I have tried to find this piece, Snow Leopard, independent of the compilation I originally found it in. The compilation itself is fucking awesome, but this piece especially spoke to me. Perhaps Ben personally knows the person who wrote it and that’s why I can’t find it anywhere. For that reason, I copied it here. It’s so awesome, so beautiful, so tragic, and yet so hopeful, it’s worth sharing on it’s own.
It’s from the compilation Mental Health and Civilization, which can be downloaded here: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2013/01/11/mental-health-civilization-a-compilation/
“Snow Leopard” by Mary LA
She wears a long-sleeved sweatshirt to work, despite the stuffiness
indoors. All day she stands at the counter and reminds herself to smile
when customers and managers approach. The air-con buzzing right behind
her, the windows unopened, the electronic ringing of the shopfront
door.
Her smile wobbles as if it has taken on a life of its own.
‘You look like a scared rabbit,’ says one woman, and Erzule
takes a deep breath and looks down at the floor as she packages up the
order. She checks the script again: double-checks the dosage for hyperactive
children. The bearded man next in line complains that Viagra
does not work for him. He says he needs sex to take his mind off things
and he stares at her breasts, not meeting her enquiring look, just straing
at her as if she is in his mind, swallowed up whole. ‘Like anyone else, I
need it,’ he says, tongue thick in his mouth, as if any encounter is better
as ‘it’, the right to dehumanised coupling in some darkened hotel
room.. She calls the pharmacist to reason with him, explains she is
only an assistant. As the Viagra customer moves away, she shivers with
fear or repugnance. A woman comes in looking for ant poison she can
use indoors and out in the garden. ‘Too many insects,’ she says, ‘vermin
underfoot everywhere I turn, filthy creepycrawlies that have no right
to breed.’
There is another customer who jumps the queue, holding out
arms fiery and corruscated with eczema, complaining of stress, the
anxiety that causes her skin to erupt and blister each time she watches
news reports on the television. She has tried every remedy on the
market and nothing works. A couple comes in with a crying baby and
demands child-safe tranquillisers. Teenagers buy cough mixture with
what might be forged prescriptions, a pair of youngsters entwined but
with no expression in their eyes, no tenderness or affection.
When she breaks for lunch and goes out into the street, there
are shouts and high-pitched shrilling, police and ambulance sirens
right there at the corner, an accident between a cyclist and a Volvo
sedan. Deafening noise of sirens, voyeurs gathering in groups to look
at the cracked windscreen and hoping for news of ghoulish death, suffering,
anything to relieve the monotony. The cyclist has been taken to
hospital, says a gaunt angry woman, the driver of the Volvo has been arrested. An elderly pedestrian was injured too, but nobody pays much
attention to elderly pedestrians in the city.
Vermin to the authorities. Dead rats, dead pigeons, the bodies of teenagers
who have overdosed in the alley behind the shopping mall. All
of it garbage. Tasteless slices of pizza thrown into the gutters, a strangled
cat flung thrown over a brick wall. Everywhere she looks, there is
waste and destruction.
This society is unlivable, she thinks, and flinches as if she has
said something too real and too close to the truth.
All afternoon there are more customers lining up for medications
and palliatives, complaining of unwellness, the pervasive depression,
sadness and apathy. Will the new pills enable me to go on without
hope? asks a slender woman with fingernails bitten to the quick. There
are no answers, but the questions haunt Erzule. It has begun to rain and
the streets are dark outside the spotlit shop windows. The customers
keep coming in, spluttering and grey with pain, holding out prescriptions,
holding out the cash for generic medicines. Sometimes Erzule
detects some simmering rage, some suppressed fury, but then she hands
across the sedatives and the flicker of anger has vanished. What would
it be like to feel well in this city? she wonders. To wake up and feel well
enough to want a changed life in a different kind of world? She walks
home along the bridge over the river and grieves at the sight of waterborne
debris, the sodden packing cases, milk cartons and mattresses,
the bloated corpse of a large dog, the sour odours rising from the murky
water. Once there would have been forests here and tall reeds for nesting
birds, a swift clean river flowing south to the ocean. Now there is a
cesspool.
In the basement flat with rent paid two months in advance,
she prises open a small aperture of window. The noise of traffic from
the freeways will keep her awake, but the stale air is unbearable. She
goes to the bathroom cabinet and takes out her bandages and a razor
blades. In the evenings she has begun cutting herself again, letting the
red blood flow so that she can stay calm.
Her mother rings from El Salvador at 8pm each evening. She
takes the call at the kitchen table, hoping her voice will sound calm
enough to fool her mother. Blood pools onto the table, dark slow pools
of blood that shine in the lamplight, as her mother tells Erzule the family
news. Her brother in Chicago has been imprisoned again for dealing
in drugs. Her uncle has poisoned himself by eating contaminated fish
in old tin cans. The army is beating up students who joined the rioting
workers outside the foreign-owned factories. The tap water has been running rust-red all week, nobody dares drink without boiling it first.
Neighbours get up before dawn to queue at the market, but dried beans
are the only food in abundance.
