Inferno Read online

  Praise for Inferno

  ‘Completely devastating. Completely heartbreaking. Written in luminous, spiralling prose’ Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under

  ‘This book is utterly brilliant: poetic, truthful, frightening, clever. I held my breath at both the power of the prose and the writer’s unflinching honesty’ Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness

  ‘Compelling and exquisitely written. Catherine Cho’s eye-opening memoir took me into a world I knew nothing about … Exceptional’ Ruth Jones

  ‘A fierce, brave, glittering book that charts with unflinching honesty the shift from one reality to another and the family ghosts that – without always knowing it – we all carry’ Rachel Joyce

  ‘A must-read for those looking to understand one of the darkest corners of the female experience’ Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story

  ‘I’ve rarely read such a powerful account of madness. Gripping, chilling and ultimately hopeful, this is one not to miss’ Lisa Jewell

  ‘Utterly compelling and beautifully written, Inferno is one of the bravest and most beautiful books I have ever read’ Alice Feeney, author of Sometimes I Lie

  ‘A powerful and poignant book. The difficult and haunting brutality of both psychosis and relationships was so beautifully and honestly portrayed’ Bev Thomas, author of A Good Enough Mother

  ‘I was hooked from the very start … Catherine Cho does a great service to the cause of breaking down stigma surrounding mental ill health … A beautiful book’ Alastair Campbell

  ‘Insightful and shocking’ Stylist Best Non-fiction Books of 2020

  ‘Triumphant’ Cosmopolitan Books You’ll Be Reading in 2020

  For James and Cato, the light in my life

  According to Korean tradition, after a baby is born, mother and baby do not leave the house for the first twenty-one days. There are long cords of peppers and charcoal hung in the doorway to ward away guests and evil spirits. At the end of the twenty-one days, a prayer is given over white rice cakes. After 100 days, there is a large celebration, a celebration of survival, with pyramids of fruit and lengths of thread for long life.

  When my son was born, I was reminded of this tradition daily by my family and by my in-laws, because we were breaking all the rules. I took a shower after birth, ignoring the week-long rule of no water on the mother’s body, and my first meal wasn’t the traditional seaweed soup, it was sushi. We opened our doors, let in guests, bundled my son in layers and took him on walks in the falling snow. And then we did a fateful thing: we left our home.

  My son was two months old when we embarked from London on an extended trip across the US. I had come up with a plan to use our shared parental leave to do a cross-country tour of family and friends and introduce them to our son. I didn’t see why we had to pay attention to Korean traditions – or superstitions, as I thought of them. As Korean Americans born and raised in the US, my husband and I had never paid much attention to the rules, and I had always thought our families didn’t either. Except that suddenly, with the birth of a baby, the rules seemed to matter.

  We had avoided any evil spirits from California to Virginia, but perhaps we’d just been running away from them, because they found us at last at my in-laws’ house in New Jersey. My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.

  My husband would take me to the hospital emergency room; by then I would be screaming and tearing off my clothes in the waiting room. I was admitted to the hospital where I spent four days without sleeping.

  In desperation the doctors gave me a cocktail of drugs that my body rejected; I still wouldn’t sleep.

  The decision was made that I should be admitted to a psychiatric ward. I was checked in to an involuntary psych ward in New Jersey, which is where I am now.

  It’s difficult to know where the story of psychosis begins. Was it the moment I met my son? Or was it decided in the before, something rooted deeper in my fate, generations ago?

  My first memory of psychosis is the light.

  A bright light. I’m lying on a bed. The room is white, stark and plain. I’m wearing a hospital robe; it feels like paper against my skin. I try to raise my arms, but I can’t, there are restraints crossing my body, snaked around my wrists. The restraints are heavy and made of dark cloth, loops that cut into my skin. My hands are clenched. I notice that there are strands of hair in them. There are metal curtains around me; they fold like an accordion.

  I try to lift my head, but I can only move it from side to side. I see a man, standing in the corner. He’s looking at a clipboard. He has dreadlocks and he’s wearing glasses. He looks up and smiles at me gently.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. His voice is calm, grave.

  ‘Nmandi,’ I say, reading his nametag.

  He looks surprised. ‘Yes, I’m Nmandi. I’m a nurse here.’ He points to his chest.

  ‘Do you remember how you got here?’ he asks.

  I shake my head. I don’t know. I have a vague memory of tearing off my clothes in a hospital waiting room. I remember terror. I can still hear the sounds of screams in my ears. I think they were my own.

  My lips are dry, and I try to clear my throat. I find my voice. I want to feel something certain, something to take away the fear. Nmandi is looking at me kindly.

  ‘Nmandi, do you believe in God?’ I ask.

  He pauses, and he looks thoughtful.

  ‘Fifty–fifty,’ he says. ‘But I’m OK with that.’

  He walks over to me and takes my hand.

  ‘Do you see me?’ he asks.

  ‘I do,’ I say. And I do see him, in the fullest sense of the word. He’s Nmandi, the one who speaks with his hands. Someone who comforts those who mourn and helps those who are afraid. But I also know that he must be the archangel Michael, come to deliver us from the demons.

