Hurry Down Sunshine Read online

  “Is there something else I should know?” I ask.

  “Not really. Just that…I release you, Michael. I’ve been wanting to tell you this, and I think now is the time. I release you. And I bless you with all my soul.”

  The next morning Sally has the dazed look of someone who has just crawled out of a car wreck. When I ask her about last night she collapses onto the couch and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes.

  I turn to Cass, struggling with the laces of her combat boots, anxious to leave. She avoids looking at Sally and she won’t look at me either, deflecting my questions with a series of shrugs and grunts.

  With greater finesse, Pat manages to loosen her up to the point where she choppily tells us what happened. She and Sally were out walking, Sally talking a mile a minute, trying to communicate something weirdly urgent, biting Cass’s head off when she interrupted her or failed to understand. “I’ll show you what the fuck I mean!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, and began stopping passersby on Hudson Street, shaking them, grabbing their arms. When a man cursed Sally and pushed her away, Cass realized it wasn’t a joke. She was begging Sally to cut it out when Sally flew into the middle of traffic, rushing at oncoming cars, sure that she could stop them in their tracks. “I dragged her back to the sidewalk, I don’t know how she didn’t get killed. And when the cops pulled up, she started on them. Same way. All this crazy shit.”

  Without saying good-bye to Sally (who anyway shows no sign that she is aware of her existence), Cass hobbles out of the apartment, her boots still untied, and starts down the stairs.

  I follow her onto the landing, a rush of questions. The answer to which comes to me on its own, with the force of a total solution. Drugs. Acid, Ecstasy, at the very least some galactic ganja making the rounds.

  I press Cass to admit it.

  All she gives me, however, is an imploring look. “We didn’t take any drugs. Can I please just go home?”

  In the apartment Sally remains on the couch, far away, inert. I sit down next to her, take her hand, concentrate on it. I say her name out loud, not addressing her exactly, but as if to assert a tenuous strand of contact between us.

  No response.

  “She may have saved Sally’s life,” says Pat, referring to Cass.

  But why did her life need saving?

  Suddenly Sally pulls away from me, jumps to her feet, and starts pacing around the apartment. She is shivering, not as one who is cold might shiver, but with a bristling inner quake of her being. And she is talking, or rather pushing words from her mouth the way a shopkeeper pushes dust out the door of her shop with a broom. People are waiting for her, she says, people who depend on her, at the Sunshine Cafe, holy place of light, she can’t disappoint them, she must go to them now…

  She makes a run at the door.

  I throw myself in front of her and she shoves me against the wall. Her strength is startling: five feet four, maybe a hundred pounds, enormous gusts of energy whistling through her like a storm. Wrestling me to the floor, she rips off my glasses, claws my face till it bleeds. Pat lets out a shriek and runs over to help me. Overwhelmed by the two of us, the stretched wire of her body slackens. I break our clinch, still guarding the door, and she scuttles out from under us, retreating to the opposite side of the apartment.

  She sits on the floor under a window, and we glare at each other, panting, like animals across a cage.

  Recovering her composure, Pat slides down beside her. Who’s waiting for you, Sally? What do you want to tell them?

  That’s all the coaxing she requires. She erupts into language again, a pressured gush of words delivered with a false air of calmness this time, as if Pat has put a gun to her head and ordered her to sound “normal.” She has had a vision. It came to her a few days ago, in the Bleecker Street playground, while she was watching two little girls play on the wooden footbridge near the slide. In a surge of insight she saw their genius, their limitless native little-girl genius, and simultaneously realized that we all are geniuses, that the very idea the word stands for has been distorted. Genius is not the fluke they want us to believe it is, no, it’s as basic to who we are as our sense of love, of God. Genius is childhood. The Creator gives it to us with life, and society drums it out of us before we have the chance to follow the impulses of our naturally creative souls. Einstein, Newton, Mozart, Shakespeare—not one of them was abnormal. They simply found a way to hold on to the gift every one of us is given, like a door prize, at birth.

