equipment, let in the door by Sally.

I’ve forgotten about Sally! She looks shrunken and stunned.

How could I have done this to her?

Sweating in their bulletproof vests, laden with guns and ammo and flashlights and billy clubs and handcuffs and ticket books and notepads on which to write the night’s crimes, the cops quickly clock the scene. Their right hands hover reflexively over the holsters of their Glock semiautomatics, while they make small talk, maintaining a casual air.

“You should tell the landlord to put an elevator in this place,” one of them says to me.

“Are you going to take him to jail?” asks Sally.

“Only if he’s committed a crime, young lady.” And at that moment, the speaker recognizes Sally. He’s the cop who removed her from the middle of the roadway on Hudson Street and brought her here with Cass. He’s the one who hid the knives.

Pat is still sitting in the tub.

“Are you the lady who called?” one of the cops asks her.

She nods, and they look her over, searching for bruises, blood, marks of assault.

“She checks out fine.”

I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, my hair wild, my eyes two bloodshot slits. I feel as if a train is running through me and sit down on the couch. Sally sits next to me, but sidles away when I try to comfort her. How can I comfort her? Her touchstone of sanity, as I thought of myself, has snapped.

“Explain your relationship to this man,” one of the cops asks her.

“She’s my daughter,” I say quickly.

“I asked the girl. Are you this man’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” says Sally. “But it’s not my fault.”

I try to get Pat’s attention, but she won’t look at me. She is talking to the sole policewoman in the group, answering her questions in a voice I can’t hear.

“Sometimes it’s best to walk out on each other when things get too heated,” says the cop who rescued Sally from Hudson Street, as he is leaving. “That’s what I do. I go out and take a long walk. And if the walk lasts all night, well, that’s better than doing something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”

We listen to them descend the stairs, gossiping loudly, our neighbors spilling out into the hall to find out what’s going on.

“Are you getting divorced?” asks Sally.

“No,” says Pat.

The answer is meant for me as well. I think I detect a smile on Pat’s lips, then realize that her eyes are wet with tears.

Sally slips her earphones back on and climbs up to the loft bed, while Pat and I stand in the living room like two people who have just watched their house burn down.

I’m appalled at myself, and in shock that she felt she needed armed men to protect her from me.

“Did you really think I was going to hurt you?”

“I didn’t know what you were capable of or if you’d stop or even knew how. I was scared, Michael. I had to put an end to it. I didn’t recognize you. It was as if you didn’t care about me or even know who I was.”

Her face is slightly stretched with emotion, but no streaming tears, just the telling moistness of her unnerving pale eyes.

She goes to bed, and at around 1:30 I lie down next to her.

We’re like two strangers bunking together who dare not touch.

At about five, however, we wake up entwined in a stunned unconscious clutch. She quickly disengages.

“I feel sick,” she says.

“What are we going to do?”

The question could refer to so many things—to where we will live, to our marriage, to Sally. Neither of us knows how to begin to answer it.

“I won’t blame you if you’ve had it with me,” I say.

“Is that an invitation for me to leave?”

“God, no.”

“Maybe you think it would be easier to go it alone with Sally.”

“All I meant was, this whole mess, it must seem more than you bargained for.”

“I wasn’t bargaining.”

Her wounded imperious look reawakens a memory I have of her onstage at Bryant Park, performing a solo called Hiding with a buffalo skull strapped to the top of her head. Spotlit, Pat rose from under an army blanket in infinitesimal slow motion, a skeletal phoenix. The memory fills me with new feeling for her. I want to apologize, to erase last night, but under the circumstances it would seem a meaningless gesture—inadequate and too small.

Instead, I run the risk of offending her further, as I tell her that I’ve been sensing her misgivings, that I could feel her retreat, that I’ve imagined her regretting the loss of the unblemished artist’s life she led before I came along, when she was content with a monastic bowl of capellini and Swiss chard at midnight. I tell her of my worry that the job of mothering Sally is more than she can reasonably accept; it will take too much out of her, she needn’t darken her life with what she’s not to blame for—and where will it lead, since she is not really Sally’s mother and never will be, as Sally herself is so intent on reminding her?

“Do you actually think I’d bail on her? Or are you saying this because it’s what you would do if our roles were reversed?”

“That’s not a very charitable interpretation.”

“Michael, I’m here because I want to be here. I’m worried sick about Sally.”

She seems even more disappointed in me than after my outburst of last night. Apparently I have completely misunderstood her, though I could reasonably argue that she expects me to divine telepathically the withheld subtleties of her inner life, and feels let down when I fail to do so.

“I would do anything for that girl. I’m amazed that you could think otherwise.”

She goes out to the living room, at a safer distance from me now.

The first light of day pushes through the window like an exhalation of white steam.

I rummage about for a large garbage bag and start filling it with the shorn scraps of the bathroom door. Part of the door is still hanging from its hinges, looking as if it has been broken open with an ax. I diligently sweep up the ancient layers of paint chips that have scattered across the floor. The pitiful after-mess of my tantrum.

“Such a pretty sight,” cracks Pat.

She has made coffee for herself and is sitting at the table, not indignant or disapproving of me, as I had expected her to be, but depleted and lost. It is clear that we have passed into a new space, a flimsier, more provisional one that seems almost comically epitomized by the sheet I am struggling to hang over the bathroom doorway—to afford us a modicum of privacy until I can replace the door.

In a confessional, almost hypnotized monotone Pat is telling me about her closest friend when she was in her early twenties, a woman I have never heard of until now. “We lived together. We talked about everything. No subject was off-limits between us. She had this shining brilliance, you believed in her importance somehow, it was the most exhilarating friendship. She went mad, but it took me weeks to notice. We were too close for me to accept that anything was wrong. It wasn’t unusual for us to say the same thing at the same time. And there was a point when even my dreams seemed to be a version of hers. We lived so deeply in the same world I thought her delusions were normal, they were okay—I have a high tolerance for aberrance, I suppose, we both do, Michael, or we would have realized the distress Sally was in before it was shoved in our faces.

