Puncture

Before I go on lithium, if I do, I want some sort of picture of my brain, she said, so I can look back at some point later if I’m all flatlined, and know this was the right thing to do, or at least there was a reason for it.

Jane. In his mind, she was always Sweet Jane. He thought about whether this was shallow while she talked, 2500 miles away on the phone. Would she still be Sweet Jane if the drugs steamrolled her? Or if she still had those episodes?

He said, I thought you were trying to stay off the hard drugs as long as possible, resisting the diagnosis of bi-polar, right?

He took hope from the idea that she still had some control over it. Then she started reciting the litany of the pharmacy full of meds she’d already been on, diagnoses she’d heard, doctors seen, the patient knowing more, or so she thought, withholding or giving information to test them, hoping they would deny the self-diagnosis she had already made.

He felt that moment burning its way up from the back of his brain like a caffeine buzz. The moment he had hoped wouldn’t come this time.

Sweet Jane was his mother script. Crazy mom, shock treatment and gone till his 5th birthday. Mom who came home every so often, springing little boy hope to life that this time was different. The old German housekeeper, he figured out later, always preaching caution and the hedging of one’s bets.

He tried all his usual shit with Sweet Jane, the things girls seemed to melt over.

The showing up at her house unannounced, for spontaneity or maybe to try to see Sweet Jane unguarded. She asked him to stop, it was too much. Too much for someone who claimed great victories in correcting her sleep cycle or in being able to meet a friend for lunch on time without freaking out. Someone who didn’t own a cell phone because, she said, she didn’t want to be that accessible.

He understood.



He drifted in and out as she kept talking: Mayo Clinic.. Brain scan.. Dependent on mother for money.. New insurance in a couple months.. He was a good listener, but a revelation kept pushing through, insistent like a headache:

He had thought (up until the moment) that he could save her!

All his life, fairly well off, his only limitations his own. This… contempt, really, for people who couldn’t get it up.

He honestly thought love if-we-got-to-that-point could make her better!

Who the fuck did he think he was?

He felt her stop talking, plucked a phrase out of his near-conscious from a sentence she’d spoken 30 seconds back, asked a question about it. Her answer was precise and short. They had reached that point people who have only been dating three weeks reach. Nothing left to say on this call.

Look, he said, I do miss you, and whatever you need from me you can have. If you feel up to shopping when I get back, that’s great. I’d love to be with you, he said, meaning it, but if you can’t make it, I understand.

He meant that, too. He finally did understand.

He understood that sometimes it doesn’t get better, and that moment he had feared crawled up his neck and he felt the bubble burst, the bubble that always burst at that point where he knew it wasn’t going to work out between him and whichever woman it was, the time after which he spent plotting how to get out without hurting her, how to still be able to see her on the street.

He made gracious goodbye noises and hung up, sitting there alone in the car on an unusual 60-degree night in Indiana, 2500 miles away from Sweet Jane.

How Sweet would she be when she went episodic, he thought. How Sweet when the lithium evened her out. Sure, he could make her laugh now, on the phone so far away. He had done it once on that call, and she tinkled that beautiful throaty guffaw into the afternoon sky, back there in Oregon where she was. He pictured her there in that battered chaise lounge on her deck, head thrown back, cigarette in hand, the neighbors shaking their heads, he was sure, wondering what was always so damn funny with that girl in the bungalow that was painted orange like a pumpkin.

Would he still be able to make her laugh after she started the drugs? Her words echoed in his head: Once you go on lithium, she said, it wasn’t like other anti-depressants, you pretty much stayed on it for life. What did it do to you, he wondered? Did mom ever take it, or did they just shock the shit out of her? He shuddered, picturing something out of a Boris Karloff movie, all electrodes and zapping blue arcs, the young boy he was then timid and shivering in the corner.

So maybe he couldn’t save her. He put the car in gear, drove out to get some food. Maybe we only have moments, like the one last week with a late lunch in a sunny little café on a Tuesday afternoon, dreamy talk of opening a restaurant of their own, strolling in rare Portland sun to the used record store and the garden shop, planting their own flowers.

It matters that you plant flowers. Even if they die later or never come up at all.

He stopped the car and headed in to the Chinese restaurant. He paused in the twilight for a moment, leaning against the rental car, pictured himself hugging her on that stupid oversized couch, the one with cushions that were made for it but somehow designed too large to fit two people.

He sighed, a deep sigh of longing and just a touch of delicious torment, managed a smile over the cosmic absurdity of it all. He walked, boldly but deliberately, waiting for the next moment.