Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

This one was Contemporary Bipolar. Like two for one. He was low, now, “sickly, peevish, having suffered a recent rejection of a manuscript he’d sent to an important publisher.” I’m paraphrasing what my father read. They’d found him holding court in a city park, where everyone called him Professor, wearing round glasses with no glass in them. He had this enthusiastic teenage boy who’d follow him around with an apple crate to stand on. Mom observed that you could tell different doctors wrote up the information cards. She said this one had been in a creative mood. The conclusion of the medical history was that this madman was the son of a lowly cleaning lady and had never been to college. It marveled that he could be so erudite in his philosophies, though the doctor confessed he had not heard of many of the figures the madman liked to quote. He was not sure if this was a measure of his own ignorance, as he had only taken introductory courses in the classics, and although he had done very well in them, it had been a long time ago. My father attempted a knowing glance at my mother, which she rejected. He whispered to me, “Next thing you know, that doctor’s gonna be eating a madeleine.”

I said, “What are you talking about?” and then I felt bad.

Next there was a woman madman: “with monstrous breasts, contorted, black”—actually, the madmen were a variety of races and racial mixtures, but this card pointed out black for some reason—“eyes bulging, head and arms thrown back, clothes discarded on the floor” (all noted on the card, as well as true to my observation), “with a madman’s staff, clenching hands, found biting her own arm, broken out of chains, bold, brazen, brainless”; then a Cretin, with his wiener in a bottle, peeing, then holding the bottle up and looking in it with a monocle (“He’s imitating his physician,” my father interpreted, “monkey see monkey do”; to which my mother flashed him a look about insensitively using a monkey analogy and he said, “I’m just explaining!”); a Cuckold wearing a Cuckold’s horns, I don’t know what they were made out of but they looked real; a Schizo-affective who on his card it said “mute” and explained that like so many, he’d latched on, in an early delusion, to where the Bible says, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” a sentence which, gathering from my education, has resulted in madmen missing just about every body part you can think of, but this madman had cut his tongue out, and then, to cauterize it, stuffed a flaming torch down his throat. Mom: “ Cauterize means seal up”; me: “I know,” but I didn’t. Then a Possessed guy with landscape tattoos. Then a short guy evolving into a divine being, officially Monomaniac, with sticks stuck into his hair like a crown, trying to look down on us. Next a Wildman dragging a club, with a face like a “panther or a goat,” this heavy lumpy body, like he’d broken everything and healed back wrong; then a Phlegmatic, “sad, recumbent, forgetful, pale, eating the bread of the workers of iniquity…protruding eyes, weak chin, terror”; and next a rich girl whose secret lover had joined the army and died. Then Frenetic. Fevered delirium, “raving but seated, ready to be purged.” Drawings on one wall of his cell showed a warden after a patient with a billy club and a doctor after a patient with a needle, and on another wall a drawing of being looked at by two tall people with a short one. The one with most detail I recognized from our textbook: an operation to remove the Stone of Folly. The doctor had given the madman the stone just cut from his head, and the madman held it in the air like a jewel. The drawing showed it glinting with light. The drawings were good, considering they’d been done with a stick and fingers and who knows what for paint.

I got dizzy on and off through the madmen, partly because all the iron in my body was rushing out between my legs but also because of the madness. After the Recumbent Frenetic was a pair of cells each containing a Fool, dancing, a man fool and next door to him a woman fool: one with a feather headdress, one with bells around the wrists and ankles. Lighthearted types, goiter on the neck of one, one with a pink balloon on a branch of a bifurcated stick, counterparts dancing like mirror images — how could they know through the wall? It didn’t make sense to look at them individually, but I couldn’t see both cells at once. The gallery was too narrow, I couldn’t back up enough, so I looked from one to the other trying, but it made me feel seasick. I felt at odds with myself, that phrase came to me. Like I was related to whatever invisible puppet master was making them dance together when they couldn’t even see each other. I think I spent less time with them than anyone, but the effect went straight to my body.

Plus there was the madman in the cell right after them.

This one had an information card that folded out like an accordion. “ ‘At sixteen,’ ” my father read, “ ‘she became insane over the favor her older sister received from a young man, her husband, so that she was institutionalized.’ ”

“Whose husband?” my mother asked. “Who lets these people write?” My mother had continued her commentary all through the gallery; I’d just tuned most of it out. But the point here is this madman’s huge long history:

“Periodic manias, daily three to six in the afternoon. Much of the day she behaved normally, but from noon until three sank into the deepest melancholy. Following that she would become lively, and at exactly three in the afternoon she would get a fit of rage and smash everything, attack her attendants and drink enormous amounts of ice water. At six she would become calm again. Taken in by a family when she was seventeen, who, within a year, interrupted three suicide attempts with a silk cord.” My mother, again concerned with grammar, wondered how the family might have used a silk cord thusly. But the story went that the girl was finally found so dead she was almost black (I hadn’t known this about death), but they revived her, and while they were deciding what to do with her next, she disappeared. Turned out she wanted to be a dancer, which I used to want to be myself, and started working at strip clubs by night and taking dance classes by day and through her stripper and dance friends met up with a troupe of trapeze artists who went across the country and Europe, meeting up with circuses and innovative performing groups, putting on intense acts that, for certain invite-only audiences, were rumored to contain explicit sex with emotional and intellectual depth. A distinguished artist within this community, her prison record called it Live Queer Porn. “And yet,” said the account, “such transgressions often bear the germs of healing in them.”

Then something happened. The account said: “suddenly.” Suddenly she quit the troupe, burned her costumes, wrapped herself in rags, took up a staff of madness decorated with shells, strung a crucifix around her neck, and joined a group of pilgrims on their way to Rome. They were a whole group of people who felt bad about themselves so they went to Rome, but when they got there, the girl threw her rags into the Tiber and wouldn’t go into the cathedral. She slept in the Colosseum for months. Then something else happened which I forgot, and probably they skipped some stuff, and she ended up at a mission taking care of orphans even though she refused to wear the crucifix or explain what she was praying, which she was allowed to do because she’d impressed all the religious people, one of whom eventually fell in love with her, ruining his career, but she wasn’t interested in him like that, and this whole episode seemed to wear her out, so she kissed her orphans goodbye one by one and then left on a boat in the night, which wrecked in a storm near Messina, where she washed up and was taken in by a group of shepherds — her feet were all cut up — until she could walk, by which time the local doctor had fallen for her and kept inventing medical problems so she’d stay. But once she figured that out, he just left everything and went with her through a junglelike landscape until one night they were accosted. She cut the thumbs off the assailant and escaped, but the doctor was killed. There was definitely some more religion, stone temples, shamans and stuff, Amazons, and a battle she helped win with poison she discovered in local sap, but she started drinking heavily and rather than admit her addiction to her tribe, she slunk into the jungle, where she lived on fruit and roots — that’ll dry you out — and then something else and she ended up here, in godforsaken nowhere California, after an episode not far from my school actually, where she had been “excessively frightened by soldiers” is how the write-up put it, please note the air quotes which are so annoying but I’m serious because I believe I’ve heard about those assholes.