I get up in the middle of the night and shuffle to the bathroom. To avoid waking up fully, I don’t turn on the light. On the way back to bed, I get stuck in what ultimately becomes apparent is a giant spider web. The more I try to extricate myself, the more entangled I get. This is not really happening, I think in an effort to calm myself. But it is really happening. My husband’s cadenced snoring in our bed is audible proof. I could wake him up, but he’d be mad. ‘Always thinking of yourself,’ he’d say. ‘No consideration for others.’ As an alternative to panicking, I recite nursery rhymes in my head to pass the time, hoping he’ll wake up on his own. In the midst of LITTLE MISS MUFFET the web starts to vibrate. The spider responsible for this thing has to be enormous, and the vibrations must indicate its approach and imminent attack. I may not be in actual danger. My imagination could be taking liberties in the dark. I don’t want to scream. I scream nonetheless.
“What the devil is wrong with you?” my husband yells.
“Spiderspider!” I yammer.
“You don’t have to shout. I’m not deaf,” he shouts and turns on the light.
The first thing I realize is that there is no spider here.
My husband glares at me as if he has never seen me before. It is not a flattering glare. Once I take stock of the situation, I can’t really fault him. I have sprouted extra pairs of arms and legs. It’s definitely a look that takes getting used to. Worse, it will double the price of manicures.
“What the hell is this supposed to mean?” he hollers, gesturing at my new appendages.
“I don’t know,” I say. That’s the truth, too, unless I lay the blame on a chemical imbalance.
“How can you not know? Only a crazy person would not know. Do you want me to think you’re crazy?”
“No,” I say. Plastic surgery, I think. The surplus arms and legs could be amputated. It might even be advantageous to get rid of the old ones and keep the new. I kind of like the idea. The first joint of my pinky finger on the old right hand is bent with arthritis. Ditto the first joint of the index finger on the left hand, which is thickened into the bargain. The new hands look great. They look younger too. I could get work as a hand model. Who knows, but this could be the start of a terrific career.
“Are you going to answer me?” the good man demands.
I have no answer. I have to improvise. “I had a bad dream,” I say. I’m about to explain how vulnerable I am during periods of low biorhythm, but he doesn’t give me a chance.
“You are scary,” he says.
I should keep my mouth shut. If I say anything it should be, I’m sorry you feel that way. “Since when have you found me scary?” I ask instead. I can tell by his reddening face that this was a mistake. “Since yesterday? Since two minutes ago?” I continue.
He jumps out of bed, stalks to the closet, takes a suitcase out, plops it on a chair and flings it open. “I have found you scary for years,” he says. He is, of course, lying. That’s one way to justify callous behavior.
With zero affect, I ask him to elucidate on what is so scary about me.
“You have got to be kidding,” he says, as though that constitutes an answer. He empties his underwear drawer into the suitcase, tosses in some shirts, slacks, some toiletries, and the digital alarm clock, the cord of which he furiously yanks from the wall.
“What’s this? Are you leaving? Don’t you love me anymore?”
“I love you deeply.”
He rubs his eyes with both hands as though to wipe away tears, but I know a mind fuck when I see one. Stay calm, I think. Don’t be getting defensive. “Since you’re leaving, I’ll call the bakery and cancel the biscuit order,” I say, as we have a standing order at the bakery for tea biscuits every morning. How I’d get to the phone to make the call is another matter.
“No! Don’t do that!” He is terrific at feigning alarm. “I plan to come back here for my biscuits every morning.”
I burst out laughing–somewhat hysterically I must admit, and start to hiccough.
“These histrionics of yours are precisely what I find scary,” he says, slams the suitcase shut and, on his way out shouts, “I’m calling your psychiatrist!”
“Get me out of this spider web and I’ll call him myself,” I shout after him.
He’s already at the front door when he hollers, “I’ll be at the Hilton Hotel if you want to reach me.”
My psychiatrist tucks in his shirt and straightens his tie. Both are askew from his climb through the window, necessary because I couldn’t get to the door. “How are you feeling?” he asks, fiddling with the coke-bottle-lens glasses behind which his eyes look as disproportionately large as those of a fly.
“How would you feel if you’d been stuck in a spider web for hours,” I answer.
“I’ll ask the questions,” he says, adding, “You must take responsibility for what’s happened to you.”
He’s probably right, for all the help that is. “I’d be delighted to take responsibility if you’d explain what biological malfunction led to the growth of extra arms and legs.”
“What do you think led to it?”
