A Fish Out of Water

 

A Fish out of Water 2,630 words

 

 

Philistine's face, magnified through the fishbowl, is a feline smear of black fur and enormous green eyes. The goldfish blithely swims across his face of doom like those fish that swim among a predator's cavernous teeth, living toothpicks surviving on the dental remains of less fortunate fellows.

 

The cat never tries to get the fish but spends, daily, an almost dutiful amount of time absorbed in observation, his green lunar crescents reflecting fluid gold as they track the goldfish and its flickering aurora of amber fins.

 

Philistine watches the fish; I watch Philistine; the television, sound off, watches us. I use TV on mute to get ideas. Call it the Ouija Channel. Talking heads mouthing dead air can trigger the mind to fill the vocal void.

 

We schizophrenics are like that. The way that we form a whole, coherent world is by balancing the voices in our head with the voices out there, using antipsychotic medication the way a soundman uses a mixing board to blend drums with bass. Too much medication and the voices are gone but so are your car keys. Too little medication and the voices return but without conviction, as if they doubt that they're real, and for a schizophrenic to wonder if he's hearing real vocal hallucinations or false vocal hallucinations or pretend vocal hallucinations or imagined vocal hallucinations....is more disturbing than the voices themselves.

 

In between too much and too little is a sweet spot. Just right and you can talk to yourself like a normal person enjoying an uninterrupted conversation. I lean toward less medication for a low murmur of voices that rarely insist on being heard but that can be highly informative when encouraged to speak up. The brain shivers, like someone clearing their throat, a mental ghost stamps its foot, and speaks my mind.

 

Yesterday, for example, on ELLEN, a rising young movie star with a French name described the love between his Irish setters and how they (the setters) wanted to adopt since they'd been neutered. Ellen didn't seem at all shocked other than being unable to speak despite moving her lips. You get the idea.

Me, I got a concept for a cartoon series, The Setter Family, where dogs are the "people" and people are the "pets".

 

It keeps me on my toes, looking for that point where the voices speak up and take liberties with reality; it also pays the bills. The pay scale for cartoon screenplays is refreshingly proportional to their quality, and the voices can be very inspiring if I can eavesdrop on them without being too obvious. Cartoons (and kids) live on the edge of insanity. If I can catch my mind as its just beginning to take leave of reality, I can pull it back before it jumps the ledge of the window that it's just opened, and then we share the enlightening view, me and my mind watching itself perform tricks.

 

But I can't actually watch cartoons. They're too crazy. I barely have time to shatter the window before leaping the ledge. From there it's either Superman or Dante's Inferno, and neither are healthy. The former puts me in jail, the latter in a psych ward. Now that she's gone, I can't afford either: who would feed Philistine while I was in custody? Not to mention my extreme distaste for being tazed. You can taste the voltage. It's like powdered tinfoil.

 

***

 

It's a miracle she stayed as long as she did. We almost saw two Christmases together. In between, summer weather made it easier for her to spend time away from me, and time away was a crucial component of our life together. She's a nature girl born to ride a bicycle, and when she'd come home from a long ride she'd be so endorphinated that she could handle my evening babble without too much trouble.

 

Winter weather strained things. Hot cocoa, and silence or Mozart, were what she needed, not my psychobabble; but if I upped my meds enough to remain silent I couldn't hold up my end of a meaningful conversation much less an erection.

 

We're still friends but that's boy-in-a-bubble land. Writing notes through a two-way mirror. She lives with me now in the empty space of a pair of shoes in a closet full of the ventriloquist dummies I've collected over two decades. They're a pair of wood-and-leather clogs, and I can still see the pink wrinkles of her heels when I look at them. I don't have a foot fetish but there's something about the feet of a beloved... magic tootsies... look at those copper-coated baby booties our grandparents made of our parent's first shoes.

 

She'd worn boots against the weather when she walked out on me, but I see in memory her clog-shod heels smacking the hallway carpet as I stood in the doorway watching her go.

 

She left the fish behind. It's name is Satie, and I think Philistine is in love with its beautiful organism and innocent eyes.

