Voluntary Madness Part 16

As you can imagine, escape was a big attachment for everyone in that room.

Get out in a h.e.l.l of a hurry.

That kind of escape.

Up, down, sideways. Didn't matter which drug. Just out. Out of the present. Out of the mind. Out of pain.

Again, the drug was a means. The real problem was the same as mine. Just the loud ouch of being alone and inadequate, and your thoughts like the Promethean eagle, pecking out your liver every day.

So for all of us it was the same cure, the long haul of learning to be present. Learning to face. All this, and I hadn't yet been there a day. That was Mobius for you. Roll up your sleeves and operate, elbow deep in the guts first thing. I liked it.

Our process therapy session broke up for the day at three thirty, and we all piled into the white van that they used to shuttle us around in, and which we quickly nicknamed the short bus. Diggs drove us to the apartments for the hour or so of late afternoon downtime we always had between cla.s.ses and the evening's activity. Monday night was bookstore night, but the night tech on duty (Diggs finished at four o'clock) took me to the grocery store instead to buy my week's provisions.

I filled my half of the apartment fridge with foods I like, and like to think are healthy. Naturally, I still had to have one of my drugs. I bought lots of makings for coffee: grounds, sweetener, cream, filters. Mirabile dictu, there were two coffeemakers in the apartment and one in the kitchen at the offices.

The apartment was very comfortable, carpeted wall to wall, central heating and air, washer, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, and two full bathrooms. My roommate and I each had our own bathroom. My room had a single bed, a walk-in closet, a night table, a bedside lamp, a dresser, and a ceiling fan. My roommate was a TV junkie and a late-nighter, so I spent most of my postdinner time in my room with the door closed, reading or writing in my notebook.

A tech, whoever was on duty on the night shift, always woke us gently in the morning at around 7:45 to give us our medication, if we needed any. A couple of months after leaving St. Luke's, when the fear and downward thought spirals, though less intense, still hadn't gone away, I decided that trying to go without meds while in the middle of a book project wasn't the greatest idea. I went back on 20 milligrams of Prozac, the lowest maintenance dose. By the time I got to Mobius, I was holding steady. While I was there, I took my pill first thing at breakfast.

There were always two techs on duty in the evenings. During the night they'd make the rounds of the four apartments every few hours and peek into our bedrooms to make sure we were there. Most of the techs were either recent college grads like Diggs, interested in pursuing a career in mental health, or just doing an easy, relatively well-paid nonjob (they got $12 an hour) until they figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. The rest were youngish parents with two jobs trying to make ends meet, or slackers who couldn't handle more commitment in a job than a night shift with nutters.

The shifts went from 8:00 a.m to 4:00 p.m. (Diggs's time), 4.00 p.m. to midnight, and midnight to 8:00 a.m. It was all just glorified babysitting, shuttling us from place to place, or running errands, picking up laundry soap or bug spray or whatever else, if we needed it. They had to inspect our bags at the grocery store and gather receipts for what we bought, that sort of thing, but they never made a big show of being our keepers. Sometimes they sat on the couch with us at night and watched TV, or they sat at the dining table and did paperwork or read. There was also a small loft room above the kitchen in our apartment that had been made into an office for the techs, so they could use the computer or get on the Internet.

The techs were cool. They had the keys to the apartment, but the door was never locked except when we all went to the offices during the day or out for our activities in the evenings. They left us alone, even as they watched over us, or listened over us as they worked in the office above. They chatted with us if we wanted to, and they catered to our needs willingly, even if it meant driving to the store at odd hours.

We came and went pretty much as we liked, at least on the grounds of the apartment complex. It would have been quite easy to slip away and get high or drunk if you wanted to, or break the rules in other ways, including romantic encounters with other clients, as I learned that Bobby and Cook were doing virtually every night down at the Jacuzzi.

This was grounds for dismissal, but I didn't get the impression that the techs were making a particularly concerted effort to catch us in flagrante. If you shoved it in their faces, they'd have to report you, but otherwise the prevailing att.i.tude at Mobius seemed to be that it was your cure, take it or not, and more often than not your money as well, so why sweat stolen kisses or other small infractions, if that was your game. Dr. Franklin's whole program revolved around his understanding of the will and its role in a person's mental convalescence. He wasn't going to give you the delusion of agency, only to shackle you with spies.

