Episode

Once, Barbie came over in her pink convertible and shot me in the head. Ken was tied up in her trunk. He said, help me please. Barbie said, I’m sorry for shooting you in the head. I forgave her.

What happened to your face though?

Oh, did I tell you it grew back?

Lindsay is smoking a cigarette on the back porch of the halfway house, which looks like the porch of a normal house, the toe of her shoe tracing invisible circles over the cracked, gray wood. Lindsay’s hands smell like stale smoke. She’s running her fingers through my tangled, frizzy hair, and I’m afraid to tell her I fear my hair will smell like death, push me closer to it. Sometimes I’m sure she can read my mind.

You don’t like that?

I shake my head no. She stops brushing.

Lindsay pulls up a plastic chair and slumps into it, staring blankly at the street, her legs stretched out before her. I notice how much my little sister has aged in the less important moments between the important moments when no one is paying attention. Since when does she have crow’s feet? Certainly the last time I saw her in this pair of frayed jeans with her old university sweatshirt she did not have them. I picture her getting into the Master’s nursing program to which she has applied. I can see her pea-green Volkswagen filled to the window tops with plastic trash bags of clothing, boxes of kitchen utensils and bubble-wrapped plates, even the walnut rocking chair she likes so much, the microwave. I can picture the car driving away, the way it would turn the corner of our street, where the giant oak tree stands, the one we played in as kids. Harder to picture is Lindsay driving the car. Who else would drive it? That’s what she’d say. She turns her head. She meets my gaze. We’re the type of sisters who don’t need to fill the silence.

There is a lake behind the hill that frames the house. I’ve counted eleven ducks and three small turtles that call it home. Sometimes when I’m having a bad day, Lindsay takes me back there, and we sit and count the ducks and turtles again and again, and when my mind drifts she simply says, Take a deep breath, Esther. Start from one again.

Today she hasn’t mentioned walking to the lake. Today she just sits.

Are you okay?

Me? Of course I’m okay. There’s no room for me not to be okay.

What do you mean?

Esther, she says with a sigh. What would you do if I wasn’t around to visit you every day? And who would take care of Mom?

I could take care of her.

We both know that’s not true. And we both remember it was true, once.

An Episode, they call it. My life is made up of two planes of reality. Episodes and Life. That’s how the psychiatrist explained it to Lindsay. Right now I am in an Episode. And I know she is growing impatient with me because she chastised the kind night nurse for not checking to make sure I took the night pill. I’m supposed to want Life. I’m not supposed to enjoy Episodes.

I try to explain how the night pill, the shiny red one, makes me wake up shivering and light headed, and how I can’t connect the thoughts in my mind, like they’re threads knotting together until it’s impossible to tear them apart. And Lindsay just sighs and says, you know it gets better. You know that’s just temporary.

It’s like having a good dream, the best dream you’ve ever had, and then someone bursts into your dream and is like, want to wake up or sleep a little longer? I’ve always liked to nap, since I was little. I wasn’t one of those kids who burst out of bed eager to take on the day or who cried and stamped her feet when a mother said bedtime. Should I have known then?

Lindsay gets up. She leans until her face is level with mine.

Look, she says. Mom is not doing well. I need you to take your medicine. Do it for me, okay? You are never going to leave here if you don’t do it. Can you promise me that? Can you? I nod. She takes my hand, and we walk to the lake.

What happened after Barbie grew depressed? she asks, softening.

I lied. It’s not all like a good dream. Two days after I’ve complied with my promise to take all the medication, I wake up to a horrific scene. There are lines and lines of masking tape covering the one small window in my room. There are pieces of masking tape covering the electric outlets and the air vents. I am suffocating. I scream.

Sanchez, the day nurse, who is not as kind as the night nurse, bursts in.

Okay, Ms. Esther, he says, holding me down on the bed. I see we’re not going to comply today, are we? Remember what we said—no screaming?

I’m shaking my head and trying to explain how I woke up trapped in a room with not an inch of light trailing in from the outside, but I can barely form the words between sobs.

Now, what did I just tell you? None of that or you’re going to have to stay in here all day. You want that? To get an injection and stay here all day?

I wail and thrash and scream.

Then calm down. Calm the fuck down.

He pulls straps from the sides of the bed and squeezes them around my biceps like blood pressure cuffs.

Masking—I try to form the words.

Oh, no. You are not getting any more masking tape. Don’t you think you’ve made enough of a mess here? You said you wanted to keep the—what were they? Spies?—from recording you in your sleep? I gave you one roll of tape. That’s what we agreed on. If you don’t stop this outburst right now, I’ll rip all the tape off, you understand?

