DAY 216
JANUARY 15

I wake up. I think that the crazy lady who stabbed her pencil into my shoulder has gotten into my room and jammed her pencil in my ear. I draw my hand slowly from under the sheets and run it up the side of my face and feel my ear. There is nothing in it. Not even a sound. I pull on it and it fills with pain.

Ear infection.

I’ve had them before. Lots of them. So many that a doctor decided to take my tonsils out to make the ear infections go away. It didn’t work. The infections stayed. He should have cut out my ear instead of my tonsils. They didn’t give me ice cream. I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. But right now, if they offered me a scoop, I’d take it and stick it in my ear. My ear is so hot, it wouldn’t just melt the ice cream. It would vaporize it.

I sit up. Carefully. PAIN.

Open my eyes, just a little. Enough to see the dim lights outside my door and the bright desk light at the nurses’ station. Middle of the night. I feel a yawn entering my nose, which is a weird place to start. But I can’t open my mouth. At all. There must be a hundred rubber bands circling under my chin round the top of my head. My bottom jaw feels like it’s going to swallow my face and bite my brain. The yawn, having come into my body, now wants to leave. But the doors are locked. My throat blows up like a bullfrog’s. The yawn, now desperate, finds a side window to escape through and explodes out my ear. Shards of white glass fly behind my eyelids.

I want to black out, but searing aftershocks keep ripping through my ear and tearing down my neck. Tears squeeze out my eyes. I remember the surgeon saying that everything is connected. I remember the anesthesiologist saying to count backwards from one hundred. I need both of those guys right now. But I’d settle for a vet. If he couldn’t fix my ear, he could at least put me to sleep.

I stand and walk like I’ve got books on my head. My door is locked. Of course. I knock on my own window to get someone’s attention. The sound waves become nails hitting the hammer in my ear. Dizzy. Nauseous. The floor comes up to meet my tailbone. Crack.

I crawl away, in case a nurse heard me, rushes in, and slams me with the door. Back to bed. Like a sick old dog with my tail between my legs. Only I think my “tail” is now off to the left. My heart has moved into my ear and is pounding like a kettledrum. Everything is in the wrong place. Including me.

I finally make it to the bed. I try to pull myself up, but it’s like I’m on a glacier. My fingers can’t get a grip on the smooth white surface. I need an ice pick. Or at least fingernails. I shouldn’t have eaten them. I grab at the covers near the end of the bed, but they just keep coming at me like a rope with no one at the other end. I slide back to the floor. Someone moans. I move my eyes to find them. I’m alone. The moaner is me. Where the hell is somebody?

I lie down on the floor. Unborn-baby style. But it’s not a womb, warm and soft and human-smelling. It’s cold and hard and bleachy. For once I’m glad they wash the floors so much. And empty the garbage.

’Cause I’m going to throw up. I grab the metal bucket.

Olympic events begin in my body. My tongue starts to swim in saliva. My stomach gets in the ready position. Crouches down like a sprinter in the starting blocks. Puke pole-vaults up my throat, but hits the bar of my teeth. Vomit squeezes through like toothpaste. The force of my choking pushes the rest through a lot faster.

I’m done. Just kill me now.

Black.

—

Blinding white.

Must be on the bullet train to heaven. I squint to see who my welcoming angel is. I hope it’s Lily.

No luck.

“Marty!…Marty, can you hear me? Did you take something? What did you take?” the nurse yells at me.

I try to shake my head no, but I don’t think it moves.

“You better tell me right now!” she says, as she snaps on rubber gloves. From my chin she swipes a fingerful of vomit and brings it to her nose. She inhales deeply.

I gag and point to my ear and moan.

“Your ear hurts?” she asks.

I moan again.

She grabs my face and cranks my head to the side. “It’s all red.” She puts her unrubberized wrist against my forehead. “And you’re hotter than Hades. Bloody hell, I thought you OD’d!” she says, all pissed off like she’s upset I haven’t. She leaves.

My head is still spinning from her steering it so hard to the left.

She’s back already, coming at me with her flashlight and a wooden shish kebab stick with a ball of cotton skewered on the end.

“On’t sick at in eye ear,” I plead.

“I can’t understand you if you mumble,” she replies.

I can’t talk right with my jaw all screwed up, so I try telepathy. Don’t stick that in my ear! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t…JESUS CHRIST!

She turns the stick. Crust grinds and crackles, releasing hot lava.

