Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

You’d think she’d look like a model but she didn’t — she was plump and ordinary, with small features and a round, almost silly nose, her eyes and skin sort of pulled out of place a fraction. And you’d think to have done all those things she’d be old, but she seemed more like she could be my sister just done with college with a place of her own. My mother said the doctors were obviously believing her delusions, and she was going to ask the cat-eyed nurse if this was some kind of test, but god, Mom, can’t you just have an interesting life? Or is it like everyone really does end up with one of four kinds of cars and one of four kinds of house and one of four kids you met in junior high?

Obviously, this is the madman I wanted. Obviously, my mother said no.

I’m paraphrasing.

This is my day, I told her. This is the one day that of all days is my day and it’s not up to you. This decision is going to make me who I am. The woman madman, round and rosy, watched me yelling at my mother with a small smile on her face, looking somewhere between our yelling heads. I don’t know what my father was doing. I was so angry. Sometimes when I get really angry, I get really articulate. I said exactly what I was thinking, exactly the way I would want to have said it. But it doesn’t matter if you’re right, if you made your case, and it doesn’t matter if god, somewhere, is on your side. Whatever happens, happens anyway. My mother said obviously they were trying to pawn this madman off, otherwise why would her case history be ten times longer than anyone else’s? I said I didn’t care if it was all lies, I loved her. I said I felt inspired and connected, at which point the rosy woman looked at me like I was crazy, and her eyes went right into mine, and I could feel my feelings flaring behind my eyes, just as her feelings were flaring behind hers, lighting them up, so I knew we were both lit up, so I knew at least in that way I was right.

Well, that’s what it was like at the time. I don’t know. You get caught up in a moment.

It seemed real.

I said okay, whatever, I’ll take the Dancing Fools. My mother was so mad her lips had disappeared. I still don’t know where my father was. And I don’t know what the madmen were thinking of all this yelling. They’ve seen it all, anyway. I could sort of hear some laughing, but who knows at what, and again the acoustics. Me and my mom having out this scene, and in front of a completely undeterminable audience, if that’s even a word. When we were finally silent and I finally looked at her again, she was building up to say something and then swallowing it and then building up again. When she finally said it, she said it like it was the worst, meanest thing she could possibly say.

“You are on your own” is what she finally pronounced, and because she said it to be the meanest possible thing to say, it was.

As we learned in class, when madness comes, it comes up the spine and radiates. Madman after madman has described it this way through history, often saying they were touched by god. Of course that’s not what I felt from my mother — boy, she would love that — but my point is it was very physical receiving her words, like being iced over and then cracked. I thought of madness while I felt it. Then she stormed away down the hall, which would have had more of the abrupt effect she was after except the hall was so long she kind of dissipated down it. Plus, after a couple minutes of me watching her recede, still gasping from how mean she was, my father appeared from behind me and followed after her like a can trailing a car when you just got married. Boom went the double doors, way far away, or whoosh or something. I don’t even remember, but it seemed to let noise out from behind the scenes, and even though I know the doors went to the waiting room, what came out was what you’d expect from those vast back rooms that spilled down the hill behind the asylum: babbling, screaming.

The whole idea is you take in a madman and that teaches you about Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference, and soon we are one big family. Without looking at her again, I left my place in front of the cell of the rosy woman I’d wanted and stared into the cell of the Imbecile who was next. What had he been doing through all that with his lumpy head and beaky honker? It felt like a betrayal to even stand there, to even try to imagine who he was, so I turned around.

Turning around meant I faced a white wall. It occurred to me that I was seeing exactly what all the madmen see, but without the bars. What’s that developmental stage called when you can finally do abstract thinking? Algebra? Just kidding.

I didn’t want to look at any more madmen. I sat down on the floor. I kept looking at the wall. It was so white.

Then the double doors swung open and smacked the walls with an echoing bang, and then thump thump came the cat-eyed nurse with her outward-reaching hair and rubber shoes making squeaks every few steps. Hands came waving through bars as she stomped toward me, though as she neared I could see she wasn’t angry at all, or stomping, it was just the sound of moving down that unpredictable gallery. Some hands she slapped five or did twinkle fingers with, and quips went back and forth that I couldn’t hear. She got to me and stood with her hands on her hips and gazed down at me mock-somethingly, which got me sheepish, as I’m sure she intended.

“You seriously want the Dancing Fools,” she said.

“Yes.”

“ That I would not have predicted.” She walked a little circle around me, shaking her red mane, and I pretended I wasn’t freaked out to look at her, and after a few seconds of pretending, it was true. I’m not freaked out by a cat, I thought, and I’m not freaked out by a nurse. So where’s the problem? That’s where I was, emotionally. “Do you dare me to give you the Fools?” she asked.

“No, I don’t dare you, it’s just what I pick.”

She stopped and crouched next to me. She was wearing orange tights with her white uniform and I hadn’t even noticed it before. Now that the rest of her was normal, the tights could look crazy.

“Look, miss. I get ‘rude’ all day from people like them, ” she said. “Do you think I need ‘rude’ from you ?” I could feel her looking at me, but no matter how much of a problem I didn’t have with her I could not look directly into those fucked-up golden orbs of doom, and just like that, her life stretched before me: one endless gallery of madmen seen as if through a keyhole because of my catty eyes. I had one cat-eyed kid left from a litter lost tragically, and a husband always out on the prowl.

I’m kidding.

What happened is off I hopped from my high horse because she was nice, she was right about me, and I didn’t need to understand her back.

She pulled a small spiral notebook from the front pocket of her skirt. There was a list of names in handwriting that looked like calligraphy: Bobo, Kai, Armand, Kelly. “These are all fine choices, and they all like you fine,” she said. I hadn’t seen any of them yet. They were farther down the gallery. Maybe there was an information card on me. The kingdom of the mad is inexhaustible, as they say. I knew a kid once whose parents were against the madman system, and he got out of it by spending summers building houses for the poor and taking a test on human rights history. I was glad my parents weren’t around to interfere, but I still thought of that kid’s parents, parents like one thing, like conjoined twins, but reverse: of two bodies and one mind.

Then suddenly I thought I felt blood spilling out of me and I stood up in a panic, like a rabbit on the highway, no idea which way to go. It was awful. Along with my boots, I was wearing brown pants that were plain but just cut really nice for my body, but I hadn’t been thinking, when I put them on, about my period and all that could happen. I had no idea what would happen with this color pants if I leaked. The madman in the cell behind me, the imbecile with the head and the beak, who at some point had snuggled up with his sheet on his cot and was possibly sleeping, sat up with a jerk and said, in a voice that sounded not like an Imbecile talking back to a dream, not like an Imbecile at all: “No, please, not me. I’ll do anything. I’ve got a bad feeling about you.”