“With my friend, it never occurred to me to step back, I was inside it with her. And when she started claiming that she had invented the alphabet, and drew diagrams on a pad to show me how she had done it—I felt destroyed. Suddenly, everything we had shared was meaningless, all our talk about art and the future and our plans—it was all nonsense.”

I finish filling the garbage bag and drag it out into the hall. Then I lift out the pins and remove what is left of the door from its hinges and carry that out to the hall too.

“I want to take care of Sally and I want to get as far away from her as I can at the same time,” says Pat. “When you think of how terrified and cut loose she must feel, it tears you apart. When she’s her most vibrant wonderful self, she’s in the most danger. That’s the trick life has played on her. Just when you think you’re beginning to understand her, that you’re finally on the same wavelength, she says something that makes you realize you’re not. You can feel how much she wants to be heard, even though it’s nonsense, it’s her nonsense, it has meaning to her. That’s what I learned from my friend. I don’t care if I’m not her mother. I am her mother in a way. I can give myself to Sally, like I give myself to my dance company. It’s a tropism, I guess, my weakness for devotion that you like to poke fun at.”

The opening of Pat’s show is drawing near and her rehearsal schedule intensifies. She seems always to be rushing off to meet costume and lighting designers, or to root out props from the discount bins along Canal and Fulton Streets for the elemental Beuys-like sparseness she favors. One day five galvanized steel washtubs are sitting in the living room; on another occasion, an enormous industrial fan. She is “making movement,” she says, the way one says, “I’m making money” or “making art.”

She treats her dancers much the way she treats me, with a strategic elusiveness that seems to keep them guessing and off balance. She resents having to explain in words what to her seems obvious. Overhearing her on the phone, I recognize the exasperation in her voice when she tries to describe to one of her dancers the distinct characteristics of a lunge, a dive, a slide, a flop. She wants the movement to be “less nervous,” she says. “But not casual.” Praise is measured out in small, avidly consumed portions, like a dessert that has to be stretched to go round.

With Sally she is attentive, guiding her through her disjointed monologues, and her visions of future accomplishments and glory. “I think she’s improving,” Pat says to me. “But I’m holding my breath. I don’t want to jinx it.”

Sally doesn’t mention our fight, and for a while I have the impression that she doesn’t remember it, until, after I beg her to calm down during one shrill postmidnight jag, she retorts: “Oh, like you didn’t almost murder Pat the other night.”

Is this teasing momentary glimmer of lucidity what Pat means by Sally’s “improvement”?

She paces the apartment, evil-eyed. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of who I am,” she tells me.

We’ve grown accustomed in the middle of the night to the serrated scrape of the window when it’s lifted on its rusted chain, alerting us to the fact that Sally has climbed out onto the fire escape to smoke a cigarette. I get out of bed to keep an eye on her. According to Lensing, she’s not experiencing “suicidal ideation,” but I can’t bear to have her sit out there fifty feet above the street unwatched.

“Did you take your meds?” I ask, pestering her to ingest the very drugs I’ve grown to despise.

“I can’t stand this! Do I seem crazy to you right now? Do I? I’m not a child. And if I was a child, I would be blessed and you wouldn’t even know it!”

She dips up and down, in and out of psychosis. Neither of us knows who she will be from one minute to the next, and this lack of continuity is what is most difficult to bear. Ground down, she ceases to be an individual, not only to us, but to herself too, I suspect. There is no I, no reliable self to retreat to or upon which to stand.

The constraints my anxiety imposes on her are suffocating, but I can’t stop myself from hovering over her—the jailor, the watchdog, a one-man crack-up prevention squad. I worry that in trying to calm her I am actually causing more agitation. And by the same token, when Sally tries to show me through some gesture that she is okay, I mistake it for yet another sign of disturbance.

She leafs through Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Yeats’s poems, and the King James Bible, staring at pages she marked when she was manic, as if to recapture the feeling of the person who put them there.

“I can’t read,” she says. “I’ve forgotten how to read.” And she begins to weep.

And when all should be quiet your fire burns a river of sleep, wrote Sally before the dopamine blockers erected a dam against the free flow of language in her brain.

My own mood and feelings toward her are erratic, shifting several times in the course of a day. During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease—the disease I must bear. In my notebook I scrawl in a furious hand: “I am intoxicated with Sally’s madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned.”

One morning, while Sally and I sit on the front stoop of our building, our neighbor Lou from down the street comes by walking her sheepdog. It’s the first time we’ve seen her since her stinging retreat from Sally on the day we took her to the hospital, an incident I’ve replayed several times in my mind; before that day, Lou had treated Sally with a special sympathy.

My impulse is to avoid her so as to spare Sally the humiliation of being shunned again, but with a friendly overhead wave Lou comes loping across the street to greet us, pulling her mild sheepdog behind her.

“Sally! I’ve been thinking of you. You look so much better than the last time I saw you.”

“I do?”

“You do, darling. But you must take care of yourself. Listen to your father. Now more than ever.”

Sally strokes Lou’s dog. “It’s just like a child.”

“She’s my child,” says Lou.

She obviously is aware of what happened to Sally. But how? I walk her to the corner. “Did the story get out somehow? Are people talking?”

“No one’s talking, Michael. I just knew. I’ve lived. I know about these things.”

I remind her of the way she fled from us. “Like we were lepers. It shocked me.”

“All I can tell you is I know the state she was in. From my sister. My grandfather. I recognize it when I see it, and always have. I have my reasons for turning away. Now, God bless you.”

When I return to the stoop, Sally says: “She’s been listening to me. She can hear what I’m thinking.”

