THEN

“Would you like a stool softener?” the orderly asked me.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a stool softener,” he replied. “It softens your stool. Would you like one?”

“Will it fuck me up?” I asked.

“More than likely not,” he replied.

After giving me my paper cup of pills, the orderly looked up at the wall and sighed.

On a piece of paper taped above my bed: ERIC NUZUM IS A VICTIM OF MATHEMATICAL ERROR.

“I’m going to turn this in to the head nurse,” he said, pulling it down. “You know, when they ask you to stop doing this, you really should listen. They’ll put this in your Progress Plan, you know.”

I did know.

The ward staff seemed very tired of me and my signs. I’d write them on the back of some form or report, steal tape from the nurses’ station, and hang them above my bed.

After putting up signs reading QUESTION EVERYTHING, GO AWAY, and ANARCHY IN THE 5B, I was warned that putting up signs above my bed was not acceptable. When I asked why, I was given the same excuse I heard for everything, from walking around with my bathrobe over my regular clothes to playing the piano during breakfast: It will cause a disturbance among the patients.

There was already plenty of disturbance among the patients, I’d argue. My signs weren’t going to make any difference.

After the nurses and therapists started to frown on me posting these signs in my room, I started branching out into the ward itself. Signs started to appear above the TV (DON’T LOOK UP!!!), on the back of the couches (THE PUDDING IN THIS PLACE TASTES LIKE DOG SHIT. HMMMM. WONDER WHY?), and elsewhere. After putting up EAT ME in glued macaroni (my first occupational-therapy project), I was warned that one more sign would result in having the issue of sign making added to my Progress Plan: the list of “goals” (read: requirements) that needed to be achieved in order to get out of here.

ERIC NUZUM IS A VICTIM OF MATHEMATICAL ERROR wasn’t the first sign I’d made since receiving my final warning. It was the fifth.

I was begging them, taunting them in fact, to whip out the Progress Plan and add the sign making to my list of goals.

The Progress Plan was one of the many euphemism-laden forms, charts, and outlines that the staff dutifully filled out to document my daily routine, goals, and activities. My Progress Plan contained four items:

• Patient will not harm self on unit.

• Patient will report hope for the future.

• Patient will identify three alternate coping mechanisms.

• Patient will problem-solve re: stressors.

On my second day in ward 5B at Timken Mercy Medical Center, a nurse presented me with my Progress Plan and asked that I sign it. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept thinking, if I sign this, what am I admitting about myself? That what they were saying was right? That I believed that being here would make any difference in my life?

Every doctor, nurse, and social worker repeated the same explanation: I wasn’t going anywhere until we agreed on a Progress Plan and fulfilled every single item. I explained that while it was very kind of them to put together a Progress Plan, this was all a mistake and that I wanted to leave. They explained that when I was admitted, I’d signed away my ability to make that decision until my doctor had determined that I was no longer a threat to myself and others. I explained that I was fucked out of my gourd when I was admitted here. They produced a statement signed by two witnesses (both hospital staff) attesting to my lucidity and recognition that I understood all the paperwork and was made aware of my rights. I’d explain that they could fuck off.

It didn’t go well from there.

At that point, I’d been in 5B, the “high observation” ward (another euphemistic title for a level of care and oversight that was just a small step up from a straitjacket and padded room) for five days. I still had only a sketchy idea of the circumstances involved in how I got here. The morning I was admitted, I had driven my car up my parents’ driveway, scraping against the house a few times before coming to a stop. Damage to the house was incredibly minor, a small scratch mark, one chipped chimney brick, and a corner taken out of a limestone stair in the back. However, the process had torn the front driver’s-side wheel from my car and chewed up the surrounding body panels. Supposedly, I then tried to drive the car back down the driveway. I got about ten yards in two or three tries, dragging along on the broken axle, before I passed out in the car. Somebody called my mother at work, who came home and announced that we were going to the emergency room. I told the admitting nurse that I’d been carrying around a vial of sleeping pills with the idea that I’d use them to kill myself. I talked with a couple other staff people and was presented with papers to voluntarily commit myself.

The information was sketchy because no one seemed to want to tell me what had happened. Outside of hitting the gas pedal in my parents’ driveway, I remembered exactly none of this and very little of the preceding days. I just knew I was in a mental ward of a hospital, which, for the most part (minus the chocolate pudding and gelatinous fried chicken), had exceptionally tasty food.

The doctors and staff were pretty flummoxed about my complete lack of withdrawal and DTs after being in the hospital for five days, consuming nothing stronger than unsweetened iced tea. Shortly after I was admitted, they sent a social worker to inventory the alcohol and substances I had taken in the seven days prior to my admittance. At first, the social worker looked a little perturbed.

“Look, I’ve heard about you,” he said. “You need to cut it out and give me the actual list.”

