Elizabeth Flock - But Inside I'm Screaming

“Like a rock. What time is it?” Isabel turned Alex’s wrist so she could see the face of his watch. “Why’d you let me sleep so long? Damn! I have so much to do today.”

Alex stroked her hair. “You need your sleep, Isabel.”

She curled up on the couch alongside her husband. “You take such good care of me,” she purred. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You won’t have to find out,” he said somberly. “You won’t find out.”

“Plus, my parents have two other children to think about. My brothers are healthy and successful and happy. No. They’d be sad for a while but they’d go on.”

“That’s depression talking, Isabel,” the doctor says. “It’s hard for you to see beyond your feelings right now, I know that, but a lot of people would be sad, very sad, if you killed yourself.”

Silence.

“I just want to go.” Isabel is exhausted. “Just let me go.”

“I can’t do that and you know it.”

Why? Why can’t you just let me go?

The next morning it is impossible for Isabel to pull herself out of bed. She lies on top of the covers and stares at the acoustic-tiled ceiling, focusing on the mess of holes punched in each square.

Someone has the mind-numbing job of running a machine that pokes the holes into each of those perfectly measured squares. How can they live with themselves?

A knock on the door breaks the embryonic whoosh of her sound machine. “Yes?”

“Isabel, you’ve got to take your meds.” The nameless nurse pokes her head in the door.

“Okay, okay,” she sighs, not moving from her bed. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Here we are, scurrying around like ants: “You have to take your meds, Isabel”; “Line up, kids”; “It’s time to file your income tax returns”; “Would you like this for here or to go?” Each person has their little job and they do it, then they go home, then they eat, then they sleep and then they get up and do it all over again the next day. What’s the point? We’re all just filling up space. Why do people want to reproduce? So they can bring more children into this already overpopulated world so they can fill up space with some meaningless job and then go home and do it all over again the next day? Like those ceiling tiles.

The knock comes again. “Isabel?” It’s the nurse again and this time she looks annoyed when she sees that Isabel hasn’t moved. “You have to come get your meds, Isabel. After that you can get back in bed for a little while if you want, but you have to come take your medicine,” she says emphatically.

I wonder what she thinks of her job. What does she do when she leaves here? Does she talk about all of us to her husband?

Isabel hauls herself out of bed and puts shorts on over her boxers.

“Okay, okay,” she says to no one in particular as she heads down the hall to the medicine distribution window. After swallowing the controlled substances that will beat back nature until the next dispensation—all have foreboding names packed with too many late-alphabet consonants like Serzone, Zyprexa, Trazodone—she shuffles back to her room and crawls back into bed, this time assuming the fetal position.

Doesn’t anybody else see how meaningless this is? How we are all consumed with our chores, which are ultimately useless because with the swipe of a broom we can all be swept away into the abyss. Here I am in a mental institution, trying to get better so that I can go back into the world and rush from job to job, killing time until I die of something other than suicide. I take medicine to help me deal with the nothingness of my life. Millions of us have to take pills to distract us from the sheer boredom of it all. We hurry from thing to thing like ants when we’re all going to end up suffocating, anyway.

“Isabel.” The voice on the other side of the door sounds like Kristen’s. “We’re getting ready for the morning meeting. You coming?”

Isabel looks at her watch. An hour has passed.

A nother sign of failure.

Isabel is out of clean clothes. She has been out of clean clothes for two days but has doubled up on dirty underwear instead of admitting to herself that she has been in the hospital for so long she has cycled through her hospital wardrobe twice.

She bends over and starts gathering her clothes together in a bundle and trudges down the hall to the communal laundry room. The door is closed. Balancing her laundry on her hip, Isabel opens the door and is startled to find Sukanya.

Sukanya stands, wedged in between the dryer and the washing machine—which, Isabel notes, is in use—holding an open book and mumbling what sounds like a prayer. In front of her, on top of the dryer, is a single lit candle.

Before backing out the door Isabel watches the sixteen-year-old girl.

Sukanya looks up, sees Isabel and looks back down, without interrupting her prayer.

Isabel closes the door and thinks how nice it is to hear Sukanya say something other than “I’d prefer not to say.”

She dumps her laundry back in her room and grabs her pack of cigarettes.

“Kristen? Patio?” Isabel has started the question on her way around the corner into Kristen’s room but stops short when she finds Kristen immersed in paperwork spread out on her crinkly bed. “Oh. Sorry.”

Kristen looks up for a split second and then races on with her paperwork as if she is in the middle of taking SATs.

“What is this stuff? What’re you doing?”

“Application forms! Can’t you see? I’m trying to fill out application forms. I’ll talk to you later…” She trails off as she flips over the side of one form. On it is an unmistakable logo. A huge M formed by two golden arches. McDonald’s. Next to Kristen is a stack of what appear to be a hundred more.

“Seriously, what’s up? Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Kristen answers distractedly, not looking up from her work. “I love to fill out forms. Any forms, really. These are the best, though. McDonald’s. They’re the best because you have to fit each letter in its own square; it takes concentration. Other forms give you a line to fill in. That’s not as challenging. I love these forms.” Kristen is hunched over a fresh application and is carefully squeezing her name, letter by letter, into the appropriate boxes.

“You do this often?”

“Yeah. I have hundreds of the same forms. I take them everywhere with me. Want to do one?” she asks hopefully, as if these are New York Times crossword puzzles.

Um, yeah, Kristen, we’re so alike.

“Ah, well…no, thanks,” Isabel says. “I guess I’ll go, then. I’ll be outside if you want to come out.”

But Kristen does not seem to hear her.

Isabel goes out to the smoker’s patio and sits alone in an Adirondack chair flanked by two pots of fatally dehydrated geraniums.

A half hour later Kristen pushes through the door and looks relieved to find Isabel.

“There you are!”

“Hey.” Isabel is tentative in her greeting. She watches Kristen light her cigarette at the wall, noting her shaking hands.

“I’m glad you came and got me,” Kristen says as she pulls a chair up alongside Isabel. “I can get a little obsessive about my forms…”

No kidding.

“…but it calms me down when I start thinking about my mother,” she is saying. “After we talked about Billy the other day I talked more with my shrink and I guess that’s what got me going.”

Isabel feels Kristen looking at her, studying her. She knows Kristen wants to talk but does nothing to encourage it.

That does not dissuade Kristen.

“It sounds corny, but I feel like you get it,” Kristen says. “You understand me.”