I think of the blue woman from the elevator, how the giant empty holes in her ears might have once held earrings as large as this.
“No,” I say. “I’m not saying I have multiple personalities. Of course not.”
If she knew more about the girls, she wouldn’t have even asked that. The girls may tell me things, and let me walk through their memories, but I don’t become them. They’re them, and I’m always only me.
I fold my arms over my chest and play with the caution-orange cuffs on my floppy sleeves. The sweatshirt smells musty, like my mom wanted to dress me as a whole other person and had to search for the costume in the back of my closet. Or like she’s some other woman, come to impersonate my mother, wanting to dress a girl who’s impersonating me.
“Do you ever see things you think might not be real?” the doctor asks.
“What do you mean by ‘not real’?”
“Hallucinations. Things or people no one else can see.”
I’m silent for a long time.
She’s not asking any more questions, so after a while I speak up. “Can you be a psychiatrist and believe in stuff?”
“How so?”
“If you had a patient,” I start, “and if she said she saw a ghost, if she said she could talk to the ghost and the ghost talked back, would you automatically give her medication and call her crazy?
Or would you consider that maybe some kind of supernatural explanation is possible? What I mean is, do you believe in things like that? Are you even allowed to?”
She skirts the question. “We never use the word crazy here.”
“But would you? Would you say that seeing something like that is only a chemical imbalance in her brain?”
“Seeing hallucinations can be a symptom of mental illness, yes. Seeing a ‘ghost.’ Talking to the ‘ghost.’ Having the ‘ghost’ talk back . . . Yes.”
“Like what?” I say. “Like which illness? Tell me one.”
“We don’t insert labels so soon in the process, we never—”
“Schizophrenia,” I insert for her.
“Like my dad.”
She pauses and absently touches her wrinkled knee. “So you did hear what your mother and I were talking about.
That was not about you. You understand that, right?”
I shrug.
“Schizophrenia isn’t something that can be diagnosed after just one episode.
A diagnosis can take years. And I want you to know that one person’s experience
isn’t
necessarily
like
another’s. Experiences can vary, and nothing in psychology fits neatly into a box and gives us such easy answers.”
She’s being vague. I don’t respond, so she keeps on.
“There are many things what you’re going through could be. You say you’re not depressed, but that’s something we need to explore. There has to be time for therapy, time to adjust to different medications, to—”
More things, she says more things.
She keeps talking. She could be talking about shamans and gods, for all I know —I suspect she talks simply to hear herself talk. What I’m waiting for is another voice, an answer in my head. A voice of a lost girl to tell me all of this is what’s crazy. My being here. My having to listen to this. While outside they’re being taken and I’m the only one who knows. The meds aren’t making me as slow and sleepy as they were in the beginning, but they do something far worse than that. They make it so I haven’t heard a voice in days.
At some point I realize the doctor has gone silent.
“Who are you listening to?” she asks.
I’m confused. “I’m listening to you.
You were talking.”
“You turned and looked over there”— she points at the potted plant in the corner—“is someone there, talking to you? One of the ‘girls’?”