Rip it off! I cry, not knowing whether to trust his version of the truth or mine, which is that none of what he is saying ever happened. Thinking that all Sanchez tries to do is make me crazy.

I’m thrusting myself side to side, thinking if I do it hard enough the straps will give, and thinking, I need to get out of here and how far is my house and would I even know how to get there from here by foot? And Sanchez, he’s ripping off the tape with those fat fingers, making a horrible loud sound like a Band-Aid ripping skin, each layer another sliver of sunlight cutting through my eyes, which I can’t even shield, because I can’t move my arms. My mother once said psychiatric halfway homes will make a sane person mad. I’ve told Lindsay that, but all she says is: And also, a mad person sane.

Then calm. Sanchez gives me a Xanax, and I’m swimming through a cloudy lake. Nobody comes to let me out of the arm restraints for hours.

If the ceiling is that cloudy lake, and if life is playing beneath the rippling surface like a movie reel, I’m watching flickering images of childhood with a mother who would breathlessly stay up for days. I’m watching how I’d wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, and she’d be in the kitchen baking brownies or cakes, and she would run up to me and say, what do you want to do? Want to play Barbies with Mommy right now? Or drive around town? And I would say, But I think it’s the middle of the night. And she always had lipstick in her teeth. And dresses with colors that swirled together like spinning tops. At least, that’s how I remember it. Lindsay remembers it in reverse—in her version the movie is probably black and white—Mom in bed for days, apologizing for being Mom, tears and hunger, Lindsay forgiving Mom. Lindsay being Mom. But admitting that before I got sick, I was like a mom to her, too.

I can remember it all—even though the doctors warn my condition can severely affect memory formation. The thing is when I was diagnosed they weren’t sure what caused it: Mom/Family (“genetic mental illness”) or My Choices (so many drugs, since “the age of twelve when the brain is still developing”). So the doctors didn’t know what would happen to my memory or my intelligence or all the other aspects of Me controlled by brain tissue. It could go either way. Lindsay tells me not to think about it, so I don’t. But then sometimes she brings out a notepad and says, Can you tell me some of your memories? I want to write them all down. And I think she believes the worst will happen.

The first time she did this I asked her, from Before or After? And she said, It’s all your life, Esther; There is no before or after. But she knows there is. Everything was different after my diagnosis at eighteen, after the Episode in which I lost nearly all my friends and the boy who had claimed to love me. After, even light felt different, sharp on every surface, spread across the days like butter.

That’s the memory I gave her the first time she asked. Detailed so she would understand. It starts with something like: I met a boy in high school. Don’t many terrible stories begin that way? We ran in the same circles. We did the same drugs. We met at a rave one night after I had run away from home because Mom was yelling and throwing dishes and saying she should never have been a mother because she was a horrible one and Lindsay wasn’t home, only me.

Steven had a dark fringe of bangs and was the only high school boy I knew with tattoos. Also, he drove; I didn’t. His mom had died during a routine operation and his dad was nowhere to be found, but he didn’t like to talk about it. No problem, I didn’t like to talk about my family either. He lived with an uncle or something.

He was my first boyfriend and we laughed and drank beer and people said things like Esther, I think it’s so cool that you ran away from home. Fuck parents. I slept in his room for weeks and I don’t even think Mom noticed. Of course Lindsay did, but I had already told her I was in love. I saw her in the halls at school when I was proudly holding Steven’s hand. People were afraid of Steven. They darted their eyes away and I felt even prouder.

I was sick with love, its own kind of delusion. The second week of staying with him, Steven and I dropped two tabs of acid and browsed wedding magazines at the supermarket and watched the happy couples dance before us, me thinking, that could be us.

And then one day, after I’d been staying with him for three weeks, Steven said, I think you should go home. I protested but he promised we would still be together and talk on the phone and go to raves and trip together. But he didn’t call me that entire weekend. And when I saw him at school, I sensed a distance too wide to bridge; him there but his mind slipping from my grasp. Even when I wore the dress he loved, the one he said emphasized my curves, he said nothing.

We were at a rave, a birthday party for a friend of his. I was by his side as usual, a tourist in this life I so badly wanted. I left to use the bathroom, and when I returned, I saw him caress the back of a petite girl with cascading curls and a chiffon dress, a girl I recognized from my math class. I stood observing from afar: how she talked, how she laughed and subtly brushed his shoulder, how she leaned in to whisper in his ear. I felt a familiar shiver through my body, that feeling of impending doom. And my mind, the one I thought belonged to me, intruding: What are you stupid? You know you’ll never be like these people. You know there is something wrong with you. And then it said, No, you know what? There’s nothing wrong with you. But that woman, look how her eyes dart nervously. She is here to ruin you. And these people? They are staring at you. They see your mind, and all its insecurities. Now they see the truth. Now everyone is watching you. Leave. Leave now. Leave because they know your secrets. And I left. And I ran all the way home.