“What do you think of cutting me loose?”
He ignores my question, interjecting his own. “Can you make any connection between being in a spider web and having the same number of appendages as a spider?”
“Why don’t you enlighten me.”
“Because that wouldn’t be helpful to you. You need to stretch, to reach the answer for yourself.”
I’m supposed to connect a freakish physical occurrence with a psychological quirk? I suspect he cut Psych 101—not that this suspicion is of any practical use. I might as well just give him what he wants. Possibly he’ll return the favor. “One might regard my having managed to spin a web as some odd wish fulfillment.”
He whips a pad and pen out of his right shirt pocket. “Please elucidate.”
I’d rather be relaxing on the sofa, resting my multiple arms and legs. Since he is scowling at me, motionless, pen poised over pad, I clear my throat, launch into a lecture on love and the dichotomy between what is promised and what is delivered. I touch on how the forbidden can become the permissible because the concept of right and wrong is subjective.
“Would you go as far as killing your husband like the Black Widow spider kills her mate?” this student of the human psyche asks.
Would I? “I don’t know. I can’t tell you,” I say, totting up the pros and cons of committing murder. “Maybe I would.”
He throws me a look like a slap in the face and scribbles on his pad. I may have gone too far. What I should have expounded on is how pain can distort one’s thinking, but I’m not in the mood right now. This clown is in my employ, not I in his. “Don’t tell me you’ve never felt like killing someone,” I say.
This seems to unnerve him. Attempting to thrust pad and pen back into his pocket, he drops them. The pad lands face up on the floor. On it he’s scrawled, Delusional. Underneath that, Hostile. And finally, HOMICIDAL!
Hostile? All right, that’s well enough observed. Not so, delusional. Nor, for that matter, homicidal. But arguing with him would be a waste of time—protective, as he typically is, of his diagnoses. An alternative tactic is called for. “Look here, I’ll make a deal with you. Get me out of this web and I promise not to kill the shithead,” I say, sincere as hell. “I give you my solemn word.”
My sincerity doesn’t impress him. Neither, apparently, does my solemn word.
“You are a danger to yourself and others,” he says.
“You are misinterpreting what I said,” I point out reasonably.
He’s not into reason. “I have no choice but to hospitalize you,” he says, triggering an impolitic volley of vulgarisms from me–alas, to no avail.
The white coats arrive with a power saw and cut me out of the web. I’m told to pack only essentials, and thus load up on cosmetics and lace bras with matching thongs, and am forthwith shanghaied to the loony bin. Upon admission, my stuff is unceremoniously poked through in search of “sharps.” Once my dental floss, nail clippers, hair spray, compact with mirror has been duly expropriated, I’m left to cool my heels (all four of them) in a crowded gym-sized room furnished with three threadbare couches, several armchairs, and a splintery wooden coffee table. A small, spiky haired boy comes over, squats at my feet, and stares up at me with bulging eyes. I stare back.
“Are you a visitor?” he asks after a good five minutes of mutual staring.
“No, I’m a patient.”
“You don’t look like a patient,” he says, deadpan. “But you will in a while.”
At times no response is the best response. I figure this is one of them, and I’m right. The kid moves off. I am assigned a cubbyhole of a room. I hate it. In no time at all I’m climbing the wall. It’s no problem with four arms and four legs. I’m really getting into it when a mental health aide with hair like stalks of dead grass barges in and orders me to come back down.
“Physical exercise stimulates the endorphin production and has proven beneficial to mental patients,” I say from my vantage point near the ceiling.
“Climbing the wall is against the rules,”she bawls. If I were casting a war film and needed a Gestapo agent, she’d get the part.
I jump down and start toward her. Intent on throwing her out of the room and shutting the door, I make a grab for her. She takes all four of my wrists in her two shovel size hands and stays put. She’s stronger than she looks.
“You’re on twenty-four hour eye contact. Gotta be able to see you. Standard for new admissions,” she informs me.
Group therapy. The 30’x30′ room is overheated, has sad institutional-green walls, a barred picture window, and an assortment of threadbare armchairs arranged in a circle. It’s a decor ill suited to promoting mental stability in my opinion. I would share this opinion with the group were I not preoccupied with the issue (we don’t have problems here, we only have issues) of how to arrange my surplus extremities in an aesthetically pleasing pose. One pair of legs is already folded under me. The other pair gets crossed at the ankles. The blood flow gets compromised in the folded legs. They start to tingle. In no time, they’ll be asleep. It takes all four of my hands to haul them out from under the chair, which is hardly a graceful move. I arrange them next to one another like pins in a bowling alley. That still leaves the issue of how best to position my arms aesthetically. Cross two of them over my chest and drape the other two over the arm rests? Talk about projecting a double message: the relaxed arms indicating guilelessness, the folded ones just the reverse. What the hell, I decide, sprawl in my shabby armchair, appendages akimbo, and check out my “peers” as we’re supposed to call each other.