  Sally related her vision to the little girls in the playground. Apparently they understood her perfectly. Then she walked out onto Bleecker Street and discovered her life had changed. The flowers in front of the Korean deli in their green plastic vases, the magazine covers in the news shop window, the buildings, cars—all took on a sharpness beyond anything she had imagined. The sharpness, she said, “of present time.” A wavelet of energy swelled through the center of her being. She could see the hidden life in things, their detailed brilliance, the funneled genius that went into making them what they are. Sharpest of all was the misery on the faces of the people she passed. She tried to explain her vision to them but they just kept rushing by. Then it hit her: they already know about their genius, it isn’t a secret, but much worse: genius has been suppressed in them, as it had been suppressed in her. And the enormous effort required to keep it from percolating to the surface and reasserting its glorious hold on our lives is the cause of all human suffering. Suffering that Sally, with this epiphany, has been chosen among all people to cure.

  Pat and I are dumbstruck, less by what she is saying than how she is saying it. No sooner does one thought come galloping out of her mouth than another overtakes it, producing a pile-up of words without sequence, each sentence canceling out the previous one before it’s had a chance to emerge. Our pulses racing, we strain to absorb the sheer volume of energy pouring from her tiny body. She jabs at the air, thrusts out her chin—a cut-up performance really: the overwrought despot forcing utopia down the throats of her poor subjects. But it isn’t a performance; her drive to communicate is so powerful it’s tormenting her. Each individual word is like a toxin she must expel from her body.

  The longer she speaks, the more incoherent she becomes, and the more incoherent she becomes, the more urgent is her need to make us understand her! I feel helpless watching her. And yet I am galvanized by her sheer aliveness.

  Spinoza spoke of vitality as the purest virtue, the only virtue. The drive to persist, to flourish, he said, is the absolute quality shared by all living beings. What happens, however, when vitality grows so powerful that Spinoza’s virtue is inverted, and instead of flourishing, one is driven to eat oneself alive?

  With renewed force I grasp on to what I am certain is the answer to this question: drugs. Some havoc-wreaking speed-ball has invaded Sally’s bloodstream, prompting a seizure of violent—and, most important, temporary—proportions.

  Troubling as this explanation is, under its shield Sally’s delusion takes on a less malignant cast. My learning-disabled daughter believes she is a genius. Believes all people are geniuses, if we can just reignite the infant fires within us. Not an outrageous notion. The Balinese believe that during our first six months we are literally gods, after which our divinity dissipates, and what is left is a mere human being. And to the gnostics we’re deities who made the mistake of falling in love with Nature, which is why we spend our lives yearning to recapture a state we only vaguely recall. What is Sally’s vision if not the expression of that yearning? She has returned to her idealized instant of existence, before diagnostic tests and “special needs,” before “processing deficits” and personality evaluation—before the word “average” came to denote a pinnacle beyond attainment. She has voided her past, renounced the corruption of influence, turned her back on divorce, betrayal, her mother, me…and who can blame her?

  Sally’s sitting on the living room floor, her arms wrapped around her ankles, her head on her knees, shaking slightly
, but momentarily quiet. Taking advantage of the lull, I motion Pat to the bedroom where we can talk without being overheard. Here, I lay out my thoughts. Surely we can understand Sally’s need to pump up her ego. Psychiatric literature is filled with such cases: low self-esteem bubbling up in a froth of exaggerated self-regard. Allowing for the distorting effects of the drugs she has obviously ingested, might not her enthusiasm be indicative of a healthy desire for emotional balance?

  “If we can just get her to calm down, all this will pass, I’m sure of it. She’ll be back to her old self again.”

  “We may have to ask ourselves who Sally’s ‘old self’ really is,” says Pat.

  The blank incredulity of her voice stuns me. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to like hearing this, but Cass didn’t seem stoned to me. And I don’t think Sally is either. Even if she did take something, it would have to have been at least ten hours ago. Shouldn’t the effects be wearing off?”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror through the open bathroom door: two strings of flesh hang from my cheek where Sally scratched me.

