A Madness Foretold : Part 1 (Brainstorm Quarterly (In)Sanity)
“How are you finding your classes Aurore?”
I had told her to call me that because it comes close to my name and means the same thing. I’m meeting with the Law School dean about my progress… rather, my lack of. I arrived late for this semester and have been in a halfhearted fight with some lecturers who won’t let me into their classrooms because I TOLD them I was late. If I had snuck in quietly quarter way through the semester none of this would be happening. I am hoping to use my charms to get Madame Brais to coerce them into letting me sit for the exams. I haven’t really been to class either. I’ve been locked in my room using the English channel for white noise…and the noise has been white! Sometimes it’s talk shows by that guy who does Survivor and that Ricky Lake who used to be good at talking but now excitedly interrupts her guests as if scared that at any moment someone will tell her the show has been cancelled. I find myself waking from an illusion to catch entertainment news about American celebrities.
Once in a while I float out of my thoughts to find that I had been watching Days Of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless, shows I am surprised are still on with characters who have all slept with each other and really just stare awkwardly at the screen waiting for the all-powerful scriptwriter to kill them off. During the weekend I switch to one of the French channels and watch an omnibus of The Simpsons, Family Guy and Cleveland Show/American Dad. When I have time I read through some Law book or another, always with a bunch of highlighters in hand, hoping to make the words bleed rainbows.
Well, some lecturers wouldn’t let me in their classes.
I wonder about my French accent as I speak. She seems to understand what I am saying, so I suppose I am a successful fraud.
“I wanted to talk to you about that. It seems we can’t register you for this semester since you came late.”
No! She has to be on my side! My friend told me to cry if I have to, if I don’t pass this semester then I have either failed my year abroad or confined myself to Québec City, much longer than I can stand. None of these options seem viable. I remember my inability to cry; I have to find another way.
“I didn’t come late of my own volition.”
I announce, thinking Africa > Kenya > Elections, things she can Google and confirm but won’t have to because I am so convincing she will believe anything I say…a half-truth will do! Halftruths always do!
Look, it’s an election year in my country and there was some violence in Kisumu and that delayed me a bit, obviously. Nothing I could do about electoral passions boiling over!
I don’t think anything on my file says I am from Nairobi. Even if it does, my father was directly involved in the Kisumu nominations… so involved, in fact, he didn’t seem to notice me stay home a while longer!
“That is unfortunate! Why didn’t you call or email?”
I don’t understand why she won’t just call the lecturers now and tell them I will be sitting for the damned exams! I aced Constitutional Law last year, without ever stepping into a class and given the fact that I sat almost half way through a different exam before realizing I had not signed up for Maritime Law all together. I don’t see why I am being barred from the set of frivolous non-entities that I picked for this semester! Something wet slides down my right cheek and then I become an incoherent English speaking puddle that she is struggling to comfort. Backup is called, phone calls made and my peaceful non-existence shattered forever. I will be seeing the school’s only English-speaking psychologist on Wednesday. Until then Madame Brais will feed me, call my room to check that I am breathing and implore me to take a walk in the snow that’s higher than my knees, sludge that somehow gets to my feet every time, and fog that feels like an eternal night club with only a smoke machine and no lights. I will drink one mocha and feel satisfied for a week because the floor of my bedroom is a black hole that threatens to swallow me forever and eating is overrated. It also takes an average of six months for the human body to eat itself, so as long as once a week I ingest something, I should be able to live a bit longer. No one seems to understand this. The psychologist asks me to see the doctor, after a handful of questions that seem to lead nowhere. I walk to the doctor’s little office and meet the receptionist.
She smiles really wide; it means nothing.
“I was in Kenya in 1990. My sister and I were on safari there. I would love to go back! Such a beautiful country.”
I was born in 1990, I manage to say. I don’t even know if the words come out because I am crying again. I don’t know if it’s because I regret being born or I miss that place I was in before birth, or the innocence of childhood, or Kenya. Maybe I am jealous that she gets to remember Kenya in 1990 when I don’t and we were both there! All I know is something this lady said is making me cry and she might never talk to another patient again after this! The doctor will see me now; this irks me because all I want to do is be invisible.
If I had the energy I would shout at him, but there are so many screams stirring in my chest, I am afraid I will burn his face off if I make a sound. So I talk to him as if he is a timid mouse that needs soothing from all that is wrong in this world.
