Scott Delisle

Scott Delisle received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His work has previously appeared in Response and elsewhere. He lives and works as a biomedical engineer in Boston.

Please read with care, the below piece includes some details and thoughts of self-harm and suicide.

Connections

There were two pieces missing from the puzzle. One cut a jagged line through the snout of a howling wolf, another an uneven hole in a snowy hillside. Maybe the puzzle was donated like that. I couldn’t imagine where a piece would disappear to. It had taken me three days to finish it on the small, folding table that was beside the entrance to the main meeting room. Nobody had touched it while I was working on it. A pleasant surprise. Staring at the final image, I tried to feel any sense of accomplishment. But with those two gaps staring up at me, nothing came. At least I didn’t have OCD. I don’t know if that’s offensive or not. Would they really care about a puzzle that had two missing pieces? I never asked.

I checked myself in to this unit. Or my therapist did. But only after I told her I thought that was probably the safest thing. Didn’t trust myself to last the night. Instead I found myself in the ER just outside of town. During my seventeen-hour stay in my small, curtained-off section, I had a blood test, a urine test, a psych test, and I had to change into the papery robes with the missing back. Not that I minded doing those things. Then they wheeled me out into the hallway because they couldn’t find a room for me yet in any hospital. Wandering eyes found me as people walked down the hall.

The nurses talked to me when they could. One got me some saltine crackers and apologized that she couldn’t get a Big Mac, laughing. I had never had a Big Mac. Might as well have told her I’d never eaten. Not that she looked like she ate them all the time or anything, just that she couldn’t imagine I’d never had one. Told all her nurse friends about it. They never told me the results of the tests they did. But they found me a room in a psych unit nearby. So they wheeled me out, because it’s policy that I have to be transported on a gurney in an ambulance, strapped in, regardless of the fact that I could walk. When I reached the hospital, they wheeled me up to the door, then let me off. By then my parents had arrived. It wasn’t their fault. I know some people have horrible upbringings that lead them to situations like this. Mine was fine. In the waiting room, a fellow patient discovered that he had been tricked by his father in to coming back there and was upset. My father said it was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Which character was I? I don’t know, it wasn’t really like that. It wasn’t a nuthouse or anything.

I had my first meeting with a counselor, who told me that my parents probably had something to do with it. I didn’t say anything to contradict it. She told them not to stress me out. I didn’t give any sort of permission for her to confront them, but maybe she didn’t need it. Once they lock the doors behind you, freedom takes on a sort of different meaning. They had bars on all the windows too. That part was like the movie. They let me change back into my clothes at this point, which I was grateful for. But they did take my belt and shoelaces, so my bottom half was a bit loose. I mean, I wouldn’t use my shoelaces. Who would do that? I guess someone must have, or it wouldn’t be a rule. The belt’s got some substance to it though. I can see that. Once I got to Level 3 privileges I could get the shoelaces back. So that was something to look forward to.

I said goodbye to my parents, then, as I was led into the unit. They looked tired. They hadn’t even taken off their jackets, even though we’d been there for probably a couple of hours.

“We’ll come back tomorrow, alright?” my dad said. He had his hands stuck inside his pockets. People always said I looked more like him than my mom, but I didn’t really see either of them when I looked in a mirror.

“Alright,” I said, holding my pants up with my hand as inconspicuously as I could.

“Try and call us when you get the chance, sometime tonight,” my mom said, trying to see through the open door behind me into the hospital.

“I’ll try, but I’ll be fine, really.”

“Okay, okay.” I saw both of them look towards my arms, but then quickly look at the floor.

“We really had no idea.”

“It’s fine, please—”

“I mean, even after you went to see your doctor for it, we thought the medicine would be enough.”

“Really. I’m sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” They both took deep breaths and looked at me, then nodded slowly.

I got shown to my room, but by that point I had missed dinner so I didn’t have much to do. I met my roommate, Oswald. He was a young-looking guy. Shaved head, glasses, jeans, and a black sweatshirt. There were two desks and two beds in the room. I got the one by the window. He had his things all packed up on his desk.

