The Edge of Every Day Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Marin Sardy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Some chapters in this book were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Strange Things I Have Encountered” in The Crooked House (2012), “A Shapeless Thief” in The Missouri Review (2014), “Chokecherries” in Phoebe Journal (2013), “The Dragon at the Bottom of the Sea” in Fourth Genre 18:2 (2016), pages 153–66, “Disintegration, Loops” in Post Road (2014), “Dades Gorge” in Madcap Review (2014), “Theory of Mind” in Puerto del Sol (2016), “All My Charms” in Cactus Heart (2013), “Animate” in Hobart (2015), “There Is the Urge to Find Meaning” in Sweet: A Literary Confection (2016), “Break My Body” in Guernica (2016), and “Nix” in TheRumpus.net (2016). “The Rumor” was originally published as “Upright Eggs” in Bayou (2014), and “A World of Absolute Order” was originally published as “Lightning, or Feathers” in Tin House #68 (2016).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Sardy, Marin, author.

  Title: The edge of every day : sketches of schizophrenia / Marin Sardy.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2019

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042987. ISBN 9781524746933 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9781524746940 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Schizophrenics—Biography. Schizophrenia. Schizophrenics—Family relationships.

  Classification: LCC RC514 .S3155 2019 | DDC 616.89/80092 [B]—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018042987

  Ebook ISBN 9781524746940

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v5.4

  ep

  For Adrienne

  These notes are directed

  towards a region

  I wanted to perceive

  but could not.

  —BHANU KAPIL,

  SCHIZOPHRENE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  STRANGE THINGS I HAVE ENCOUNTERED

  A SHAPELESS THIEF

  CHOKECHERRIES

  THE RUMOR

  A WORLD OF ABSOLUTE ORDER

  CONVERSATIONS WITH FAMILY

  THE WILDCATTER

  THE DRAGON AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

  GRAM JULIA’S SPIES

  ASYLUM

  DISINTEGRATION, LOOPS

  ULTIMA THULE

  A TREE FALLING

  MR. RAIN JACKET

  DADES GORGE

  THEORY OF MIND

  WINTER

  ALL MY CHARMS

  VAGABOND

  ANIMATE

  VAGABOND

  THERE IS THE URGE TO FIND MEANING

  VAGABOND

  SLIDE

  BREAK MY BODY

  THAT FRAGILE SPACE

  NIX

  WHAT REMAINS

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Strange Things I Have Encountered

  The pattern I saw as a small child when I closed my eyes: concentric ovals in purple, red, and electric blue, the oval rings vibrating around a few dots in the center, which vibrated too.

  * * *

  —

  The sound of my mother sitting on a sofa in our quiet house late in the evening, rhythmically grinding her teeth.

  * * *

  —

  A halibut’s migrating eye after it has worked its way around to the other side of its head, where it is not quite aligned with the rest of the face.

  * * *

  —

  The ash that fell from the sky and coated Anchorage in gray dust a few days after Mount Augustine erupted. It was as quiet as winter, but it made you feel uncomfortable and bleak when you looked outside.

  * * *

  —

  The map of the world that my brother hung upside down on his bedroom wall, saying it is just arbitrary that we think of north as up.

  * * *

  —

  The note I found on my mother’s desk, written by an administrator for the British royal family, thanking her for her letter but assuring her that she was not the Duchess of Kent.

  * * *

  —

  Once I caught a high fever and spent a day talking to the walls, which bowed outward from the corners of the room.

  * * *

  —

  A lichen-covered human skull lying in a weathered coffin on an expanse of tundra, pushed up out of the frozen ground.

  * * *

  —

  The balls of aluminum foil that my mother wadded onto the ends of our television antennae to protect us from radiation. That she would decide that foil could solve the problem, but not, say, rubber or Styrofoam.

  * * *

  —

  The fancy plate of Asian glass noodles that my brother ordered at a restaurant in Hawaii. When it came, my mother said it looked like worms and wouldn’t let him eat it. They argued about it for ten minutes before she made the waiter take the noodles back.

  * * *

  —

  The crowd watching a parade that you are in. As you walk along, it feels like they’re the parade.

