THE FISH | Anjali Jaiman
My mom wanted me to be kind. “Areni. You have to breathe. Breathe, honey. What you have can hurt people—don’t ever forget that.” In through my nose and out through my mouth when the anger rises. I whisper mantra-like —All people are cruel. All people are kind. All people are cruel. All people are kind.
I generally avoid the hospital because I know it to be a place of such intense cruelty. But I find myself there from time to time. Nobody wants to be Narcaned. I don’t want to die though, so I’m grateful in a sense. But as soon as I'm breathing, I’m out 'cause I know what’s coming next.
This time I am brought in, slumped in a wheelchair. My eyes are half open, and I can see through my eyelashes, thin hairs dividing up the light. The nurses look like angels, bluish in their beauty, but I’m not sure if I am really seeing them or it’s the fentanyl showing me what I want to see. The hands that lift me up are gloved. There is the bed. There is the needle. My legs are screaming and my head feels broken.
Once when I was a child I fell out of a tree and broke my arm. I woke up during the surgery to reset and pin the jagged shard of bone tenting the skin of my forearm. I couldn’t feel and I couldn’t move. No one tells you they need to paralyze you to fix you.
Now I’m on the ceiling looking down at her stiff and upright, arms oddly angled, handcuffed to the bedrail. There she is, trembling, feral-eyed, chained. Bile spews from her mouth. The priests stand over her in their white robes, muttering incantations. She sinks again, the bed pulls her down, consumes her. Possession can have a kind of stillness–a kind of serenity. And she looks beautiful down there, hair plastered to face, smiling. And again, the waving of incense, the chanting. “Respiration falling. On three. Push it quickly.” And the panicked gasping of a second resurrection.
Witch-hunters like the drama. The purging of evil, the extraction of sin from the body should look like terror. It doesn’t have to hurt like this if you push the Narcan slowly. But the judges think that there should be damnation before redemption cause only sinners invite the devil in.
No one likes a drug addict–even when they pretend to. Or—excuse me—a person with a “substance use disorder,” they pronounce. They think their magic is the good kind of magic. They think praying “frog into prince” will mean we all believe they really did do magic, even though their spells are dry. As if they aren’t constantly slurping up our language and spitting it out again at us. And we are supposed to thank them for the water. I believe in words of power—words from the lips of my mother could suddenly change a glass of water into a glass of wine at the end of a hard day of work. That’s some real power.
“I wish Charge hadn’t assigned her to me.”
“I'm thanking god it wasn’t me!”
“Maybe she will leave against medical advice.”
“We can always pray.”
“They usually do.”
“I feel bad for her—how do you do that to yourself?”
“Yeah-it’s sad.”
“But they are never grateful. It’s like Hello. We are trying to help you.”
“I’ve taken care of her before—she is really difficult.”
“Don’t worry she usually leaves when she wakes up, so you won't have to deal with her for long.”
“If I were you, I would just print out the paperwork now—so that she can sign herself out as soon
as she wakes up.”
They haven’t bothered to close the door. The headache is coming. Breathe. Breath. I whisper. But in spite of myself, I splay my fingers. A wind begins to pick up around me as if a draught of air were coming from the street through an open window. But of course, you can’t taint inside with outside in a hospital. The wind builds. The curtains flutter and the papers on the table next to my bed scatter across the room. Bandages, clipboards, pens, the plastic bag containing my shoes are lifting and with increasing velocity circle around me in a whirlwind. Now colliding and careening off the walls.
“What the fuck!”
“She is losing it.”
“Can you page her doctor?”
“Page security!”
The overhead sounds, Code Gray to room 401. Code Gray room 401.
Fuck security is gonna be here. It’s too late to stop it now—it will be as it will be at this point.
There is a howling in my ears. The door to the bedside cabinet bangs, the drawers open and closed. The telephone cord snaps and it’s flung across the room, crashing into the wall. The chair and bedside table are pulled slowly off of the ground.
“She’s throwing stuff in there.”
“No one’s inside. Everyone’s safe.”
“The doctor’s on the phone.”
“We need Haldol–stat!”
“Wait! Oral and intramuscular!”
“Ask for permission to use restraints.”
“Fuck this—I can’t handle this today. I’ve got a bed cleanup in 406.”
“Just go! Security will get here. We’ve got this.”
I can’t breathe. The wind has created a vacuum that sucks all the air out of the room. Breathe. Breathe! I urge my body. Everything is blurry now. And then quickly as it started, it’s over, and everything smashes into the ground.