The numbers were so high he thought I was making it all up. Just to be difficult. To be fair to him, I did do that kind of stuff, but this time I wasn’t.

Looking at it now, I believe there are two very clear, rational reasons why I was having no withdrawal or cravings.

First, I was not an addict. By now, it’s kind of an addict cliché for said addict to declare, “I can stop whenever I want.” However, I actually could stop whenever I wanted, and I did. I never felt the physical need to drink or take drugs. It was an emotional need. There were times when drugs felt like an answer. They felt like a way out or a method to dull my senses into a blissful void of nothing. My world would somehow darken or Little Girl would show up, and I’d scramble to find a way to cope. Coping usually involved a mixture of substances—a cocktail of inebriation—that would make it all better, if only for a little while, until it didn’t anymore. Then I’d stop again. I’d kind of lose my taste for it. I’m not saying that I wasn’t abusive—with drugs, alcohol, or other things—just that I wasn’t addicted. Drugs were never the problem in my life; they were a symptom.

All this considered, take it from me, if you are ever in a circumstance where you are being evaluated for possible substance abuse, the last thing you want to tell them is that you aren’t an addict. As soon as you try to explain all this and those words—“I am not an addict”—come out of your mouth, opinions are sealed and there is absolutely nothing you can do or say that will convince anyone that you are actually, in fact, not addicted to any substance. I would tell them, over and over again, that I was not an alcohol and/or drug addict and could, really, honestly, stop using whenever I felt like it. They would slowly nod, pat my hand, and tell me they would be ready to talk when I was ready to confront my problems. I’d exclaim that I wasn’t being difficult, but that I really, double-swear, was not an addict. They’d offer me some blandly affirming gesture and tell me they were there for me. I’d tell them to eat my ass. They’d decline.

Second reason I didn’t suffer for lack of drugs once I was admitted to the hospital: I was high all the time. Three times a day an orderly would show up with a tray of paper cups. At every one of these pill feedings, I would be given, at minimum, four to six pills to take.

“The doctor just wants to determine the right combination of medications to help you.”

A lot of the time I felt like a zombie, stumbling around the ward trying not to slip and fall in my own drool trail. I’d have the spins so bad that sometimes I couldn’t even contemplate going to sleep at night. I needed to sit upright in a chair, or I’d be throwing up for hours. The staff would tell me to lie down in my bed. I’d tell them I couldn’t, that I’d get sick. They’d shake their heads. They’d heard about me: uncooperative. Three times a day an orderly showed up, each time pumping me full of new drugs or new combinations of drugs. Each day I just seemed to get more fucked up than before.

I spent a lot of time asleep or watching television. There were no Little Girl dreams.

The fact that I had no Little Girl dreams once I entered Timken Mercy was odd to me but not nearly as odd as the reason I was given as to why I had nothing to fear while staying there. Shortly after I was admitted, I had told a nurse that the reason I couldn’t sleep was because there was a dead girl who would find me there. The nurse reassured me it would be okay.

“These walls and windows?” she said, standing up to run her hand along the plaster. “Ghostproof. No ghost can enter. You are safe.”

“Ghostproof?” I asked.

“Sweetie, I’ve worked here for twelve years; no one comes in or out of here without me saying so.” She gave me a reassuring smile.

The one good thing that I saw Timken Mercy providing me at that point was a break—a break from school and people … and even from Her. I was so desperate to believe that She could not bother me there that I was willing to accept the nurse’s claim of ghostproofing as reasonable. I really didn’t want to apply too much scrutiny. She wasn’t there; that’s all I cared about.

When I wasn’t being grilled by doctors, therapists, and social workers, or trying (and failing) to sleep, or swallowing dozens of pills, I basically spent most of my time roaming around the ward.

If you weren’t suicidal when you arrived in ward 5B at Timken Mercy, a few hours there would definitely get you in the right mood.

Besides the fact that it was geared toward containment, there were two terms that described everything in 5B: flameproof and stain-resistant. Since it was a psych ward, patients would do just about every imaginable thing (and then some unimaginable) with just about every imaginable bodily fluid and discharge. Therefore, there was a lot of mopping and wiping going on. This required furniture, drapes, floor coverings, and upholstery that were up to the task. Everything that wasn’t was contained in a Plexiglas box, and that included the television.

For many of the same reasons, the staff of 5B were understandably concerned with fire. Every surface was coated in some kind of flame-retardant goo that left it feeling like slick plastic. Even the curtains in the dayroom felt like they were made out of shredded garbage bags. Considering this, it was odd that they let us smoke. In fact, it was almost like they encouraged us to smoke. I think several patients who had never smoked before entering the hospital became chain-smokers while there. Smoking seemed such a core component of patient care that if residents of 5B wanted to smoke six cigarettes at a time from breakfast until lights-out, the staff seemed happy to let them do it.

