Нед Виззини - It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Are you like a blood fetishist? There was one of them in here before. He wanted to make me like his Queen of the Night or something.”

“No! It’s nothing like that. It’s like this: when people have problems, you know . . . I come in here and I see that people from all over have problems. I mean, the people that I’ve made friends with are pretty much a bunch of lowlifes, old drug addicts, people who can’t hold jobs; but then every few days, someone new comes in who looks like he just got out of a business meeting.”

Noelle nods. She’s seen them too: the scruffy youngish guy who came in today with a pile of books as if it were a reading retreat. The guy who came in yesterday in a suit and told me in the most practical way that he heard voices and they were a real pain in the ass; they didn’t say anything scary but they were always saying the stupidest stuff while he was in trial.

“And not only in here: all over. My friends are all calling me up now: this one’s depressed, that one’s depressed. I look at what the doctors hand out, and there are studies that show like, one fifth of Americans suffer from a mental illness, and suicide is the number-two killer among teenagers and all this crap . . . I mean everybody’s messed up.”

“What’s your point?”

“We wear our problems differently. Like I didn’t talk and stopped eating and threw up all the time—”

“You threw up?”

“Yeah. Bad. And I stopped sleeping. And when I started doing that, my parents noticed and my friends noticed, sort of—they kinda made fun of me—but I could go through the world without really letting on what was wrong. Until I came here. Now it’s like: something is wrong. Or was wrong, because it feels like it’s getting better.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“You’re out there about your problems,” I say. “You put them on your face.”

She stops, puts her hand in her hair.

“I cut my face because too many—too many people wanted something from me,” she tries to explain. “There was so much pressure, it was—”

“Something to live up to?”

“Exactly.”

“People told you you were hot and then all of a sudden they treated you different?”

“Right.”

“How?”

She sighs. “You have to be the prude or the slut, and if you pick one, other people hate you for it, and you can’t trust anyone anymore, because they’re all after the same thing, and you see that you can never go back to how it was before . . .”

She pulls her face into one of those faces that could be laughing or crying—they use so many of the same muscles—and leans forward.

“And I didn’t want to be part of it,” she says. “I didn’t want to be part of that world.”

I grab her leaning into me, feel for the first time the soft dimple of her body. “Me neither.”

She puts her arms around me and we hold each other like that from our two chairs, like a house constructed over them, and I don’t move my hands at all and neither does she.

“I didn’t want to play the smart game,” I tell her. “And you didn’t want to play the pretty game.”

“The pretty game’s worse,” she whispers. “Nobody wants to use you for being smart.”

“People wanted to use you?”

“Someone did. Someone who shouldn’t.”

I stop.

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t you.”

“Should I not touch you?”

“No, no, you didn’t do anything. It’s okay. But . . . yeah. It happened. And I lied before.”

“About what?”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of surgery I have. I did it with half a scissor, Craig. It’s going to leave scars. I’ll have scars for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wanted to get off the world a little after this . . . this thing . . . and now I’m never going to be able to have a job or anything. What are they going to say when I go into a job interview looking like . . .” She sniffles, chuckles, and snot comes out. “. . . like a Klingon?”

“There are places in California where they speak Klingon. You can get a job there.”

“Stop it.”

We’re still holding each other. I don’t want to look up. I keep my eyes closed. “There are antidiscrimination laws too. They can’t not hire you if you’re qualified.”

“But I look like a freak now.”

“I told you, Noelle,” I say into her ear. “Everybody has problems. Some people just hide their crap better than others. But people aren’t going to look at you and run away. They’re going to look at you and think that they can talk to you, and that you’ll understand, and that you’re brave, and that you’re strong. And you are. You’re brave and strong.”

“You’re getting better at the compliments.”

“Nah. I’m nothing. I can barely hold food down.”

“Yeah, you’re skinny.” She laughs. “We need to fatten you up.”

“I know.”

“I’m glad I met you.”

“You’re bare and honest, Noelle; that’s what you are.” Words come into my head like they’ve always been there. “And in Africa your scarring would be highly prized.”

She sniffles again. “I didn’t like seeing you with that other girl.”

“I know.”

“You like me more, right?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

I pull away from her—maybe the first time in my life I’ve ended a hug—because a level of eye contact is required.

“I owe you a lot more than I do her. You really opened my eyes to something.” My actual eyes have been closed for so long on Noelle’s shoulder that the hall is blinding. But when they readjust I see the Professor, watching us from her door, holding the doorknob with one hand and her shoulder with the other.

“I wanted to show you this.” I reach under my chair to pick up something for our meeting—I had it down there as a trump card. I didn’t think the date would go like this; I thought it would all be Noelle yelling at me and I’d have to do something drastic. But now I can do something drastic and it’ll be like a cherry on top.

I pull out my couple’s brain map and show it to her.

“It’s beautiful!”

“It’s a guy and a girl, see? I didn’t do any hair, but you can see how one has a feminine profile and the other is masculine.” They’re lying down, not on top of each other, just side by side, floating in space. They have sketched-out legs and arms at their sides, but that’s the whole point of my brain maps—you don’t need to spend a lot of time on the legs or the arms. What they really have are brains —full and complete with whirling bridges and intersections and plazas and parks. They’re the most elaborate ones I’ve done yet: divided thoroughfares, alleys, cul de sacs, tunnels, toll plazas, and traffic circles. The paper is 14” x 17” and I had room to make the maps huge; the bodies are small and unimportant; the key thing that your eye is drawn to (because I understand now, somehow, that that’s how art works) is a soaring bridge between the two heads, longer than the Verrazano, even, with coils of ramps like ribbons mashed up at each end.

“It might be my best yet,” I say.

She looks it over; I see the red in her eyes, fading. There aren’t any tear streaks—I still haven’t seen actual tear streaks on anyone. Her tears went right into my shirt; they cool and chafe now on my shoulder.

“You were the one who suggested I do stuff from childhood,” I continue. “I used to do these when I was a kid, and I forgot how fun they were.”

“I bet you never did them like this.”

“No, well, this is easier, because I don’t have to finish the maps.”