Saving Anna Karenina
Part 39
Start with Part 1, and read a short synopsis of the original book.
After a lunch of bean soup, salad, and chicken, all in child-sized portions, Anna could hardly believe it was the same day. She said as much to Kurt, who sat next to her in the front salon, restlessly flipping through a newspaper.
“It’s like Vegas,” he said. “Except in Vegas, I don’t have to chew fucking Nicorette.”
Anna forgave Kurt’s foul language. He was ill with a disease called AIDS. He agreed with Anna that the doctors were charlatans. When they gave her a pamphlet on Borderline Personality Disorder, he advised her to throw it away. Crack would take his life sooner than the disease, and he was there to stop smoking it. It had now been a week now. The medicine they gave him was horrid, but lessened the withdrawal symptoms.
New people were always arriving. Last night, an Irish boy arrived after stabbing himself in the stomach with a Swiss Army knife. The knife was dull, leaving only a small cut. Today he was quiet and ashamed. He confessed to Anna that he had been drunk when he did it, and that he was just a drunkard, not a psycho.
A new, beautiful woman had also arrived. She wore pearl earrings. It was rumored that she was a doctor. She walked out of lunch in protest to the way the servant spoke to her.
Blair greeted them all and learned quickly what was the matter. She was in love with the one with vomit on his pyjamas, Theo. She wrote him love letters, which he didn’t read. Anna doubted his capacity to love or to read, although Blair was certain he was putting up a “smoke screen of insanity” to protect his soul from the doctors. Theo lied about everything, telling new patients that he arrived only yesterday, when the truth was he’d been there a month. “Keep lying,” Blair wrote in a three-page love letter that made Anna laugh. “It distinguishes you in the best way.”
Now Blair was sitting next to him with a giant academic book, repeating French conjugations. He was fluent in French, she believed, though this fact remained unconfirmed, because he soon fell asleep, resting his head on Blair’s shoulder.
Visiting hours were this afternoon, from 3:00 until 5:00. Anna slept through them before. She didn’t expect any visitors. Children weren’t allowed, and she didn’t have any adults to visit her. It was now 2:00. Anna couldn’t concentrate on her novel. It was too special to squander in a lively public forum like the front salon, where people played table tennis and Blair shouted about this and that, occasionally breaking into song.
Matyas was having a nap. He slept all the time, Blair said, because he was on Haldol. Haldol was the medicine everyone hated. The doctors forced it on them. Anna wished he wouldn’t sleep so much, but he told her it was healthier than being awake in a mental hospital, waiting without end for someone to come and fetch him. Matyas had been there longer than anyone, and Blair said it had to do with politics and insurance. And the time he had told the community meeting that he was a vet from the Afghan War, and deserved a hero’s welcome. Blair had kissed him dramatically, playing along, and then they had both been put on Haldol.
Anna wondered at this new tactic of giving people drugs to punish them. Many patients said that science fiction movies had predicted it, and that soon, everyone in the world would take some kind of daily medication for their mood.
There was a drug called “antidepressant” that people were given outside of the sanitarium — people with money and families, who were feeling sad, or bored. The people who took OxyContin, Anna’s former drug of choice, were politicians, celebrities, and junkies, according to the boy with a mustache. People in the hospital took antipsychotic drugs that made them tired and fat. No one was allowed to have an antidepressant, even if they were depressed.
This is part 39 of a serialized novella being published each Thursday. It is a speculative sequel to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina.
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
I’m the author of Oh, the Places Where You’ll Have a Nervous Breakdown.
