Chapter 5 of Slide in all Direction

Day one proved a wash out. Wanted to sleep all the time. Day two and three were good, not sleeping, always thirsty, having to piss hourly, but writing, a couple of poems good as anything he'd done before, beginnings of a short story, maybe a novel, going all night when he couldn't sleep. Day four and five it was getting rough, his mind on the verge, on the edge, his body full of electricity, couldn't sit still, couldn't hold the pen, doodling weird little creatures with long crooked legs, and then these drawings of his beginning to move about the page on their own, and him pulling back, knocking the chair over, balling the paper and throwing it, and then throwing his cup, and then his chair, and then knowing he wasn't going to make it, wasn't going to get through this, felt the edges of his brain scraping against his skull, felt the pit of despair beckoning, felt like decking the halls of Bedlam, becking the balls of Hedlam, his brain looping and his eye deceiving, and then, overcoming an outrageous fear of stepping in the puddles of linoleum light, leaving his own kitchen and going down the lonely hall banging on each apartment door until some skeleton sticks his head out and says, "What the fuck you want?" 

But Harry finds he can't say what he wants, his words a bad salad of poems and songs and the current price of eggs. He slumps to the floor next to the skeleton's door, the thin man stepping out to look at him. 

Harry looks up at the man, finds the man's head is aglow from the light behind him, his image watery, and at his feet the snakes scurrying.  

The man looks down at Harry, seeing him clearly there, not well, asks, "Is there anyone I can call?"  

"I'm all right," says Harry, brushing ants off his shoulders, out of his eyes, the ants trying to reach the portals of his ears.  

'No, you're clearly not," says the thin man.  

Harry tries to get his wallet out, spilled papers, old Kleenex, receipts, cards on the floor. He points to a small yellow card between his legs. "That's my daughter," he says. "Phone number. Probably working." 

"It's Saturday," says the thin man, picking up the card, looking at it, then returning to his apartment, leaving Harry with his ants. 

The ambulance took him to the Emergency of St. Joseph's Hospital where they gave him an I.V. with minerals and salts, and Dilantin, and loaded him up with zeens and zines until he slept a while and finally wakened, knowing where he was, and the year and the month, if not exactly the day, and the ants were gone, and he could almost hold a fork steady enough to feed himself. They were going to discharge him then, send him home with Dilantin and Ativan and a card with the AA number to call, when his daughter talked to the head of his old department at the University, who called somebody at the hospital, and they took another look at Harry, seeing him now maybe not as a street drunk, but an alcoholic with underlying mood disorder, as he heard the intern put it, now calling his reckless trysts with the bottle, "self-medicating". Harry had always understood the power of words, and these words got him sent to the Psychiatric Hospital rather than the Mission or the Sally Ann. He especially liked the concept of "underlying mood disorder" as it resonated with "a demon in the undergrowth", and the assumption that went with it, that is that he drank, not from cowardice or shame or even pleasure, but from an honest attempt to doctor himself, to treat the illness within, the demon in the undergrowth. He went without protest, knowing he would not be the first, nor the last poet to be thus directed.  

A nice Irish doctor at the hospital on the hill found even more precise words to describe Harry. Bipolar Type Two, he called it, having ascertained that Harry, on occasion, might feel happy, enthralled, exhilarated, and not always weary. His daughter, having gone so far as having Harry redefined medically, and placed in safekeeping, did not visit. "I won't visit," she had told him. "The place creeps me out. But if you, you know, stay sober afterwards, we'll see."  

It was enough for Harry. She had, he thought, forgiven him running off with Sarah, and leaving her mother, and the rather public thing he'd had with another young woman. She had said to him then, "Dad, you can go with any woman you want, but if I catch you with someone younger than me, I'll kill you." She was in her mid-thirties now, two children, a good husband, a very stable life, as she pointed out to him, contradicting his predictions of human behaviour.  

So now in safekeeping for a few weeks of early spring, he paced the halls, he listened to Donny, he watched; he told himself there was material here. He let the lithium dull his locus ceruleus, clog the band width of his corpus callosum, slow the binaries of his temporal lobe. He let his body heal from the excesses inflicted upon it, knowing all the while that once back in his den above James Street, he would..... 

"Lord love a duck," said Donny, sitting down beside him in the day room, the featureless open space encircled by well-used chairs. "I gotta be honest wit ye. I did try the crack once, when I couldn't get no Valiums. It just grabs you by the balls, the crack does, and it don't let go. The one time I done it though, I busted my ankle, never healed proper. Wasn't really the crack that done it, though. I fell off a whore is what did it. She was a plump round thing. Nothing much to get hold of, you get my meaning. Never did heal proper."  

It was mid April by the time they discharged him back to his apartment above the coffee shop on James. He had attended group, an AA meeting or two, taken his pills, had a haircut, his beard trimmed. He had watched the early April rains through the mesh on the windows of the day area, the first daffodils and irises emerge in the sparse gardens on the grounds. At night he had slept deeply, medicated. Donny entertained him until Donny was caught smuggling in a bottle and then unceremoniously discharged with the address of the Mission printed on a small card.  

Harry's rent had been paid a month in advance and the hospital kept him just short of a month. Nobody seemed to have noticed he was gone. The cab let him off after doing a 360 at the Shoppers Drug on the opposite corner. With a paper bag of his few things, standing on James, he noticed a new name on the small panel of buzzers: Wesnicki. The apartment next to his own. He speculated that this Wesnicki could be a failed poet like himself, or a young man sponsored by the John Howard Society, or a man in mid-life punishing himself for leaving his wife.  

Once in his apartment, Harry sat briefly in each of his chairs, then for a while in the tattered armchair in his small cluttered living room. His phone didn't ring. There were no messages from Sarah or his daughter. In the bathroom he flushed all but his sleeping pills, and then left his apartment and walked, on this fine spring day, to the liquor store.