  The rules of time don’t exist in a psych ward. Each of us counts the time differently. There are some who count in days, others in weeks and months. And then there are those who don’t count the time at all, they’ve been here for so long. The ones who count in days, they are the ones who pace. I am one of them.

  I’m wearing foam slippers, pale blue with smiley faces on them, government issued. I claimed them from the bin, they’re now a treasured possession.

  I walk past the glass enclosure of doctors, past the TV room where the sound of the 24-hour news cycle is blaring, past the activity room with the conference table, the hallways of resident rooms, to the heavily locked doors, and then back again.

  I’m not sure how long I’ve been here. I think it’s a few days. But I count today as day one. The first day that I’m aware of where I am.

  In my pocket, I have a folded piece of paper where I’ve written my truths in purple marker. These are words that I cling to as reality, or at least the reality I hope for. I’ve repeated the phrases so often I know them like the words of a prayer.

  I am alive. Real.

  I am married to James. Real.

  James loves me. Real.

  I have a son. Real.

  My son is three months old. Real.

  My husband and son are waiting for me. Real.

  I have post-partum psychosis. Real.

  I have post-partum psychosis. I had never understood what it meant to doubt your own sense of reality, to be removed from time. The closest way I can describe it is those moments in dreams where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still sleeping, but in psychosis, no matter how many times you try, you don’t wake up.

  The medical definition of psychosis is a mental illness in which an individual has difficulty determining what is real and what is not – it’s a loss of objective reality. I had never heard of post-partum psychosis before my own diagnosis. Pregnancy ha
d brought a list of worries – episiotomies, prolapse, pre-eclampsia. I was so preoccupied with the idea of losing my body, it had never occurred to me that I might lose my mind.

  When I woke up this morning, my memory was in fragments. I was flooded with glimpses of past versions of my life, real and not real, as though I’d been copy and pasting a paragraph of my life on repeat.

  When I reached for my body, I didn’t recognise it. My breasts were a network of red angry knots from not breastfeeding, my ribs were protruding and I could feel the edges of my collarbones. I was wearing a hospital robe and my wrists were sore with the marks of restraints. My hair was damp, tied in a strange way, someone else must have tied it. I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Wasn’t I married? I was sure that I was. I remembered a lace dress, roses and ivy in my hands. I tried to remember the song that played at our wedding. But which wedding? I remembered a few, the groom’s face was blurred in all of them.

  As I pace the hallways, I’m trying to find the molecules of myself, to collect myself in the present, to contain myself.

  Any time I try to remember something from before, to hold on to what was certain, I come up against loops, tangles of repeating memories, replaying with different outcomes.

  I remember living and dying, again and again, each lifetime of decisions splintered into possibilities.

  I go back to my truths. I am Catherine. I am married to James. I have a son.

  Counting my footsteps makes me feel reassured. Numbers are certain; they hold a linear logic. It occurs to me that no matter how many steps I take, I will remain constant, in this place.

  I try to remember, but I can only recollect moments.

  I remember a baby. The curl of a small fist. The feel of a breath against my arm.

  I remember a balcony in Hong Kong, counting the seconds while surrounded by the grit of an orange sky, listening to the man pacing inside, hoping he will forget about me and go to sleep.

  I remember sitting with my brother under a maple tree, watching the clouds descend, revelling in the silence, waiting for the tornadoes to come.

  I remember my first conversation with my husband. His smile. The swirl of bourbon in cut glass.

  Mostly, I try to remember who I am.

  There are twenty-five of us in the ward, men and women. We aren’t allowed shoes, and so we shuffle in socks and slippers. We act as though this is temporary, like travellers at a departures terminal. People come and go, and we wave them off, those who get to exit promise to keep in touch, but we know that they will not. Someone new will appear and join in quietly, and the cycle continues.

  There are those who make a fuss, who scream – but we ignore them, it’s too much. I’ve already become part of the routine, it’s as though I’ve always been here. I have trouble remembering anything before; the rhythm of the ward feels innate.

  No one talks about their lives outside of this place; we don’t acknowledge that there is anything outside this place; instead, we exist separately from reality, obedient to the rules of the ward. We are suspended in time.

  We move along to the preordained schedules, waiting in the meds line, waiting to be called to the cafeteria, waiting for lights out.

  I can’t get used to the smell of the ward. It reminds me of the chlorine of a swimming pool, dank and dark. The walls are beige; there are tiles on the borders like the ones you’d find in a high school. The paint is peeling in places, and there are stains on the walls.

  The ward is shaped like a Y, three corridors that intersect in the centre. At the centre of the ward there is a large glass enclosure with a circular desk inside. It is where the doctors and workers stay. The desk faces out onto each side of the ward; it reminds me of the control panel of a spaceship. On either side of the glass enclosure there are two rooms, a television room and activity room, each with a pane of glass so that everyone can see in.

  On one side of the glass enclosure is a hallway lined with rooms. This is where the residents sleep. During the day the doors are kept open, and at night they are latched shut. Some of the residents sleep during the day or sit on their beds. There are workers sitting on chairs in the hallway, looking at their phones, standing guard. The workers aren’t nurses, as far as I can tell. They wear civilians’ clothing. We identify them by their earpieces and clipboards. They don’t have lanyards around their necks; I guess it’s a choking hazard. Their poses aren’t natural, they seem tensed, ready in a moment to jump to attention.

