The door to the bathroom is hollow. Just two pieces of balsam wood, spaced and sealed between them an inch of air. Unsanded, you could grow up nervous you’d catch a sliver off that door. Painted white. You can tell it is hollow by rapping a knuckle against it. Or by trying to slam it. Manufactured wood doesn’t carry a lot of weight. The projected fury of an attempted slam upon this door is easily shouldered by the atmosphere. Its momentum slows to a painfully unsatisfying caress of the retractable bolt to its metal jamb. Fury without discharge only amplifies in intensity.
I stare at the white door, forced shut with both of my open palms. My thumb had punched the lock. I crouch in stillness and shadow, my back against the cold pressed Pepto Bismol tiles of the floor and wall. I follow my eyes around the bathroom. The color of the bathtub matched the tiles. The sliding glass doors of the shower, mottled and crusted with white hard water stains. Rusting aluminum frames three panes of glass, looking out through black iron bars at the traveler palm, the unused greening pool, the graveled patio. Finally, a break. There was respite here: cool, still, unmoving, firm.
“Open the door,” the cop said. “Open the door and take your meds.”
My stomach clenches. I thought I had cried myself dry. I thought I had made it to a place beyond numb, beyond basic thought or feeling, beyond comprehension. This new voice outside the bathroom door — this sound of summoned external authority, an acknowledgment from my mother that I was indeed out of her, and my, control — made a liar out of my body once again.
The meds matched the bathroom as well. Depakote. Pink, with a hint of vanilla.
I just wanted one night without them. I just wanted to feel again.
Next year, I will begin to involuntarily gag on these pills — my body, too, wants its sense back. I will have to leave home for this to happen. It will take me a decade to wean myself from the anesthesia, another decade to decipher the damage. A thumb that won’t stop twitching. A thyroid that attacks itself. A nervous system that kicks itself to sleep. And what is to be made of my brain? The channels of avoidance carved by an anti-psychotic? Receptors shushed by an anti-epileptic? How to rebuild responsiveness? Had I been permanently severed? Will I ever feel again? If so, could I withstand it? Did I really come equipped for feelings too big for this body to manage?
It would take me another fifteen years to properly appreciate vanilla once again. To not choke at the smell of it.
I can’t know this from the cold pink bathroom floor. From here, I can’t be concerned with quality of life. I can’t be certain of survival. My life, full of wet fire and opalescence in my own unstable hands, or, collapsed into an abstraction by a pharmaceutical cocktail, something technically functioning but bizarre beyond laud or consideration. My life, tenuous. Its economic value, questionable. Which of these options was worth the breath in my chest?
“Open the door, kid. You’re worrying your mother.”
Seriously?, I thought. I’m more worried about me right now. There are no more painkillers in the bathroom cabinet. Not since six months ago, when I had emptied them out across the counter, all eighty-six of them, and swallowed them, six, ten, fourteen at a time. There are no more razors, or bottles of bleach. No more needles. But I know she now knows — a will to find its way out will find its way out.
I don’t want a scene. I don’t want the white balsam wood door to suffer into destruction, to splinter under my mother’s fear and my fury I have locked up in this cold, still, unmoving, firm bathroom. I just want a say in the workings of my own life. I just want to be alone in the quiet — I can figure all of this out if I could just have enough quiet. But that cop isn’t going away until I open the door. And if it’s my face in his face, telling him to get the fuck out of my house, if it’s my own rage in my hands on his stupid mouth, on his navy blue belly, on his brass authority, there will be no gun. The system only wants to help whiteness. There will be only shoving and pinning, handcuffs and cruiser, assault charges and a hospital and another someone else deciding what is to be done with this too small body and these too big feelings.
The escape route is through the open door and the open mouth. The open mouth that stays open to swallowing tranquilization until it can find its legs and run. So strange, this brain bent on surviving itself, for no good reason except to keep going. I hate it for its simple tenacity. I smash it into the wall behind us, and finally relax a little. Fury, discharged, somewhat. I smash it again, and once more. I punch it in the eye, in the temple, I slap it in its face. And it’s then I realize this is me I am throttling and now I need to stop my hands. I throw their wrists into the wall. but the triceps are shy pitchers, so I fling myself around to scream those wrists into the wall with the force they needed to stop acting this way, stop hurting me, I am this brain, this electric convergence, and somehow we all live in here, this brain, that eye, this face, your wrists, that back and butt and those knees and ankles and feet that I am now standing on, and the banging is louder but it is not me this time, it is the cop and his voice and the white balsam wood door. I will not attack anyone anymore tonight. I slip my hand around the door knob and twist. The lock pops open inside my fist. The door , flimsy and ignorant, glides open. The cop, a squat muscle in his late-20’s, takes a step back, looks me up and down with concern, then meets my eyes. I have nothing for him. I forget what he says the second he says it. I look past him to my mother, clutching herself behind him.
“Give me the pills.”
She reaches into the pocket of her bathrobe, and produces two smooth pink ovals. A blue glass of water trembles towards me from her other hand. I pinch the pills between my fingers, take the cool glass in my other hand. I stare at what is left of me in the bathroom mirror. Choking on tears and the smell of vanilla, I slip the pills into the back of my throat and swallow.
