Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
It’s not over.
You lie there, not even thinking really, except to try to consider how to describe the hurt, as if finding the language for it might bring it up out of you. If you can make something real, if you can see it and smell it and touch it, then you can kill it.
You think, it’s like a brain fire. Like a rodent gnawing at you from the inside. A knife in your gut. A spiral. Whirlpool. Black hole.
The words used to describe it—despair, fear, anxiety, obsession—do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.
For a moment, you think you’re better. You’ve just had a successful train of thought, with an engine and a caboose and everything. Your thoughts. Authored by you. And then you feel a wave of nausea, a fist clenching from within your rib cage, cold sweat hot forehead you’ve got it it’s already inside of you crowding out everything else taking you over and it’s going to kill you and eat its way out of you and then in a small voice, half strangled by the ineffable horror, you barely squeeze out the words you need to say. “I’m in trouble, Mom. Big trouble.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE ARC OF THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS: Having descended into proper madness, I begin to make the connections that crack open the long-dormant case of Russell Pickett’s disappearance. My dogged obsessiveness leads me to ignore all manner of threats, and the risk to the fortune Daisy and I have stumbled into. I focus only on the mystery, and embrace the belief that solving it is the ultimate Good, that declarative sentences are inherently better than interrogative ones, and in finding the answer despite my madness, I simultaneously find a way to live with the madness. I become a great detective, not in spite of my brain circuitry, but because of it.
I’m not sure who I walk into the sunset with in the proper story, Davis or Daisy, but I walk into it. You see me backlit, an eclipse silhouetted by the eight-minute-old light of our home star, holding hands with somebody.
And along the way, I realize that I have agency over myself, that my thoughts are—as Dr. Singh liked to say—only thoughts. I realize that my life is a story that I’m telling, and I’m free and empowered and the captain of my consciousness and yeah, no. That’s not how it went down.
I did not become dogged or declarative, nor did I walk off into the sunset—in fact, for a while there, I saw hardly any natural light at all.
What happened was relentlessly and excruciatingly dull: I lay in a hospital bed and hurt. My ribs hurt, my brain hurt, my thoughts hurt, and they did not let me go home for eight days.
At first, they figured me for an alcoholic—that I’d gone for the hand sanitizer because I was so desperate for a drink. The truth was so much weirder and less rational that nobody really seemed to buy it until they contacted Dr. Singh. When she arrived at the hospital, she pulled a chair up to the edge of my bed. “Two things happened,” she said. “First, you’re not taking your medication as prescribed.”
I told her I’d taken it almost every day, which felt true, but wasn’t. “I felt like it was making me worse,” I eventually confessed.
“Aza, you’re an intelligent young woman. Surely you don’t think drinking hand sanitizer while hospitalized for a lacerated liver marks forward progress in your mental health journey.” I just stared at her. “As I’m sure they explained to you, drinking hand sanitizer is dangerous—not only because of the alcohol, but because it contains chemicals that when ingested can kill you. So we’re not moving forward with the idea that the medicine you stopped taking was making you worse.” She said it all so forcefully that I just nodded.
“And the second thing that happened is that you experienced in the accident a serious trauma, and this would be challenging for anyone.” I kept staring. “We need to get you on a different medication, one that works better for you, that you can tolerate, and that you’ll take.”
“None of them work.”
“None of them have worked yet,” she corrected.
—
Dr. Singh came by each morning, and then in the afternoon another doctor visited to assess my liver situation. Both were a relief if for no other reason than my omnipresent mother was forced to leave the room briefly.
On the last day, Dr. Singh sat down next to the side of my bed and placed a hand on my shoulder. She’d never touched me before. “I recognize that a hospital setting has probably not been great for your anxiety.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do you feel you are a threat to yourself?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just really scared and having a lot of invasives.”
“Did you consume hand sanitizer yesterday?”
“No.”
“I’m not here to judge you, Aza. But I can only help if you’re being honest.”
“I am being honest. I haven’t.” For one thing, they’d taken the wall-mounted sanitizer station out of my room.
“Have you thought about it?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.”
“I can’t stop thinking about getting C. diff. I just want to be sure that I’m not . . .”
“Drinking hand sanitizer won’t help.”
“But what will help?”
“Time. Treatment. Taking your meds.”
“I feel like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening, you know?”