Нед Виззини: It's Kind of a Funny Story

The walk from Dr. Minerva’s office to our apartment is a short one, but loaded with mocking stores. Food stores. The absolute worst part of being depressed is the food. A person’s relationship with food is one of their most important relationships. I don’t think your relationship with your parents is that important. Some people never know their parents. I don’t think your relationships with your friends are important. But your relationship with air—that’s key. You can’t break up with air. You’re kind of stuck together. Only slightly less crucial is water. And then food. You can’t be dropping food to hang with someone else. You need to strike up an agreement with it.

I never liked eating the traditional American things: pork chops, steak, rack of lamb . . . I still don’t. Never mind vegetables. I used to like the foods that come in abstract shapes: chicken nuggets, Fruit Roll-Ups, hot dogs. I liked junk food. I could demolish a bag of Cheez Doodles; I’d have Doodle Cheez so far infused into my fingertips, I’d be tasting it on myself for a day. And so I had a good thing going with food. I thought about it the way everyone else did; when you’re hungry, you have some.

Then last fall happened, and I stopped eating.

Now I get mocked by these groceries, pizza places, ice-cream stores, delis, Chinese places, bakeries, sushi joints, McDonald’ses. They sit out in the street, pushing what I can’t enjoy. My stomach shrank or something; it doesn’t take in much, and if I force in a certain amount it rejects everything, sends me to the bathroom to vomit in the dark. It’s like a gnawing, the tug of a rope wrapped around the end of my esophagus. There’s a man down there and he wants food, but the only way he knows to ask for it is to tug on the rope, and when he does, it closes up the entrance so I can’t put anything in. If he would just relax, let the rope go, I’d be able to give him all the food he wanted. But he’s down there making me dizzy and tired, giving extra tugs as I pass restaurants that smell like fat and grease.

When I do eat, it’s one of two experiences: a Battle or a Slaughter. When I’m bad—when the Cycling is going on in my brain—it’s a Battle. Every bite hurts. My stomach wants no part of it. Everything is forced. The food wants to stay on the plate, and once it’s inside me, it wants to get back on the plate. People give me strange looks: What’s wrong, Craig, why aren’t you eating?

But then there are moments when it comes together. The Shift hasn’t happened yet, maybe it never will, but sometimes—just enough times to give me hope—my brain jars back into where it’s supposed to be. When I feel one of these (I call them the Fake Shifts) I should always eat, although I don’t; I sometimes stubbornly, foolishly try to hold the feeling and get things done while my mind can operate, and neglect to eat, and then I’m back where I started. But oh, when I slip back into being okay when I’m around food, watch out. It’s all going in. Eggs and hamburgers and fries and ice cream and marmalade and Fruity Pebbles and cookies and broccoli, even—and noodles and sauce. Screw you; I’m going to eat all of you. I’m Craig Gilner, and I will make myself strong from you. I don’t know when my body chemistry is going to line up to let me eat again, so you are all getting in me right now.

And that feels so good. I eat it all, and the man is away from his rope. He’s busy down there eating everything that falls inside, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the head on the floor, munching food of its own. All my cells take the food in and they love it and they love my brain for it and I smile and I am full; I am full and functional and I can do anything, and once I eat—this is the amazing part—once I eat I sleep, I sleep like I should, like a hunter who just brought home a kill. . . but then I wake up and the man is back, my stomach is tight, and I don’t know what it was that got me to have a Slaughter eating experience. It’s not pot. It’s not girls. It’s not my family. I’ve started to think it must just be chemistry, in which case we’re looking for the Shift and we haven’t found it yet.

Night is here except for a thin gray at the edge of the sky and the trees are thick with rain and the drizzle is pissing on me as I come up to my house. No sunsets in spring. I lean in and ring the buzzer, streaked bronze from years of use—the most used buzzer in the building.

“Craig?”

“Hi, Mom.”

Bzzzzzzzzt. It growls deeply, amplified by the lobby. (Lobby. Mailroom, more like, just a compartment for mailboxes.) I throw open one door and then the other. It’s warm in the house, and it smells like cooked starch. The dogs greet me.

“Hi, Rudy. Hi, Jordan.” They’re little dogs. My sister named them; she’s nine. Rudy is a mutt; my father says he’s a cross between a chihuahua and a German shepherd, which must’ve been some wild dog sex. I hope the German shepherd was the guy. Otherwise the German shepherd girl probably wasn’t too satisfied. Rudy has a pronounced under-bite; he looks like two dogs where one is eating the other’s head from below, but when I take him for a walk, girls love him and talk to me. Then they realize that I’m young and/or messed up, and they move on.

Jordan, a Tibetan spaniel, looks like a small, brown lion. He’s small and cute but completely crazy. His breed was devised in Tibet for the purpose of guarding monasteries. When he came into our home, he immediately fixated on the house as a monastery, the bathroom as the most sacred monastic cell, and my mom as the Abbess. You can’t go near my mother without Jordan protecting her. When she’s in the bathroom in the morning, Jordan has to be in there with her, placed up on the counter by the sink as she brushes her teeth.

Jordan barks at me. Since I started losing it, he started barking at me. It’s not something any of us mention.

“Craig, how was Dr. Minerva?” Mom comes out of the kitchen. She’s still tall and skinny, looking better each year. I know that’s weird to think, but what the hell—she’s just a woman who happens to be my mom. It’s amazing how she looks more stately and confident as she gets older. I’ve seen pictures of her in college and she didn’t look like much. Dad is looking like he made a better decision every year.

“It . . . was okay.” I hug her. She’s taken such good care of me since I got bad; I owe her everything and I love her and I tell her these days, although every time I say it, it gets a little diluted. I think you run out of I love yous.

“Are you still happy with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Because if you’re not we’ll get you someone else.”

You can’t afford to get anyone else, I think, looking at the crack in the wall next to my mom. This crack in our front hallway has been there for three or four years. Dad paints over it and it just recracks. We’ve tried putting a mirror over it but it’s a strange place to put a mirror—on one side of a hallway—and my sister started calling it the Vampire Mirror to tell if people who came into the house were vampires, and it came down after a few weeks, when I came home stoned and stumbled into it. Now there’s an exposed crack again. It’s never going to get fixed.

“You don’t need to get anyone else.”

“How’s your eating? Are you hungry?”

Yes, I think. I am going to eat the food my mom made me. I’m still in control of my mind and I have medication and I am going to make this happen.

“Yes.”

“Good! To the kitchen!”

I go in, and the place is all set for me. Dad and my sister, Sarah, are sitting at the circular table, knives and forks in hand, posing for me.