It's Kind of a Funny Story: Chapters 17–28

The nurse—short with curly hair and a clownish face—reaches to the hooks behind her and unfurls a blood pressure gauge.

Under “reason for admission,” she puts SUICIDAL IDEATION.

He’s well dressed in dark brown—with black shoes like mine—and he’s holding his hip and writhing in pain.

I look again at the black guy; as I do, a big police officer with closely cropped hair and those weird little fat bumps on the back of his neck saunters onto the scene with a newspaper and a cup of coffee.

“I toldja: it come to ya!” he yells back in a succinct Southern voice.

I crash on the stretcher with my hoodie draped dejectedly over my head, but there are way too many thoughts in my brain.

I look around and muse...

“All right, Mrs. Gilner, since you’re here, your son has checked himself in due to suicidal ideation and acute depression, you understand?”

Admitted. That probably means to the special room where I get to talk with Dr. Mahmoud. A quick visit and then I’m gone. It’ll give me the feeling that I’ve accomplished something, that I haven’t just languished in the ER.

Mom puts her loopy indecipherable signature on the sheet.

A quick hug, and she’s on her way—Chris watches, with his hands on his hips. I’m really curious about his efficacy as a hospital security guard.

We open a door near the bathroom and pierce a seal into an entirely different biome of the hospital—red brick, indoor trees, posters of notable doctors who practiced there.

“Going to adult psychiatric, huh?” I ask Smitty.
“Well”—he looks at me—“you’re not quite old enough for geriatric psychiatric.”

There’s fuzz coming out of his neck and a big swath of black hair on his little head.

I’m in the mental ward.

He wraps up the blood pressure gauge.

“And see? It says that you will be discharged at the discretion of the doctor once he has come up with your discharge plan.”
“I’m not getting out of here until a doctor lets me out?!”

She returns a minute later with a gaunt, hollow man with big circles under his eyes and a nose that looks like it’s been broken in about three places.

Inside, the tables have been pushed aside, and a panoply of people sit in a loose circle.

A girl with a streak of blue in her dark hair slumps over her chair like she’s obviously more messed up than the others; a big girl with a wan frown leans back and twiddles her thumbs; a black kid with wire-rim glasses sits perfectly still, and hey—there’s Jimmy from downstairs.

"...But here”—he gestures around, as if you need to elucidate what “here” is, as if you don’t just take it for granted once you’re inside...

I keep my peripheral vision on the hall in case the messenger returns.

Her legs are encased with jeans that have frills around her butt.

Jennifer/Charles and Becca eventually appear at the end of the line, chatting and gesticulating, and Jennifer/Charles blows me a kiss.

She reaches into her purse—her first one, black, a recent Mom purchase—and unrolls a glossy pink monstrosity....

His half-harelip and hair shock my sister, but his relentless enthusiasm for just—I don’t know—living—would knock the fear out of anybody.

The phone on Six North is a hubbub of activity, with Bobby and the blond burned-out-type, who I learn is named Johnny, fielding calls from, I assume, their respective female counterparts.

People on the outside world don’t know what’s happened to me—I’m in a sort of stasis right now. Things are under control.

He can’t move or anything. He’s catatonic.

A Hasidic Jewish guy, complete with the white pants, yarmulke, tassels hanging off him, braided hair, and sandals, dashes down the hall toward me.

Scraps of red food dot his dark beard, and his eyes are wild and unhinged.

“We don’t keep you here until you are cured of anything; we keep you here until you are stable—we call it ‘establishing the baseline.’”
“Okay, so when will my baseline be established?”

“Thursday,” I mumble to myself, looking across the room at Muqtada’s prone lump.

“You see how fast he eats? If you could harness a quarter of his energy, you could power the island of Manhattan. I’m not joking. He should really work in a place with people like us. He has such a good heart and he’s never down.”

Jimmy, two tables away, notices my stifled laughter, smiles at me, and laughs himself.

People here don’t want to get out. Getting out means going back to the streets or to jail or to try and fish their things out of an impounded car, like me.

Once they pull a cigarette out of their respective packs, they walk single file through a red door, passing Nurse Monica, whose job is to light everybody up.

“You gotta watch out for this one,” Humble said. “He’s crafty.”

This place isn’t real. This is a facsimile of life, for broken people. I can handle the facsimile, but I can’t handle the real thing.

“No, I know I’m not going to be able to sleep,” I respond. “I’m taking preemptive action.”