“Now, now.”
“Grab her.”
“Get her arm.”
“Hold that down.”
The hands are on me. The stab of the needle. And nothing.
I wake up with goosebumps. No one bothered to give me a blanket. My mouth is dry. I want to reach for a glass of water next to the bed, but my hands and feet are bound. Fucking restraints. It’s not the first time, but this is definitely not the day I wanted to have. This morning, I was in the woods with Alan. I’m sure he’s worried about me since I’m not back to camp yet, but there is no fucking way he is coming into the hospital to look for me. We scored—finally—after a whole day without and just being so anxious that we weren’t gonna get the money together. When I first met him, he asked me why I didn’t just use my power to make the money or better yet make the stuff. I couldn’t explain what I can and can’t do because I don’t understand myself. If you can’t control it, is it really magic? Don’t we call those miracles instead?
I remember what I was dreaming: I was wandering through the woods picking daisies, and each flower I picked left a hole in the ground through which the light streamed, a rosy light like dawn and a rumbling tumbling sound. That dream must be pointing me to a way forward. Even with my hands tied down I can focus my eyes and look towards the electrical socket across the room and feel the light streaming through the outlet warming me up and stirring me out of the stupor. My wrists and ankles burn as the restraints melt away.
Mom’s practice was in the back of our house. She wanted me to be a doctor one day, and set up a stool in the corner so I could watch. “What else are you leaving behind with me?” She would ask, and the women would say — “I’m leaving behind a bad marriage… an exploitative family…a life going nowhere… a body that isn’t mine.” They would leave those things behind with us, blowing them into glass mason jars that my mother sealed tight with wax and then buried in our backyard. She would invite the women to dinner after the procedure. “Sometimes you need company and good food,” she would say. The bed was so soft, some nights I’d sneak into the garage to sleep there, the bloody sheets were always bleached clean again. “A woman is not an animal—she doesn’t need stirrups. A healing should free you, not tie you down.”
I’m not sure if I have a fever, but there is cold sweat on my face. I’m in a different room now. To my left I see there is another patient. She is lying so straight, cocooned in her sheet which is pulled up to her chin so only her face is visible. She is beautiful and old; her hair is long and silver, the creases of her cheeks cut a mosaic into her face. “You there,” she says pointing to a spot next to the window. “Come a little closer. I can’t see you. You look like a shadow. Can you turn up the music? I love this song.” She struggles with the sheets that are so tightly tucked in around her. “You want to take me to the beach? Shall I get ready now? But I’m not sure where I left my bathing suit.” She struggles with the tangle of linen.
A voice comes from the speaker next to the woman’s bed.
“Mrs. Johnson. Do you need to go to the bathroom? Please stay in bed until someone can help you to the bathroom.”
“I can’t hear you dear.”
“You have a device in place, you can just urinate in the bed without getting up or you can wait until your nurse is free to come help you. We don’t want you to fall.”
“What? That’s ridiculous. I can’t pee in the bed. I have to go to the bathroom now–before we go to the beach.”
“Mrs. Johnson. Please don’t get up right now.”
The fever is breaking as sweat pours off me. It is rushing from my armpits, from my face, from my back. The gown and sheets are soaked, and water pools around my hips, sinking into the plastic mattress. Mrs. Johnson shifts in the bed, almost free of the tangle of bed linen, but now finds that the rails are up on both sides, preventing her from swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. She begins to shimmy to the foot of the bed where there is a gap through which she might wriggle into an escape, but the movement causes her bed alarm to sound with its rhythmic scream.
They enter, hurrying over to Mrs. Johnson, pulling the curtain closed for privacy.
“She can’t get out of bed. She is a fall risk.”
“Ms. Johnson you–have–to–stay–in–bed.”
“But what about the beach? I want to see the water. We can’t stay inside–it’s a beautiful day!”
“She just needed 48 hours of cooperation. Now, she’ll be here forever, waiting for a bed in the dementia ward.”
“Why can’t someone sit with her? I feel so bad. She hasn’t been able to brush her teeth since she’s been here.”
“We were hoping to get her to a nursing home, but they won’t accept her if she needs a sitter. She’s gonna have to go to a dementia ward, it’s locked so she won’t be able to wander. I was hoping we could use the AvaSys Telesitter because if she had stayed in bed, she could have gone to a regular nursing home.”