“I’m heading out tomorrow,” he said, gesturing towards his stuff.

“Oh. Cool. Leaving me already.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, “though it’s nothing personal. Just have to get home, see my daughter.”

“Oh?”

“I haven’t seen in her in a few weeks so I think it’ll be good for me, you know?”

“I do.” He was 22 years old. I told the nurses that night that I had made a mistake but they wouldn’t let me leave. In the morning my roommate and I shook hands and I never saw him again.

The first day at the hospital was uneventful. People expect these places to be loopy. But really it’s just a bunch of people doing their own thing, being polite and talking with each other when they want. Sure, some people are very quiet, and some people are very loud, but that’s how it always is. The first night and day I had to get used to a staff member making the rounds, which means they check to make sure you’re alive every 15 minutes. At night this means shining a flashlight on you until they see you breathing. It takes time to adjust to that part. Then I met with some counselors again who said I had to go to the group sessions or it’d be harder for them to know if I was ready to leave. And I didn’t want to have to stay too long, in case I lost my job, because then I’d just be home, without anything to do. Having time to think is probably the most dangerous thing.

So I went to some group sessions. There were a lot of groups for people with addictions, but I didn’t have any of those, at least not that a group could help. I went to a mindfulness session with a calm-voiced, bald man leading meditation. It felt alright at the time. We were all lying down on the floor of the main meeting room with the lights off and blinds drawn, relaxing our muscle groups one at a time. I went to some drawing classes. Drew patterns. Talked to more counselors. Talked to some of the other patients. My parents still came to visit, until I told them they didn’t have to anymore. Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing them, but I didn’t see the need for it. They agreed, so long as I called them every day. I did, but we didn’t talk about much. Just what I did that day, what I learned. Things like that.

I started the puzzle then. On the small folding table. The 1000-piece wolves howling at the moon. Thought it might be a good change of pace. Probably my third day there I was sitting working at the puzzle when a girl slightly older than me came up and sat. She watched me work.

“Getting pretty far along now, looks like,” she said.

“Pretty far.”

“I’m Jane by the way.”

“Scott.”

“I know. We call you Silent Scott. My friends saw you walk by the other day and they asked who you were. I said I call you Silent because I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard you speak.”

“Oh. Well, now you can tell them you have.”

“I guess I can.” She itched at a mark on the top of her hand and caught me looking. “This is sort of the reason I’m here. Took a whole bottle of Zoloft with half a handle of vodka. Hallucinated that the IV in my hand was growing crystals so I kept ripping it out. I was in the hospital for five days before I got here.”

“Wow. Well, I’m glad you’re not hallucinating anymore.”

“Me too. What are you here for?” I rolled up my sleeve and showed her. This was a common exchange.

“Hm, yeah. Seems like a lot of different kinds of people here. You from around here?”

“Yeah, I work in the city.”

“Oh, what do you do?”

“I work in biotech.”

“Fun. What, like drugs and stuff?”

“Kind of. I work on the systems that get the drug into the body.”

“Sounds like a blast,” she laughed.

“Really, you wouldn’t believe.” I smiled and looked back down at the puzzle pieces scattered over the table.

We talked for a bit before she went on to something else. I didn’t think I was that silent. I guess I didn’t talk at the nightly meetings though. The staff mainly asked people about problems that had come up during the day, things like that. A girl talked one night about how she needed a very specific kind of Greek food that her family had brought that day, and that she was glad it was there so that she could eat. Rick talked quite a bit every night. Or maybe I just remember him more because of his English accent. I remember another girl who didn’t talk very much either. She kept her blonde hair in a ponytail and was pretty much always in pajama pants and a hoodie. I also remember her because I only ever saw her eating cucumbers at lunch. I later learned from someone that she had an extreme eating disorder and was just out of the hospital where she had spent nine months being fed by IV.