Smoking also highlighted the most unusual feature of ward 5B: the wall lighter. If you had a bunch of disjointed folks with questionable compulsions, you certainly weren’t going to let them carry around matches or lighters. But the staff had plenty of other things to do than light cigarettes all day. So they came up with what was, frankly, a genius solution: Install an electric coil, like a car lighter, in the wall. You’d walk up to this thing, about an inch around, and press a small button underneath. In five seconds or so, it would start to glow red. There was a small wire mesh cage surrounding it, so it would be impossible to wedge anything other than a cigarette in there. Well, one time I did see a dude stick a pencil in and try to light it on fire, but pencils were contraband to begin with, so, oddly, the staff seemed much more concerned with how he had gotten a pencil than with the fact that he had intended to light it (and perhaps the entire ward) on fire.

Many everyday items were strictly forbidden: For example, we couldn’t keep plastic or Styrofoam in our room (the staff feared we’d try to burn it in order to inhale the toxic fumes). Food came precut, and patients were only allowed to eat with spoons. If you wished to shower or shave (and, frankly, few 5B residents seemed particularly concerned about either), you had to have an orderly in the bathroom with you. The staff viewed just about anything not permanently attached to our bodies as potentially dangerous and a candidate for contraband status. This seemed so odd to me. Here was a collection of people who couldn’t cope with anything or function in the everyday world. Yet at any moment, the staff believed, we could turn into MacGyver-like evil geniuses able to do immeasurable harm to ourselves and others when left alone with some dental floss, a can of Coke, or a transistor radio.

Thankfully we were allowed to use the toilet unsupervised. If they were so concerned with what I might do with a fork, it was astonishing that they would leave me and my creative 5B brethren alone to drown ourselves in a toilet tank or do God knows what with some fresh feces.

My 5B brothers and sisters were an assortment of life’s walking wounded: failed suicides, alcoholics and chronic substance abusers, crying depressives, head-trauma cases, people caught in the tail end of a massive meltdown, burnouts, and a few who seemed on the verge of being completely and forever checked out. This was before rehab, stigma-free therapy, and Prozac. At that time, they’d simply sedate you into submission and cross their fingers in the hope that you’d work your shit out with endless therapy sessions.

I was one of the youngest patients. There was another kid my age, a really thin boy named Harold. He seemed to be very upset and didn’t leave his room much for the first few days. The only time I’d seen him out of his room, he was yelling that he was the son of God and begging for everyone to look at his stigmata.

Besides Harold/Jesus (actually, he was one of two Jesuses on 5B), there were about two dozen other patients. I befriended a few, like Stan, who had purple skin when he first arrived (which turned yellow within a day or so). Also Richie, who seemed normal until he got nervous, and then he’d start to tic with increasing frequency until he stood rubbing his hands together and singing Bob Seger songs. I’d heard that before he came here, Richie was found living in a home with six dogs and no heat or electricity. For the first few days I was there, whenever I tried to talk to him, he’d suddenly pretend to be asleep. I had better luck with my roommate, Silas. Silas was a large middle-aged black man who always seemed happy and was always complimenting the patients and staff, always had a kind word for someone who seemed upset. Silas seemed so normal that you could easily mistake him for one of the staff. In fact, for the entire time we were there together, I never garnered a single clue as to what Silas was doing in a mental ward.

The one thing all us folks had in common: This was where we had crash-landed. This was where our friends and relatives brought us when they couldn’t deal with us anymore. This was a place for the broken, those who had completely worn out their welcome, tested patience, and seen wit’s end. This is where we ended up when there were no other options. All the residents of 5B wore their pasts on their sleeves, as if they were caught up or frozen in some part of their own history. But once we were here, our pasts, which we held on to so closely, were done with us. As we stewed in 5B, our lives were moving on. We were put here, left behind, as part of cleaning up the mess we’d created.

I remember being escorted into Dr. Blumfield’s office. I was told he was my psychotherapist, not to be confused with Dr. Chang, my admitting psychiatrist; Kay, my social worker and substance abuse counselor; or Jo, who coordinated my “multidisciplinary treatment plan,” whatever the hell that meant.

“Hi, Eric,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

“Have we met?” I replied.

“Ah, yes,” Blumfield said, flipping through my chart. “We talked for an hour the day after you were admitted.”

I plopped down in the chair across from his desk.

“I may have been talking, but I wasn’t there.”

Blumfield smiled and nodded.

He had a rumpled, pasty, aristocratic look to him—a little weak, a little professorial, and a little like you’d expect him to be wearing an ascot and announce he was late for the opera. He had a thin beard and frameless glasses, kind of hip for a therapist, but not that hip. While we spoke he often ran his fingers over the seams of a beautiful silver cigarette case, which, I’d later learn, contained generic menthol cigarettes.