         

By mid-August Lensing is speaking of Sally’s “measurable steps toward real recovery.” “Remission” is the word she often uses, to keep us from nursing unreasonable expectations.

“It wouldn’t be obvious to you who are with her all the time, but it’s happening. I can see it clearly.”

When Sally is in the bathroom, she tells me: “I persuaded her to visit the coffee bar on Greenwich Avenue where she had some of her most disturbing moments while manic.”

“I wasn’t aware of this.”

“She went there yesterday. During one of her fifteen-minute outings. The idea is for her to demystify these places, to see that they are ordinary, that the things she believes happened there were all in her mind. When I asked her what it was like to be there, she said, ‘What kind of question is that? It’s a coffee shop. I had a cup of coffee.’ I loved that answer. I’m going to lower her haloperidol, starting today. If all goes well, it will be the beginning of a gradual tapering off.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“We can’t be too careful about this. The adjustment will be slow. She’s still having psychotic flashes. Short in duration. Sometimes no longer than a minute.”

“What kind of flashes?”

“She thinks a neighbor is watching her or that she’s being followed. That sort of thing.”

It occurs to me that Sally has been having these sorts of “flashes” all of her life. We just didn’t know what they were. I remember Aaron teasing her when she claimed that people were talking about her on buses or at restaurants.

         

During the next two weeks, Lensing fiddles with Sally’s medication, adjusting and readjusting her chemical regimen as if Sally is some delicate technological invention that Lensing is preparing to launch. Haloperidol is scaled back, as she promised it would be, and valproic acid is increased. At first, Sally appears even more placid than before, spending an entire Sunday in silence on the couch, forgetting even to go out to smoke.

She is now permitted to leave the apartment alone twice a day for an hour at a time. Her longer absences are a relief to both of us. We need this respite from each other.

One afternoon, she returns from the coffee bar with a woman in her late fifties who claims to be the former Miss Georgia.

“What an absolutely amazing young lady is your daughter,” she says in a homemade accent that is two parts Southern belle and one part Westminster London.

Sally has already begun to emulate her speech, turning supercilious and comically patrician.

“Roseanne says I’m a midfork beauty,” she says.

“That’s what we call a woman who, when she walks into a restaurant, people freeze to behold her with their forks midway to their mouths,” explains Roseanne. “All Sally needs to do is melt off a few pounds. She could have a splendid career as a model.”

Twirling, Sally checks herself out in the mirror.

“This is not what we want Sally to be focusing on right now,” says Pat frostily.

Roseanne gets the hint, delivers three loud smooches to Sally’s cheeks, and hurries off.

         

A week, ten days pass and Sally and I are still unable to sustain a rudimentary conversation. When we do talk, it’s as if we’re shouting at each other across a crowded expressway: what I hear most clearly is the vast roar between us.

Then, one evening in late August, everything changes. Sally and I are standing in the kitchen. I have spent the day at home with her, working on my script for Jean-Paul.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” I ask.

“That would be nice. Yes. Thank you.”

“With milk?”

“Please. And honey.”

“Two spoonfuls?”

“Right. I’ll put the honey in. I like watching it drip off the spoon.”

Something about her tone has caught my attention: the modulation of her voice, its unpressured directness—measured, and with a warmth that I have not heard in her in months. Her eyes have softened. I caution myself not to be fooled. Yet the change in her is unmistakable.

I put on the kettle and we stand together by the stove. The opulent town house below our kitchen window is lit up for a party. Sumptuously dressed guests spill out into the yard where tuxedoed waiters carry around trays of hors d’oeuvres. A scene from Gatsby.

“I’m glad we weren’t invited,” says Sally.

The kettle boils. Sally leans toward me, resting her body against mine. “You and Pat saved my life. It must be hard for you.”

It’s as if a miracle has occurred. The miracle of normalcy, of ordinary existence. Following Sally’s lead, I act as if nothing unusual has happened. And by all appearances, to her nothing unusual has happened; she seems unaware of the change.

I think to myself: I’ll remember this conversation—this seemingly insignificant exchange—as the moment when Sally returned.

It feels as if we have been living all summer inside a fable. A beautiful girl is turned into a comatose stone or a demon. She is separated from her loved ones, from language, from everything that had been hers to master. Then the spell is broken and she is awake again, “surprised to have eyes.”

The spell ends for me as well. My insomnia falls away and I sleep in long dreamless gluttonous sprees, unable to rise.

At Sally’s suggestion we pay a weekday visit to the Museum of Natural History, and find ourselves alone among the Large African Mammals, each in its glassed dioramic world. We used to come here often when Sally was a young girl, and we relive the delight of those excursions, revisiting her favorite diorama, that of a springbok gazelle with a small bird feeding off the bugs that live in the springbok’s hide.

In the museum cafeteria, she says: “I have to figure out who I am again. It’s like starting from scratch.”

She tells me that on the night before we took her to the hospital, with her mind blazing, she caught a glimpse of herself—“the sane me”—looking back at her from the bathroom mirror. “It was a spot in my eye, and it was there for a split second, this little part of myself that I still hadn’t burned, watching me go crazy. I see you. I know what you’re doing. I know who you are. And then it vanished.” She snaps her fingers. “It didn’t fade, it just went out, like the wick on one of those kerosene lamps we used to go camping with. It was like I stopped to take a last look at myself, like I was saying good-bye.”

I remember the tale of the rabbi to whom a dead man came with a problem: he believed that he was alive. “Don’t you know,” the rabbi told him, “that you are no longer among the living? You are in the Land of Confusion.” On hearing the story, the rabbi’s son worried that he too was in the Land of Confusion. “Once you know that there exists such a world, you cannot be in it,” explained the father.

The matter of who exactly she is now after her manic attack continues to pester Sally. At home, she asks, “Does this mean that everything I believed while I was crazy is bullshit?” How much must she repudiate? How does she sort out what she can safely keep from her mania, and what she has to discard?

