I was at the Veteran's Administration earlier today, checking on some paperwork for school. The only other woman in the waiting area was a plump, 40ish brunette w/ a cropped 'do and a bad dye. She had a Mona Lisa smile and big eyes that perhaps had once devoured all they beheld, but today they seemed somehow far away. As familiarity is sometimes a curse I was cautious in approaching her.
"Excuse me," I finally said. "May I ask you your name?"
Her lost gaze came my way, as her brow wrinkled up slightly in uncertainty. The hint of fear almost imperceptibly crossed her face.
"Melissa X" she replied. (- I'm making that up. We're just calling her "Melissa X." )
"You don't remember me, do you?"
I reached out for her hand and she tentatively gave me her own in greeting. I gave her my name and her large orbs scanned my face for something, anything to remind her of who I was but came back empty.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I've had so many EST's that my memory's not so good anymore."
"We were together in the Navy hospital in Orlando in the late '80s," I said, taking the seat next to hers.
Still she was blank and I did not press her further, fearing her confusion might overwhelm her. You never know with vets in a VA hospital.
"It's the EST's," she said again. "They really mess with my memory."
"I don't know what EST's are."
"Electroshock Therapy. It's an experimental therapy they're using on schizophrenics. I'm hoping my memory will clear up after a while."
All those years ago it seemed Melissa X was full of tales of how the military wanted to silence her regarding an attack she endured while a patient at Bethesda Hospital in Maryland. She said she had been raped by a corpsman who held a scalpel to her throat as he had his way with her in her hospital bed. She claimed there were officers present but no one intervened. She was chartered around from one hospital to another after that, and that's how she came to Navy Orlando. When she was granted leave to go home and visit her toddler daughter, she phoned from a Greyhound Bus Terminal to say the CIA had placed a "GENERAL in DRESS UNIFORM" next to her on the bus to try to convince her to keep her mouth shut.
I did not know then that she was schizophrenic, and diagnosed during the time we knew each other. Like so many of the young sailors I was hospitalized with, I thought she was prone to hyperbole.
"My diagnosis was for many things in addition to schizophrenia," she says now with an apparently dry tongue and an inability to look directly at me. I know the litany before it passes her lips - paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, psychotic, borderline personality syndrome, etcetera etcetera. Between my brother and my nephew, I'm getting a good education in such things. That's when it dawned on me that in her far away eyes I saw my brother. I saw the baggage he carries every day because he is unable to put it down. I heard the last conversation I had with Huggy and how I told him it was up to him to carry it or not. It hadn't occurred to me that perhaps it was not a matter of will but a matter of ability.
Melissa X told me of her now grown daughter, expecting Melissa's first grandchild, waiting to marry the child's father until she's finished with school.
"She can have the baby and not lose anything," Melissa says to me. "But if she gets married, she'll lose all my benefits and I can't afford to send her to school without them."
She is clearly proud of her 19 year old, but I cannot help but wonder if Melissa X weren't ensnared in her own nightmarish reality, spending every morning at the VA getting schock treatments that may or may not help her already ravaged mind, would she have been able to teach her daughter about birth control?
"She's got scholarships to Florida State and to Mercer in Atlanta," she tells me next and I realize I may have just fallen into her sickness's diabolical web.
"She graduated from high school when she was 16, the Valedictorian of her class," she says.
"Congratulations," I say with a smile, suddenly leery of pity.
"It pissed off all the other kids in her class, because they were all older than her and she wasn't part of them, she just tested out of school."
"Isn't that something..." I say.
Just then a gentleman called my name and beckoned me to meet with him in his office. Before turning to leave, I reached out for Melissa X once more, taking her hand in my two and wished her the best success.
"You too," she said with that Mona Lisa smile.
She was no longer in the waiting area when I finished with my meeting. In spite of myself, I had hoped to see her again.
All those years ago, it had been Melissa who made the special purchase of the big numbered playing cards so I could stay in the game of million point rummy after my vision slipped from 20x20 to legally blind in a matter of weeks. Melissa and Emogene, a widowed retiree who was in and out of the hospital for as long as my fourteen month stay, were the two people who were constantly available to help alleviate my then dire circumstances. I was 21 years old, had quite literally left everything behind to join the Navy and was suddenly diabetic, and even more suddenly blinded by a freakish onset of diabetic cataracts. Melissa and Em refused to give up the game we long-term patients had established many points earlier (at the time of my blindness I was nearing 100,000 points). Instead, they would alternate playing my hand with me while sitting out the round. Then Melissa bought the big deck and if I squinted hard enough I could make out the cards I was holding.
It was Melissa and Em who first held my arm and walked with me around the hospital grounds. Because of my blindness, and my ongoing legal battle with the Navy regarding my medical condition that it did not desire nor intended to help in any way, I was not allowed to leave my ward without an escort. For the first ten months of my stay, I did not leave my ward but for a few hours on Thanksgiving day with Emogene and her ginormous family.
It was Melissa and Em who read letters to me, received from other patients I'd met on the ward who'd long since returned home. Letters I received from friends, I would only allow Em to read to me. She was like the grandmother I never knew my own to be. She was warm and big hearted and fiesty, and had absolute integrity. I did not know that of Melissa, although at the time I could not say why.
When she finally received her discharge from the Navy, Melissa lived with Em for a few months, sleeping on the floor of Em's tiny cottage while trying to get her feet on the ground. It ended disastrously between them, in a scene I could easily interchange with one of my own memories of life with Huggy. To Em, Melissa was a mess, sloth-like and unmotivated. To Melissa, Em was demanding and expected too much. In the end, Melissa took a car a mutual friend had bought for her on the condition she repay him in monthly installments, and disappeared. Until this day I did not know what had happened to her.
So now she catches the bus at 5:15 every morning to be at the VA by 7:30 to have her head shocked and her memory shredded. Maybe. Maybe she simply goes to the VA to have some company and convince herself of the truth behind stories she's been telling herself for so long.
I hope I do not see her again. I am afraid I will see Huggy in her eyes, and convince myself that bringing him to live with me might be good thing, when I know to do so would be utterly insane.