Dr. Franklin had an interesting relationship to his creation. Hands-on and hands-off. He was rarely in the offices, so I didn't actually meet him until several days into my stay. He was the presence behind, and the inventor of, everything that happened at Mobius, process therapy in particular, but you hardly ever saw him. Yet when you called the information number on Mobius's Web site, he was the person who answered the phone. It wasn't some hasty minion who couldn't give a s.h.i.t, or some sleazy salesperson trying to part you from your money. It was Dr. Franklin taking cold calls. It was a smart way to keep his hand in, and it showed how personally invested he was. Everyone who came to Mobius had some relationship to Dr. Franklin from the start, since they had spoken to him on the phone and filled out his online application form to gain admittance. He had heard everyone's story, everyone's reasons for coming to Mobius. He had booked them in himself. He knew who was staying in his house, even if he wasn't there very often.

When I finally did meet him, it was like meeting Ronald McDonald or the Hamburglar or some other advertising mascot whose entire physical being and presence is dominated by a single exaggerated feature. In Dr. Franklin's case it was his bushy black mustache, which seemed to trumpet loud and clear: "I was a hippie back in the day, and now I drive a Lexus. But I vote green." And it was true. He did drive a Lexus, a sport utility no less. And I know this, because that's what he arrived in when he met me my first Sat.u.r.day at Mobius at ten o'clock in the morning to play tennis on the courts at the apartment complex. He was a tennis nut, and when he found out that I played, he'd said, "You know, I don't usually do this with clients, but in your case I'll make an exception."

I knew he was environmentally conscious, too, up to a point, because he was wearing sweatbands on his wrists that were made entirely of bamboo fiber, and he said he was starting a whole line of green products, including, among other things, coffee mugs made of corn plastic. He even gave me a certificate a.s.serting that a portion of my fee would go toward the planting of four hundred trees in my name in forests all around the world. He told me of his plans to move the Mobius offices to a new, "entirely green" building that he was designing with the help of an architect.

He was, as a hippie himself might say, a trip. He was way into the occult, talking about the mystic revelations of the Akashic records and the testimony of past life regressions, which he said he himself had performed many times. I asked him if he would try it on me, but he declined, saying he didn't do that kind of thing anymore. It was all a little hokey and strange. He was a little hokey and strange. An odd personality. An unusual combination of energetic and laid back, naively gung-ho and sagely hard-boiled. But I didn't care. To my mind, anybody who could think up and run a place like Mobius was a genius and a blessed shepherd of lost souls, even if he was a bit cracked. Maybe it took someone who was a bit cracked to even try it.

Besides, he was just too likable to dismiss. We smacked the ball around for an hour or so that morning, taking water breaks and talking about other treatment centers, mostly in Central America, where, in previous years, he'd established places like Mobius. He'd been in the alternative treatment business for a long time, establishing, refining, trying things out. At Mobius, it seemed, it had finally all come together. You could see that he was proud of his invention, and he had every right to be.

My first night at Mobius, I dreamed of a house by the sea. I could live alone forever if I just had a view of the sea. I could live alone forever if I just had a view of the sea. That is what I thought as I sat in the dream house at the wide wooden desk, in the large empty room, with the old unvarnished floorboards and the peeling white paint on walls as dry and bleached as driftwood, looking out through the large seamless windows at the sea. I thought: That is what I thought as I sat in the dream house at the wide wooden desk, in the large empty room, with the old unvarnished floorboards and the peeling white paint on walls as dry and bleached as driftwood, looking out through the large seamless windows at the sea. I thought: I could live here forever. I could live here forever. And then I thought: And then I thought: This belongs to me. This is mine This belongs to me. This is mine.

This place. This mind. This pole of being. Here. At the center. In me. Of me. Just me. And here again. Redirect the attention. Here. This spot. This still point. Consciousness conscious of itself. A being just being, each moment following upon the next, fully felt, fully found.

How many times have I heard the injunction "Know thyself"? But how? How to find oneself when the seeker is the thing sought? The dog is chasing his own tail, the snake is swallowing his.

In the dream, my house looks empty to me, because the person who lives there is outside looking through the windows, or she is inside looking out at the sea, but never inside looking in at herself.

How can she? How do I see myself but in a mirror? And why is the image so hollow? I search the gla.s.s for clues to the person behind the eyes, but there is nothing. The meaning is more elusive the longer I look, the eyes more two-dimensional, the more I stare. This is not the way. So what is the real mirror of the soul?

