Songs of the Maniacs Read online

  I hand her the Kleenex box and Celia wipes her bleary eyes. It is time for verbiage, so I indulge her. I tell her the dreams are part of her illness and it is good for her to air them, let them dissipate. I tell her everyone here has dreams like this, dreams in which we are terrible people who do terrible things. There is no escaping the dreams. We must accept them and try to be strong.

  “Do you have ugly dreams?” Celia asks me, her head cocked, the damp tissue balled in her fist. Palm fronds rustle as the wind picks up slightly, a tease.

  “Yes,” I say. “I have awful dreams too.”

  Perhaps these kinds of dreams are, in fact, normal dreams. In this time and place, who can say? This is what I tell Celia and she smiles. I can see her once pretty face sunk deep in the crêpe paper skin drooping from her skull.

  Before she came here, Celia had a life. College student, bank teller, partier with lots of lovers. “I don’t remember my dreams from that time,” Celia says. “I slept like a baby, though.”

  Now she sleeps in a dorm room with six single beds lined up along one pale green wall. Home to Celia is a numbered room on a long drab hall of identical rooms in a squat brick building specially designed for troubled women.

  She sits back against the couch and stares at me from under heavy lids. Her eyes have no life in them. She is a shell. A crust.

  “The guilt in these dreams is awful,” she whispers. “But the sex is fucking fantastic. So what the hell does it mean?”

  It means Celia is becoming more herself. Her condition is advancing, that is, she is deteriorating in the same manner all the residents do. It appears to be the natural course of the condition. This is what I regard as self-improvement through total self-destruction.

  I cock my head, non-committal. “You tell me,” I encourage. “What do you think it might mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Celia says, hesitating. She inhales so deeply her nostrils flare. “But I will say this: I’m scared. Because this morning?” She hesitates and looks down at her lap, where she is picking at the plastic hospital bracelet with her ragged, chewed-up fingernails. “This morning, right before I came over? When I looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink, I almost fainted. Because there was nothing there. Where I should have been, I mean. Instead, I was looking straight into the eyes of a stranger. A man. A big, ugly, awful man. I froze, then as quick as I could I turned around. There was nothing there. Nothing. No man. I turned back to the mirror. And there he was. Instead of me.”

  First you become less yourself. Then you become more yourself. Much more.

  But I do not say this to Celia. No, I hand her the disposable words she has come for. My words of comfort and reassurance melt in the air between us. Celia’s hollow eyes drift off as if she is already thinking about other things.

  Outside, the wind whistles as it cuts across the quad and speeds west toward the far side of the world.

  3.

  When I was a child I went unscathed. My life was simple and free. At least in my child mind it appeared this way. I had two loving parents, we lived in a comfortable house in the Miami suburbs, and my three older brothers adored me.

  Two of my brothers are residents here. They both have been institutionalized for quite a few years. In fact, they came here soon after SIPD was officially identified by the American Psychological Association as a new (and rampant) personality disorder. SIPD was not yet epidemic, more a curiosity than a disaster. Once I took on my position here, I was able to arrange a semiprivate room for my brothers, and we receive a family discount which cuts the tuition down to a manageable fee.

  My other brother has been missing for more than a year. When I visit with Thom and Kip, we all speculate on Franny’s life of mystery. Both of them think he split because he couldn’t face coming here to visit, seeing his siblings deteriorate. I disagree. Franny is the oldest and the most responsible. So he is also the most screwed up. In my opinion, Franny needed to separate from us in order to become who he is. Rather than remain who we want him to be. More or less.

  But this is the way I look at everyone. It is my training to seek such motivations in people. Especially in people who appear to have lost all motivation.

  Celia has left behind the sour scent of disinfected wounds. I write a few clinical notes in longhand on a legal pad while I sip my Diet-Water. I should go grab some lunch at the café across the quad but I don’t feel like rushing. Instead I finish my drink, which tastes more like nothing than nothing itself, and I stare out the window at the wind. There is nothing to see, but you can look for what would be there if the wind could make more of itself.

