Mind Demons

When I was an undergraduate, I rented an attic apartment from a friend’s father and stepmother.

The attic was a coup for this young woman who was over 1,000 miles away from home and struggling to make ends meet. The ridiculously cheap rent included a spacious bedroom, a small, bright yellow kitchen with a sun roof through which the sun poured in, a study with hardwood, built-in bookcases, and a clean, modern bathroom. The attic had been renovated for my friend, but she chose not to live in it. Her father and his wife were both professors at the university, and she thought that it made for too small a world in a university town.

A few days after I moved in, about half past five or so in the evening, her brother knocked on the door leading to the attic, looking for his father. I introduced myself and told him that the attic was now an apartment, that I was renting it, and that his father wasn’t upstairs. I had been told in passing the day before that Ron was recently released from the military and was having some problems “adjusting,” and that although he didn’t live with them, he visited often. Ron seemed agitated that I didn’t know where his father was, even more agitated that I was now living in the family space, albeit separate from the rest of the house, up the stairs.

I told him it was best to check in the house. He left, only to return by opening the door at the bottom of the stairwell and coming up to my apartment about ten minutes later.

One of the longest nights of my life thus began.

The air was thick with fear and confusion. Mostly confusion, though I didn’t immediately recognize the odor because of his rambling, which was at first hard to distinguish from a simple lack of manners. But my gut told me something was wrong, very wrong, so I went with the flow. Common sense told me to run, but given that he was already in the apartment, I stayed with my gut.

I started chatting with him and showed him the apartment. We went to the study. I thought my books would deter him from lingering, given that everyone but my fellow geeks found philosophy less than interesting. Behind my inane prattling about the books and the comforts of the study, I kept asking myself why he thought he could come up to my apartment, apart from the fact that his father owned the house, or why he wanted to be up here. Since I didn’t yet have a phone, I had to stay with my gut, the most precarious telecom device in uncertain circumstances.

Confusion. It was palpable. Before long, I realized this visit wasn’t personal or sexual, the first fear for a woman alone with an uninvited man, it was all about having someone listen to his ramblings about the CIA, his connections to ultra secret intelligence, his father’s high ranking military liaisons (his father taught English Literature), and what the U.S. was going to do over the next ten years with their military power. All top secret. Only known to a few. Only a few knew “the answer.”

Ron was a paranoid schizophrenic and experiencing a full blown episode in my ever so quaint but soon to become apartment from hell. I didn’t know that then, didn’t even know that his “adjustment” issues had been already been diagnosed. Apparently, paranoid schizophrenia was something that the professors were not too keen on admitting to themselves or others.

My evening with Ron continued, the ranting was an ebb and flow of seeming coherence marked by greater degrees of lunacy and agitation. The agitation was the most unsettling, as the evening air moving through my new little nest grew thick with psychic energies I had never before felt, nor have I ever again. I stayed calm, though there was no relief in sight. I casually suggested every so often that we go downstairs to see if his father and stepmother were home, but Ron would have nothing of it, and each time I mentioned moving downstairs, he glared at me ferociously, the pupils of his red rimmed blue eyes dilated, and the irritation caused his entire body to slightly convulse in tremors, from his head to his legs. About ten-thirty or so, I managed to gently coerce him downstairs, through the house entry, into the kitchen and then into to the living room. Safe territory, I thought, breathing easier.

No one was home.

Eleven-thirty. Twelve-thirty. One-thirty. The evening relentlessly drug on. Ron had decided we should sit in the living room–he in his father’s leather reading chair, I in his stepmother’s brocade upright. I watched the Queen Anne clock on the side table laboriously tick off the hours as Ron continued telling me about the CIA, military intelligence, his father’s conspiracy alliances, how he could read people’s minds (and presumably at that moment, mine), and that he knew things others didn’t.

I had simply moved the agitation and confusion from the attic to the living room, but I was still alone, and his raving and the uncertainty of my situation increased every quarter of an hour. A dash to the phone would have set him off, I was certain. So I waited and hoped that at some point his father and stepmother would come home from the soirée and save me from the oppression.

Quarter to three. I suggested for the umpteenth time that it was time to call it a night, and he seemed ready to make it so, remaining calm and agreeable. I said “good night, it’s been nice getting to know you,” made my way to the house door, to the attic door, then locked myself in, and hustled up the stairs.

In a few minutes, Ron followed, easily breaking through the lock.

He was delusional, demanding that I give him “the answer.” I had to give him the answer. He wanted it, he didn’t want to wait, and he was tired of people holding out on him. The answer. Now.

I don’t remember why or how I ended up on the bed, but for some reason I remember leaning back on the edge of the mattress, him hovering over me, ranting, shaking, eyes glaring, pupils dilated, demanding the answer. I did not know what answer he wanted, and when I had no answer for him, he pulled out his switch blade from the black leather sheath on his belt, sprung it open, put it to my throat, and flatly told me that “if you don’t give me the answer, I’m going to give you the answer . . .”

He started counting. Ten. Nine. Eight.

Calm. Be calm. I prayed, waiting for an answer.

Ron continued counting down, and when he reached three, there was a loud knock on the door at the bottom of stairwell. It was Ron’s stepmother, “Is everything alright up there?”

Reality had momentarily cut through his delusions. He was distracted, the blade dropped, I bolted up past him and ran for the door. He came downstairs, walked past the two of us without saying a word and left, switchblade in sheath.