“Are you telling me that you don’t recall our conversation?”

“I’m telling you that you may have very well had a conversation, but I have no idea who you were talking to or what was said.”

“Hmmm,” Blumfield said, starting to take notes. “We seemed to have a pretty lucid conversation, Eric,” he said. “You revealed quite a bit in the assessment.”

“Assessment?” I replied. “If you were making judgments based off what you heard the other day, then you definitely need to throw those out.”

“How about we start fresh, then?” Blumfield pulled out a copy of my Progress Plan and placed it on the table.

“Jo says that you are refusing to sign this,” he said.

In truth, I’d wadded up the Progress Plan and told Jo to go fuck herself.

My problem with the Progress Plan was that it didn’t feel like progress at all. Reading it felt like admitting defeat. It wasn’t about getting any better; it was about doing what I was told. Not causing problems. Being manageable.

“What are stressors?” I asked.

“Well, your Little Girl is one,” Blumfield replied.

“I told you about Her?”

Not only had I discussed Little Girl, I’d also told him that I had just moved back from New York City, where I’d tried unsuccessfully to start a band. (Not true.) I’d said that I had a vial of little blue sleeping pills that I had been carrying around in my pocket for two months. (True.) I’d told him that I planned to slip some of the pills into a stranger’s drink before I killed myself. (Not true.)

After hearing all this, I reminded him that I was so fucked up when I arrived that I would have consented to blow a donkey.

Blumfield was unmoved by this. He told me that I had discussed and consented to the goals when I’d first arrived.

“Eric, I’m afraid you’ve constructed a world where there are no rules you want to play by, where there is no accountability,” he said. “Part of moving beyond that is to stick to your word. You agreed to these goals; now I need you to sign the form and let’s get started.”

“If I was so agreeable before,” I said, “why didn’t you just have me sign it then?”

“Well,” Blumfield stumbled. “You were … um … you nodded off before you could sign it.” He smiled softly. “Do you remember me discussing the basic deal here with you?”

“Just to remind you, I don’t even remember meeting you,” I replied.

“Basically, we have fourteen days,” he said. “We can keep you here that long based on the consent form you signed when you were admitted. We can usually eke out a few more days without much of a problem. You can’t walk off this ward without our permission. In fact, you can’t even leave your bed without our permission if that becomes necessary. If you have not seen improvement by the end of the fourteen days, we can petition a judge to commit you to a longer-term care facility. Is that what you want?”

“Is that what you all think should happen?” I asked.

“Eric, that doesn’t matter,” he said. “What I want—what we all want here—is for you to get the help you need. I feel very confident that with your help, we can have you home in less than your fourteen days. But if you can’t manage that, then perhaps something more ongoing and stable is the best thing. I don’t think you need that, but in all candor, that’s up to you.”

“Like I said, your plan is shit. And if you think it’s a good plan, then I can’t do anything except assume the same of you.”

Blumfield pursed his lips and looked straight at me. “That language won’t get the reaction you’re seeking,” he said.

The next thing I knew, I was on top of Blumfield’s desk, kicking books and stacks of paper to the floor, screaming at him about seeking reactions. Blumfield said nothing to me, just picked up the phone to call the orderlies.

I was confined to my room that night, pacing, crying, and screaming.

“This is Jesus H. Christ,” I said, motioning toward the couch in front of us.

“You call him Jesus Christ?” Laura asked.

“No,” I replied. “That lady over there, we call her Jesus Christ. This is Jesus H. Christ. Before he became Jesus, his name was Harold, so we call him Jesus H. Christ. Having more than one Jesus makes it confusing.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Jesus H. Christ, rolling his eyes toward me in a jovial mocking huff as he extended his hand to Laura. “I don’t call myself that, but you can call me whatever you like.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking his hand.

“But I am God incarnate,” he added. “And I will pray to my father for you, if you like.”

“That would be nice, thank you,” she said.

I guided her elbow away from the couch.

“Jesus H. Christ knocked up his girlfriend,” I whispered. “Then he kinda …,” I added, opening my hands next to my head. “Poof.”

I motioned to the chair in the corner. “This is my roommate, Silas.”

Silas jumped up to greet Laura, shaking her hand firmly. “My, my,” he said, looking her up and down before turning to me. “You didn’t tell me she was so pretty.

“That’s a lovely blouse you have on today, sweetie,” he said to her, remarking on the black-and-white striped top that looked like an old-fashioned prisoner’s shirt.

“Why, thank you,” Laura said, smiling. “I figured it was appropriate for the occasion.”

On the few occasions that Laura and I had spent time around people she didn’t know, she was often quite shy. But that day she was gracious and warm to everyone she met.

