A Bed Opens

And they take me upstairs to behavioral health, which is what they call the psych ward now. Long gone, the good ruined words—asylum, once a sanctuary from seizure; sanitarium, once a house of health. Once you’re there, they usually call it by a floor number and direction in the building: Two East, Four South, something like that. A place reduced to coordinates.

I room with a tall old guy who reminds me of Tom Noonan from Manhunter. He writes a lot of poetry. Really good poetry, I’ll add, because I read some of it when he isn’t there, a trespass that still embarrasses me. He doesn’t speak. He leaves the room only for meals. The poems make the room feel less empty, more like a place where someone survives by making evidence of himself.

Elements on the floor are idiosyncratic. You can’t get out without a pass, but Travel & Leisure magazines, long outdated, wait in the rack beside the recumbent bicycle cardio machine. Two large maps of the world hang in the hallway, brightly colored and detailed with the names of every metropolis, as if anyone there might suddenly choose Provence, Marrakesh, the Amalfi Coast.

There are photos of fruit: a white bowl with strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries spilling out. Some fruit-pyramid propaganda advises us to “Eat a Rainbow Every Day! 5-6 Servings of Fruits and Vegetables.” The rest of the wall art looks vaguely hallucinogenic: several dogs on a park bench, staring into the sky where another dog hangs solitarily on a red balloon (tabby cat watches from tree limb). Three portraits hang side by side, “Celebrating the Accomplishments of Individuals who have Lived with a Mental Illness”: from right to left, Leo Tolstoy, Kurt Cobain, Virginia Woolf. The order seems somehow important.

There is only so much TV you can watch. Weather is forecast: “another gorgeous day.” Olympic matches. Lash-extender commercials. One newcomer guy asks of the mascara model, “How much does she cost?” Nobody answers. Commercials for potato chips in margarita flavor. A hand-sanitizing station says, “Be Good to Your Hands.” A Time magazine announces its cover story: “Why Anxiety is Good for You — as long as you know how to use it.” There, no one laughs much.

I don’t have a notebook, so I steal a few sheets of paper and find myself colored pencils. Mostly I copy things out of what I’m reading, phrases that seem to have some significance beyond my understanding of them: folio, pastoral, the Romans, genius loci, the spirit of place, Les Étoiles, L’Arlésienne, Petrarch and the forgiveness of sins for money. The words seem to belong to some older arrangement of the world, one with saints and fields and local spirits, one where a place could still have a soul.

I think about the novel I want to write, the one I haven’t started, and the quote I keep mulling over, the one all the threads of story connect to: “The outer world, from which we cower into our houses seemed after all a gentle and habitable place, and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.” I want to believe that. I write, “Read: Travels With a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson.” On the wall by the group schedule, by the advertisement for the AA group, someone has written in filigreed letters: “A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.”

My days become meals: eight o’clock breakfast, noon lunch, five o’clock dinner, bed at 8:30, while I can still see the waning light outside, the Metrodome right next door, its white dome like the top of a grounded dirigible. My days become a crime novel I’ve read twice before, several failed Sudoku and crossword puzzles, and I barely speak.

A nurse, Gail, sits down with me the night before my discharge and talks to me for about thirty minutes. When I forget to take my med and go off to sleep, she finds me in the dark of my room, hugs me, and says goodbye.

She is retiring in two years with her husband to twenty acres outside Dubuque, Iowa, where she grew up. She seems amused that I’ve gotten lost there a few times on my way to Iowa City. I tell her how I like to go to Chicago when I just want to get away, and she says that for years she and her girlfriends and mom would go on what they called a “Sexy Bitches” trip to Chicago, taking the train. She tells me to stop drinking. It never leads to “tip-top judgment.” She gives me story ideas from gruesome experiences she’s had. She tells me to take care, and she’s gone. Strange: some people enter your life with no time to stay and still become a room you keep returning to.

The next day: personal effects inventory, a red light turns green, a door unlocks, and I catch a waiting bus on Chicago Avenue and go home.

The cuts on my arm, called “cat scratches” by one guy, are almost totally healed. Weather is getting cooler, summer ending, so long sleeves make sense again. I pull them over my wrists and resume. I do my laundry. I drive my car. I go on a date. It feels good to eat food I make with my own hands. Someone calls me beautiful. Do I believe it? For a while, belief is beside the point: laundry warm from the dryer, my car starting, sweater weather, a pan simmering on the stove, the door opening when I turn the knob.

I do not know about God, or the fields, or the open house. I know the bed opened, and doors did, too. I believe I’m hanging on. Or something’s hanging on to me.