  * * *

  —

  A homeless man in Santa Fe who had a rat he had trained to lie on top of a cat, which curled up on top of a dog. They would remain that way for hours. The man said he was spreading the message of world peace.

  * * *

  —

  For a while my mother wore bandannas over her face, bandit-style, every time she was in the kitchen. The practice developed to include a second bandanna over her forehead, so only her eyes were visible through the gap in the fabric.

  * * *

  —

  That some questions in this world come with answers, and some do not.

  * * *

  —

  The glowing end of a cigarette thrown from the window of a car in front of you at night, so that the orange light bounces on the pavement a few times.

  * * *

  —

  The bullet I found one morning in Santa Fe, the metal all crumpled and unrecognizable, after it burst through my roommate’s window and then the Sheetrock wall of my closet while we slept, landing on the floor beside my bed.

  * * *

  —

  My dog, stuck in a tree.

  * * *

  —

  The miniature rubber bands my mother stretched across her teeth for months, as homemade orthodontic appliances. She refused to go to a dentist, and I winced somewhere inside every time she smiled.

  * * *

  —

  When a forest fire fills the air with smoke, and the sun glows large and red and quivers like the end of the world.

  * * *

  —

  The swath of burn-scarred tissue on my husband’s shoulder, the size of my hand. I have never looked at it closely because it is too painful to take in all the details of such an injury to someone I love.


  * * *

  —

  The months when my mother didn’t seem to eat anything at all except cheddar cheese and green onions. She would stand in the kitchen over a cutting board and take a bite of one, then the other.

  * * *

  —

  The sheer volume of unanswered questions we carry with us always.

  * * *

  —

  When a man said to me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and I realized that nobody says that unless they know exactly what you’re talking about.

  * * *

  —

  In ski towns in winter, when the coldest air sinks to the bottom of the valley, so that on extremely cold days it is much warmer partway up the mountainside than down where the houses are.

  * * *

  —

  My mother asked me, “Do you ever hear people calling out to you, but you can’t tell who it is?” I was young—maybe twelve.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Like when somebody kicks a rock and it sounds like a voice?” I knew I was reaching. I did not say, “The voices you hear aren’t real.” I had a feeling that by the force of my will I could bend the moment into something else. “Like the wind blows,” I continued, “and it sounds like your name?”

  “No,” she said softly. “No, not like that.”

  * * *

  —

  A ring of fungus that briefly invaded my forearm. When I imagined all the microscopic threads growing and eating into my skin, I felt violated and frantic.

  * * *

  —

  The time I got angry at my mother for buying ice cream while I was trying to diet, and I put the carton in the sink and turned on the hot water over it. And as she reached to turn off the faucet she said, “Don’t be strange.”

  * * *

  —

  That songbirds pull their feathers out, leaving bare spots around the neck and shoulders, when they are constantly afraid.

  * * *

  —

  Eclipses of my mind, which happen at times for no apparent reason. I am walking and then I am falling. But I’m not falling. I have gone black for a fraction of a second, and in that time I lost my sense of my position in space. Then I become afraid that at any moment I will pass out and fall.

  * * *

  —

  An elderly woman on a Manhattan sidewalk eating raw pork. She looked at me with unfamiliar eyes and a slab of meat hanging from her mouth, and I stared for a moment and thought of my mother.

  * * *

  —

  When a sharp object presses into you but doesn’t cut you, and your skin bulges around it and forms a crease at the point of contact.

  * * *

  —

  Standing very close to the edge of the high cliffs at Canyon de Chelly. You are perfectly safe, but death is one step away. It is strange that some people find this terrifying while others are not scared by it at all.

  * * *

  —

  A runaway horse cantering through traffic on Cathedral Parkway in Manhattan, with three police cars and two mounted riders chasing after it. The riders were both women with long dreadlocks that left wave-shaped memory traces on the air when they passed. It was beautiful and incomprehensible and then it was gone.

  A Shapeless Thief

  My mother knows the earth’s surface is composed of tectonic plates, and that these plates move hundreds of miles with ease. They arrange and rearrange themselves, very quickly sometimes, creating natural phenomena when they shift. There is one place, the Shear, where the plates have fallen away, leaving a bare, scraped expanse extending for hundreds of miles. In another place, near Monterey, California, a plate dropping into the ocean has created a series of horizontal shelves at the continent’s underwater edge. On one of these, she says, a city thrives beneath the waves.