  A hurricane is a good way to see the wind reaching for its potential.

  The sparse ficus trees flutter a bit. The curly brown leaves that have blown off their branches whisk across the sidewalks with each stray gust. Fat bushes sporting yellow, peach, and red hibiscus blooms blot up the sharp noontime light. The flowers cling tightly to their thin stems whenever the breeze picks up.

  I watch as a pair of three-foot long iguanas mate quickly on a shady scatter of leaves under an overgrown sea grape tree. A hundred feet away, a couple of neon orange males bob their heads at one another, vying for territory or some female hidden from view in the trees. People walking through the quad are stepping around the iguanas, allowing a respectful berth. This is mating season and the males tend to act aggressively when breeding.

  What makes us think we are so different from the animals?

  The clock ticks over and I look up. Lately, the time has seemed to flow more rapidly, as if headed downstream.

  Franny would tell me I’m finally grown up and that’s why time seems different to me now. I can picture him saying this to me, a wet laugh at the back of his long pale throat. When I imagine him sitting here on the couch in his black leather jacket with the snake patch on the shoulder, he has a smirk on his handsome face. He always used to smirk and say to us, “Guys: Be smart, not slick.”

  Sometimes when I imagine Franny sitting here across from me, he is staring down at his hands, his jacket creaking whenever he shifts position. Sometimes he looks up at me and there are two dark basins full of stagnant and unmoving water where his hazel eyes should be. Nothing stirs, and then he is gone.

  “Knock, knock. Anybody home?”

  Victor is a symptomless resident whose presence here baffles me. He likes to drop by and chat when I am between visitors. I am no closer to understanding him after months of daily banter. He exhibits a wholesome amount of self-interest, enough so that he exudes a kind of angry-guy sexual energy that I find annoying and arousing.

  I wave him in and Victor plops down on the couch as always. He wears a worn pair of cutoff jeans, a white tank-top, and a day or two of beard. I can smell his athletic sweat. He’s come from the gym or a jog around the grounds. Victor never reeks of fear and self-loathing like the other residents. This makes him strange, untrustworthy.

  “Why do you drink that stuff?” he asks, pointing to my empty bottle of Diet-Water. “You’re already too thin. A woman like you should savor the flavors of life. To serve as a role model,” he adds quickly.

  Victor tries to goad me out of my professional demeanor. He’s good at it. Too good at it.

  When I ask him why he is here today, which is what I ask him every time he comes by, Victor smiles. His big front teeth overlap slightly in an adorably boyish way. He stretches out his muscular legs and crosses them at the ankles. His basketball shoes are dirty and scuffed.

  “I‘m here for the company,” Victor says. Then he looks at my breasts, grins, and nods his head. Victor is twenty-seven going on seventeen. I squirm in my seat. “When are you going to admit that you want me here? You want me as much as you’ve ever wanted any man,” he says, then laughs.

  We go through the I’m-going-to-have-to-ask-you-to-leave routine for a minute before I relax. I’m trying to remain professionally distant, b
ut he’s making it difficult.

  “If you let me stay I’ll tell you a dream I had. A dream I had before I came here,” Victor says instead of getting up to leave. I sit back in my chair, cross my arms over my breasts, and listen.

  “I’ve had this dream five or six times. Always the same dream, with minor but essential variations. Like a really good song played by really different bands. ”

  He pauses and strokes his overgrown sideburns where they meet his incoming beard. Dirty shoes, failure to shave, dreams that repeat themselves and lend themselves to discussion. Victor may not be symptomless after all. I tell him to tell me all about it.

  I give good ear.

  “The dream goes like this. I’m driving into The City to see a girl. I’m behind the wheel of my ‘66 Mustang with the top down, so I’m not speeding. I’m in my lane, enjoying myself. There’s really no reason to speed in a classic car. You want to let everybody see what you’ve got.”

