Walks on the Margins: A Story of Bipolar Illness

WALKS ON THE MARGINS

A Story of Bipolar Illness

Kathy Brandt

Max Maddox

Published by Monkshood Press at Smashwords

Copyright © 2013 by Kathy Brandt and Max Maddox

All rights reserved.

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For more information visit kathybrandtauthor.com

ISBN 978-0-9891414-0-6

Library of Congress Control Number 2013905281

Cover art and design by Max Maddox

For Jessi

and all the sisters and brothers of those with mental illness

Contents

Chapter 1  The Electric Blue Hour

Chapter 2  Elopement Risk

Chapter 3  Margaritaville

Chapter 4  $100 Nikes

Chapter 5  Pretty in Pink

Chapter 6  Yo-Yo

Chapter 7  Paradise City

Chapter 8  Ted’s Dad

Chapter 9  This is Where

Chapter 10  Corrective Shoes

Chapter 11  Black Flower

Chapter 12  Cedar Rapids

Chapter 13  Candy Junkie

Chapter 14  Commitment

Chapter 15  The Lighthouse

Chapter 16  You Better

Chapter 17  The Cat’s Meow

Chapter 18  8:32

Chapter 19  The Spirit of Transportation

Chapter 20  XYZ

Chapter 21  Real Music

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Mystery Novels by Kathy Brandt

Chapter 1

The Electric Blue Hour

Max

Fine chocolates and white wine, little soaps and body powders wrapped in satin yellow bows, a diamond accented with emeralds on a band of white gold. The Love Park fountain bursting through the city lights. A childish quartet splashing in the baby blue, exhilarated by the coming of the hour. The air was for once fresh, the flags of the avenue full as sails with the warmth of summer. Sisters of hers, brothers of mine, drifted by, the priest, the promenade.

The scene was fleeting, emptying, disappearing. She never came, and where I thought my walk had ended, it had only just begun. And so I stood. Twisting precious gems around my little finger, to my fair lady I heeded the signs. The flier on the telephone pole, in the newspaper box, the ad on the side of the bus. The arrangement of flowers in the store window, the stray cat, the draw of the cicada’s pulse, the charms that fell from her bracelet.

Bent over like a real beggar, smelling like fungus and urine, I walked on the same blisters, only bigger. Gruesome, unnerving, crimson silver dollars on my Achilles heel, medallions on my walks over the horizon, marathons on the margins. On the fissures in the bricks of the lovesick, in the storm that would right everything wrong, it was for her, my paradise.

She was a promise, one that could never be made good. But a promise so great that its very mirage crippled even the strongest of wills. If I finally do recover, it will be from my dying love for her; it will be from a broken heart.

But let me start from the beginning, nearly 12 years ago now.

* * *

It was just before sunrise, at the electric blue hour I had come to appreciate in the week since I had given up sleeping. That early morning, George W. Bush was making one of his first appearances on TV, his image forming there before me in a virtual dance across the screen. He moved as if to music only he heard, waving his effortless wave, just to my left, just to my right, squinting over here, shaking hands where they needed to be shook.

My eyes alit on parted hair, red neckties, and baby-boomer wives, while I considered this little epicycle in the conservative political upheaval, suddenly motioning around this one individual. So far as I was concerned, the man was already president. I had told my good friend Ana it was the best course, the course we are always on, painful as it is. The conditions for a revolution would be made.

You can hardly tell the difference between a lunatic and a young Marxist, but there is one. Actually, there are at least two: eating and sleeping. Ana was concerned enough to emphasize to me their importance. I don’t think she had ever been so serious. We agreed with Karl that the "dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question." And still, against my advice, she continued to make her way to Poli Sci class, and whatever else she signed up for that semester. It had become clear that if either of us would be going anywhere, we would not be going together.

Though I’d taken some time for a little independent study, you still might say I had a hungry mind that year. I had never been so interested in reading and my retention and focus had come together in an extraordinary way. I would have just as soon strolled through the astrophysics aisles at the library, flipping through the giant books of equations at ten pages per second, shall we say, than fidget my way through another philosophy lecture on monads.

Just a few days erstwhile, I thought to win the Nobel Peace Prize for my work some day; it seemed perfect for what I was doing. But all of that had become irrelevant. I was at a historical crossroads of sorts, one whose effect couldn’t be entirely known by the legions and arbitrators of history, including its prize givers. Sometime in the night, I had made plans for the morning’s activities. I had become the king of making plans then. But this one was simple.

I took one last long pull off the pipe, put it back on the arm of the chair, and left. Three cans of spray-paint and my mom’s manual Minolta in my backpack, I walked down the steps into a perfect morning. It was one of those days that feels like your birthday, like you could have anything.

The songbirds from the trees lining Broad Street recoiled around my fixation on their asymmetric cries. Down 6th Street, the bank sign flashed coded APR rates and sent out its congratulations to the recently wedded, its witty absurdities poignant, settling me into this riddle.

