the only way to get rid of mania is death

Arshia Iqbal 

Alam Khalu died at midnight yesterday while I was at a bar then a party then skipping back to my dorm because something about mania entails moving as much as you can as many times as you can until you’re in bed paralyzed by your own recklessness. And that’s what happened. I moved so much that the heels of my foot felt numb the next morning when I woke up to a frantic call from my mother.

“He died last night,” Ammu said sniffling on the other line, “Come home, Sabina. We need you to take us to the janaza tonight and then they’ll bury him.”

It’s spring break at Sarah Lawrence and I had decided earlier that week not to go home when everyone else did. The night before we were all supposed to leave, I ran into the man of my dreams, my souuulmate as one would say. It was a murky Friday night and we were at a dive bar. I stayed sober because you shouldn’t drink on seroquel, especially seroquel 300, especially seroquel 300 extended release, the dosage that doesn’t ever really leave your body. But Kayla turned twenty one and she demanded that we all go to Lucky’s and watch her try to get lucky. In the midst of it all, in the bar I really never liked, the dim lights and the pool table I always tried to play a game on, I saw him. Lodged somewhere in a corner with dark and deep eyes, and blonde hair. And though my rule is generally to avoid blonde men because they remind me of the Ken dolls I used to behead, I was drawn to him. Maybe that’s why I waited outside the bathroom for him to come out and accidentally spilled my ginger ale on him, and maybe that’s why I got a water from the bartender and a napkin and used it to dab up the sticky liquid off of his shirt, and maybe that’s why he said I was really kind and he wasn’t used to that in a big city.

“We’re in Bronxville,” I said.

“Bigger city than Fairhope Alabama,” he responded chuckling.

“That’s not a real place”

“I’ll take you one day,” he smiled, a dimple popping up on either side of his cheeks.

His name was Jacob and he was in town for the next week and he loved New York because the sewer system was so unique and I laughed because I thought he was joking. He didn’t notice though. Then Kayla threw up and wrapped her arms around my waist. It was time to go home because she said she’d piss herself if we didn’t leave in ten minutes. So we did and if I was normal I’d say that was the last of Jacob I’d ever see. But because I felt good enough to do so, I made it my mission to see him again, to linger in the bars and the cafes and the college adjacent streets to see him, for this serendipitous meeting between us to occur again.

Mania happens when life gets too good, when job offers come knocking and you lose ten pounds and your professor says your essay was remarkable even though you didn’t finish the book because you were too busy feeling good. Mania happens when you feel soo good, when the limbs of your body are disjointing themselves out of joy and sometimes when you walk, the air lifts you up a little. Mania is so good that you don’t need to sleep or eat or lay down because then you’re wasting the goodness, the joy, the little particles of happiness that surround you because you deserve it. That’s what mania is.

When I was nineteen I trekked my way to Zucker Hillside psychiatric hospital at the tail end of Queens and sat in the waiting room for four hours until they found a doctor to see me. I refused to move or breathe or think of anything except for a cure. I needed to be cured, from the emotional rampages and the weeks of utter desolation I felt afterwards. Surely, there was a pill for that, a cure packaged in orange bottles. There was no cure, is what the hot doctor explained to me. He said, “bipolar disorder is something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. You can manage it, but it'll never go away." I started crying after he said that and just as I thought the brunt of the burden had been placed on my shoulders, he shrugged and said “Kanye West has it,” and I cried louder.

He was right. The disorder never goes away, symptoms come and go, but the sweet fruit of mania stays until it rots inside of you.

So I called Ammu and told her about this midterm I couldn’t finish in time and how much I valued getting good grades my senior year. Usually she’d fight back, tell me that the library back in Queens was walking distance and that I would die of hunger because the dining hall is closed. This time she didn’t. Her cousin’s husband was dying and she was too preoccupied with hospital visits and the Quran recitations and the phone calls to every relative we’ve ever had, to make a fuss.