This is work for conjurers. How strange. I cannot be with the person who is right here, here all the time and yet not here, because I do not know her, cannot see her. I have never seen her. She is a ghost heard tell of. We are never in the same place at the same time, because we are the same person. I try to talk to her, and our conversations go like this:

Her: Knock knock.

Me: Who's there?

Her: Who.

Me: Who?

Her: Who.

Me: Who is who?

Her: Exactly.

My time at Mobius was full of dreams, dreams I woke up remembering and then drew in bright color the next day so that I could hang on to what they were telling me, imprint the pictures they showed me, and bask in the feeling they gave me. Calm and centered. Full.

I spent a lot of time there sitting with myself asking: How do you feel? And then listening carefully to the answer.

In the dream of the house by the sea I saw the metaphor of myself. I had a house, to which I had the keys, but I did not live there. Now and again I'd go into the house to empty the trash or do some other ch.o.r.e, but I always ran in and out as quickly as possible, full of anxiety, the way you might if you were the caretaker of a house you knew to be haunted.

But then one day, while I was in the house, I stopped in the room with the sea view and stood at the windows looking out. I was struck suddenly by the thought that this view was spectacular, and that it made the property, despite its disheveled condition, quite valuable. It occurred to me that I might stay, even take up residence. And that is when I began to consider the problem of ident.i.ty, of how to both be and be with myself.

As my tutelage at Mobius went on, both alone in therapy with Carol and in process therapy with the group, it became clearer and clearer that the problem was very simple, and always the same.

Me.

Every behavior was a form of escape, evasion, or cover. I kept picturing myself sitting in a chair in the middle of an empty room. Every few moments, it seemed, I'd get up and check the clock, or fiddle with something at the window, or go for the door. I couldn't sit still. I couldn't just stay in the chair. And that, in the larger real-world sense, was what doing drugs and having affairs was all about, getting up from the chair, not doing the work, not sitting through the discomfort.

Carol did a lot of this work with me, pushing me by the shoulders into the chair and making me sit there with whatever came up, turning my head to face it again and again.

That is where I got the most traction at first, and learned to stop spinning my wheels.

During my first private session with Carol, she drew another stick figure on the board and said, as she had in group, "What's the thought?"

This time I wasn't going to varnish my answer.

"Do I want to f.u.c.k you?" I said.

She turned and furrowed her brow. When she saw my face, she said, "You're serious, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm not messing around. That's what's in my head."

She needed confirmation.

"Every time you meet someone you consider whether or not you want to have s.e.x with them?"

"Pretty much. I mean I usually discard the idea pretty quickly, but it crosses my mind."

She let out a big breath.

"Okay."

She wrote it down in the thought bubble above the stick figure's head: "Do I want to f.u.c.k you?"

She stepped back and looked at it for a moment, then reapproached the board. Again, as she had done before, she drew the heart over the stick figure's chest. She turned back to me.

"What's the feeling?"

Again, I didn't hesitate.

"Same as before. Loneliness, isolation."

She wrote these down inside the heart. Turning again she asked, "Anything else?"

"Emptiness."

She wrote this. Paused.

"Anything else?"

I listened for what would come through, trying to go deeper, trying to let a very old part of my brain speak to me, translate some hidden code into a concept and then corral it into a word. Then it came. Hard. Unexpectedly hard. I spat the word rudely, surprising myself.

"Hate."

She made an expression of interest, and then wrote that word in caps, larger than the rest.

HATE.

I felt a p.r.i.c.k of rage, hot and pointed in my chest, and then a wave spreading from the point of entry.

"You know the drill," Carol said, drawing arrows out from the heart.

"Now what's the behavior?"

The behavior that comes from loneliness? That was easy enough.

"Seduction," I said.

Pause. Then the behavior that comes from emptiness? Again, easy enough.

"Predation."

Pause. And the behavior that comes from hate? That was not going to be easy at all. Could I admit this? Could I own it? It was coming anyway. The channel was too open to stop it. Four letters. One syllable. Hate's other shoe dropping. Wait for it. Yes, yes, there it was, on the tongue, the tip of the tongue, then in the back of the mouth bursting forward, barking into the room.

"Rape."

There. Done. Criminal intent. On the board. In the open. Declared.

Carol took it well, considering, but I felt the need to clarify, so I added: "Men, not women."