The police officers came about 20 minutes later and took a report. Nothing else happened.

Ron was on the loose all summer long. Moving was out of the question; I was living close to the bone already, let alone coming up with money to move yet again. My dream apartment became a nightmare hotel room, given that I could barely keep myself there for fear of Ron showing up and wanting to visit. Nobody incarcerates a paranoid schizophrenic in a university town when the parents are professors and the victim is an undergraduate. I was implicitly if not explicitly understood to be exaggerating the incident. Ron was simply “adjusting,” and I was being dramatic. A philosophy major. A female. A young woman with a few loose herself, no doubt. Given my own history with depression, and the fact that I was on my own for the first time, 1000 plus miles away from home, who was I to argue? It was my own uncertainty against the voices of experience and authority. They won.

Ron often told me during his visits that summer, none of which reached the same tenor as that night, but all marked by agitation and paranoia, that I reminded him of his mother. “You’re a lot like my mom, you know.” “You remind me of my mother.” “My mother says stuff like that too.”

A little under two months later, Ron visited his mother who lived about four blocks away, in a nice little white A-frame house surrounded by old shade trees, around the corner from her first husband and his second wife. He stood behind her as she washed her breakfast dishes and talked about the day’s upcoming activities, he took out the switchblade and unceremoniously slashed her throat.

His mother survived the attack.

I had temporarily moved out of the attic just a few days before, for the psychic tension had become so viscous that I had to leave the house, imposing on friends to stay with them. They thought I was “overreacting,” but humored me. Good thing.

Ron was indicted and subsequently committed. I later learned that his older brother had also been committed for paranoid schizophrenia a few years before. Adjustment issues ran in the family.

With the coming of fall and the turning of the leaves, the return of students and a new batch of freshmen, my friend’s parents told me that they were no longer interested in renting the apartment.

I left. Fall financial aide packages would be coming in, and I was eager to begin my senior year with the summer behind me.

But that season allowed me to see my own mind demons from an entirely different perspective.

What frightened me about Ron was my confronting my deepest fear: the mind’s fragility, the ability for our mind to turn on us, and leave us no longer who were were. Or to strip of us what we imagine ourselves to be, rob us of that slippery if not downright deceptive notion of ourselves called “the self.” I saw starkly the unpredictable psychic undercurrent of our lives, lives ordered on a precarious reality known as the mind.

Facing madness is extra-ordinary. To face someone else’s madness is to face the potential of our own. To see the mind arbitrarily wander amid chaos and its contours, create realities on a whim, such is the stuff of imagination gone amok, a train wreck of synaptic triggers, when the thin tethers holding many of us to reality are severed, cast away into a neural nether land, sometimes far beyond reach.

Less than a decade after my summer visits from Ron, I too went mad for a period of time. We have DSMR to tidily categorize these states, and I was diagnosed as bipolar, an assailant as unforgiving as Ron’s. Mania and hypomania, punctuated by the deepest throes of depression and the mind’s oblivion. During the darkest moments of my hell, reality and unreality were at times inseparable for me, days there were when I could not connect the marks on the page with letters and something called language. Days when the psychic pain was so severe that I pulled out razors to make the pain go away. Physical pain is the easiest way to control psychic chaos, crystallizing and localizing those mind demons in a single, physical act. All is there to be felt and seen. Controlled. The answer. Now.

On days when my mind demons visit anew, without the ferocity with which they did in the early nineties, but as part of the ebb and flow of a managed life, Ron sometimes come to mind . . . for that is precisely the issue: the human mind.

I remember reading “Sybil” five or six times between seventh and eighth grades, for even then the idea of how one brain could have so many minds fascinated me, got me thinking about this thing with which we we think. What is the mind? What is this construction called self? Perhaps more important, how can we know reality with an organ stuffed between two ears and decorated with a face? A psychiatrist told me several years ago that many who experience trauma split off as a defense mechanism. That was Sybil’s story. Others disassociate. My story.

But when repressed psychic pain comes to the fore, when disassociation no longer serves to fight the onslaught of a twisted reality, and the pain becomes so intense that the air one breathes is so weighted with memory and one cannot move, the mind demons have their day. Oscar Wilde wrote that “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell,” but for some it is those uninvited demons who create our hells, elusive beings who run around willy nilly in the ephemeral chemical regions of the brain.

I look at the quaint apartments that people call their minds, those who have easy cerebral openings to the world, with a roof window in which sunlight pours in sweetly, there is one room in which to sleep, one in which to study, one to wash in. Where reality is nicely ordered and easy. I covet spaces like those, minds flooded with clarity, like a summer night awash in light breezes filled with jasmine, where answers are easy, and the mind makes no demand for something beyond its reach. Where there is little insistence for anything other than this moment on its own terms. Where the world is simple and straightforward, as it should be. Not clouded by a thick jam of angst and chaos, or flooded with lights so bright that they blind one to their immediate landscape. The Buddhists say it is a practice. Perhaps.

That night many moons ago when Ron held a switchblade to my throat and I remained calm in the face of my mortality, what frightened me the most was the fragility of my own mind, and having to live with the uncertainty of this very delicate instrument by which I order my life and count my days.

Death is an easy sleep. For some of us, learning to live with those demons who can render a glorious spring day a long, dark night proves the real challenge.