Thirteen Knives

Published in “Please See Me” 2024 as Thirteen Knives of Grape Jelly

When the doctor says, “Serious and persistent,” the mother, because she has no emotional shelf for this concept, imagines Japanese Knotweed pushing up through asphalt; knotweed that you must knock down repeatedly because its roots are tenacious and robust. Then cover with black plastic and rocks for two years. The moment you turn your back, the plant grows stronger, and more resistant than ever into a dense, six-foot-tall hedge with flowers and seeds that readily disperse everywhere.

No one has control over this.

“I can’t even talk to him,” the psychologist says. “Not until your son has been on medication for six weeks.” He looks steadily at the mother. “Do you have a lock on your bedroom door?”

The mother ponders his words.

∞

Her son sits in his room all day, alone. When his mother returns home from work, she calls upstairs, and hears screams and explosions from his video games. Her son emerges from his room only at night, sneaking downstairs to scavenge food from the refrigerator. 

This goes on for a year, and slowly, the medications begin to work. The mother is no longer woken out of a deep sleep by the stereo blasting full volume. Gone is the pacing back-and-forth upstairs, door slamming that shakes the entire house. His fear of leaving the house and engaging with other people – except for his psychiatrist and therapist – is real.    

∞

After another sleepless night, the mother is downstairs, thinking Something has to give. She’s making coffee when she notices knives in the sink covered with grape jelly. Even the handles. Thirteen knives. How can this be? There are jelly dimples on the cupboard knobs, the stove burners, inside the refrigerator, even on the windows: smeared in a swirly pattern as if some part of him desperately wants out.  As she steps away from the sink, reaching for the paper towels, her foot glides a good three feet on the tile, lubricated by an unusually large jelly globule.

Her hand reaches out and she catches herself just in time.

This is what I’m up against, she thinks, yet it’s clear he’s making his own sandwiches. “Without any help from me!” She says aloud. A hairline crack in her assumptions. It’s then she hears the guardian angel overhead telepathing a new truth: Nothing is ever over until it’s over. The mother thinks about this day-and-night, until it becomes her mantra, and re-energized, she reads everything she can about mental illness. She listens with purpose to podcasts and TedTalks. She seeks advice from anyone willing to talk to her.

 Then she starts, slowly, with her son. “I know you are ill. The doctors call this a brain disease, and I’m not so sure what that means, but I am sure that you are not brain dead. Your brain is on a different wavelength, and that doesn’t mean you can’t chop vegetables for dinner. It doesn’t mean you can’t take the dog on a walk.” She emphasizes the you can, saying it with conviction – no pity, pity would doom them both – and because she believes it, he starts to believe it. He chops vegetables. He walks the dog. After six months, a group home accepts his application, and there, he relearns basic social skills, and although his life is far from normal, a new trajectory has emerged.

With improved – but not stellar – life skills, he moves into a Section 8 apartment. There are bloody feet (bedbugs), a roach apocalypse, an unbelievably densely-plugged toilet, a failing bathroom floor, but despite it all, the you can start to out-compete the serious and persistent, and become the you’ll figure it out. The son returns to college virtually, and it’s rough, but he finishes his degree. He talks to people, just a little. Sometimes they talk back.

“I know you believe this particular conversation happened,” his mother says. “But the eat-shit-and-die, the I am reading your mind responses: that’s the disease talking. That’s not you. You need to separate the two. Understand that most people care only about themselves. They don’t care about you.”

He begins to believe that he is a person, not the disease, and that he is not responsible for the disease, but he is responsible for managing it.

The son has one friend (met during a hospital stay) who joins him for Sunday dinners.  The friend also has a dog who must be walked three-times-a-day. Once the son demonstrates he can do this (facilitated by large earphones and opaque, wrap-around sunglasses) the son adopts a dog. The dog is white with blue eyes, and whenever the son and the dog meet people on the street, people almost always say: “What beautiful eyes!”

Something changes in the son, and he not only initiates the hello, but engages in short conversations. At the outpatient facility, he attends the recovery classes, and makes friends, people who understand that he is a person, not a freak. When the illness struck, he lost every single friend he’d ever had. There he meets a woman his age, with her own emotional support animal. They go out for coffee. She stops by his apartment to play chess. He returns to college, virtually, part-time, for a master’s degree.

He starts thinking about a job, and when he says, “Do you think I can?”

In her mind’s eye are the knives in the kitchen sink, covered with grape jelly. She smiles. Doesn’t even need to nod.