When Rudy is manic, he likes to talk about the end of the world. He
pulls out a well-annotated Living Bible the preferred version for
plain-speaking evangelists and animatedly jabs his stubby forefinger at
key passages in the Book of Revelation. Look, here! Its all here!
After the rapture comes, born-again Christians will rise to heaven, and
the anti-Christ will rule the earth for seven years. If you have the
mark of the beast, 666, you'll burn forever. Rudy's gray eyes sparkle
ferally as he plays Jeremiah, and his voice grows louder, more
insistent. Were in the end times, Im telling you! Its all coming
to pass just as Revelations says! With all these credit cards,
computers, the UN, its all preparing for the anti-Christ! As he warms
to his subject, Rudy performs amazing leaps in logic, effortlessly
gliding from ancient metaphor to contemporary politics. His ideas
jumble into a confused mess, yet in his ears he hears a
precisely-sequenced argument. Seven seals . . . the reunion of
Germany. Its all there. We can . . . Look! Russia is the big bear
who comes down into Afghanistan. Millennium thousand-year reign. When
Rudy is manic, he prognosticates for hours, soliloquizing in a
psychedelic stream of consciousness.
But when Rudy is depressed, he becomes another man a Mr. Hyde turned Dr.
Jekyll, transmogrified and animated out of the pages of Robert Louis
Stevenson. Then, he sits motionless at the kitchen table, his Living
Bible tossed carelessly onto the counter among dried bread crusts,
discarded peanut shells, and cheap paper napkins. His mouth as sealed
as the prophetic books in Revelation, he pushes the buttons of a
calculator repetitively. He adds nothing, yet adds continuously he will
not explain what sum he hopes to find after punching calculator keys for
hours. His mind retreats somewhere deep into itself, and his eyes
become heavy veils dropped before the mysterious and tortured workings
of his brain. On these days, Rudy spends his time not prophesying, but
watching the sun rays as they stream through the grimy kitchen window,
traveling through their daily course and empowering his solar
calculator.
If Rudy were in fact a character either from Revelation or from Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he might well serve as an evocative literary
symbol. But Rudy is my father, a man whose illness undermines the more
sanitized state of mental illness when it is controlled whether within
the pages of a literary text or by a pharmaceutical company. For he
refuses to take the drugs that could stabilize the synaptic processes in
his brain. He did try for a while. After an adulthood of increasingly
bizarre and violent behavior, he was finally tagged with mental illness
in his late fifties, only after being arrested and then hospitalized for
physically assaulting my mother and then skirting suicide.
Psychiatrists at the regional mental hospital placed him on a rigorous
lithium treatment plan. And suddenly, for the first time in years, his
life seemed hopeful and understandable to those around him. When he
returned home after his month-long sojourn at the hospital, mom noticed
how calm he had become, how slow he was to anger. True, his sparkling
sense of humor seemed dimmed, and he lacked the zest for life which she
had always loved, at least periodically. But he was, after all, much
more manageable on lithium.
That manageability lasted approximately nine months before the potency
of the drug provided an excuse for non-compliance. My father noticed
kidney problems increasingly, he had trouble controlling his bladder;
and such side effects were too uncomfortable and humiliating for a proud
man to tolerate. So one day he severed communication with his doctors
and left a half-filled bottle of lithium tablets to gather dust in the
bathroom cabinet. And, in his mind, he recovered. Within days, he will
tell you, he felt better. He felt alive again, awake, alert. My
senses have never been so sharp, he asserts monotonously. The doctors
were trying to kill me. Thats the only explanation. Psychiatrists
were the ones who made Hitler so evil, you know.
While my fathers subjective testimony implies improvement, mom
confesses that the swings between polar states actually seem worse now
with each passing season. The rapid cycling sends both of them on an
interminable carnival ride.
Its the sickness, she explains wearily to me one day after he roars
off in his rattling car, on an unspecified yet frantic mission to
nowhere. I am home with my parents for one of my strained annual
visits, and I feel psychically vulnerable without the thousand-mile
pillow that normally cushions me from their reality, my nerves slivers
of steel under my skin. Moms gnarled fingers curve around a coffee
mug, and a weak line of steam curls out of the oily black liquid. He
wan't always like this, you know. He used to be a wonderful husband, a
wonderful father. She gazes blandly out the window, examining the
gravel road which runs beside their dilapidating house, an ironic soft
smile playing around her lips. I dont know what will happen, she
finally admits, dully.
The prognosis for my father seems grim, his actions more unsettling as
each year crawls by. He has been known to enter friends unlocked
houses late at night, uninvited, looking for someone or something. He
spontaneously erupts into snarling tirades of embittered paranoia. An
acrid smell of urine hangs around his body like a polluted cloud because
he cant be bothered with basic hygiene. He even shot a rifle at the
squirrels that jump from towering oak trees onto his decaying roof. Mom
worries he will inevitably hurt himself, or someone else.
Yet she stubbornly insists on her vision of the old Rudy, the man she so
hopefully married four decades ago. Sitting with me at her kitchen
table on this slow Saturday morning, she weaves magical tales of a man
openly proud of his children's musical accomplishments. She relives
joyous family vacations in happier days, when she could count on her
husband to follow an itinerary and drive safely. She remembers his
exuberant performances in community theatre, how he loved to steal the
show and become the talk of the town. She emphasizes what a good
provided he once was, back when he still held his job as a technician at
the local television station. Numbly, I listen to her reminisce,
striving to filter her sunny memories through the darker ones crowding
my mind.
A scream of brakes and the deep rumble of a dying car engine signal his
return home. Bursting through the back door, he casts a malignant
glance in our direction he must sense we have been discussing him and
clumps heavily into the family room to watch a video about steam
trains. When he was healthier, he enjoyed model railroading and built
an elaborate rail village that stretched across the basement floor. Now
he ages in front of a twenty-five inch television screen that offers
frame after frame of passing engines and cars, a train going nowhere.
Mom and I sit in pregnant silence for a while, listening to the lonesome
sound of the television trains whistle. My mind travels with it,
reflecting on the predispositions encoded in my genes, and on the things
my parents must never know about me: the high daily doses of
antidepressant and mood stabilizer I choke down bitterly, the
bewildering dysphoria of my own manic depression that chronically
threatens my progress in a doctoral program, the intricate network of
self-inflicted scars preserved on my forearms. Here are burdens never
to be shared so intimately here is a bond with my father I choose not to
cultivate.
Well! mom announces suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. I've really
got to get these dishes done! She struggles to her feet and gathers
breakfast plates from the table. She needs to clear the space, for
later my father may want to rest there mutely with his calculator. Or
perhaps he will want to talk to her about the end of the world, and she
will listen to the rise and fall of his voice, and imagine he speaks the
old languages of love, of life, of hope.
Lizzie.