  “I have to tell you, I called Arnold,” says Pat, referring to the Reichian therapist who treated her after she was hit in the leg by a car and her career as a dancer abruptly ended. “He had one piece of advice: ‘Take her to the nearest emergency room.’”

  The significance of Arnold’s advice isn’t lost on me, especially in light of his weekly radio show where he voices, among other things, his skepticism toward psychotropic drugs and the biomedical-minded psychiatric establishment. I’ve heard Arnold call “mental illness” a social myth invented to silence a potentially subversive sector of the population.

  “I thought he disapproved of emergency rooms.”

  “Not in the case of acute psychosis.”

  Acute psychosis. The phrase shocks me. By comparison “mental illness” sounds benign. I splash my face with water; a few pale drops of blood swirl down the drain. Then there’s a ruckus as the front door flies open, Pat gives a yell, and the two of us are running down the stairs after Sally.

  We catch up to her on Bank Street, speedwalking west with a forward headlong tilt. She is going to the Sunshine Cafe, she explains in answer to our repeated questions, people are already gathered there, soaking in the light, waiting for her to come back as she promised.

  She turns down the narrow cobblestone alley near Charles Street and, trotting to keep up with her, I have the powerful sense of having veered out of time, into some luridly accurate painting by Bosch or Brueghel: Two Fools Chasing Madness through the streets of some walled medieval town.

  A minute later we’re in front of the Sunshine Cafe, a dingy lunch joint flanked on one side by a flophouse that has been converted to a hospice for people with AIDS, on the other by a pornographic bookstore with a sign in its window announcing a final liquidation sale. “Everything Must Go!” On the disintegrating pier across West Street a half dozen sunbathers are precariously sprawled.

  As soon as we enter the cafe, the guy behind the counter rolls his eyes at the ceiling, like he’s had the displeasure of dealing with us before. Then he proceeds conspicuously to ignore us. Sally zeroes in on the only customer in the place, a mild-looking man with a crew cut and leather minishorts, quietly working through a plate of chicken Caesar salad. She sits down and projects her face right up to him. What has brought you today to the Sunshine Cafe?

  “To meet a friend, I hope.”

  She grips his naked, tattooed arm. “You’ve already found a friend. I am your friend.”

  He squirms away from her, startled, then visibly recoils.

  Sally reads the opposite message: she thinks he’s hanging on her every word. She gives him a stretched, strangely distant smile. Before she has the chance to launch into him, however, the man behind the counter intervenes.

  “Get her outa here. I don’t want to see her fucking face again.”

  I absorb the shock of seeing her through his cold glare: a pariah. My heart sinks. Our neighbor Lou, this summary eviction from the Sunshine Cafe…I remember a legend of Solomon: outwitted by a demon, he is thrown out of Jerusalem and the demon takes over as king. Solomon is forced to beg for food, insisting he is really the king of Israel. People take him for mad. They mock and shun him. He sleeps in dark corners, alone, his clothes filthy and torn.

  With Pat’s help I try to coax Sally toward the door. She shoots me a murderous look and orders me to be quiet. But she doesn’t turn violent. She allows us to lead her out of the cafe, and we reverse our steps through the hot Village streets, Sally between us now, gesturing imperiously like a captured monarch on a forced march.

  We resume our helpless positions in the apartment, shiny with sweat, heat oozing through the ceiling in an almost visible shimmer. Sally, are you hungry? Do you want to lie down? Would you like me to read to you? My voice sounds far away and strange, as if by dint of some self-soothing illusion I have set the clock back to when she was two years old. With each question I await a response, the slightest indication that whatever spell she is under has broken and she is the child I know again. Each time, however, her otherness is reaffirmed. It is as if the real Sally has been kidnapped, and here in her place is a demon, like Solomon’s, who has appropriated her body. The ancient superstition of possession! How else to come to grips with this grotesque transformation?