Later, she wonders how something so vivid and obvious could turn out to be false. “If my insights weren’t true, then what is? When you fell in love with Mom or with Pat, did you worry that it might be a delusion?”

“Only a little bit.”

“But it didn’t stop you.”

She seems immensely matured. I realize that she has acquired another dimension. Her range of experience seems enormous. I have to remind myself of how little she has lived, that she is still a girl.

         

The time has come to remove the Wellness Contract from the refrigerator door. Sally goes out now for three hours alone. She is pensive, filling new notebooks, “self-educating,” she tells me, “the way you did it.”

We enroll her in a Japanese brush painting class at a storefront studio on Sullivan Street, so she can ease herself back into the quotidian world of conversation and simple human exchange. It proves a benign place to begin her reentry; she attends her three classes without enthusiasm, but seems heartened that they are not a total disaster.

One evening, she invites me to sit with her in the Bleecker Street playground, the site of her initial epiphany. She goes straight to a bench—“my bench,” she calls it—like a worshiper to her regular pew in church. It is almost nine, no children are here, which seems to be the way Sally prefers it. “It’s like visiting myself in a museum,” she says.

After I have sat down next to her, she does her best to make me see it, the moment her life changed. This is where two four-year-old girls playing on the wooden footbridge near the slide signaled to her—a wave, a stare of recognition, a solemn nod—igniting the vision that had been gathering force inside her: that everyone is born a genius, but it is drummed out of us almost from the minute we open our eyes. Everyone possesses this genius. It’s our unmentionable secret. When childhood is over we are afraid to salvage it from within ourselves, because it would be too risky to do so, it would rupture our drone’s pact with society, it would threaten our ability to survive.

“I thought that to protect yourself from my discovery you had convinced everyone that I was insane. I really believed my vision would crush you, Dad, because you, more than anyone, were toiling to get your genius back, but you couldn’t, you were trying too hard.”

She takes my hand. A couple passes by, noticing us with an approving smile.

“Everything fell into place,” she says. “I don’t know how to describe it. My mind was going incredibly fast. But time slowed. I could see underneath the surface of things. I could see inside people. It was like I had been sleepwalking until then, waiting for this to happen.”

She shakes her head in amazement and we sit in the empty playground for a while longer, in silence.

Dr. Lensing continues to wean Sally from haloperidol, and the change is plain to see. “She’s reading again,” I tell her after one of Sally’s sessions at the behavioral clinic. “Her concentration is coming back.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t turn on her,” says Lensing. “Concentration can become fixation.”

But she is obviously pleased with Sally’s progress. Two days later, at the end of their session, she takes me aside and whispers, “She’s almost out of the woods. The dark forest.”

Sally says that when she hears people climbing the stairs at Bank Street, she thinks they’re coming to check on her. “Then I remind myself it isn’t real. I think people are watching me, but it’s only me watching myself.”

Lensing warns Sally not to flirt with such thoughts. “They put you at the center of the world. They make you feel important. People are watching you. You feel chosen. You know better than to fall for that bill of goods.”

Sally listens with her lower lip between her teeth.

“I don’t know when to trust my mind anymore. I don’t know when I’m being psychotic.”

“When you’re back at school and your life is full again, you’ll be less interested in what psychosis has to offer.”

At the mention of school, Sally grows tense. Only eleven days remain until she is to start tenth grade. “I won’t be treated like an invalid,” she shouts. “I don’t want special treatment. I won’t stand for it! I can do what other girls my age do!” She begins to cry.

“Where is this coming from?” asks Lensing.

To me Sally says: “Do you think I’ll be able to handle school?”

I assure her that she will.

“Will my friends be able to tell that I changed?” She turns to Lensing. “If I can’t handle it, I’ll quit.”

         

On Labor Day, September 2, my brother Steve calls.

“I’m not feeling good, Mikey. I want to go to the hospital. I think I’ve had it.”

“What about those freeloaders?”

“They’re gone. Junior and the others. They took off. Three days ago. I’m alone now. I swear to you. They’re not coming back.”

In a shaky grasping voice, he tells me that to survive he’s been tramping to church basements for handout meals. “I been standing in line with the rest of the bums.”

“You’re not a bum, Steve. Your family is behind you. You can hold your head up. You don’t ever have to be a bum.”

I tell him I’ll be over in half an hour.

“I love you, Mikey. Not because I have to. Not because you’re my brother. You’re the only one.”

It has been a month since I laid eyes on Steve. After my last, disastrous visit to his apartment, with his stoned friends sprawled out on the floor, he stopped meeting me at the supermarket for our shopping dates or even answering the phone.

A week ago I received a call from a man named Edgar, who identified himself as the manager of Steve’s building. “I need permission to inspect your brother’s apartment,” he said. “There have been complaints, and we’ve reason to believe Steve is violating his lease, as well as posing a health hazard to my law-abiding tenants—and to himself, I might add.”

I fended Edgar off, playing for time. “I understand the problem. We’re taking steps to resolve it.”

“I’d prefer not to have to resort to legal action.”

I reminded Edgar that he has been accepting rent from Steve since the day the building opened, twenty-one years ago. And it struck me that this was the real reason why he wanted to evict Steve: his rent is a quarter of what the apartment would fetch on the open market.

“This is the first problem you’ve had with my brother. Ever.”

“Yes, but it’s a very large problem, Mr. Greenberg.”

As it happened, Edgar also contacted my eldest brother Jay at our father’s scrap metal yard, which Jay and another brother, Larry, inherited after our father died.

After speaking with Edgar, Jay called me. He didn’t blame him for wanting to get rid of Steve. “The way he’s living in that apartment sounds revolting.”

I pictured Jay with Larry in their square, gray, bunkerlike office, their metal desks only feet apart, Jay restless and hardened by a life that he fell into rather than chose.