As if this made it somehow better.

But it was true. I'd had pretty violent fantasies about raping men-always people who royally deserved it, mind you. Terrorists, rapists, child abusers, that sort of thing. In the fantasy I'm always a prisoner of theirs-usually in the terrorist fantasy-and they've had me for weeks, starving me, torturing me. At some point I break free or, more likely, I'm liberated in some trade or forced hostage relinquishment. There is always a big crowd of people waiting behind a fence when my captors bring me out, as if the transfer had been brokered and the meeting point revealed.

When one of the captors brings me out for the trade in front of the crowd, I turn on him with a hidden weapon, always a bat or a bludgeon of some kind. That, or I relieve him of his weapon in a stunning martial arts move right out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I bang his head against the pavement a few times to subdue him, and then I tie his hands behind his back. Then I get him facedown on the ground, grab a fistful of his hair, and pull back his head so that I can spit my words right into his sweaty ugly face. Then I say something cringe-inducingly trite but satisfying, like: "My friend, you picked the wrong girl on the wrong day."

Then I yank down his pants, still clutching his hair and pulling back his head as far as it will go, and then I shove my dry fist up his a.s.s, or as much of it as will fit, and as I'm ripping up his insides I say: "This is how rape feels."

The world is watching this, mind you. CNN and Fox have it live, even if they're blurring out the fisting, and the crowd is either roaring or stunned into silence, I can't decide which. Either way, this act is being seen. Recorded. Both on film and in the minds of every onlooker. It exists. It will be burned into memory and this man's flesh.

If a woman rapes a man in a clearing and everyone's there to hear it, see it, and taste it, does it make a sound, a sight, a meal? Does it register? Does it const.i.tute payback for every private, silent, secret rape in the world? I don't know. Maybe it's just payback for one. And that's enough.

And there you have it. The subconscious at work, plucking scenes from bad movies and making a dream world of retribution. The poorly written script of my fantasy that plays over and over in my head, and has been for as long as I can remember, usually when I'm listening to raucous music on my iPod while I'm riding on the StairMaster at the gym or when I'm gritting my teeth to the cracking point in my sleep.

This was the rage wound up inside me like a tapeworm after years and years of feeding it and wondering why I always still felt hungry, and why I think about whether I want to f.u.c.k everyone I meet, making them into meat in my mind's eye and wondering how tender or tough they'd be, or how they'd smell, of clay and onion or maybe scalp oil and a musty old couch, or seaweed and the rotting sea. And I think about what they'd secrete, creamy or clear, salty or sweet. And then I'd force myself to think of drinking it, lapping it up and gagging, angrier still, but angriest with myself.

This is punishment. But whose? His, whoever he is or was, and mine. Mostly mine.

Punish me for my transgression. Because the transgression is mine. I fantasize about hurting the perpetrator, some perpetrator, any perpetrator, but the vector of revenge always turns back on me in real life, mostly because it is unacceptable to rape anybody, but also because the sickness lives in me, and that's where it has to die, be cut out, excised, exorcised.

I had said none of this to Carol. She was still with the thought bubble, the hate, and my last word, rape.

"Talk to me about this," Carol said, breaking my foul reverie. "How does it go in your head?"

I wasn't going to get into it, so I said what I'd said to therapists many times before.

"I was molested as a kid. I had a venereal disease before I was ten."

She was ready for this, of course. Had put it together from the moment I'd said the words "Do I want to f.u.c.k you?" and "rape."

"Molested kids are often hypers.e.xualized as adults, you know."

"Yeah, I know."

She knelt down next to my chair. I wasn't ready for this kind of sympathy. Didn't want it. The molestation bit hadn't been a confession. It was old material. Really old. I'd talked it to death in the past, or at least what little I could remember of it. The doctor's office. The medical facts pointing to events I couldn't, still can't, recall except in comparatively innocent snippets. The virus suggests more. But what more? Who knows? Who cared? Yeah, yeah, I always thought, so somebody got to me in some way. So what? It happens all the time. Move on. I don't need you to hold my hand.

But she did. She took my hands, both of them, in hers, looked me long and hard in the eyes, waiting for me to meet her gaze and hold it. I couldn't. I looked at the potted fern behind her on the floor, occasionally glancing back at her eyes, which were searching my face for recognition. When our eyes did meet for longer than an instant, she gripped my hands a little tighter.