What did not come back were the days that had led me to Silver Hill—or, more to the point, the miserable person who I’d been in those days. In an almost-literal flash, the treatments had transfigured me. My healing brain’s sentimental attempts to feel conflicted about this loss met with no success. No easy medical metaphor—they had amputated a wounded limb; no, they had cut out a tumor—seemed the right fit. The doctors’ electric pulse was more like the clearing of an old attic, or the burning of a barren field: Rather than destroying a part of me, it had restored me to who I really was. Or who I imagined myself to be.
The counterfeit Boxfish—that crazy woman, that sorry drunk—was a mistake, a wrong turn, a missed stitch. Now she was gone, unraveled, with no stone to mark her grave, mourned by no one. Me least of all. She shadowed me for years, feeding off her inarticulate anger at the world, and when she saw that I was weak, she attacked. She sabotaged every effort I made to adjust my dime-bright expectations to my middle-aged maternal circumstances, and when the resultant shambles didn’t satisfy her, she tried to kill me and nearly succeeded. So good riddance to her—the best of all possible riddances.
My only hesitation—the only thread of doubt in my vast tapestry of gratitude—has been the fear that, thanks to the treatments’ extreme effectiveness at expunging my enemy from my memory, I might not recognize her if she ever came back. Almost all electroshock patients have follow-up treatments every few months or years to keep their symptoms in check; I never felt I needed them, and so I never did. Over nearly thirty years, of course, this fear has faded as the stakes have shrunk. If she comes back now to claim me—this tall, proud, husk of a woman, ending her days alone in Manhattan—then I can’t see how the prize would be worth the fight.
Once the treatments were over I wanted to go home. I could have walked back to Murray Hill, I swore—an easy thirty miles along the Lower Post Road, a thoroughfare older than the Constitution, rambling through Port Chester and Rye, through Mamaroneck and New Rochelle, across the Bronx, over the Third Avenue Bridge into Harlem, past the homes and the businesses of every kind of New Yorker you can think of, straight down Lexington to East Thirty-Sixth—but of course they did not let me.
Rather I got shipped—alone this time, no Max, and certainly no Johnny—back to Silver Hill for indefinite “observation” and further rehabilitation.
For three months I hovered like an astronaut over my old life, my real life. I wanted so badly to return to it—but in my own way, on my own terms. The thought of friends seeing me in my current circumstances was abhorrent. Fortunately, few of them wanted to. I received a number of kind and thoughtful letters, but blessedly next to no requests to visit.
“If I may appeal to your expertise,” I asked anodyne Dr. R as he made his rounds, “perhaps you can settle a question for me: Is crazy contagious? Some of my acquaintances behave as though it might be.”
Dr. R, accustomed at long last to my kidding, took this in the spirit it was intended. “For the most part, no,” he said. “Unless we’re talking about something like syphilitic psychosis. And you can assure your friends that they’re in no danger of catching that here. Silver Hill is a progressive institution, but only up to a point.”
“Thank you, doctor. You’ve helped me win a bet with myself.”
“A thing I have noticed,” he continued, unable to avoid self-seriousness for more than thirty seconds or so, “is that encounters with people who are confronting their psychiatric issues often produce anxiety in people who are not confronting their psychiatric issues, precisely because they are not doing so. You might keep that in mind while you’re reading your correspondence.”
I shook my head in mock wonderment. “What a peculiar career you have chosen for yourself,” I said. “Didn’t your mother want you to become some regular sort of doctor? Like a podiatrist?”
“Don’t get me started on my mother,” said Dr. R.
My own parents were both dead by that time, to my great relief. My mother died in 1950; my father lost his will to live in her absence and followed not more than six months later to wherever it is that people who’ve died go.
Nowhere, I think, is what you’d call the place.
My older brother never came to visit me. He did write me letters, though: distant and condescending ones, because those were the shallow pools in which his small mind swam. When he sent me a clipping called “Mastering Your Impulses,” about how alcoholics bring their problems upon themselves and need merely to “buck up” and “grow a spine,” I never wanted to hear from him again, at least not while I was still inside. I sent him an envelope full of worthless plastic prizes that I’d collected from boxes of Cracker Jack—Dr. R was a psychiatrist, not a dentist—and I wrote my response on the backs of what the box called a Zoo Card Animal Game: You are acting no more sensitive than a stupid animal when you send things like that. I feel caged enough as it is. If that is all you can find it in your brain to send me, then I wish you’d refrain. I’ll just see you when I get out.
He did not write me anymore at Silver Hill, and that was fine with me.