Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 64

‘A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to have killed you. Sertraline in combination with an MAOI^[28] will kill you, in enough quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides, I’d say you’re pretty lucky to be here right now.’

‘My mother sometimes thinks she’s hallucinating.’

‘Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when changing medications.’

‘She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.’

The doctor chose his second-finest pen from the array in his white coat’s breast pocket and made some sort of note on Kate Gompert’s new chart for this particular psych ward. Crowded in among his pocket’s pens was the rubber head of a diagnostic plexor. He asked Kate if she could tell him why she had wanted to hurt herself. Had she been angry at herself. At someone else. Had she ceased to feel as though her life had meaning to it. Had she heard anything like voices suggesting that she hurt herself.

There was no audible response. The girl’s breathing had slowed to just rapid. The doctor took an early clinical gamble and asked Kate whether it might not be easier if she rolled over and sat up so that they could speak with each other more normally, face to face.

‘I am sitting up.’

The doctor’s pen was poised. His slow nod was studious, blandly puzzled-seeming. ‘You mean to say you feel right now as if your body is already in a sitting-up position?’

She rolled an eye up at him for a long moment, sighed meaningfully, and rolled and rose. Katherine Ann Gompert probably felt that here was yet another psych-ward M.D. with zero sense of humor. This was probably because she did not understand the strict methodological limits that dictated how literal he, a doctor, had to be with the admits on the psych ward. Nor that jokes and sarcasm were here usually too pregnant and fertile with clinical significance not to be taken seriously: sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. The doctor — who by the way wasn’t an M.D. yet but a resident, here on a twelve-week psych rotation — indulged this clinical reverie while the patient made an elaborate show of getting the thin pillow out from under her and leaning it up the tall way against the bare wall behind the bed and slumping back against it, her arms crossed over her breasts. The doctor decided that her open display of irritation with him could signify either a positive thing or nothing at all.

Kate Gompert stared at a point over the man’s left shoulder. ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There’s a difference.’