“I like talking to you,” I told Dr. Barney.
“Well, you’ll be seeing me in a month, to check up on how the medication is treating you.”
“You don’t do therapy?”
“The other doctors are great, Craig; they’ll help.”
Dr. Barney stood up—he was about five-foot-five—and shook my hand with a soft, meaty grip. He handed me the Zoloft prescription and instructed me to get it right away, which I did, even before taking the subway home.
thirteen
The Zoloft worked, and it didn’t take weeks—it worked as soon as I took it that first day. I don’t know how, but suddenly I felt good about my life—what the hell? I was a kid; I had plenty more to do; I’d been through some crap but I was learning from it. These pills were going to bring me back to my old self, able to tackle everything, functional and efficient. I’d be talking to girls in school and telling them that I was messed up, that I had had problems but that I’d dealt with them, and they’d think I was brave and sexy and ask me to call them.
It must have been a placebo effect, but it was a great placebo effect. If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch. My brain said yes I am back and I thought the whole thing was over.
This was my first experience with a Fake Shift. Dastardly stuff—you do well on a test; you make a girl laugh; you have a particularly lower-body-simmering experience after talking online and rushing to the bathroom; you think it’s all over. That just makes it worse when you wake up the next day and it’s back with a vengeance to show you who’s boss.
“I feel great!” I told Mom when I got home.
“What did the doctor say?”
“I’m on Zoloft!” I showed her the bottle.
“Huh. A lot of people at my office take this.”
“I think it’s working!”
“It can’t be working already, honey. Calm down.”
I took my Zoloft every day. Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal human being; some days I woke up and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and wondered what the hell the point was of getting out of bed and brushing my teeth like any normal human being. But I always managed to take it. I never tried to take more than one, either; it wasn’t that kind of drug. It didn’t make you feel anything, but then after a month, just like they said, I started to feel that there was a buoy keeping me upright when I got bad. If the Cycling started there was a panic button attached to my good thoughts; I could click it and think about my family, my sister, my friends, my time online; the good teachers at school—the Anchors.
I even spent time with Sarah. She was so smart, smarter than me for sure. She’d be able to handle what I was going through without seeing any doctors. Her homework bordered on algebra even though it was only fourth grade, and I helped her with it, sometimes doodling spirals or patterns on the side of the pages while she worked. I didn’t do maps anymore.
“Those are cool, Craig,” she would say.
“Thanks.”
“Why don’t you do art more?”
“I don’t have time.”
“Silly. You always have time.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Yes. Time is a person-made concept.”
“Really? Where’d you hear that?”
“I made it up.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. We all live within time. It rules us.”
“I use my time how I want, so I rule it.”
“You should be a philosopher, Sarah.”
“Uggg, no. What’s that? Interior design.”
My eating came back around: first coffee yogurt, then bagels, then chicken. Sleeping, meanwhile, was two-steps-forward, one-step-back. (That’s one of the golden rules of psychology: the shrinks say that everything in our lives is two-steps-forward, one-step-back, to justify that time you, say, drank paint thinner and tried to throw yourself off a roof. That was just taking a step back.) Some nights I wouldn’t sleep, but then for the next two I slept great. I even dreamed: flying dreams, dreams of meeting Nia on a bus and talking with her, looking at her, seeing her off a few stops down the line. (Never having sex with her, unfortunately.) Dreams that I was I jumping off a bridge and landing on giant fuzzy dice, bouncing across the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey, laughing and looking back at which numbers I had landed on.
When I couldn’t sleep, though, it sucked. I’d think about the fact that my parents weren’t going to leave me much money and they might not have enough to send my sister to college and I had a history assignment to do and how come I didn’t go to the library today and I hadn’t checked my e-mail in days—what was I missing in there? Why did I fret so much about e-mail? Why was I sweating into the pillow? It wasn’t hot. How come I had smoked pot and jerked off today?—I had developed a rule: on the days you jerk off you don’t smoke pot and on the days you smoke pot you don’t jerk off, because the days you do both are the ones that become truly wasted days, days where you take three steps back.
I started to work in phases a little bit. For three weeks I’d be cool, fine, functional. Even at my most functional, I wasn’t someone you’d pay a lot of attention to; you wouldn’t see me in the halls at school and go “There he goes, Craig Gilner—I wonder what he’s up to.” You’d see me and go, “What does that poster say behind that guy—is the anime club meeting today?” But I was there, that was the important thing. I was at school as opposed to home in my bed.
Then I’d get bad. Usually it happened after a chill session at Aaron’s house, one of those glorious times when we got really high and watched a really bad movie, something with Will Smith where we could point out all the product placements and plot holes. I’d wake up on the couch in Aaron’s living room (I would sleep there while he slept with Nia in the back) and I’d want to die. I’d feel wasted and burnt, having wasted my time and my body and my energy and my words and my soul. I’d feel like I had to get home right now to do work but didn’t have the ability to get to the subway. I’d just lie here for five more minutes. Now five more. Now five more. Aaron would eventually get up and I’d pee and force myself to interact with him, to get breakfast and hold down a few bites. Nia would ask me “You all right, man?” and one Saturday morning, while Aaron was out getting coffee, I told her no.
“What’s wrong?”
I sighed. “I got really depressed this year. I’m on medication.”
“Craig. Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry.” She came over and hugged me with her little body. “I know what it’s like.”
“You do?” I hugged back. I’m not a crier; I just look it; I’m a hugger. Cheesy, I know. I held the hug as long as I could before it got awkward.
“Yeah. I’m on Prozac.”
“No way!” I pulled back from her. “You should have told me!”
“You should have told me! We’re like partners in illness!”