Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

hand over my mouth, trying desperately to keep my panic private. My breath slows; my lungs fill again. For a moment, three seconds at the most, I’m calm, but it’s an expression of optimism and hope that I can’t sustain.

As the hands of the clock turn and whir, my nameless, faceless Suicide Preventer is replaced by another. And another. They all look the same. Worried middle-aged women, anxiety stitching the wrinkles into the brows. I look an inch to the left of their face, or an inch to the right. I can’t bear to look directly at them and see the sadness, pity, confusion, disappointment painted on their faces, sinking their eyes deep in their faces.

They eventually blur and shimmer and morph into one woman, who sits at the end of my bed on the same small plastic chair tucked into a corner, the drawn curtain brushing her arm. I wonder who she is, who loves her, whom she loves, where she goes home to. Whom she’ll tell about the woman who cried and spat and tried to obliterate herself.

In her lap, she clutches the clipboard that they’ve all been clutching, that holds several sheets of white, lined paper that she must fill in constantly, with tiny words in neat, tight handwriting, covering every movement, every twitch, sniff, glance, every act of mine, however small, however seemingly insignificant. She fills it with wave upon wave of black spidery script, her hand rising and falling with my heartbeat. Later, when I’m more present, I’ll become conscious of seeming or not seeming mad, but right now I’m so far away that I don’t know and don’t care how I seem. It feels so unrelated to me.

More patients come in to share my cubicle, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. I don’t look at them, acknowledge their presence, their faces beige flat circles with no features.

After some hours in the smudge, the weaving blur, I’m told that I’m about to be taken to the cardiac ward for monitoring. I’ll be given medication to detox from alcohol while I’m there, offsetting the vomiting, the shaking, the other physical withdrawal symptoms. I want to walk, but they say I must be pushed and I must be lying in the bed. In a haze of barely remembered, barely registered set of coordinated movements, mostly by other people, I’m moved out of the ER, through the chained, cussing, coughing of the men I pass, to another floor.

My wheels come to a rest and I’m parked in the bay closest to the corridor, artificial yellow light flooding in from two sides: from the streets through the window and from the corridor just to my side. Almost immediately, a slight man with sandy hair comes into view, tossing a small rubber ball against the squeaky floors over and over again.

Bounce, slap, bounce, slap, bounce, slap bounce, slap slap, bounce bounce.

He strides up and down the corridor, past the window facing into the corridor, peers in, the ball a distraction while he hunts out information. I avoid his eyes and draw the curtains.

The current Suicide Preventer is installed at the end of my bed. I look at her, seeking solidarity against Rubber Ball Guy who is already testing my broken mind and patience. She looks my way, not quite meeting my eyes. I stare harder. She doesn’t respond, doesn’t acknowledge the noise that is repeating and sinking inside my brain, burrowing down.

Slap, slap, bounce, bounce bounce slap.

I move my hands to my head as it repeats and repeats and repeats, echoes in my ears. She studies my reaction, writes, pauses, watches, writes some more. I have my first flash of panic about what she’s writing, recording. What if she doesn’t get that my enraged look is about how really fucking irritating Rubber Ball Guy is? What if she doesn’t see and hear it like I do? And just thinks that I’m, well, nuts? Because I am, right? In here, to her, right now, I’m mad. The gown, the band around my wrist, the file tucked in the end of the bed, they all tell her the same basic, conclusive story: I’m mad. Not to be trusted. Not with myself, not with anyone.

And suddenly I know what my job is. I have to do everything in my power not to seem mad. My face slips into a mask, hardens and I stare at the wall over her shoulder impassively, without evident emotion.

I fall asleep and when I wake up it’s three a.m. on the ward. My bed is at the exact point that darkness from the sky and light from the corridor collide, but it’s not this that wakes me up. It’s the noise coming from the bed next to mine, which has had the curtains drawn around it since I’ve arrived. All I’ve seen is scuffling feet; all I’ve heard is whispered conversations. But right now, all I hear is:

Beep, beep-beep, beep, beep, beep-beep, beep, beep-beep, beep.

I sit up, now fully awake, irritated. ‘Ugh, that noise,’ I say to the new Suicide Preventer, a different one to the one who was at the foot of my bed when I went to sleep.

‘Noise?’ she asks.

I nod. ‘Can you hear it?’ My hand is to my ear, straining.

She frowns, asks in broken English, ‘You hear something?’

I nod again. ‘Yes! Do you hear it?’

‘Voices?’ she asks.

The woman in the cubicle had been talking to the nurse. ‘Well, yes, sometimes, but not right n …’ I start to say, stopping as she immediately starts to write, mouthing quietly to the rhythm of her hand movements.

I settle back into my pillow and then realise what she thinks I just said. ‘Hang on! No!’ I spring up. ‘Not voices!’

‘You hear voices,’ she says.

‘No, no, I don’t hear voices! I mean the beeping of the machine, and the voices as they talk.’ This is not helping. ‘But I don’t hear voices that aren’t there!’

She looks at me quizzically.

‘Please!’ I say, trying not to scream. ‘Please, if you’ve