Friday, December 30th:

My roommate’s heart warned him not to eat the food here, but the tray they give me for dinner isn’t so bad. The chicken has some modest seasoning and is not bone dry, which is an improvement from my last stay, and there’s a whole wheat Smucker’s Uncrustable. Although, the tray and the containers themselves are a mishmash of recyclable and non-recyclable materials, all of which go straight into the garbage. So no points for sustainability.

My roommate, Mahmoud, is a troubled young man. When I’m first brought to my room, he is in the shower. His Quran is sitting on the one desk in the room, and his copy of the Hadiths and other belongings are strewn about on his bed. “He’s studious and devout, and he showers,” I say to myself, grateful. However, when I return to the room later, he, rather confrontationally, tells me that: 1) if I touch him, I’m gay, 2) he likes to lay on the floor and meditate, and, finally, 3) he likes to eat his own boogers. He moves furtively around the room as he says this. He’s short, underweight, and unshaven, and his eyes take up a significant portion of his face, 2 perfect ellipses with midnight-black disks in the center. He repeats that last point about the boogers several times, with a significant degree of seriousness. I thought it was in bad taste, not necessarily out of disgust for the act itself, but because it’s much too stereotypical and unoriginal a quirk for an insane person to have.

The hospital has the usual restrictions and the usual annoyances, designed to protect against various methods of self-harm, some of which I can’t even imagine. I’m writing with a dry-erase marker right now because pens aren’t allowed. No shoelaces, of course. No straps or strings of any kind, in fact. The orderlies do checks every 15 minutes to make sure everyone is accounted for, even at night, cracking the door open to see if we are sleeping and taking a note if we aren’t. The chairs are absurdly heavy. The faucets and showers have no handles. The toilets have no handle and also no lid, prison-toilet-style. The curtain over the window is the same as the curtain in the shower, only shorter, but you can’t see out the window anyway because it’s covered with this opaque metal grate thing that looks like chainmail. The water fountain has fruit flies.

I attempt to seek refuge in the common room to read Jon Krakauer’s biography of Pat Tillman, but they’re watching the Jennifer Hudson show at max volume in there. When I sit down anyway and try to ignore it, the young woman next to me introduces herself. Her voice sounds like Elmo. She implores me several times to write her a summary of the book I’m reading because she “does movies,” but I’ll be damned if I let someone assign me homework.

In order to avoid activating any more unwanted dialogue trees in the common room, I shuffle back to read in my room, resigning myself to the fact that I’ll probably have to listen to Mahmoud as he explains his whole deal or whatever. It’s best to just get it over with now, I think. Sure enough, after a few minutes of quiet, he looks up from pretending to read the Quran - he keeps opening it up at a random page - and begins to explain his philosophy, metaphysics, and eschatology, which barely have the slightest hint Islam in them. To put it concisely, he values patience, ‘staying cool,’ and meditation, and he uses the hate and evil of his oppressors (that is, nurses and doctors) to fuel himself (which explains the uneaten tray of actual food I see on the floor). The ultimate test of his patience and his ability to stay cool will be when the Antichrist rises up and cuts him in half (lengthwise), subsequently resurrects him, and then throws him in ‘the fire.’ Additionally, somehow fitting into all this is that 1) his old shoulder injury was transferred to the pilot of Kobe Bryant’s helicopter, causing him to lose the ability to fly and to crash, killing everyone and 2) his heart speaks to him as an actual voice in his head. Thankfully, after almost an hour, he seemed to have said all he needed to say, and he and I were able to pretend to read and read, respectively, in relative silence.

I get through a couple pages before I set the book down and lie listlessly on the bed for the rest of the evening. I’m the one who brought myself here. This is a situation of my own making. Didn’t I swear I wouldn’t come back here?

My room is near an intercom speaker and also one of the landline phones patients are allowed to use. At 9:30 at night, a nurse or orderly or someone is playing family reunion music over the intercom - you know, 80s and 90s R&B and latin music - and I don’t oppose that in general but I’d been given my medication and it was now bedtime so I felt like I was getting Manuel Noriega’d. And on the phone, a woman is alternating between speaking quickly Arabic and crying, and she’s just as loud as the music. I can tell it’s Arabic because of Duolingo and although I don’t know exactly what she’s saying, you can tell from the desperation that she’s begging someone on the other end of the line to bring her home.

Then Mahmoud leaps up from the bed all of a sudden and darts out the door, to tell the girl to shut up I’m thinking but no it turns out his concerns are much more…uh.. abstract. I hear him run down the hall to the nurses’ station and begin to chant on repeat: “Take more blood from me, I love it when you do evil to me.”

They’ll draw blood from me too, in the morning.

What the fuck am I doing here?