SEPTEMBER 08, 1999

55 F, 12.8 C

INTEREST RATES

RISE AGAIN

6.25%

CONGRATULATIONS

ON YOUR DAY

TED & SYLVIA

JONES!!!!

I rounded a familiar corner to the long red brick wall outside the entrance to the local dive bar tucked in behind Main Street. Underground and shrugging at code, the details of which didn’t make it that far inland, it was here that many of us eighteen-twenty year olds regularly spent a few nights a week guzzling pitchers of Wisconsin macro and playing violent games of foosball. It is in Iowa where these talents are best honed, and hidden potential is best found and lost over the course of a night.

My face was inches from the wall as the aerosol spread its colored mist, encircling my head and speckling my face like St. Augustine on his last ascent. For the next three and a half years, on the way to drown ourselves on a given night, my friends and I would avert our eyes from the three overlaid spellings of GOD in primary enamels as we tripped back down to the pub for another forgettable night. If I had only written something else, there would have been more to say.

But even on this morning my mouth was as though stitched shut, and my possessions were as my chains. Watch, wallet, and keys, and shoes disposed of, I tossed the empty cans to the asphalt of the silent alleyway, catching the eyes of another early riser, unsure whether she had just witnessed a crime.

A full day’s spin of the earth, and the light fell the same way it ever had. In Grinnell, Iowa, that September, the sun stretched out across two-story buildings, lapping against the hard green leaves, washing the wind into form. At a yellow-orange daybreak, I snapped black and whites at my reflection in tinted office windows.

Facsimile of the inverted horizon bent in my camera’s lens, I turned its focus on all of the instances of reflection. With each snap the change in light grew more rapid until my face was overtaken from behind by the steep rays of the sun. The solitude of the early morning was slipping away; I grew embattled with the delay of what I had expected to be an outcome of sorts.

Baggy-eyed pig farmers, in it for another day, emerged from their respective holes. Something about my appearance had caught them off-guard, and they silently encouraged me to make my way out of this town of ten thousand. Along the way, I decided to continue my summer in Bodega, California, where for months last summer I lay with Leaves of Grass, ate blackberries, and hippie-flipped in the redwoods with my donkey neighbor on The Ranch.

Whether I was laid out by someone headed east, the sun pouring into their windshield, my blood exploding over the corn on either side of the highway, or whether I was afforded a more elegant departure into pure enlightenment, I was willing to digress in an ongoing way, as far as my feet would take me down that two-lane.

Wind flowing through my face holes, bare feet on a yellow balance beam, I-80 to I-76 to Highway 50. The cars piled up, trailing my slow gait; even behind the wheel, courteous as Midwesterners should be, they minded their own business as they crept by on my right. I had not in fact made myself invisible as I would have had myself believe.

When will you wake up, deep thinkers, heavy drinkers, all washed-up while I do all the work of the wake? Take my maps, my unfinished projects, my rude and unmeaning poetry, and meet me here, at the corner of this checkered parachute. Clinch the tapered edge, spread tight this fabric over the cliffs of the Pacific! Snap hard this horrible nylon quilt! Lock your arthritic claw, let your skeleton smash against this shore of black rock! Keep forever the smile of the skinless jaw!

The chirp of a siren at my tail broke me free from this last plea for company, waking me from the utter loneliness of pure faith. I gathered that I was being pulled over by the local outfit, so I moved to the shoulder in the customary way. Here in the middle of nowhere, not even farmers believe in the devil anymore, and the local bookstores had long carried the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Most of the cops know when to throw you in jail and when to take you in for a check-up.

A little Q&A nonsense, some vitals and the cold coin of a stethoscope, and the doctors found me sickly and undernourished, flighty and over determined. My friend Will showed up at the hospital and identified me as the specimen I was—by all appearances his roommate. The causes of my ailment seemingly extra-physical, I was sent to Des Moines on a narrow slip in the back of an ambulance.

I have been on a number of these rides now, whipping around corners, laying it out on expressways, wondering why we were always going so fucking fast. Fully enjoying it though, not having so much as a splinter, as I made my way to the more appropriate hospital, feeling as though I’d finally found someone to agree with my assessment of the critical situation.

Dear red suited man, what could you possibly say? I who am looking up at you, you who belted me to this cart. We who have never met are locked together in a swiftly moving box, listening like you do, eyes inside-out, wide blue open to the stream, fast babble and deep heaves, blowing my word-train into your face.

* * *

A flash of the fully lit day, and I was rolled through the west wing of Mercy Hospital, almost every bed without an occupant that sunny Tuesday. I told them who I was (everyone) and where I was from (everywhere), crying into my hands as the lady in white scribbled out a few notes, enough syndromes for a diagnosis.

This must be so hard for you, she said with sad eyes.

The mere suggestion of sympathy had me feeling the exhaustion of weeks of the most extreme emotions that have ever descended up