  Another hour passes. The day feels more and more unreal. I keep waiting for some kind of spontaneous remission—the hypnotist’s snapped finger, as it were—but the likelihood of this happening seems increasingly remote. A hermetic silence surrounds us. It is as if we have been struck mute. But the mute have signs, a system of shared meaning. In the most profound sense Sally and I are strangers: we have no common language. Everything is gobbled up in the iron jaw of her fixation; there is no reality apart from it. She’s gone away like the dead, leaving this false shell of herself to talk at me in an invented dialect only it can understand.

  “People get up-set when they feel set up. Do you feel set up, Father?”

  Her voice pierces me like a dart. She is flushed, beautiful, unfathomably soulless.

  “I’m proud of you, Father. There’s so much to cry about. So very much.”

  Only when I feel the wet sting in the scratched grooves on my cheek do I comprehend what she is referring to: she thinks I am shedding tears of joy at her epiphanies; that I have embraced her vision; that thanks to her I too have been saved.

  By late afternoon there is nothing left to do but follow Arnold’s advice and take Sally to the hospital. Far from resisting this plan, as I expect her to, she greets it with a swell of optimism as if we’re about to embark on a long-postponed adventure. She’ll be able to “share” her discoveries with people who are versed in such matters, experts who will understand. So we’re down the stairs again and scurrying along Bank Street, the neighborhood’s eyes on Sally as she broadcasts her crack-up, engaging all comers, discordant and wired.

  At the Bleecker Street playground she stops, grips the bars of the wrought iron fence, and with peculiar severity contemplates the children within. She seems mesmerized as she watches them run through the sprinkler, dig in the sandbox, circle one another in their plastic cars. Her breath is shallow, quick, her eyes glossy and, for the moment, immensely sad. Sad beyond her capacity to recognize sadness (“Glory in miseria,” Robert Lowell called it, writing of his own abysmal elation), what I would come to know as the mixed state experienced by those in the throes of dystopic mania.

  Adjacent to the playground is a small square with seventeen silver linden trees rising fifty feet and higher from what must be the deepest tree pits in the Village. The leaves of these lindens weave a roof so thick over the square the sun can’t get through, even in July. It’s as dark as a cave in there, and perpetually cool, a haven for can gatherers and anyone else in need of a place to curl up and be left alone. A half dozen bodies lie fetally on the benches, while others rummage through plastic sacks, change
their clothes, fry sausages on portable burners, drink liquor concoctions with names like Tequiza and Pink Lady, all with an air of bedroom leisure, radios playing low, ripe odors rolling out from under the trees.

  As I ungrip Sally’s hand from the playground fence, a woman from the square wanders over. I’ve seen her before, on my way to the bank, the subway, her sea lion body sheathed in dirt, a protective armor against sadists and thieves. I go to put a coin in her outstretched hand, then see she isn’t begging for money: sitting in her palm is a dead sparrow, its tiny brown claws pointing straight up at the sky. I flinch involuntarily, while with a contradictory lurch my heart goes out to her. I look in her eyes: two shiny shellacked stones, at the center of a world that to her is the only world. How unknowable we are! I start to say something to her but the chasm between us seems impassably huge.

  Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word “schizophrenia”) once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they’re strangers to us, what are we to them?

  Indignant, Sally hisses the woman away. “Don’t let her bother you, Father, she’s totally out of her mind.”

  After sweating it out for a while in the hospital ER, with the kidney stone, the detoxer, the rollerblader with a chipped bone, we’re summoned into one of a series of partitioned modules.

  “Let me do the talking,” orders Sally, confident that the admitting nurse will grasp the importance of her message in a way Pat and I cannot. She starts out in the lecturing tone of a schoolmarm, primly smoothing the creases in her dress: the parody of a woman in control. Within seconds, however, speech shatters like a dropped glass.

  “Are you this girl’s father?” asks the nurse.

  “Yes—yes I am.”

  “Go through those doors and make a left. Take seats in one of the examination rooms. An empty one, of course.”