Mangoes

Chapter 4

It’s been an hour. I stare up at my ceiling fan spinning lazily and watch as the blades blur into a single disk. I’ve turned on a soft white lamp and the colors of the room feel alive, breathing with me, glowing beautifully across my vision. The album covers on my walls begin to pulsate and ripple with colorful geometric patterns. I feel stoned, like I’ve taken a heavy dose of edibles. I close my eyes but the visuals remain, swirling on the inside of my eyelids. When I open my eyes, the visuals have intensified. I stare down at my body. I’m wearing an oversized tee shirt, and can see a cluster of spots on my inner forearm. I lift my arm and bring it closer to my face. I squint at the markings, about the size of dimes, bunched together in a honeycomb pattern. I scratch at them, then see that more have appeared on the back of my opposite hand. I recognize these. I sit up, batting at the dots, trying to wipe them off my skin, away from me, out of me. This can’t be happening. I watch as they spread across my exposed skin. I tear off my shirt in a single motion, throwing it in a pile on the floor. There are more. Across my belly, my chest, they’ve populated my entire torso. These are mango flies.

I’m shaking, holding my arms out at my sides so as not to touch my own body. How can this have happened? Mango flies aren’t native to the American Midwest. There’s no way one could have laid all these eggs without me noticing before. I open my bedroom door. Mom is dead asleep on the couch. I rush into the bathroom and grab my safety razor. I unscrew the top and the razor blade falls out into the sink. I pick it up. It’s not sterile, but I don’t care. I just need these things out of me. I begin cutting little X marks in the skin over each larva, just deep enough into my arm that I can maybe squeeze them out with some pressure. I press and press, blood cascading down my forearm, dripping from my elbow into the sink, splattering crimson against the porcelain. I begin to hyperventilate. Nothing is coming out. They must be deep. I slice through to my subcutaneous fat, bubbling pink and metallic-smelling. I groan.

“Bee? What are you doing?” My mother is at the bathroom door with a horrified expression on her face. “Put that down.”

My hands are shaking. Blood drips down the razor and onto my fingers. I feel lightheaded and nauseated. I drop the razor into the sink. I hear blood rushing in my ears like a freight train coming right at me before I fall over and black out. 

***

I wake up in the hospital, this time in a private room. A nurse is placing bandages over the cuts on my arm. It throbs with the pressure, alleviated only slightly by who-knows-what in my IV. There’s a cop standing at the door, arms crossed, head down. Mom is sitting in a large reclining chair and talking to someone I don’t recognize. He isn’t wearing scrubs but he has a nametag and a clipboard. He’s writing vigorously as she speaks. Mom’s eyes are swollen and red and she’s clutching a wad of tissues. She looks over at me and sobs, “My God, Bee. What happened?”

I try to speak, but a creaky sound comes from my throat instead. I squeeze my eyes shut. I can still see the swirling geometry on the inside of my eyelids. I remember the pill. I opt not to say anything at all.

“They want to send you back to the psych ward,” Mom says. 

The man with the clipboard steps toward the foot of my bed. “Bee, do you know why you’re here?”

I nod. 

“You’re very lucky that your mom was there to call 9-1-1. Once a bed opens up on the sixth floor, we’re going to take you up there for a 72 hour hold. Unfortunately, you don’t have a say in the matter. Do you understand?”

I nod again. The nurse finishes with my bandages and walks out of the room without a word. 

“I have to leave for work in the morning, sweetheart,” Mom says. “Tomorrow is visiting day. I’m going to stay here until they take you upstairs.” She blows her nose and drops the clump of tissues into a garbage can by my bed. She hugs me tight. Hug her back as my eyes moisten. 

I don’t sleep a bit. Three hours later, a group of nurses enters the room with a wheelchair. They roll me up to the sixth floor in an all too familiar route. One of them whistles the entire way. We make it past locked double doors into the intake room of the ward, and I am asked to take off my clothes to be inspected for injuries. I comply and see that the mango flies are gone, replaced with bright red scratch marks and dried blood across my skin. I sign some papers without reading them, then fill out a menu for the next day’s meals. Last time, no matter what I put on these menus, the kitchen always sent up a random meal. A staff member guides me to my room and I lie down on the stiff mattress. My new roommate is asleep. They turn over to face opposite me. I don’t sleep for another two hours.

***

In the morning I’m woken up by staff doing rounds. I get up, brush my teeth, and go into the day room for breakfast. A behavioral tech I remember from last time sets a tray down in front of me.  It’s sausage links and scrambled eggs. I ordered french toast, but I eat it anyway. I’ve never been a fan of the texture of meat but I can tolerate the hospital stuff. It’s barely meat. 

After breakfast is morning group, where we write down how we’re feeling and make goals for the day. If the social worker running the group recognizes me, she doesn’t let on. She passes out the morning goal sheets. I write “Survive.” in small letters spaced out across the line. I don’t circle any emotions from the list provided. 

We have some downtime before the next group. I sit in the TV room at an empty table. The same game show Mom was watching last night is playing. I grab a floppy rubber pencil and a blank sheet of paper. My therapist has told me to journal a dozen times before, but I’ve never done it. She always says it will be the best way to organize my feelings in a way that makes sense to my left brain. The left brain-right brain thing isn’t true, but it’s a useful metaphor, and she comes back to it nearly every session. I begin writing, flaccid lead bending against the page.

I feel

Isn’t that enough? It really encapsulates the entire issue. The problem is that I feel things and the solution is medication and therapy.

I feel wrong. Like I can’t do anything right and anything I do will always be tainted by the fact that I have done it.

