OVO

The following is an account by James Scianna of some of his experiences after temporarily ceasing to take powerful anti-psychotic and antidepressants after eight years of taking these drugs.

I go to this Vietnamese public health office, or at least when I get there it is run by a Vietnamese woman. I go in there and I guess there’s some conversation done in some curt professional manner on her part and it sort of defines the situation. I get the feeling that she’s talking down to me because I’m not of her race. I’m going there to get some special cockroach spray for the apartment that they are supposed to have there (I called them before I went). Anyway, she checks on this and I find out they don’t have it there in stock.  Then she starts talking about how I owe them / her seventy-five cents for some sort of “consultation fee” from the phone call I made, which pisses me off since they didn’t have what I wanted. I think I pay this. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she starts talking about how I owe her a pen since the last time I was there I took her pen. This becomes too much for me and an argument ensues, again, not heated but very curt, mature and professional, like that which often occurs between a customer and proprietor.  Anyway, I leave in a huff.

At this point what I am feeling is that for some reason the woman, because I am not of her race, looks down on me and is fucking with my head, trying to get one over on me, pushing me into a confrontation with her.  She’s playing on my own secret tendency to look down on Vietnamese people. The effect on me is one of frustration and of guilt. Although I know I didn’t steal her pen, I feel guilty as if I did. Perhaps I just forgot to return her pen to her accidentally. I don’t know, I’m not sure. Still, I feel guilty about this. I feel as if I’m definitely in the wrong and yet feel as if I should feel that I’m in the right. I’m frustrated.

As I’m walking home I notice that I’m at the curve of the road by the Main Public library at the intersection of Market and West San Carlos but the place is like a ghetto instead of a thriving hub of civic activity, what with with library, the civic center, the convention center and Fairmont Hotel all in that area.

A screaming, crying, half-naked Black kid comes running out of one slum yelling something about her father trying to tattoo her. I’m concernedly asking her and the brother who comes to fetch her if she is all right even though I know that there is nothing I can do if she isn’t all right, which is most probably the case.

I feel a sense of token concern over this. Again, we get a minority that l secretly look down upon. Whereas before I was not responsible for the situation, and yet I felt responsible, I felt as if I should feel responsible and wanted the other person to feel I had nothing to do with what she had accused me of. In this case, it was the flip side: even though I was not responsible for this young child’s situation, didn’t have anything to do with it and, indeed, I didn’t want to deal with it, I wanted the people involved to think that I could do something about it, a token show of concern. “Are you all right?” What was I going to do if they weren’t?  Nothing?

As I’m walking along I walk by a short cyclone fence of a house. On the inside of the fence, hanging on it by the neck, is the desiccated carcass of a tiny little kitten. Immediately I understand that another abusive father is at work here, that the cat of some poor family has had a whole litter of unwanted kittens and the father is abusing, killing and neglecting them so that they die and he doesn’t have to deal with them.

Two of these starved, half-dead yet amazingly strong and eager little unwanted things come up to me and start grabbing onto my ankles and legs with ferocious tenacity, saying (non-verbally) “Please! Save us! Take us home! Feed us! Please! Love us!” It frightens me, the intensity of their need to be rescued from this, hellish kitty concentration camp and yet I’m concerned that they are going to get run over by a car outside of the fence where they are. I pick one of them up to throw it inside of this malevolent sanctuary and it digs its claws into my hands, unwilling to let go at any cost. I throw it in anyway.

I am hurt physically and psychologically by this whole scene. The kittens are repulsive to me. I want to be rid of them, of the sight of them. I am appalled by their horrible existence and their ferocious desperation. I can’t do anything about their pain. I literally throw them back into their situation. My feeling at this point is like there is a great weight on my shoulders, the weight of the world, the world’s pain, even though it is typified in two isolated incidents. I feel I’m living in a terrible world. I keep thinking how appalled my sister would be at these kitten’s plight. This is the third instance in which I feel guilty about something I have no power over. About something I haven’t done and can’t do anything about.

I notice a roach in the room. Then another. Then another. Like that movie Creepshow, “They’re Creeping Up on You.” I’m pissed because I can’t get the roach spray that’s going to solve my problems. So I get a can of Raid out and start spraying every square inch of the place with a heavy foam of the diluted poison. Spraying it directly onto roaches as I find each one. Until, when spraying under the bed, I come upon the queen cockroach herself. No matter how hard and how much I spray her, though, she doesn’t die. She becomes bigger and bigger.

She comes out from under the bed and she’s like a huge queen ant and by now she’s agent the size of a schnauzer. I’m spraying the Raid at her like she’s some sort of monster in some B horror movie, but it’s horribly real. The Raid comes out in a long foamy stream, an endless supply of the stuff directed at her insecticide head. She just laps it up like a dog drinking from a water lose.

Again, there is the deep feeling of revulsion and horror. I want to run screaming from the place but realize that I have no place to run to. The queen cockroach is insistent. She gets bigger and bigger after she crawls from beneath my bed.

