State of Paradise

by Laura van den Berg

My sister’s rage could fill a field. I am certain she has never forgiven me for leaving Florida to become a “student of literature,” whatever that means. She is enraged with our mother, who she feels owes us both—but her in particular—an unpayable debt. This is because our mother, the retired social worker, spent so many hours on the job, engrossed in the problems of other families.

Hello mother

I don’t regard my work as a ghost as storytelling, by the way. The novels I ghostwrite are more like a mirage: they appear to be stories, but they are not. They are not stories, because there is no deeper impetus.

In the community room, she put her hand on my arm and began listing all the famous writers who spent time in institutions. Tennessee Williams, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. “Sometimes,” she said, “there is a price to pay for being a genius.” I asked my English teacher if I was, in her estimation, a genius and she told me it was too soon to say for sure. “You can’t follow instructions to save your life. You daydream. You seem full of disorder. These are all promising signs.”

When the night shift orderly cracked open my door for room checks, he always found me awake, sitting on my bed and staring at the ceiling or reading the Oxford English Dictionary, the only thing I had found of interest in the Institute’s modest library.

In the attic room, I submit my chapters for the Miami-underworld-time-travel novel; within hours I get a reply from the assistants, even though we’re in the dead of night. I assume they’re writing to point out my mistakes. Too many concrete descriptive details and not enough adverbs! Too many em dashes and too few ellipses! Everything is not as it seems— vs. Everything is not as it seems … The assistants believe that em dashes are abrupt, mysterious, foreboding. Ellipses, meanwhile, are an enticing trail of bread crumbs. A hand reaching out from the shadowed night.

When we landed in Orlando, I asked if someone from the clinic was coming to collect her, or if she would rent a car. She began to list all the things she needed to do before she even considered leaving the airport. She needed to eat at the Chipotle; use the restroom in Terminal C because international terminals have the cleanest toilets; get a ten-minute massage. Maybe she would even check into the airport hotel for a night. “Being a patient is serious business,” she said. “I have to prepare.” I wondered if preparation meant exercising every choice available until you were so exhausted that it would be a relief to have your choices taken away.

At the Institute, plenty of people were nice enough to me, but it was always in the service of wanting me to do something. Every interaction was laced with agenda. The friendliness was a mask that fell the moment I refused to swallow a pill or to crochet a winter cap in silence. Never mind that there was no need for winter caps in Florida. So I learned how to perform. I learned how to fake everything.

I start writing down one detail a day.

I write about the knife I find sticking out of an anthill. I write about states of suffering and states of paradise and try to understand how a person can travel from one to the other. With these fragments I slowly begin to build a world.

To write is to attempt to bridge the gaps that cannot ever be closed.

She’s right, I think, after I submit my resignation. The novel is a pretty outdated technology, but that is exactly why we need it. The form is so archaic that it can’t be fucked with.

I keep building my Florida Diary. I keep writing down ideas about the world, from both my own imagination and the imaginations of others. Like these snippets from a book I read on time. 1. A position in time is called a moment. 2. Time involves change; a universe in which nothing changes would be a timeless universe. 3. An event can never cease to be an event. 4. Whenever we judge anything to exist in time we are in error. And when we perceive anything as existing in time—the only way in which we ever do perceive things—we are perceiving it more or less as it really is not. 5. Perhaps time is ultimate, which is to say it is not a thing that can be explained, nor is an explanation required.