Jenna Le
Kimiko

In my third year of medical school, I witnessed the following scene:

A Japanese-American woman in her late twenties, fearing she was having what is called a "psychotic break," checked herself into the psychiatric ward of a Manhattan hospital. It was the tail end of winter. For me, it was the raggedy tail of a bone-tired but nonetheless frighteningly feral animal: in my mind, I am picturing a lean, angry raccoon, roughly the height and length of a St. Bernard, its claws rummaging fiercely in snow-dusted trash bags heaped on an Upper West Side sidewalk at night but finding nothing worth eating.

Medical school had proven a singularly exhausting experience. My quilted winter coat, which was plump with goose feathers and which I had brought with me from Iowa, was starting to fray: every time I turned my head or moved my arms, little white plumes burst through the worn-out seams and layered at my feet.

I rode the subway to the hospital every morning around 6 AM. (This was three hours earlier than my ex-boyfriend Eliot, who had only recently stopped being my boyfriend, had to wake up for work each day: he was a professional artist.) Every night I came home to a three-quarters sapped toothpaste tube and a toilet paper dispenser that always seemed to be bare.

The Japanese-American woman, whom I will call Kimiko, explained that she was the only person in her family to have immigrated to the United States. Her parents and many siblings lived in Tokyo, unaware that at this moment Kimiko was sitting in a dreary locked hospital room, being interviewed by an army of psychiatrists and medical students.

When the head psychiatrist, sleek-whiskered Dr. White, suggested that Kimiko phone her family to alert them to her unusual circumstances, she sweetly shook her head. "Sure, it's mid-afternoon in Manhattan, but it's the middle of the night in Tokyo right now," she said by way of explanation.

Kimiko was calm and pleasant, with a shy soft voice. She did not look like what I pictured a psychotic would look like at all. Perhaps she was not really psychotic, but only fancied herself to be so.

"I'm an art student. My goal is to become a professional artist one day," Kimiko said when Dr. White asked her what her occupation was.

Dr. White quirked his lips in a calculated imitation of a smile. "What kind of art is it that you like to make, exactly?"

"Oh, multimedia installations, collages, things like that."

"Why did you decide to check yourself into the hospital, Kimiko?" piped up Matt, one of Dr. White's interns. Matt was a gentle young man, with a warm voice and sparkling brown eyes. I frequently caught him fidgeting with his skinny silk necktie, as if he were unaccustomed to wearing one. He had grown up in Atlanta.

I liked Matt because there was something about his face, a whiteness or blankness, that made him easy to project my daydreams onto. I pictured him as a kindred spirit, a fellow lost traveler whose insides were gnawed by an homesickness similar to my own. It soothed me to imagine that there was someone else in the sanitized homogenized regimented world of doctors who might be able to understand how displaced and alien I felt, fearful that I'd picked the wrong city to live in, terrified that I'd chosen the wrong career. Out of all my mental constructs, it pleased me most to picture Matt as a thwarted musician trapped in a doctor's body. One afternoon two weeks before, as I scurried back to the hospital after a hasty lunch break at the corner deli, my greasy fingers twisting self-consciously against my gray pencil-skirt-covered thighs, I had caught Matt stealing a few minutes away from his work to tap out a terribly sad Chopin nocturne on the grand piano in the skylight-illuminated hospital lobby. I gawped. He smiled at me encouragingly. Stricken, I could not bring myself to smile back.

"Why did you decide to check yourself into the hospital, Kimiko?" Matt now asked the slim girl in blue hospital pajamas who sat facing us.

"Ah, that's a long story. You see, last night, I stayed up very late, surfing the internet. I was using Facebook, and I just lost track of time."

Kimiko proceeded to explain that she was in love with one of her ex-boyfriends, a classical violinist named Ryan who had broken up with her two years ago. Unable to accept the fact that her relationship with Ryan was over, Kimiko continued to pore over his Facebook page on a regular basis. The night before, she had been ruminating on Ryan's latest Facebook updates and drinking cheap liquor, feeling more and more depressed as the hours passed. At around 5 or 6 AM, she heard a noise and, looking up, saw "a kaleidoscopic light formation, hovering in mid-air above my desk. It was all different colors, but mostly green and red and blue. It didn't resemble anything in particular: just a cluster of geometric shapes. I knew right away that it was a hallucination, and only crazy people have hallucinations. That's why I checked myself into the hospital."

Upon further questioning, Kimiko revealed that she had recently experienced many of the symptoms of clinical depression: not only had she been sleeping less than usual, but she also routinely skipped meals. She constantly felt tired, depleted of energy. "One of my uncles, who was depressed for many years, got better when he underwent electroshock therapy in Japan," she said musingly. "I think I'd like to try it myself."