“You sure are cooking something up in there,” she says, as she looks at the stick with melted yellow goo on the end.

I must be roasting frigin’ marshmallows.

“I better take your temperature.”

Not up my ass you don’t.

She searches her big nurse pockets. “I’ll be right back,” she says, and spins away, making her rubber Birkenstock clogs shriek, which makes me want to scream too. That and the air pressure she displaces upon her speedy return, weapon in hand. “I’m going to stick this in your other ear, okay?” she says, and holds out the thermometer thing that looks like a telephone receiver with a Pinocchio nose growing out of the earpiece.

I blink twice. Once for yes. And once as a thank-you to the God I don’t believe in, but am grateful that he doesn’t hate me as much as I hate him.

She gently slides the nose of the thermometer into my good ear. Apparently only bad ears are good for mashing things into. I exhale. Three seconds later, beeps are being fired into my ear, through my brain, and hit the bull’s-eye of my bad ear. My eyes do backward somersaults in my head.

“102 degrees. No doctors around this time of night, and they’ll just yell at me if I page them for an ear infection. You’ll have to go to emergency. Let’s get you off the floor and then I’ll figure this out,” she says, and lowers herself into a deep knee-squat, shoots her arms straight under my armpits like a forklift, and hoists me up onto the bed. She steps back and examines her lab coat. A puce-colored design in the shape of an inkblot test is what she sees. “Well, look at that mess.”

I see a butterfly. I never see a butterfly in Katz’s office. I wonder how many points I’d get now.

“Pull those clothes off while I get us both clean ones, and if you’re going to throw up again, for God’s sake, do it in the bucket.” She daintily pinches her coat and holds it out from her chest as if she’s pretending she has bigger boobs. She looks down and gains three chins. She leaves. Again.

I know she wants me to undress, but I can’t seem to move. I’m so cold, the thought of being uncovered hurts worse than my ear. And she is going to be back in a nanosecond.

She returns, all white again. “Come on, Marty, you should have got that stuff off. You’ve got to help me. I’m short staffed tonight.” She tears the sweatshirt over my head, yanks my sweatpants off, and leaves me sitting in my white socks, white underwear, and white spots in front of my eyes. I’m freezing. I want my down comforter from home. She throws a hospital gown at me. “Put that on.”

I reach for my thin covers and start to lie down.

“Go back to sleep half naked if you want to, but no covers,” she says, as she rips them from my hands. “You’ve got a fever and need to cool down. I need to find someone who can deal with this. I don’t have the time.”

—

Nurse Brown and I stand in the air lock–the space between the front doors of the building and the doors that open into the foyer. The security camera stares at me from its perch in the corner of the ceiling. The intercom on the wall says nothing.

She tries to open her umbrella. “Come on!” she says, and bangs it on the floor. She buzzes the reception desk. No answer. Security must be on a break. “Forget it.” She throws the umbrella against the wall. She takes off her raincoat and holds it over my head. “You okay to walk fast to that yellow car in the second row?” She points to an old VW Bug that looks like it’s being dented by the pelting rain.

I nod.

“Okay, here we go. You get the door.”

We run-walk towards the car. I can’t remember the last time I saw rain. I like rain. But not today. It comes down on my coat-roof like bombs. The sound explodes in my ear.

At the car, Nurse Brown nods at the passenger door and says, “Give it a yank.” She holds the coat over my head until I’m all the way in, and then throws it into the backseat. She closes my door gently and runs around to the driver’s side. She gets in.

She’s soaked. Like she’s just stepped out of the shower. She reaches into the pile of take-out coffee cups and fast-food wrappers at my feet and finds a paper napkin to dry her face.

All those times you ragged on me about my room…and you drive a pigsty.

“Sorry about the mess.”

I forgot that she could read minds.

She opens her purse and roots around till she finds a pill bottle. Uncorks it and pours out a selection.

Great. I’m sick and she’s taking meds.

She decides which one she wants, holds it in front of my face, and says, “It’s Vicodin. If you can hold this down, it will make you feel better. Between you and me, I gave this to you at the institute. I’ll put it in your chart when I get back. I could get in a lot of trouble, but you look like you’re on the rack and you could be there awhile. Emerg might be backed up.”

I stare at her. She isn’t handing me a painkiller. She’s giving me ammunition that I could use to shoot her down for good.

