Humans evolved to reproduce, not to be happy. Only with the advent of consciousness did we decide we needed to be happy. Consciousness, therefore, may have been a mistake.
Pilar Arreba, Ph.D.
I got into the program at the age of thirty-two. I’d been on and off public assistance, had just lost my job (again), and needed a way to pay my rent. I met the criteria: I’d never taken prescription drugs and I was officially, medically, definitely depressed. The doctor said so. I was in her pristine white exam room when she said so, with those pristine white teeth, like the pristine white porcelain of a freshly bleached toilet bowl.
I didn’t hate her though. I hated myself. Or is that too much of a cliché? Depressives can be as sentimental as anyone. Maybe more so. I hated myself. I didn’t want to die though. I was too lazy for that. I just didn’t want the one thing I feared more than death: living with my mother.
The program let me avoid that. The only problem was, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing there. I ate. (When I could.) I slept. (When I could.) I kept a diary, but only because one of the therapists suggested it, for my own use. They weren’t even going to look at it. This is what I wrote on my first night:
“Sometimes it feels like I’m dying. Not from an illness, not physically. Just dissolving. From the outside in. Fading away. I wouldn’t be surprised if my hand passed through a wall one day. I have become insubstantial. I affect nothing. I drift.”
Sentimental, like I said. Depressives are a ridiculous lot. Or maybe we’re prophets, or a diverse collection of Cassandras. Except we don’t speak the truth, just the truth as we know it.
They didn’t give us any drugs. There was no TV. I could get a signal on my phone, but I didn’t have anyone to call. I mean, except my mother, but I didn’t. She knew I was there. She didn’t need to know anything else. It was a sort of sleep-away camp for depressives. Except we didn’t stay, or not all of us. Not the whole time. We disappeared, one by one. When you fell too deep, you’d get removed. Moved into the second phase of the program. There were thirty-eight of us to start. A week in we were down to thirty. Three weeks it was twenty-five. Six weeks it was just me and my roommate.
I didn’t know if that was a coincidence. Maybe depressives are better at holding onto one another, using each other as flotation devices. Six weeks and two days and my roommate went down. Her name was Pearl — yeah, it’s that old fashioned. She said she was German and Chinese, but all I knew was that she had too much hair and never rinsed out the sink after she brushed her teeth.
I’d been talking to her for three hours, or really just listening. Or sitting there. I never knew what to say to other depressives. She told me she was in the hole, and what can I say to that? I’ve been there. I know what it looks like, down to the color of the walls, the shape of the furniture. But I still couldn’t look at her as the nurse took her pulse and tapped a handheld. It was as if Pearl were confessing to the enemy.
I didn’t have to go with her, but I did. I didn’t want to admit that I was scared, so I didn’t.
The place was in a basement. They called it a sub-floor, as if that made a difference. It was 11:30 at night and everything smelled like steel. I didn’t even know steel had a smell. Floodlights picked out a lozenge-shaped pool, like a big white trough, covered by an oily film. Tubes on jointed arms hung over it and a purple light blinked on and off, so slowly I was never sure if any of the machines were actually working.
There were no doctors, only a pair of nurses and three technicians wearing shorts underneath their lab coats, as if they’d been called away from a tennis match. One of them rubbed his fingers together in a familiar gesture, over and over, the way my mother always did. He was probably dying for a cigarette.
No one said a word to me. Not even Pearl, though one of the nurses tried to get her to answer a few questions. Are you in pain, he’d asked, and I wanted to laugh. I think sometimes if I punctured my wrist, the blood would bleed out black, like tar. I didn’t know Pearl very well, but I’d guess it was the same for her.
She didn’t even struggle as they lowered her into the vat. I want to say I would have, but I can’t. The tubes moved on their jointed arms, connecting one by one to hidden valves, and the steel smell got worse and the whole room seemed to drop ten degrees. I shivered and sweated at the same time. I could hardly see her now, between the hips and shoulders of the technicians and nurses. Just her feet, sticking up like some absurd fruit above the silvery sheen of the liquid.
I looked away when the lid went on. It slid into place over the top of the trough and sealed without a noise, without even the hiss of air to reassure me she could still breathe. The purple light went off and on like it always did, but it was joined now by a whole row of lights I hadn’t seen before, coming to life one by one. I stayed until a nurse told me Pearl was okay, that she was in a deep sleep. Induced coma. The product of technological progress, the hibernation state that would cure depression.
I left the next morning. Not into the basement, into a taxi. I went home. I packed my things and had my mom pick me up. I won’t repeat what she said. My old room was still intact, save for the sewing machine and the exercise bike and a half-dozen baskets of folded laundry.
I heard from Pearl six months later. She sent me a text. She was doing great, she said. She was going back to school. She’d never felt better in her life, and she wanted to meet up, was I free?
I was working part-time at a hotel. I was still living with my mother. I had good days and bad days, though mostly bad. I was still mostly invisible. I couldn’t think of a way to say no.
So I didn’t say anything at all.
July 11, 2015