I hid in the basement, crouched beneath layers of blankets, sheer terror. Voices kept shouting, and I couldn’t make them stop, not even for a second of quiet, not even for a moment to gather what was truth and what were lies and what was happening. An old, broken radio on a shelf in the corner of the basement: on in a burst of static. I was shocked to hear messages from an agent of some sort who was angry I had discovered the truth—that everyone in my life was there to spy on me and report to the Controllers. He tormented me for hours. The voice warning that if any of the Discovery Spies found out I knew the truth, they’d kill me. I was so afraid for my life, so afraid someone would notice I was afraid and know that I knew, so I didn’t leave the basement for two days. I peed in a corner and ate nothing.

On the third day, hunger broke me, and when I heard silence upstairs, I darted up, threw a jar of pickles and a jar of red peppers in my handbag and ran out of the house. I ran, looking behind me all the while because I was sure they followed me, sure I was seconds from death if someone read the fear in my face. How could I know who was or wasn’t a Discovery Spy? When exhaustion hit, I didn’t recognize my surroundings and was sure this was a trick from the Controllers meant to confuse me further. I hid in a train station behind a beam. I ate handfuls of roasted red peppers until the voices started up again—don’t you see? They probably poisoned them! I thrust the jar away, and it shattered into so many slimy pieces and the sharp scent of vinegar swam through the air like a current for the two more days that I stayed in that corner. Until a cop found me—muttering to myself according to Lindsay—and took me to the station. I was unsure whether he was there to help or hurt me. I went along so as not to give any outward sign I’d been gifted the truth, that I already knew this world was all a farce and I knew about the Controller. Apparently, Lindsay had been looking for me. Apparently, she was sure Steven had kidnapped me and confronted him at school, and she said a fight almost broke out between her and Steven’s new girlfriend. I tried to whisper to her to keep quiet, that They were recording us constantly and I would tell her the truth but she had to prove she wasn’t Part of It.

I don’t remember her response, only that she cried. Truth is, most of the details after that point are blurry. I do remember that the psych hospital where I spent six months taking tests and different combinations of medication smelled like Listerine. It made me want to constantly brush my teeth, and I had no appetite. I remember no one from high school visited me except my math teacher, who I had never really liked until that moment, and her voice sounded like it was speaking tome through a veil of thick smoke, saying, It’s not your fault you were born into such a family, Esther.

And I remember when it was all said and done, and I was stable and lucid and diagnosed, I lived in terror of another Episode. I questioned whether anything I saw or heard was real. When you’re not supposed to trust your own mind, there is no one left to turn to—not even yourself, especially not yourself. But days turned to months turned to years and the panic subsided crumb by crumb and I realized I could Live. I even got my G.E.D., enrolled in college. I wanted to be a lawyer, and I kept my diagnosis a secret and everything was almost as if I had taken scissors and cut out that one Episode. But then there was another Episode, and another hospital, and then another Episode and another hospital. I dropped out. The doctor said: Sometimes there is only one your whole life, but sometimes they recur even with the meds, usually in times of stress. He sounded like he was talking to me but looked at only Lindsay the whole time.

It’s lunchtime, and a nurse I don’t recognize lets me out of bed and hands me a tiny cup with three pills in it. Let me see that tongue, she says, cooing at me. I open wide so she’ll go away.

A different attendant brings a tray of gray meatloaf and sectioned-off mashed potatoes. She gives me a spoon. Weare not allowed forks or knives, but unlike some others here, I don’t mind that the food is soft for this reason. I like soft.

Once I’ve placed the tray outside my room and pressed the button I’m supposed to press when I’m done, everything comes into focus. Sanchez was right, I realize, and this kills me. This Episode involved hospital personnel who tapped my cellphone and then started following me everywhere, beaming through any windows or vents video feeds that would record the thoughts in my head, like projectors in reverse. This Episode involved Lindsay coming home from work to find me in the dark in my room, having flung my mattress off, having urinated on myself, having hid beneath a comforter, screaming and covering my ears. The voices saying, there is something wrong with you. There will always be something wrong with you.