  He pauses and looks at me. For what? Approval? Admiration? Envy? Men seem to want something extra from me every time. I stare back, my face an open window he can look out to see his own back yard. His own highway lines.

  Whatever.

  “The sunset is rosy with air pollution and the air is thick with car fumes, but it’s a perfect tropical evening and I’m cruisin’. I’m listening to Kanye. Totally chill. Then I pop in an oldies CD and the wind is combing my hair for me like the long cool hands of a long cool woman in a black dress, and I’m singing along with the music and then...”

  Victor shakes his head back and forth a few times, then looks at me. “That’s how it ends. With nothing. It ends every time with nothing.” Victor gives me a rueful smile. “Now you tell me what that means to you. Then we can get going on things. Together.”

  I say nothing. The wind shrieks for a minute and we both glance out the window. Sunshine spills across the quad like shards of glass. We stare at one another.

  “What’s with the fucking iguanas, eh? Everywhere you go, big ugly reptiles. Grunting and humping one another.”

  Victor stands up and strides over to my desk. He leans across it to place a hand against my right cheek. His sweat smells fresh with a tinge of lime. Key lime. His smooth palm is warm and gentle on my skin.

  “I’m tired of talking. Why don’t we try to feel something, you and me? Us, baby. Why don’t we try to feel something together?”

  He strokes my face and I turn slightly so I can hold onto his fingers with my front teeth, softly. The fingers taste salty, like little minnows. I would guess his body would taste like one big salt lick. I bite down. A metallic taste fills my mouth.

  Victor pulls his hand away. “Jesus. The prisoner awakens.”

  It always comes to this with me and men.

  “This place, you don’t get it, do you?” Victor says as he lifts his wounded hand to his lips. Victor has nice pillowy lips. I could fall asleep on those lips. “Here’s a hint. Think about stars. How the stars you see are dead but the light still comes here. Why is this true? Because we are all living in the past but we don’t even know it.”

  Whatever.

  I need to stop looking at Victor’s lips. He is sucking on his hand, staring at me like he needs something I am unable to provide. So I stand up and point to the door.

  I don’t feel anything when he leaves. I’m a professional and I have a job here, and he’s either a resident or an employee with serious problems. Does he know who he is? Does he know who I am?

  No need to talk myself out of anything.

  It’s 12:30 and there is time yet before my next visitor. Later today, I will walk to the sea and back. I will enter the mouth of the wind and maybe I will get swallowed up in the storm.

  Maybe then I will feel something more, rather than something less.

  4.

  When Justin sits down on the couch I turn from the window with a start. He is like a ghost, appearing without the sound of approaching footsteps, so thin he seems to shimmer. He brings a suck of cold air into the room with him.

  He lies down, flat on his back, staring at the ceiling in the dead man’s pose. I look at his emaciated body and think I will never be able to help Justin recover. But his symptoms will go away and he will leave here. He has Stage IV SIPD. So do many of my visitors.

  Stand-in Personality Disorder is widely regarded as a treatable disease. According to all the latest scientific research and ongoing reports in the medical literature, that is. According to all the professionals and the institutions they run, the drug companies and the universities funded by them. All the blah blah blah says SIPD is a treatable disorder.

  When looked at on an individual basis, however, treatable is the word. Because as a professional in the field, I have never known anyone to recover. People do have their symptoms disappear. They certainly do leave here and not return. But I have not seen anyone fully recover. Because the truth is, out of everyone here who has SIPD (and they all have SIPD in some stage or another), not one of them has been able to recover the self. And it is my opinion that when you fail to recover the self, then you fail to recover. Isn’t that the definition of a cure, to recapture the whole self? Perhaps the post-postmodern self is too malleable for recovery. Maybe the psychic internal forces accompanying SIPD work to change the self irreparably.