I met with a man at one point, a counselor. I didn’t recognize him really, I hadn’t seen him around. But he talked to me for a long time about what was going on. About the things that I could control and the things that I couldn’t. There was surprisingly little that I could control, I was finding. And that frightened me. I had written in a small black and white composition notebook the night before that I deserved nothing. That word was underlined. Nothing. And I was right. And this man, this counselor I had never met, confirmed that I didn’t externally deserve anything. That internally I did. I had to make my own worth.

He wrote lists for me. He would group names together. Like parents, ex-girlfriend, bosses, siblings. And then we would go through them together and try and assign blame. And none of them deserved any.

“These people all care for you,” he said to me. “They want to see you succeed, and are in pain when they see you in pain.”

“I don’t know. I think there are more than a few people who wouldn’t mind if I disappeared.” Whenever I said this to counselors, the response was always the same. Of course they would mind. Of course they would be distraught. Of course.

“What do you think they would feel if you were gone?”

“I don’t know. Relief?”

“Is there anyone in your life that you would feel that way about? Anyone you wish would disappear?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“And you know these people pretty well, on this list here.”

“I think so.”

“And you can honestly tell me you think they would feel relief at your passing?”

I thought about it. There was a part of me that did feel that way. But also somewhere I knew it wasn’t true. Or at least I knew I had to believe it somewhere. I knew if I didn’t believe it at all, that I don’t know who or what would be able to help me.

I finished that puzzle somewhere around the fourth day. Other than the last two pieces. I remember because Rick mentioned it at the meeting that night.

“I saw that you’ve finished that puzzle. Seems like it took quite a bit of work. Nice job with it.” I looked at him, confused as to who he was talking to. When I realized it was me, I nodded to him and mumbled a thank you. Maybe I did need to talk more.

On the fifth day my new roommate arrived. His name was Xi. He was a post-doc at Harvard doing some kind of biology research. He shook my hand emphatically when we met, and seemed in good spirits. Maybe he was one of those people that felt relief when they came to a place like this. That they didn’t really have to worry about policing themselves anymore, at least for a short while. They could focus on problems in a controlled environment. Xi set up his small bag on the bed and looked at the group schedule, trying to determine what would be the most useful for him. I recommended the patterns one. I don’t know if he liked coloring shapes, but I figured it was universal.

I couldn’t sleep that night so I went out to the hallway and started a small, 300 piece puzzle of some weather balloons. The staff didn’t seem to mind, so long as they could see me. They didn’t even really have to do that, since they don’t look at you in the shower or anything. They just knock on the door and you have to say your name. The puzzle was coming together when Xi came over from our room and sat down with me.

“You don’t mind, right?”

“No, go ahead.” He started to sift through the puzzle pieces.

“Kind of like life, no? The puzzle?” he asked, looking at me.

“What? Oh, yeah, sure, in some ways.” These grand comparisons were also common here.

“But then I wonder, you know, what’s the point?” He shifted in the faded red armchair.

“Of what? Life?”

“Yes. I don’t know why people should continue on.” He looked at me and I knew he believed this. It surprised me, his surety.

“Well, because you have to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, maybe to help other people? To make them happy?” What I really wanted to say is I have no idea why anyone continues on. But I couldn’t say that to him, the guy wanted someone to tell him it was alright to just be.

“But what if other people don’t want you around?” he asked.

“Then figure out why. I think other people are worth the trouble, generally. Is there no one that wants you around?” He paused and looked down, put his hand to his cheek.

“My wife probably does.”

“I think your wife definitely counts. Is she going to come visit?”

“Probably, in a day or two.”

“Good plan. How did you guys meet?”

“Online.”

“Well, she’s very lucky.”

He laughed. “Thank you. Do you have anyone to come visit?”

“Yeah, my friends are coming tomorrow. So, we’ll see how that goes.” He nodded and looked back down at the puzzle pieces. We finished the puzzle in about an hour and then went back to bed. I didn’t want him to die.

My friends came to visit the next day. I had known both of them all through college and our first few working years in the city. Phoebe had her beige coat in her lap and spent a lot of time looking at the walls.

