Ericka Russell
Controlled Substance

    According to the brochures, mania lowers inhibitions, incites risky behavior. In layman’s terms, it is the most embarrassing, unhinged state a human can be in. And I would know, I’ve been mortified my whole life.
    It’s April Fool’s Day. I think the emergency room is a set with a live studio audience, so my dad distracts my reality by showing me pennies, asking me to compare the years they’re made. I’m put in a wheelchair and wheeled up to the psychiatric unit with Ericka Mary Caroline Russell 02-01-1996 DOB and allergen (AUGMENTON) wristlets—there is no room to include I don’t like stepping barefoot onto tile after a shower or I have 1-2 coffees every morning before 9am or I prefer to eat lunch early, say 11am.
    I go voluntarily because I think I am being rewarded with a retreat. A writer’s retreat, a sex retreat, an Ayahuasca retreat—who knows! I don’t question it because I’ve just had this unheard of epiphany that everything happens for a reason.
    Blue Eyes, the nurse with blonde hair, glacial eyes, and the smell of cigarettes sits next to me on the tiny bed of my room. I am handed papers, and she goes over the rules quickly but emphasizes how they’d take care of me, they’d make sure I wouldn’t fall, I was safe here. Yes, yes. I sign this? Then I get the drugs? Blue Eyes exists stage right.
    The sheets feel nice right now, starchy but warm and clean. Do I wait for the drugs? Are they in the air ventilation? Is everyone running a little behind? What time is it? Do I sleep first? 
    Blue Eyes returns with a puke bucket holding a roll of toilet paper, No Tears shampoo, a bar of White Marble soap, a comb, a flimsy, soft-bristled toothbrush, and alcohol-free toothpaste. 
Blue Eyes leaves. The stage is set. 
    This is where it gets tricky. Where mania and memory play tag, and I don’t know who’s it.
    I stand in the gas chambers, watch the steam roll up and out of the shower. Beau, my partner at this time, is Jewish, so I need to go through what his ancestors went through. Too, death and rebirth are on my mind, so maybe I can transcend into the next dimension. But the gas doesn’t kill me or even put me to sleep. So, I hold my chin up to the stream and voluntarily waterboard myself. Water gags my mouth, the heat of it burning my throat, my neck, my face. I breathe in water, through my nostrils, all the way into my lungs. I hold. Until I feel like throwing up, or dying. I give myself a moment to gag. I resume. I do this until I can no longer stand, until I aspirate, until I can’t hold myself up anymore.
    Exhausted, unattended, and sitting in the corner of the shower, I finally start to clean myself. But there is LSD in the soaps and shampoos, working its way through my hair follicles, tingling like Nair on open cuts. 
    With no miraculous medical intervention, the water turns cold, the hallucinations suspend, and the LSD seems to have run out. I creep out of the shower onto glossy white tile—a fall risk, you’d think. In neglect of my surroundings, I left the toilet paper sitting next to the stained shower, soaked all the way through. I wipe with the nearest white washcloth—every material, every wall, every tile, every cinder block here is white. Later, I’ll see the nurse who wore a yarmulke—I think her name is Mary but that seems too easy, too B-level of a detail—spraying that same washcloth with stain remover, in front of everyone. Everything here happens in front of everyone. Privacy is not a right or a curtesy, it’s unsafe. And the cancer here is self-inflicted. 
    On my ligature-resistant, tamper-proof hospital bed drilled into the floor is orange sherbet, vanilla ice cream, and chocolate smores malt. I eat my treats up, narrating my eating like describing a porn scene. The hallucinations return; to chase the LSD high, I start eating the alcohol-free toothpaste. Thanks to my narration about “eating out” this toothpaste container, Blue Eyes comes in to stop me. Mania-induced waterboarding: ok. Pornographic narration: not ok. 
    Blue Eyes tells me it is getting to be bedtime, but, for the life of me, I can’t remember what tired feels like.
***
    Mania is like that woman who was attacked and kept walking home, shaken, not realizing there was a knife sticking out of her shoulder, blood staining her dress shirt. 