Even though I had been on the ward for five days, she was my first visitor besides my mother. For the first forty-eight hours I wasn’t allowed to see anyone. Once that was over, I kept scanning the dayroom during visitor hours. My mother started visiting almost every day; my brother and father would not come. And friends? Besides Laura, I didn’t seem to have any left.

Eventually I had gotten it together enough to call her. I did so partly to let her know where I was and partly to almost brag about where I was. Whenever I’d get morose, sulky, or stuck somewhere between crabby and suicidal, she was quick to say something disarming or indirectly tell me things weren’t that bad. Laura wasn’t exactly dismissive of my feelings, but I often left our conversations feeling like she didn’t quite get how harsh things felt for me—or at least that she wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. This frustrated and upset me. I spent so much time trying to hide the depths of my feelings and the cluster-fuckedness of my life from everyone, except her. The one person I was honest with was often telling me that I was being too dramatic, or overthinking things, or would I just please change the subject. It wasn’t like she didn’t believe me—it was more like she questioned why I let things bother me so much. In a small way, ending up in the mental ward was a strange kind of validation for me. Being in Timken Mercy proved that when I was insisting that things were terrible, and she kept insisting that they weren’t, they were, in fact, kind of terrible.

When I first called her from 5B, she thought I was joking. It wasn’t until she hung up and called me back via the hospital’s switchboard that she fully believed me. She was full of questions. How did this happen? Whose decision was it to keep me here? Was I in danger from the other crazy people? What were they making me do? Was I getting shock treatments?

Laura went from never wanting to discuss my feelings to wanting to discuss nothing but my feelings.

As we were wrapping up our call that first evening, I remember her asking, “Well, are you any better?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Being there, does it make you feel any better?”

I had no idea how to answer her.

I called Laura almost every night after that to talk about what had happened that day. Of all the group sessions and analysis and testing and therapy, the only time anything seemed to make any sense to me was when I tried to explain it to Laura on the phone at night.

It was a few days until she could get a ride to the hospital. It was my first chance to show her everything I’d been talking about. Eventually we settled into the corner of the TV room to talk. While she initially seemed very happy to meet everyone and was intrigued by the quirkiness of life on 5B, the reality of the place started to seep in. She slowly wore her revelation on her face. It was starting to dawn on her that this wasn’t a joke. These people weren’t eccentrics goofing around. I was in real trouble. I had landed in this terrible place, which was potentially just a pit stop before an even more terrible place. I was wearing a thin veneer of jokiness, but she could tell how scared I really was.

“Take those old records off the shelf. I’ll sit and listen to them by myself,” rang out from the hallway.

“Richie,” I said, looking over at Laura. “It must be cookie time. He always sings ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ when they hand out cookies in the afternoon.”

Richie sang as he walked into the dayroom, rubbing his hands in a blur of motion.

One of the nurses started walking over toward us with a barely polite “It’s four o’clock and visiting hours are over now get the hell out” look on her face. Laura picked up her bag and took a last look around the ward.

She looked at me and touched the back of my hand. “We need to get you out of here,” she said.

For the first time, I felt like she was getting it. She understood why I had fallen to this point, why I felt the way I felt. I noticed her eyes darting around the room as if she was seeing everything anew. A single tear ran down the side of her face. She got up and walked toward the door.

For the first time in years, I didn’t feel alone.

“Hello,” said a small Asian man standing at the foot of my bed.

“Hello,” I replied.

“You care for milk of magnesssah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Milk of magnesssah … I prescribe for you?”

I looked at the embroidered name on his jacket. It was Dr. Chang. The infamous Doctor Chang. I’d apparently met him several times in my first few days here—meetings, like that with Blumfield, of which I had no recall whatsoever.

Dr. Chang was the kingpin of my stay at Timken Mercy. He was the psychiatrist who admitted me in the emergency room. He was the doctor who oversaw all the other various therapies I was assigned. He was also my Dr. Feelgood, coming up with all the pills and combinations I’d been force-fed since I’d arrived. In short, Dr. Chang was “the Man” in my life. Yet, despite his role as a despicable authority figure, I found him fascinating. I kept wondering how someone with such a limited grasp of the English language could become a psychiatrist in the United States. I’ve never had a complete feel for how the Sharks versus Jets–like relationship between psychiatrists and psychologists works, but I definitely got the vibe that to Dr. Chang, a solid command of the local tongue wasn’t necessary for him to know I was a collection of misfiring synapses and nerves in need of chemical balance.

Now, apparently, he was trying to pimp me some milk of magnesia as well.

“Why are you people always trying to get me to take laxatives?”

Dr. Chang started to write notes on his chart.

“You have suicide thoughts today?” he asked.

“Well, I had been so constipated that I thought of ending it all,” I said. “But now that I have milk of magnesia, I should be good.”

He continued writing, then started to scribble. His pen had stopped working. He put his clipboard down on my bed and looked at me.