I look over at the camera. Seven feet tall, an enormous hunk of plastic on wheels towering over Mrs. Johnson’s bed.
“She just needed a few more hours of cooperation. Mrs. Johnson, why did you get out of bed?”
“Are you coming with us? To the beach?”
“But this is on camera, the nursing homes won’t take her now. She has to go to the locked ward.”
“Let’s give the Haldol. She’ll be in outer space.”
The water is pouring off my bed onto the floor in a gushing cascade. I am lying half submerged in a pool of water. I can feel the salt drying on my skin even as more water spills from my pores, my eyes, my mouth.
“It has to be intramuscular. The speech therapist said she is an aspiration risk. She is not supposed to have anything to eat or drink.”
The nurse pulls a syringe out of her pocket and uncaps it. I move my fingers like I’m touching a keyboard. I keep my eyes shut, but I know without seeing. As the nurse moves towards Mrs. Johnson, the hand holding the syringe moves in a graceful arc and she stabs herself in the fleshy part of her arm.
“Goddammit. Fuck.”
“How did that happen?”
“I have no fucking idea. I injected it. I have no idea what just happened. Shit–I can’t believe it. This is what happens when you work a double! It was like a crazy muscle spasm. Fuck. What is all this water on the floor? Is there a leak? Can you take care of this? Forget the med for now, just tuck her back in and pray. I have to talk with the Charge nurse and I’ll let her know about the water. Fuck. I think I’m gonna need coverage. I have no idea what is going to happen–I have never had an anti-psychotic.”
“Mrs. Johnson you need to just take a little nap.”
“But the beach. I want to go in the water.”
“Yes, we will go to the beach after the nap.”
“You know when I’m in the ocean, I like to pretend I’m a singing whale. I stick my head underwater and just scream.”
“Just stay in bed Mrs. Johnson. I’ll be back.”
She splashes to the door and exits. A shallow wave of water sloshes against the beds in her wake.
My mom was a healer. Even in the thrashing violence of someone’s pain, she was tender. I’m not naturally like that. She knew that and it scared the shit out of her. It’s not that she thought I was bad, she just worried the magic would rear up and rain hell. Who’s my good girl? Aremi is my good girl. Stabbing a person with a needle is not a thing a good girl would do.
People don’t always understand that to use drugs can be an act of love as well as an act of sadness. Addicts are the most loving and generous people you will ever meet. At least a lot of them. An addict (the ones I know), will give you the coat off their back if you need it. We know that life is violent. To live is to be violent and have violence done unto you. It’s everywhere. You buy a house in the suburbs just for you, and you cut down the trees so you can have a yard and you drive to work and you live in a safe neighborhood in a safe country and you buy your things and more things and more things and more things. You just export the violence. You push it behind the fence where it collects in a heap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where you can’t see it and where you can’t feel it. You hand your violence over to the police and the military and the drones with bombs. It seems just ordinary to you, this everyday banal evil.
I don’t want to pretend like that. Everyone is violent, myself included. Fentanyl helps. When violence comes for me, I can meet it with gentleness–like my mom did. Yes, it’s like being a moth drawn to the single bulb hanging on the porch–for light–for warmth in the cold night. There’s greed—and obsession in addiction. But there is also renunciation. I take the painful things and the angry things and the scary things and spit them out on the ground and cover them with leaves.
I’m taking Mrs. Johnson to the beach. We are standing in the hallway. It’s a good time for a jailbreak; there is chaos in the hallway. Someone’s throwing towels on the floor, someone else has a mop, there are telephone calls and screams, people picking up equipment that can’t get wet. No one will notice us.
Mrs. Johnson can’t stomp in the puddle, but she marvels at the ripples she makes as she slowly shuffles forward. She squeezes my shoulder. “I think I left my purse!”
“Don’t worry, you don’t need any of that anymore,” I say.
“Call security! Call security! Mrs. Johnson is trying to leave.”
I feel my fingers brush my collarbone. And then suddenly they all slip into the water. It’s so quiet. I turn to Mrs. Johnson. She is struggling next to me, lying on her side in the shallow water, gills exposed, mouth opening and closing, heaving, air hungry. It’s all of them. They are drowning in all of this air. But the water will rise.
There is a world where it’s okay to be me. Exactly as I am. There is a kinder world. I think I’d also be kinder in that world. I slosh through the empty hospital full of fish and saltwater. The ocean is calling.
Anjali Jaiman MD, PhD, is a family medicine doctor in Rhode Island.