Saturday, December 31st

I have visions in the night of Black Poncho Day. That’s what I call it in my dream, anyway. My body resting spiritless in a vacant parking lot far from home. The black plastic covers my body, but a small trail of blood is leaking onto the concrete. The gun I just purchased is lying dormant in my relaxed hand, one bullet through the skull, one still left in the chamber just in case, Gary Webb style. The rental car is parked next to me, overnight bag and instructions in the back seat. Did I call 911 myself or am waiting to be discovered? A breeze shifts the poncho gently. It’s a ghastly act, but it’s neat and self-contained. A nice and simple resolution.

Vincent, a short black guy covered head to toe in faded tattoos, is taking short quick steps up and down the hallway outside my room. His tempo is metronome-steady. Step, step, step, step. Back and forth, back and forth.

I’ve finished my Krakauer book and now I’m highlighting sentences in Nietzsche in black crayon. On the Genealogy of Morals is the book. Didn’t he go insane at the end of his life? It shows for sure. But you know, even when his ideas gets a little crazy, he’s always plausible. Is an aggressive, aristocratic vitality to be prized over democratic humility and patience, which he claims are a sickness? Is the ‘will to power’ the foundational human urge? Nah, probably not. But he almost convinces you. Although he sure does italicize Jews a lot.

Mrs. Yao can always be found wandering through the common room and hallways engaged in a lively conversation in Chinese with someone no one else can see. But sometimes she’ll look you in the eye and say something in heavily accented English. Her grey hair is furled out every which way and her teeth look like skittles. All in all a nice lady.

The TV in the common room is playing Turner Classic Movies and there are a bunch of people in there hypnotized by it. I guess the The Thin Man (1936) is pretty good.

A sudden wave of sadness hits about a half hour after dinner. It’s a physical ailment, a particular pressure in the head and chest. I just don’t understand why I’m not allowed to kill myself.

Looking up from a passage in the Quran, Mahmoud asks me, his forehead wrinkled in genuine confusion and curiosity, “What does it mean to pray?”

Happy New Year’s Eve.

Sunday, January 1st:

I’m nothing but a memory in the mind of my future self, I think to myself. It’s a mantra that helps sometimes, with pain.

There’s a smaller door with a lock inside the door to each room, so that the nurses can get in if you try to barricade yourself inside.

I asked for more food yesterday, but my plates seem to get smaller and smaller with each meal.

The doctors have been on vacation and they don’t come back until Tuesday.

The mirror in the bathroom is dented in several places. Someone probably punched it is why, but deep down I suspect it’s because they don’t want us to see our reflections.

Mrs. Yao writes my name in Chinese with a marker on a paper towel and hands it to me with a smile. I nod thankfully.

Monday, January 2nd:

Mahmoud says that God wants us to be gentle with ourselves. He’s got a prayer rug now but he just sort of sits on it instead of doing the pray-5-times-a-day thing. And it’s hard to get your bearings in here but I think he’s about 90 degrees off from Mecca.

I don’t hate myself. Yeah sure, I want to kill myself, but I don’t hate myself. I just think if you’ve never woken up with even a speck of joy in your entire life then for the love of God you should be allowed to put yourself out your misery. Everyone makes such big deal out of the whole suicide thing, but to me it’s as benign as quitting a job you’re not interested in. But I’m not supposed to think that.

The primary task in the psych ward is to fill space in the day. All external concerns are dwarfed by the issue of finding the precise ratio of lying in bed to staring at the tv to pacing the hallway that will make the day go by faster. I live from mealtime to mealtime. That’s all I can do.

I think about what’s in store in the future for someone… disabled liked me. Not physically, obviously, but emotionally. I lack what humans need to live a life in this world. I’m a horse with a broken leg, and dear god I’m begging for the glue factory.

Mrs. Yao smiles at me in her fucked up way and tells me that I’m going to have a great wife one day.

Tuesday, January 3rd:

“I think I’m a psychopath,” I say to the doctor. I use the word. I understand that it’s pretty rare, I say to her, so it’s unlikely for any one person to be a psychopath and that not many people know what it means. But I think I have a pretty good case.

I describe my lack of affection for any of my family: parents, brother, grandparents, cousins, all of them, many of them people I have no reason not to love. I describe how much of a task it is to talk to people, even the people I call friends. I describe how I’ve felt since I was a kid that I’ve been pretending or performing in interactions with other people but couldn’t quite figure out why I felt that way. I describe how burdensome all social interactions are because of the effort required by this performance. I describe how much time I spend alone. I describe how it feels like there’s a curtain or a film between me and the rest of the world. I describe how I’ve never felt guilty for anything I’ve done. I describe how many kind and interesting people I’ve met and how hard I’ve tried to feel one iota of love or care or something or anything for anyone. That emotion, that feeling that I see that other people have towards each other, it’s just not there in me, I say.

Is there anyone I’d give anything to protect? Is there anyone I’d mourn the loss of? Is there anyone whose well-being I give a second’s thought to when I’m alone? Is there anyone whose face, when the gun is resting on my temple, could stop me from pulling the trigger? No, no, no, and no.

The doctor considers it and offers tentative agreement or at least is willing to entertain it as a hypothetical. She asks, What about the things you said about wanting to kill yourself when you came here? Where does that fit in?