‘We cannot go on like this,’ says Erzule’s mother, a phrase she
has used all her life. But she goes on all the same.
‘You have your papers now,’ her mother tells Erzule. ‘There is
nothing to worry about. Don’t send money until you are made permanent
staff. Are you eating properly? Who helps comb and plait your
hair each week?’
When she puts down the phone, there is blood all over the
table, dripping onto the floor. Erzule wonders if she is going mad, the
way so many immigrants go mad when they finally get a toehold in the
New World. Back at home life is so much harder, the desperation and
uncertainty. Her uncle stockpiling cans of imported food in the cellar,
corrugated drums of petrol hidden behind the bedroom partitions. The
stinging air gritty with pollution, the rumours of toxic dumping, the
rubbish pits burning through the night. Armoured vehicles driving in
convoy through the streets, the plazas barricaded. The forests are being
cleared in the valleys around the city, a pall of smoke rising from
the ravaged clearings, mudslides into the stagnant river, the land gutted
and broken. Young boys go out to scour through the undergrowth,
hoping to capture exotic birds, iguanas, toads and snakes for export as
novelty pets to the rich foreigners with their gilded cages and aquariums
in skyrise apartments.
And she is the lucky one, able to live in a wealthier country,
able to walk home without passing through armed checkpoints, not
waking to the noise of gunfire at night. Here the war is invisible, like
internalised conflict, a war everyone chooses to ignore. She takes a
clean blade and slices again, going in too deep. The blade hits an artery
and bright scarlet blood gushes all over her sweatshirt. This is bad. No
tourniquet can stop the jet spraying her clothes, the floor, the walls.
A fter several minutes of fumbling with soaking bandages and
towels, feeling the dizziness and knowing she will lose consciousness
soon, she calls for an ambulance.
Coming around groggy, furious at herself, she stares up into the
neon glare of emergency casualty. The nurse is angry with her, telling
her to hold still. Her arm is numb. ‘Are you crazy?’ says the nurse as she
takes Erzule’s blood pressure. ‘To waste other people’s time and money
on your own madness. You could have died if you had not called for
help. It is criminal to damage yourself this way, you owe it to the state
to stay alive and contribute.’ Erzule looks up at the tired worn face of the nurse, the frustration
etched into deep grooves on either side of the mouth. The nurse
reminds her of her aunt who worked with battered women in the shelter,
would end a long day by raging at the women themselves as they
left the safety of the shelter and returned to the men who hurt them.
Women needing money for bread and rent, staying on with brutal men
because that is what their mothers had done, because that was all they
knew. Her aunt who had wanted to help and had found herself helpless.
We age so quickly, thinks Erzule, the masks that stiffen into
place, the habit of defendedness and turning away, turning against ourselves
and one another. We train ourselves not to feel because we cannot
go on enduring the pain and fear. She wishes she could sit down
with this tired woman and have a cup of tea, say things that might
break through the barriers, explain why she needs to cut, why she is
going mad. But the nurse is hurrying, there is another patient waiting,.
Wheeled in, a small white face against the coarse bedsheet, tubes coiled
above an oxygen mask.
A fter the stitches and blood transfusion, Erzule has to talk with
the psychiatrist. A tall greyheaded man with an abstracted manner, as
if he is not really here, is somewhere off by himself, in an easy chair beside
the fire with a detective novel open and his pipe lit. Avuncular and
genial, a man believing himself to be harmless. Clearing his throat as
he reads, amused by the fiction, the unsurprising murder in the vicarage,
the elegant solving of fictional murders, a parallel universe where
everything has a solution for those clever enough to decipher the clues.
More tea, vicar? He has the air of a father confessor, a kindly scientist, a
man who can finish crossword puzzles. Erzule knows immediately that
she will not be able to communicate with him, this white-coated priest
of the psychiatric wards. So many professional and irrelevant questions.
His name tag is partially concealed by a crease in the white
coat. Dr Whar-, perhaps Wharton or Wharburton. To war with Whar,
she thinks, bracing herself. Dr Whodunit, a senior psychiatrist who can
pigeonhole Erzule with clinical definitions. He frowns and makes some
notes, then tells her she may be bipolar, rapid cycling bipolar, treatable
but lifelong. The moods go up and down, he explains, too high and
too low. He muses about the likelihood of previous psychotic episodes.
Does she feel the world is an unsafe place? Does she suspect she is being
followed or watched? Has she ever thought she might have unseen enemies? All the time, doctor, says Erzule, all the time. Paranoia, he says. He will give her medications to take each
evening and assures her she will feel better once the meds kick in. A
counsellor will see her once a week and a community social worker will
be appointed to help her adjust, refashion her lifestyle, learn smarter
techniques of self-care. It will all get better. Life is what you make of
it, he says, that practised crinkly smile. He would pat her shoulder but
does not touch disturbed females in his wards, sets clear boundaries between
the staff and the patients, the sane and orderly versus the insane
and disorderly. Although Dr W does not use the term ‘hysterical’, it
stays with him as he does his rounds. How these sick women spill over
into messy emotional disorder, like cats giving birth to too many kittens,
like shrieking furies that lash out at themselves with knives, the
smashed mirrors in the cloakrooms reflecting only fragments, women
flying along corridors like trapped birds flinging themselves against
sealed windows, the walls of the consulting rooms smeared with pathetic
messages in blood. Bedlam, madness uncontained, avenging
women threatening to burn down the hospital, run out into the streets
and commit murder or worse. Women who seem hellbent on destroying
civilization, all that has been built up over generations, the decency
and morality and prosperity of the civilised nations. Homewreckers, arsonists,
dambusters, bombmakers, all of them lunatics needing restraint
and confinement.