I draw a small cartoonish pill capsule and shade it in lightly. Someone turns up the volume on the TV and I listen in for the first time. A new episode is starting and the host is introducing the show. He’s wearing a gaudy patchwork suit of red and yellow fabric. He has a grin that makes me shiver. “Welcome to HeadScratcher,” he says, “where we bring together four scientists from around the world to compete–or collaborate–to win our cash prize. What’s the twist? Nobody knows the rules! Well, I know the rules. The contestants don’t.” He gestures to a large seven segment display screen behind him, the kind that old clock radios have, with an eerie green glow illuminating the number one followed by six zeros. “We start with a pot of one million dollars. Each player has two different buttons in front of them: one red, one blue. They may press them at any time, but none of them knows what each button does and when. With each button press, contestants must answer a trivia question about one of the others’ fields of expertise!” He turns to a second camera, using his hand to hide his mouth from the first. He whispers, “Let’s introduce the contestants!” He gestures to a group of people walking onto the stage and taking their spots at each of four rectangular podiums in an arc around the stage. There is a cut to a camera trained on the first contestant. He is tall and thin, wearing a green sweater and khaki cargo pants. A narrator explains that he is an entomologist from Seattle who studies the life cycles of local aquatic invertebrates. Next is a vulcanologist from Manila who studies the sublimation of oceanic crust, followed by a condensed matter physicist from Johannesburg studying soft matter in magnetic fields and a nephrologist from Baltimore who works on gene editing in pig kidneys.

The camera switches back to the host. “Alright, everyone, do we all know the rules?” He makes an exaggerated facial expression whose underlying emotion I have no hope of identifying. The scientists each shake their heads. Two of them mouth “no”. “Good! That’s just how we like it. Let’s begin. You have thirty minutes.” A clock appears on the screen, counting down. Immediately, a disembodied narrator announces that contestant three has pressed their green button. The host turns toward him, saying, “That was fast! Light speed!” The physicist smiles back at him and tells the audience with a smirk that someone had to do it first. The host asks a question about the spawning process of sea urchins. The physicist answers correctly and ten dollars leaves the pot, appearing on the screen in front of him.

“This is my favorite show,” another patient says, turning in her chair to look at me. She has bright red hair and a shirt with characters from a Tim Burton movie on it. “What’re you writing?” She sits up straighter, straining to see my paper. I instinctively cover it. 

“Just journaling. Kinda private.” 

“Cool, cool. Hey, you should pay attention to the show. This part is really good.”

“You’ve seen it already?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen every episode. Really captivating stuff. Not sure why.”

I look back at the screen just in time to see the vulcanologist press both of their buttons at the same time. She answers a question about superconductors. The pot drops to zero and the vulcanologist’s screen displays $999,990. A graphic of confetti flashes across the screen. The host exclaims that he’s never seen someone press both buttons before. The entomologist presses his blue button and misses a question about transverse faults. No money changes hands.

“I really love science. I think it’s cool to have such smart people on the show,” the girl with red hair says. 

“I’m a mathematician,” I say. 

“Really? That’s so cool! Is that like quantum physics? I love physics. Did you know there’s a theory that you can use the power of manifestation to attract things into your life? It has something to do with super-positions, I think.” 

I nod along. I have heard of manifestation. I took one quantum mechanics as an undergrad and I hated it. When I told my grandpa about it, he talked extensively about his theories. He was a retired engineer, but claimed he always wanted to be a physicist, lamenting that the establishment would never accept his radical ideas about magnetic monopoles and the like. He sent in letters about his theories to faculty at all the local colleges anyway. He never heard back except in the form of a cease and desist letter from a professor at my school. Even he thought manifestation was bullshit. The red haired girl and I continue to watch the TV until they break for commercials. 

“What do you think the rules are?” I ask.

“Nobody knows for sure,” she says. “There are like, forums online where they talk about it but no one’s gotten it right.”

“Do you think it’s random?”

“I hope not. That would ruin the mystery, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know, random things can still be valuable. It would be kind of lazy, though.”

The red haired girl is quiet for a moment, and then says, “You know, you remind me of someone. He’s always got really cool perspectives on things.”

For some reason, the comparison to a man gets to me. I know she probably didn’t mean it, but it still stings. 

“What’s your name?” I ask. “Mine’s Bee.”

She twists around in her chair and offers me her hand. “I’m Ruby.” We shake. 

“Did you dye the hair because of your name, or did you choose your name because of the hair?” 

“What?” 

I cringe, remembering that most people, in fact, do not choose their own names. I wonder if I’ve just outed myself. In my unshaven state, I doubt it makes a difference. 

“I mean, is your name Ruby because you like to dye your hair red, or is it a nominative determinism thing?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She turns back to the TV. We don’t talk again for the remainder of the episode. The entomologist wins, taking home $640,720. The rest is divided between the nephrologist and the physicist. The vulcanologist goes home empty handed.

***

After lunch is visitation. It’s the first time I’ve seen my parents in the same room since the divorce. Mom tells me about a student at school who’s been acting up. Dad tells me about his supervisor who he hates. I mention watching HeadScratcher and ask Mom if she was watching it the other night. She says she was, that it’s her favorite show. She tells me how fascinating it is. Dad tells me to go to groups and suggests I beat up the biggest person in here. I say that I am the biggest person in the ward. Mom gives me a bag of lifesaver gummies smuggled past the nurse’s station from a vending machine downstairs. We hug, and then it’s time to go. All the family members line up at the door and the staff let them through. I wave to Mom and Dad and return to my room. My roommate is still there. They haven’t gotten up at all today. I hope they’re okay. I climb into bed and shut my eyes. I see a seven segment display on the back of my eyelids ticking down, down, down.