I think it’s obvious, I respond. In the typical case, when someone is depressed and/or has external circumstances that are dire and oppressive, you try to remind them of some connection they have to this world in order to steer them away from suicide. You encourage them to find a meaning and purpose of their own creation. But the bulk of what human beings create lasting meaning and purpose out of is a connection with other people. And if I lack the very thing that people create purpose out of, then what the fuck am I doing here? Am I supposed to live an isolated life, devoid of felt human connection for the next 50 odd years until nature decides I’m finally done? A life of loneliness, maybe even a life of evil?

What am I left with? Existentialism? Absurdism? Fuck off. Camus and Sisyphus and the whole lot can go fuck themselves.

I think suicide is reasonable in my case, I say to the doctor. I don’t think it’s depressive thinking. The intense period sadness that I’ve experienced the past few days is over now, I say. I happens sometimes. It was really bad, so I came here. But the logic of suicide doesn’t feel any less true or resonant with me now in this more stable emotional state. How am I supposed to stop considering something so obvious and simple? I’m a wretched little creature, I say, and I’d really like to die.

I suppose she wouldn’t be a good doctor if she admitted I was right, so she doesn’t, but she can’t explain why, and it makes it hard for me to take her seriously.

“Gentle… gentle,” Mahmoud moans in his sleep.

Wednesday, January 4th:

Someone asked me a while ago if I liked being “mysterious.” And one of the social workers asked me the same thing today, sort of out of the blue. You’ve got me pegged wrong, I say to her. Other people are just as incomprehensible to me as I am to them. I can no more imagine an internal world filled with devotion to fellow human beings than a blind guy could imagine colors. So yeah, in my solitude I end up reading a bunch of books that no one else reads and the ways I think become more and more particular to myself in a way that makes it harder for outsiders to penetrate. But it’s not so that I can appear a certain way to other people. I don’t even think about other people. It’s just how I am.

The trick of the asylum is that no matter how much of an empty void your life is on the outside, the restrictive conditions make you miss what you had. It makes you miss when you could drink water that wasn’t lukewarm and didn’t come in a 6 ounce cup. You miss cleanliness. You miss shampoo and face wash. You miss pens. You miss sitting in a chair with no one bothering you.

Muhammad, who is in the room next door and has a particular paranoia about the numerology of dates and who snores in between his sentences, expresses his concern about missing the last few seconds of the NYE ball drop. He feels that he needs to witness particular dates and times in order to be in good health. 1/1/23 is the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence, but I’m not sure that’s what he even means. He’s trailing behind me as I pace slowly up and down the hallway reading the The Crying of Lot 49. I end up having to explain the B.C./A.D. system to him. “Thank you, I will call my father,” he says.

How disturbed my parents must have been, to have a child that never looked at them with love.

“One more thing,” Muhammad catches up to me. “Do you think I’ll ever come back to reality? I think I’m kind of in my own world right now. That’s what everyone tells me.”

“Sure you can,” I lie.

Thursday, January 5th:

At any given time, 2 networks are playing Law and Order: SVU. If you’re crafty, you can watch 2 episodes at the same time.

“If you don’t want your trays, you should just throw them away instead of letting them sit there,” I say to Mahmoud. He’s fasting from food and liquids “every 24 hours, for the rest of his life,” although I find wrappers and other trash from when he inevitably gives up in the middle of the night. “I don’t like wasting food,” he replies. Who the fuck does he think is going to eat it, fucking Santa?

When I was a toddler, I would wear my pajamas under my clothes so I could go straight to bed. Even now, sleeping is the best part of my day.

I am watching the food network and the girl that sounds like Elmo is parroting phrases from the show and the commercials. I do not strangle her.

Michelle the MILF is eyeing me, giving me apples and asking about my tattoos and shit.

“Lip repair cream,” the girl that sounds like Elmo squawks. She’s draped in a set of velvet pajamas. She looks like a couch.

“I saw a bird,” Mrs. Yao says to me, flinging her hands out to either side and giggling. “Always go outside,” she says.

I’m surrounded by visibly sick people, people who couldn’t hide their illnesses if they tried and probably aren’t here on their own volition. But I’m the sickest one here, no? I mean, the jury is still out on whether I can actually be considered to be a person. In each of these people is a capacity for love, the very thing every sci-fi movie about AI or robots says makes us human. Even HAL 9000 has greater depth of feeling than I do. There isn’t any cure for my condition. There are medicines for every other ailment the people in this ward suffer from, but there isn’t a drug that can give you the ability to love.

Friday, January 6th:

I wrote a letter asking to be released, so I’m being discharged today.

I came here looking for some kind of answer, but the doctors said the same thing they’ve always said. I have to believe in the fiction that my emotional world will, at some point in the future, expand to include true and beautiful love, even though there currently is no indication that it ever will. Until this undetermined time, I have to continue to walk on air as if it is earth. I have to pretend to be human until I actually am. What an act. Let’s see how long the play lasts.

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