“Tell me this,” he said. “If someone was bringing drug addicts off the street into your building, where you lived, how would you feel?”

“Right now, I don’t give a damn what Steve’s neighbors feel.”

“Well, you better start giving a damn, because they’re going to evict him.”

“They can’t evict him.”

“Bullshit they can’t. The building’s going co-op. He’s destroying their property values.”

“Steve’s a legal leaseholder, with a lifelong history of mental illness. There isn’t a judge in this city who would evict him, and Edgar knows it. So let’s forget the threat, and figure out how to get rid of the deadbeats who are crashing with him, because if we don’t, he may wind up on the street, no eviction necessary.”

I told myself that Jay’s callousness toward Steve was really an expression of his guilt at being lavished with Helen’s love while Steve got nothing—guilt expressed as anger at the guilt-inducing party for causing so much discomfort. But what did I really know of his feelings? We were a battalion of Cains, growing up, willing to throw a weakened brother onto the garbage heap. “More for me!” was the operative ethos of our household. Cut loose by our parents, Steve became our resident scapegoat and pariah. Our shield.

“The only way to put an end to this is to scare him straight,” said Jay.

To accomplish this, he and Larry planned to send a hired tough to his apartment—an ex-cop who had installed a security system in their warehouse in the South Bronx. His name was Ralph. I had met him once while visiting my brothers about a year ago, a powerful-looking, well-mannered man in tan Florsheims, a pink button-down shirt, and blow-dried hair. My brothers seemed proud of their association with Ralph. He was a testament, they believed, to the raw-knuckled world they inherited from our father (though our father never would have hired anyone to intimidate a member of his family). The idea was that Ralph would pose as a cop and threaten Steve with eviction and jail. “Wise him up.”

When I protested against this tactic, my brothers reminded me that nothing I tried thus far had worked, that fear was what people responded to, that it was for Steve’s own good.

They may understand fear, I thought, but not the intractability of madness. How to explain this, however, when I just learned it myself? Steve was beyond the therapy of fear, and Ralph’s threats wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Steve was in another world.

         

When I arrive at Steve’s building, Gato the Dominican doorman with a mustache so fine it looks as if it was drawn over his lip with an eye pencil, my ally in the building, is listening to the Yankees game on the radio.

“Edgar’s been calling me. How bad is it?” I ask him.

Gato takes me aside. “Look, I got a loco of my own at home, it isn’t easy, I know the score, you got to keep loving ’em when what you want to do is shoot ’em between the fucking eyes. Management sent orders not to let anyone up to see Steve. ¿Entiende? Some bruiser came by last week, said he was a cop. I let him go up when he showed me his badge. Otherwise, Steve’s barred. Not that it changes anything. These malditos sneak in through the service entrance. They have their own keys to your brother’s apartment. Tenants are freaking out, hombre. Malditos roaming around the fourth floor. People afraid to go out into the hall. People who live alone. They call me wanting to know what’s up. I’m going to let you through because I know you’re okay. But escúchame bien, do something to straighten out your brother, man.”

Steve’s door is unlocked and I walk into his apartment without knocking. Junior and the freeloaders are gone, as Steve told me they would be, though their blankets and debris are still on the floor. They have sold his television, the cable box that Helen paid for every month, his radio, his phone. The lightbulbs are shot, and the flannel sheets covering the windows make the place feel like a cave. I pull back the sheets; a large jagged section of glass is missing from one of the windows. The room is filthy, the stench overpowering.

Steve sits on the bed, in his underwear, his cracked lower lip protuberant and slack. His skin has a calloused texture, puffy and pixilated with grime. I know what I look like, his expression seems to be saying. You don’t have to tell me. This is the way it is.

“What happened to the window?” I ask

“Junior pushed this guy Raimundo against it. It was an accident. A little scuffle. They went at each other. I had nothing to do with it. Now the rain comes in. It makes me feel homeless. Can you fix it, Mikey?”

I search around for something presentable for him to wear to the hospital, but everything is dirty and torn. I settle on a striped pullover I gave him, its cuffs frayed as if they’ve been gnawed, and a pair of black jeans. I get him into a pair sneakers, without laces, and we make our way to the elevator in the hall.

“I know what you’re thinking. I went on the spin cycle. I went out of control. It’s like Dad used to say, I can’t hack it, I don’t know how to have friends.”

In the lobby, Steve shuffles out of the elevator like an elderly man, barely lifting his feet, his sneakers sliding off as he advances, the rear part of the shoe crushed under his bare heel.

He nods hello to Gato. “You know my brother,” he says, obviously ingratiating himself to me. “He’s the one who keeps me straight. My lifeline.”

Gato opens the front door for us and we step out onto Twenty-second Street. Steve immediately removes a charred corncob pipe from his pocket, jams a few twigs of tobacco into the bowl, lights it, sucks in the smoke till his face turns red, then exhales gasping. To empty the ashes, he hammers the pipe against the leg of his pants, peering at me in a burlesque of rage and contrition. “We gonna stand here all day?”

I flag a cab and direct it uptown to a hospital on Fifth Avenue—not the hospital where Sally was—I couldn’t bring another member of my family there, I couldn’t face them—but where our father died two summers ago.

We hurtle crosstown, the city rushing by, exhaling hotly, Madison Avenue still and pale, its window displays looking more preserved than alive, like the dioramas at the natural history museum. Another empty holiday weekend.

Steve’s relief is palpable. He doesn’t seem psychotic to me, but childlike and helpless. His belligerence of the past two months has drained away, spent from the effort of a rebellion that he knew from the beginning he wouldn’t be able to sustain.

