I'm going to tell you the saddest story that I've ever heard.
When her last boyfriend stopped by to deliver his break-up speech,
Camilla Zen was surprised. Like death, it was something she knew was
coming yet when it did it was still unpleasant and hard to accept.
As Dale made his explanations for why he couldn't stay with her,
she focused on the dingy white walls of her apartment.
"I still want to be friends," Dale was saying. "I want you to take
care of yourself." He was careful to stand several paces away from her, in
case she tried to attack him again.
She nodded unseeingly, still slumped on the floor against the wall.
"If you don't try to change you're doomed," Dale said. "I love you but I
can't stand to be around you."
As a farewell gift, he placed a bottle of Prozac on the kitchen
countertop. "Try it," he urged, as he zipped up his Goretex jacket. "You
need help." He closed the door gently as he left.
Camilla stared at the small plastic bottle sitting innocently on her
counter. It seemed to mock her, in a run-of -the- mill pharmaceutical way.
In the past she had mistrusted antidepressants. When a co-worker had casually
referred to his sister's dependence on lithium, her face had first registered
revulsion before relaxing into the standard roue of compassion.
She thought about gulping fistfuls and collapsing to the floor so
that she would feel Dale's arm around her once more. But he was gone.
She reached for the bottle. It was unmarked, a cache from Dale's
personal supply that he received in abundance from his Boeing-backed psychiatrist.
"My psychiatrist thinks Prozac should be added to toothpaste," Dale had
told her. He was on a daily double dosage himself. She wondered how many Boeing
employees used Prozac, and if it made it any easier when they found out they were
going to be laid off. She twisted the cap off and looked inside. The drug came in
pale yellow and green capsules. When she pulled one apart a fine white powder spilled
out. Pretending she was Snow White eating the poisoned apple, Camilla put a capsule
on her tongue and swallowed.
* * *
Later Camilla would tell her friends that she could pinpoint the exact
moment she had first felt the drug begin to work on her. It happened on a weekday
morning. Acutely aware of being disheveled, unemployed, and depressed she had
risen early and climbed the hill to her urban neighborhood coffeeshop. On the trip over
She kept her eyes glued to the plodding feet encased in dirty tennis shoes that moved
her along--her feet!--watching detached as they splashed through puddles of pre-dawn rain.
All around her people with hopes and dreams and goals were going to work, buzzing by
her in their cars, on bicycles, by foot, on buses, their faces shiny from morning showers,
their clothing and hair fresh, their faces still innocent from well-earned sleep, the
well-earned sleep of the righteous worker with a purpose in life.
Unlike her sleep. Her sleep had been a series of thrashing catnaps, as
though she were restling with a demon from The Exorcist. As she walked back home,
a freshly lit cigarette in one hand and a steaming mocha in the other, the usual
litany of woe crowded her mind. She had no job. She had no goals. She felt like a
co-dependent leech waiting to spring on her next victim like something out of Star Trek.
She had money but she had nothing to do. She was a failure. There was nothing she could
do. As she passed shopwindows' reflections she saw her drawn face, her furrowed,
madwomanesque brow.
And then it dawned on her. How lucky she was. There was nothing she
had to do! The meaning of the words flip-flopped like an optical illusion in
an M.C. Escher sketch. How wonderfully lucky she was! What the hell was wrong with
her?! A Disney tune sprang to mind, her step suddenly switching to accomodate its
rhythm--O! the pirate's life for me! Camilla smiled, the way the Grinch who Stole
Christmas smiles at the end, when he hears the little Hoos singing down in Hooville.
Her abrupt mood swing sent her tripping along the sidewalk. Suddenly she looked
around her, noting the greenness of the grass on the sidewalk. She bent to blow a
kiss to a sweet little ant on the sidewalk, the bright sun in its heavenly zenith,
the glistening silver drops of morning dew on the boughs of the happily waving pine
trees. She was enjoying perfect freedom! She had no job to go to, no responsibilities
to attend to, no nothing to do but wander and raise her face to the sunshine breaking
through on that rainy morning. If Camilla had been born of a different time and age
she might have interpreted her experience as the fervor of religious conversion, her
lungs suddenly filled with the breath of God instead of nicotine, in her mouth the taste
of manna instead of chocolate.
Before long Camilla had written a book entitled, "A Woman Listens to Prozac,"
which topped the best seller list. She and Oprah enjoyed a tearful embrace. She became
Bruce Springsteen's third wife. On a flight to L.A. to speak at a
celebrity twelve-step meeting their plane crashed and Bruce died. Camilla lingered on in a
seven year coma, her hands atrophied into talons, her bony knees drawn up under her chin.
A rictus grin stretched painfully from ear to ear. Prosaic.
But she's not me.
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