That night, as I rode the subway home, I felt as though I'd swallowed a walnut whole. My throat muscles strained around the walnut. The moment that the subway train emerged above ground, I dialed up Matt on my cell phone. To my fellow passengers I must have looked crazier than Kimiko in that moment: my entire body trembled as I crushed my little flip phone against the side of my flushed and wild-eyed face. I cowered away from the passengers who sat on either side of me, acutely sensitive to the possibility that my shameless phone conversation might be overheard and judged by these total strangers. My thighs felt icy beneath my inadequate skirt, but my face burned like a fever rash.

An hour later, Matt stood in the doorway of my apartment, still wearing the pink button-down shirt he had worn to work earlier that day (he had, fortunately, doffed his white coat before leaving his own apartment). His boyish face was shy yet eager. Eager, but not the same kind of eager that I was: for I was eager to shut out all thoughts of Kimiko, eager to suppress my nagging fear that I resembled her far too closely for comfort.

An hour after that, Matt's skinny striped necktie lay on my bedroom floor, limp and uncoiled, like a no-longer-hungry snake.

* * *

"I'm going to the bathroom to get a glass of water. Want one?" Matt drawled, lifting his tousled blond head from the moonlight-glazed pillow beside me. We had been sleeping together almost every single night for a week by this point.

"No, thanks. I never drink bathroom water," I said, feeling the words to be silly even as I voiced them. It sounded like something a neurotic would say.

Matt raised an eyebrow at me, a sexy look that tied my bowels in a knot. I rushed to defend myself, my words stumbling over each other.

"My parents never let me drink tap water when I was a kid. And then it became a habit with me. I mean, it just sorta stuck. I only drink bottled water now."

"What were your folks afraid of? That you'd catch the same American germs as all the rest of us kids?" Matt asked. Not in a disrespectful way. I had told him that my parents were Cuban immigrants who had immigrated to the Midwestern U.S. to work as doctors. My dad was a general practitioner, my mom an obstetrician.

"I'm not sure." I paused, racking my brain. "I think that maybe they thought the municipal water supply had flecks of lead in it. They were afraid I'd get lead poisoning and that it would make me stupid."

Matt's right eyebrow inched up again. "You? Stupid?"

I blushed. I was grateful to him for putting in the effort to pay me compliments now and then, even though it was obvious to both of us that this was just a casual hook-up. "Too stupid to cut it as a doctor, I mean."

Silence. "Your folks really want you to follow in their footsteps, huh?"

"I guess you could say that."

"What would they do if you quit med school? Like, let's say you up and quit tomorrow. What would they do, have an aneurysm?"

"Maybe." I pressed my face into the pillow. "Hey, do you ever want to quit?"

"And do what, be a busker?"

"Sure, why not?"

Silence. "I guess I like nice things too much to quit. Nice Italian restaurants in Soho, vacations in Madrid. Plus, I dig the feeling of helping patients get better, you know?"

* * *

My ex-boyfriend Eliot, the professional artist, worked a string of different day jobs when the two of us first moved from Iowa City to New York City, me to attend med school and him to work on his art. For a couple years, he was a peon in the publishing industry. Then the economy hiccupped. He did temp jobs for a while after that: tutoring anxious rich kids for their SATs, being a doorman for mink-collared apartment-dwellers who never made eye contact, doing data entry for big banks that employed hundreds of thousands. One day, he decided that he was fed up with having all his time consumed by menial labor that drained his energy and detracted from his art.

"I'm not gonna do these kinds of jobs anymore," he announced that night over our habitual dinner of microwaved Kraft macaroni and cheese. "From now on, I'm gonna try to make a living from my art, and if it brings me close to the brink of starvation, so what? That'll just motivate me to work like a demon, to become the best artist I can be."

"How will you survive?" I asked in a high-pitched voice, wearing a scandalized look on my face that I had learned from my often-scandalized mother. What I really meant was: How are you going to win my parents' approval so that they'll allow us to marry?

Lying in bed next to Matt now, hearing his mellifluous southern accent shape the words "nice Italian restaurants in Soho," I was suddenly overcome by the memory of the rancorous fight that Eliot and I had had that night. I remembered how I had worn that scandalized look on my face for hours like a hypocrite, like I was some paragon of pragmatism. It had felt like I was a human being wearing a mask of frigid reptilian skin to convince the world that I was an alien. But I was not an alien; I was a human being, one who was confused and scared and, yes, despite all the precautions that had been taken on my behalf, stupid. But not because of lead poisoning. And not because I had a brain malady that the psychiatrists could conjure away with their therapy, pills, and electrical shocks.