“But if he dies, you have to come home,” she said. And I agreed. That man had been on death’s door for a year, and my souuulmate could leave for Arizona at any minute now. I needed to be on the hunt, but more importantly, I also needed to keep feeling good without anyone stopping me. Going home is being a real person, it’s relatives and oily food, and insurance paperwork my dad can’t seem to understand but here, I can keep it going, I can keep feeling good. I can go to bed at three and wake up at nine, walk five miles a day looking for him in cafes and bookstores and in the Target I spent too much money in and eat Cheerios by the handful for dinner, and then spend the rest of my money on Gogo boots because the sixties are back and they’ll never come back again. And at night I’d go snooping, back at Lucky’s looking for him in a corner, and then to another bar because the girls I met in this one are also tourists and we should definitely hit up all the spots where tourists could go, for no particular reason of course, and then the girls leave and its morning and I’m back in my bed, unasleep.

Then Monday night happened. Before the rest of the story is told there needs to be an emphasis on this: I did not love Jacob, I could never love Jacob, I think I liked his blonde Ken-like hair and the fact that he laughed at all my jokes, but the mania makes me think we were souuulmates and the morning after I met him I put my shoe on and it fit just right, more right than it had ever fit before and it convinced me that Jacob was a fit, a perfect fit because I was thinking about him while I was putting them on. Then I walked to the store and I saw a flyer that said “Hope,” and I knew all hope wasn’t lost, that I was promised something and I deserved it wholeheartedly. So when I walked into Lucky’s with my hair straightened and my lips glossed on Monday night and the man of my dreams, who for two whole days I thought was going to move me to Alaska to bear children who would dog sled their way to school, was making out with a blonde girl, I felt like death.

The other thing about mania is that a little bad is a lot of bad. Suddenly I’m outside the bar dry heaving and I feel all the food I didn’t eat come back up my throat. I’m worthless and ugly and why would a man from Alabama (I just remembered that he was from Alabama not Alaska) want someone like me? Stupid. I’m stupid. No man is ever going to love me. I’m stupid and I’m sick and I don’t think I’ve eaten a real meal since Thursday. Why wouldn’t he go for the blonde? She has cowboy boots on. I should have bought cowboy boots instead of Gogo boots, but it’s too late to return because I stepped in a shit ton of mud and now they’re stained. Life is awful and I’m awful, and I deserve to die.

That’s when I’ve lost all control. Losing control is skipping a pill and walking out at midnight to see the stars, but there are no stars in New York City and your pepper spray was lost when you switched bags. But still there’s the urge, the urge replaced by anger replaced by this desperation to go up in the sky and wipe the light pollution away with the end of your sleeve.

The urge is then taking up the tourist girls on their offer to go to a party at the back of a bowling alley where girls in tight dresses sat on top of dumpsters and I grabbed a megaphone and made everyone play “Simon Says.”

When you lose control, mania is like a fire under your skin. It’s this constant burning until you give in to every desire you could ever have, leaving no stone unturned in this quest to suffocate the living, breathing flame nursing itself in your insides. One summer I lost control and fell asleep on an open roof, and then the next week I took a kitchen knife and ran it up my thigh fifteen times because I really wanted to get stitches. When the girls on Twitter say they’re manic because they dyed their hair and decided to sleep with their best friend’s boyfriend, people like them, but when I do it, get manic and hold my finger over an open flame to see how long I can withstand the burn and sit on my hands so they get numb and slap myself with them until either my face or my hand gives out, nobody retweets and I’m left alone, stupid and vulnerable.

There’s a protocol in place for it though, the mania, the out of control mania. First it’s sleep, but I can’t sleep because I feel my heart in my chest beating at all times in the crook of my ear. Then, it’s food, but I can’t eat because everything tastes alien to me, even the white bread feels not white to me. After that it’s exercise, but after the sixth mile my mind still stays muddied. Lastly, the final step, the last possible thing I could do or would want to do, is to make myself feel bad, hone in on every negative emotion possible and plunge myself into a depression, into a phase where I can only eat and sleep and rot away. Sometimes it's opening Instagram and letting pictures of people I went to high school with appear on my feed over and over again, future lawyers and handsome boyfriends and waists the size of my fist. Other times it’s looking in the mirror, ten straight minutes until I can't recognize the person on the other side, and there is no real Sabina. This time, fate smiled at me, Ammu and the dead uncle. I would go home, feel the death, hear their sobs and finally, sadness and helplessness will take over - and maybe I’ll be able to eat something.

It was a forty minute drive from Bronxville to Queens and I drove slow. Queens is where the trauma is stored, it’s like those videos of those white women in the Thai health retreats where they’re bent over and they let out this carnal scream. Going back to Queens will release it, release me back into my own torment and I won’t be manic anymore because life is so hard that feeling everything all at once in your familial home will make you yearn to feel nothing at all.