  I am having difficulty accepting this as a new kind of truth. But I am afraid that it is an unspoken truth for our time. And, when I am totally honest with myself, I will admit this difficult truth: I am not helping to cure anyone, not really.

  Justin lies still, his yellowed eyes staring straight up. The ceiling, when I look, has wet spots. Something must be leaking in the office located on the floor above me. The water has created an expanding galaxy of stars above our heads.

  Finally Justin turns to me and smiles. His teeth have fallen out and, even though he is around my age, he looks a hundred years old. He waves one bony arm at nothing, his pathetic panhandler smile fading. Then he begins to talk, and I let him.

  “Most of the world’s population dies within a few miles of where they were born. Most of the world’s residents never go out into the world to see what the world has to offer them. Or take from them. And they are so afraid. They are afraid of losing the little they have. The trinkets, the old yellowed photographs, the crumpled newspaper articles about their puny accomplishments or the deaths of loved ones.”

  He wipes at the sticky spittle on his withered lips with the back of a hand cross-stitched with blue veins. Outside, the palm fronds slap one another. It sounds like someone shuffling a new deck of cards.

  “Let me tell you what I know. I tell you this from a specific perspective, the perspective of the person who takes away. Because I am a thief. But I am a good thief. I relieve others of the useless material items that hold them from their futures. It is only when the overwhelming weight of their meaningless past is lifted that they are free to explore life with a pure and unfettered heart. The way of the good thief is to quietly come into a life only to unchain it from its most beloved burdens. ”

  Justin uses a bony finger (and that’s all it is, a bone with a cellophane wrapping of flesh) to point to the ceiling. “If there’s a God upstairs, he should do something about the rampant materialism that has destroyed us. Even the poorest parts of the world now, even the most remote edges of China and Africa and India. Even the South American jungles that once offered a harbor from the onslaught of consumerist culture, even the tiniest island in the middle of some unnamed sea. Everywhere you look there is too much product and not enough soul. If I had an army of thieves, I could never strip it all away.”

  He sighs heavily and closes his watery eyes. I know what he means. But that’s our way of life, and one must accept life in order to live among the living.

  Justin then recounts a primitive sexual fantasy in a dull monotone. There’s too much food, booze, and me in Justin’s fantasy l
ife.

  I doodle on my legal pad and say nothing. If he’s looking for my disapproval, Justin does not find what he is looking for. My face remains impassive. My face is a portal, a hole through which he can see his history, his former life, the life he thinks he wants now.

  Whatever.

  Justin sits up and puts his standard issue paper slippers back on his bluish feet. He hums faintly, a melody that sounds like “Comfortably Numb.” Then he smiles at me, baring his blackened dog’s gums in a ghoulish attempt at good humor.

  “You don’t seem to care what I’m telling you here. Your face lacks affect. These things could be interpreted as symptoms.” He raises his forehead where his eyebrows should be but are not. “Doesn’t that worry you?”

  He is taunting me. It always comes to this. Justin may be the walking dead, but he is still a man like all men. A man who feels powerless, yet somehow superior simply for being a man.

  I tell him I believe his symptoms are abating. I tell him his fantasies are healthy ones. To want to eat, drink, and have sex, these are the fantasies of a healthy person.

  Justin laughs as he stands to leave. His laugh sounds fifty years younger than he looks.

  “If what I just told you is a ‘fantasy,’ then how do you explain this pretty little coed?” he asks. He walks toward my desk slowly, his hand outstretched. He drops a wadded piece of paper in front of me. Thick, yellowing paper. Photo paper. Old, damp, wrinkled up photo paper.

  By the time I have unfolded the photo, Justin is at the door. He watches me to see the shock register on my face. “Aha!” he cries gleefully. “Affect is still possible. There’s hope for you yet.” He pauses, but I refuse to look up. “You seem like a smart girl, so why don’t you think about this,” he says. “All people are interchangeable. We each believe we are unique, yet as living beings we are as interchangeable as clouds in the sky.”