What We’ll Do to Get Attention

The Treatment room—treatment, one more word Bunny now puts in air quotes, “treatment”—is dimly-lit, although it could be it seems dimly lit only by way of comparison to the ward where the rows of fluorescent lights cast a relentless and ghastly-yellow overglow, rendering everything, and everyone, ugly. This light is softer on the eyes, calming even, but the association Bunny makes with it is sinister, an association magnified by the contraption on the far side of what she’s thinking of as the operating table, which is in fact a gurney and no different than an examining table except it’s longer, wider, on wheels, and an examining table doesn’t usually come with restraining cuffs. Wires, black wires like adaptor cords, dangle from the equipment. The dials look like knobs on an oven.

It’s only natural that Frankenstein would come to mind, but Bunny, being Bunny, instead is reminded of the Milgram experiments, way more creepy and they really happened. But this isn’t some gothic horror insane asylum. It’s not even Bellevue, where Bunny ushered in the New Year strapped to a gurney and injected with a sedative. It’s one of the top hospitals in the tri-state area with a world-renowned cardiac unit.

Bunny sits sideways on the edge of the gurney as if she were about to jump off. Sondra tells her that Dr. Tilden and Dr. Kim will be here any minute. “Dr. Kim is the anesthesiologist,” Sondra explains. Then she tells Bunny to lie back. “Feet up. Rest your head here.” She pats the pillow, which is no more of a pillow than the pillow on her hospital bed is a pillow, and she reiterates that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that everything will be fine, and Bunny thinks, There’s everything to be afraid of.

This thought is followed by another thought, a far more alarming thought: she is no different than Howie. A perfectly normal person pretending to be mental. Pretending to be mental to get attention. That she would undergo electroconvulsive therapy just to get attention is not necessarily something to put past her.

The need for attention can be like the need for air: Pay Attention to Me.

Dead center in the living room, gripping a butter knife, the tip poised at her heart, while her mother, who did not indulge nonsense, vacuumed around her feet. If she broke her leg on the high-school weekend ski trip, everyone would sign her cast. Even a broken arm would’ve been good, but that didn’t happen, either. First love hit its high point with its end, when her friends gathered around to console her, to tell her she was too good for him. Her friends were a claque of dimwits; a thought she kept to herself because she wanted to be popular.

Like the broken coil she is, Bunny springs up on the table, and she tells Sondra, “I’m faking. I’m doing this just to get attention.”

Sondra places her hand on Bunny’s shoulder and gently eases her back into a prone position. It goes without saying: anyone who would go to such lengths just to get attention, that person would have to be seriously sick in the head.