    The hallucinations felt so real because they were simple, harmless even, at first. Washing my face in the mirror, a man runs like a blur behind me. It’s nothing, I think, I would have heard the apartment door unlock. Or a white cat scurries between my legs. It’s nothing, I think, just your imagination. I recognize I am seeing things, but I always see things: gnats, shadows, someone I think I know, ghosts. How can you see a warning sign like this?
    Mania has epiphany and dopamine holds hands, flirt with utopia. Epiphany: I am famous. Epiphany: there are hidden microphones and cameras in my apartment, watching me for all modern invention. Epiphany: I am the source of love songs, movies, books, fashion, culture. Epiphany: God-like. Epiphany: God.  
    I don’t need sleep—why would I? All the hurt doesn’t hurt anymore. 
The mania is believed to be a nasty beast, insurmountable without medicine, sanity, treatment. But never in my life have I accepted myself so unconditionally, so assuredly.  
    Mania tells me I am the center of the universe, and that would mean there is something after death, I am special, and everything happens for reasons beyond the accidents of atoms. All these stars, no, I could finally see, were constellations.
***
    I found the fragile, yellow newspaper clipping by accident. I was looking for childhood photos to display at my high school graduation party. The clipping is just a thin thing. Just a slip of paper. My grandmother, Caroline, “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” It was Sunday, 12:40pm, after church and lunch, my uncle Eric, barely a teenager, found her. 
    She ended her life in the barn that still stands on my grandfather’s property, the one closest to the house, always visible through the living room window, so close you can see the chipping paint on the antique barn doors. Chipped paint and splintered wood that holds his tools and machines, that I used to try to sneak away to—before I knew—but was always locked, as if some curse would come out and snatch me. 
    All those visits growing up, maybe it did snatch me as I stared through the crack between its two doors and felt the cool breeze blow the smell of sawdust and old rust to me. I can still remember it in my nose, my eyes. 
    That barn always pulled me toward it, and I’d stalk around it, looking for more cracks to get inside. 
    My parents did not tell us Caroline was schizophrenic. Until I ask my mom why Caroline killed herself. It was triggered by a minor dental surgery—anesthesia affects brain activity. My grandfather, Don, had to put metal bars in all their windows because Caroline thought she was being surveilled. The government was after her, her family. So many eyes on her, and no one could see it!
    At church she hung on every word the preacher preached. If he said sell all their possessions and donate their money, then they must, Don. If he said move to a foreign country to help dig wells, then they must, Don. If he said to fast for forty days and forty nights, then they must, Don. They stopped taking her to church. 
    How hard, I wonder, was it to keep her there. 
    I feel like we know each other even though I have to recognize we don’t. I cry whenever I think of her. I miss her like she was once here with me. I miss her like I made her all up in my head and someone told me she isn’t real. I do have her freckles and Irish blood, her love for travel and houseplants, even her nose and strong arms. I like to imagine I have her laugh. But I don’t. I have my mom’s. 
    I never got the chance to try to save her. To keep her here. To say, “I know I can’t see it, but I believe you.” Or, “I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to stay, please. Stay for me.” 
I could say, “We’re not cursed. We matter.”
    How I struggle, losing something I never had.
    It’s hard, carrying the name of a woman I never met. Ericka Mary Caroline. This and the porcelain cat figurines, three wooden candlesticks she whittled, some pictures, a newspaper clipping the size of half a ruler, and my father is all I have left of her. If I stay alive, will that keep her here?
    I think about her most nights, right before sleep. Maybe she knows I’ve cried more over her than anything else. That there is always this extra space next to me in my bed. It’s right there—I promise. I just can’t see it.
***
    The first night in the hospital, after I’ve “showered” and eaten dessert and toothpaste, I spend most of my time trying to escape. I think I have found the exit code. E = M C². Ericka=Mary Caroline²!
    I leave my room to tell the night nurse the code. She isn’t getting it. 
    “E = M C².” I say again and again. 
    “Ericka. It’s time for bed. Please go lay down.”
    I go to my room, shut my door, lay down for a second, close my eyes, reset, then come right back out.
    “Eee. Equals. M. C. Squared.”
    I don’t know for how long we go, but we are equally persistent. “Ericka. It’s time for bed. Please go lay down.” 
    Eventually, I try to fight my way through with brute force, crawling between the nurse’s legs in the doorway. The nurses think me insane, but they, too, are doing the same things over and over again with the same results. 