When I get home, I park at the front of the house, take out my luggage from the trunk and ring the bell. Ammu opens the door, her eyes are bloodshot and her face is stained with tears. She drags me into the living room and discusses the death at length. They Facebook Live’d his last moments so relatives all over the world could see, and Ammu watched it for thirteen hours straight even though the hospital was thirty minutes away. She’s a germaphobe.

“And then the shaking,” she said, “the shaking, violently and rigorously. It was so bad, I closed my eyes because, ya Allah, it was painful.”

She hands me a samosa. It tastes like cardboard and I spit it out. I’m not cured.

“We’ll all die some day,” she cried. “A second away from death’s door and poor Asma, that poor woman had to watch it all happen.” She keeps bawling, I wipe the tears off her face and rub her shoulders, snot is coming out of all ends. I can’t remember this guy’s face. How can I mourn and cry and rip out my hair by its follicles if I can’t imagine what he looks like? For now he looks like Barack Obama, but Desi because that’s the only man I could think of.

The phone rings. Ammu grabs and holds it to her ears. She starts crying louder. Something about the burial and the washing and this pain of having to bear it and to make sure Asma Khala got something to eat.

I don’t feel a thing.

Ammu said Alam Khalu was a good man. He worked at a Stop and Shop in Long Island for twenty two years and raised three kids on that salary. His wife, Asma Khala, was Ammu’s favorite cousin - who she only spoke to three times a year because in order for someone to stay as a favorite they need space from you. They were married for forty years and Ammu did Asma’s henna for their wedding. He was a good man and he held me as a baby. And he came to our house for Eid except I was in college, but he did ask for me and I did speak to him on the phone three years ago. We were planets in orbit, never quite meeting at the right time, and maybe that is something to grieve, his dead body never seeing my curly hair in its prime because I just learned to style it four years ago.

I still don’t feel a thing - except this desire to sit on my hands and burn the tips of my fingers. My dad comes home, his eyes are puffy and swollen. I start to feel left out. When I was little I used to rip out my bottom eyelashes to help me cry during funerals and weddings and the endings of sad movies I didn’t quite understand. But I don’t do that now. I’m older and wiser and my hands are numb. Still, I try to cry. I sit there for three minutes and I don’t blink. I try to squeeze out any semblance of a tear until my little brother walks past me and says I look like I’m about to take a dump.

The death doesn’t move me, neither does the story of it, nor does the reaction of others. I’m frozen manic, an icicle of human emotion. I need to take it a step further. I need to see the body. I need to feel the coldness of a lifeless vessel and maybe I’ll cry. I deserve to cry.

The drive to the masjid in Hicksville is silent except for Ammu’s sniffling. Abbu sits on the passenger’s side, Walid’s in the back, and I am wracked with excitement. I’m going to see the face, and I’m going to cry, and I’ll be so sad that I’ll finally sleep, a nice depression sleep where I can dream of ways to stay stable. I’ll see his face and my eyes will well up, and the world will suddenly get smaller and mortality will become something I think of all the time and life will gain value and lose excitement and I’ll never ever ever let a man from a sports team hold me upside down on a keg again. I won’t because I’ll be thinking of my dead uncle and I’ll be so sad.

The sports boy will come up to me and ask if I know how to do a handstand and I’ll look at him, solemnly and say “Of course I do, but I’m in mourning right now” and people will nod their heads at me respectfully, thinking of how brave I am for showing up, but how tasteful I am for not engaging in it. And then maybe I’ll make out with the sports boy because he was so respectful about my dead uncle.

We get to Hicksville as I am still reeling from the thought of the sports boy, he would definitely be a basketball player and I would definitely feel like Gabriella from High School Musical. I park a street down and all of us - Ammu, Abbu, Walid, and I, walk over to the masjid in silence. At the gate Asma Khala greets us. I remember her, from my fifth birthday when she accidentally ate a candle. Asma Khala wraps me in a thick hug and looks me up and down.

“You’ve gained weight, haven’t you?” she says. In another world, that would be enough to make me depressed, but it’s not in this one, partly because every time she talks I imagine her spitting out the pink wax candle she was chewing on.