“What are your thoughts on life?”
Is he a doctor or an existentialist philosopher on a secret mission? “He’s trying to find out if you are a suicide risk,” someone says.
We wouldn’t want you to commit suicide here you know. We’d have to honour you in some way so as to make the school not look bad, and like we treat our international students poorly…and that takes money and PR.
He doesn’t say this of course, but the thought of my face plastered all over the Canadian news slotted somewhere between the pothole that the neighbourhood in Montreal is complaining about, and the sandwich fight that is now an attempted murder case because one of the participants was ‘deathly’ allergic to tomatoes, is enough to make me want to smile and say ‘I am all better now.’
Existentialist with empiricist leanings and when I’m really going at it I get a bit solipsistic. I thought I liked Ayn Rand but objectivism isn’t for me.
I shrug. I don’t know how to say that in French, if he needs me to say that in French I will just announce that it is a deep, recalcitrant ennui that has me by my throat. I find it hilarious that I cannot say it in French! Existentialism is inherently linked to Sartre, Empiricism to Descartes; both are French men, there is of course my Kantian Romanticism which remains unaccounted for, and my Camusian Absurdism. He nods his head and smiles. I’ve been using my words as swords lately… mostly because I don’t want to see anyone or smell them or sense their troubles or be interested in their lives. It was Sartre who said that hell is other people; I believe him.
You get to go home with antidepressants.
He doesn’t say this either, just hands me a prescription and asks that I go to the mall and get these drugs. True to form, I go back to my room and switch on the TV, sitting on my bed… the only gravity defying floating island that keeps me from sinking into the black hole. My coat hangs on the door and makes the shadow of a lion. Lions; the laziest of the privileged male species in the world! Human males cut a close second…both are exalted for nothing. This coat is an asshole! And my subconscious is obviously too Sigmund Freud for my own liking.
I had felt such a deep sense of betrayal when I got home and realized that I had just bought a red winter coat. Under the strobe lights of the shopping complex, it had been a delicious tangerine hue…and my skin looks so very edible in tangerine and my English winter coats were no match for the -60 degrees Celsius of Quebec city. I came home and it was red. RED! I loathed the colour! I avoided people who liked it…they always seemed to thirst for blood to dip their toes in. They always had a murderous intensity…I always hit a wall with them; I didn’t know if I had put this wall up, or they had. And here I was with a RED winter coat; if I didn’t hate the mere sight of people I would have taken it back…but now this is what shielded me from sharkjawed snowflakes that yearned to bite into my flesh.
The phone rings…my room phone never rings. I never gave anyone this number! It’s the first of many of Madame Brais’ calls…calls to make sure that if I feel like killing myself I do not.
“Suicide is alarming. Suicide creates alarm. Please, don’t kill yourself”.
I do not feel like killing myself…I wonder if maybe I feel like killing myself but I’m the only one who doesn’t know, and one day I will wake up and find a knife in my chest and scream ‘You Bitch!’ at my own betrayal. I was once friends with Yukio Mishima, and I have half-heartedly asked people who disappoint me to consider suicide by sepukku; a sword to your spleen! I have casually said a sword to your spleen.
“How do you feel about going home?”
I do not relish the fact. Sure, I hate Law School and this place, and if I had energy to spare I would hate everyone…I hate this place so much I will not die here! But going home? I count my words before I say them.
Listen, my dad has a lot on his mind and I am not good at failing in anything in case you haven’t noticed…
“You hate what you are doing here.”
It’s been weeks I think, of being cajoled into seeing the psychologist once or thrice in a week, and calls from Madame Brais and finally convincing myself to buy the drugs as long as I bought art supplies as well. I don’t need a doctor; I know how to get myself out of a funk. Usually some writing, some drawing, some painting and sunshine do the trick; I’ve been here before in England.
“Your drawings are incredible.”
I smile at the compliment; I’m not good at swallowing them.
I’ve never been to an art class in my entire life. I do love art galleries though.
I suppose I am too tired to be my usual guarded pithy self.
“We have an art school, you can go there and try it and see how you feel about it.”