     “Ericka. It’s time for bed. Please go lay down.”
***
    My in-patient doctors are not gentle, swooping in like vultures, picking at my wounds, flying off again, not back for days. One chuckles in my face when I scream that I am a lab rat. I’m scared. I’ve inferred from the night nurses that the doctors are the ones with the code to escape that I want. So I always try to be sure I say precisely the right things to the doctors. Our conversations are minefields, hysteria, hallucination, insomnia, noncompliance—all mines that could detonate. 
    None of those in charge of my care care to tell me what is going on, how I am experiencing a manic episode, how I am hallucinating in all five senses, how some things are real and some things are not and I cannot differentiate them as if they are flashcards of sight words: nurse-real, nurse-TV show, pill-real, pill-acid, elevator-workers, elevator-stage. I do have the clearance to know shift changes are at 6am and 6pm, visitors come from 6pm-7pm, admitted patients don’t have to wear masks, and my skin is dry because I am showering too much. With my outdated prescription glasses, the masks become the blurry white symbol of sane and insane. 
    Whatever cocktail of medication I am given is about as effective as my grandma giving her pet lab sour cream to treat its seizures. Very routinely I bring my blood-pressure cuff out to the nurses’ station at shift change, before lunch, before dinner, before bed. Constantly, I feel my heart beat like stomps chasing up behind me. 
    I keep crying under the bright fluorescence, in front of my doctors, distancing six feet across the room with masks on. The doctors are one big microscope, and quickly I see I am just another pesty specimen on a slide.
***
    Caroline’s doctors had failed her. She wasn’t on the right medication. They didn’t know how to treat it, her. Today, surely, she would not have killed herself. Doctors are supposed to be better; our brains could be more understood.
    “I wanted them to file a malpractice suit against her doctor. That should not have happened,” my mother explains. “That should not have happened.” 
    And I agree. But it did happen. And I’m so mad and so futile and too late.
***
    I lose track of the days in the hospital. I don’t know how long it has been since I was outside. Still, I cannot sleep. I sleep for two hours and then wake up and try to see if the nurses have any other medications I can take. When they can’t give me anything, I complain of headaches to get Tylenol or Ibuprofen in the hopes I can turn water (over-the-counter pain relief) into wine (a sedative).
    I toss and turn on my thin rubber mattress until I sleep for another two hours. Mostly, I pretend to be sleeping. I lay awake and go through my family tree. Mary, Caroline, Harold, Nancy, Jeff, Terry, Anita, Ginger, Judy, Shannon, Meredith, Cynthia, Rick, Russell, Eric, Evelyn. I stroke my pubic hair like a pet and wait for morning. I count all the rugs in all the homes I’ve ever been in. I walk through memories of family trips—a bridge over manatees floating along, the highest peak in Montana, pina coladas in hollowed out pineapples, a rare blue lobster, Native American burial mounds made of oyster shells.
    When it's finally six in the morning, I can leave my room. I watch the sunrise. I am not allowed to have coffee. I am still uranium buzzing inside the failing walls of coolant. Everyone still wide-eyed around me. All deer and I, headlights.
    The dry, recycled air of the hospital starts to make my lips crack. I pick obsessively at the scrolls of flesh until they tear off and bleed. I pick at my bloody boogers. I ask nurse Travis why my nose won’t stop bleeding, and he says it is because I keep picking at it. I try, but I can’t stop. I pick at the labels on the clothes my father dropped off. I want to get the labels off. I don’t like labels. I keep tearing off my identification wristbands. They print another, another. I pick at the scabs on my legs. I pick at the scabs on my scalp, and the dried, red flakes hang in the strands of my hair like Christmas ornaments. Pick, pace. Pick, pace. Pick, pace.
    I conspire in my room. Undoubtedly, they are giving me meth. I look down on my house shoes—we are to not have shoelaces. My hospital gown has eight strings total.
    I am granted my first visitor day three, day four? Beau lasts ten minutes. Isn’t he taking me home? Take me home. Let’s go! I did everything right, I behaved, I cracked the code! E=MC². Take me with you. Let me get on the elevator. Open the elevator for me. Don’t leave me here. I can’t sleep. The back of my neck hurts. My feet have blisters from pacing. I can’t see well with my glasses. They don’t tell me what medicine I’m taking. Take me home. Please. I’ll be good. I’ll sleep. I promise. Take me home. I promise!