 

***

 

What first drew me to her was her penchant for philosophical double-talk.

 

"Life takes forever to unwrap," she'd said early in our dating phase. "It isn't fully revealed until we're wrapped in a burial shroud. Closure opens the unknown."

 

Deep philosophy like that can excite me so much that I'm literally foaming at the mouth. At my peak, I can say so many words so fast that I literally don't make a lick of sense. I know because she recorded one of my rants and played it for me over next morning's coffee. It was both humbling and glorious: not many people can talk nonstop for five minutes and not utter one complete coherent sentence.

 

But she had a way of talking that soothed the wizards inside my head into relative calm, like she was Buddha and they were lucky limbs of the banyan tree in whose shade legend says He first realized enlightenment.

 

It was, ironically, my ability to listen to her go on at length that so impressed her.

 

"Most people don't like this stuff," she'd said. "If I had a dollar for every time someone said 'that's too deep for me'..."

 

I'd up my meds on those first dates so my voices and I could keep my mouth shut, letting me listen to her with properly rapt devotion. I was very much for her falling in love with me and was prepared to be that person even if I wasn't.

 

It worked. It helped that she was on the outs with her roommates and loved my fortress of solitude with its TV always on but silent. How manipulative is it that I didn't tell her about my mental condition until we'd crawled into bed after moving her stuff into my apartment? Three bicycles and seven boxes aren't all that much stuff but their inertia helped her accept the news, I'm sure.

 

For awhile, I got a lot of work done. She'd go to her espresso job, I'd watch silent TV until it pronounced just the right absurdity for a cartoon about a talking bellybutton, I'd take my meds just in time and just enough to be gracious and attentive without drooling when she got home, and love lay in our basket like a happy heap of fruit.

 

I kept my hands busy, for idle hands are the schizoidevil's workshop just as idle lips are the devil's mouthpiece, but the voices would find their way out through my fingers and I would become a sign language interpreter for the inner deaf, something that the psych meds worsened, since at higher doses they trigger Tardive Dyskinesia. Even though TD is mostly about the lower face, not the hands, the fact that my mouth moved more and more in silent muttering while my hands worked out intricate debates with each other, finger-pointing premises and gnarling each other in discursive knots, only made the voices that more visible if not yet audible to her.

 

I knitted, and drew, and hummed songs under my breath to camouflage the truth. But the scarves I knitted were Mobius strips, I drew endless crow flocks of v's, and the songs grew louder. By the second week she'd had her first meeting with the voices.

 

It wasn't too bad. They're entertaining at first. Sort of like stand-up comedy but with the tape oddly spliced. Eventually, several tapes are running at once and not only don't I make any sense but the frustration comes out. It sounds angry and frightens people although I am emphatically harmless. I don't have a paranoiac bone in my body, because despite being schizophrenic I am frightfully sane. I know the voices in my heads are just hallucinations. I know that I'm not really Superman or The Pious Penitent. But my voices think they're the real deal, and it frightens people to hear Superman gripe about all the kryptonite in the water that keeps him from flying or stopping bullets with his hands.

 

Worse than the anger is the wretched self-pity that takes over as I grow exhausted several days into a peak cycle. The Pious Penitent is embarrassingly pathetic, and eventually gives way to St. Sorryworm, who makes people fear I'll take my life when actually I'm almost exultant because his presence means the worst is almost over and I'll be normal in maybe two days.

 

But she took it all in with remarkable understanding and, oh, the love. It helped. It really helped. Her love gave me so much strength that I was able to leap small doses with a single bound, stop derailed trains of thought before they went over the cliff, and I could always sedate my sorry self senseless during the worst parts while she looked after things. I'd come out from half a week of stuporous 18-hours-a-day sleep fresh and full of charm. For about ten days a month I was, she said, the most delightful, funny, perceptive, caring soul. But for another ten days I was a nonstop monologue.

The fatal flaw was that she took credit for helping me stay in the Zone of Normality for those ten days or so, and while for the most part she was right, it is not healthy for a sane person to believe they're the cure for a lunatic. Ever wonder how otherwise caring psychiatrists could ruin so many lives with electroconvulsive therapy and, back in the days of Freud, incessant voyeurist forays into a patient's imaginary sex life?

