Нед Виззини - It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Bobby’s pad! That’s right! That’s where I’m headed.” He raises his arms. “Movin’ on up.”

“Enjoy.” I hand them the piece.

“Who gets what?” Johnny asks. “You want us to rip it apart?”

“No, man, we’re supposed to keep it together because we’re friends,” says Bobby. “I’ll make a photocopy.”

“Where’s the photocopy machine in here?”

“There isn’t one! I’ll do it when I get out.”

“Where’s that gonna leave me?”

“With a copy!”

“I don’t want a copy!”

“Would you listen to this guy? Nothing’s good enough for him—”

“Hey, Bobby,” I interrupt. “Any way I can get yours and Johnny’s phone numbers to talk to you after you leave?”

Johnny starts to say something, but Bobby leans in and stops him: “It’s not a good idea, Craig.”

“What? Why?”

He sighs. “I’ve been in and out of this place a lot, right?”

“Yeah.”

“There are good things about this place; I mean, the food is the best around; there are good people here . . . but it’s still not a place to meet people.”

“Why not? I met you guys and you’re really cool!”

“Yeah, well, all the worse, then, when you try to call me or Johnny up and find out that we’ve OD’ed, or been shot, or come back here even worse, or just disappeared.”

“That’s a pretty negative view.”

“I’ve seen it before. You just remember us, okay? We meet in the outside world, it just ruins it. You’ll be embarrassed of me and I . . .” He smiles. “. . . I might be embarrassed of me, too. And I might be embarrassed of you, if you don’t keep your stuff together.”

“Thanks. You sure no numbers?”

Bobby shakes my hand. “If we need to, we’ll meet.”

Johnny shakes my hand. “What he said.”

The last guy in line is Jimmy.

“I tell you, what’d I say? You play those numbers—”

“It’ll come to ya!” I answer.

“It the truth!” He grins.

Ah, Jimmy. What’s in Jimmy’s brain? Chaos. I do up his nearly bald head and shoulders and then start putting the most complicated, unnecessary, wild highways through him from ear to ear. I connect them in intricate spaghetti ramps. In one nexus, five highways meet; I have to erase and redraw the ramps a few times. Then I put in the grid—a grid laid out by a hyperactive designer, with blocks going in all different directions. When Jimmy’s brain map is done it might look the best—a catalog of a schizophrenic mind, but one that works somehow.

“Here you go,” I tell him. He’s sitting in a seat that he took next to me to watch me work.

“It’ll come to ya!” he says, and takes the map. I want him to finally open up, to call me Craig, to tell me that we came in together, but he’s still Jimmy—his vocabulary is still limited.

We sit back in our respective chairs; I doze off a bit. Making art on demand is tiring. But the last thing I see before I go to sleep is Jimmy unfolding his brain map next to me and comparing with Ebony, who says of course hers is a lot prettier. That’s not a bad thing to go to sleep to.

“Craig, are you okay?” Mom asks. I jolt up and I have a momentary seizure that it was all a dream, all of it—the whole Sixth North bit—but then I wonder, where would the dream start? If it were a nightmare, it would have to have started somewhere before I got bad; it would be like a yearlong dream. You don’t have those. And if it were a good dream, that would mean I was still back where it started, leaning over my parents’ toilet or lying in bed listening to my heart. I didn’t need that.

“Yeah! I’m—whoa.” I sit up. They’re all there—Dad, Mom, Sarah.

“Are you forcing yourself to sleep?” Mom asks. “Are you depressed?”

“Are you on drugs?” Sarah asks. “Can you hear me?”

“I was taking a nap! Jeez!”

“Oh, okay. It’s six o’clock.”

“Wow, I was asleep for a while. I was drawing my brain maps for people.”

“Oh, boy,” says Dad. “This doesn’t sound good.”

“What are brain maps?” Sarah asks.

“That’s his art,” says Mom. “This is why he wants to change schools. Making this art makes you happy, right Craig?”

“Yeah, wanna see?”

“Absolutely.”

I take the stack from beside me and pass it around. This is really what I was creating the stack for, I think; to show my parents.

“Some of the best were the ones I just did, for the patients.”

“Very original,” Dad says.

“I like this one,” says Sarah, pointing at the pig with quasi-St. Louis inside him.

“You put a lot of time into these, I see,” Mom says.

“Right, that’s the thing: they don’t actually take me much time,” I explain. “I’m starting to get a little bored of them, actually; I want to move to something else.”

“So how are you feeling, Craig?” Dad puts the stack back on the floor.

“You look a lot better,” Mom says.

“I do?”

“Yeah,” Sarah says. “You don’t look all freaky as much.”

“I used to look freaky? ”

“She doesn’t mean freaky,” Mom tells us both. “She just means that when you were down, you looked a little under the weather. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”

“No, he looked freaky.”

“A flat affect, that’s what the doctors call it.” I smile.

“Right, well you don’t have that as much anymore,” Sarah says.

“So you want to quit school?” Dad brings us back to the real-deal stuff.

“I don’t want to quit.” I turn to him. “I want to transfer.”

“But that means quitting the school you’re currently at—”

“He can’t handle the other school!” Sarah says. “Look at—”

“Hold on a second. I can talk,” I say. “Guys.” I look at all three of them in turn. “One thing that they do in here is give you a lot of time to think. I can’t explain it; once you come in, time just slows down—”

“Well, you don’t have any interruptions, that’s probably it—”

“Also I think the clocks are a little off—”

I wave my hand. “Point is, you have time to think about how you got here. Because obviously, nobody wants to come back. I don’t want come back—”

“Good. Me neither,” says Dad. “What I said last time, about actually wanting to be here; that was a joke.”

“Right. Hey, did you bring the movie?”

“Of course. I can watch some of it with you, right?”

“Absolutely. So anyway, I’ve been thinking about when things started getting bad for me. I realized: it started after I got into high school.”

“Uh-huh,” Mom says.

“That was the happiest moment of my life. The happiest day. And from there on it was all downhill.”

“Right, this happens to a lot of adults,” Dad says.

“Will you stop interrupting him?” Sarah interrupts. Dad folds his hands behind him and straightens his back.

“It’s okay, Sarah. I just. . . I think I was concentrated on getting into Executive Pre-Professional because it was like, a challenge. I wanted to have that feeling of triumph. I never really thought about the fact that I’d have to, you know, go to the school.”

“So you want to do art,” Mom says.

“Well, let’s consider. I never really liked math. I was good at it, but only because I liked having basic information in front of me to get through, to reach that feeling of accomplishment. I never really liked English. This”—I point at the brain maps—“this is something different. This is something I love. So I’d better do it.”

“You’d better love it,” Dad says. “Because it’s a hard life. It’s mostly the artists who end up in places like this.”