She pushes the pill between my teeth and bends over and fishes around my feet in the passenger’s side till she pulls up a bottle of already-been-opened water. She holds it up and swishes it around and takes a good look for backwash asteroids. No sightings, I guess, because she unscrews the cap, hooks her baby finger into my cheek, pulls it out and pours a little water into it and a lot of water down my neck.

Very unnursey. Very unhygienic. Very appreciated. I hope she can read my mind on the last very.

“You’re welcome.”

Of course.

Nurse Brown drops me off at the hospital entrance and goes to find a parking spot. I go inside and tuck myself into a corner of the waiting room. People start sneaking looks at me. I look at myself. Tennis shoes–no laces, no socks. Hospital gown hanging out from underneath a dripping wet raincoat. I look like a mental patient who broke out of the asylum. Not a mental patient with an ear infection, busted out by Nurse Brown.

Nurse Brown runs in and scans the room. She spots me. Question marks appear in her eyes and she makes the okay sign with her hand. I give her the okay sign back and she turns to find the triage nurse. I know that’s what she’s doing. I’m a pro at emerg. Except for the last time. I don’t know what they did then. I was unconscious.

My teeth start chattering. I grab my face to stop them. My cold hand feels good on my hot cheek. I put my other hand / ice pack gently over my ear. I must look like the hear-no-evil and speak-no-evil monkeys combined into one.

The painkiller isn’t doing much. Maybe it was a placebo. I need the real thing.

I want my mom…mommy…mother. Why doesn’t one of those words fit?

I want Her.

I don’t feel like Her knows me. But she would know where to rub my head. If she could remember way back when. When I was just a little kid and she wasn’t just my mom. She was my superhero. Until I was about ten years old and figured out that Wonder Woman wasn’t supposed to drink silver bullets–she was meant to deflect them.

She’s not here. Take care of yourself, Marty.

That phrase is so familiar. Maybe it has to do with what Dad said when I was small. He said, “Nobody is going to take care of you, but you.” I don’t remember the place or situation, but I remember the words–I always remember the words. Maybe they were the words said to him when his father died. And he remembered.

I look around the waiting room to see the other people who are supposed to take care of themselves. There is a yellow guy who looks like he used a cheap fake tanning cream. I don’t think that’s his problem. His eyes are yellow too. Jaundice. His friend tries to look relaxed while he reads a fashion magazine. A mother nuzzles a too-quiet baby. The dad has his arm around both of them and his eyes glued to the doors where the nurses come through to call who is next. An old couple sit holding hands. With his free hand, the man holds an oxygen mask to his face. Her free hand clutches her chest. They need a double room.

Nurse Brown walks towards me with a set of scrubs and a flannel blanket under her arm. She takes my hand. “I’m going to get you out of those wet clothes.” She pulls me up slowly and doesn’t let go. She puts her other arm around my waist. We do a my-back-to-her-front tango across the waiting room floor.

I’m feeling a little better. The Vicodin must be kicking in.

“There’s more room in here…and it’s cleaner than the bathroom,” Nurse Brown says, as she opens the door to the linen supply closet. She leans me against a rack and closes the door. “I called your mother,” she says, as she takes off my coat and robe, and unties my gown.

“And…?”

She pulls a scrub top over my head and looks me in the eyes. “She said she would like to come, but she didn’t think you wanted her.”

We never think the same way. We think too much.

“So I called another nurse in to cover for me,” Nurse Brown says, and gets down on one knee and puts my hands on her shoulders. She rolls up the pants for me to step into. My feet don’t want to lift off the ground. I feel so heavy. She takes off my wet shoes and puts my feet in the pants for me. She pulls up the pants and wraps the blanket around me.

“I used to think you were a real bitch,” I say.

“Well, Marty, I guess I could say the same about you,” she says.

“Say what?”

“That I thought you were a bitch.”

“I knew you could read minds!”

“Marty, you said the bitch thing out loud,” she says, laughing.

“Oh, my God.”

“That was out loud too. Don’t sweat it. The Vicodin can make you a little loopy. It acts like a truth serum on some people.”

“Is that why you gave it to me?”

“No. But it’s going to be a nice bonus. I want to ask you some questions. And medicated or not, you have to be honest with me from this moment on if you want to get out of the psych ward and come back to the unit.” Nurse Brown pulls socks out of her back pocket and kneels down to put them on my feet. She stays there. Just staring at the floor. She takes a deep breath and says, “Do you want to come back?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be a pain in the ass?”

“Probably.”