There's a flower that blossoms in the minds of sensitive people, people like Kimiko, a strange little weed that it is all too easy to explain away as a mental illness. But that's not what it is, not entirely. I can't explain quite what it is. All I know is this: artists understand it better than doctors do.

* * *

A week later, Kimiko lay on a padded table, ready for her first electroshock treatment. Dr. Vine, an anesthesiologist-in-training with messy red curls, hovered over a cart nearby, unscrewing the caps from squat glass bottles labeled MIDAZOLAM and PROPOFOL and SUCCINYLCHOLINE.

Matt and I stood with our backs against the opposite wall, watching. Matt's brow was furrowed. He studiedly avoided meeting my eyes. Two nights before, he had told me, gently, that he didn't think it was wise for us to continue seeing each other. It would be impractical, he said. You're a nice girl, he said. A bit intense, but a very nice girl.

The room was quiet: we heard only the sound of Kimiko's jagged nervous breathing, the sound of Dr. Vine tinkering with glass. Dr. Vine bent over the soft flesh of Kimiko's bared arm, a syringe glinting in his hand. Restless, my eyes drifted to Matt's profile for the umpteenth time.

"Fuck!"

It was Dr. Vine's voice: gunshot-loud, panicked. As if jolted from sleep, Matt and I rushed to the patient's bedside, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Something truly terrible must have happened, to cause Dr. Vine to forget all the rules of professional conduct and bellow out such a potent obscenity for everyone, including Kimiko, to hear.

"I gave her the wrong medicine, I gave her the wrong medicine." Dr. Vine was muttering. My gaze shot to the syringe in the anesthesiologist's right hand, the glass bottle in his left. In small but clear print, the glass bottle read: SUCCINYLCHOLINE.

Kimiko's eyes were open, brutally wide open. Her mouth was ajar, too, registering an expression of supreme fright. The rest of her body was unnaturally still, paralyzed by the fast-acting succinylcholine that had just been injected into her bloodstream. Over the gurgling noise in my ears, I heard Matt's musical voice saying, almost singing, "Vine, weren't you supposed to give the patient the propofol before giving her the succinylcholine?"

I dig the feeling of helping patients get better, you know?

* * *

Kimiko survived.

In fact, she more than survived. Thanks to the concerted efforts of many experienced doctors, she recovered. And thanks to midazolam, a medication that has the coincidental side effect of inducing memory loss, she sustained no recollection of her harrowing experience on the padded table.

Three weeks later, I saw Kimiko sitting at a table in the Occupational Therapy room, at the end of the long main hallway of the psychiatric ward. A sheet of stiff red construction paper was spread out on the table, and Kimiko was dropping tiny balls of silver glitter on it. Her face wore a preternaturally peaceful expression.

Dr. White, the head psychiatrist, stood outside the door of the O.T. room, his nose pressed against the thick glass window that was inset in the massive door. His second-in-command, Dr. Kohler, hovered at his cardigan-clad elbow. As I drew nearer, I heard the two doctors talking to each other in low voices.

"Look at that ugly thing that Kimiko's making," Dr. Kohler scoffed. "You call that art?"

Dr. White shook his head in sympathy. "It certainly doesn't look like any art I've ever seen. It's just the product of a deranged mind."

"Well, if we needed further evidence that more drastic treatment is required in Kimiko's case, this proves it," said Dr. Kohler.

"A few more weeks of electroconvulsive therapy would do her good, perhaps?" Dr. White mused. "Ah, I am of two minds! Yesterday, it had seemed to me that she was much improved. I even said to myself yesterday, 'James, it's high time you sent that Japanese girl home!'" He noticed me standing nearby, then, and inclined his head in my direction politely. "What say you?"

My voice, perfectly calm, utterly unafraid, boomed out in the stale air of the poorly ventilated hallway. "I think Kimiko's artwork looks very lovely. I actually have a friend who's a professional artist who I think would greatly admire it."

Dr. White turned to regard me directly, his grizzled face thoughtful. "Is that so? Well, you could be right, for all I know. I haven't taken an art class since elementary school, I confess! Very well: I shall release Kimiko from the hospital tomorrow."

Then Dr. White and Dr. Kohler walked away together, their conversation turning to other topics, other patients. Their voices faded as their cardigan sweaters receded down the hall. I went into the O.T. room, got a large red Dixie cup out of one of the cabinets in the back, and brought it to the ladies' room, where I proceeded to have a very long drink of water.

_ _

Jenna Le is a writer of poetry, fiction, translations, and criticism. Her first poetry collection, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), was a Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller. Her writing has appeared in AGNI Online, Post Road, Salamander, and elsewhere.

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