Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone is out now (read a selection below). Read an excerpt from Hannah Proctor's Introduction here.
BEDTIME IS THE BEST TIME OF DAY
When Holly was brought into the hospital on involuntary all she wanted to do was crash, that is, sleep all day and night to escape her imprisonment. While this lasted for many weeks as a good solution, the day came when her body could hibernate no more. Sleeping no longer felt good. But still there was nothing to get up for, and moreover she was in a permanent state of drowse.
She tried to train herself not to sleep during the day, because the absolute worst was to get trapped at lights out all raring to go. It was hard. There was little to do, and nowhere to go on a shut-in psychiatric ward but her bed. At home when she had missed a night of sleep, she had slept all day, been up again till the wee hours when at last she had allowed herself to sleep till noon; but then it got later and later, 3:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m., until some lucky day when she was able to sleep around the clock and wake up at nine to start a fresh sleep cycle. And failing that, to brave it out for twenty-four hours without any sleep at all or until she was so dead she could just fall into bed.
Here in the hospital there was no such freedom of hours. You were woken at seven and then frequent mealtimes and then constant interruptions and scheduled ‘activities’ for which you had to leave your room or be checked off as sick. The trouble was, now that her hibernation cycle was used up temporarily, she could not drop off to sleep at a moment’s notice, to sleep for, say, an hour that happened to be free, because for that she had to be hungry for sleep and she was, instead, oversatiated. She found it increasingly impossible to sleep during the day, so afraid she was of not being tired at lights-out time. But even with a sleeping pill she could not sleep at night either. And she was worried about the sleeping pills, because Ativan was as addictive as Valium, and she didn’t want to leave the hospital with a habit, one moreover which required a prescription.
This is how she ended up an insomniac on the waiting list for the Sleep Disorder wing of the psychiatric hospital.
SWOONING
After they raised her dose to 42 mg of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died (that lasted about three days) in which all the blood rushed to her head and when it rushed back again she felt old and ready to die.
But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness she felt an overwhelming relief. The black-velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, blackout, and never wake up again.
ORGONOMY
I read of a Reichian treatment once which was deemed successful: a seventy-nine-year-old widow began to recover ‘streaming’ sensations in her body and limbs. Her cancer went into recession. But what should she do then? There was no one, nothing in her life for her to reach out toward. (Maybe this is why she had gotten sick in the first place – a cry for attention.)
EMOTIONAL PARALYSIS
Coming out of the hospital, she could not shop. It was more than just the surfeit of goods, which had always confused her. Even a shopping list did not help, she dropped her cart in the middle and fled. Her shelves were lined with missing objects she needed and had almost bought. Even when she succeeded in actually going through with a purchase, she came home dissatisfied with her choice. To pick out a simple birthday card for her more and more distant relatives was agony. She was reminded of those stories of war-torn soldiers who arrived back from years in the army unable to make even the smallest decision. The hospital did that to you: meals were all laid out, but even there she had a hard time choosing any small choices on the menu, and was glad they had dispensed with that pretense and just gave the same thing to everyone every day: a variation on bread and cheese, sometimes a grilled cheese sandwich, sometimes macaroni and cheese; and for dinner it was invariably leg of chicken. She got used to this routine and felt cheated out of her meal if it was anything else. Similarly, just to order deodorant from the gift shop of the hospital was a big deal, and even choosing gum in lieu of the now-banned cigarettes gave her a problem. She had few visitors and they did not as a rule bring her anything she really needed, just clutter for her two or three drawers where she had been wont to squirrel away extra linen. She still didn’t have a decent pen or paper.
Her indecision was awful, for no sooner did an impulse arise to do something, than it would be crossed by a contrary impulse; she was conflicted. (She watched herself undergo this in slow motion as it were, but was powerless to avoid it.) Or she was confronted by so many choices of things to do, that must be done, that she could choose none of them. She not only couldn’t shift gears, her gears were locked. She was paralyzed into inaction and came to rely on other people to marshal her or just to do the task entirely instead of her. Her inability to initiate a simple motion read as extreme laziness. Inertia is my middle name, she was fond of saying to her worker.
This paralysis was stubborn and lingered for years, not months, after a hospital stay. She needed to be babied, but there was no one around to do it now, and her things just didn’t get done. Slips of paper mounted, but filing terrified her and she didn’t have a filing cabinet anyhow. She was as though blind, feeling under different clumps of stuff for half-remembered items. This mounding applied to clothing as well. Besides, she had lost her feel for the weather, and always wore the wrong thing.
This paralysis was stubborn and lingered for years, not months, after a hospital stay. She needed to be babied, but there was no one around to do it now, and her things just didn’t get done. Slips of paper mounted, but filing terrified her and she didn’t have a filing cabinet anyhow. She was as though blind, feeling under different clumps of stuff for half-remembered items. This mounding applied to clothing as well. Besides, she had lost her feel for the weather, and always wore the wrong thing.
This left a huge gap in her time once filled by reading, writing, cinema. Nor could she hang out, she was getting too old, and she didn’t have the money anyway. Her old habits of seclusion and screening out distraction remained, but there was nothing to be secluded for. Once in a while she prodded herself to write, but the old excitement of creation did not return, or if it did, it fizzled by morning after her nightly medication. It was a dry fuck, every word painful and laborious. But like sex itself, even masturbation, it was the initiative that was most lacking.
Her general state of indecision was matched only by her impatience. For example, waiting for doctors or nurses or clerks in the outpatient wing of the hospital was agony. She shifted from one leg to another like someone who was holding it in, and kept jabbing her face and her forms at personnel until they began to dismiss her as daffy. She could hardly sit still in a doctor’s waiting room, a beauty parlor, or a church service, or stand in a postal queue, and travel was, forget it. She couldn’t read, she was too nervous, she couldn’t even watch TV. Instead she reverted to hospital behavior: long hours of blanking out, just watching the hands of the clock go round until the next mealtime or bedtime or wake-up time. Sometimes she panicked at the thought that she had thirty more years to kill this way, with only more and more institutionalization ahead of her and suicide no longer an option.
Perhaps due to the medication, her biggest trouble was she couldn’t care about anything, and love was forgotten. That left getting through the blank days as comfortably as possible, trying not to sink under the boredom and total loss of hope. She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan. The decades were passing quickly and she was going gray; she was no longer attractive to anyone, male or female.
Indeed, she felt herself repulsive, in the most literal sense. Hearing of a death, she often wished she could trade places with that person – let someone who knew how to organize and enjoy life benefit from her bodily health better than she could!
- Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone is out now.
In a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces follows characters in psychiatric wards and out in the streets of New York City to move beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional spaces to record acts of cruelty and kindness. Firestone's short stories are accompanied by a Reader featuring contributions by Lola Olufemi, Hannah Proctor, Laya Firestone Seghi, Lourdes Cintron, Susan Faludi, and Chris Kraus. Read an excerpt from Hannah Proctor's essay, Unaccustomed Tenderness: On Airless Spaces, here.