She gave her head another shake, her personal tic of confusion. “Fuck my
mother. She teaches babies, first graders. I’d teach adults.”
“What would you teach them?”
E x i l e s i n A m e r i c a
7 9
“Metaphysics.”
“Oh? What kind of metaphysics?”
“All kinds. I never met-a-physics I didn’t like.” And she laughed, a loud,
angry bray. “See, I can be funny. I am so fucking funny. I should have my own
TV show. But I wrote Jay Leno and offered myself. For free. Do you know
what he wrote back?”
“No, Rebecca, what did he write back?”
“Nothing. Not shit. Do you know why? Because he knows: I’d take his
show away. People would love me and hate him. And it’d be my show, me on
TV. That’s why I study TV. I’m not some moron watching just to watch. I’m
studying it for my career. Or I was until my cunt mother stuck rats inside our
TV set to chase me out.”
“And you’re sure they were live rats?” asked Zack. “Not just rats in a TV
nature film?”
“Hey. I was there. It was live fucking rats.”
“How did an old lady like your mother catch rats and get them inside a
television set?”
The eyes widened in a split second of doubt. Then she shook her head
again. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“No. But you’ve been ill, Rebecca. Maybe you imagined rats. You halluci-
nated rats. You dreamed them.”
“Fuck you. It was real rats. I was there and you weren’t. When do I get to
smoke?”
Yes, she must be bipolar with psychotic episodes, hence the hallucina-
tions. It would be more responsive to medication than a borderline disorder
but was still bad news. Bipolars could sometimes manage their disease with
drugs, except Rebecca Mays looked like the type who’d soon go off her meds
and bounce back here, again and again. In the meantime she’d live in the cus-
tody of her mother and terrorize the poor woman. Zack felt sorry for the girl,
but he felt far more sorry for the mother.
He wrote out a pass to the smoking porch. “This will be good for today. I’ll
talk to Ms. Jackson and get your name on the board. But remember, it’s a priv-
ilege and can be revoked. We’re starting you on new medication, which you
have to take if you want to keep your smoking privilege.”
8 0
C h r i s t o p h e r B r a m
She snatched the pass from him and greedily studied it, as if it were a
check for a million dollars.
“I’ll see you again on Thursday. We’ll see how you’re doing. Okay, Re-
becca?”
She didn’t answer him; he was already invisible.
“Goodbye,” he told her and departed.
Zack put in ten hours a week at Building 2: six hours on Monday and four
on Thursday, the day of the general staff meeting. Ten hours were more than
enough to throw his outpatient practice into sharp relief. It was such a differ-
ent world here, so unlike the rest of his life. Here Zack was the adult and
everyone else a child. He couldn’t treat them as equals. It was all medication
and little dialogue, all disease and not much personhood. He was dictatorial
in one world and democratic in the other. He tried not to confuse them.
Building 2 was a grim world, yet it could also be oddly restful, in the same way
that life in wartime must be restful: There were fewer trivialities, ambiguities,
and choices. It also felt less emotional. Zack had learned early to shut down
most of the sorrow he felt for his mental hospital patients, although he sus-
pected something remained, burning in secret.
He walked down the hall to the pharmacology station and gave the
nurse, Ms. Krasic, the prescriptions for Mays’s lithium treatment. Then he
headed toward his office. It was almost three o’clock, time to go home. He
passed the cheerful bumble and buzz of Oprah or one of her imitators on
the TV in the common room. A half dozen medicated patients slouched
groggily in their chairs. A bony young man in sweatpants and a plaid shirt
stood at the door, watching Zack pass. Zack smiled hello: the man jerked
back like a startled deer. The unit was locked, of course—all the units were
locked—and Zack carried a heavy ring of keys at Eastern State; he always
jingled on Mondays and Thursdays. And he wore his white jacket here,
which sometimes made him feel tough and efficient, sometimes cold and
heartless.
There were three industries in town: the college, Colonial Williamsburg,
and the mental hospital. The grounds of Eastern State were a sad echo of the
William and Mary campus five miles away, a patchwork of open fields sur-
rounded by scrub pine and scattered with redbrick buildings, half of which