I ask him about the “cop” who came to see him. Steve’s recollection of the visit is vague. “Was he a policeman? I guess he was. He acted like he didn’t want to be there. But who would? My place isn’t exactly four stars. He seemed to feel sorry for me. He told me I was going to be arrested if I didn’t straighten out, I wasn’t really listening, he talked like a counselor. He apologized for coming. Maybe he was shocked. I don’t know. He gave me a couple of bucks for tobacco, and split.”

We make it to the Emergency Room, the first checkpoint, and settle in for a long wait on the hard plastic chairs, a television blaring overhead on its metal arm. To pass the time he recites the birthdays of most everyone in our family, including those of distant relatives, dead and alive, names I haven’t heard in years. Steve knows them all with uncanny retention, though he has less to do with them than any of us brothers; on the rare occasions that he shows up at family gatherings, he slips away after an hour.

“I think you may be mentally ill too, Mikey,” he says.

“What makes you say that?”

“When you were a teenager, come on, your temper, your fights with Dad.” He gives me a sly, satisfied look. “They have markers for mental illness. All you need is a blood test to find out for sure. Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to scare you, but I think you have it, I’ve seen signs. They can tell from this test if an unborn baby is schizophrenic. Because you can be schizoid in the womb too. Why do you think they legalized abortion?”

“There’s no marker, Steve. No blood test. You know better than that.”

He emits one of his scraping laughs.

“Come on, Mikey. I’ll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours. Bob Dylan said that.”

He asks after our mother, whom he hasn’t seen in many months. He’s worried about her too. She’s getting old. She always had Bernie. She’s not used to life without him. An acid tone creeps into his voice. “She never worked, like I’ve worked, Mikey, putting in my time, schlepping vases of flowers in the snow.” He claims that the last time he visited her, she was sitting in her apartment in the dark. Alone.

He is describing himself, of course. The person he is speaking of is nothing like our mother. Helen’s apartment is unusually bright; she has dozens of friends and, since Bernie died, several suitors as well. Her phone rarely stops ringing.

Finally, a psychiatric resident interviews him. Steve doesn’t protest when the resident invites me to join them. “I got no secrets from my little brother,” he says.

During the interview Steve is especially wily. He obviously wants to be admitted and knows how to play his hand. He tells the resident that he is hearing voices, and I am almost certain he is lying.

“Can you identify the voices?”

“It’s my sister-in-law, the wife of my brother Jay, our mother’s favorite. Am I right, Mikey? Tell him. Jay got everything. He’s the prince. And he got the princess and she’s jabbering in my ear.”

Without warning, he pulls out his tongue with his fingers and offers it to the resident for close inspection, wagging it from side to side.

“Do you see signs of rot? Sores? Cancer?”

“Put your tongue away,” I say. And to the resident I explain: “He’s usually shy. Cleanly dressed, as gentle as the milk of God. You wouldn’t recognize him.”

Sparing no detail, Steve describes his exploits with Junior on St. Marks Place. I wonder if he’s spreading it on too thickly as he talks about their “ho” Maxine, but he seems disoriented in a way that can’t be feigned—by turns emphatic, obnoxious, innocent beyond the precincts of blame.

He is accepted into the hospital and we ride up together to the nebular safety of the locked psychiatric ward.

A nurse feeds him his medication.

“I’m a chemical experiment, Mikey. A living side effect. Remember Aldous Huxley? Brave New World? That’s where I’m at, little brother. Soma. I started taking these drugs in 1966.”

I tell him I’ll be back to check on him in a day or two.

         

I spend the next two days cleaning Steve’s apartment, throwing out the detritus of his binge, including the turntables and broken amps and computers that he and his cronies collected. I change the lock on his door, buy curtains for the windows, and hire a glazier to repair the broken pane.

During one of my trips to the compactor room I hear the metallic jingle of a chain lock sliding into its slot. During subsequent trips, I sense the eye of the person behind that door watching me through the peephole as I pass.

Finally, the neighbor steps out of her apartment and confronts me, a small soft-spoken woman in her sixties. “I know who you are,” she says. “You drop some care package off for your brother and leave right away, because you can’t stand to be here. But I’m here all the time, separated from him by a Sheetrock wall.”

I apologize for the nuisance of the past two months and assure her that things will improve.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, letting him live like this. You obviously don’t give a shit.”

After three days, Steve is discharged from the hospital. He seems glad to return to his digs and pick up his life where it was before he embarked on his disastrous “social experiment,” as he has now taken to calling it.

I present him with a new key, a fresh tin of tobacco, and his weekly groceries, which I have stored neatly in the fridge.

In a matter of minutes he has reinstalled himself in his Barcalounger with his pickle jar filled to the brim with Lipton’s tea.

“I’m going back to work for the Greeks,” he tells me. “The busy season is about to kick in. Ten, twelve deliveries a day. You’ll see. High times are around the corner. I heard it on the radio. Clinton’s going to be reelected president. A new boom.”

         

On September 9 school is to begin, and as the date approaches Sally is filled with dread at the prospect of reentering the world, let alone facing her classmates. She is ashamed of what she might have done in the late spring when she was gearing up for her manic gallop. Imagining the worst, she has taken to crossing the street to avoid facing neighbors and shopkeepers whom she barely knows, convinced that she disgraced herself with them. The fact that she can’t remember how only serves to sharpen her retroactive shame.

“I don’t know who I was,” she says. “What if people ask me to explain the weird things I did?”

“What kind of things?” asks Pat.

“I don’t know!”

Robert Lowell felt that talking about a manic attack after “the froth of delirium has blown away” is like “a cat trying to explain climbing down a ladder.” Sally is that cat, laboring downward after her fleet heedless climb. The vividness of mania has left her unsure of where her thoughts ended and her deeds began. It doesn’t seem possible to her that the high drama of her projections weren’t actual events, and that gray ordinary life went on as usual while she was mad.

“It was all happening inside you,” I tell her. “No one could see it, until you boiled over with Cass. And that was already in July.”