The thought of being in a place with people makes me want to crawl back into my room. I don’t know why I can’t stand the sight of anyone anymore. I shower at 4 am because no one is around then. It takes so much energy to pull myself together enough to walk to the vending machine and buy something to eat. When I do I feel like Batman…as if I have to leap from shadow to shadow to avoid being seen or recognized or pulled in by humanity. And here is Marcel, the psychologist…with his eyes always prying into me, and his Québécoise English always curious in his tongue, like a glass of wine being tasted and judged insufficient, and his valiant efforts to get me to be comfortable and talk. I always imagine what I will tell him when I am on my bed…but by the time I levitate mercurially into his office I am so tired and angry at having seen people that I do not want to say anything.
“Can I buy one of these drawings?”
Why would someone want that particular sketch? It’s a woman being accosted by humanity; they have no mercy on her. She is naked and on her knees, holding her head to the ground begging to be left alone but a crowd gathers anyway; staring at her with their lives. I look up at him; is he a schadenfreude? I never look up at him. I am always looking at the collection of stones that he has in a bowl, or the ‘primitive’ statuettes he’s lined up from some Inuit collection or outside the window. Today he’s won something…my curiosity.
“I love sketches…they seem more authentic and imperfect…more artistic.”
I stare blankly at him. Who am I to judge if he derives pleasure from other people’s pain? I had learnt the word when I was ten, watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire; it had felt delicious in my mouth. I think of Schopenhauer…Arthur, I call him, as if we had known each other intimately; He had said that to envy was human but to savour schadenfreude was devilish. People eat all kinds of things on this earth, things you couldn’t put on a menu. Some people eat shame, others pain, others eat curiosity and imagination, others still ambition. I had always held tight to these pieces of me, wore my shame like a crown and wielded my curiosity and ambition like a grenade… would today be the day I give my pain away? Perhaps he can rid me of it.
“You’re very artistic…even the way you talk…”
He announces softly to me, even though I barely speak to him. This is where it’s going. I could now announce that I am either Salvador Dali incarnate or his secret lovechild with Sam Beckett, which, though empirically and scientifically impossible…pfft science! Or I could nod my head and say something…milder. I had told him before that I pictured myself sliding on the snow and cracking my head open…and the thing that displeased me most about this possibility was that my red blood would stain the white snow and I personally found the contrast between red and white devastatingly ugly.
“I think I have a high functioning schizotypal personality disorder.”
I sigh softly. Let’s move this along then shall we? If you want to eat my pain then here it is. Either he doesn’t know what that is or is curious as to how I would come to that conclusion. I do not tell him that I first suspected it when I was four years old, that at seven I was half convinced I was a sociopath. He pulls out the DSMV and I continue to talk; I want to get to the part when we sing kumbaya and dance around a fire.
I feel cajoled into emotional bonds, including those forged by my family. I don’t think I’ve ever made a friend in my life… I’m just put in an awkward position where someone decides we’re friends and I have to play along because I don’t quite understand the rules. I sometimes wonder how I would feel if I didn’t feel so responsible for everyone else’s feelings. Would I love them? Is that sense of responsibility love? That sense of having to shield them and/or comfort them from the harshness of this world? I do not like intimacy…I find it to be violent and invasive. I don’t think I am delusional; it’s just that everyone else thinks in a linear manner and I think…laterally, for lack of a better word. I think in explosions and expanses, and they think in straight lines. I also happen to think that I’m simply ahead of my time but would have been better placed in the past. I believe in William James’ multiverse theory; that I inhabit the same space/time continuum as Arthur Schopenhauer and Frantz Fanon. I believe the secret to immortality is in art and writing. I do not like the colour red or people who do. Sometimes I ask them if they like the colour red…other times I just KNOW that they like the colour red, and I avoid them as if they want to crush my heart in their hands just to use it as a stress ball. I hate the fact that I am going to be successful and that this success is going to be mine alone; that there are people who will be left behind, that I will have to donate to charities and volunteer so that I do not feel bad about my own success. I want everyone to succeed; to this extent I believe I am an anarchocommunist…or at least that’s what Malatesta told me
He looks up from the book, nodding his head
He, Bakunin and I hang out sometimes…so I suppose he is.
I don’t mention that Malatesta died in 1932, I don’t even remember when Bakunin died…and I shrug away the mention of my arguments with Kropotkin about anarcho-communism. I love the DSM-V; The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. I sometimes like to leaf through it and laugh at what is considered madness. Schizotypal personality is characterized by irrationality and intimacy avoidance. I’ve never cared much for the bounds of rationality, because I am always trying to stretch them. Intimacy avoidance…I could write the book on how to do it while looking like you’re an open book; hiding in plain sight is always the best option.