“There are two directions here,” he said. “Everyone wants to go 4B. With hard work and cooperation, you go, too.”

Ah, 4B. The way the staff and residents of 5B talked about 4B, you’d think that everyone walked around down there in satin pajamas and ate Ben & Jerry’s all day while getting back rubs and blow jobs from hot nurses in skin-tight uniforms. 5B was kind of like the intensive care unit of the mental ward. Most people started out here with a great amount of supervision and restriction. However, once you got your shit partially together, you’d get transferred to the “open ward”—4B. 4B had board games. 4B had a small library. 4B had visiting hours twice as long as ours. 4B had three TVs, none of which were surrounded by cloudy Plexiglas.

“However, there other alternatives if you cannot try here,” he said.

He didn’t need to say another word. In one direction lay 4B. In the other: Massillon State Hospital.

I’d heard of Massillon State Hospital before coming here. People would tell jokes about it or you heard about it on the news. One thing was clear: It was chock-full of seriously fucked-up people. It was a padded-cell-and-restraint kind of facility. From what you heard about the place, it was a lot like the Hotel California. People went there but rarely left.

The staff and residents of 5B really didn’t color in any details on Massillon; they didn’t need to. The reality of a hospital mental ward made it pretty easy to imagine what a worse version might be like. All the 5B staff had to do was remind me that if I couldn’t or wouldn’t function at Timken Mercy, they would place me in a facility that “better matched my care needs.”

“Choice is yours.”

But was it?

Choice was often an odd word for me then. There were times, like that moment, when I felt that implying choice gave a glow of false hope. Most times, I reasoned, there aren’t choices at all; everything is just following an obvious and unavoidable outcome. In those moments, choice was theoretical. Technically, it existed, but I felt that only a fool would think that events are that easy or able to change.

There were other times when choice indicated that there were unlimited options available at the whim of the chooser. It could imply freedom and range that rarely existed in reality. In truth, having a choice often meant picking your pain. Choice really meant that there was more than one non-great option. It could also imply that you were the one who got to make a decision that pleased you. Especially in this case, I did not feel in charge of the decision or the options at all.

Dr. Chang reached out to shake my hand. Immediately after doing so, he walked directly to the sink to scrub his hands. Then he left my room without another word.

“Would you like another stool softener?” the orderly asked.

“Sure, what the hell,” I replied. “Bring it on.”

He handed me a stool softener, along with eight other pills.

“What the fuck is this? I just took another handful of pills four hours ago,” I said. “How come every day I’m in here, you give me more and more pills?”

“These are what your doctor wants you to have,” he replied. “Sometimes they change medications, or combinations of medications, to see what works best for you.”

“I mean, I almost fell down this morning from being so damn dizzy,” I said. “How am I supposed to get better if you people have me fucked up constantly?”

“You can discuss this with your doctor,” he said. “For now, I need you to take these pills.”

I pulled each pill individually out of the tiny paper cup, looked it over, sniffed it, put it into my mouth, and swallowed it with some water. Toward the end of my medication-taking regime, I picked up a tiny blue pill.

“Why am I getting this?” I asked.

“It’s a sleeping pill,” he replied. “Did you mention anything to your doctor about not being able to sleep?”

“Yeah, but you don’t understand,” I said. “I used to buy these. I mean, I took a lot of these.”

“But the doctor wants you to have this,” he said. “You need to take it.”

I declared I wouldn’t take it and threw it down on the tray. The orderly gave me an “Are we really going to start this again?” look. I said that I thought the point of being here was so that I wouldn’t take this stuff anymore. If Dr. Chang wanted me to take that pill, he could come down here and hear me say no to his face.

“Fine,” the orderly said, taking a moment to rearrange the cups and pills on his tray. “You know, you would move along faster on your Progress Plan if you just did what you were asked to do.”

“I’m sure I would,” I replied.

Later that day I was due to be in Blumfield’s office. It was the second visit since my last blowup. In the previous visit, we’d actually had a good conversation about my life over the previous few years. I was honest with him. I answered every question truthfully. We talked about everything. Toward the end, he asked me to complete an MMPI mental health test.

“Look at this thing,” I protested. “There are, like, four hundred and fifty thousand questions.”

“Actually, it’s more like six hundred. Six hundred questions,” he said.

“Six hundred?” I proclaimed. “How about one question, ‘Are you fucking nuts?’ Check: yes or no.”

“It doesn’t take as long as you might think,” he said. “You can take it back to your room and work on it in your free time.”

It didn’t take as long as I thought it would—it took longer. Hours longer. I sat there checking boxes following statements like “I am easily awakened by noise,” “I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be,” “I am very seldom troubled by constipation,” and “At times I feel like swearing.”

Then I started to think about what I was really saying about myself.