  My room is not in this hallway. I am in one of the 24-hour high-security rooms. It’s located straight across from the glass enclosure. There is a worker who sits outside my door, making notes on a chart every time I leave.

  In the glass enclosure the doctors and workers tap away at computers and talk on phones. They pretend they can’t hear us when we tap on the glass.

  I am like a zoo animal, except the zoo is inverted, and the cage protects those who belong on the outside. We, the animals, roam.

  I wait for the showers to open. I have my arms across my chest, which is sore and so swollen it feels like it’s about to bleed. Shara, one of the workers, nods at me. She’s hunched over her phone, her hand under her chin.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going to shower, baby?’ she asks. I nod.

  Shara mumbles into her earpiece and makes a note in the chart on her lap, and then she goes back to her phone.

  The showers are in closets, doors that open in the middle of the hall next to the television room. There are two of them, side by side with curtains, but really it’s meant for one person at a time. I stand by the door uncertainly. I know that Tamyra is going to take the first shower slot, meaning that she’ll have the brief window of hot water.

  Tamyra swoops in without any greeting. She wears a Walking Dead T-shirt that’s stretched tight over her belly. She’s twenty-one and pregnant with her third child. Tamyra is a returner, residents who are released each week only to return the next. She knows all the nurses and residents by name and presides over them with authority. She is initially suspicious of me, but we make peace when I give her the morning shower slot and let her have my portion of dessert.

  I sway from foot to foot while I wait for the showers. Around me, the ward is starting to come to life. In the glass enclosure, I see workers appear from one of the back doors, a door we don’t have access to. They turn on computers, unpack papers, open binders. They greet one another, but they don’t look at us.

  Tamyra steps out of the shower room without looking in my direction; she’s wearing shower shoes and a towel wrapped tightly around her hair. She’s still wearing the Walking Dead T-shirt.

  I step into the shower room. The tiles are green; it feels like the showers at the gym, smelling of bleach and mould. I take off my clothes quickly and balance them on the sink; there’s nowhere else to put them. I don’t have shower shoes, so I stand on folded hand towels. The showers are icy. There’s a burst of hot water for a few minutes, and then it pours down cold. I try my best to massage the knots from my breasts, but it’s difficult with the cold water. I start to feel like stone.

  I quickly dry myself with a small hand towel and shrug on my clothing. I’d found clothing in the shelves next to my bedroom door. Maternity leggings, maternity bras, jumpers that I recognise as my husband’s. I’m wearing one of his grey ones now – it’s soft, woollen and smells familiar. I tuck cotton wool into my bra so that I don’t leak through my clothes. On top of my jumper, I zip up a hoodie. I have my hands in my pockets, so that I can keep hold of the piece of paper with my truths. It makes me feel grounded, a talisman.

  I walk back to my room, where I fold my towel and make my bed. The bed linen is grey from being over- washed, and the material is scratchy and thin.

  I can’t stand being in the room more than a few minutes, it feels so damp. I step outside the room and shut the door behind me. I start to pace the hallways. From the other end of the hall, residents are starting to walk to the cafeteria, it’s brea
kfast.

  The cafeteria is at the far end of the main corridor, the farthest from the rooms, next to the heavy double doors that I imagine lead to an exit. Breakfast is at eight each morning. We stand outside the doors until they are unlocked. There are six cafeteria tables lined up in a small room. At the front of the room, two workers pass out trays of hot food. Breakfast is powdered eggs, pancakes, and slivers of bacon.

  ‘Tea or coffee, honey,’ Ronnie asks. He’s one of the popular workers, with close-cropped hair and a wide smile. Tamyra calls him her man, and he always laughs.

  ‘Coffee,’ I say.

  I breathe in the coffee. I close my eyes, and for a moment I remember that I have a home, a place away from here. I try to imagine the table, the windows, the view, but all I can think of is the smell of coffee, and then I’m back. Grounded here in the ward.

  The cafeteria is quiet; we eat in silence. The windows are frosted over, the tables are crowded in, we have to stand in between them in order to wait in line. The only sounds are the voices of the workers around us. They stand around the tables and in the doorways, their arms crossed. They each have an earpiece dangling from one ear.

  Lingering is frowned upon. We have thirty minutes to eat, and we shovel the food into our mouths with flimsy plastic utensils. We file out one by one as we finish. Whoever is last to leave has to stay and help clean up.

  Dave is usually the last to finish eating, but he doesn’t have to clean because he sits in a wheelchair. Dave is a homeless veteran in his fifties. He has four children. He’s black and has a habit of chuckling to himself; he calls himself Chuckles. He spends most of the day wheeling his chair in front of the glass enclosure, waiting for a doctor or worker to acknowledge him. He stands up from his chair whenever he wants to emphasise something, and he often shouts that ‘it’s a disgrace!’ he hasn’t been allowed to leave yet. Sometimes he falls from his wheelchair and the workers have to help him sit back in it.