Nurse Brown looks up at me half smiling, half wincing.

“You said I have to be honest.”

“The last question was a test–you passed.”

The doctor in emergency had given me a prescription of antibiotics and a standing order for Vicodin.

Nurse Brown drives us back to the institute and parks facing east. I start to get out of the car and she puts her hand on my shoulder and says, “Wait a minute, Marty. I want you to see something. Just look forward.”

“To what?”

“To lots of these.”

I don’t have a clue to what she is talking about, but I stare straight ahead.

And then it happens.

I wonder if I’m hallucinating because it looks like the engine is on fire. The fire is not new. It is billions of years old. Sunfire.

The sunrise. It gets brighter. Blinding. As it climbs higher over the hood of the car and becomes framed like a crystal postcard by the windshield.

“When I work day shifts, I come early so I can do this. Just sit and watch the sun come up. It helps to keep me sane.”

“I haven’t seen a sunrise for a long time. Maybe that’s why I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, Marty.”

“What do you call someone who tries to kill them-self?”

“Full of pain.”

“I’m not feeling any right now.” I laugh.

“That’s because of the painkiller. You have an ear infection and some physical pain, so I gave you one painkiller. You used to be violent, so the psychiatrist prescribed tranquilizers. But even he didn’t know how much mental pain you were in. You tried to kill it with thirty times the normal dose. I don’t believe you were trying to kill you, Marty, just the pain. Unfortunately, the you and the pain are tied to each other. You’re not crazy.”

I don’t know what to say. So I say the first thing that pops into my head: “I killed Lily.” I look at Nurse Brown. For a reaction to my confession.

Nurse Brown continues to stare straight ahead. Doesn’t move anything but her lips. “How do you think you did that?”

“Lily was in my bed when she died, right?”

“Yes. She was lonely and upset. She missed you when you went home for Christmas, so she moved into your room.”

“But my bed, right?”

“What’s so deadly about your bed?”

“Remember when you made me scrape the toilet paper from my intercom?”

“That was months ago.”

“I destroyed the wiring….”

Nurse Brown turns and looks at me, cocking her head to one side.

“When Lily tried to call for help, it wouldn’t work. If it weren’t for me, you could have saved her.”

Nurse Brown grabs my chin, turns my face to hers. She wipes my tears with her hand and leans across to put my head on her shoulder. She whispers into my ear, “Is that what you’ve been thinking?”

I nod. She rocks us gently.

“Her heart was damaged. And she’d starved it, and…oh, honey, Lily didn’t have time to push a button.”

After a while I open my eyes and look out the windshield. “The sun is gone.”

“It’s still out there. You just have to look for it.”

Nurse Brown asks, “Where do you want to go, Marty?”

“Back to my old room.”

We walk through the institute in silence. It’s peaceful. Too early for anyone to be up and going crazy.

So here I am. Staring at my old place by the window. “Is that my bed?”

“No. It’s new. They took the old bed away because it freaked out the girls to have a deathbed on the unit.”

Lily dying in this room must have been too much for Katherine and Catwoman because they are gone too.

Nurse Brown says, “Rest today, sleep tonight, because tomorrow you start.”

“You mean start again.”

“No,” she says, “just start. Start fresh and keep it simple. You have to explain to the other girls why you tried to kill yourself. You really blew them away. You were the strong one. The one with the big mouth who didn’t care about anything. Now you have to tell them the truth.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Nurse Brown smiles. “The doctor said the antibiotics should kick in, in about twenty-four hours. I’ll give you thirty to find the truth. If your ear still hurts and you haven’t found anything by 2:00 P.M. tomorrow, I’ll give you another Vicodin. That should help solve your problems,” she laughs.

“I’ve got a lot more than two problems. How many do you want to solve?”

“Not me. You. And you’re going to do it one at a time.”

Journal Entry # 10

I am alone. But not quite alone. Nurse Brown rescued my journal from the psych ward. We are grateful for her heroics. She also released a box of pens. Maybe she peeked (she wouldn’t have had time to read much) and saw how much I’d written. Or maybe she knows. Just knows. Brought me all this ink so I wouldn’t run dry.

Anyways, she tucked us all in before going home to get some sleep herself. She’ll be back for 2:00 P.M. tomorrow (group therapy) when we return to our regular program of the crazy antics of anorexics and the nurse who breaks all the rules to save them.

I’m going to sleep now.

I wonder if Lily will visit me.

Signed, M.