    The next day my father visits, he explains I have to stay here longer. He takes all the photos out of the frames in my apartment and brings them. He tells me to get a marker so I can write down everyone’s name. I am a little kid again with dad and a fat black Crayola. I say, “That’s great grandma Norma holding baby Ericka,” and my dad says, “You’re right, Ericka, good job!” I can’t remember them all, and I blank at the person, stuttering. “It’s okay,” my dad says, “That’s great uncle Bert. Remember.”     “Yes.” I lie. But a fog still has me.
    When I return to my room with all my pictures that I’ll later arrange and rearrange on my bed when I can’t sleep, I see a pile of books, a journal, a word-search book, and a sudoku workbook on my bed. I ask nurse Travis where they came from. My father brought them. 
    I still can’t ask dad where he got them, why he picked them out. “Let’s not talk about that,” he always repeats—about roadkill or someone being teenaged and pregnant or the time I went crazy, and it really did look like there was no coming back. When I thought if no one else can find a way to stop it, I would have to stop it. Stop me.     When I thought, How am I going to have the gall to kill myself?
    Yes, you’re right. Let’s not talk about any of it.
***
    Caroline was born in Fostoria, Ohio. One of those small towns that is always referenced in relation to Toledo (40 miles) and Columbus (90 miles). It is brick, midwestern, reminiscent of quilt shops, local pharmacies, and furniture stores fighting to not look like antique stores. 
    Her family, the Patrick’s, moved from the poverty and famine of Ireland to the American Dream of Irish Need Not Apply. Caroline would meet Don, they would marry and have two boys, Mark would meet Nannette at McDonald’s, and they have three children.
    Caroline died March 19, 1989. Early spring, the same time of year when my mania symptoms started. They say there is a spiritually in numbers, but I’ve long lost the ability to intuit premonitions. Caroline only had 45 birthdays, and, as Lutherans, they didn’t celebrate a single one. 
    There’s a family portrait of all four of them: Don, Caroline, Mark, and Eric. Mark and Eric smile like farm boys, freckles and red hair, unruly and bright. It could be a pose, but it looks like Don is holding Caroline’s hand in place on the table in front of her. Keeping her steady?
    Don remarried, asking for my father’s approval less than a year after Caroline’s death. I don’t like MaryAnn—how could I?—but Don didn’t know what to do. Caroline’s grave has a space to the left for Don to rest. It says it right there: Don Russell 1939 - . The wood carving of the Last Supper is still hanging where Caroline kept it, between the door to the stairway and the pantry. I worry so much more has changed.
***
    My mother almost didn’t marry my father because of his family’s mental health history. Both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are genetic. 
    But the stress of a mother with a child in the womb has a significant role on the child’s mental health. And my mother has understandably carried galaxies of stress in her womb. Carried them more than her babies. 
***
    After eight days of my “voluntary” hospitalization, I move back in with my parents. I am not healed, the mania lingers, clings to me like a cat trying to avoid a bath. I wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, so my father tells me stories, sometimes for hours, until I fall asleep again. 
    Routinely, I ask my father to tell me about Caroline. I know it hurts him, but I let my hurt take import over his, like I always have as a daughter to a father. My father kneels next to his and mom’s bed—it is the only place I can remotely sleep for a long time—and warms my hands in his and tells me about how his mother loved their family trips. How she’d wake up early and pack up the car with blankets, board games, snacks. Then she’d come in and wake him and Eric, and they’d ride for hours and hours from Ohio to Ontario.
    He tells me about how much Caroline loved to catch fish and to eat fish. They’d spend a week in Canada, and all they’d do was catch fish, clean fish, and fry fish. Just the four of them. Fishing in the same five lakes where the three of them still go to in the same aluminum fishing boats. Catching generations of the bass, walleye, perch, and pike that she caught. 
    He sometimes falls asleep, and I’ll almost follow, but the loosening of muscles, the head relaxing into the pillow would snap me back awake. I wake him, he stirs, not angry, and starts all over again. I can’t sleep, and he won’t. 