But the blank spots in her memory continue to haunt her. “I was out of my mind. But I don’t know what that really means.”

Lensing tells me that her anxieties are to be expected. “‘Better old demons than new gods,’” she says, quoting the Chinese proverb. “The mind flies back to the storm it’s familiar with. There’s a certain brittleness to Sally right now. A tendency to self-manufacture stress.”

She increases Sally’s antipsychotic medication, though it remains well below what it was when she left the hospital. “Just for a few days, to help her over the hump,” Lensing explains.

But then Sally frets that her friends will know she’s sedated.

“What if I don’t pass the lunch counter test,” she says, referring to the ability to be in public without one’s mental illness being detected.

Under Lensing’s guidance she is keeping a “mood journal,” chronicling, with worrying meticulousness, every shift of her heart. I wonder if she is overdoing it; shouldn’t she be encouraged to look away from herself, to look outward?

Four days before school is to begin she says, “I think we’re rushing it. I’m not ready. I haven’t had a chance to deal with what happened. I’m sorry. Will I ever stop disappointing you, Dad?”

She plugs along bravely, however, delivering her mood reports to Lensing, though she herself harbors doubts about their reliability. She is the sole source of information about herself, and that’s the rub. “I have a knack for fooling people into believing I’m in control. They go along with me, when I’m a total mess. It’s a little scary.”

Lensing isn’t worried about being fooled. “The spectrum is narrowing,” she tells Pat and me. “Her mood swings are less radical. She’s an exceptional writer. It just pours out of her. She draws you in. It has…”—she pauses, searching for the word—“…immediacy.”

She places Sally on a strict regimen, “the manic-depressive diet,” she calls it, designed to keep Sally firmly planted on the ground. “As little refined flour as possible, but potatoes are okay. Lots of vegetables and protein. Two tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day, nine hours of sleep without interruption, and no naps.”

Alone at dinner with me, Sally has the jitters of a bride just before her wedding, unsure of whether she is throwing in her lot with the right man. “I can’t go through with it. Why don’t we just accept the fact that school is something I can’t handle.”

“Have you considered the possibility that things might work out?”

“Possibilities don’t help me. I need to know.”

“No one can be sure about the future.”

“Yes. But it’s different with me. If my mind turns on me, I won’t even know it’s happening. I won’t know I’m being a freak. But everyone else will.”

I think: how fragile she is. Yet the unstoppable force of her being is the opposite of fragile. I wish I could stop her from overidentifying with her illness, but how can I when the very mechanism of managing it requires a self-scrutiny that constantly reinforces it in her mind?

When I suggest that she take it slow and wait a few more weeks before starting school, she says with horror, “And be a dropout? Are you serious?”

Around midnight Pat returns from rehearsal. Sally has gone to bed. Pat sits down a few feet from me on the couch, silent and intense. It’s been almost a month since our blowup, and we are still tentative with each other, halting, careful about what we say, and physically shy. It’s as if we’ve been waiting for a new order to declare itself, a new way of being that we know instinctively not to force along.

Pat sits with her knees pressed together, on the edge of the couch, as if she’s about to spring up at any second. I put down the book I’ve been reading.

“I think we should have a child,” she says.

It is clear to me that this is not a suggestion, that Pat has already made up her mind, and my first overriding impulse is to argue against it. Would it be wise for us to do such a thing now? Shouldn’t we wait at least until we’re resettled? Eric is impatient for us to move, nudging us out the door with a steady stream of hints and unpleasantries. And although we have spent the better part of each weekend looking for an apartment, we’ve yet to find one we can afford.

“Can we handle a baby when everything is so uncertain?” I ask.

“Things are always uncertain,” says Pat, inadvertently paraphrasing the platitude I delivered to Sally earlier in the evening. She brusquely rises, obviously offended.

Overhearing us, Sally climbs down from the loft bed, stricken. “I knew this would happen. You’ll never love me as much as your own baby. It’s the biological law. You’ll say you do, but it will be a lie, not because you want to lie, I don’t think you ever lie, Pat, but you won’t be able to help yourself, I’ll always be second.”

She sits on the couch where Pat had been sitting, her feet curled under her, wide awake, worrying.

“Pat will be an amazing mother,” she says to me in a whisper, so as not to be overheard.

During the weekend we visit friends in Woodstock in upstate New York. They have a healthy five-month-old baby girl. Sally grasps her fists and talks quietly to her, and our friends remark at how absorbed and tranquil the baby is in her presence.

At lunch, the new father props the baby in his lap and his wife trains a video camera on the scene.

Impulsively, I jump up from the table, throw my arms around Sally, and say, “This is my baby. Video us too!”

Sally turns her head away, and Pat gives me a scalding look from across the table.

“One is always a baby to one’s parents,” says our hostess kindly.

She turns the camera on us for a few seconds before politely putting it away.

I sit down, burning with shame.

         

The night before school is to begin, Sally is supernaturally calm. She is annoyed at the fuss Pat and I make as we prepare her for the big day: a special compartment in her backpack for her noontime meds, and a note to remind her to take them.

In the morning, Sally makes fun of my checklist of “things to remember.”

When I ask her if I’m being overprotective, however, her sarcasm dissolves. “God, no. I’m terrified. That’s the problem. I need this.”

The familiar simmering apprehension comes over her. “What am I going to say when people ask what I did over the summer?” She throws her voice into a high-pitched mimicry of chitchat. “‘Oh, I spent July in the loony bin. I found out I was psychotic. What about you?’”

I advise her to keep the events of the summer to herself. “People won’t understand. Or very few will. You don’t know what kind of prejudice you’ll run into. Best to work it out with us, and with Lensing.”

But am I right about this? Is it really better for Sally to conceal what happened? It may not be possible. And what of the burden such a secret will place on her?

Too preoccupied to work, at three o’clock I’m sitting outside on the stoop waiting for her to come home.