“We brought you this book from your shelf, I know you said to just grab anything, I figured maybe it’d help pass the time.” She handed me Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. I nodded thanks and put it next to my bed. She had streaks of blonde in her brown hair and a small, slight face, with an almost constant half smile. Jason was sitting next to her.

“So what’s it really like in here?”

“Well, it’s like a hotel kind of, except not at all.” They laughed and I told them about the puzzle and the people. They talked about the bus route they had to take to get to me and how they got lost on the sprawling hospital campus, which looked more like a college. It’s not like it had to be on a secluded hilltop with a continual thunderstorm raging in the background. It was tranquil in its own way. However, near the end of their visit, the fire alarm went off. They can’t let the patients outside unless it’s a real emergency, so they piled us all into the meeting room while they waited for final confirmation. The loud sirens and flashing lights gave a couple of the patients panic attacks. They had to put blankets over their heads to drown out the noise. I saw a patient sitting near me who had just come back from a round of electroconvulsive therapy. His eyes were only half open, but he seemed generally aware of what was going on. Eventually the alarm turned off, and the doors were never unlocked.

I spent the next three days at the hospital, meeting with the staff trying to convince them I could go back to the real world. They eventually let me, and my parents picked me up and drove me back to my apartment. Before I left, Xi gave me one last vigorous handshake and wrote down his email, just in case. I said goodbye to Jane, and she surprised me with a hug. I hugged her back and wished her all the luck I could give. I ate lunch that day wearing my hospital bracelet. I probably should’ve cut it off. I just didn’t want to forget. I remembered the boy I met there who sliced open his arm while his friends were asleep around him, then woke them up to take him to the hospital since he didn’t want them to have to find him lying there. I remembered the twice divorced mom who always wore the same pink fleece to all the meetings. I remembered the graduate student in biomedical engineering who had short brown hair and liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I remembered the people there.

I still felt the same way. I wasn’t cured. There was still a small necrotic section of brain tissue at the base of my skull, near the neck, near the bit that governs all the basic bodily functions, the part of the brain that you can’t really live without, the part that they can pretty easily replicate with machines if they need to but then you’re not really alive you’re just biding time. The other parts of the brain are a bit more disposable. Lobotomies for example. They just mix up the front of your brain like scrambled eggs.

But I would tell people about my diagnosis, more people. Gradually I became myself. This self that I became was not alright with what was living in my head, but it was accepting of the fact that it would never change. That nothing would be the same afterwards but that everything would be the same. What I mean is that just because I received a name for this vacuous mass in my skull, could call it bipolar, doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been there, waiting, growing, sending its tendrils into the dark recesses of my mind where doubt and fear and exhaustion live. When people asked me how I was doing, I began to stop lying. I would say things like: not so good, pretty shitty, a little down. This put people off balance, and they were bad at hiding their surprise at my response. I wasn’t lying to them. Shouldn’t that be a cause for praise? I tried, I’ll tell them. I tried and yet here I am. Maybe this was living. Maybe this was giving up. Maybe this was what it looks like to lose. Maybe.

About six months later I was talking to my dad on the phone about a rough period I was having when I heard a deep sigh on the other line.

“You know, I’ve had thoughts like this too. Back when I had to close the store and I couldn’t find another job, I thought that maybe it would be better if I drove my car off the road. My life insurance policy is pretty good. You get to thinking maybe you’re worth more dead than alive.” He had owned a small art supply and framing store in town that had gone out of business. I used to go there when I was younger and draw with the pastels and watch the artists he had on his staff draw portraits. That was where I cut myself on one of the razor blades he had lying around for framing and stared at the life draining from my thumb and marveled at the color of it. Once it had left me, I didn’t even know if it was mine anymore.

“Anyway, just know that you can talk to us about stuff. We may have a good idea every once and a while. We may know how to help you.”

“Okay, whatever you say.”

“Why do you say it like that? We just want you to be happy, that’s all we really want.”