When asked if “I am scared of what others think of me,” I had to answer yes. When asked if “at times I have fits of crying that I cannot control,” I had to answer yes. When asked if “I see people around me that others do not see,” I paused but eventually answered yes for this as well. The more I read, the sadder I became. For every odd statement such as “I like mechanics magazines,” there were hundreds of tiny confessionals about my life—things that I didn’t like having to put a black or white answer to.

About halfway through, I just started filling in random dots. I stopped bothering to even look at the remaining questions. “Yes.” “Yes.” “No.” “Yes.” “No.” “No.” “Yes.” No one was going to learn anything from this test that couldn’t be learned from talking to me for a fraction of this time. The next morning I took it to the nurses’ station, complete, and asked them to give it to Dr. Blumfield.

“Let’s talk about this ghost business,” Blumfield said at the start of our next session.

I’d kind of expected Blumfield to bring up the test. But he made no reference to it.

“What about it?” I replied.

“When did you start seeing her?” he asked.

“I’ve told you before,” I said. “I never saw Her.”

“Yes, you did,” he replied quickly. “You told me you saw her in your dreams, repeatedly.”

“Dreams aren’t real, Blumfield,” I said. “You of anyone should know that.”

We talked more about Little Girl. Going over the dreams again. Going over the feelings of Her presence again. My answers became increasingly short. We’d been over and over this. Why did I have to tell him about it again?

“Have you ever contemplated that the Little Girl wasn’t what you thought?” Blumfield asked. “Have you ever entertained that it all may not be real?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, have you ever entertained the idea that it could all be an illusion … or a hallucination—not real?”

“Of course it’s real. What are you saying?”

Blumfield stopped and looked at me, then he grabbed a book on the corner of the desk and turned it to a page marked with a slip of paper.

“That blue sleeping pill? The one you handed back to the orderly and wouldn’t take?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

Blumfield turned the book toward me and dropped it onto the desk.

“Triazolam,” he said. “A favorite of uptight housewives and pill poppers across America.”

I scanned through the gobbledygook on the page without really reading it.

“Yeah, so?”

“So …,” Blumfield said, taking the book back. “Twelve percent of patients report experiencing severe hallucinations from triazolam. The effects could be even more pronounced when mixed with alcohol.”

“What are you saying?”

Pause.

“Have you ever thought that, perhaps, this is all the result of chemicals you put in your body?”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “I’ve been having those dreams and hearing Her since I was, like, a kid … years. I wasn’t taking those pills when I was thirteen, for Christ’s sake.”

“And you think that it isn’t possible to hallucinate a history? Sometimes hallucinations relating to past events are just as powerful as the ones our minds place in the present.”

I think I knew, even at that moment, that what Blumfield was suggesting was at least possible. The idea that it all could be a product of my imagination really didn’t have to be true. To me, Little Girl was the most horrifying thing I could imagine. It was even more horrifying to consider that I may have invented Her myself.

“Are you suggesting I made all this up?” I yelled. “Well, fuck you. I didn’t lie about this.”

“I’m not suggesting you lied. A powerful hallucination could feel as real to you as us sitting here right now. I’m just asking that you consider the possibility that—”

“Enough!” I yelled, standing up. Blumfield reached out and picked up his cigarette case and notes—the things he didn’t want to see end up on the floor. “I know who I am. I know what happened to me.”

Blumfield made a short attempt at calming me down but soon gave up. I stormed out of the room, yelling back at him as I stomped down the hallway in a fury. I ended up in my room, curtains drawn. I skipped dinner, mostly out of fear that I would be confined to my room anyhow. I ended up just sitting there sobbing until my eyes were almost swollen shut and I couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore.

If the Little Girl in a Blue Dress was an illusion, I thought, then anything could be an illusion. If I was wrong about Her, I could be wrong about anything. The reasons I ended up in the hospital in the first place could all be a farce, built off delusions and hallucinations.

I knew what I experienced, I told myself over and over again. I knew what was real.

“So Blumfield thinks I imagined the whole Little Girl thing,” I told Laura as we sat on the edge of my bed the next day. “All of it.”

“What do you think?” Laura asked.

“I think Blumfield is an asshole.”

“Well, does it really matter? If you imagined it or not?”

“That’s what I said,” I replied. “Well, that’s what I meant to say. Well, I guess I kinda said it. But I was kinda screaming at the time. And I didn’t quite phrase it that way.”

Laura just looked at me for a moment and slowly shook her head.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook and pen.

“Why are you here?” she wrote at the top of an empty page.

“I don’t know,” I wrote after she passed me the pen. “To find something I’m looking for. To chill out. To get my head straight. WHATEVER.”

“Do you have any idea what you are doing here?” she wrote.

It was my turn to write something, but I wanted her to write the answer too. I so much wanted her to tell me what to do.