 

Hubris. Pride. Once a person has tasted the power of healing, they're like Jesus starting up a fish'n'loaves franchise. They carry the whole world on their heady little shoulders, and after a while, it cracks. Insanity is infectious, leaves its shadow in the same way that swim suits make tan lines from too much exposure to the sun -- which was brilliant the day she left me.

Two days day before that, Black Friday, winter had pounced on Spokane like a consumerist curse on credit card greed. Snow bansheed all morning until late afternoon. The horizon cleared just in time for a brief hopeful sunset glow before leaving night entirely naked, shivering under stars locked in black ice like snow flakes on a frozen pond, and the temperature dropped close enough to zero you could count it on one mitten.

 

Next morning brought more clouds and more snow, and it would've been great fun in a winter wonderland if the windchill weren't 21 below.

 

I'd taken to going into the laundry room and yakking at the dryers full of tumbling clothes. It gave her a break but made my reappearance all the more confirmation of the simple truth: I was driving her nuts.

I offered to leave, go hang out at Starbucks, but she said I was likely to get into trouble, and she was right. Wild weather, anything extreme, makes me worse and the cops less patient. A wild man seems all the wilder for stomping into Starbucks with a snowstorm behind him.

 

She left instead, laptop in an arctic backpack. But she didn't really want to sip an over-priced latte and socially network or whatever it is we do online these days. She wanted to be home, if not with me, at least with Philistine and Satie, doing yoga.

 

"There ain't room enough in this clown for the both of us," I'd joked when she returned, weary, patient, and tense.

 

The next day the weather turned inside out. A warm Chinook wind churned blue sky and crazy clouds to a tropical 46 degrees, and the world melted faster than a Hollywood set change. Both of us were buoyed up, ebullient, I was quiet without being chained, enthralled relatively speechless, and we walked outside holding hands, dressed for rain (the gutters rained beaded curtains of sunlight), bought rainbow trout from Safeway's on a whim, and took the long way home, the wind whiffling about like invisible dogs wanting to play. She talked at fascinating length about how the sun was so bright that it was invisible, how even if you stared directly at it, fearless of going blind, it would obscure itself in a second behind a blob of greenish glare, how the stars at night are more visible to us, so many light-leagues away, than they are to the residents of their orbiting planets, for we can look at them all night without going blind.

 

I listened like a priest on morphine, soaking in her verbiage like a fish brought home from the aquarium shop and let loose in its new, more ample microcosm.

I told her that being with her was like being a fish in water, and her eyes lacquered, limpid with love despite already being tearful from the rasping wind.

 

We made love as soon as we got home. I battered the trout and fried them as she bathed. We ate, Philistine enjoying a platter on the floor, Satie in the other room, protected from the horror of us eating fish.

 

"Being in love is crazy enough," she'd said, quietly, looking down at her plate. "Keeping you from crazy. It's driving me nuts... insane. I'm scared for my sanity."

 

There was absolutely nothing I could say. Inside, I could hear my selves gnawing the truth like rabid puppies with new chew toys, but I held my tongue.

 

She was moving in with her Mom. Her cousin would come over and pack up her stuff. She loved me. Like a... like... she loved me. It was impossibly cruel, she said, and that was all she could manage to get out before the tears took over. She put on her boots and coat. She hesitated at the door, and looked at me with that courage people find when they must face the facts, and I saw in her eyes what a lonely life I had ahead of me, and how I should save the past year in some clean safe place in my mind.

 

"Philistine will miss you," I said, unable to utter how I felt without melting. She left, I got up, watched her walk the hallway toward the stairs, and her snow boots were clogs on a spring day and she was just going for a ride and would be home in two hours. I held that thought until I was sure she couldn't hear me, then let loose.

 

It finally dawned on me today that Philistine is lonely. He and I are very close but human company is so... human. He wants a companion that doesn't talk all the time. It's time I started collecting cats.