When Dr Shah asks how he can help me, I only manage a distracted half-smile in response because the calendar on the wall behind him has all my attention. The days of September have sprung to life and the lavender flowers lining the bottom edge have dissolved into a pale purple sea. Dates are bobbing in and out of the water: 6, 7, 10 and 12, wooden rafts floating on the surface, the early 20s pirouetting through the air before diving back down with big, soundless splashes, 27, 29 and 30 swimming, trying to outpace each other.
The tab of acid under my tongue dissolved forty-five minutes before I walked into Dr Shah’s chambers at Serenity Psychiatry Hospital.
‘Aleena?’ His voice floods my ears – filling my canals, slapping against my ear drum – bringing my attention back to his face. I’ve rehearsed my answer so many times, it should be embedded in my brain by now, but what finally tumbles off my tongue is a feeble mumble. ‘Ummm ... I’ve been, well, I’ve been hallucinating. It’s been a while now...’
He nods. It’s an encouraging nod, one that expects more words.
But where do I start?
The image of a car, a silver Alto, violently flashes before my eyes. The car starts rolling down the hill. Slowly at first and then very, very fast, all of a sudden.
My body tenses up, the panic rides up my chest and pushes out words I’d planned on arriving at much, much later. ‘I think I might be depressed. That’s what WebMD says.’
He shakes his head, the smile sitting low on his lips.
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions right away, okay? And let’s not take the internet too seriously. It tends to come up with wild diagnoses,’ he tells me.
I nod. The nodding makes me feel like a bobble-headed doll. A dumb little doll waiting to be picked up in a little souvenir shop in a touristy holiday destination somewhere, anywhere.
‘Would you like to tell me more about these hallucinations? What are they like?’
I nod again, my head lolling forward on its axis. I stretch my neck taut and grind my teeth to make it stop. It works. The car is not rolling downhill anymore.
I start narrating. I begin with Jynx, the Pokemon that appears on the top of my cupboard almost every night and gently grooves to the beats of a drum I can’t hear, hands swaying left to right, never losing eye contact. A sea appears often too, at the foot of my bed. A towering vertical sea with waves for arms that hold machine guns and shoot at invisible enemies. When I mention the Amazon package that appears weekly or fortnightly, his smile slips a little. ‘It has tiny wings that keep flapping non-stop. Whenever it appears, I hear ‘White Flag’ by Dido playing somewhere far away,’ I tell him.
YES!
I’m ready to tell him more but he raises his left hand. His hand seems to be missing its fingers. Before I can focus on it any further, he asks me if perhaps these are just dreams.
I shake my head. My neck feels stiff. I try hard to not stare at his stump of an arm. I blink and it grows mini tentacles that stretch up into the air, worming backwards to join the dates of September in the purple sea.
‘I do have vivid dreams, though,’ I tell him. Or do I imagine telling him that? He nods, so I suppose those words have been said.
He asks me a few more questions – if my daily life stresses me out, if I’m on medication for any sort of chronic pain and if my job may be physically or mentally taxing. I say no, no and no. He doesn’t ask me what happened with Sanya.
He takes down some notes on his pad, the writhing tentacles resting on his lap. I assume he’s been writing for a few seconds, but they feel like long, heavy minutes. Minutes that seem to have come alive and are stretching out and out and out, spreading across the table like spilled water. It makes me nervous. The minutes reach the edges, just about to drip off onto the floor. I feel my heart beating. Fast. Dub. Dub. Dub. My right hand balls up into a fist. Then, my sister’s words boom into my ears.
You need to talk about it, Aleena. You must talk about it. You must.
I feel a nausea rise up from the pit of my stomach, carrying with it words that rush up into my throat and gush out.
Dub. Dub. Dub. My heart’s still racing.
He stops writing. I feel a sense of relief wash over me. When he looks up, his face is missing its smile. Shit. The relief melts into a puddle at my feet, an uneasy nervousness taking its place.
September is still a sea full of numbers. Diving, pirouetting, swimming.
‘Could you explain that a little more, Aleena?’
You need to talk about it, Aleena. You cannot keep avoiding it.
My response isn’t one I’ve thought through; the words just roll off my tongue without reason.
His smile hasn’t returned. He nods and writes something down. I crane my neck to read the word. It says ‘depersonalisation’. He adds a question mark at the end.
The words from verywellmind.com swirl into my head: Risk factors include: A history of recreational drug use, specifically marijuana and hallucinogens, experiencing or witnessing a traum-’
I grind my teeth, stretch my neck taut and ball up my trembling fingers into fists. The words fade away.
When he speaks again, his voice is a softer, warmer version of itself.
‘Have you spoken to somebody about this? Friends? Family?’
‘Yeah, I’ve spoken to my sister.’
‘And? What does she say?’
This acid business needs to stop. It’s been two years.
I shrug and tell him that she just thinks I have a very active imagination. The next few words slide off my lips before I can fully word them. ‘Tripping … she thinks I’m tripping.’
