(TW hospitalization)
There were no good books in the psych ward.
Every work that sat piled on the shelf behind the nurses’ desk was as battered and stained with unknowable substances as you would expect. Pages were torn or missing completely, and needless to say, there wasn’t a hardcover in sight.
There were clearance section romance novels, their covers bearing muscular cowboys; travel guides to wildly unappealing destinations like Mount Rushmore and Boise, Idaho; John Grisham knockoffs likely sold to the hospital by libraries for ten cents apiece once they were too unsightly to even be lent out for free. The one book in passable condition was a single copy of Crazy Rich Asians, coveted by whichever lucky patient had gotten ahold of it and treated with the utmost reverence by the rest of us, the only article of slightly above-average entertainment from the outside world.
In the rec room, Law and Order: SVU played on the TV 24/7. Olivia Benson chased down child molesters while we did word searches with broken crayons in our green scrubs and hospital socks.
I spent my first hours in the psych ward passed out on my twin-sized mattress. My sixty-four-year-old roommate Wendy lay with her back to me a few linoleum tiles away, facing the window. At lunch, we sat together and she told me I had nice hair as we picked at colorless piles of steamed vegetables.
The quiet was nice for a while. The clack of fingers on keyboards from the nurses’ desk, soft chatter from the rec room down the hall, the odd shower running in one room or another. I laid in the semidarkness of my room, no earbuds, no phone, my neck light from the absence of its usual gold chain. In my room, I sat on the windowsill next to Wendy’s bed with my head leaned against the glass and watched people walk their dogs down Lake Shore Drive twelve stories below until a nurse stood in the doorway and told me to get down.
At phone time that evening, I called my mom. She’d flown to Chicago that afternoon to see me, and I apologetically explained to her that the hospital had a no-visitors policy during the pandemic. I called my sister and as she told me about her day the claustrophobia that filled me from head to toe was paralyzing. I talked to a friend from the city in the last few minutes of my allotted time. She asked me what it was like there and I said okay, but there’s not much to do. She offered to stop by and drop some books off at the front desk for me, which books did I want? Surprise me, I said.
After making my calls, I sat in the rec room writing the phone numbers I’d just dialed over and over on the back of a color-by-number with a rubber pencil. On the TV, the Law and Order opening sequence started for the millionth time that day. Snack before bed was a cup of orange juice and Lorna Doone cookies.
The next afternoon I was called to the nurses’ desk to pick up three freshly-bought paperbacks and one of my friend’s sweatshirts. I skipped snacktime to pull on the sweatshirt over my scrubs, slipping my frigid hands into the sleeves. She’d gotten me The Odyssey, which I knew but hadn’t read; The Passion, a slim little book with nice cover art that she’d told me was one of her favorites; and The Road, which I’d never heard of. I didn’t think I had the capacity for a five-hundred-page poem in my current mental space, and I wanted to save The Passion, which I was most looking forward to reading, for after I was discharged. So I scanned the back of The Road and headed for the rec room.
On the way there a cute nurse stopped me and asked what I was reading. I showed him and said I hadn’t started it yet. He hadn’t heard of it. He asked me how old I was, like everyone else there did, and when I said nineteen he looked sad, like everyone else there did. I was the youngest person there by at least a full decade.
I asked him what he liked to read, and like every other Londoner, his favorite book was Harry Potter. He’d grown up in England after his mom emigrated from a little seaside town in Nigeria. I asked him why on Earth he’d come here over London or the Nigerian coast. Why did you? he asked. That wasn’t what I meant, but I let it go. I thanked him for talking to me like a regular person, which none of the other nurses did, and he said it was his pleasure, but he hoped never to see me again. I promised he wouldn’t.
The Road is the story of a father and his young son in a post-apocalyptic United States, traveling a world so thoroughly razed by some unexplained event that the sun hardly permeates the permanent layer of ash in the sky. They’re headed for the coast for no reason other than to have a destination to move toward every day. The book is dark, and Cormac McCarthy writes in nondescript sentence fragments. As I read it, I began to understand the appeal of Law and Order in a place like a psych ward, and at the grimmest parts, I came to appreciate the need for books like Crazy Rich Asians. It’s nice to know some people have bigger problems than you do, and it’s equally nice to know that some people have smaller ones. This is a conversation between father and son in The Road:
Father: “Real life is pretty bad?”
Son: “What do you think?”
F: “Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here.”
S: “Yeah.”
F: “You don’t think that’s so great.”
S: “It’s okay.”
I cried for the first time in bed that second night, because for the first time in my life I was actually homesick. Not homesick for my mom’s house in Delaware or my dad’s house in Colorado or my friend’s apartment that I’d been staying at in the city, not even homesick for my suburban Maryland hometown. I just missed outside. I missed the sunlight stinging my eyes, unobscured by dirty window panes; cool breezes that didn’t come from a noisy A/C unit; the din of garbled 808s coming from a Honda Civic’s cheap subwoofers at a stoplight; hot, sticky evenings waiting at the bus stop with a plastic bag full of leftovers. I missed wearing shoes and drinking water out of something other than a styrofoam cup.
Why did I want so badly to get back out into a world that was the very reason I wound up in a psych ward in the first place? I don’t know, I just did. A lot of bad things have happened, but I’m still here. The last paragraph in The Road goes like this:
Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
I have to be melodramatic now, because McCarthy reminded me that life is precious, all of it. When life is lost it doesn’t come back; all we have is what’s left over. McCarthy’s characters must know this, because even when they could very well be the last living organisms on Earth, they know to keep going. In their world, everything is dead, but they still remember that they matter, and so do I.
I remember when I’m on the phone with my sister, when I see spiders in my bathroom, when my mom texts me pictures of my dog, when I think about the person who’s sitting at my old seat in front of Law and Order: SVU.
The minute I stepped into the emergency room two nights prior, I didn’t want to be there anymore. Then I read The Road and I no longer needed to. If a man and his son can walk across a barren country just to keep existing together, I can find solace in little moments of my own life. They find beauty in their world, so I find it in mine. I find it in the sunlight filtering through my blinds in the morning, the dog that pulls on its leash to sniff me as I pass by, a whole table to myself in the library, new music to listen to at midnight Eastern on Fridays. In morning runs and a cool shower after, a fresh bottle of water, train rides, cooking, picking out a pair of sneakers for the day. Now that I’m looking, I find it everywhere. I don’t know how I could’ve missed it before.
I donated my copy of The Road to the hospital, where it sits behind the nurses’ desk. I hope it surpassed Crazy Rich Asians and assumed the title of Most Interesting Not-Destroyed Book at the Psych Ward. It definitely had what I needed at the time; someone else there could probably use it now. Maybe the nurse from London will recognize it, or Wendy, my old roommate. Or maybe — and this is what I really hope — the person who’s sitting at my old seat in front of Law and Order: SVU right now will pick it out sometime. Whenever they get sick of Olivia Benson, crayons, and Lorna Doone.