  Sometimes plates duplicate themselves or multiply, resulting in two or more that are nearly identical and seem to contain the same location. For this reason, she says, it’s important to pay attention to details when you travel, to make sure you stay on the right plate—in the correct Roswell; in the Anchorage where you grew up. Each Roswell, each Anchorage, is a distinct colony. And if you accidentally end up on the wrong plate, you won’t find the people you know, because they’re not there. This is why flying is tricky. You go up in the air, and when you come down there’s no real way of knowing if you’ve landed on the right plate or another by the same name. You fly to Santa Fe to see your sister, but when you go looking for her, you may not be able to find her.

  So check the sky. See if it looks different today. Strange. See if it looks like a different sky than the sky you remember seeing over Santa Fe. And if you go to your sister’s house and she’s not there, look at the pillows. They might be the wrong color. These are the little things that help us know where we are.

  * * *

  —

  In bits and pieces over many years, my mother has described to me this earth, the one she inhabits, expansively elaborating on the details of plates and colonies, as well as what she calls the Assay, a natural force that continually sorts us according to where we belong. It’s more than a single fantasy. It’s a whole system of rules and perceptions that together constitute an alternate world—a foundational delusion that emerged slowly in her mind when I was in high school and developed into a full-scale paracosm by the time I finished college.

  I’ve been told that when I was very young and my mother was still sane, she sometimes spoke of the universe as existing in two streams. First Stream was our tangible, everyday reality. Second Stream was a separate, inner place, the realm of the imagination and spirit. Then the boundary between realities became so porous that she lost track of their differences. Metaphor entangled physical fact. The two streams ran together.

  Now she doesn’t bother to explain much, because she knows I understand the basics. She’ll bring up the topic only if there are new developments, usually as a prelude to offering important advice: “Stay away from California for a little while.” Or “Make sure you have plenty of gas!” This isn’t overprotectiveness on her part; it’s reasonable concern. Her world is one that is capable of shifting beneath her feet. The houses she has lived in, the cities they were built in, the very rock they stand on—all can be torn out from under her.

  This may explain why, for a long time, she moved regularly through several states, never living in the same place for longer than a year but instead looping back to visit the same spots again and again. She never flew. Instead she’d take the train from New Mexico to Monterey. She’d work her way by bus up to Bellingham, and maybe take the ferry into Southeast Alaska, to Sitka or Juneau, sleeping in hostels and befriending the twenty-somethings she met there. Sometimes she would give me a name and a number. “Hang on to that,” she’d say. “If you find yourself in a bad situation, this is someone you can contact for help.” Or “Remember this name. If you meet someone by this name, you could take her home and give her a place to sleep for the night. She might become your roommate!”

  My mother’s travel habit began in the grip of her descent into psychosis three decades ago, when she was nearly forty and I was ten. She spun into a six-month round-the-world romp, jetting from Hawaii to North Africa to Australia, and then returned periodically to many of those places over the next several years. This was paid for by inherited money and fueled by a belief that someone was after her, and it may have started because my grandparents were trying to have her hospitalized. After a few months in and out of a clinic in Alaska, she went along with their plan to try one in Dallas. There the effort reached an unexpected climax when she bolted across a parking lot, jumped into a cab, and disappeared into the night. She resurfaced with a phone call, two weeks later, from the other side of the world.

  * * *

  —

  I was offe
red few explanations for my mother’s behavior, beyond being told by my father that she was “ill” and it was not her fault. At some point the word schizophrenia reached my ears, but it meant little to me. In place of understanding, I took hold of the tokens of her travels, as if they were crumbs I could follow to this new place inside her. Whenever she returned from a trip, she would bring back wonders for my sisters and brother and me to pore over—embroidered housedress-like garments from Algiers, all kinds of currencies. The Australian coins were our favorites: kangaroo, platypus. Once, my older sister, Alicia, organized the coins into a booklet and labeled them. Although we were savvy enough to sort out the sources of the various European currencies, there were a number whose origins we couldn’t decipher from the script. Alicia labeled those “Arabic Nation.” We had asked our mother, but she didn’t know. She had gone missing in more ways than one.