A little cloud of doubt crosses his face before he chuckles. ‘Occasional use? Marijuana?’
I respond with a sheepish smile. There’s a long bridge between his definition of occasional and mine and I don’t do weed. Not anymore. But I don’t feel the need to correct him. Not now.
‘Occasional drug use – recreational’ he writes down before telling me that my hallucinations are not likely to have been caused by the weed.
‘Do the hallucinations ever feel like a threat? Like they could cause you harm?’
‘I’M THE ONE THAT CAUSED THE HARM. IT WAS MY FAULT,’ I’m tempted to yell.
‘No,’ I say. My head lolls forward. It feels wobbly. So wobbly.
‘Okay, that’s good. You said your dreams are vivid? Would you like to tell me about them?’
My head’s foggy, I can’t recall any dreams. My brain decides to try improv.
I tell him about a night out with friends. How the sea rose around us, picked us off the road and put us down on cushions on the surface of the water. A whale appeared, hurled itself into the sky and dived back down, sending us back into the sky as we shrieked.
When I finish, he’s wearing a wider version of his smile.
‘Okay, Aleena, so what I’ll do is have you take a test. It’s a questionnaire that can indicate if you may have an underlying problem. You can come in sometime next week and just fill it up here. Let’s see how that goes and then, we’ll take it from there.’
He tears the paper free from the pad, the one with his notes, and hands it over.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to share with me? Anything at all?’
It was two years ago. We were headed to the hills, our destination a fifteen-minute-downhill-journey away. I was driving the Alto, Teresa was seated next to me, her five-year-old daughter Sanya was in the back seat. Teresa’s motion sickness got out of hand; we had to make a quick stop. Sanya was playing with some candies, her favourite orange sugar candies. She flung a few out the window. I stepped out to pick them up. There was a puppy across the road, its head in a polythene bag. I dashed across to help. Moments later, I heard Teresa scream. I turned around to see the car moving, Teresa sprinting after it. It swiftly picked up speed and reached the edge of the hairpin bend twenty feet away. Then, it was gone.
I put up my best smile, shake my head and say no. My head’s starting to spin fast, my sister’s words in my ears getting louder and louder and louder.
You cannot keep blocking that memory. LSD is not a coping mechanism. You cannot keep blocking that memory. LSD is not a coping mechanism. You cannot keep blocking that memory. LSD is not a coping mechanism.
*
When Dr Shah explains the questionnaire and tells me there are 100 questions in total, I’m only partially listening. I’m staring at his neck that isn’t a neck anymore, it’s a bright orange candy coated with a sugar glaze. My thoughts rapidly flit between his candy-neck and the tab of California Sunshine I swallowed two hours ago. His phone beeps loudly, notifying him of a new message or an email or something. The sound brings my attention back to the sheet. Next to each question are five blank circles. From left to right, they’re labelled ‘strongly disagree’, ‘disagree’, ‘neutral’, ‘agree’ and ‘strongly agree’. I’m supposed to colour in the circle within seconds, without overthinking. I don’t look up but I can see the orange candy hovering at the corner of my eye.
The first set of questions are straightforward and include easy ones like ‘I like spending time alone’, ‘I feel anxious around other people’, ‘I prefer staying at home to socialising’. I fill in the ‘agree’ circles. When I reach No. 75 (‘I find it difficult to open up to people’), the circles swiftly merge with each other, ending up in a clump. I blink fast, hoping they’ll go back to being circles. It doesn’t work. I skip it. The circles for No. 76 (‘I often feel physically and/or emotionally numb’) appear intact, so I neatly colour in the ‘strongly agree’ circle. I do the same for the next (‘I feel distressed easily’) before erasing it and filling in the ‘neutral’ circle. I snigger when I reach No. 80: ‘I engage in recreational drug use’. I watch the words slowly crawl towards each other to form a straight black line. I look up to see if Dr Shah’s watching what’s happening on the sheet. His head’s bent over his phone, his neck still an orange candy. The sight of it is starting to make me nauseous. I drag my attention back to the sheet. The next question ‘Have you ever lost a close family member/friend?’ makes the bile shoot up my stomach. I need to leave the room as soon as possible. I resort to blind guesses. I scribble in rashly, hoping I’m filling in the ‘neutral’ circles. When I’m done with all 100, I push the sheet towards him, tell him I need to dash to the washroom, pick my bag off the floor and flee.
*
It’s been two months since. I haven’t answered any calls from Dr Shah’s office. I told my sister he seemed like he didn’t have the sixteen years of experience he claimed, that he was impatient and unwilling to hear what I had to say. ‘I swear I tried to tell him everything,’ I assured her. She said she’ll find me another doctor.
I still see Jynx. Almost every night. The vertical sea has shot me a few times now.
*
Amrita Lall is a writer and editor based in Bombay and Bhubaneswar whose constant quest is to squeeze out some hours every now and then to write fiction. Her work has appeared in publications like Lonely Planet Magazine India, Nat Geo Traveller India and Architectural Digest India. She graduated in law but chooses to write for a living.