Free Haywire by Brooke Hayward

repeated. “I must have passed out right after I talked to you on the phone, and come to just a little while ago.”
    It took a minute for me to grasp what she meant.
    “This is what happens when I have a seizure. Sometimes I hurl stuff around, get very violent. Look at this unholy mess. I think I’ve broken all of my good wineglasses. I don’t know what I’m doing until afterwards, when I start to come out—and then I sort of remember sort of in a dream …”
    “But, Bridget,” I said to her, my heart pounding, “you talked to me on Friday. This is Monday. Do you realize that? You can’t have been unconscious for almost three days.”
    “Well, I must have been,” she said. “Sometimes it’s for a long time. The last thing I remember was leaving the apartment and putting my overnight bag down to lock the door—and then this terrible feeling.…” She collapsed onto the convertible sofa.
    “What kind of a feeling?” I asked.
    “It starts in the pit of my stomach. Kind of a rush of pain. Oh, the worst pain you can imagine. Then I begin to feel dizzy. Nauseated. Sort of a sensation I’m being sucked into the center of a black whirlpool, pitch black, whirling around and around towards the very center. Strange high-pitched voices in another language that I’ve never heard before, can’t recognize. Voices in a foreign language—but I understand it perfectly.
Perfectly.
” She shuddered.
    “What do they say?”
    She put her head in her hands.
    “Bridget, for God’s sake what do they say?”
    She lay back and put her arms over her face and began to cry again.
    “Bridget, I can’t stand this—what do the voices say?”
    “Well—there’s this strange humming sound, buzzing—hurts my ears—like a dog whistle, very high frequency. I am walking down this long corridor, tunnel, endless, with lots of arched doors on either side, but I know they’re locked, I can’t open them. They say, in this strange language—I know it sounds crazy—but they are saying something like ‘Bridget, you must open the door, one of the doors,’ sort of in a chant, very high. ‘Try harder—you mustn’t come to the end of this tunnel—past the last door there’s
nothing
, just blackness.’ And the voices get louder and louder and I can’t stand it any more, and then at last I open a door with all my strength, and the light comes in, the sun, and I begin to rise—and I know I’m alive, I wake up, I’m still alive after all.”
    “Bridget,” I said gently after a while, “this is really serious. I mean two and a half days is no joke. What if you were driving a car or crossing a street or something, and you went into one of these? I promised you on my sacred word of honor that I wouldn’t tell Father, but I’m beginning to think I should.”
    “No, no.” She grabbed me. “Dr. Brenman [her analyst atRiggs] knows all about it. It’s happened before. Really. There are warnings. I know when it’s about to happen. The pain I was telling you about—if I was driving, I would have enough time to pull over to the side of the road. I promise you. Look—I was outside my apartment when I began to feel it and I had plenty of time to unlock the door and come back in to lie down on the bed here. There are my purse and suitcase. I have plenty of warning. Please, whatever you do, don’t tell Father or he’ll make me go to a closed hospital or back to Riggs.”
    “But, Bridget, I don’t understand. I thought Dr. Rogowski gave you medicine to take every day so you wouldn’t have these blackouts. Aren’t you taking it?”
    “Yes, yes, of course I am. Maybe he should change the dose or something.”
    I made her promise me that she would go see Dr. Rogowski, and, in return, swore I wouldn’t mention it to Father. And that’s the way we left it.
    Tom Mankiewicz:
    “Throughout the winter we became closer. At that point in her life, she needed desperately to have somebody to hold on to. I think she very much wanted to