The Embarrassments of Suffering

The cat stretches his neck, and Albie scratches him under the chin. If only Bunny were more like Jeffrey. Or even a little bit like Jeffrey. “How about some breakfast?” Albie asks. “There are bagels in the freezer. I can scrape the mold off the cream cheese.” He hardly expects Bunny to laugh at what is a pale attempt at humor under any circumstances, yet he has hopes for a droll ha-ha or even a half smile, but Bunny only says, “I’m not hungry.”

“Coffee, then? What about a cup of coffee?”

“No,” she says. “Not now. Maybe later.”

Every day Albie tells her it would be a good thing if she were to get dressed and go out for a walk, and every day she says, “Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”

Now, seemingly apropos of nothing unless you’re privy to her state of mind, Bunny wants to know, “What’s that animal? The one that curls itself into a ball?” At that, on cue, Jeffrey gets up and does that cat thing, the walking in tight circles, counter-clockwise, a ritualistic three times around, as if taking part in a druid divorce, before he settles down and curls into a ball. Bunny shakes her head. “No, I mean as a defense mechanism. Against predators,” she adds, unnecessarily. Her attempt to remember what surely she knows blinks like a light bulb loose in the socket, and her effort to recollect comes to her in an unrealized image that breaks into particles of dust before it can take form. She is certain that there is such an animal, but she can’t come up with what it’s called or what it looks like except she’s pretty sure it has a tail.

Intermittent and short-term memory loss is symptomatic of her affliction: facts and dates elude her. She frequently drops the thread that pulls a thought through from beginning to conclusion, and words—not all words, but deeply desired words—vanish in a flash like lantern fish at the bottom of the ocean. She finds she can describe a scene, but the connective tissue needed to tell a story becomes white space, like lines skipped on the page.

Her affliction. Bunny does not know how else to phrase it, how to articulate what is wrong with her. Not what is wrong with her in the big picture, insofar as what is wrong with her personality. That she knows how to articulate; like a line memorized for the stage, Bunny will often say, “Generally speaking, I am a headache of a person who is not easy to like.” It’s true. Bunny is not easy to like, but it’s possible to love her.

Although there is no chill in the room, Bunny pulls the blanket up to her chin. The blanket—Adirondack pine-tree green wool, coarse in texture similar to a hair shirt—is a blanket that she associates with the Girl Scouts. Not that Bunny ever was a Girl Scout or a Campfire Girl or a member of any other fascist or neo-fascist organization that requires wearing a uniform with a sash to display medals, ribbons, and badges. Lack of firsthand experience, however, plays no part in her formation of intractable ideas, one of which is that the Girl Scouts, a socially regimented youth group ripe for totalitarian indoctrination, spend their weekends goose-stepping along mountain trails. But, even for Bunny, to connect the Brownies to the Brown Shirts was pushing it, although it’s never stopped her from mentioning—just mentioning, mind you—that brown is a curious choice of color for a uniform for little girls because, as far as children’s tastes are concerned, well, there’s a reason there are no brown balloons.

Pronouncements such as these are emblematic of problems with her personality. But contrarian disagreeability is irrelevant to this particular iteration of what is wrong with Bunny. Although she cannot bring herself to say so in these words, Bunny is suffering from depression. In reference to herself the inherent theatricality of the verb to suffer embarrasses her. In this context, to suffer, she believes, would be melodramatic and self-aggrandizing, not to mention rendering her a person empathetically stunted when you consider real suffering like starving to death or stage four colon cancer or a baby rhesus monkey given a wire coat hanger to cling to instead of a mother. To refer to herself as suffering would mean that, on top of everything else, she’d also be an asshole.

Of all the things that can go wrong with your mind, of all of the Oliver Sacks-ian mistaking your husband for a pair of mittens kinds of things, depression, even major depressive disorder, isn’t likely to elicit much more than a yawn or a roll of the eyes. In fact, it could be said that there is nothing wrong with Bunny other than her indulging a penchant for self-pity. But if there isn’t anything really wrong, then what is wrong with Bunny?

No matter what is wrong with Bunny, whatever you want to call it, one thing is certain—to be sick in the head is not at all the same as being normal sick. If you are normal sick, people will at least pretend to care. If you are normal sick, people will call or even stop by for a visit. They will offer to run errands for you, pick up orange juice and NyQuil; they will offer to bring you soup and banana smoothies; they will offer to walk your dog. They will say, “Please, let me know if there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.” Of course they are counting on you to take them up on none of it, but at least they go through the motions. Sometimes they send flowers. But no one has come to visit Bunny. No one has offered to bring her hot soup; no one has sent her so much as a Get Well card or a balloon, one of those Mylar balloons with a yellow happy face, and you can forget about a basket of fruit.

In all fairness, the bit about no one sending her a card, that is not entirely accurate. Although it wasn’t exactly a Get Well card, less than two weeks ago, Lizzie Frank sent her an email:

 

Dear Bunny,

We all have bad days. You’re not special. Pull up your pants and get over it.

XO Lizzie

PS Don’t forget. New Year’s Eve. We’re expecting you.

 

Also to be fair, people do call Albie to ask how Bunny is feeling; what they won’t do is call when Albie isn’t home. No one wants to talk to Bunny. They are afraid to ask Bunny how she is feeling.

As to be expected in light of his profession, Albie knows about the ways of animals, their habits and habitats, their mating rituals, what they eat, and which ones have tails. He knows about their defense mechanisms, those that hide, those that run with the wind, and those that curl into a ball as a means of defense. In answer to Bunny’s question he says, “The armored millipede, the hedgehog, the armadillo.” Then, unable to resist, he gets carried away with himself about the armor of the armadillo. Overly effusive in his description of the plates of the dermal bone, he is waxing on about the horn-covered epidermal scales when Bunny cuts him off. “No,” she says. “Not the armadillo.”

Although Bunny has always been enthused, fascinated even, by what he knows, by what excites him in his field of study, her evident lack of interest now in dermal bones is to be expected. Expected, which doesn’t mean there’s not a nettle-like sting to it. But the sting subsides quickly, and Albie says, “Maybe you’re thinking of the hedgehog. The hedgehog has quills that look like the quills of a porcupine, but they are hollow and don’t easily detach.” Before Albie can explain how the hedgehog curls into a tight ball, the quills, or spines, projecting outward, Bunny asks, “Would you make some coffee?”

Relief comes like the release of a coil. Albie springs up from the couch. “Colombian?” he offers her a choice. “Or French Mocha Java? We might still have some of that Sumatran blend left.”

“I don’t care,” Bunny says, and when Albie is out of earshot, she says it again. “I don’t care.” And then softer, “I don’t care,” and softer still, I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. Idon’tcareIdon’tcareIdon’tcare. The words take on a perpetual motion of their own like Newton’s pendulum, or the flow of a river, or the om of some pretend-Buddhist yahoo fraud. Bunny lacks the decency of tolerance when it comes to converts to Buddhism because her older sister is a pretend-Buddhist yahoo fraud. Bunny doesn’t much care for her older sister, and she doesn’t much care for her younger sister either, and the lack of affection is returned in kind.