“I know. It’s just, you didn’t even want me to take medicine for it, see anyone, you thought it would pass, like a cold.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“It’s what you said. Do you know how damaging that can be?”

“There was nothing to fix.”

“How can you still say stuff like that? You saw the hospital just like I did.”

“That was just a one-time thing. You haven’t gone back, and it sounds like they think you made a lot of progress.”

“Was it? Can you be sure? It never goes away, you know? There’s no cure. There’s no vaccine. I could just as easily be back there in a day, a week, a year. I am constantly on guard from it. It’s exhausting. Fucking exhausting. And then I have to defend my own feelings from you? If I told you how I really felt every day, you’d never pick up my calls again.”

“That’s what we want.”

“Is it? We never talk about these things, we never have. And I don’t expect you to change now. Those were real people in there, at that place, who had real problems. I don’t know if what I’m feeling is quite so bad, but sometimes that’s all I need. I don’t need a miracle from you, just some basic comprehension.”

“Okay. I get it.” The line was silent for a few seconds.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re both trying your best.”

“I know. It’s hard to talk with you sometimes. We just want you to be happy, and when we can hear in your voice that you aren’t, it’s hard.”

“I know.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’m sorry again.”

“It’s okay.” There was only so much I could do.

I switched jobs about two months later and started working at this large pharmaceutical company. Soon after I started I decided to update LinkedIn, for some reason. I never used it, but there I was. I looked down the page to my suggested connections, and I saw Xi’s face looking back at me through a profile picture. The website was suggesting we connect. I had never contacted him and he had never contacted me. I had wondered many times over the years what had happened to the people in the hospital, especially Xi. I thought that at least one of them had to be dead. Almost a given.

He had grown his hair out quite substantially. I wondered if he was still with his wife he had met online. I didn’t know the success rate. Not that it would govern their specific relationship. I was just curious. I thought about clicking on his name, about sending a message to let him know that I was still out there too, was still moving forward despite what had happened. I wanted to ask him if he ever thought about his time there. If he ever went back again. If he had ever found anyone who agreed with me about living life for other people. There was a lot I wanted to ask him. But I never clicked on his name.

A few months later, I was eating outside with Phoebe at a café. We both had iced coffee in plastic cups, drinking and watching the people walk through the square. The sun was shining and we both had sunglasses on. We were talking about a movie we had seen a few days earlier, some documentary about a town in the Midwest, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and shielded my eyes, looking up to see Jane.

“Oh wow. It’s you!” I said, standing up.

“In the flesh. It’s Scott, right?”

“That’s right.” We briefly hugged and then stood there.

“This is my friend Phoebe,” I said, gesturing towards her. They both waved at each other.

“Sorry for interrupting. I didn’t know what the protocol was on interactions like this. But I couldn’t help it.”

“That’s alright, it’s been a while.”

“It has. How have you been?”

“I’ve been… good. Just a few complaints, but isn’t that always the way. How are you?”

“I’ve been good too. I’ve been good. Got a new job selling clothes at this fancy-ass place in the city, so I’ve been getting really good at performative smiling.” She demonstrated, and it really was convincing. “But sometimes they’re real. I really am glad to see you.”

“Me too. I sometimes get to thinking about you and the other people there, and you can’t help but wonder.”

“I know. You can’t. Have you been back?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“Same. Listen, I have to go to this Korean market down the street to pick some stuff up for my grandmother, she says it’s the most authentic one around, but I’d love to talk more about what you’ve been up to.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Well here, let me see your phone.” She took my phone from me and opened up the messages, writing a text.

“There, sent. That’s me.” I looked down. Jane Park.

“Alright, awesome. I’ll text you later today.”

“Great. Well, I’ll talk to you later. It was great to meet you, Phoebe.” She walked away, waving to us. We waved back and I sat back down.

“So weird. What’re the chances, right?” Phoebe said, picking up her cup. She was right, of course, the chances were slim. But not impossible. We sat and drank, watching the sunshine on the people walking by.