“Your intonation… it’s flat.”
I am too tired to pepper my voice with false hope.
Part of Schitzotypal personality disorder, I point out.
“Also part of Asperger’s.”
He adds, as if seeing me for the first time. Have I heard of Asperger’s before?
“It’s in the autism spectrum… sort of anyway.”
He explains. Marcel flips through the DSM to the Asperger’s page. I can’t be wrong about myself can I? But then, he’s the one who went to school and studied these things. Autism? My phone is in the habit of ringing. I once looked for the plug that makes it function but couldn’t stomach the thought of Lise, as Madame Brais now has me calling her, bursting through the door because I didn’t pick up my phone. My room has been mine alone since I got here…and my paintings are here now; happy paintings about drowning boats and women who have the heads of chickens and the proportions of tsunamis, paintings about the darkness that I sink into in order to forget my existence, the way I find the world distasteful, the aches I would have felt had I not met the one person who understood most of me. My phone is ringing…I brave the troubled sea that is my carnivorous floor and reach for it; the journey tires me. It always feels like sharp pieces of my broken mind seer onto the soles of my feet when I step on the floor.
It’s my big sister; she convinced apartment security to give her my room number. This isn’t particularly shocking. I come from a tribe of Amazons. Where we get the strength to trudge through whatever is on our path, I do not know. Tears on my part; I never wanted to disappoint anyone.
“Come home. We love you.”
I have never known love to give one freedom. To the best of my knowledge love is always used as a noose around one’s neck; do not go too far from us or you will die of it. This was the tag at the end of the tether; I was being pulled back into place. If you’re going to die do it to my face! I can’t even speak past the joy of hearing her voice and the reminder that I have a family that I need to take care of. I picture my niece at the funeral. The first time I met death I was seven years old. I stared at my uncle, ashen and sleeping in a suit, and I wondered when he would wake up and stop everyone from crying; I do not want that for her. I picture my best friend shouting
“I can’t believe this bitch is dead!”…
I always die before he does; I always leave people behind.
I whisper through my tears. I was going home. I had no energy to fight her or argue. I was going home.
“How do you feel about going home?”
More like how do I feel about you emailing my family and scaring them into demanding that I return? I do not say this, I smile… I always smile; that is where all my secrets go.
Good… I mean I’m a failure and I will cause them nothing but trouble…but they asked for it.
“What will you do once you get home?”
“With your life, that is.”
Life is meaningless, it doesn’t matter.
But you should do it anyway,
Swear if I could wring the optimism out of you Mohandas!
I hide this silent conversation with Mohandas Gandhi behind a deliberate smile. I can tell my answer is insufficient; he is searching for something, some sign that he has succeeded in our interactions.
“Are you going to go back to Law School?”
I hadn’t thought of it. I would want to finish what I started…but…
I realize now that the reason my floor was a gaping black hole was because my floor was really a metaphor for my Law career. I already had a job lined up and a future as an ICC judge just waiting to unfold, if I did not get out now, then I would never get out.
“Will you go to Art School?”
I think of the art schools at home. Nothing comes to mind. Will Art School even have me? What will I tell them? That I started drawing because I was depressed and my schadenfreude psychologist thinks I am talented even though his own taste in art is a bit questionable? I think of smiling my way back to a London art institution with my “I’m an ethnic, black girl from Africa with a dream of greatness and you want me to be your alumna if you’re going to keep luring Africans to study here” face. It didn’t get me into Oxford Law (I suppose their quota was filled) but it got me into an English Law and French Law degree…so who’s to say it won’t get me into a Fine Arts degree?
I would love to go to Art School.
I would also love to see my father’s face when I burn the possibility of being an ICC judge in his face and ask him to pay for me to study Art. My father… I didn’t want to disappoint anyone yet here I was! I am ashamed. I have to go back home, I am told. What will I tell my family?
“The best thing you can do now is be with your family, see the sun…”
Remember you owe them a responsibility to be happy and content with a life you’re not a fan of; he doesn’t say this. He also doesn’t say
I think they would fire him if he did. He, however, offers me one of the rocks from his collection. I think of my sister always comically shouting ‘Tarusa Mawe!’ (We will throw rocks) whenever someone doesn’t bend to her will. I take it.
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