I run to the back of the house, toward Dr. Kleinman’s office, and bang on the door, but he doesn’t open. A pretty blonde woman does. She looks me up and down and peers out the hallway.

Where is your nurse?

I have no idea. But is Dr. Kleinman behind that door? I need to talk to him, I say breathlessly.

I want to tell him I’m back to Life, I’m ready to go.

The blonde woman nods and backs up to an intercom beside the door. She presses it, and I hear her voice reverberate through the house.

Psych office. Nurse Rivert, can you page, please? Nurse Rivert?

I hear a few beeps. And then a scratchy voice through the intercom saying, Coming. Be right there.

This is the worst part of having an Episode: nobody listens. You can scream and cry and explain and still, you will say something like, Can I talk to Dr. Kleinman, and they will hear, Press the intercom. Press the intercom. Press the intercom.

I am lucid, I tell the woman. I am on medications. I am clear as morning light. I just need to speak with him. He needs to discharge me.

But she just keeps saying, Okay, honey. It’s going to be okay. Just go on ahead to your room, and Nurse Rivert will get you set up with an appointment. Go on, you don’t want to get in trouble do you?

I don’t go to my room. Because Dr. Kleinman isn’t going to be in my room, and nobody in my room is going to discharge me. Because Lindsay is alone at home, cooking Mom dinner, even though that’s supposed to be my job. I plead and plead and plead and two burly nurses come with Nurse Rivert and hold me down on the ground and then pull me up and drag me kicking and screaming because in the end, it never matters what I want, because in the end, I go to my room.

And then two hours later, I’m in the car with Lindsay, and we’re driving to Johnny Rockets, our favorite.

Jesus, Esther, she says. I don’t know why you have to make it harder on yourself. If you’d just follow directions, things would go your way.

I’ve been flagged for unruly behavior, which means Dr. Kleinman has to let me go and write a recommendation for another short-term stay at the psychiatric hospital. Lindsay comes to get me, and she’s supposed to take me there. But Lindsay isn’t like the people at the home or at the hospital or in the world. Lindsay is the only one who listens. I tell her I’m doing all right, and she sighs and rubs my back.

Johnny Rockets then, she says, and I feel every muscle in my body relax.

Lindsay and I devour French fries, malt shakes, deluxe chicken burgers with mayonnaise squirting out the sides of the buns. Neither of us says a word until we finish, fingers sticky with grease and crumbs on our lips.

So what happened, Esther? What do you think triggered it?

I say: Probably missed a couple of doses. I’ve been distracted.

I don’t say: I missed them on purpose. I wanted to fly.

Sometimes I yearn to share the layers of color and joy in my life that are unique to my condition with Lindsay. I begin stories about the more positive moments with “Once, when I was on acid…” I’ve discovered that is more acceptable—to choose to lose your mind.

Lindsay sips quietly on her vanilla shake and looks away.

What is it?

Esther—

She pushes the shake aside. She takes one of my hands in both of hers and looks me in the eyes.

I can’t believe it, but I got into the program, the nursing one. I found out last week and I haven’t wanted to say anything. Because after this, I’m just not sure I can leave you.

And then I realize it: why I wanted to fly, why I stopped taking the pills. I feel a pressure spread in my chest, thinking, does Lindsay know it too. I try to smile, but I feel my heart in my throat, a gnawing at my temples, the burger suddenly a rock in my gut.

Lindsay, I never ask you what you want to do with your life even though you always ask me.

She looks at her hands covering mine.

Lindsay, I think you should go.

Who would take care of you? Of Mom?

Sanchez, I say. Or somebody like him. Plus I’m going to take my medication. Plus it’s going to be different this time for real. I can feel it. I’m getting better.

Lindsay lets go. She comes around the table and takes my arm.

Come on, let’s pay. I want to go home so we can watch TV. It’s been lonely without you.

She takes out several crumpled dollar bills from her pocket and counts them out at the register. She pats me on the back and smiles. I wait for her to say she’s not leaving, she would never leave. I know it’s selfish and Lindsay would want me to go wherever I want, to fly. So I bite my lip and say nothing and remind myself that I’ve always known it couldn’t be this way forever, me and Lindsay, Lindsay and me.

I’m lucky to have you, I tell her on the ride home. It could be so much worse.

Lindsay taps her hands to the rhythm of a song on the radio while we wait at a red light. She smiles and grips my hand. And then I see tears running down her face.

I ask what’s wrong. She doesn’t say. So we just drive like that, all the way home: Lindsay crying, me reaching over to grip her hand. Like I said, we’re not the type of sisters who need to fill the silence.

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