    That’s the kind of man she raised. The one who told me stories until I fell asleep when I was little, who slept on the bathroom floor with me in our old house because I was scared I might throw up, who would make a pallet to sleep on in my room after I’d watched a scary movie at a friend’s house, who couldn’t hide his fear of injury, mistakes, death, unpreparedness, so I caught on quickly. After the hospital, he was the one who woke up with me every two hours, who drove me around the same country block for hours because I would finally sleep in the car, who helped me brush my teeth and blow my nose and push in my chair to eat because the hospital overdosed me on dopamine, lock-jawed, drooling, catatonic. 
    It took twelve pills a day to help get me back. We got a rainbow weekly morning/night pill holder. I couldn’t keep track of what I was on, which pills needed to be halved or doubled. I basically kneeled over it in prayer each night. Begging it to fix me. 
    Eventually I wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming in agonizing pain. Eventually I could look in the mirror and see a self. Eventually, I found the fight in me was strong enough. Yet, something of myself is still caught on the hinge of that time, I stalk around it, and I try, and I try, but I cannot release it. 
***
    In another time, we’d be soothsayers, deities. Caroline would be alive. She’d see in me what everyone else looks away from.
    We live in a warm hut, smelling of clay soil and charred aspen, our long hair down our backs. Caroline is beautiful. She has this smile that has known so much. There is an infinity behind her eyes. See, our minds are valued, not sick.
    We walk through the forest, a different path every time. The sunlight a kaleidoscope, sun spots like freckles on the skin. My grandmother tells me that as long as you have the sun you are alive. “Light is the opposite of absence,” she says under her breath, straw grass between her fingers. 
    She touches my face, but when I lean in, I get that looming feeling like this will never last. Like you have to catch it but, somehow, it’s already gone. 
    I start to notice that all the frogs are just leaves propelled by the wind. And the hares just plastic bags rustling through the forest floor. The sound of trees aching against one another and the birds sweetening the air stops. 
    And my grandmother, I think I can still see her. But she’s just the empty space next to me in bed. And the rain was just the same tears all over again.
***
    Bipolar is a line so thin, just thin enough to see it. I try to walk along it like a tight-rope or a balance beam of toothpicks.
    After returning to my apartment in June, my parents visit more than ever. This visit, I’m balancing on a chair at an Italian restaurant. This day I am contemplative, quiet. I am not talking too fast or too slow. And my parents are tiptoeing around me, defibrillating questions to try to get a register, a hint. I know my parents will worry about me if I’m not talking enough, not spreading complex sentences along with the butter on the table. But I can’t today. I’m tired.
    I split gruesomely into two. The Ericka who performs, who talks back, who sits up in her seat, who wears earrings, who brushes her teeth, who parrots. The Other stares out the window, down the blue of the sky, at anything but a face. Static. 
    Why can’t you just feel something? Laugh, goddammit. Care about what your family is up to. Listen when people speak. But I can’t. Try, just try. But I have. I tried and tried and tried. I try.
    You’re waiting around for the old you to come back. Don’t you know she’s gone? They’ve killed her? She must come back. She won’t. She won’t. She’s got nothing to come back to. Come back, I say. Try.
    I do. I try. 
    Just let her go, I think, like a twig floating by on water.
    Look at us. We’re old concrete steps leading up to an empty lot. There’s not much left.
    So I fantasize putting on my most plain clothing and walking to some country hillside of Kentucky. I’d find some overgrown, abandoned house. A one-story that’s nothing but chipping white wood planks and broken windows. Ivy and honeysuckle its only curtains. I’d force my way in through a broken window or an empty threshold and say, “Honey, I’m home,” to the gnats and the spiders. 
    I’d find a corner and lay down to rest. Finally, I would not eat, I would not bathe, I would not brush. No one would know where to find me. And I’d just get to fade away into those creaky floorboards. I’d get lost to the worms and the mushrooms and the cobwebs and the liverworts. I’d get lost to sleep. I’d get lost so no one would find me.
    The curse would break, and then I would say, Ericka.
    It’s time for bed.
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Image by Анастасия Быкова from Pexels
Ericka Russell is a full-time instructor of literature, composition, and creative writing at Western Kentucky University. Her publications can be found in Writing on the Edge, Bridge Eight, Asylum Magazine, Feminine Collective, and Knee Brace Press.
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