I put myself in the cockroach’s place, and speak with her “voice:” “I am a monster. I am hideous. I am loathsome. I am disgusting. I hide in the dark, buried underneath an altar on which are sacrificed all my secret dreams and lurid fantasies. And yet, when I am seen and noticed I shall not be denied. I am not evil.  I do not want to cause Jim pain. I cannot help what I am. I am what I am. I need to be loved.”

I find myself watching some sort of special Donahue show on schizophrenics, but it’s being hosted by a bearded Johnathan Winters (who was diagnosed “schizophrenic,” or at least so I’ve heard). As he goes through the panel, introducing each schizophrenic to the studio audience, he asks them: “Are you on any medication right now?” And yet, these people aren’t like the mentally ill people I know. They’re cute, they’re funny, they’re amusing, like characters off of a situation comedy. One guy is an annoying lawyer from the movie The Onion Fields (at least he looks like him). Another woman on the panel, thin, slightly older, red hair, interrupts Winters’ monologue by saying “Excuse me, sir; excuse me, sir,” over and over. Again, the audience is amused.

I know that it’s all bullshit. It’s not real. Mentally ill people tend to be shuffling, confusing, confused, unwanted souls tucked away in the cellars of society.  They are not television personalities who delight millions with their eccentric antics and bizarre behavior. And yet, I am not indignant at this realization. If anything, it is an afterthought I’m caught up in the illusion. It’s a great show. It’s great stuff. Real good television. I wish I were taping it to add to my collection. I am entertained.

As the lady on the panel is saying “Excuse me, sir,” we see a three-dimensional, real time computer animated representation of their talking heads, and of her  saying “Excuse me, sir” over and over while she’s saying it. The point of view of the computer animation sweeps over these heads, focusing on one, lifting,  panning over the panel, all to electronic music. I think it is a fine technical job. Then in this real-time cartoon, we see the heads being disassembled like  blocks of wood. Like some sort of puzzle. Sections of the scalp and face spontaneously disappear until the skull is revealed, then sections of the cranium, portions of the jaw, geometrically bisected portions of static gray matter. We see the entire interior structure of their heads. Then the whole thing happens in reverse and we’re back to the real show.

It’s all fascinating to me. How in the world do they do that? I don’t care. It just looks great, sounds great. I’m caught up in the mastery of the technical wizardry. This show is great!

The schizos are involved in some sort of sketch. One woman (perhaps the same one) is not satisfied with her performance and keeps wanting to start it over.  They try to explain to her that it is a live show and that she should just go through with it. The audience is amused by this. I realize that is just a show that has been on before. It is a re-run. Its all just so much bullshit. But high-quality bullshit.

I wake up. But I don’t really wake up, I’m still dreaming, having woke up from a dream within a dream. My sense of “reality” is undermined as it teeters on the edge, the blink between joy and madness. For some reason, I’m ecstatic in my disillusionment. What the hell does it matter? Christ, I might as well be happy. And I am, I’m joyous; content in my confusion. Am I mad? The thought doesn’t even occur to me as I’m swept away in spirited rapture.

The phone rings and it is a friend of mine, Mike. I talk to him some and I realize that I’m excited and talking very weird and I start to sense that he’s going  to start feeling that I’m mentally ill and start talking down to me or patronizing me. This particular friend works with autistic children and tends to condescend to me at times, like I’m one of his clients.

He asks me if I went to this Vietnamese place to get the roach spray and I tell him yes, I did, but they didn’t have it. I anticipate that he thinks this is too easy, that I’m lying about it. He says something and I say; “Mike, are you accusing me of lying to you?” My heart trembles and hitches with frustration and fearful indignation in its heaving rib cage as I anticipate the imminent professional rebuke.

“Well,” he insists, “are you?”

Demanding voice echoes in my ears. A maddening drone.

“Are you? Are you? Are you?”

I am paralyzed in my fear. My back is pressed hard against an unyielding wall. A million angry beehives explode between my temples drowning everything out except his pounding query. I close my blind eyes tight against the undeniable assault as it screams in my scrambled brain.

My eyes snap open in wide terror, glistening like moist eggshells. My mouth stretches into an exaggerated pain-rictus howling a silent scream.

White out.

Black out.

The wall behind me is a soap bubble. I slide through it effortlessly and tumble unoriented, wildly, spinning out of control through a sunblasted expanse of spinning thick-blue atmosphere and silver-white clouds of hairswept coolness. The uncatchable sun orbits me insanely as my head and feet exchange places over and over. I can’t tell if I’m falling up or down.

“Are you? Are you? Are you?”

I spread my arms wide and the rushing wind catches me with a silent hand, deep in my chest, pulling me back and up, swinging me in wild looping arcs.

“Yes… yes… yes… yes… I’m lying to you, Mike. I’m lying to you. I’m lying to you, Mike. I’m lying to you. I’m lying! I’m lying!”

Untamed laughter explodes from my forehead like furiously convulsing feral spirit. My laughter screams. It tears at me gloriously, ripping me apart. My laughter becomes the sky I’m falling in. It sustains me. Pulls me in whatever direction I choose. It echoes endlessly. I twist and dance like a flame.

I awake tangled in damp sheets. I awake laughing, my face slick with tears. I awake fist stabbed into the clumsy pillow.

I awake.

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)