It's Kind of a Funny Story

Something deep in my guts, below my heart, has made a shift to the left and settled in a more comfortable place. It’s not the Shift, but it’s a shift. I picture Nia with her gorgeous face and little body and black hair and pouty lips and Aaron’s hands all over her but also with her pot smoking and the pimples on her forehead and making fun of people all the time and the way she’s always so proud of how she’s dressed. And I picture her fading.

I play cards with Armelio in the dining room until Bobby pokes his head in:

“Craig? It says on your door Dr. Mahmoud is your doctor? He’s making his rounds.”

twenty-six

“I don’t want to be here,” I tell him at the entrance to my room, where I catch him before he visits Muqtada. “I don’t think it’s the place for me.”

“Of course not.” Dr. Mahmoud nods. He has on the same suit he had on earlier in the day, although that feels like last year. “If you liked it here, that would be a very bad prognosis!”

“Right.” I chuckle. “Well, I mean, everybody’s friendly, but I feel a lot better, and I think I’m ready to go. Maybe Monday? I don’t want to miss school.”

Also, doc, right now the phone messages and e-mails are bunching up and the rumors are flying. I just talked to this girl—and I did okay—but the Tentacles are coiled and the pressure is rising, getting ready to pounce on me when I leave. If I’m in here too long, I’ll have that much more to do when I get out.

“We can’t rush it,” Dr. Mahmoud says. “The important thing is that you get better. If you try to leave too soon—suddenly, everything is better?—we doctors get suspicious.”

“Oh. Well, you don’t want the doctor who can sign you out of the psychiatric hospital getting suspicious.”

“Right. Right now, to me, you look much better, but maybe this is a false recovery—”

“A Fake Shift.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A Fake Shift. That’s what I call it. When you think you’ve beaten it, but you haven’t.”

“Exactly. We don’t want one of those.”

“So I’m going to be here until I have the real Shift?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’m going to be here until I’m cured?”

“Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner.” Dr. Mahmoud leans in. “Life is managed.”

“Okay.”

I’m apparently not as impressed by this as he would like. He arches back: “We don’t keep you here until you are cured of anything; we keep you here until you are stable—we call it ‘establishing the baseline.’”

“Okay, so when will my baseline be established?”

“Five days, probably.”

One, two, three . . . “Thursday? I can’t wait until Thursday, Doctor. I have too much school. That’s four days of school. If I miss four days I will be so behind. Plus, my friends. . .”

“Yes?”

“My friends will know where I am!”

“Aha. Is this a problem?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Because I’m here!” I gesture out at the hall. Solomon shuffles by very quickly in his sandals and tells someone to be quiet, he’s trying to rest.

“Mr. Gilner.” Dr. Mahmoud puts a hand on my shoulder. “You have a chemical imbalance, that is all. If you were a diabetic, would you be ashamed of where you were?”

“No, but—”

“If you had to take insulin and you stopped, and you were taken to the hospital, wouldn’t that make sense?”

“This is different.”

“How?”

I sigh. “I don’t know how much of it is really chemical. Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.”

“Ah. This is why you need to be in here longer, to talk about these things,” Dr. Mahmoud says. “You have a psychologist, correct? Have you called your psychologist?”

Shoot. I knew I was forgetting something.

“You need to call; your psychologist will come here to meet with you. What is her name? Or his?”

“Dr. Minerva.”

“Oh!” Dr. Mahmoud says; his lips curl into a far away smile. “Wonderful. Get Andrea down here.”

“Andrea?” I never knew her first name. She keeps it like a big secret. It’s blanked out on all her degrees. She says it’s part of policy.

He waves his hand. “Make an appointment with her; then we’ll be that much closer to coming up with your treatment plan and getting you out of here as soon as possible. We will try for Thursday.”

“Not before Thursday.”

“No.”

“Thursday,” I mumble to myself, looking across the room at Muqtada’s prone lump.

“Five days, that’s it! Everything will be fine, Mr. Gilner. Your life will wait. You just participate in the group activities and call Dr. Minerva. And when you grow up to be rich and successful, you don’t forget me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Can please you close the door?” Muqtada asks from his bed.