Sunday, February 27, 2011

RAYMOND by Neil O'Brien

Raymond is a tall, thin man of about twenty-seven. His head is clean shaven and shines. I wish to Christ he would grow his damn hair again. With his shaven head he reminds me of the guy who shot all the people in Tucson. From across the table his intense, brown eyes meet mine. He cries. Big tears roll down his cheeks. I want to cry but don’t. I’m not supposed to. I’m his “practitioner. That’s what they call me, a practitioner. My job is to take care of Raymond and others like him. Really, I’m his father and mother and his family. I’m here at the behavioral health unit to visit him. He is here after a severe panic attack caused him to pass out. The EMT’s had to break down his door to get him out of his apartment. He looks at me, cries, and then hangs his head. He shakes and touches his forehead and face over and over again. He’s decided he has OCD and ADD. I guess these are acceptable. “But I’m not mentally ill,” he says, “and I’ll sue anyone who says that for defamation of character.” At this moment he is very mentally ill but I don’t say that. He looks at me and runs his hands over his bald, shaven head. It has cuts in it from the razor. He tells me he’s never speaking to his mother again. “They hate me” he says of his mom and step-father. “They don’t hate you Raymond,” I say. “They’re concerned for you, worried about you.” As true as that is it is sometimes difficult to defend the actions of some people. She wants him to be in a place where he can be supervised twenty-four hours a day. He wants to be in his own apartment. She tells him constantly that he will fail, that he is incapable of living by himself. We give him a chance to live by himself. She hates us for that. Raymond won’t speak to her anymore. Now he has pulled his authorization for me to speak with her. She’s infuriated with him and me and everyone. I know how she feels because I’m the parent of two mentally ill children. I guess at 37 and 35, they’re not children anymore. Raymond gets up from the table and walks around to me. He drapes himself over me in a big hug. He is a big guy and squeezes me hard. “I love you,” he says. “I love you too Raymond,” I say in a whisper. I shouldn’t say that. I’m not supposed to love my clients. It’s not therapeutic. It crosses a line that shouldn’t be crossed, or so they say. But at this moment I do love him. At this moment he’s ripping my heart out. Why can’t I ever get used to this, harden up, not feel that damn knot in my stomach. It’s the same knot I felt for years and years with my own kids, and still do if I let myself.

This whole episode is driving me to a place where I don’t want to be, a place where I never want to go again. I look at him crying and rubbing his face and head and the cuts in his shiny scalp. First the Tucson guy comes to mind again. Yes that certainly could happen, I think. Am I enabling possible mass murder? It’s not so farfetched, happens all the time. Is his mother right? Maybe he should be locked up. Maybe that would be better for him and for society. Then I’m driven back in to my life. As I watch him hang his head and cry some more I see my daughter. I remember, for some reason, how she used to cut her face and arms up, scratch herself until she bled. I remember sitting in the hospital, this very same hospital, with her and asking to have her admitted. I remember having to tell the doctor right in front of her everything that was wrong with her. I remember the hurt look on her face as she listened. Most of all I remember leaving her here for the first time. It is a feeling that literally sickens me all these years later. It is a feeling that is being resurrected by this experience, by Raymond and all the others that I must work with on a daily basis. I remember how much I hated the mental health system and how I thought and still think that it helped destroy both of my children. “Christ!” I think, now I am the system. I still hate the system. I’m here to protect people like Raymond from the system I work for. Sometimes it’s just all too damn much. I want to sit down in my chair and write books and poems and get paid for it. That doesn’t seem to be happening. And who in the hell is going to protect Raymond if I’m not here? That’s pretty egotistical I guess, but that’s what I think. After all these years my brain doesn’t work right either.

Raymond came home to his apartment today. I’m not sure he will be all right. It’s a chance that has to be taken. He deserves a chance to have a life, even if mom doesn’t think so. It is six o’clock and I have to go home now to my own life. “You going to be all right for the weekend? I ask him as I open the door to leave. “Sure Buddy, I’ll be fine,” he answers. He likes me to be his buddy rather than his mental health worker. It’s OK with me if that makes him feel better. As I leave and close the door behind me, the knot in my stomach returns in full force. I hear the phone ring, though there is no phone here in the parking lot of Raymond’s development.

“It’s Shawn. I’m on the train Dad.”

“What train?” I say in my daydream.

“I’m on the train. I ran away and I’m lost. I think I’m in Philadelphia. Can you help me?"

2 comments:

Yolande Villemaire said...

A very moving piece.

Unknown said...

I found this deeply moving also. I was taken in by the stream of conscious the writer shares and by the haunting power of the ending. What a piece.