“How did it go?”

“Fine,” she almost snaps. Then, in a softer voice, “I didn’t get eaten. No one ran away from me or noticed anything strange, except that I gained weight. But everyone looks different than last year.”

We celebrate at dinner. Robin phones to congratulate her. Then Aaron calls to cheer her on. “Nothing happened!” he says triumphantly. “Never have those two words sounded so good.”

To be congratulated for nothing is “pathetic,” insists Sally. But I can see that she is pleased.

The school week ends and nothing continues to happen.

Lensing pulls back the antipsychotic medication again, and by the end of September Sally is only taking a tiny dose before bed. Her lightning wit returns—her verbal precociousness, and her intense feeling for people, including those she encounters in literature and in movies.

She forms a tight group with three girls from her class, and often, after school, they happily colonize the apartment. Evenings, I listen to her on the phone with them, intimate, biting, gossipy—the buoyant sound of health.

After a long discussion with Pat and me, she tells them about her crack-up. They readily accept the news. Being an alumna of the psych ward confers social status on Sally. It’s a kind of credential. She has been where they have not been. It becomes their secret.

         

On October 23, the day before the opening of her dance performance, Pat calls me late in the afternoon. “Tech rehearsal was a disaster,” she says as if what she suspected all along has finally been confirmed. “The piece looked terrible. The dancers forgot everything I taught them. They started posing, moving in time with the music. It was deadly.” She apologizes for not inviting me to rehearsal as she had promised. “I realized you were too close to the material. You wouldn’t be able to see it with your best critical eye.”

She hasn’t told me anything specific about the piece, and I have the sense that she dreads showing it, though this may be just her normal pre–opening night panic.

At home, she confers with the dancers for hours by phone. “They need to be a little scared,” she tells me. “There’s no compromising now.”

The living room floor is covered with sheets of tracing paper—Pat’s latest prop. I hear her cutting the paper as I drift off to sleep.

At 5 A.M. she is sitting on the edge of our bed, pale with apprehension.

Good news: the show is sold out. I arrive with Sally and watch the audience drift in with a sharp expectant rush. The seats around us fill. The chatter grows louder. I spot Helen wearing a purplish dress woven to a brocaded finish. She embraces Sally, introducing her to the two friends she has brought along as “my gorgeous granddaughter.”

“Congratulations to the husband,” says one of Helen’s friends. “You must be very proud.”

Sally grips my hand. I feel a triple panic: hers, Pat’s, and mine.

“Pat is so brilliant,” Sally says, after my mother and her friends have gone off to their seats. “She held on to her creativity. I feel so lucky that she loves me. I do believe she does. Do you think she does?”

The house lights go down and we are plunged into Pat’s psyche, but also, astonishingly, into a mirror of our own. Clinical Data the piece is called. The dancers lunge and flop, jerky and raw, while two actresses follow them spouting poisoned rapid-fire phrases—“…we’re here to take out the useless parts of your brain…”—their haunted whispery voices overlapping. They’re the voices inside the dancers’ minds.

Sally seems mesmerized. I watch her watching: her still face and large black eyes. The dancers look as if they have been caught by surprise, ungainly and vulnerable within their invented world. The tracing paper that Pat had been cutting in our living room the night before has been assembled into fifteen dresses which hang on fishing lines from the rafters, each with a yellow sash. An enormous fan, its steel blades glinting, sits upstage center like a bull’s-eye.

The fan is switched on, blowing almost violently through the theater. The dresses have a feathery look suspended in midair. The dancers slip into them, the paper rustling loudly as they move, crumpling on their bodies and falling off in shreds that sail randomly around the stage. The effect is of sloughed skin, as the dancers in their torn dresses assume a ravaged, fashion catwalk appearance. The action may be taking place in a prison from which the effort to escape is comical, because even when they think they have broken free the dancers are still there.

“What’s your diagnosis?” asks one of the voices, the way a prisoner might ask, What are you in for?

A Colombian saxophonist, whom Pat met while he was playing for quarters in the subway, plays boleros he composed. The dancers blow bubbles at each other that land like psychic bombs. It comes to me that we are in the dayroom of the psych ward, reimagined as a kind of lunatic ball.

So this is what she has been doing all summer, I think. I have the urge to get up and leave. It’s too intense. I take Sally’s hand. She seems delighted and amazed.

When it’s over, the audience is momentarily stunned. A few seconds pass before the applause gathers momentum.

The dancers take their bows, spent and euphoric. I glance at Pat, standing in the back of the theater, her face swollen from lack of sleep, cheering for them with her hands over her head.

Helen congratulates her on her way out of the theater. “You captured it, Pat. You showed us something profound.” She embraces Sally again. “There was a lot to think about out there tonight, sweetheart. But don’t think too hard.”

Her friends seem bewildered and moved. “She’s a quiet girl,” I hear one saying of Pat as they head toward the exit. “A lovely girl. You don’t expect this from her.”

At home, Sally says, “It was like watching my episode from the outside. It was beautiful. You showed it to me. I just hope we didn’t scare anyone. All those people in the audience, I mean. And how they were cheering for you, Pat!”

She attends the second performance, hanging around the dancers afterward, sitting backstage next to Pat with her head in her lap.

Two weeks later, she receives an A—her first ever—on a paper about James Baldwin’s essay The Fire Next Time. “He wrote this book so he wouldn’t go mad,” she tells me.

The shelf on her loft bed is piled with new books she has acquired: Women and Madness, The Myth of Mental Illness, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

Sometimes, after school, she retreats to her loft bed or takes long wandering walks in the Village. I can sense her contending with what she knows is inside her now, bewildered and brave, negotiating with it, as if trying to reach a truce with herself.

In December the three of us move into an apartment of our own on West 108th Street, and the time of our troubles limps to an end. At least for now.