17 & Gone(66)
This time, though, when I say I’m feeling better, the doctor asks about the voices. “The girls,” she calls them, as if she was pleasantly introduced to each of them before I came in the room and they’ve stepped out for a moment, perhaps for tea.
How long have they been talking to me? she wants to know. Do they ever ask me to do things, things that scare me or upset me? Things I’d rather not do?
“Like what kinds of things?” I ask.
“Violent things,” she says carefully.
Her hair is layered and cropped short, and her pantsuit is wrinkled in only one spot as if she ironed everywhere else but the left knee. This mistake in her pants seems violent to me.
“No,” I say.
“Such as trying to hurt your mother?”
she says, and waits.
“That’s not what happened,” I start, getting upset. “I’d never hurt my mom.
Who do you guys think I am?”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she says, then switches gears. “Tell me about this party where you lost your keys. That was a bad night, wasn’t it? What happened?”
“I lost my keys.” She stays silent, so I keep talking. “I guess I dropped them. I don’t remember. I kind of blacked out.”
“Do you have blackouts like this often? When you wake up and don’t remember what you’ve done? Or maybe when people tell you that you’ve done things and you have no memory of doing them?”
I’m not sure what someone told her I did beyond losing the keys; my mom wasn’t even there that night. Has she been talking to Jamie? Did Jamie say something?
“That’s like something I saw on TV
once,” I say. “Multiple personalities, I think. Is that what you mean? Like I black out and someone other than me takes over and makes people call me by a different name?”
“I’m not saying that at all. Is that what you’re saying?”
She leans forward and the large button earrings she has fastened into her lobes droop low, skimming her shoulders. The earrings themselves are bigger than her ears and must weigh a ton. It’s like she’s decorated herself with two plates from her kitchen.
I think of the blue woman from the elevator, how the giant empty holes in her ears might have once held earrings as large as this.
“No,” I say. “I’m not saying I have multiple personalities. Of course not.”
If she knew more about the girls, she wouldn’t have even asked that. The girls may tell me things, and let me walk through their memories, but I don’t become them. They’re them, and I’m always only me.
I fold my arms over my chest and play with the caution-orange cuffs on my floppy sleeves. The sweatshirt smells musty, like my mom wanted to dress me as a whole other person and had to search for the costume in the back of my closet. Or like she’s some other woman, come to impersonate my mother, wanting to dress a girl who’s impersonating me.
“Do you ever see things you think might not be real?” the doctor asks.
“What do you mean by ‘not real’?”
“Hallucinations. Things or people no one else can see.”
I’m silent for a long time.
She’s not asking any more questions, so after a while I speak up. “Can you be a psychiatrist and believe in stuff?”
“How so?”
“If you had a patient,” I start, “and if she said she saw a ghost, if she said she could talk to the ghost and the ghost talked back, would you automatically give her medication and call her crazy?
Or would you consider that maybe some kind of supernatural explanation is possible? What I mean is, do you believe in things like that? Are you even allowed to?”
She skirts the question. “We never use the word crazy here.”
“But would you? Would you say that seeing something like that is only a chemical imbalance in her brain?”
“Seeing hallucinations can be a symptom of mental illness, yes. Seeing a ‘ghost.’ Talking to the ‘ghost.’ Having the ‘ghost’ talk back . . . Yes.”
“Like what?” I say. “Like which illness? Tell me one.”
“We don’t insert labels so soon in the process, we never—”
“Schizophrenia,” I insert for her.
“Like my dad.”
She pauses and absently touches her wrinkled knee. “So you did hear what your mother and I were talking about.
That was not about you. You understand that, right?”
I shrug.
“Schizophrenia isn’t something that can be diagnosed after just one episode.
A diagnosis can take years. And I want you to know that one person’s experience
isn’t
necessarily
like
another’s. Experiences can vary, and nothing in psychology fits neatly into a box and gives us such easy answers.”
She’s being vague. I don’t respond, so she keeps on.
“There are many things what you’re going through could be. You say you’re not depressed, but that’s something we need to explore. There has to be time for therapy, time to adjust to different medications, to—”
More things, she says more things.
She keeps talking. She could be talking about shamans and gods, for all I know —I suspect she talks simply to hear herself talk. What I’m waiting for is another voice, an answer in my head. A voice of a lost girl to tell me all of this is what’s crazy. My being here. My having to listen to this. While outside they’re being taken and I’m the only one who knows. The meds aren’t making me as slow and sleepy as they were in the beginning, but they do something far worse than that. They make it so I haven’t heard a voice in days.