“She has,” Ammu responds, hugging her friend slash cousin deeply and they both begin wailing together. Also, in another world, it would read that they’re crying because I’m so fat. They’re not, but that would be enough to make me depressed. So, I kinda wish they were.

Then I catch a glimpse of the three kids, they’re three adults now, two sons and a daughter in their mid-thirties. They’re inside the masjid, one is on the phone and the other two are speaking to each other, carefully and calmly like one wrong word would kill another family member. We’re early, uncomfortably early, just like Ammu likes it.

Asma Khala turns to us, “Do you want to see the laash.” The body, the limp dead body with the cold face and the color drained from it. Walid shakes his head “no,” but Abbu pinches his arm and he yelps. Ten year olds don’t get opinions.

“Of course we do,” Abbu responds. It’s disrespectful to not catch a glimpse, especially if it’s offered. We walk over to the back to the masjid and the body is resting there on a metal tray, covered in a white cloth with only the face showing. It’s an old man with a mustache. Not Barack Obama. I don’t recognize his face, but it’s colorless and his eyes are closed. He seems to be at peace, calm and cool and collected and death seemed to be a favor for him, a lifting of something. Ammu starts to cry and runs off, Abbu goes after her, and Walid follows behind, afraid of the body and if it would come back alive to bite him. But I stay back. I look at the face, the long eyelashes and the thick eyebrows, I see his lips are slightly parted and his nose hairs are sticking out.

I start off by apologizing.

“I’m sorry that you’re dead, that must really suck,” I say, “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if you were alive, but I really need to do this, so please don’t haunt me.”

Then I look around, afraid an uncle could catch me mid act or a loose child could think this touching business was a free for all. Nothing. Then I take a deep breath.

I pick up my left hand and touch his cheek. It’s cold and hard and chalky. Obviously. He’s dead.

But there is no wave of sadness, no rush of helplessness, I don’t feel overwhelmed by the futility of this life, instead I am left with the facts. His face is cold and he is dead and I just touched a dead guy for no reason. And I was excited to touch a dead guy and in some countries this would be illegal and I would be stoned, and not in the fun way.

I look again to see if anyone is there, any cameras or pigeons or loose children, but I see nothing. I go to the bathroom and look at myself, if I had ten minutes I’d teach myself to forget who she is, but the chalky feeling of dead skin touching my callouses had overcome me. I wash my hands. Once in hot water, and another time with plenty of soap, one more time where I used my nails to scratch the skin off the palm that touched the corpse, then a last ditch effort where I rubbed my dead body hand against my pant leg until the skin felt raw to touch and my hand hurt to move. I had touched the dead man and I felt as alive as ever.

I try to rush out the bathroom door when I come face to face with the daughter, his one and only daughter. I think her name is Baby, every Bengali family has a “Baby,” and I think she’s ours. I look at our Baby, her swollen eyes and dry lips, as if she had been crying for a century and then some.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “he was a good man.”

And she smiles, as if she can’t tell I’m faking it and wraps me in a hug. The kind of hug only family can give each other because it comes from shared blood, from the one given to us by a great grandmother who died on a cot in a village somewhere. They say that women hold their great granddaughters in their eggs, which means at some point, Baby and I were hugging like this, on a smaller scale, in a great Nani’s body.

“He would have been happy to see you,” she says in Bangla.

He would, wouldn’t he? I’d be forced to sit next to him on our living room couch and he’d ask me when I’d get married and I’d say I’d wait until law school and he’d spend the rest of his life telling people I was a lawyer. We’d laugh once or twice or three times at his corny jokes and he’d go home, Ammu would tell me that when he married Asma Khala she thought he was ugly, and then he’d get a heart attack and die. That would be our last meeting, and I would have something to grieve, but instead, I was his last human touch and the weight of his dead face on my palm is dragging me down, and Baby will never know that I touched him for the sake of touching him and we’d continue to hug like this until one day she too dies of a heart attack and I won’t cry like Ammu did when Baby’s father died because I’d be too selfish, too manic, too sick to care of anything but myself.

With my hand still feeling cold from the chill of touching the dead and the voice of a daughter, a real grieving daughter ringing in my ears, I walk back to the women’s section and sit next to my mother. I take her hand and hold it in mine and we both start to cry. Her in this fear of death, the loss of a family member, the aches of a life taken too soon. Me, in the fear of life, the cold of the dead body sticking to my skin, and this sinking feeling that I’ll never not be manic again.