“Outside of not getting myself committed to a mental institution?” I wrote.

“Well, that seems to be working out very well for you,” she wrote.

“Very funny.”

“What do you want, Eric?”

Pause.

“Honestly?” I wrote.

She looked at me and nodded.

“I guess I want peace,” I wrote.

She circled the word peace several times, putting a large question mark next to it.

“I just want to be left alone to do my thing,” I wrote. “Freedom not to have to explain things. Not have to struggle all the time. Space … peace.”

“That’s not peace, that’s complacency,” she wrote. “It’s false. There’s nothing worth having that doesn’t require something of you.”

“Ridiculous,” I wrote after snatching the pen. “Effort is exhausting. What’s wrong with wanting peace?”

“No,” she wrote. “What you are asking for is to not have to try. You just need to be happy.”

“To me, having peace is being happy.”

“What good is peace if you aren’t willing to set things on fire?” she wrote.

I looked at her and scrunched my face. What did that mean?

“All I know is that I don’t want to live this way,” I eventually wrote.

She scratched out what I’d written. “Then fight,” she scribbled over it

I took back the pen without looking at her.

“I’m sick of—”

She grabbed the pen from my hand midsentence and scrawled “FIGHT” over what I had just written.

“If I can’t find some—” I wrote.

She pushed the pen in my hand toward the paper to stop me from writing any more, then reached up and turned my face toward her own.

“Fight,” she said out loud.

She placed her hands on my cheeks. She gently drew me to her and kissed me.

“What you need is a reason to want to leave here,” she said after pulling back. “You need a reason to want to be happy.”

She grabbed her bag and seemed to get ready to leave.

She offered no further explanation. What was happy? Her? Something else? I didn’t understand. She didn’t seem to think it was important to explain it to me.

“Oh, I thought you might want this,” she said, pulling a cassette from her bag and throwing it onto my bed. It was the copy of Music for Airports that I’d given her the year before. “Sure beats Bob Seger,” she added, nodding and turning to walk out the door.

Later that evening, after the 5B residents had all settled in for that week’s episode of Highway to Heaven, I snuck off into the Relaxation Room, remembering that there was an ancient cassette player on the corner table. It was placed there for the convenient playing of the Relaxation Room’s collection of self-help tapes, such as Lessons in Hygiene, A Better You Through Sharing, and other similar nonsense.

I pressed the thumb-sized Play button and rested my head next to the speaker, turning the volume up just loud enough that I could start to make out the notes.

I wanted to feel it vibrate against my cheek.

I wanted to soak it in through my pores.

I wanted to breathe it in.

As I heard the first few notes crackle out of the player, I could feel tears roll down my face and collect where the grille of the speaker touched my cheek.

I knew that in a few minutes the staff would notice that I wasn’t accounted for. Then they’d come looking for me. Then they’d probably take the tape away, coming up with some improvised reason about how I could harm myself or others with shards of plastic and forty-five minutes’ worth of magnetic tape.

I knew I only had a moment, so I wanted to drink it in and savor it.

How did I ever get to this point? I wondered. How did I ever come to the point that I’d have to sneak away from a room full of drug addicts and schizoids in order to listen to some music? A point where my freedom was completely gone? A point where someone had to watch me shave and clip my fingernails?

The sound of Music for Airports didn’t seem random at all; it seemed very purposeful. Outside of many renditions of “Heart and Soul” on the ward’s piano, it was the first real piece of music I’d heard since being admitted, and probably the most powerful medication I’d received. It was beautiful.

It was at that moment that I thought to myself: I’ve had enough.

Right there in that room, listening to that tape Laura gave me, I decided that I wanted something more than what I’d allowed myself to become. Listening to the voices and piano notes fade in and out, I decided that I wanted to be happy. If I had to fight for things in life, I wanted to fight for something bigger than the right to eat with a fork. I wanted to love and be loved and feel alive. I had no idea how to find my way, but listening to that music wash over me, I felt, for the first time, that the struggle I faced would be worth it.

Evangelicals always talk about being born and then being born again. They speak of the moment they devoted their life to Christ almost as if it were a reboot, starting over, being born anew. I had no idea of this at the time, but when I look back at that evening, with my head resting on that speaker, I know exactly what they mean, and why. It was a simple stolen moment to listen to some music. However, it was also a mark in time. The end of one life and the beginning of another. I don’t think anyone, except for Laura, thought I had even the remotest chance of pulling it off. That just made me want it even more.

The next morning I walked into Blumfield’s office and apologized for trashing his desk. And for almost doing it again. And for calling him a needledick motherfucker. And told him I didn’t want to live this way anymore. And if he was willing to help me, I was willing to work hard.

Perhaps I’d been wrong about choice. For me, it felt like that moment was a true choice. At that point, I chose to live.