Last week as he had been crossing a recreation room near one of
the locked wards, smiling at the quiet rows of patients watching game
shows on television, an obese and unkempt woman named Sarah had
accosted him and told him she was on a personal mission to destroy the
nuclear family, put an end to the farce of mothers and fathers and twoand-
a-half children. ‘I’d rather we ran free as tribes in the wilderness,
I’d rather we lay down homeless on the dark earth each night listening
to the stars whirling overhead,’ Sarah had shouted at him, her tangled
wiry hair falling over her face, her eyes black with hatred. DrW had
kept his cool and had the woman restrained, then sedated. But the incident
had left him unsteady, reluctant to move around the building
unescorted.
‘It will get better if you take your meds and be sensible, cooperate
with us, be a good girl,’ he says again, already moving on to the
next bed, the next sad but typical case history. Erzule nods, because she
cannot say to him that the madness is out there, a collective cultural
insanity. Nobody escapes the madness out there.
A flashlight in the face. She wakes from a drugged stupor and
watches the night nurse moving between the beds with a handheld torch, fixing the beam so that it catches the patients full-face. Surveillance,
a system of well-intentioned spying. Lie still and fake sleep, keep
your eyes squeezed shut, do not move on pain of death.
Erzule opens her eyes in the half-dark and recalls a school trip
into the mountains, years before, an educational outing to see the new
dam, then to visit the trout hatcheries filled with imported rainbow
trout. Walking along the raised walkways, watching the fish gasping
and threshing together in the hatcheries, shallow pools encased in
mesh. The rose-red and white blooming of ulcers and lesions on the
trout, those dappled flanks dulled and diseased, the damaged scales cascading
into the foul water. She could not move, could not look away. These suffering sentient beings tortured and confined in such appalling
conditions. She could feel her own body memories surfacing, hands
gripping her wrists, the probing between her legs, convulsing with fear
and shame, the certainty she would be killed, condemned, blamed and
driven away from the family home, a disgrace. There is nowhere that
does not hurt in this body that is not her own, is used and tormented by
others.
A new terrible language comes into her mind and she hears it
clearly in the dying throes of the trout: They are suffering as I have suffered
but I am alive to tell the story, I am just standing here and they
are dying. This will never leave her: the agony in her chest when she saw
the trout struggling in vain. How she could not breathe properly, sucking
in fear as if the day had become airless, a refined zone without
enough oxygen, the river somewhere deep down blocked and twisting
above the towering dam wall, the observation viewing stations and the
pillared bridges over the dam, the power thwarted, the life force ebbing
out of the depths. The river too in its death throes, the fish dying in
meshed pens, the humans oblivious.
In an hour or two it will be dawn and they will drug her again.
To go on seems impossible. If she can get to the window, she might be
able to open it and breathe fresh air or at least glimpse the sky, something
to give her courage for the day ahead. She might even find the
courage to leap into the void.
‘Listen to me,’ says the patient in the next bed. All she can make
out is his black hair on the pillow, a young strong voice.
‘Up in the mountains of north Kazakstan there is a snow leopard
crossing a ravine to reach the far slope. A fully grown female leopard
able to spring at her prey from a distance of 25 feet, lithe and agile
and uncompromising. She lives and hunts between the tree line and the
snowline and against a snowy outcrop she is one with her background,
moving out only at dawn and dusk when visibility is poor. At night
she sleeps with her tail curled around her face for warmth. There are
bullet tracks healing on her flanks. She has survived the murder of her
parents, her sisters, her cubs, and right now, just for this moment, she
is indomitable. Lie back and listen to her treading snow, moving in that
stillness, learn from her.
‘Her fur is the colour of smoke spotted with black markings
and she could stand unseen beside you on a slope of mottled screed.
She can outwit all but the most heartless of enemies. Keep your mind
fixed on the survival of the snow leopard, listen to her moving through
the ravine, padding between boulders with her long tail swishing. Keep
watching her. Her survival makes sense, her survival is the key to our
sanity.’
He goes on talking, speaking of allies and conspirators and another
kind of future, a world independent of what crushes us now, but
Erzule has fallen asleep. She sleeps deeply until the day nurses come on
duty and when she wakes the bed is empty. But she is not alone now
and the insanity out there does not matter. The boy in the next bed is
gone, but she knows how to find him. And in her mind’s eye there is
the snow leopard crouching on that rocky outcrop, free and dangerous,
waiting to spring.
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