There are eight of us. Six of them look as ordinary as ham and cheese on rye. They could pass for more or less normal on the street. The other two (not to be overly judgmental) exhibit that off-beat look of one whose inner world has influenced their outer appearance.
Xenobia, who never raises her eyes from the floor, has two antennae sticking out of her forehead. How this plays into her professed diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder is uncertain. Ditto her frayed yellow and black wings—the wings of a monarch butterfly if I am not mistaken. In a high, whispery voice, she confesses an affinity for Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, the man who awoke to find himself changed into a giant cockroach.
“I understand how he must have felt it was preordained,” she says. “That every day of his life led immutably to this transformation, which had less to do with happenstance than with perceiving himself unequal to all others.”
“You need to let go of this Gregor person,” says the therapist, a sallow-skinned female in worn sandals, beaded necklaces, and a beige kaftan that hangs from her boney shoulders like a sail gone slack without wind. She’s a burn-out case it seems. She cares, and she doesn’t care. “Do not mention him again.”
Xenobia, still eyeing the floor, starts sniffling. “But, but…” she whimpers, “It’s only through his story that I… That I can make sense of what I’ve become.”
“You need to focus on your own story,” Kaftan Babe says, and nods to the dude on Xenobia’s right. “Let’s hear from you, Oedipus.”
Tremors, and the periodic jerks of his head, appear to mark Oedipus as a long-term-medicated-to-the-eyeballs “peer.”
“Oedipus. Borderline Personality Disorder,” he drawls. “A dumb misdiagnosis, but par for the course here at the roach motel.”
Xenobia winces at this reference to the Black Flag product by the same name.
In response, Kaftan Babe tilts back her head, literally looking down her long crooked nose at Xenobia .
My attention wanders, comes to rest on a guy, extra cute, extra sexy in his muscle shirt and ripped jeans, and bad-ass smile. Bad-ass smile winks at me. Does he like spiders? Spider-like women? Does he want to play fly and get all wrapped up in arms and legs? Whatever the case, I wink back at him. Unlike my errant spouse, he does not seem to find me scary.
“Yes?” Kaftan Babe interrupts my thoughts.
I look at her, nonplussed.
“Kindly do us the favor of joining us, introducing yourself, and telling us what brings you here,” she says, sounding like an automated voice on an answering machine.
I give my name, pause, figure she expecting me to say I have a Borderline Personality Disorder. That seems to be the diagnosis du jour in this place.
“Homicidal Arachnoid Disorder,” I say instead, feeling that gains me a measure of respect—if not from the Kaftan Babe, who gives me an insincere “Thanks,” at least from my peers. After lunch we get herded up six flights of stairs to the roof for a smoke break. The logic of confiscating “sharps” and endorsing a trip to a roof from which anyone could jump eludes me. What the hell. I can check out the spot for escape possibilities. Kaftan Babe is once again with us. I mentally dub her KB for short. She’s actually wall-eyed, making it hard to tell for sure who she’s looking at. Gotta keep that in mind. I didn’t notice it earlier. I can be wildly unobservant.
A three foot high cement block barrier encloses the roof. Brilliant. Super brilliant, allowing for mucho opportunities to go over the edge, so to speak. Keeping an eye on KB’s eyes, I back toward it. Can I get from here to the ground in one piece? Only two possibilities. I can, or I can’t. And if I can’t? Christ! Lying smashed on the sidewalk will not be a pretty picture. Goodbye neat nose job. Goodbye wrinkle-free puss. Hello Sanitation Department workers scraping up the mess.
KB is looking at passing clouds. My peers are looking into thin air. I ease myself onto the cement blocks, swing my legs and then my butt over, hang on with four hands. What had all the aspects of calamity this morning is coming in handy right about now. It might work well in the long run for that matter. Hooking up with a plastic surgeon isn’t exactly next on the agenda. Getting away from here as fast as possible is. But plastic surgery is a thought. I could keep the new arms and legs and get rid of the others. To be honest, they do show age. Who knows, I might have great career as a hand model ahead. Or, for that matter, a foot model.