2. After the end

The room itself was odorless though I woke to the pissing of an old man holding a plastic container. The winter light was gray but not unkind. My first thought that cohered was: 'I'm alive....' How awful-the unshaking world gripped my indifferent life. All hospitals were the same to me then. The decor, replicated more uniformly than inside any institution except The Army Tent, coolly depressed my eyes like a sterile sheet. Getting up was an ordeal—my body fumbled around and failed to rise. I hurt all over due to the overdose and whatever was done in the Intensive Care Unit. Settling down belly-upwards was sickening. There was nothing to see, so I curled up, unable to cry or truly feel I still existed. When I resigned myself to this, it ceased to matter at all, except for a short-lived humiliation that I had failed.

Sadness, to the nurse who came in, spurred a sequence of memorized kindnesses: pillow-fluffing, sheet-changing, pulse-taking, and the 'vital questioning'....

"Do you know your name? Yes?... How many names is that? Now do you want water—Yes? Do you need the phone? Are you too hot?"

I liked the musical accent in her voice (latina?) Her face and neatly pinned chestnut hair were so pretty to watch that it made me almost glad she was there. Anyone was an improvement over my 'roommate' whose smell had strengthened by then. The emptiness stretched into hours after she left to fetch the doctor, and intense boredom made even him welcome when he appeared.

Dr. Steiger was stern and inquisitive. The world-worn wrinkles, retreating hair-line and lipless mouth betrayed a veteran psychiatrist's ennui. Yet his eyes, like green lights, probed with a life their own. Our eyes met, person to patient. The glimmer of mildly critical curiosity showed his displeasure to me. I felt a queasy increment of guilt which, by itself, could not persuade me I was wrong to hate life. His questions lacked any sympathy, and consequently I could not recall his name three times in a row, and so many wrong guesses made me even forget my own name. I suspected he was testing me at a deeper level, so I had to mumble how my friends knew my 'real' name regardless of the day, place and name inscribed on my birth certificate. I'd started reading Sartre, so I wanted to say that who I was had to be more than those historical accidents. A human being was a project, an existential experiment in freedom even if that meant man was no more than "a useless passion" or a being burdened by total responsibility for his actions alone. I even started to explain this heroic philosophical stance.

But since I'd just tried to kill myself, he just repeated my legal name back at me, our location, the year and the date.

In just ten days and nights I would watch this humorless sketch in a white coat become the eminent figure in my survival. Only his signature could release me from 'observation.' The blur of his white hands would flesh out into strong, supple and ageless tools. The baritone drone would quip in agitated clips, sigh from bottomless experiences, and laugh with sardonic hope (lacking the naivete to hope purely). The face inevitably grew more human with every sentence though he never lost a protective mask of irony. At the end of this 'trial,' he declared I was sane, enough for release anyway.

"Why did you try to kill yourself?" he asked.

"I dunno. What's the big deal about it?"

"Inadequate response," said his eyes and frown, unconsciously, while his words eluded all emotional impulses.

"So, you are an actor, Cayle?"

I nodded twice before I realized he had just used my familiar name. Then I realized how self-conscious and crisp the question was. I laughed lightly at him. He was trying to trip me up, to see if I could really tell who I was. I saw through it because I was a good actor.

"What was that for?" His voice struck an emphasis for a first time (a sign of humanity), so I began to talk to him in earnest to reassure him that I knew who I was 'really' and 'in practice.' Actually, I confused these deep in my soul. To make matters worse, I had been in rehearsal in a play up until the time I was hospitalized. Speaking of which, I realized I was needed on stage....

Some weeks earlier, Jules had brought me along to a rehearsal of Last Gasps by Jeffrey Weiss, the famous New York playwright-director. With a vibrant spark in his eyes and an artist's beret on his head, Jeffrey was so animated that he was more fascinating to watch than any of the awkward youths acting. When he finished directing the scenes and improvs, he surprised me by stepping straight toward me with his glowing smile and welcoming handshake. It didn't even faze him that I used my left hand; whatever was wrong with my right hand didn't matter to him because he had already impulsively decided to create a character out of me for the show. Without saying so explicitly, he let me know then that he needed someone to vary the all-white glow of the cast.

I had straight black hair, olive skin, a waist small enough to be declared missing (twenty-four inches), a punk's impish naivete, a slapdash English accent, wide brown eyes, and a bagful of opinions invented to shock on every occasion. I was liked by some for the variety or charm of it all, but I was also hated for being obnoxious as a know-it-all. The character Jeffrey created out of me was a mute, moron thug and Bruce Lee wannabe, a bungler of all tasks his evil master commanded. I was named "Hat Chet Man" ....I was comic relief.