The Elizas: A Novel(93)

“Up, you have to shower,” the nurses say gruffly. Or: “On the toilet, now. There you go.” Or: “If you don’t eat something, honey, we’re going to have to give you a feeding tube. Your choice.”

I try to argue with them that I just want to die, but apparently dying isn’t an option here. They have rough hands and slam the doors and speak loudly when I want quiet, and on day eight, when I start making tiny requests—for a drink, for a walk down the hall, to talk to someone—they sometimes forget what I’ve asked for. Desperate for water, I try my door to find it locked. I spend hours shut in my room, rocking on my coccyx bone, until finally a nurse sweeps in and rolls her eyes. “Get up.”

Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, because when the fog starts to clear, the staff members are all quite pleasant.

The third week in, I start to mingle with other patients. If I want to be out and about, there is no way to avoid them: we eat meals together, watch TV together, and I’m even forced to go with some of them to Group. Some of them descend on me, leechlike, chattering about their stories, who they are, what landed them here. It surprises me how many people talk unapologetically. Peter says almost proudly that this is his third visit to the Oaks. Angela shows me self-inflicted burns up and down her arms. A girl younger than me whose name I can’t remember boasts that during her last breakdown, she smeared herself in shit. On the other hand, some of the patients seem completely normal, just sort of worn-out: like Jim and Pablo, who play chess in the corner. Like Felicity, who wears the silk bathrobe—she’d be so pretty with makeup on, and she’s always talking about her kids. Like Caroline, who knits and smiles at everyone and says that in a previous life she was really talented at baking cakes.

In some ways, though, the Oaks exceeds my expectations. I have my own room with no roommates—a terror at first, when I needed distraction from my screaming mind, but now it’s an incredible gift to escape from the others. There are a lot of channels on television and decent books on the shelves in the common rooms. The staff lets you spend a lot of time outside, tilting your head into the dry desert sun, thinking about nothing.

My therapist is a thickly muscled, goateed, African American man named Albert. He looks like he could asphyxiate anyone who came close by just sitting on their chest, which I appreciate. I need a big, strong man around me. I still can’t get Aunt Eleanor’s cackle next to me on that barstool—or that flash of her face in that mirror on Dr. Roxanne—out of my mind.

Albert is slowly unwinding my memories, explaining that I distanced myself from them as a form of self-protection—and because I was manipulated to forget. He shows me a picture of the man who tried to literally excise Eliza from my existence, and it’s Herman Lavinsky, flasher guy from the café with Posey. The Freak Show who wrote the pamphlet-book at my parents’ house. What the pamphlet didn’t mention was that aside from being a faith healer or some shit like that, Herman is also a neuroscientist, and he developed a few experimental psychopharmaceuticals he was trying out on people. He and his team of people hypnotized me—count backward from ten—put me into an MRI machine, asked me to spew forth my memories of killing Aunt Eleanor, and then carefully targeted this chemical he developed to turn off the memory gene. And then, poof! Memories gone.

I would have been better off with a trephine.

Of course, those weren’t the only things Herman tried. Along with whatever chemical he stabbed into my brain, he also used antiquated drugs like ether on me, and some weird Native American herbs. My central nervous system was put on ice. I had electrodes stuck to my head. Not that I remember this—Albert just reads it back from various papers and articles written about his process. Herman spent hours in my room every day—a room that wasn’t in UCLA at all but in a hospital all the way in the Mojave, where I guess they allowed him to do this nonsense, unexamined—cataloging all of my memories with Aunt Eleanor in them and rewriting them, one by one, so that Eleanor was no longer there. In the case of me having a brain tumor as a child, apparently that was too tainted with Eleanor to salvage, so it was wiped away completely. Why would someone want to remember a childhood brain tumor, anyway?

The problem, of course, is that my memories were too strong for Herman’s method, and they were screaming to get out—hence The Dots, and hence various pieces clawing through at importune moments, though I’d tricked myself into thinking I’d had the brain tumor I thought was present last year but that had only existed when I was a little girl. Albert hasn’t yet read my book, so I have to try and explain my story to him all by myself. Much of it is still foggy to me; I can’t figure out where Dot ends and I begin. Part of me still denies any of it happened to me. Another part thinks some of it happened, but in a very different way.

“Really, your family shouldn’t have tried to hypnotize your memories out of you,” Albert says. “It doesn’t exactly work that way. It’s much better to work through your memories. Try and make sense of them. Try to see their significance, and try to decide what you believe. This business of erasing them? Well, it leads to a lot of messiness later on.”

Messy as in losing one’s mind on Dr. Roxanne. But I don’t comment—I don’t want any insight on that, either.

So we work through my memories, all shitty seven zillion of them, reversing Herman’s freakish effects. And I see Aunt Eleanor, brighter and stronger, with every moment that comes back. Love of my life, Aunt Eleanor. Lovely little addiction I clung to again and again. I know I should be furious at her, and I definitely am. But on some early mornings, I have dreams of our old conversations, the back-and-forth banter from when I was a child—her telling stories, me telling a joke, her telling me I was the smartest girl alive. She hugs me and says, “All of it, darling, is a lie. I love you, I love you, I love you.”